With both of these developments in mind, a secure website is imperative, but not at the expense of usability. This article will show you nine steps to achieving both of these goals.

Five steps to a more complete and usable WordPress installation

Let’s start with the less complex steps. These five steps are part of the setup of your WordPress blog, but are often skipped, especially by those who have installed multiple instances of WordPress.

1)      Complete your user profile, your tagline, and your timezone

As novice and beginner as this may seem, we have often advised people who have not filled out the most basic information on their websites. These are all simple things to do, and they help maintain consistency with your company’s brand. It can seem amateur if a company based in Newfoundland has a website that conveys times in Pacific Standard Time.

2)      Change your permalinks

Outside of being aesthetically more pleasing, changing your permalinks to include the name of your pages and blog posts is also search-engine friendly.

3)      Activate Akismet

Akismet is the leader when it comes to spam prevention in your comments on your blog posts. Register for an API key at http://www.akismet.com, or just use your wordpress.com API key. Once you’ve done that, apply that key in the plugin settings for Akismet.

4)      Download plugins

Some of the plugins out there are great helps to your website when it comes to SEO, and you don’t even have to pay for them. There are plenty of free plugins that will help you optimize your website for search engines. An example of these are the “All in One SEO pack” and “Google XML Sitemaps”.

5)      Choose the right Theme and Appearance Settings for you

Ultimately, your website is an extremely valuable tool to facilitate communication between you and your stakeholders. Therefore, pay special attention to choosing a theme and layout that meets your objectives. There are thousands – if not millions – of free themes on the market, but they tend to be difficult to use and customize. There are also premium themes that you can acquire, and in some cases, you may decide that you want to have your own theme designed and developed to meet your specific needs.

Four Steps to a more Secure WordPress-based website

Note that these steps involve knowledge of the WordPress system and its files, and some editing may be required. If you are not comfortable with this, hire a professional, or at the very least, preserve originals of any file you edit.

1)      Change the database prefixes in wp-config

To secure your installation against hack attacks, it can be useful to change the prefixes of your database tables in your wp-config file. Visit http://www.random.org, and generate some random strings and apply that string as the “$table_prefix” in wp-config.php.

2)      Install WordPress manually

WordPress can be installed very easily and without any hassle using many one-click services. This is a boon for those less experienced with website installations. On the downside, one-click installation processes only set default settings, which make it easy for hackers to gain access to your site. Using a manual process may take longer, but it allows you to alter the default administrator username. Most hackers correctly assume that website owners resort to default usernames and passwords, so it’s imperative to change these usernames

3)      Delete wp-admin/install script

After installing wordpress, delete wp-admin/install.php script to increase login security. If you don’t do this, a database error will make your installation page indexable, allowing just about any visitor to reinstall your WordPress installation with new Admin and password settings. To protect yourself from this, the very least you can do is to kill the “wp-admin/install.php” file after installation.

4)      Install plugins

One of the great qualities of WordPress is the community that creates plugins and provides support, and there are also free plugins that can increase the security of your WordPress installation. “Secure WordPress”, “Ultimate Security Check”, and “WP Security Scan” are among the more useful plugins to enhance the security of your wordpress installation. Note that you have to configure these plugins before they work fully.

This was a significant project for us, not just because OCRI is such a big name in Ottawa but also because OCRI’s web needs were distinctively unique. OCRI’s reason for migrating to WordPress was to leverage WordPress’s powerful CMS abilities to pull information from its many different web presences representing different OCRI initiatives while presenting it all in a clean, organized, and highly automated fashion. 

OCRI needed an enterprise solution that would give its web marketing executives the ability to aggregate and conslolidate the OCRI web presences around a CMS platform while providing customized web layouts to each department and each individual departmental page having its own customized sidebar. Each department had very specific and different needs, from different banner images and colour schemes, to custom widgets and feeds on their sidebars and hence the scope of the project from a design and layout point of view was immense. Each department’s landing pages had different content requirements and multiple content sources – for example community event feeds, internal articles, external blogs, identified syndicated feeds, partner and stakeholder websites etc. 

The bulk of the OCRI solution is highly customized and leverages WordPress 3.0 capabilities. The solution leverages the core capabilities of WordPress such custom fields, custom tags etc and it is also supported by a couple of custom plugins that were specifically coded to address identified needs. These include the calendar in the sidebars, the events calendar, and custom plugins that import events from identified feeds after parsing the feed. On top, the solution has a hige number of custom widgets that were created to replicate the key elements of look and feel of the old OCRI website. Besides, the solution is rich in its Social Media capabilities and any article while being published can be pushed to twitter while assigning hashtags from within the backend. Standard Social Media capabilities such as on the fly video, flickr feeds, RSS aggregators etc can all be easily employed from within the system and can be employed in multiple different ways to keep the look and feel of the solution. This high level of customization is a requirement, since each department needed the ability to customize their pages on the fly, without having to go beyond the basic WordPress backend.

In summary, the four month project while being demanding was well worth the effort put into it. We learnt a lot, and we are very proud of the end result. Dave Hunt from OAK was the principal architect and developer on this project, and he worked closely with Jeff Elyea from OCRI who provided all the design directives and project management as well as stellar testing and deployment support from within OCRI. This was a big endeavour, and we look forward to re-creating this magic for another organization like OCRI.

I heard someone at a local dev event making this comment today and it immediately got me thinking. True, I do not spend as much time as I used to – oh the good old days – worrying about meta tagging. But are meta tags really irrelevant? This introspection set into motion an evening of soul searching and web research, followed by this blog entry.

The truth of the matter is that “meta tags” are not nearly as important as they used to be, and that should be remembered when one is allocating his/her time towards this specific task. Not too long ago – during the time of the good old Web 1.0 – meta tags were a primary factor for search engines, and all of us gave those ”meta keywords tag” and “meta description tags” that little extra bit of attention. They are, however, no longer the primary factor for the modern search engine. And alas, the statement that got this introspection going is relatively true …

Whilst meta tags are no longer the main factor in classifying indexing, titling and describing websites in the modern web world, some – such as the “meta description tag” mentioned above – are still important and should not be immediately discarded.  To better explain, a meta description tag is a brief and concise summary of your page’s content. If you do not use one, then Google (and other search engines including Yahoo and Live Search) will simply do its best to describe your page by using a section of your page. This tag is especially important when it comes to the “related sites” functionality.

On the flip side, taking the example of the “meta keyword tag”, it is a summary list of the most important (key)words in your web presence. At the time of its introduction, this tag was meant to make it easier for search engines to find relevant content online. Working as a partnership between web site developers and the search engines of time, the tag was a pointer to the site content – and relevant and contextual content to that effect. The partnership collapsed when web developers and web managers started resorting to “anything at any cost” to bring visitors to their web sites, and in the process abused technology through techniques such as “keyword spamming” and consequently broke the psychological contract in place with the search engines. This – for obvious reasons – has resulted in the search engine algorithms assigning less (or, for some tags, none) importance to specific meta tags.

The “meta keyword tag” – to be precise and to the point – is dead. It is useless, a waste of space, quite redundant code, and not worth anyone’s time. None of the major search engines make use of “keyword technology” any more, and outside of the major search engines (even if the minors index it) no one should really (really) care. The old “meta description tag”, I would say, is still relevant.

One tag that is still very relevant, and absolutely a must to put in, is the “Title” tag. It is imperative that you make good use of the “Title” tag and maximize its impact by making sure that the title of pages across your website are different – even if only by a little bit. A careful and systemic use of the “Title tag” gives you good control over search engine robots behaviour, and therein lies the reason for my quandry earlier today. True, tags are not what they used to be, and true, you cannot leverage them as we once used to – but they are definitely not irrelevant and a smart, judicious use of tags can still go a long way in ensuring that your website is pulled up whenever someone searches on … your keywords.

For more information on the history and usage of the meta tag check out the wikipedia entry here, and for a really good list of meta tags, their attributes and their usage, please click here

So what is in the latest SDK:

• Multitasking
• iAd
• Game Center
• New API
• New Development Tools

We at OAK Computing are excited to get our hands on this latest SDK. Our clients have been asking us to start brainstorming the possibilities of using the new SDK.  Apple has opened up a few of the closed APIs that will allow us to really make the experience fun and unique.

Perhaps the most exciting feature is “Multitasking” and along with it the ability to do “offline notifications”. If your application needed to provide real time alerts to the user without the use of push notification the “offline notifications” should really make it easier. Your application can now keep running in the background and when needed be ready for consumption.

We at OAK Computing have already started working on some updates to our existing client applications with latest SDK. If you wish to see how we can help you deliver on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, please get in touch with us.