Below is a simple function that allows the best of both worlds: the flexibility of get_the_content() (where you control when the output happens) with the option to perserve the formatting like the_content();

The function (place within your functions.php theme file):

function get_content_with_formatting($content){
$content = apply_filters(‘the_content’, $content);
$content = str_replace(‘]]>’, ‘]]>’, $content);
return $content;
}

Usage example (use within The Loop) :

<?php

// in your functions.php
function custom_loop(){
// customize the loop
$params = array(‘post_type’ => ‘post’,'posts_per_page’ => 5);

// setup the custom loop using WP_Query
$new_query = new WP_Query($params);
// the custom loop
if($new_query->have_posts()): while ($new_query->have_posts()) : $new_query->the_post();$id = get_the_ID();
$content = get_the_content();
$content_formatted = get_content_with_formatting($content);

$return.=’.$title.’;
$return.=’.$content_formatted.’;
endwhile;
endif;
} ?>

<?php // place below code in an output template file such as home.php to display the post content
echo custom_loop(); ?>

To see the original forum answer this post is based on go here (props to jonradio for the answer).

If you have any questions about how to use this function in your own wordpress theme or just questions in general, post them below in the comments.  Feel free to use this function in your own WordPress theme.

Thank you for reading and have a great day.

It is a fact that SEO is becoming less about keywords and more about relevant content.

“The  Panda update [to the Google ranking algorithm] was designed to improve the user experience by catching and demoting low-quality sites that did not provide useful original content or otherwise add much value. At the same time, it provided better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.” ~ How Google Search Works

This shift in focus makes perfect sense since keywords are meaningless unless the content is there to support them.  The search engines, namely Google, have picked up on the content quality and relevance as an important search rank indicator and are doing something about it.

SEO the wrong way: Cheat the system.

I know it’s tempting but don’t engage in iffy SEO keyword and back link schemes. They game the system and can get you penalized. Google and the other search engines know about the games / schemes and actively look for ways to prevent them from skewing the search results.

Ask yourself:  Do you really want to risk your search rank on a company who wants you to pay them to cheat the system for you?

Doesn’t sound quite right does it?

SEO the right way: Give ‘em what they want.

And what do the search engines want?

Relevant, quality content!

You can publish relevant content through your website, blog, news feed, article writing, guest blogging, etc.  If you create great content and then use the keywords to help identify it, your on the right track.  If you guest blog, or write articles, you can link back to your site and create quality back links for the search engines to pick up as well.

But don’t forget:

Oh yeah, with all this talk of search engines, don’t forget your visitor. Relevant quality content helps them too. They are the ones who will ultimately decide to come back for more, so make sure your optimized content is visitor friendly too.

The Takeaway:  Improve your SEO by creating quality, relevant content for the search engines and your visitors.

If you have comments, questions, opinions, thoughts or you just want to say something about this topic, post a comment below.  Your comments are welcome here.

“How do I get more business online?”

I see this question written on business forums and website forums all over the place this same question and I believe I have an answer:

Distinguish yourself.

If you have an idea for a better way for your customers to purchase your products online, build it and see what happens.  If no one in your industry has done it yet, you have a good chance to be the first and thus, you distinguish yourself.  If your competition is selling online products but their site does not adapt to the mobile screen, make yours mobile friendly and distinguish yourself.  If no one else in your industry blogs (or blogs well), start blogging and distinguish yourself.

In all of these situations, the underlying theme is to do something your competition is not doing or fill a need that your competition is not filling online.

That being said, ask yourself these 5 questions:

1. If you had no knowledge of your company, would you be compelled by your website to act?
2. Can you see a memorable difference between your competition’s website and your website?
3. What makes your company different?  Is your website highlighting this difference?
4. Is your website available and easy to use, regardless of device?
5. Is your website a convenient way for your website visitors to act on your products/services online?

These five questions are meant to help you get your mindset right so you can start distinguishing yourself online in a way that will produce results for you.

All of this being said, after you have explored these questions, ACT on the answers.  If you answered negatively to any of these questions, those areas would be a good place to start improving.  Keep in mind that knowing about a problem only does so much for you.  You must then act to solve the problem.

Feel like speaking your mind?  Awesome!  We would love you too. Leave a comment below or send us a message with your thoughts, opinions, etc.

You do a website update and switch from Squarespace to WordPress and in doing so, your blog link structure changes from:

www.domain.com/?category=This%20Category

to:

www.domain.com/blog/category/this-category

After the switch is complete, any link to the old blog post (with the old link structure) would break and instead go to a nasty “could not load page” error.  Imagine this scenario playing out across the old site and all of the pages and posts on it.  Ugh!

As you can imagine, this would cause major issues for visitors who previously saved links to your posts and also for Google, who would now see all of your old site links, it previously indexed, as broken.  Double Ugh!!

Don’t worry though, all is not lost.  There is a way to avoid the chaos.

Enter the 301 Redirect to help you save your web traffic and keep Google and your visitors happy.

Using the power of the 301 Redirect, you would tell the browser to redirect the visitor to the new site address when they visit the old site address.  Awesome right?!

What is the 301 redirect?

According to Google Webmaster:

“If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommended that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location.”

The 301 redirect is a status code that, when applied to a web page, automatically “redirects” the visitor to a different designated page.  This also indicates to the search engines, etc. that the page has moved permanently and that they need to update their records with the new address.

Why do you need to use the 301 Redirect?

As mentioned before, the 301 Redirect will automatically redirect traffic to different website address and do so without nasty error messages and is very useful when changing domains or changing your link structure.  An added benefit: in most cases, the redirect is seamless which improves the user experience.

Using this method will also prevent you from loosing traffic and rank due to the old links to your site not working anymore.

How do you setup 301 Redirects?

The method for setting up 301 redirects varies based on your hosting and website etc.  but if you have a self-hosted wordpress site, you can try the Redirection plugin.  It updates your .htaccess file for you and makes it super easy to setup the 301 redirects for your site.  This is my plugin of choice (mainly because it is super easy and so far, quite reliable) but I am sure there are several other ones out there for you to try out.

If you are not self-hosting wordpress, I would recommend contacting your host to see how best to setup your 301 redirects.  They may have a tool for 301 Redirects which you can use to set them up for your site.

Important Note: You have to know where you’ve been to know where your going

In order for the 301 Redirect to work, you have to have the old address that you will redirect visitors from, as well as the new address to redirect visitors to.  Without the old address, your redirects won’t work.

Also, ideally, you want redirect the visitor to the same (or similar) page or post at the new site, as the original, so the experience is seamless   Redirecting all of the old site links to your new homepage is not recommended from a user experience standpoint.

Take away on 301 Redirects

Use them and love them.  They will help you keep your site traffic and Google standing in the case of a domain change or link structure change and will keep your visitors going to the right pages.

In case you are not familiar with what an infographic is, an infographic is the graphic representation of a large amount of data or different types of data.  Think of it like this:  You have a 30 min. report that you have to present to your board of directors and they only have 5 min. for you to get the point across.  Instead of laying out all of the details of the entire report, you pick out the most important ones and display them visually using charts, graphs, graphics, etc.   This visual display, or infographic, would take care of much of the broad explanation and allow you to get the point across in 5 min.  See below for an actual infographic from the website visual.ly.

This weeks infographic is “Demystifying Amazon Web Services” and it is a doozy.

 Thanks for checking out this weeks infographic.  If you have a comment or opinion, let it be known and post it below.

As always, if you need anything WordPress, Website or Web App, give us a shout.

The situation:

To put things in context, there are generally three different configurations for a smartphone optimized website that Google supports:

1. Responsive web design:  This is where the website and it’s content will adjust to the screen it is being viewed on.  For an example of responsive website design, look at this site on your smartphone or tablet, or just grab the browser window and shrink the site down.  Notice, this site also uses the same url’s on the mobile devices (i.e. smartphones) as it does on the regular browser and the different views are created using a mixture of CSS and Javascript.  Same site, different views, with each view optimized for each device.
2. Sites that serve the same urls but provide different HTML to each device:  An example of this would be a website that is served as a flash site in the desktop browser and as a regular HTML site in the mobile browser with both versions using the same URLs.
3. Sites that have a desktop version and a separate mobile version:   An example of this would be  www.examplewebsite.com and m.examplewebsite.com.  Two different versions of the site, with different 2 different urls.

Also, it should be noted that Google defines smartphones as “Phones with browsers that render normal desktop pages, at least to some extent. This category includes recent mobile browsers that can render HTML5, and covers a diversity of devices, such Android-based phones and iPhones.” - Google

Background:

I always went with “responsive” website design for building smartphone optimized websites just because this configuration made more sense to me.  You see with responsive design, your mobile website address is the same as your regular address, you don’t have to deal with visitor re-directions to a different domain or sub-domain and you can directly control how your content displays in the different size screens, all from the same place, using the same code.  Less mess overall and less to keep track of, both for me as a developer and for my clients as well.

The Research:

Being that my tendency to use responsive web design was just based on my opinion, I decided to dig a little deeper and lo and behold… Google agrees with me.

I found on the Google WebMasterCentral blog the answers to my smartphone optimized website questions and here they are:

 ”1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.”

~Recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites- Google

This is all well and good but it left me begging the question “Why?”  and as usual, the powers that be at Google had an answer for this too:

“[Google] recommend using responsive web design because it has many good aspects:

• Using a single URL for a piece of content makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content, and a single URL for the content helps Google’s algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.
• No redirection is needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. Also, user agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site’s user experience (see “Pitfalls when detecting user agents” section for details).
• It saves resources for both your site and Google’s crawlers. For responsive web design pages, any Googlebot user agents needs to crawl your pages once, as opposed to crawling multiple times with different user agents, to retrieve your content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.”

~Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites – Google

What does it all mean?

So what does all of this mean?  Well for starters, it seems Google wants to do as little extra work as possible to crawl, analyze, figure out and relate smartphone optimized websites and thus, the easier we make it for Google, the better.

Serving multiple URLs for the same content, as in config #3, has it’s uses but really doesn’t make Google’s task of indexing those files and relating them all back to each other any easier.  The same goes with serving one type of content on the desktop browser and a different type of content on the mobile browser, config #2.  More difficult for Google to understand right?  I think so.  Lastly, we come to responsive website design, Google’s recommended configuration, where the style of the page changes to meet the device (smartphone, tablet, etc.) but same website content is served using the same URLs, making Google’s task that much easier.

Other Advantages of Responsive Website Design:

There are other advantages to having a responsive smartphone optimized website such as:

1. One web address for your customers to remember.
2. Less development time and testing since the only thing changing is the display of the site.
3. The functionality of the live site can be applied to the smartphone optimized version (to the extent the mobile browser allows).

Smartphone Optimized Websites and You.

If you don’t currently have a mobile website, consider making your regular site responsive so you can provide the growing number of mobile users with an optimized version of your site, just for them.

Shameless plug:  We can create a custom responsive website for you or convert your existing site into a responsive website optimized for smartphones.  For more information on this service, contact us right now.

If you have a response, objection, rebuttal, thought, or well, anything to say about this topic, please post a comment below and let’s discuss it.

Thank you for reading and have a wonderful day.

-Big Cloud Media

What is #WPQA?

Over the last couple of months we noticed that a lot of people on Twitter were asking variations of the same questions about WordPress but had no way of comparing or collaborating on the answers.  After helping several of these people with everything from the CSS of a theme, to recommended WordPress hosting, to the difference between self-hosted WordPress and WordPress.com, we decided to dig deeper and explore a way to get the questions and their answers into one place and accessible to anyone who needed them.  Enter the Twitter hashtag #WPQA.

The problem

Since we don’t all have access to everyone’s twitter streams, have time to look at everyone’s tweets or even know who to ask in most cases, we just tweet the WordPress question and wait.  It’s literally a shot in the dark.  If you have 5 followers and none of them know about WordPress, chances are, your WordPress related question will go unanswered.

Those tweeters that have a ton of followers sometimes get an answer but unless an expert is actively looking for their question, it’s a likely chance that the questions go unanswered and the issue goes unresolved.  This can lead to lots of frustration and bad results from un-informed decisions.

This whole situation just re-enforces the confusion surrounding WordPress in general and as mentioned before, some questions never get answered at all.  THIS IS BAD.

Our solution

In an effort to help fight this growing issue, we recently launched the #WPQA hashtag on Twitter which we actively monitor to make sure the questions, issues, concerns, etc. posted with it, get addressed.

#WPQA stands for WordPress Questions and Answers

This hashtag represents an effort to capture and address WordPress questions, issues, concerns, etc. all in one place, which can be easily found, searched and used by anyone on Twitter.  Our goal is to ensure that WordPress questions get addressed, regardless of whether a WordPress expert is following the user asking the question.  This will hopefully alleviate some of the confusion and help users, developers, and others make more educated decisions regarding WordPress.

How do you use it?

To post your question to the #WPQA list you just include #WPQA in your tweet.  That’s all.  When an answer is posted to your question, you will be mentioned and the tweet will also contain the #WPQA hashtag so everything stays together.

To find all of the questions and answers posted to the #WPQA list, just search “WPQA” or “wpqa” and all of the posts tagged with #WPQA will be shown.

How can you help?  Spread the word.

You can help the cause by just telling your Twitter followers to use the #WPQA hashtag when tweeting a WordPress question and also by using it yourself.  Easy peasy.

If you have any questions, concerns, thoughts, kudos, etc. regarding this post, please leave us a comment below.

As always, if you need anything WordPress related, feel free to contact us today.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for our next post.

What does this mean for you and your small business?  

Well, probably not a whole lot right now since it is invite only at this point.   But, that being said, if and when Google opens this program up to all businesses, or if you have received an invite already, it will be an easier way to pay for and keep track of your AdWords campaign.  You get the flexibility of credit and only one place to use it which keeps it on task and not mixable with other things you might have going on.  This translates into a convenient payment method for a lot of small businesses with many things currently on their credit plates, who want to keep their AdWords campaign spending completely separate from everything else.

How does it work?

As far as we can tell, it will be a regular credit card that only works with Google AdWords.  You apply, you have to get approved, your given a rate (the Adwords blog post notes that “*Depending on creditworthiness, rates range from 8.99% to 18.99%.”), you’d only use it for Google AdWords and pay on it each month.

The purpose, according to the InsideAdwords post,  is to “give Small and Medium Sized Businesses more flexibility—some ‘extra credit’—so they’re able to focus on growing their businesses even further”.

Back to You.

Would you be down to use an AdWords Business Credit card?  Is this just another attempt by Google to take over the world?

Be sure to leave us a comment with your thoughts, concerns, rants, raves, or you know… whatever is on your mind and as always, thank you for reading.

~Big Cloud Media

ps. If you need help with your Website, WordPress or Web App, give us a call (210-519-7729), send us a message or tweet us: @BigCloudMedia.

How can you use Buffer?

Excellent question.  Imagine this scenario:  You have a product launch coming up and you need to get the word out to your followers.  You know they interact with you but you don’t know exactly when so it’s hard to gauge when the best time to post is.  So, what do you do?  Set Buffer loose and watch the awesomeness happen.

Using Buffer you can write the post(s) and let it schedule when to post them for max effect.  Fire and forget.  Easy, peasy.

Buffer analyzes when your following interact with you on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter and schedules your posts accordingly.  If you get the most interaction at 9am, 11am, 4pm and 7pm on Linkedin, buffer schedules your Linkedin posts for those times.  Add into the mix the ability to re-order the posts, tweak the post times, use a url shortener and track the interactions via Buffer’s analytics and BAM!  You have a great tool at your disposal for increasing your social media interactions.

Buffer and Me?

Currently, Buffer is one of my most used apps on my phone and on my computer.  I am always using it to post news articles or other tidbits to inform my followers of happenings or helpful info.  I find several articles I’d like to tweet but I don’t want to flood my stream with them all at once, enter Buffer to save the day.  I use Buffer to schedule my tweets and organize when I want what posted for max effect.  If I think Buffer could do better, I adjust and customize the pre-determined posting schedule accordingly.

In Summary:

To summarize, I love using Buffer and I have seen an increase in my interactions, etc. throughout my Buffer connected social media accounts.  Don’t get me wrong here, Buffer is not a magic solution to all of your social media issues you may be experiencing but it has helped me to grow and interact with my social media following more and more since I started using it.  My links get clicked more, etc. and I have seen a marked improvement in my social media reach.  If you are looking for a post scheduling solution for your Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook accounts, check out Buffer.

Have you used Buffer?  Leave a comment and tell us what your experience has been.

As always, if you need help with your website, your wordpress or your web application, contact us today.

Thank you for visiting and have a wonderful day.

In the last post we explained how to get yours going and what you might use it for and in this post, we will feature some of the creativity already being displayed with the Twitter profile header image.

Here are some examples of the new Twitter header image in action:

Do you have a cool Twitter profile image?  Have you seen an awesome Twitter profile image whilst you be surfing the Twitterverse?  In either case, leave us a comment with the Twitter handle of the user who’s profile header image we should add to our listing and if we agree, it will be done.  By the way, there is no shame in self-promotion, if you got it, flaunt it.

Even if you don’t have a Twitter profile to recommend, drop us a line anyways and let us know what you think about all this Twitter profile image hubbub.

As always, if you need anything WordPress, Web-app or Website related, contact us today.

Thanks for reading.