Variables Products and how to update them

Variable products and attributes are complicated and we’ll start with a disclaimer that you shouldn’t follow everything in here to the letter. You’ll need to adapt things depending on what plugins, product set-up and functionality you have on your own store. Our basic WooCommerce guide covered the different types of products you can have. In this guide we’ll take a more in-depth look at how to amend variable products – adding more variations.

Step 1: check your attributes

First up you need to have all the attributes defined. You’ll find these under the products / attributes menu. Before you go any further, make sure you have all the attributes and terms you need defined. We’ll use these at the next stage. Here’s a sample from Plug Plants by Post. This is the case study we’ll use to walk you through the updates.

Step 2: Add new attributes to your product

In this example we’re taking a product which has some simple variations already set up and adding some more. Here we start with 3 quantity variations with prices set for each.

The next step is to add more variations. We’ll add a new category of ‘plug plant strips’ and set up product variations based on the attributes Plug Plant Type and quantity. Not all types will be available in all quantities. The mature plug plants will be available in 3,9 and 24 – as currently. The strips will be available in quantities of 5,15 and 45, with different pricing.

In this case we only currently have 1 attribute set on the product for variations – quantity. We’ll need to add some more.

We’ll add new attribute of ‘plug plant type’ and choose the variations we want – in this case ‘Mature plug plant’ and ‘plug plant strip’. And then save them.

Next we’ll need to add the new quantities – we currently only have 3,9 and 24. So let’s edit the quantity variation (see highlighted arrow) and add the new ones:

Step 3: Generate the new variations

Let’s move to the Variations tab and see what’s currently there:

We want to set the existing variations to be only available for ‘mature plug plants – just change the dropdowns to do this, and save. The next step is to add the new variations for the plug strips – 5,15 and 45. The easiest way to do this is to add them manually. We can start by altering the ‘any quantity / any type’ and clicking edit to change the price. At any point you can ‘preview’ your changes from the right hand admin panel. We should end up with something like this:

Step 4: Ordering of attributes on the screen

Next make sure your attributes are in the right order. In this case the Plug Plant Type attribute was added below the Quantity. So elts jump back to attributes and drag Type to the top (drag from the 3 bars)

Step 5: Check your product categories

This step is going to depend on how your shop is set up. In this case we have product categories set for ‘Mature Plug Plants’ and ‘Plug Plant Strips’. So we’ll also have to now add this product to the Plug Plant Strips category so that it shows up in the right places on the storefront.

And there we have it! The product is now in a new category, with a new ‘strip’ variation and quantities

For this store we have also installed the YITH WooCommerce Product Add-ons & Extra Options plugin so that variations which are not available are marked when a selection is made. This has already been configured, so there are not changes required.

Conclusion

We hope this has been a useful deep dive into altering product variations. You should be able to use this in any standard WooCommerce store, although your use cases may differ slightly.

Advanced WordPresss Site Editing

In our ‘How to Edit Your WordPress Site with Confidence‘ article we cover just a few basics to get you started adding new content, whether that be posts or pages. But what if you need to do more? If you add a new page, it has to go onto the menu. In fact, if you add a new top level menu page you may also break the responsiveness of the site.

Sounds scary? Well … if in doubt, you can give me a call to help. But if you feel brave then this article will talk you through some of the more complicated tasks. For now we’ll focus on menus.

Adding a new Menu Item

You’ll need administrator rights for this task, so if you can’t see the menu options, let me know and I’ll give you access.

1. Head down to Appearance / Menus on the left hand admin menu.
2. From the ‘Add Menu Items’ panel on the left, tick the page / post / brand / category (ies) you want to add
3. Click ‘add to menu’ Helpfully … this adds them to the bottom of the menu. You’ll need to drag them to where you want. If the menu item is indented, it will form a submenu..
4. Change the menu text if required by expanding the menu item and altering the Navigation Label (eg my help page is called ‘help documents’ but I just want ‘Help’ to appear on the menu)
5. Save the menu!
6. If you want the menu to appear immediately then you will need to clear the cache. Otherwise it should eventually appear

Clearing the Cache

We tend to use WP Fastest Cache on our sites. At the top of your admin bar you should see a ‘delete cache’ dropdown. Choose the ‘Delete cache and all minified CSS’ option. The cache will get rebuilt over time, but it does no harm to have a look at your home page in a private browsing tab just to reload that immediately.

Adding a new top level menu item

To be continued …. this one requires some knowledge of developer tools and you’ll have to change some code. If you need this guide now, call us! (We produce these ‘just in time’)

This is your ‘go to’ checklist when you want to add a new post to your WordPress website!

Last year we wrote a very specific post on how to blog from your phone. Essentially that was because Kenneth was cycling from Carlisle to Rome, with a cello in tow! And it’s been in our minds for a long time to update that article for the rest of our lovely clients – and show you exactly how to add a new post on your WordPress website (Please don’t use your phone unless you are travelling – It’s much easier on a larger screen!)

Quick checklist

1. Go to Posts, News, Projects or the relevant post type.
2. Clone or duplicate an existing post, or choose Add New if your site does not have a clone option.
3. Change the title.
4. Update the text and images.
5. Set the featured image.
6. Write the excerpt.
7. Choose the correct category.
8. Update the Yoast SEO title, slug and meta description.
9. Preview the post.
10. Publish.

Adding a new post

When we build your website, we’ll often add a news area or similar where you can add new articles. When we do this, we’ll always add one or two posts to get you started. Because it’s much easier to copy something that’s already there than to start from scratch. So this post focuses on a checklist of things you should work through when adding a new post.

Where can I find my posts?

Your posts are found on the left hand admin menu in WordPress. They may not be called ‘posts’ (more on this below) but they’ll always have a drawing pin next to them. And we’ll cover exactly what types of posts you have in your handover documentation. It’s always site specific!

In this image you can see that we have 2 types of ‘post’ on our website – posts (which is where we write our help articles) and ‘portfolio’ (which is where we add new sites that we’ve built. Separating posts out like this allows us to give them better names and a better site structure – which helps SEO. Compare these two links:

https://www.greystokewebdesign.co.uk/help/3-simple-steps-to-improve-your-seo/

https://www.greystokewebdesign.co.uk/portfolio/leve-tech/

By having 2 distinct post types we can build a site structure that separates our help articles and our portfolio posts. We do this by giving them ‘custom permalinks’ using the Custom Post Type UI Plugin.

On your website we may have called this ‘news’ or ‘projects’ or – as we do for Eden Valley Mountaineering Club – something very specific such as ‘crag guides’! Basically it’s what makes sense for your website!

So now you know where to find your ‘posts’ and what to look for – the drawing pin icon. Next let’s cover creating a new post.

Clone an existing post

On many sites we build, we add the option to clone or duplicate an existing post. If you can see a Clone or Duplicate option, this is usually the easiest way to keep the same layout. If not, choose Add New instead. This gives you the structure you need, and then all you have to do is update the content. Head over to your posts and look at ‘all posts’ (We’ll use ‘posts’ from now on, but remember this might be ‘all projects’; or ‘all news items’ etc) Hover over the post you want to copy and select ‘clone’ or ‘duplicate’ to create a new draft. Then ‘quick edit’ it to change the name of the post (We’ll cover the permalink / slug later).

Edit the content

Dive in and edit the content, update your photos and get the post looking the way you want to. Here’s our starter guide to editing content: https://www.greystokewebdesign.co.uk/help/wordpress-content-updates/

Review and update your SEO

Having relevant content on your site that people want to read helps your overall SEO – so adding new posts regularly is a great way to improve your website and attract a new audience. So the next step is to review your SEO settings in Yoast (more here: https://www.greystokewebdesign.co.uk/help/search-engine-optimisation/)

Make sure you set your focus keyphrase, SEO title, slug and meta description. Your meta description gives Google a suggested search-result description, although Google may choose different wording.

Edit your post settings

Next head over to the post block on the right hand menu. Here you’ll want to update your post settings including writing a new excerpt, updating the featured image if you have one and making sure that you have ticked any relevant categories. Your excerpt controls how the post appears in many post lists on your website.

That’s it! And once you have published your post, then ‘quick edit’ provides a great way to review and quickly edit any settings you need, like tags and categories. Here’s what this post looks like:

Things to check before you publish – important!

1. Make sure your Permalink (aka slug or url) is succinct and to the point. Instead of ‘adding-a-blog-post-from-a-phone’ perhaps change it to ‘how-to-blog-from-phone’.
2. Have you got your post in the correct Category? This post has a category of ‘WordPress’ and ‘Blog’ for example.
3. Do you want to add tags to help people find related posts?
4. Have you set a featured image (this will appear on post grids / lists / timelines)? You should do this!
5. Have you written a punchy, eye catching excerpt? If not, make sure your first paragraph does the job – again this is what is displayed in post lists – and what is used by search engines. Writing an excerpt gives you much more control. You should do this.
6. Check your SEO fields are updated – focus keyphrase and meta description
7. Click Preview and check the post on the front end before publishing. Look at the title, image, spacing, links and mobile view. If anything looks odd, save it as a draft and ask for help before publishing.

None of the other settings should need to be changed. If you will be blogging regularly, this will soon become second nature. Once you publish your post, don’t worry you can always edit it again to correct anything!

Why do I need to care about storage space?

Although we’re talking about our web hosting accounts in this article, you need to care about storage in general! How much space does your music take up on your phone? What about all those videos and photos? Every device and account has a limited amount of data associated with it. If you need more space, then you’ll pay extra. A google account comes with 15GB for free. Once you use it up, everything stops working – you can’t back up any more photos, and you can’t get any more emails. (Pro tip: that’s why I recommend having a dedicated Gmail account for your photo backups!). It’s the same with Apple’s iCloud. Once you run out of space, you need to either delete things or pay for more storage. Your web hosting account is no different. And once you run out of space, it could bring down your website.

Fortunately there are some handy tips and tricks to avoid getting into this situation!

What takes up the most space in my account?

As a general principle, videos take up the most space, then audio files (eg that voice recorder app on your phone) then photos and then files like large documents or pdfs – generally with embedded images. So if you are looking to save space, start by deleting videos to get the most ‘bang for your buck.

OK so for my Web Hosting what do I do to free up space?

Managing Space on your Website

We build our websites as efficiently as possible. If you are uploading images or files to the site after we hand it over, we ask that you make those images the right size, and that you optimize them. We’ll also set limits on the maximum file size you can upload, and have tools running behind the scenes to further compress images. We do this not just to save space on the server, but also to keep your pages lean and as lightweight as possible so they load faster – which improves your SEO. We also encourage the use of YouTube or Vimeo to embed videos on your site, and would never recommend uploading videos directly.

Helpfully we have some handy guides on how to optimise files:

• Editing Media on WordPress
• Adding PDFs to WordPress

Managing Your Emails

If your webhosting account is running out of space, chances are it’s your email account that is to blame. Your email account(s) wherever they are hosted should also be managed efficiently. Here’s how.

Never send Large Files via Email – Use WeTransfer Instead

As a general principle never send large files over email. It impacts not just you but the people you send the emails to! Instead we recommend sending all videos and images via WeTransfer. This is a great service offering a generous free tier – and it’s really easy to use! If you’ve tried dropbox in the past and been put off, give WeTransfer a go.

Maintain Good Housekeeping in your Email Accounts

We all fall foul of this one. We start with the best intentions and then life gets in the way and all of a sudden our mailboxes have filled up. If you are in this situation then you have 2 choices – delete large emails or archive messages to your computer.

1. Delete messages:

You can delete messages so that you reduce your usage of storage space on the server. This is the simplest solution – especially if you don’t really need to store all your old email messages. If you know you will never ever have to refer to an email that’s e.g. over a year old, you could manually delete all messages this old from your mailbox.

This is the simplest solution, but possibly not the best solution for everybody. Having said that, it’s quite good to get into the habit of deleting irrelevant emails every day as they come in – this saves space on the mail server and, if you later archive these messages on your own computer, will save space there as well.

You can search for messages larger than a certain size, and delete messages with large attachments. Instructions on how to do this will vary from platform to platform depending on your email client. Here is an example for Thunderbird (our preferred client):

Go to Edit / Find / Search messages. Then simply search on ‘size’ ‘is greater than’ 1024 – this pulls up all messages larger than 1MB. Make sure you have selected your mailbox in the ‘search for messages in’ dropdown at the top.

You can order messages by size, and start to address the largest ones. If you don’t see that option on the toolbar, then head to the right hand corner and ‘select columns to display’ and tick size. More on how to do that here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-list-columns

If you are deleting messages to free up space – remember to empty your bin afterwards!

2. Archive your old emails:

This option is a sort of cross between using IMAP (messages stored on a ‘cloud’ server and accessible via multiple devices) and using POP3 (messages stored on a physical device). For new emails, you retain all the benefits of IMAP, and its ability to synch your email between your different devices. But for your old emails, these are downloaded to one of your devices (e.g. your desktop computer) and deleted from the mail server. Old emails will then only be visible on the one device where you archived the mail. Email applications will generally have an archiving function. For example, in Microsoft Outlook, Auto Archive can automate the archiving task for you, checking regularly for mail that is older than X months and archiving it to be stored locally on your computer.

This Microsoft article describes how to use the “Auto Archive” function in Outlook: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/AutoArchive-settings-explained-444bd6aa-06d0-4d8f-9d84-903163439114. In addition, a further setting may need to be configured to ensure that archived emails are removed from the mailserver: – in Tools … Accounts … (..account..) … More settings … Advanced – check Purge items when switching folders while online.

The Auto Archive process can also be used to delete old messages, instead of deleting them manually as described in option 1. So, for example, if you know you don’t ever need emails that are older than e.g. a year, your can use the Auto Archive settings to delete these old emails. See the Microsoft article mentioned above for more information.

Thunderbird does not offer an automatic archive but it’s simple to do this manually: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/archived-messages

Bear in mind that your archived mail is downloaded to your computer and deleted from the mail server. So make sure that the location where your email application archives your email is part of your regular (hopefully daily!) backup plan – otherwise you run the risk of losing all your emails in the event of a disaster such as a fire or the theft or failure of your computer.

How will I know if my Web Hosting is Running Short on Storage?

We’ll let you know because we have monitoring in place to give you advance warning!

You’ve got your new online shop – but what do you do next?!

What’s this article about then?

We try to write guides to help you with the sites we’ve built for you. If you google ‘how to update a WooCommerce site’ you’ll likely end up with a list of technical articles telling you how to install WooCommerce and set it up from scratch. This guide does not do that. This guide talks you through the common tasks you, as a new online store manager, will need to carry out on at least an occasional basis.

Explaining the new Menu Items

When you log into your site you’ll see some extra menu options on the left hand side. WooCommerce, Products, Analytics and Marketing. First up a quick explanation of each of these before we dive into the detail!

WooCommerce

This is where the store is set up and configured – eg your shipping rates, payment gateways, taxes, and discount rules. But it’s also where you will find your Orders and your Customers!

Products

You guessed it … here’s where your products are configured, along with all the other things that define them such as tags, attributes, categories and brands (more on all of this later). It’s also where you’ll see product reviews.

Analytics

We love this tab! It’s where you’ll see your store’s performance and top selling products. If you like stats and graphs, you’ll love this!

Marketing

If you have any marketing plugins, such as MailChimp or TrustPilot. We won’t go into any more detail on this at the moment, as none of our WooCommerce sites leverage this yet. But when they do, help will appear here!

Ok. So that’s the new WooCommerce menu items explained. Let’s explore some of the more common tasks.

Order Processing

I’ve got an order!

Congratulations! What to do now though?

When a customer buys a product on your store you’ll get an email confirming the order. It’s then up to you to fulfil the order. If your product is ‘virtual’ eg an e-book, the order will have automatically completed. But it’s likely you don’t have a virtual product. In this case the order will be set to a ‘processing’ status in WordPress.

We’re not going to rewrite the WooCommerce user guides here, so to find out more about order statuses here’s the official guide: https://woocommerce.com/document/managing-orders/. What we will do though is replicate their very handy visual diagram!

WooCommerce Order Statuses

When you fulfil an order, you’ll need to update the status from processing to completed. Doing this will issue an ‘order completed’ email to the customer. So it’s an important step to take. Don’t forget to click ‘update’ in the order actions to save the status.

Other steps you may have to take might be to refund the order, cancel it or manually move an order on from ‘on hold’ to processing – for instance when you are awaiting a cheque for payment for an order.

Here’s how to refund an order: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-refunds/ The refund should be automatically processed by Stripe / Paypal when you refund the order.

And here’s a screenshot of where to find (and process) the refund

Clicking on the refund button will allow you to choose what item(s) to refund. Click on ‘refund via <your integrated payment provider> to process the refund.

Whilst we’re on that subject here’s a list of all the emails that come by default with WooCommerce. You’ll also get emails about any failed orders (eg invalid card details) You can read more about them here: https://woocommerce.com/document/managing-orders/view-edit-or-add-an-order/#order-notes

Order notes are quite useful, and you can read more about how they work here: https://woocommerce.com/document/managing-orders/view-edit-or-add-an-order/#order-notes

OK so that’s a quick overview of orders. Next up – products!

Explaining Different Types of Product

There are 4 basic types of products: simple, variable, grouped and external. A simple product is a thing that you buy with no variations for example a wireless mouse for your computer. There may be many different types of mice, but ultimately you are buying one type of mouse that comes ‘as is’. Contrast this with a T-Shirt which many come in many different sizes* and colours* – the t-shirt is a variable product. These are the most common.

* Sizes and colours here are known as product ‘attributes’.

Sometimes we may set up a ‘grouped’ product. The example WooCommerce use is a lounge suite. The suite can be set up as a group of products which can also be bought on their own. So for instance the suite might consist of a 3 seater sofa, an armchair and a footstool. This allows a customer to add multiple related items to their cart from one product page. If you did want to set up grouped products, three’s more on products in general here https://woocommerce.com/document/managing-products/ and on grouped products specifically here: https://woocommerce.com/document/managing-products/add-product/#adding-a-grouped-product

Product Attributes and Variable Products

Where we have variable products we can configure a list of attributes to control the variations. Let’s take the T Shirt example again. We have a Size attribute (XS, S, M, L, XL) and a Colour attribute (Red, Green, Blue). By assigning these 2 attributes to the product we can then generate product variations and allow the customer to pick a size and colour. Stock control, pricing and sales pricing can be set at variation level. In the store the customer is then asked to select size and colour before adding the T Short to their cart.

Downloadable Products

We can set a product (or indeed a variation of a product) to be ‘virtual’ and ‘downloadable’ to allow a customer to buy, say, an e-book or an audio recording. In such cases the order will automatically complete on payment and the customer will get a download link with their order. Take for instance a book. It could have a few variations: paperback, hardback, ebook (pdf) or ebook (epub). 2 variations would be virtual and the other 2 physical.

Editing or Adding a new Product

We’ll set up the products for you initially, but you’ll likely want to edit them and there are lots of things you can do here. This is the guide you want to read: https://woocommerce.com/document/managing-products/

One important thing to note though is that when adding a new product we would always recommend you duplicate an existing one with similar attributes.

We’re not going to just point you at the WooCommerce documentation and leave you to it though – but you should use it as your reference guide.

The Product Layout Explained

When you edit or add a product the screen is split into two. The central section is the main product data, and on the right hand side is an area where you can alter categories, tags, brands and photos.

Product Images

Please remember when you are updating product images to follow our image processing guide here: https://www.greystokewebdesign.co.uk/help/editing-media-on-wordpress/ A great image size to use for WooCommerce is a 600px x 600px square. Remember as well that your product needs to be centred in the image with some space around it for the best results, in our opinion at least!

The Main Product Data Section

Working down from the top on the main product data section you’ll find these sections:

First up is the product description – usually displayed under the product

Then comes the Yoast SEO block – here you set your keyphrase, meta description, slug and title. For more information see our SEO Quick Start Guide

Next is the product data. This is where you set the product type, shipping, any linked products, and add attributes to generate your variations, if you have them. Variable products will have the price set at variation level. Simple products have the price set at the ‘general’ tab. If we’ve set up any custom tabs for your products, such as a coverage calculator, then you’ll also be able to edit those here too.

One important tool for variable products is the bulk edit dropdown on the variations tab. This allows you to edit all variations at once – useful if you are applying a price increase, or putting products on sale.

Managing Product Reviews

One of the options under the Product tab is ‘Reviews’. Here you’ll be able to approve or unapprove, delete and reply to customer product reviews.

Managing Brands

If we’ve added brands to your store, then you can also manage brands under the product section. It’s important to remember SEO here and to make sure to set a good description and configure your Yoast options for each brand you add.

Analytics

The analytics tab lets you deep dive into your shop. You can see your store’s revenue, your best selling products and variations. You can compare performance against the previous period, and download reports.

Custom Layouts / Sitebuilder

We use the Astra Pro theme to build eCommerce sites because it allows us to customise pages. This is great for the customer experience, but as a new store manager this means you may have something else you need to edit or create.

You’ll find custom layouts under Astra / Sitebuilder. When we create them we’ll always give them meaningful names to help you identify the correct one for instance <Brand> Header or <Brand> Footer. Editing the content should then be easy enough. See our getting started guide on that here: https://www.greystokewebdesign.co.uk/help/wordpress-content-updates/

#Toptip: You may feel more comfortable with the ‘classic’ editor view in which case click on ‘switch to table view’ in the top right corner. You will certainly want to do this if you need to clone a custom layout.

If you want to create a new custom layout, for a new brand page, for example, then the best bet is to start by copying an existing one. Then ‘all’ you need to do is update the content and edit the Display and User Conditions (from the Astra button on the right hand column). In the example below we have a custom header showing on a specific category page, which can be selected from a dropdown.

A Recap

We’ve explained the new tabs you’ll see on the left hand admin menu and given you an overview of what they cover. We’ve gone into more detail on order processing and product editing. And we’ve linked to the key WooCommerce Support pages. It’s entirely possible for you to edit your own store and make all the day to day adjustments you need. But remember, we’re always on hand to help if you find it daunting to start with. And we can offer tuition to get you up and running on any particular process. We hope you found this guide useful!

If you’d like support on any aspect of your WooCommerce store, get in touch!

This article will outline 3 simple steps you can take to improve your SEO. It’s particularly relevant for new websites, but even existing sites can benefit from these 3 tips.

What is SEO?

SEO is search engine optimisation. That is: optimising “everything” on and around your website for search engines so that you rank as highly as possible in relevant search results. SEO work never stops – there are always things which can be done to improve your rankings.

Hang on – haven’t you already optimised my website for me?

Yes! But that’s only part of the story.

When we build your website we’ll look at what you want to rank for and agree some keywords and phrases that should be woven into your content. What you write is the most important thing. We’ll optimise the site, making sure the content is written in the best way possible, that images on the pages reflect the SEO terms, and ensure that the pages are structured in the best possible way. This is what we call ‘on page SEO’. It’s a lot of work, but it’s only the beginning … (NB We also build the site for speed from the ground up and make sure it’s fully accessible. To find out more about why this is important for SEO, see what we cover in our WordPress Health Check)

So why do I not appear in searches?

Google looks at new websites with a healthy sense of cynicism. Are you really who you say you are? Are you a legitimate business? New sites don’t just immediately start appearing on page 1 of the searches.

How does it tell you’re legitimate? Well, good content, and meaningful links on the site help a lot. But what we really need to do is start to persuade the search engines that your brand new website is a trustworthy one. We need to increase your Domain Authority …

What is Domain Authority and Why is it Important?

Domain authority is a score given to a web domain ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the more reputable the site is deemed to be – and the higher it will rank in search queries. You can check your domain authority using this free tool from Moz: https://moz.com/domain-analysis

Here’s a snapshot of ours at the time of writing:

A new website has a domain authority of 0. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to increase that! And we’re going to tell you how.

3 Steps to increasing your Domain Authority

Step 1 – Build out Your Business Profile Online with these 3 directories

The single best thing you can do to kick start your SEO strategy is to create an online business profile and start getting reviews. Here’s how:

Create a Google Business Profile

Sign up for a google business profile – this is an absolute must do! You can find out how to set your business up here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/10514137?hl=en-GB

Use this as an opportunity – and set up products on the page which reflect what your business does – eg web design. Each product gives you an opportunity to include relevant key words. Make sure to link to your website!

Get Customer Reviews

Next up get some reviews on there – ask people to review your business. Even better, if those reviews talk about what you do, then this is a great boost for local search results.

These 2 simple things help tell Google (and other search engines) that your website and business is real and reputable. It’s a no-brainer for any new business.

Create a Bing Places Profile

Who uses bing anymore? Well, some people still do – and more importantly, having a Bing Places listing is going to help boost your rankings. You can create your Bing listing here: https://www.bingplaces.com/

Claim your free Yell.com listing

Yell is another place you need to add your business to. You can create your free listing with Yell here: https://www.yell.com/free-listing/. A Yell listing offers 2 great benefits:

1. You can stuff your listing with loads of relevant SEO keywords and phrases
2. You can do a scan to find out where you are listed here: https://www.yell.com/connectscan/ and once you’ve done that scan you’ll get a load more free listings ideas such as Cylex. Take your time and work your way through them – get listed on as many local listings as possible.

Step 2 – Build Your Backlinks

What are backlinks, I hear you ask? Well … these are links back to your website from other sites. Backlinks show search engines that your content is important. But …. there are a couple of caveats here:

1. Remember it is quality over quantity when it comes to backlinks. A link to your site from a spammy site with a poor reputation reflects badly on you. A link from a highly trusted site, with a good domain authority, reflects well. Some of the ‘rankings juice’ from the linking site flows through to your site as a result.
2. Building backlinks takes time and effort. This is not going to be an instant win.

As you can see from the image above, building backlinks (in this case to our site) takes time. But it will pay off.

How can I build backlinks?

Great question! And there’s more than one way. The first thing we like to do is ask who your competitors are. We can study their backlinks, and this might give you some ideas. It very much depends on your business.

Links from Listings or Blogs

If you run a holiday let, for instance, then looking at local accommodation listings sites might work for you – eg Visit Eden. However if you are in a different business then perhaps there are bloggers you could approach to write an article about you and link to your site.

Step 3 – Write Specialist Content

Another way to get your site ranking highly is by writing specific content for a particular topic. This page, as an example, aims to rank for SEO. That’s a highly competitive area so could be difficult. For your business you might be able to write technical articles or blog updates which may have the potential to rank highly. This is a fantastic way to build up content on your site, and you can then share your articles and try to get people to link back to them. Remember what we said at the start – the thing that matters most of all is content. Good content, well written, optimised for SEO, will always win.

Let’s recap on those 3 Simple Steps to improve your SEO

Firstly get your business listings online – and get those customer reviews! Secondly, build up your backlinks. Thirdly write high quality content.

I can’t do this on my own. Can you help with my SEO?

Yes we can! We offer a few support packages that can help you.

Firstly our ‘Performance Pack‘ at £80 per month includes monthly SEO reporting against agreed keywords as well as loads of other added benefits such as daily offsite backups.

If that’s not right for you then you can buy our SEO report for £120 per annum.

We also offer dedicated SEO support at an hourly rate. Typically we will recommend chunking this up into 3 hour blocks. And the first thing we do is to sit down with you and work our what you want to achieve. We don’t need to boil the ocean and change everything. We focus on one thing at a time, and continually measure progress.

If you’re interested in SEO support, then please get in touch today!

What’s TablePress?

TablePress is a plugin I often use on websites to provide some great styling for tabularised content, for instance pricing information. To edit a table in TablePress, you’ll need to navigate to the TablePress option on the left hand WP Admin menu. You’ll see various options, including Add New Table. What we want to do here is hover over the table you want to edit in the list, and click Edit.

Editing Tables

You can edit existing rows directly by overtyping the content – remember to click the blue ‘Save Changes’ button (at the top or bottom of the page)!

The Table Manipulation section allows more options such as adding or deleting rows and columns, or reordering content. To select a row be sure to click on the row number on the lefthand side (See below).

Editing content with links can be more tricky, and does require some html knowledge. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, just get in touch and I can update that for you.

Importing Content

A quick way to get data into a table is to Import from a csv file. Check out the official documentation for more on that.

Support

As always this is a quick guide to some of the more common tasks, and does not replace the official documentation. You can find the official site here: https://tablepress.org/documentation/

WP Booking System – A quick guide

This guide is a work in progress. Please check back or get in touch with us to discuss any scenarios that you might need help with

We’ll often use a plugin called WP Booking System to show calendar availability, and / or to control bookings on websites. If your website uses this functionality, please read through this guide to help you manage your bookings.

You can see the full online guide to the WP Booking system here: https://www.wpbookingsystem.com/documentation/ If you do not see some of the options, it is possible we will need to install add-ons. Note that this booking system can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. I’ll always recommend starting simply, and building out from there if needed (eg adding online payments) at a later date.

What’s in this Guide?

A simple calendar and a stand alone booking form

One of the simplest ways to use the WP Booking plugin is to show an availability calendar and have a separate contact form for booking. In this scenario, when a new booking request comes through from the website you will manually have to add a booking to the calendar.

Manually Add a Booking to WP Booking System

1. Log in to the admin area
2. Select WP Booking System / Bookings from the admin menu
3. Edit the required calendar and ‘edit calendar’#

From here you have a couple of options. If you have a booking form on your website, I would recommend using the ‘add booking’ button. If not, you can add the dates manually as below:

Add dates to calendar manually

Navigate to the start date of the booking and book the dates out. Note that changeover days will have a separate legend item (eg check-in)

Note that you can bulk edit the calendar by entering a start and end date and updating the legend. Once complete, scroll to the bottom and ‘Save Calendar’ so that the dates show as booked on the website.

This is a great overview, with videos of some of the basic calendar functionality: https://www.wpbookingsystem.com/features/calendars/

Add a booking manually using the form

In this case, open and edit the calendar as above, but this time click the ‘add booking’ button

This will bring up a copy of your booking form, where you can select the dates, choose to send the emails automatically, and add the booking with all relevant contact details.

Then fill in the form and submit. Watch out for the payment option which may appear twice. Make sure you select the correct one – in this case the difference is seen on the Amount due breakdown – a deposit of 25% is due with one selection, whilst the other asks for full payment up front. This depends on the dates selected and the validation rules. Apart from that, everything works just like an online booking.

A calendar with a booking form

The booking calendar can also be linked to a booking form. This allows your customers to select dates from the calendar, and submit a booking form. Rules can be applied to the booking, such as mandating a specific changeover day, or specifying a minimum number of nights. This does also complicate things!

In this case you have 2 options available – when a customer submits a booking, you can auto-accept it, or you can process it manually. If you are managing multiple booking systems, I would recommend manual approval. This lets you check your other calendars and bookings first. You may also prefer to set a booking to pending, until a deposit payment is received to confirm the booking.

1. A booking is Submitted from the website

When a customer submits a booking, you will receive an email notification with the booking details. I’ll also configure the template email with a direct link to the booking manager area (you will need to be logged in to access this). It can be found in the left hand admin pane under WP Booking System / Bookings.

2. Manage the Booking in the Booking Manager

You can switch between list and calendar view in the top right corner of the booking manager. Depending on what view you choose, you’ll see something similar to one of the illustrations below:

You can click on the booking ID to bring up the full details.

Update the dates to booked or pending, depending on your process. Note you can bulk update from the right hand panel and clicking ‘apply changes’. “Accept booking” will update the calendar.

The booking details tab includes all the booking information, and also, if applicable, when an email reminder will be sent – for instance for final payment x weeks in advance of the stay.

You can the select the ’email customer’ tab to send a tailored email, eg with payment details, to the customer. I will have set up some email templates for you to choose from in this scenario. You can also add notes, and mark the booking as part paid / fully paid:

High Level Process Overview

1. Log into the booking manager and check that the dates requested are free. If you have calendars on other systems, now is the time to sync them – eg if Air BnB has just accepted a booking, it might not et be showing on the website.
2. If the dates are free, set the booking to pending (if applicable) or booked. Some people prefer to accept payment before confirming a booking.
3. Send an email to the customer informing them of how to pay (usually from the email tab in the booking).
4. When payment is received, log back into the bookings manager and confirm the booking.

If you are operating part payments, you may need to repeat this process – eg a deposit up front to secure, then the remainder one month before the booking.

Remember to update the calendar legend and the booking when confirming or cancelling it!

Setting up or Amending Email Templates (Advanced)

If you want to create a new email template, or amend an existing one, you can do this from WP Booking System / Settings / Email. You can add various booking fields, such as Booking Reference, or name etc. Don’t upload a logo for your emails – they work better with the logo image embedded into the body. You can set up as many templates as you like, and these will then be available for you in the booking manager interface.

Reminder Emails and Follow Up Emails (Advanced)

To set reminder emails (eg a reminder that the final payment is due n days before the booking) go to WP Booking System / Forms and select the booking form you wish to add this to. Then choose the ‘Email Notifications’ tab. This is where the booking confirmation email is set. You can also set up a final payment reminder, to be sent n days before the booking, and a follow up email to be sent a set number of days after the booking has ended – to ask for a customer review, for instance.

Adding or Editing Booking Restrictions (Advanced)

If you want to add booking restrictions, such as a minimum number of nights stay, or limit check in to a specific day, you would do this from WP Booking System / Forms. Again select the booking form you wish to add the restrictions for, and go to the booking restrictions tab. There you will see something like this, which enforces a 3 night minimum stay and allows check-in on a Monday, Tuesday or Friday only. I will usually have set these up for you if required.

Adding Discounts (Advanced)

Go to WP Booking System / Discounts to add a new discount, or amend an existing one. Note that you can add charges to the booking rules here too by adding a negative discount.

Introduction

Let’s start with a link to the official support article! https://wordpress.com/support/embed-a-pdf-file/

It’s very easy to upload a PDF onto a page or a post. But once again, size matters … PDFs can be large, like photos. The larger your PDF, the longer your page takes to load, and the more storage it uses up on your hosting account. So it’s really important to try to remember to compress PDFs before you upload them.

Step 1 – Compress your PDF

You can easily compress your PDF by using this site https://smallpdf.com/compress-pdf
As an aside, Smallpdf.com is a fantastic site which does a lot more than compress PDFs … check it out. They also have a generous free tier (these links are not affiliated and I receive nothing for making this recommendation)

Simply drag your file onto the box, or upload from file manager. Select ‘Basic Compression’ and then download the compressed file.

Tip: you only get 2 free tasks per day, but you can easily work around this by using a private / incognito tab and then opening a new one after 2 compressions (or clear your site cookies for the same effect).

Step 2 – Embed or link your PDF

Embed Your PDF

Now you have your file, you can easily embed it! Just add a ‘file’ block to the page, and then click upload to upload your PDF. Once added you’ll get a PDF viewer, with a download button added automatically for you

Link to Your PDF

To link to your PDF you first need to upload it to eh media library and then get the link.

Open the media library and either upload the document or drag it onto the library from file explorer. Then c lick on it and ‘copy url to clipboard’ from the right hand panel.

After that it’s simply a case of adding a hyperlink to the text (See https://www.greystokewebdesign.co.uk/help/wordpress-content-updates/ and https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/links/

#TopTip: I like to have 2 tabs open in the browser for this – one for media and one for the page or post you are updating. This makes things much easier!

This guide covers The Events Calendar – a plugin that can be used to add events and schedules to your website. I’ll cover adding Venues (where the events take place), Organisers (with contact details) and Events – which can have a Venue and an Organiser attached. I’ll also cover how to drop a pin on a Google map and add that map to any Event for more precise locations.

As always, I’m going to give you links to the official documentation! That’s guaranteed to be up to date. So use these notes as a guide, but refer back to the Events Calendar Knowledge Base for the latest position!

Adding Venues / Organisers

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/k/venue-and-organizer-pages/

Adding a Venue

I would always recommend adding venues first (as they can then be picked when setting up the event). You can add a venue when setting up the event as well. To add a new venue go into the Events menu on the left hand side and pick ‘Venues’, then click the Add New button at the top of the page

• Name the venue (e.g. My House)
• Add a description (the main editing area)
• Supply information about the venue (address, city, state, ZIP, phone and website)
• Set options to display a Google Map for the venue

One thing to note is that adding a location requires the postcode for the free version of the events calendar. If you have the PRO version you can enter the latitude and longitude. (See also adding Events for an option to embed a map directly into the event for more accuracy).

Optionally you can enter an excerpt (this is the summary test for the venue) and a featured image. These are not really necessary for Venues or Organisers in my opinion, but are very useful for events!

Adding an Organiser

Again it’s useful to have the Organisers set up in advance, but these can be added at the same time as an event if they are not there.

As for Venues, select the left hand menu / Events / Organisers / Add New

• Name the organizer (e.g. Ted Mosby)
• Add a description (the main editing area)
• Supply additional information about the organizer (eg phone, website and email)

Adding Events

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/k/creating-an-event/

Top tip: always clone an existing event rather than starting from scratch – it’s often much quicker. And you won’t forget to set the event category (if applicable)

Adding an Event can be done straight from the left hand menu: Events / Add New. Or hover over an existing Event in the editor and select ‘clone’.

Events can be fairly straightforward, but you’ll often find they have ‘categories‘ set up (like posts) so that you can selectively show different events on different pages, or search for specific event types. As an example fundraising events might have their own category, so that they can be shown on a dedicated fundraising page.

Caution! If you do have event categories set up, it can be easy to forget about them. So if you add an event, but don’t see it appearing where you expect it to … it’s probably because you haven’t set the event category (This is easily fixed via the quick edit menu). This is why cloning an existing event is often easier!

Add an Event name, a description and a start and end time. You can then add an existing organiser and venue (or create new ones if required).

If you need to add a featured image, or change the event category, this can be done via the right hand panel – just make sure to select “Event” at the top rather than “Block”.

If you like, you can also add an excerpt, which will be shown on summary pages – this is not required.

Embedding a map in an event

If you need an exact location for an event, then here’s how to generate a pin, and embed a map on an event (or any page) – assumes you are using a desktop.

First follow these instructions https://wordpress.com/support/google-maps

In your Event, add a custom html block and paste the embed code into it – click the plus sign where you want to add the block, search for ‘custom’ or ‘html’ then click the block to insert

Here you can see a custom pin used in a map

Here’s the actual embed code used above. Note that if I wanted to make the map full width, I would just change the width (highlighted) from “600” to “100%”. For accessibility I would also add a ‘title’ attribute to the code for any maps I add to websites I build.

<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d2307.2669807338916!2d-2.8652836842358322!3d54.66972898027754!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x0%3A0xdae836f09bb3b993!2zNTTCsDQwJzExLjAiTiAywrA1MSc0Ny4xIlc!5e0!3m2!1sen!2suk!4v1651310840712!5m2!1sen!2suk" width="600" height="450" style="border:0;" allowfullscreen="" loading="lazy" referrerpolicy="no-referrer-when-downgrade" title="Dropped Pin example"></iframe>

Final Checklist

If you think you are ready to publish, run through these questions first!

• Did you optimise any images or PDFs before adding them (if applicable)?
• Have you set the correct category, if needed (from the Post admin pane on the right hand side)?
• Have you set a featured (optimised!) image? This can appear on event summaries.
• Have you written a succinct excerpt? This also appears on summaries, and helps SEO.
• If you want to highlight a specific event on the calendar, have you marked is as a ‘featured event’?
  

All good? The hit that Publish button!