We’ve got a lot of friends using WordPress (WP) these days, and many have a question or two.

I’ve spoken with folks who wish they could sit down with their peers and see how they use WP, I’ve also talked with people who wish they could just run their site more smoothly.

Well I think it would be helpful to get a group together, have a website with links to all the best plugins and have answers to common questions and help a group out.

If this idea appeals to you, please fill out the survey below so I can work out a plan.

We’ve been pretty quiet at Focus Web Works lately.

This is partly because of projects and partly because our awesome clients have asked for some research and development.

If you missed it, we wrapped up the Ed Slott project in November: edslottintucson.com

We built a support site for a big client, Event Driven Media Partners: eventdrivenmedia.org

We’ve also added a new slide show for Tucson’s Golden Corral’s specials and community service: tucsongoldencorral.com

We’ve been busy updating press releases and updating staffing pages for DeConcini McDonald Yetwin & Lacy, P.C.: deconcinimcdonald.com

On The development side, we’ve been collaborating with software developers to create one of the best survey and quiz tools/plugins for WordPress. WP Survey And Quiz Tool: It’s become a very robust tool to add value to WP sites.

We have also been leaning some sophisticated new features for WordPress 3.0+, so it’s been pretty exciting.

Lifehacker.com posted a fantastic info graphic that you should read at least once in your life.

WordPress 3.2 is out – Handle with Care

If you spend any time in your WordPress site, you may have noticed that version 3.2 is available for an update.

If your website uses a slideshow/slider, this update will probably break it. Right after testing the new version on our Focus Web Works site, I upgraded one of our clients. The first thing we noticed (after the cool new look for the dashboard) was that her slideshow stopped working.

I’ve since done quite a bit of research and discovered that most slideshow/slider plugins are not working.

One more thing… It turns out that the WordPress developers group has decided to sunset Internet Explorer 6.0. This means that you should avoid upgrading if a large portion of your clients use IE 6.

If either of these situations are a concern for you, we recommend that you wait on that upgrade or at least contact us about your options.

Sincerly,

Nohl Lyons

If you only back up to a hard drive, it WILL fail. One day when you really don’t have time to deal with it. If you aren’t already working with my friend Alex Liebeskind, you should look into this.

It’s especially nice if you use multiple computers, and ANY kind of smartphone. The Basic package is free.
I backup 30 GB constantly and they are synced between two computers as well. I pay $4.99 a month for peace of mind.

Best of all you can give someone a URL to a big file which they can download.
It’s good stuff.

Check it out now…

I built this for a presentation last week, but I’ve had lots of requests to see it again. This is a demonstration of how a web site is built using WordPress.

Google Now Letting All Users Filter Spam From Their Search Results [Search] – http://pulsene.ws/154e5

WordPress has been updated again. This time with some interesting new features.

Really there are two keys that will make managing you site easier.

1. Vastly easier linking within a site

2. A handy administrator bar to speed navigation while updating a site

There are also hundreds of minor improvements under the hood, but item 1 and 2 above are the ones that will help you out every day.

New intra site link example

I found a nice explanation of how to use the new linking feature here. Basically when you are editing a page or a post, you can easily highlight a word or picture, click on link and then search your own site for a post or a page to link to. Click! and you’re done.

The other helpful addition is an administrator bar that stays at the top of the screen while working on your site. This is really handy when you are reviewing the pages of your site and you want to jump in and edit a page, or just straight to the dashboard, or even review comments left on your site.

I might note that the Admin bar seems to have redraw issues with Google chrome. It draws the bar on the screen multiple times.

My friend Amber at National PC Solutions, pointed me to a quiz for website owners. Quiz: Is it time to update your website?

There were some really good questions, like: Does updating the content on your website require the involvement of your technical staff or a third-party web vendor? or Do you manually collect customer information and then re-enter into a separate database? or Does your site house “dynamic” content; i.e. – does the information on it change on a regular basis?

Focus Web Works has simple solutions for all the problems in the article. The one topic that was not addressed is follow-through. The internet is full of people who want to educate you up to the point where they sell you something. Then you will find that support falls on it’s face.

Before I ever sat down to code a website, I worked in the technical support industry for 7 years. 5 of those years, I trained support representatives. Before that I taught at the University of Arizona, while finishing my masters degree. In short, education is a cornerstone of what I offer clients.

The future of the Internet includes websites managed by their owners and I am here to help you get started AND keep going.

If you have any questions, just use my contact page

Click me for big version

Apple just announced the new Macbook Air. Ordinarily I would yawn this off, but this time they did a few interesting things to get my attention.

1. They made it weigh less then 3 pounds
2. It’s less than an inch thick
3. It uses flash memory instead of a hard drive soldered on to the motherboard
4. It’s almost all battery
5. Price starts at $999

In a net shell, you get a notebook with 5 – 7 hours of battery life, that would fit in a notebook. It has a full size screen with a dedicated graphics chip. Everything loads super fast. Virtual memory is super fast. It wakes from sleep instantly. No moving parts to fail (except for the keyboard).

I could easily see myself carrying one of these around all the time. It’s super light and could get me through a work day just about anywhere.

I’ll probably post more on this as my thoughts gell.