WordPress menus: If you can’t use them, you seriously need a new theme

November 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I’ve had three clients in as many weeks who came to me with problems with the navigation menus on their websites.

In every one of these three cases, it turned out that they weren’t able to use the built-in WordPress menus, because their themes were outdated. And with WordPress 3.3 due to be released in the next few weeks, theme compatibility is on my mind.

If you’re apprehensive about updating to WordPress 3.3, get a Website Tune-Up and I’ll handle the upgrade for you, as well as making sure you’re completely backed up.

Navigation is important. If your visitors can’t find things on your site, they will go away.

To meet this need, every website should have these two things on (almost) every page:*

  1. Clear navigation menu(s). The navigation links should have short, obvious names. On my site, for instance, the purple navigation bar that appears just below my header has six links: Home, About, Contact, Store, Free Goodies, and Subscribe. My Store link also has a drop-down menu listing the individual pages describing my products and services.
  2. A “search this site” form. This can go in the header, in the navigation bar, or in a sidebar, but please put it in a consistent location across your site. And test it once in awhile to make sure it works.

*I say “almost” because there are always exceptions. On a sales page, for instance, you may not want to include a search form because you want the single call-to-action on that page to be clicking the buy button.

Is your theme compatible with WordPress Menus?

These three clients, with different websites, were all telling me that they couldn’t reorder their menu items or add items to their menus. And at first I was baffled, because the WordPress menus are really easy to work with — you just drag and drop to reorder, and adding a page is a one-click operation.

But in each case, the problem quickly became clear when I logged into their WordPress dashboard to find that their theme was not compatible with the built-in WordPress menus.

If you’re not sure if your theme is compatible with the drag-and-drop WordPress menus, visit Appearance –> Menus in your WordPress dashboard. If you see a message telling you that “The current theme does not natively support menus…” then you need a new theme. Period.

If you see this incompatibility warning, you seriously need a new theme.

Yikes! What if you need a new theme?

The WordPress menus have been drag-and-drop for at least a year now. So any theme that is not compatible with WordPress menus is outdated.

Good theme developers update their themes when WordPress introduces cool new functions like drag-and-drop menus, so it’s possible that you can simply update your theme to the latest version. If you bought a premium theme, updates like this are part of what you paid for. Ask the theme creator how to update your theme.

If your theme doesn’t have a menu-compatible latest version, you seriously need to get a new theme. Seriously. You are missing out on features that will make your WordPress-wrangling easy, quick, and fun. And older code (yes, older than a year is pretty old in Internet time) is more vulnerable to corruption by Internet Bad Guys.

With a Website Tune-Up, I’ll update your theme to the latest version, if one is available (and I’ll also update you to WordPress 3.3 when it comes out).

If you need to switch themes entirely because your old theme is outdated, consider my new Fairy Godmother package, which includes two one-hour consultations with me plus my time to fix, tweak, and test your site.

Got a question about WordPress menus, themes, or wine? Leave a comment!

Wine menu image adapted from Civertan on Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

Filed Under: WordPress How-To's Tagged With: , , , ,

Want a WordPress site?

May 17, 2011 By

Want to declare your independence with a brand-new shiny WordPress site? You can launch it to the world by the fourth of July!

My wondertwin Amy Crook and I are all booked up for the rest of May, but we have two slots available in June and two in July for our Bonanza package (which includes custom header art and a cartoon by Amy, in addition to smooth tech sailing courtesy of yours truly).

Want to see the Bonanza package in action? Check out Amy’s original watercolor art for Maribeth Doerr of StorkNetFamily.com (those are some cute baby birds!). I installed WordPress and Maribeth’s choice of theme, added Amy’s art and custom color scheme, and Maribeth now has the freedom to add and edit content as she pleases.

I also have two slots in June and three in July for Bonus packages (which includes theme customization but not original art).

And if you want a no-frills install so you can get going quickly, you can get that for $99 with the Basic package (four slots available in June and four in July).

Complete details on all the packages are available on the WordPress Packages page.

Filed Under: WordPress How-To's Tagged With: , , , ,

But what if your WordPress upgrade fails?

May 10, 2011 By

Here’s a quick way to fix one of the most common errors when upgrading WordPress — plus reassurance that it’s not your fault.

Let’s say you follow my advice to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

You log into your WordPress dashboard and click “Please update now” in the little message at the top of your screen. Then, on the next screen, since you’re all backed up (you are, aren’t you?), you click “update automatically.”

And then the unthinkable happens: Your website disappears.

All you see is a white screen, blank except for this bland, non-reassuring message:

Say what?!?

At this point you might follow the instructions and wait a minute, but probably not. A more likely scenario is that, in an adrenaline surge of anxiety, you hit the refresh button on your browser, even though you’re worried about messing up an upgrade in progress. You might even refresh a couple of times in a row. And at some point you get this even more frightening message in the middle of your still-ominously-blank screen:

And what’s worse, there is no “OK” button to click, nor is there a “cancel” button, nor is there a Panic Button.

So, naturally, you panic.

You try to load your website — any page on your website. And you get nowhere. Then you try to reload the login page, and your anxiety levels ramp up to DefCon 1 Red Alert Battle Stations when you realize that you can’t even login to the back end of your site.

At least that’s what happened to me the first time I saw this message after a “routine” WordPress upgrade.

How to fix the “Scheduled Maintenance” error

First of all, it’s not your fault. You didn’t break anything. It’s a weird little WordPress glitch that happens to me about one in every eight upgrades (and I do quite a bit of upgrading for my various sites plus my Peace of Mind Program clients).

Second of all, there is a way you can fix it. Yourself.

You’ll need to access your website files via FTP. If you are not familiar with this process, I suggest you log into your web hosting account and look in their help section for information about FTP. Your web host may have even emailed you FTP instructions when you first signed up for web hosting.

You’ll need a piece of software called an FTP client, which is different from a web browser. You can get a free FTP client called FileZilla here if you don’t have one installed on your computer.

To login to your website, you’ll need three pieces of information:

  1. A hostname. Sometimes this is ftp.your-domain.com, but sometimes it’s a server address at your web host. This is why you need to read your web host’s specific instructions.
  2. A username. Sometimes your web host assigns you one, sometimes you have to set this up yourself.
  3. A password. Even if your web host assigns your password, you can usually change it in your web hosting account. Please take care to use a solid, secure password here, because this is a direct doorway to all of your website files.

When you login to the FTP server for your website, you’ll be looking at a list of files. Look for a file named .maintenance, a file that was created today. Whether your files are sorted alphabetically or by creation date, it should appear near the top. You may have to change your FTP client’s preferences so that you can see files whose names begin with a dot (period).

On my FTP client (Fetch, which is Mac-only and not free — but when it’s transferring a file, the cursor changes into an animated running puppy, which feature all by itself is well worth the price of the software), it looks like this:

Found that file? Good. Now delete it.

Yep, just delete it.

Now go back to your web browser and try your site URL.

Don’t reload the page with the error message, the one that has a URL that looks like this:

http://your-domain.com/wp-admin/update-core.php?action=do-core-upgrade.

You’ll just get that ominous “are you sure you want to do this?” error message again.

Instead, just reload the front page of your site.

If your site reappears, you are good! You have solved the problem! Go ahead and login to your dashboard and breathe a sigh of relief.

And that’s how to fix the “scheduled maintenance” error that sometimes happens when upgrading WordPress. If you get a different error message, or a totally blank screen with no error message at all, this fix will most likely not work. But those situations are much more rare.

Filed Under: WordPress How-To's Tagged With: , ,

How long should you keep your WordPress backups?

March 24, 2011 By

 

Tower of Backups by Tony Austin

On this very blog, I’ve written up instructions for using WordPress Backup to keep copies of your website files, and also for using WP-DB Backup to back up your database (both types of backup are essential).

But what to do with those backup files?

Keep them, of course, but for how long?

Well, when it comes to storing your WordPress backups, you generally want to always have these two things readily available:

  1. The most recent backup
  2. The most recent backup from before the problem that caused you to need a backup

Although these are often the same, sometimes things happen (sites get hacked, plugins conspire to cross wires, your web host changes some settings on you — may these things never happen to you!) and you don’t know about it for a week or two, and by then your most recent backup also contains The Problem.

So if you back up your WordPress site weekly, and you save a month or two of backups, you’re fine — which means you can dump a whole bunch of those weekly backups, and still keep the most recent handful and be safe.

Also, schedule your backups with a frequency that makes sense for your site. If you’re posting every day, you probably want daily or weekly database backups. But if you don’t blog at all, and only update your site rarely, then you don’t need daily or weekly backups cluttering up your email inbox.

One other piece of advice about backups — I’d suggest keeping a copy of your WordPress theme in its original pristine condition, somewhere on your own computer. And if your theme has settings, and lets you export a copy of those settings, do that too (especially after you make changes to those settings).

It’s the backup paradox: You want to be ready for anything, while hoping nothing happens at all.

Finally, if you want me to do the setting-up and configuring and scheduling of backups, plus WordPress and plugin upgrades, I am reopening my WordPress Peace of Mind Program to a very limited number of new participants.

Filed Under: WordPress How-To's Tagged With: , , ,
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