Wittegen Press' New Look

Wittegen Press' New Look

I've finally done it - I gave the Wittegen Press website a new look. Now technically this should have just involved picking a new theme for WordPress, but things are never that simple, are they? 😝

Do you like the new header? I think it speaks about the site much more than the old one which was just the logo.

New Wittegen Press Home Page

It loads much faster now too! I think the newer themes are much better than the 2014 theme we were using.

One thing that did surprise me, however, is how many of the currently offered themes are not responsive. I had to search carefully to make sure the one I picked was.

If you're unfamiliar with the term, responsive means that the site can be viewed equally well on PC, tablet and phone and it uses CSS div layouts to do it. There is also fluid layout which uses percentages to do it, but, as you can imagine, on a phone percentages are not going to work too well.

Had to sort out all the menus as well because, while the new theme tried to sort them out, if only has once widget area (the old one had 3) so it duplicated a whole load of the menus.

There were some other formatting issues that I had to sort out, but it was actually easier than I expected, which was nice for once 😂

Other things I did while I was at it:

• Added a page for Wittegen Eros
• Updated all the books so they are now tagged Wittegen Press or Wittegen Eros so they can be found by publisher.
• Updated all books with their new covers.
• Implemented the featured stories scroller for the blog page.

New Wittegen Press Blog page

There is only one thing I can't fix and it's driving me batty. Our books used to have a G+ link on them, which is part of one of the plugins we use, and it's no longer formatting correctly, but it won't go away! I've turned off the social media setting for the plugin and turned it back on again, but it is still not working. Most frustrating.

Anyway, I hope you like the new look for Wittegen Press.

The Wonders of WordPress that I Never Realised

For a very long time I thought WordPress was just a blogging platform because we used it once on a site we had running and that was all it was at the time. However, when Soph and I rebuilt our website (WittegenPress.com) we found out just how wrong we were.

WordPress is not simply a blogging platform, it's a whole content management system with wonderful plugins and everything you could possibly need to build a site quickly, easily and in just the way you want. We were using Joomla before and compared to that WordPress is a dream.

If you would like to know the details of how we rebuilt WittegenPress.com then we created a post on that site about exactly how we did it: How We Built This Site (wittegenpress.com) With WordPress.

However, I'd like to talk about some of the advantages I've found with at least one of the plugins, other than the obvious that they let us do what we wanted to do.

We used iThemes Security, which is a plugin which greatly enhances the security of your site. I would recommend it to everyone using WordPress. However, one of the features I had no idea it had when I first installed it, that I have found very useful is the 404 lockout option, and not just because it prevents people from randomly trying to find ways into our site.

What the 404 option does is lock out users who bring up too many 404 errors too quickly in succession, which might be an indication of them trying to find a security weakness to your site. It has many customisation options so you can make sure it doesn't happen when it shouldn't, for example you can make certain files like images, ignored by this functionality. However, what it also does is log all those 404s. This is incredibly useful because we migrated our site from one platform to another and have used .htaccess to reroute requests for pages that no longer exist.

I thought I had been very thorough in making sure I had all the redirects we needed, but the 404 log showed me just how wrong I was. There were whole sections I simply hadn't though about because they weren't URLs I ever used. Over the last few days I have been watching the 404 logs and then adding required URLs to the .htaccess file so that all URLs which are still current go to the right places.

It also showed me that part of the SEO plugin we were using wasn't working and allowed me to fix it.