One of the struggles I have had recently is determining the best way to allow my clients to update the content on their websites. Although there are a myriad of content managment systems to choose from, in my experience most of them are too complicated for the needs of the clients I normally work with.
I have personally become a convert to using WordPress as the backend for most sites that I design. By doing so, I can update most client sites from anywhere in the world through the WordPress web based interface. This is a great advantage as I am no longer tied to the various desktop software applications in my office in order to accomplish most updates.
With the exception of blog themes that I have done, none of the clients for whom I have setup WordPress as a CMS system have ever updated the content on their sites. Not a single one. This isn’t a client failing, but rather I feel that WordPress is just a bit too complex for most clients.
Note: This post has been republished due to new interest in it. In addition, more detailed information and instruction has been included with the post.
I have always thought that one of the main flaws of many WordPress themes is that the main page navigation, when called by using the wp_list_pages() function, applies a title to each of the navigation links with whatever value is used in the the_title() of that particular page.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a good idea, but because of the way most navigation links are designed, the page titles need to be quite short and not very descriptive. Similarly, these themes tend to also use the_title() as the main H1 or H2 tag for the page display itself. In other words, if the navigation link says “Home”, the page title for that page usually displays as “Home” as well. This may be the way a designer wants it, but often it seems that a more descriptive page title is what’s really needed.
Do you want Google to love your blog? Chris Pearson has written a terrific article about optimizing your blog markup for the search engines.
The article emphasis takes on the concept of using H1 tags in the blog header, and thus neglecting to use them in the blog post titles. The advice offered seems to be so obvious that its hard to believe most of the major blog themes fail to use the technique.
