We are focusing totally on Classic Editor here because it’s a classic!

First step is to always be logged in or log into your WordPress Dashboard. It’s amazing how many how-to videos I’ve come across that don’t start with this essential step. How many people have made a Post without being logged-in?

You’ll need to go to your Dashboard web address which is usually something like
https://mywonderfulsite.com/wp-admin

There you enter your Username and Password. If you are a Tom Stier customer, you will have received these important items by email. If your Firefox or Chrome browser asks if you want the browser to remember these credentials, go for it! Anything that shaves time off of creating those Posts is a huge plus.

You will eventually see a screen that looks very much like the screen at the 18 second mark in the video below. Pause the video after that point and continue reading below.

This video miraculously begins with a blank ‘Add New Post’ screen.

People will not see an ‘Add New Post’ screen after logging in. Not until they click on one of the two wonderful add new Post links.

In the WordPress Dashboard there are two places where you can click “Add New” to create a blank ‘Add New Post’ screen. On the left side of the screen, you’ll see a ‘push-pin’ icon and ‘Posts’ with an ‘Add New’ choice. At the top of the window you’ll see a black bar with a “+ New.” Hovering on that link brings up the first choice in a drop-down menu: ‘Post’. Click one of these links to create a blank ‘Add New Post’ screen

If you accidentally click on ‘New Page’ don’t worry about it. Try again on ‘New Post’.

Then, you are on the ‘Add New Post’ screen!

There are  three vertical sections on this screen.

One is the left side menu.

A middle section with two fields – Title and Post Body.

A skinnier section on the right has the very useful ‘Publish’ section, plus additional settings for your Post. If your screen doesn’t look exactly like this, it’s because some genius has tarted-up the site.

The Title and Post Body section

For now, ignore the ‘Add Media’ button. To the right of that button, you’ll see two tabs. ‘Visual’ is the default and it should be slightly lighter than the one that says ‘Text’.

Add a Title. And don’t spend a lot of time worrying over it. You can always change it later. Don’t call your Post “My First Post.” Be original.

Add the Post Body. Most people write the ‘body’ of their Post in a text editor like Microsoft Word.

They ‘Select All’ in their Word doc, select Copy. Then they click the blinking cursor in their WordPress Post Body field and select Paste.

Or, you can do like I do and just start writing in the Post Body field.

Now, scroll back up to the top right of the WordPress screen and click ‘Save Draft’.

See all those little icons at the top of the Post Body field? The ones you’ll  use at first are the Bold, Italic and little ‘chain link’ icon that makes a link.

You always highlight the text first, then click one of these icons to make that text Bold, Italic or a link. Want to find out what the other icons do? Make a test Post and go wild on it.

OK, now we get to the ‘Add Media’ button!

This is where we add images to your WordPress Post. Click your blinking cursor at the beginning of a paragraph in the Post Body field. Click on the the ‘Add Media’ button.

A pop-op screen will give you the options of selecting an image from the Media Library, selecting an image from your computer or dragging an image from your computer desktop into the pop-up screen.

Small images can be left or right justified to paragraphs. Bigger images should be centered between paragraphs. Experiment with the icons you see when clicking on the images. All your choices will show.

This should give you a very good start.

Now, scroll back up to the top of the WordPress screen and click ‘Save Draft’.

Let’s now go over to the skinnier column on the right side of your screen.

Here are the sections (Some genius may have re-ordered these):

Publish – choose ‘Save Draft’ after every few changes, click Publish after you finish your Post. Made a mistake? Need to change something? You can always return to the edit screen and make changes.

Featured Image – skip this until your web-guy tells you you need it.

Categories – these determine placement on the public side of the website. Pick one or two or make a new one. I suppose they are also informative.

Tags – Ugh. Too much work. Skip it.

Format – Leave it alone.

As you become a Posting maven, there’s plenty of time to get into these other aspects of posting.

The post Step-by-Step WordPress Post Using Classic Editor appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

Here’s the definition of a virtual telecom. “A virtual network operator (VNO) is an entity that does not own a telecom network infrastructure but provides telecom services by purchasing capacity from telecom carriers.”

In my case I needed to transfer the number from a virtual telecom to a real telecom – ATT.

The phone number was bundled into the plan with our Internet Provider. At the time, this was a great setup. We were able to dump the $65 monthly charge with Verizon for the bundled $12 a month phone plan with the Internet provider.

One drawback was giving up a physical landline for a virtual phone that only worked over the Internet connection, in a rural area that had at least one major power outage a year. That Trimline phone had it’s own power!

The other drawback became apparent when we needed to leave our Internet Provider and take our phone number with us.

This resulted in a protracted process of contacting the previous Internet Provider, who in turn needed to contact the bundled virtual telecom, and then contacting a REAL telecom. We were only able to ‘rescue’ our phone number after the situation was escalated to the highest levels at all 3 companies. This took twenty phone calls.

This virtual scenario also happens in web hosting and domain name registration. Many hosting companies make things easier for customers by allowing them to purchase hosting and a domain name at the same time.

Some hosting companies, such as, say, CartoonHosting (not a real host) are not real domain name registrars. So, in CartoonHosting’s case they farm out your domain name to a real registrar – say, Launchpad – and CartoonHosting becomes your ‘virtual’ registrar.

In this virtual setup, the customer has no direct login to manage their domain name at Launchpad. They need to manage the name in CartoonHosting’s rudimentary domain options panel. I know of one instance where renewing the domain in CartoonHosting’s panel did not actually renew the name at Launchpad. This resulted in downtime for the website the domain was attached to.

Some other hosting companies who act as virtual registrars have no options panel for managing domains. You need to call and spend time on the phone with their virtual support for any change.

A bigger issue becomes apparent when you want to leave your hosting company and take your domain name with you. That process will put you right in the middle of the same three way tug-of-war I described with virtual and real telecoms.

I’m no fan of GoDaddy, but they are a real domain Registrar. They have a good do-it-yourself options panel for changing domain name settings. You just have to avoid all their endless marketing.

If your web hosting company provides virtual domain registration, don’t use it. Keep your domains registered with a real Registrar like GoDaddy.

Remember that Registrars are only required to contact you at an email address you likely used 10 years ago to setup your account.

Remember also that short domain names are very valuable, and Registrars would much rather  make thousands of dollars compared to the $20 or so they make when selling a long, hard to remember domain name.

The post Virtually Stuck appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

I’m talking about the Dark Side of web and computer applications that suddenly ‘don’t work‘ and don’t tell you why they ain’t working!

The Error Massage

One thing that hasn’t really changed about working with applications, both on your laptop and the internet, is the Error Message.

Error messages are just as cryptic and useless to real people as they were back in the 1990’s.

A computer still can’t tell you in plain talk what exactly is wrong and how to fix it.

And then, why doesn’t the computer just go ahead and fix it for you!

Thanks, Hal!

This situation hasn’t improved since the 90’s.

I believe this created a market for the smartphone.

Just like the difficulty of handling and playing vinyl record albums created the market for compact cassette tapes in the 70’s.

A trend developed of people embracing something less good, as long as less angst was involved in using it.

The Buy Button Rules

A smartphone is a phone in a limited computer.

A smartphone is basically a purchasing device, not a tool for creating.

If you stick to using your phone to make calls, messaging, buy things, generally waste time, and buy things you cannot go wrong!

This article is for the poor slobs who are using a computer to do work.

Alarming text and bleeps

When I do tech support calls for my wonderful clients, whether it’s for apps or website woes, I know the person I’m talking to has just taken a trip through the Loop.

The Loop consists of retracing your steps and going through the same routine over again, clicking the same buttons over and over again, wishing for a different result.

And that different result is “Why doesn’t this gosh darn thing work like it did yesterday!?”

Which is really not such a ‘different’ result!

Is Anybody There?

We’ve been working on this since 2019

Then, there is the dread of calling tech support, assuming that there even is a phone number for tech support.

Facebook has a bazillion business pages on their platform and no phone contact.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. The purpose of online tech support is to get you off the line or Chat as soon as possible.

Otherwise, why would the person on the other end of the Chat be called a Happiness Engineer?

Engineered Happiness

After waiting in a Chat queue for a “Wait times are longer than usual due to the _______”  amount of time, it’s suddenly your turn!

You need to tell the Customer Satisfaction Agent what the problem is.

But, you don’t know what is wrong with your app because your computer refuses to tell you what’s wrong!

So, you revert to the old standby. “The gosh darn thing doesn’t work.”

You have already exceeded your Customer Satisfaction Agent’s satisfaction with you.

Oops, An Error Occurred

Oops, an error occurred

When something doesn’t work like it did yesterday, many folks are totally at a loss.

And apparently, so was the fellow who coded this message for Instagram.

On top of that, the fear factor makes continuing to try to fix the issue on your own problematic for fear of making the problem worse.

What To Do

OK, so you are happily being productive writing your blog Post and there’s a message saying “Connection lost. Saving has been disabled until you’re reconnected. We’re backing up this post in your browser, just in case..”

First thing to do is to select all your writing and copy and paste it into your favorite Text Editor on your computer. That app always works!

Then you can take a break, go outside. Breathe.

If you are curious about what the error message means, do a Google search on that exact text “Connection lost. Saving has been disabled until you’re reconnected. We’re backing up this post in your browser, just in case..”

You may find some interesting results by people in the same quandary.

This applies to any error message you receive. Copy the message exactly.

Do a Google search on the exact error phrase. At the very least, you may find that you are not alone in your misery!

And when you do get to the front of the queue on the Chat, you’ll have the exact phrase to paste into the text box there.

Tell me about your tech support stories, and Happy Computing!

The post The History Of The Computer – The Dark Side appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

So, to put the nice pictures on a web page, I found software that made it easier to see visually how the page would look when it was published.  I also discovered that the software I was using was writing something called html to do this.

When the software started writing crazy html that Mr. Web Browser did not like, I found that I had to figure out how to understand and change the html for Mr. Web Browser.

Fortunately, there were many other people on the web that knew a LOT more than I did about these incompatibilities. I read many pages about these issues and learned all about the very popular Mr. Internet Explorer Web Browser.

I feel this was a point where many graphics people said to themselves “I like making nice websites, but my pages look weird on someone else’s computer. So, I’m outta here.”

But, I’ve always loved art and gadgets equally, and so was even more drawn to it when I found that one could make little functions that would work on a web page. Like a counter, for instance.

To be continued…

The post Tom Stier’s History of the World Wide Web – Part One appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

In the Edit Post screen there are two ways to view your Post. Visual and Text (or HTML).

On switching to the Text view, we could see that the client had copied and pasted into their Edit Post screen from another program. The other program might have been their email client (Microsoft or Apple Mail) or Word.

In this instance, the copy and paste had carried more than just the desired text. We could see extraneous code between the paragraphs, <div></div> tags. Whole bunches of ’em.

When pasting from Microsoft Word you might even see reams of proprietary markup. It wrecks your spacing and your typography. It makes aliens on other planets upset, too.

How to Avoid The Heartbreak of Extraneous Markup

The best way to avoid spacing problems is to compose your Post entirely within the Edit Post screen. OK, stop laughing. We know that is an insane idea.

WordPress realizes that you may be picking up your copied content from places unknown, so they offer two basic tools in the Edit Post screen toolbar to deal with this.

The one we use most often is the Paste as Plain Text tool. We copy the text from another source and paste it into the pop up window the tool provides. It even gives you an option to remove line breaks. This pastes the text as a chunk into your Edit Post screen, clean as a whistle.

The other tool is Paste from Word. This one promises to preserve your bolds and your italics when copying out of Word. For some reason, we don’t use this tool very much. Not sure why. Might be because the last time we copied and pasted from Word, and used this tool, the garbage got carried over anyway.

Update! WordPress has replaced both of these tools with a single “Paste as text button” Since this tool will remove italics and bold formatting, we suggest that you try pasting from Word directly in the editor in Visual mode. Let us know how it goes!

The post The Spacing In My WordPress Post is Uneven appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

For starters, I recommend that you ask your web developer for his or her opinion about any request for improvements or changes. Your web developer has experience and expertise that will benefit you and possibly save you money.

Tom Stier

I’m always surprised how sometimes folks just place an order, as though they are visiting a restaurant and know what they want, rather than thinking of this more as a visit to a doctor’s office or a mechanic, where you are asking for recommendations, opinions, and advice.

Web developers tend to be immersed in the web. We see what is effective in a constantly changing online landscape, and yet we are sometimes treated as someone with an opinion that is as just as valid as a clients’ friends or family.

Another way to save money, is to concentrate less on the appearance of your site, and instead focus on function and purpose. I am often being asked to change a color or nudge an image a pixel here or there. These changes cost money and usually do not increase traffic or sales.

Regularly check your analytics. You can check your own analytics to see what is working best for you. Analytics are essential for measuring progress on any site. Google Analytics is free to use and easy to install on a WordPress site. Try a new logo and see if it attracts more business. Post something different and track the responses yourself. Your web developer can do this for you, and make recommendations, or you can learn to do this yourself.

Another way to reduce dependence on your web developer is to know your website software as well as you can. This requires some diligence, research, and practice. That’s what you’re paying us for – but you can learn it yourself. The two main open source website software’s that we work with have massive documentation available.

By understanding your website software, you can save money by posting articles and topics yourself, and also sharing links on your social media channels, once you’ve figured out which ones work for you by tracking your analytics.

The post How Can I Save Money on My Web Site Work? appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

Forward the email you received to whoever you thought sent you the email, they will want to see it.

Have a good day! And be careful about links you click on in emails!

Salut, Si vous avez atterri sur cette page, mais nous attendions à une autre page, vous allez être redirigé loin d’une page qui peut être essayer de vous inciter à fournir des renseignements personnels.

Transférer l’e-mail que vous avez reçu à la personne qui vous avez pensé vous a envoyé le courriel, ils veulent le voir.

Passez une bonne journée! Et soyez prudent sur les liens sur lesquels vous cliquez dans les emails!

The post Spoof Email Incident appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

Q. I’m an utter novice when it comes to website design, construction and maintenance. Once you’ve got me up and running, will I be able to update, reconfigure, add content, a blog etc. on my own? Do we need to consider all these questions up front?

A. There are three main roles in establishing a WordPress (or any content management system) site.

I’m the Developer – I set up the software, the site interface, and functions.

You are the User – your job is to add content on a continuing basis. At a basic level all you really need to do is post. Text posts are easy, adding an image to a post is slightly more complicated, adding or updating a gallery is a little more complex. You will have all the tools you need to do these things in the Dashboard.

The third task is that of the Site Designer. This is a task that we can share, as in you supply concept images or layered photoshop files (preferred) of how the site will look and I interpret this into a WordPress Theme (a collection of template files that determine how the pages will display) or you can have me come up with an original concept for you, then I’m the Designer. Both of these methods require a review and approval process.

I use WordPress and other Dashboard-enabled web softwares because they have a built-in ability to grow as you add new content to your site or desire to reshape the content that is already on your site. I consider all the requirements your project will need before choosing the best matching dynamic web software.

Q. From your standpoint, is the most convenient way to try to do it all at once, or can we improvise as we go along? For purposes of providing an estimate, I think I’ll be able to give you most of what the site will need, but I’m trying to get some idea what happens if we need to make changes after the initial start.

A. The site can start with a basic setup – Home, About, Projects, Contact – some variation of these permanent pages, plus your initial post(s) or news releases. There is an assumption that the site will grow over time, as you track what visitors are most interested in. You may want to tweak content on the pages, add posts (User tasks). You may want to add a newsletter sign-up form, the ability for visitors to directly purchase items from the site, Facebook or Twitter connectivity (Developer tasks) – it’s up to you.

Q. Are all website hosting companies created equal? I would assume they’re interchangeable, but I don’t really know.

A. They are not all equal. They change over time, they are bought and sold, new owners sometimes let quality slide. It is only when things go wrong that you find out how good they are. Can you call them? Do they have a live chat? Do they answer support tickets quickly and intelligently? Do they have a community forum that is transparent? You can find horror stories about most hosts easily enough. To be fair, hosts fight a daily battle with hackers who are trying to bring them down for ‘kicks’, and with users who intentionally abuse their account limits as well.

Q. Are there ways to measure how many visits etc. are coming to the site?

A. Yes. We favor Linux/Cpanel hosting. Cpanel hosts include a server based program AWStats and there is also the mighty Google Analytics.

Q. Let me know if there are any books you think I should read on all this.

A. There is quite a lot of WordPress info on the web, and books, also. YouTube has videos on the posting process, adding an image etc. But, like I mention above, there are the Developer tasks and the User tasks. You don’t really need to concern yourself with the development side, you will just want the site to work!

The post New Client Questions & Answers appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

We always do our best to answer this question as soon as possible in the process, but it does require some information and input from our prospective customer to come up with an accurate estimate!

For a typical website project, the following steps are involved:

For someone just beginning their web presence, we can get a fairly accurate idea of the kind of presentation they are looking for by looking at examples of other websites.

If the customer has an existing website, and has already expended funds and some energy on the current design, we can look into ways of re-purposing, or re-using some of the graphic elements into the new site. This can save money on a new design process.

For most of the sites we build, we use a website software that ‘lives’ on the server. This makes it easy to produce and collaborate on a site that will include a ‘backend’ section, a place where the site owner can login and change content on the site all by themselves.

Our effort is always to empower the client to be able to manage their own site as well as possible, although we are always standing by for consulting or to actually do the updating.

Once a customer knows how to use their ‘Dashboard’, they usually just need us for presentation changes.

So, a typical scenario would proceed like this:

We ‘discover’ the customers’ expectations and target audience for their website.

We look together at websites that approximate the desired presentation and visitor experience our customer has in mind for their own site.

We give the customer options and tips based on our our hard-earned experience in the web design and marketing areas!

We have a page on our main website where we go into details about some of the costs.

Next

The post How we price a website project Part 1 appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.

The tech went through a checklist of items with the user, trying to solve the problem. After trying everything the tech could think of, there was still no joy – the machine would not ‘boot.’

So the tech advised the user to unplug the machine, pack it up, and send it back for service.

“Oh, was I supposed to plug it in?” responded the user.

At this point, the tech uttered his final words as an employee of this particular PC company: “Yes, but you might as well send it back, because you are too much of an idiot to have a computer.”

This is a funny story in tech support circles.

Although, perhaps the tech guy should have started at square one and asked if the machine was, in fact, plugged in.

We try to begin at the best starting point for our clients.

Our small website development company always tries to remember how mysterious and foreboding all the coding and hosting jargon appeared even to us once upon a time.

Most users just want something that works!

We pride ourselves on communication with clients, breaking down complicated information into language they can understand.

So, the answer is no, you can’t be too much of an idiot to have a website. You can be brilliant!

All you have to do is call us today at 413-528-3195.

The post Are you too much of an idiot to have a website? appeared first on Tom Stier-Promote Globally.