WORDPRESS WEBSITES ARE YOU MOBILE FRIENDLY?

[CRAZY K]

Im currently chatting to Marc about setting up a new site that's mobile friendly as that seems to be the way to go ( with a new site anyway)

Wordpress has been mentioned by a friend who has a simple Disco Site and it seems easy enough to set up without any particular skill other than that needed for Microsoft Front Page or Dreamweaver.

Marc has flagged up potential long term or even short term problems as it appears Wordpress is being constantly updated by the wizards who support it, I found some very worrying current posts from current users suggesting that the updates which seem to be random and not avoidable have caused major issues.

One post said their colour scheme was wrecked on their site and another said a video function had been affected, it appears that with some work the problems can be corrected but unless you know your coding you might be in big trouble.

Cant believe this--Wordpress posted to one of the guys who was unable to understand the problem and said sorry our man is in hospital so cant help at the moment. :daft:

I don't have those problems with MS Front Page or Dreamweaver.

All we need is a program editor that works like Frontpage or Dreamweaver ie allows you to see what you are typing and is mobile friendly---seems like that doesn't exist.

There seem to be ways of making Dreamweaver more mobile friendly although that is a shed load of work as far as I can see from google articles.

Anyone using Wordpress for a Website have any feedback good or bad on here?

How many of you are mobile friendly and does it increase rankings?

Thanks in advance

ALAN
CRAZY K

[Nakatomi]

I use Wordpress for my site (Still very much work in progress) and I've DISABLED automatic updates which has stopped it breaking stuff. The 'problem' is that the platform is extendable with plugins, and sometimes updates to the main code break plugins. Not wordpress' fault because progress is progress, and security updates are sometimes needed.. but annoying. Themes can be customised, and updates to a theme can break things too. I'd sooner not use Dreamweaver or any such thing because I love content management systems you type onto the page with.

[CRAZY K]

I use Wordpress for my site (Still very much work in progress) and I've DISABLED automatic updates which has stopped it breaking stuff. The 'problem' is that the platform is extendable with plugins, and sometimes updates to the main code break plugins. Not wordpress' fault because progress is progress, and security updates are sometimes needed.. but annoying. Themes can be customised, and updates to a theme can break things too. I'd sooner not use Dreamweaver or any such thing because I love content management systems you type onto the page with.

Thanks Juski that's very helpful.

Yes a disable option sounds interesting.

I assume you use a free template which is subject to updates.?

Il speak to Marc and see if its possible to run Wordpress with a separate template which is bought separately at cost and does not have updates.

Many thanks,

ALAN
CRAZY K

[Nakatomi]

Paid for themes vary in their usefulness. What looks great in a demo might be useless in your application.

Me, I use the 'Interface' WP theme which I customised heavily. What you should do if you customise a theme is make a copy & then use that copy so any updates don't break it.

[Marc J]

WordPress is fine if you want to be up and running fairly quickly, but since around 20% of all websites are running it, it's pretty much the #1 target for hackers and script-kiddies.

So, it gets updated a lot to fix security issues as they're discovered. See https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Versions for an idea of the frequency of updates.

It can now be set to update automatically (https://codex.wordpress.org/Configuring_Automatic_Background_Updates), and automatic updates will be minor updates only (e.g. from 4.3 to 4.3.1). The next major update (4.4) is planned for next month.

If automatic updates are left at default, i.e. enabled for minor core releases and translation files, they are unlikely to break your installed themes or plugins. Unlikely, but not impossible. These are the releases that are normally security related - you shouldn't really switch them off. The WordPress team are pretty quick at patching things and automatic updates are pushed quickly.

You can't halt progress, though. Major updates (e.g. from 4.3.x to 4.4) are more likely to cause incompatibilities with your themes and / or plugins, so you'd normally wait to see if a theme / plugin is compatible (or has an update to make it so) before updating. Problem here is that developers of themes and plugins (even paid ones) often abandon them, so you may be stuck - which will force a rethink and possible change of theme if you really need to update WordPress (for security reasons)...which will change the look of your site.

Then there are the big updates, e.g. 3.x.x to 4.0. Looking at the link above, v3 lasted from June 2010 to September, 2014. v2 before that had about 5 years as well. Who knows when v5 will come, but maybe 2019ish? These kind of updates will almost certainly bring compatibility issues with themes / plugins, and you probably will have to address it (again, for security reasons - security patches are only released for older versions for so long, they can't support old versions indefinitely).

So, to sum up WordPress - in a few clicks you'll probably be setup and good to go....but external factors can cause you to wake up to a broken site one day, unless you constantly stay on top of it.

Another important thing is, unlike a site designed in Frontpage or Dreamweaver, you won't have a copy on your PC that you can upload elsewhere. WordPress is a database driven CMS and everything is done online through the admin side. So make sure your host takes regular backups, and you also keep a copy yourself. In case you have to move hosts, or an update does end up breaking something and you need to roll it back for the time being.

One good stop-gap against all this - www.cloudflare.com. I always highly recommend any Wordpress sites are routed though Cloudflare's system. They stop a lot of attacks before they even get to your site. Another good tweak I use is restricting admin access to UK IP addresses only (again, through Cloudflare).

There are also steps you can take to make sure your WordPress is more secure....e.g. don't leave the admin username at the default, use a very strong password, use security plugins (e.g. https://wordpress.org/plugins/stealth-login-page/). There are loads of tutorials online re securing WordPress...

[Nakatomi]

The best thing about any CMS like Wordpress is there's no blinkin uploading of files via FTP to do once it's online if you want to change anything.

Free plugins for WP are available to take backups of both the files & database automatically. I do this nightly & I also have a script on my server which pushes the most recent backup to my server at home which in turn gets backed up to a cloud service nightly too.

[yourdj]

The best thing about any CMS like Wordpress is there's no blinkin uploading of files via FTP to do once it's online if you want to change anything.

Free plugins for WP are available to take backups of both the files & database automatically. I do this nightly & I also have a script on my server which pushes the most recent backup to my server at home which in turn gets backed up to a cloud service nightly too.

Mine is excellent on wordpress and was the reason I changed. As per the above I use a good plugin. :)

[DazzyD]

Wordpress is a "single-click" installation available as part of my hosting plan. As it's installed server-side by my webhost, they do all the updating when updates become available. I get an email to my webmaster address telling me it's been updated. It's as simple as that. And I've not experienced any problems (so far!).

[yourdj]

Wordpress is a "single-click" installation available as part of my hosting plan. As it's installed server-side by my webhost, they do all the updating when updates become available. I get an email to my webmaster address telling me it's been updated. It's as simple as that. And I've not experienced any problems (so far!).

I can't even understand why i did not move to it earlier, rather than coding each page separately!!
Used to take me hours just to post some photos.

[Nakatomi]

I can't even understand why i did not move to it earlier, rather than coding each page separately!!
Used to take me hours just to post some photos.

If you ever want to update content, be they words or pictures.. or heaven forbid, embed sounds or videos... you need to use a CMS like WordPress/Joomla/Whatever, not HTML puked out of a website generator like Dreamweaver. We're not in the 1990s anymore :D

[CRAZY K]

Well I think the need for phone friendly IN THE FUTURE is likely to outweigh the risks of the site being hacked or disabled BUT I am going to pay Marc to put in place as many safety features as possible including those mentioned in his post to avoid disaster.

A bit of insurance.

Thanks for the input so far,

CRAZY K

[Nakatomi]

Nevermind in future. Way more than half web traffic is now generated by phones & tablets. Ignore mobile browsers at your peril!

[ukpartydj]

There seem to be ways of making Dreamweaver more mobile friendly although that is a shed load of work as far as I can see from google articles.

Anyone using Wordpress for a Website have any feedback good or bad on here?

How many of you are mobile friendly and does it increase ranking

In my experience making a site mobile in dreamweaver requires you to redo the site considering both desktop, landscape phone / tablet and mobile rather than going straight in. You can buy templates if you don't fancy learning how to scale your site to the resolution of various screens. I use both dreamweaver and WordPress in my newest website designs and will be looking to eliminate WordPress from my site in the near future.

Updating content in dreamweaver is pretty quick. Replace photo :

Find original photo on computer.
Put new photo in that file and rename it to be identical to old photo. Delete old photo.
Open DW, find photo and right click then put.

Not that hard? :confused:

I like WordPress but it's not for me :)

[ukpartydj]

Hmmm ... so that tiny part of my site that uses wordpress is currently crippling my entire site!
Cannot access any of my sites except pages that don't include wordpress ... should be fun solving this one!

[CRAZY K]

In my experience making a site mobile in dreamweaver requires you to redo the site considering both desktop, landscape phone / tablet and mobile rather than going straight in. You can buy templates if you don't fancy learning how to scale your site to the resolution of various screens. I use both dreamweaver and WordPress in my newest website designs and will be looking to eliminate WordPress from my site in the near future.

Updating content in dreamweaver is pretty quick. Replace photo :

Find original photo on computer.
Put new photo in that file and rename it to be identical to old photo. Delete old photo.
Open DW, find photo and right click then put.

Not that hard? :confused:

I like WordPress but it's not for me :)

Hmm I'm not sure, this mobile friendly thing is a big leap for those of us who are not into coding and frankly could have done without any of this, however it's here so we have to deal with.

I did read the article on the Internet how to do it with Dreamweaver but it seemed very long and had loads of different changes and experimental procedures which made me think it's quicker easier ( and more costly of course) to get Marc on the payroll and sort it permanently.

I have to say I'm a bit disturbed by your next post saying pages on your sites have been screwed:daft:

CRAZY K

[ukpartydj]

I have to say I'm a bit disturbed by your next post saying pages on your sites have been screwed:daft:
CRAZY K

I'm sure you can get somebody to do it all for a "small" fee :)

I've managed to solve the issues on 2/4 of my sites. Apparently for some reason an "&" symbol which has been in the script of a plugin for 3 years is now not needed and caused every page which had the wordpress on it to display errors instead of content - that's fixed but now loads of non-wordpress stuff on another website has gone funny which makes no sense ... but it's gotta be wordpress because I have an almost identical site with NO wordpress whatsoever and it's the only one which has no issues.

[CRAZY K]

I'm sure you can get somebody to do it all for a "small" fee :)

I've managed to solve the issues on 2/4 of my sites. Apparently for some reason an "&" symbol which has been in the script of a plugin for 3 years is now not needed and caused every page which had the wordpress on it to display errors instead of content - that's fixed but now loads of non-wordpress stuff on another website has gone funny which makes no sense ... but it's gotta be wordpress because I have an almost identical site with NO wordpress whatsoever and it's the only one which has no issues.

This sounds like some of the limitations on the old Cortex digital reader when reading certain text:D

All of which confirms what Marc has predicted correctly and my reading on the net including the classic from Wordpress--our expert is in hospital so we cant help ---whaaaaaaaat ?????? .

Im hoping Marcs hybrid system will defeat these issues.

CRAZY K

[ukpartydj]

Fixed it ... apparently my website host decided to upgrade me to PHP 5.6 which is still in flipping BETA... my afternoon wasted thanks to some chump upgrading my PHP without notifying me!
It seems a lot of the code for wordpress isn't yet compatible - not a wordpress issue... there was plenty of my standard PHP script which was misbehaving also.

Switched back to 5.4 - all back to normal!

Sorry for hi-jacking the thread!

[Marc J]

Fixed it ... apparently my website host decided to upgrade me to PHP 5.6 which is still in flipping BETA... my afternoon wasted thanks to some chump upgrading my PHP without notifying me!
It seems a lot of the code for wordpress isn't yet compatible - not a wordpress issue... there was plenty of my standard PHP script which was misbehaving also.

Switched back to 5.4 - all back to normal!

It does highlight another potential issue when choosing Wordpress (or any CMS) over hard-coded HTML / JS / CSS. Most CMS systems are written in PHP, which is always being patched / improved itself. Your host should have given you warning (a LOT of warning, and a testing period where you could choose 5.6 or 5.4), but you can't halt progress and it will eventually force 5.6 (for "security" reasons, probably), at which point you'd better hope that Wordpress is compatible, as wlel as any themes / plugins you use.

Like I said earlier - when you choose this option sometimes things outside of your control mean you wake up to a broken site which requires your attention.

By the way - PHP 5.6 has very little impact on existing code when migrating from 5.5 (http://php.net/manual/en/migration56.php), which suggests whatever you had that broke with 5.6 will not work on 5.5 either.

[ukpartydj]

It does highlight another potential issue when choosing Wordpress (or any CMS) over hard-coded HTML / JS / CSS. Most CMS systems are written in PHP, which is always being patched / improved itself. Your host should have given you warning (a LOT of warning, and a testing period where you could choose 5.6 or 5.4), but you can't halt progress and it will eventually force 5.6 (for "security" reasons, probably), at which point you'd better hope that Wordpress is compatible, as wlel as any themes / plugins you use.

Like I said earlier - when you choose this option sometimes things outside of your control mean you wake up to a broken site which requires your attention.

By the way - PHP 5.6 has very little impact on existing code when migrating from 5.5 (http://php.net/manual/en/migration56.php), which suggests whatever you had that broke with 5.6 will not work on 5.5 either.

5.5 is not an option with mine, but I can go back 3 more versions. it's only silly things like I've done php includes with full urls not local ones etc.