Cool WordPress Ideas Under 40 Characters
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WordPress is far and away the most popular CMS on the planet, but it is far more than just a blog. In my presentation I explored some ways to use WordPress to create content assets that can attract links and shares, making content marketing a more realistic proposition for more of your clients.
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Cool WordPress Ideas Under 40 Characters
- 1. @HathawayP Patrick Hathaway COOL SHIT YOU CAN DO WITH WORDPRESS
- 2. Cool Shit You Can Do With WordPress @HathawayP
- 3. Cool Shit You Can Do With WordPress @HathawayP “Stuff”
- 5. @HathawayP I am NOT a developer
- 6. @HathawayP SEOs Don’t Need To Code bit.ly/digital-rockstars
- 9. @HathawayP Most of your clients use WordPress* *Entirely unrepresentative sample
- 11. @HathawayP
- 14. @HathawayP Google Drive -> WordPress -> InDesign bit.ly/auto-wp-site
- 20. @HathawayP Example: Alzheimer’s Research UK dementialab.org/discovery-lab/
- 22. @HathawayP Example: Perfect Web Page
- 24. @HathawayP Client Example: FE International bit.ly/penalty-indicator
- 26. @HathawayP Client Example: Jungle Rumble
- 27. @HathawayP Takeaways • Automate simple tasks with IFTTT and Zapier • Use plugins and themes to create ‘shareworthy’ content • Utilise the WordPress backend to make client management easy
Notes de l'éditeur
- Hello everyone, and thank you for having me. I’m Patrick Hathaway, and I work for Hit Reach. We do SEO and web design, with a particular focus on WordPress. And today I’m going to be talking to you about
- Cool shit you can do with WordPress. Ok, so obviously I don’t want to bamboozle you with technical jargon so you could easily swap out the word shit
- for stuff….or things. Or whatever you want. Ok before I start, I need to issue
- A disclaimer.
- I am NOT a developer. So if in the Q & A you ask me development questions, I will just stare blankly at you in silence. I also don’t believe that SEOs should
- don’t need to code. With so many other things to stay on top of, I don’t know why we need to try and learn a whole nother specialism itself. And obviously we get distracted by Twitter. If you’ve not seen our comics before this is one of our Digital Rockstars comic strips. When we started doing these we sat down and were like ‘yeah loads of people with embed them on their blogs and use them in presentations!’ Turns out I need to do the presentation myself to get one in. Oh well. So anyway, I don’t think we all need to spending years learning to code, but what IS important is that we can communicate with developers and explain technically what we require.
- So why WordPress? What’s particularly special about WordPress?
- Well, the main reason is that shitloads of sites use WordPress. Now if you can’t see the legend, basically WordPress is the massive blue chunk on the left, and this other half is everything else. And a more important point is that lots of small and medium businesses use WordPress, in fact…
- Most of YOUR clients use WordPress. Now these figures are based on a Twitter survey that I did a few weeks ago, where I just asked SEO agency staff which CMS their clients use. If you weren’t lucky enough to be involved, take it from me that the survey was highly representative and statistically rigorous. If you can’t see this chart again, that is WordPress at the top there with over 60% of the vote. So that’s why WordPress.
- Ok, so let’s move on to some of things you can do with WordPress. Automate stuff. Whether it’s just to save time or to make processes more efficient, automation can be a nice quick win. I’m sure you’ve all heard of IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That, and allows you to connect different applications so that when something happens on one of them, it triggers an event on the other. Zapier is much less well known, but does essentially the same thing. In fact Zapier has a load more channels to work with than IFTTT, particularly for WordPress.
- So these are some of the channels you can integrate with WordPress. If you’ve ever dealt with a client who constantly forgets to share posts on social media, you can just set up a rule to do it for them. Or maybe someone on your team needs to know every time your client publishes a new post, you can get an automatic email or a new task added to Basecamp, or perhaps keep a record of what’s been published in Google Drive. So this also works the other way around, where events on external applications can trigger an event in WordPress. So if you wanted to republish a Tumblr blog, or if you have a new video on your YouTube channel, that can create a new WordPress post as soon as they go live. Similarly on Eventbrite, when you add a new event it will automatically create a corresponding WordPress post. So there’s loads of different variations you can put together to create your own ‘recipes’.
- We actually experimented with this on our own site and built a little Rube Goldberg workflow which chained a load of these triggers together. So someone filled in a form on our website and it triggered Paypal to take payment, adding the user to a list on Mailchimp and through to a bunch of other programs. Zapier actually did a writeup on us which is on their site, if you visit that bit.ly link they run through the whole process.
- So here’s an example of a news site run on WordPress, called the Bangor Daily News. Now that is actually Bangor in Maine, in the USA… not Ireland like I first thought. Which is a bit disappointing. But the interesting thing about this site is that their workflow is completely web-based, it syncs WordPress, Google Drive and InDesign so that they have one CMS to manage both their web and print operations.
- So if you’re interested in how they do it, visits this link at the bottom here and they have a video on this post which explains it. Basically reporters put the story together on Google Drive, then when they are ready to publish they move the story to a specific folder, which integrates with WordPress via the Google Drive API. This creates a draft in WordPress, which is checked by a copy-editor before they publish online. Once this is done they can pull the story directly into InDesign via a plugin they wrote, so they can make the story ready for the print edition. In fact about a month ago they just rewrote this plugin as a script, and open sourced it. So you can find it on github if you want to use it. So both the web and the print editions of the paper were powered by the original entry on Google Drive.
- I know there’s loads of content out there about plugins and themes, so I’ll not spend too long on this section. But I’ve picked out a few ways to use themes or plugins to build really linkworthy content. As you know, ‘content’ is the big buzzword at the moment, and in particular content that can drive a lot of social traffic or attract a lot of links. But big content pieces can be prohibitively expensive, particularly for clients with small budgets. So anything we can do to reduce the production cost can really help make content a more feasible proposition.
- Everyone must have seen these Us Vs Them quizzes that are doing the rounds – How Northern Are You? How Middle Class Are You? How Much Are You Hated By The Daily Mail? Which is clearly an important issue. And they work because they are so straightforward and they’re incredibly sharable. This one is probably my favourite though, and when I was filling it in I had a shaky start – being a British male who has a job – but I ended up being fully hated. I could have got there MUCH quicker if I were a homosexual Muslim woman.
- So if you wanted to do something like the Us Vs Them quizzes, there’s a WordPressplugin called Slick Quiz which is totally free and really easy to use. It doesn’t look quite as flashy as the Us Vs Them ones, but definitely allows you to put something solid together at next to no cost. Here’s an example that the guys at Wish.co.uk are working on – like a ‘how much of hellhole is your workplace’. The link at the bottom will take you to the plugin page on WordPress if you want to have a play around with Slick Quiz.
- I’m sure you’ve also seen a fair amount of these parallax scrolling pages, or the scrolling interactive infographics, which basically have a scroll effect where the background moves at a slower rate to the foreground, creating a 3D effect as you scroll down the page.
- One of the most well known examples of this is Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, which was published by The New York Times and has had something like 4 million views. If you’ve not seen it, it really is an amazing piece of content, combining a great story with images and HTML 5 video to make a really engaging journalistic piece. Now this isn’t built in WordPress. But then again it did take over a year to produce. So how might you recreate something like this? Typically with this sort of content you’d either put it on a microsite or a dedicated page within your current site. Both are easy to do using WordPress, even if you’re not working with a WordPress site. You can just install WordPress under a specific directory, and then on here install a parallax theme which will handle the scrolling effects. This first bit.ly link goes to a collection of 30 or so Parallax themes. Almost all of these are responsive, and lots of them come with collections of additional animation effects you can add in. If you want to try and recreate the big background video they employ on Snow Fall, then try the second bit.ly link. This brings you to the Git Hub page for a developer called John Polacek and who has made some brilliant plugins – including one called BigVideo which is a Jquery plugin that allows you to set big background video in HTML5. There’s also another great plugin on his Github page called SuperScrollorama which lets you use loads of cool scroll effects and have content bouncing onto the screen and flying about everywhere.So, by combining a parallax theme and some of these cool plugins you can create a really engaging piece of longform content without a massive expense on development.
- So here’s an example of a company using WordPress to produce something visually spectacular. This is Alzheimer’s Research UK, who put together this microsite to help raise awareness and increase donations, and uses a really cool scrolling animation that walks you around the lab, with various hotspot callouts with videos or stats. This is just built in a standard WordPress theme with a few Jquery plugins to create all the effects.
- So some of you might have seen this interactive guide we published on our site last year, which split off into all the different elements of a web page and what you can do to optimise each one of them. It did pretty well – 50,000 unique visits, 3000 plus shares and over 100 linking root domains. So cos we built this for ourselves, the back end wasn’t particularly friendly to work with. So if you want to edit the content, it looks like this…
- Which is not too friendly at all. In WordPress, with something this complex, you can’t edit the data in visual mode, or it screws everything up, so you have to edit it in the text editor. Now in fact guide was the first piece of content I ever worked on for Hit Reach. Because, since I’m so down with the kids, I actually got my job through a Twitter conversation. I hadn’t even ever met my boss Chris or even spoken to him on the phone before he’d unofficially hired me. So we actually made this content piece as a test to make sure we enjoyed working together and wouldn’t drive each other up the wall. So this in effect was my interview. Annnnd one day when we’d worked on it for a couple of weeks I logged in and updated it in visual mode. Which defaulted all the fonts. So Chris had to go in and manually reset them all, which on 6000 words is a bit of a ball ache. But luckily he still hired me anyway.So anyway the point here is that, at least for this type of resource, you are going to want to keep it up to date. But if you try asking a client to edit this, they will guaranteed break it.
- Ok so here’s another example, on this one I’m talking about a specific client, called FE International. They are website brokers, so they buy and sell websites, and they generally deal with anything that turns over more than £1000 a month. They identified SEOs as a target market for their services, so they wanted some awareness in the SEO space. So we came up with this content idea of a website penalty indicator, which pulls in SEMrush traffic data for a website and then overlays Panda and Penguin dates. So it’s a bit like Panguin except you don’t need access to Google Analytics. So it’s a useful prospecting tool.
- And unlike the previous example I showed you, we built this one with a friendly back-end. We built the main data fields into a settings option on their site, so they literally log into WordPress, choose the setting and select SEMrush graph, then they can update the content or add in new updates. So the important thing here is that this is perfectly familiar to anyone using WordPress – there’s nothing new to learn, it’s really easy for anyone to update, and it’s on a system that they already know how to use.In my opinion this is one of the most powerful features of WordPress as it just makes everything much easier to handle. And these types of custom fields are really easy to implement with a plugin.
- Ok so my final example is another client job we did, and this was for an indoor golf company. Now they already had a WordPress site when they came to us, and what they actually wanted was an interactive scoreboard system, where players could enter their scores as they went round the course. Although WordPress doesn’t support features like this, we built them a system that still allowed them to interface via WordPress. So when a group of players came in, our client opens up WordPress and creates a new team for them, and then within that team they create all the players to go round the course. Then the system generates 2 URLs – one for the players to input their scores on the phone, and one that goes on the TV with the result. All the players join the local wi-fi on their phone, go to the players URL, select themselves and input their score on their phone as they go round the course. This is linked to the clubhouse TV which shows the result URL so everyone can see how they got on. Everything is updated in real time utilizing node.js, and the input and output URLs don’t live within WordPress, but they push and pull data from the WordPress database. So the important thing for our client is that he still gets to use one single backend system for his website and also for his customer scoring system, which works out quite neatly for him.
- So here are the takeaways from this talk, which I’m sure you can read for yourself. The point of my presentation is not to try and convince you how great WordPress is, but to help make you aware of the opportunities that are available to you, so you can confidently sit down with a developer and say ‘this is what I’m looking to achieve’. This is not really about how to do ‘cool shit’ with WordPress. It’s about how you can make the most of the technology and better serve the needs of your clients.