Tips and Tricks for the WordPress interface- and updates on revisions.
How to get the most out of plug ins- themes and the Word Press blog engine.
If your website looks the same on a smartphone as it does on a computer, you’ve got a problem.
The latest data from a study shows that almost 25% of the 35% of Americans who own smart phones, use their phone as their primary way of accessing the Internet:
the Pew Internet Project finds that one third of American adults – 35% – own smartphones. The Project’s May survey found that 83% of US adults have a cell phone of some kind, and that 42% of them own a smartphone. That translates into 35% of all adults.
Our definition of a smartphone owner includes anyone who falls into either of the following two categories: One-third of cell owners 33% say that their phone is a smartphone. Two in five cell owners 39% say that their phone operates on a smartphone platform these include iPhones and Blackberry devices, as well as phones running the Android, Windows or Palm operating systems.
Several demographic groups have high levels of smartphone adoption, including the financially well-off and well-educated, non-whites, and those under the age of 45.
Some 87% of smartphone owners access the internet or email on their handheld, including two-thirds 68% who do so on a typical day. When asked what device they normally use to access the internet, 25% of smartphone owners say that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer. While many of these individuals have other sources of online access at home, roughly one third of these “cell mostly” internet users lack a high-speed home broadband connection.
via Smartphone Adoption and Usage | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
The use of WordPress as a CMS (content management system) makes it easy to have your content display one way for a computer screen and a different way for a phone or tablet through the use of simple plugins.
- For tablets, OnSwipe is a solid solution that gives your site a magazine feel.
- For phones, WPTouch is a bit of a pain to configure but does the job.
There are also some themes that are purely built for mobile, but, that’s information for another post.
Lately, I’ve been on a usability kick- and looking at better ways to interface with programs we work with everyday.
WordPress has a really great interface- except, that the left sidebar with all it’s drop downs for the different options- seems to have a mind of it’s own- when something is dialed down, you don’t know where to click.
Enter- Ozh- and his plugin for moving the menus to the top- saving space, and making things appear in the same place every time!
When WordPress 2.7 and its new and optimized user interface came, I thought there was still room for improvements: a horizontal menu gave the admin area more of a “desktop application†feel, and I think it’s superior to a vertical menu. So I updated the WordPress Admin Drop Down Menu.
You can download older versions and the current version on his site- but, I always prefer to get it from the Codex:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ozh-admin-drop-down-menu/
Need a quick introduction to the new features in WordPress 2.9- watch the video:
For the first time, I didn’t need to use viper007bond Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin to post this, since embedding is covered for a number of video sites. However- it’s still not as easy peasy as they say- I had to switch to HTML view to paste the “embed” code- to get it to work. The little filmstrip button which is supposed to “embed” media- still asks for the user to figure out what type of file they are embedding.
Somehow, even with Automattic (the publishers of WordPress) having a UX person on staff- the user interface is still more complex than it needs to be. I’m still looking at the four “Upload/Insert” buttons- and wondering why they need four buttons for the same controls (I thought I’d written a post about this- but, couldn’t find it).
Other cool features are the ability to crop and rotate images, update and compatibility check all plugins, and a few other cool little fixes. We’ve installed it on our sites- without problem so far (5 days). We’ll report any changes on that as we find them.