The easy way to tell is take a look at your dashboard area!  If it looks something like the one on the right then you’re probably up to date, if it doesn’t then you would benefit from getting the latest sparkling new version.

The new version of Wordpress currently – 2.9.2 is feature packed with a host of great new features such as

• Easier editing
• Greater picture control and upload
• Cleaner clear control.
• Super quick page and post ordering
• Improved Search Engine Optimization

Plus much, much more you’ll see the difference right away, and adding and editing pages will be quicker and easier than ever – you can even add posts by email now!

So if you would like to take advantage of the upgrade get in touch today – the cost of this quicker, slicker upgrade is only a £50 one off charge.

Ever thought of adding a little more functionality to your website.  The power of the Wordpress platform is second to none, the ability to exand it from a few pages to an all singing and all dancing website is easier and cheaper than you think.  Take a look at these additions to enhance your website.  All the plugins are free to use (some are donation based – a small donation to the software developers is all that’s needed if you like them).  All we charge for is a one off installation and set up, taking the strain out of your website ownership experience, so you can reap the rewards.  Here’s four of our favourite additions for this month!

1. Video streamed from YouTube – including video is easier than you think and perfect for creating a personal message, profiling your services or products or even showing video from other sources.  We can add a YouTube compatibility quickly and easily to your website. All for only £40
2. Poll your visitors. Creating a visitor poll is a superb way to gain feedback from your customers, you could a few simple questions that will build provide you with superb information on what they feel about you business and services.  From simple polls like how did you find us on the internet, to did you find the service was professional and value for money, the list is endless. Polling pages can be public or private so you have the ultimate choice - add the ability to do customer Polls today for only £30.
3. Speed it up – speed is of the essence when it comes to visitor experience, that’s why this site operates an invisible cacheing system.  Ok it doesn’t mean that much but the software operating on this site, speed access times up by over 50%.  Your site too could see this increase quite easily – make the speed jump today for only £50 one off
4. Keeping track of those jobs – ok we all have a list of things we want to do on our site, add content, edit content, create a news letter, but often once we start we forget.  Why not try this quick and easy solution the dashboard task manager.  Ok it won’t change the look or fuctionality of your website but it provides a quick and easy way to jot those things to do down.  Quick and easy and only a £20 upgrade!
   

If you have seen a feature on another website the chance are we can replicate it quickly and easily – just get in touch and we’ll look into it.

Have a great month – watch out for the next update next month!

An example of this keep type of simple website is www.theworldofcars.co.uk - a new website launched as a test site for WN6 to develop new technologies and features for our extensive customer base.

If you like cars and want to keep up to date with the latest news – log on to www.theworldofcars.co.uk

WN6 Creative are looking for individuals who would like to take advantage of our FREE website/blog facility.  All sites come with a comprehensive Wordpress content management system for ease of use and great SEO.

All applications for FREE websites/blogs are granted on a few criteria only, mainly you can produce good content on a regular basis and you feel you can generate visitors, if you are interested please get in touch via email today.

Please note this offer is open to non-commercial customers only.

Free websites/blogs are granted on merit and at the discretion of WN6 Creative.

We always advise that you add your content by typing it directly into the editor window, however we have two work around’s so that your text doesn’t get messed up with additional code.

The first method is simple – copy the text from Word or your word processor, then paste in to Notepad (you can find this on all versions of windows) then copy the text out of Notepad and past it into the Website editor screen.

The second method is even easier, copy your text from Word, then in the website editor click the button that looks like this if you can’t see it, click the button that looks like this first and the text button will appear.  Click the Text button and a window will appear, past your text in the new window and click the insert button.

Hey presto whatever method you use, you’ve got clean text that will remain the same across all your website.

Option number 1 -  The handles on the image.  The image on the right shows how this works.  First click the image and 8 white squares and border appear round the image.

Click on any on of these and keep the mouse button held down.  Move your mouse and the image will become transparent and start to scale up and down.  The corner squares will allow you to scale keeping the aspect ratio the same.  Whilst the square on the sides will squash or stretch the image.

Option number 2 - the image on the right explains this one.

Click the image and you will see two icons appear in the top left of the image.  One is a landscape icon.  Click this and you will be returned to the screen that looks like the insert screen from previous lessons.

However this time you will see a resize area above the buttons for links etc.  Using the slide on the left hand side you can re-size the image in terms of percentage.

It’s important to understand this about images and sizes.  When you upload and image, the software produces automatically at least 3 versions of the image.  A small thumbnail, a medium image and a large image.  It does this so you don’t need to be inserting massive images and re-sizing them to fit.  However it does come with a pay off.  You can’t enlarge all images you can only make them smaller.  In other words if you decide the thumbnail you inserted isn’t big enough, delete it from the page, click the upload/insert button select the image again and it insert it at a larger size and then resize it a little then.  Making small images bigger will lead to a loss in quality – like the image below.

• There is no need to upload images that are bigger than 800px wide and max resolution of 72dpi.  If you do upload bigger image they will only slow down your site and explode far too big if someone clicks them to view a bigger version (more about that later).  Plus you website should try and restrict you uploading images less than 2mb
  Most digital cameras come with software to edit and resize images – if you’ve lost yours try this free piece of software – remember we have used all these pieces of software but download and usage is at your own risk.
• Few images are free on the internet – so if you want some really cheap images that look great then go here to Dreamstime.  We use them for most of our magazine work.
• In general animated images (in our opinion) although sometimes interesting aren’t very professional.

Other than that images add interest, colour and context to your page – although Google and search engines don’t see images so they don’t do much for your ranking, as they aren’t words.

OK? Then let’s add some images to your page.

First click at the beginning of the line of text where you would like to insert the image. Or if you want to insert images in a blank space then simply click the page anywhere.

Remember though – images can’t just be postioned in the middle of a page like you can in MS Word or in a paint package.  The software looks friendly but it is a website application and on the web we have to do things a certain way.  If you need to know more please call us.

So, click the button just above the Bold, Italic, Underline bit on your editing bar.

It looks a lot like the button on the left the first one after the words – Upload/Insert

Next you will a box will appear asking for you to select a file to upload.

• Click the select button and navigate to where the image is stored on your computer.
• Click the ‘open’ button.
• The Software will then upload and crunch the image (this just means optimise)
• Next you will have a new screen unfold before your eyes – the main bit you need to look at is like the image below.

Ok this is easier than it looks.

• First select if you want the image to align left, right or in the centre.  If you align left or right your text will flow around the image.
• Now choose the size you want to insert the image, choose the option you think best suit the job.  You can always change the size later.
• Lastly you need to decide if you want to provide the reader with the option to click the image to show a bigger version.  Click the camera at the top of the page and you’ll notice it will zoom out top show a bigger version.  If you want this to happen then click the option that says this will link your smaller image to the larger original one when, when the reader click the image – hey presto a bigger picture.
• If you don’t want the picture to link to anything leave the Link URL box it empty – or click non.
• Lastly click ‘Insert in to Post’.  you’ll notice another option next to insert into post ‘Delete’ this will delete the image from your site – simple!

We cover image resizing in another post – so feel free to take a look.

Your website should have some pages set up already ready for you to edit. They may contain something that looks a lot like latin – don’t worry we can delete that.

Hover your mouse over the page you would like to edit – you will see a number of options.  Edit, Quick Edit, Delete and View

• Edit – yeh you got it this is the button to edit the content of your page.
• Quick Edit – allows you to do a number of things quickly, such as change the page order.
• Delete – hmm deletes the page, but don’t worry it will ask you to confirm if you really want to delete the page should you accidentally click it.
• View – allows you to view the page.  The easiest way to use this feature is to right click it and open the page in a new tab.  This means you have the web pages to view on one tab and the editor on another tab.

Having your browser set up like this means you can flick backward and forward quickly and easily from editing view to the front end.  Incidently – browsers! WN6 Creative prefer Firefox for lots of reasons so if you do fancy a change later go here and download it – it’s free so you’ve nothing to loose.

Anyway back to editing the page.  Click the edit button on the page you wish to edit.

BANG!

Sorry! You should now see a page that looks something like the one.  Looks like an ordinary text editor such as MS Word (Yuk) or Open Office (Hurrah more great free & legal software that works a treat)

features such as Bold, Italic, Underline, Bullet Lists, Number Lists, Left Align, Centre and Right Align all on the top bar.

Now delete all the latin looking text and start to type your first piece of content.

Once you have finished the content your typing click the Update Page Button  you’ll find that on the furthest right hand side  of the editing screen.  If you can’t see it, click the PUBLISH tab and some more options should appear a lot like the image on the right.

Great stuff you have now edited content on a page.  You can do this for any of the pages you wish or create a new one if you like.

Remember your website has been set up with a style sheet so the font, font colour and sizes are controlled automatically for you so really you should only need to use bold and italic if you want something to stand out.  Keeping a consistent look is an essential part of keeping your site looking smart and professional.

HOWEVER!  Some people may wish to change the colour a little – the easy way to do this is first – click a button that looks like this, it’s on the far right hand side of the formating bar (the one that starts with the B for Bold. Hey presto, another editing bar appears. Like the one below.

Ok, this is where you could get yourself in a muddle.  But with care you should be fine.  To change the colour of any words, you will first need to highlight the words you want to change and then go to the button next to the smilie face – the one that looks like an A with a line under it and a drop down arrow connected to the button.  Click this

You’ll be presented with a set of colours and a button that says ‘more colors’

Go on choose one or have a play with the more colors option – it looks something like the one on the right.

Your text can now be changed to whatever colour you wish!

And yes if you click the smilie face button you can add…..   smilie faces, should you wish to cheer your reader up?

On the subject of inserting smilie faces – you will notice when you insert one it will be displayed in your editor as :lol or something similar, don’t worry the software will insert the appropriate smilie accordingly.

Ok who’s for adding images?

The first screen you’ll see is the Dashboard – which looks similar to the image on the right

The Dashboard screen is where you will in time find lots of other links and features that have been built into your site.  These features are things you may decide you’d like to integrate in the future.  But for now let’s get on with adding content to your website.

To add content to your website the primary area you need to be concerned with is the button labeled – PAGES

Click it! And remember the website has been set up so that it’s almost impossible to break – so don’t worry!

If you get in to trouble or your confused get in touch – we’re always happy to help.

• Unlimited Pages
• Email Accounts
• Unlimited Pages
• Flexible easy to use content management system
• A complete website package that grows as you gain visits.

So if you are looking for a website and really want superb value for money plus the ability to add and edit content from anywhere in the world take a look at the £100 website package – exclusive to WN6 Creative!

Websites, magazines, branding – the cost effective design service!

The Irish computer Storage and Multi Media giant – Clever Stuff Ltd commissioned WN6 Creative to create their new look websites and content management system for number of reasons :-

• Personal Service
• Flexibility of the Content Management System
• Cost effectiveness
• Functionality
• Unlimited web pages
• Co-operative content development
• Personal support

It’s a pleasure to role out these two new websites and we hope to have a long working relationship with Cleaver Stuff in the future.

With almost 100,000 visitors a year to these two sites we are sure they’ll prove to be very successful indeed.