Category Archives: Code

Microsocial for WordPress

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Seen and unseen, tiny bits of data are hard at work on every website. Search engines and social networks are using this information. But are you making them work for you? Microformats, microdata, metadata : what are they, what do they do, and how can you use them to attract visitors and improve SEO on your WordPress site.

If you liked the presentation on structured data that I gave at the Social Capital Conference, this is part II – micro social applied to WordPress. The last presentation was for a general audience, and this one is meant for intermediate bloggers and for developers. I gave this talk last weekend at WordCamp Montreal 2013.

Check out my slides from WordCamp Montreal.

If you are looking for a checklist for general users, check out my previous post.

Microsocial: How tiny bits of data can make or break your website

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Seen and unseen, tiny bits of data are hard at work. Microformats, microdata, metadata : search engines and social networks are using this information. But are you making them work for you?

Today I was one of the speakers at the Social Capital Conference, a conference in Ottawa that focusses on Social Media. My talk focussed on some small but important things that are happening on the Web that can get you more traffic, better search engine results and more social media attention.

Check out my slides from the Social Capital Conference 2013.

Get the Microsocial Checklist

Download our easy microsocial checklist to help get your website ready for the microsocial web.

How to Get Structured Data Onto Your Website

I was also asked for some links to tools that will allow you to create structured data easily. Here are a few.

Add Microformats to Your Contact Page
Microformats.org has a tool which will allow you to mark up your contact information in Microformats.

Add Microformats to an Event
Microformats.org has another cool tool that lets you add microformats to events.

Add Open Graph and Twitter Cards to WordPress
If you happen to own a self-hosted WordPress site, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to add meta tags for Facebook and Twitter.

The future is mobile: Part II

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This is the second part of a two-part series on designing for mobile.

Today, I’m going to cover SEO, server-side tweaks, and conditional tags. I’ll also look at how to deal with javascript and multimedia. I’ll be posting a short follow-up on accessibility soon. Check back for more.
Continue reading →

The future is mobile – Part I

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Last weekend I gave a presentation at WordCamp Montreal 2011 on developing for the mobile Web. The talk covered some easy online tools, and WordPress-specific themes and plugins that require no coding. Then I offered my own solution.

Designing for mobile can be tough because you are designing for so many different devices, screen sizes, screen resolutions, operating devices, and functionality sets. Your design needs to be really flexible in order to work on the majority of mobile devices.

And it needs to be attractive. Most of the mobile web is not especially functional, and what is functional is a bit plain vanilla. It’s quite easy at this point to build a standout site, if you put in the effort. Continue reading →