Tag Archives: Wordpress

WordPress buttons, icons and badges for Social Media

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Ahhh WordPress. My favourite system, CMS or blogging software on the net.  Simple to install, versatile, powerful (when its done right) and with a library of plugins that stretches from here to the moon, figuratively speaking, it has every reason to be loved and utilised so completely by so many around the world.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about the self hosted version of wordpress, the one that requires hosting.

Just, bloody brilliant.

Click any of the images to enlarge it then right click and select “save as” to download he icon to your computer.

Check out more Social Media Icons Badges and Buttons.

Source: credits for the sites and artists who made these cool icons badges and buttons.

Have you made a donation to your WordPress Plugin Developer?

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I was put to shame today, well and truly, and be prepared as you may be next.

I read a post regarding the donations that WordPress plugin developers have received from all the hundreds of thousands of people who have decided to downloaded a plugin and install it on their blog. You might think that they have made some pretty tidy amounts from all these donations but nothing could be further from the truth.

Have you made a donation to your Wordpress Plugin Developer?

WordPress Plugins and a lack of financial support

The original article was posted by Kevin Eklund on his blog http://www.tomuse.com.  I would suggest you have a read at it. The numbers and generosity of people is, quite simply, frightening. Not frightening in regards the massive amounts of appreciative donations handed out by us, but the complete opposite, the severe lack of them is more to the point.

Kevin went into detail, speaking to WordPress plugin developers such as Joost de Valk, and Donncha O Caoimh, directly and asking them the percentage of donations they received from users. It seems that upon looking at these figures it was largely under 1% and when the numbers where crunched the figure become more like 0.025% (!!) and this was for one of the most popular wp plugins available, the NextGen Gallery plugin.

I cannot dare to imagine what a less popular plugin would receive in donations but suffice to say it probably wouldn’t buy you (or them) a coffee.

Hardly a just reward for some excellent work the vast majority of us seem to have taken for granted.

Why do we have to pay?

Why should we have to pay for these plugins when WordPress is free? The point is that wordpress may be free but the power of wordpress itself is the plugins the developers create and the support and time they give to help us use and deploy these plugins as we wish.

Without them seeing reward, and I don’t mean Kudos here, the support they give is nearly a full time job for some of these guys, but some sort of financial incentive then we may soon see these valuable wp plugins becoming much more expensive to obtain in the very near future and not through the choice of the developers but because of our lack of contribution financially.

Time to put it right – Make that donation

If your using WordPress plugins, take a minute to think about how much value they add to your blog. Look at your plugins and ask yourself honestly “What is this plugin worth to me?”.

Login and check the settings. You may come across a polite message asking you to take the time and make a small donation to help with the development, maintenance and support of this and future wordpress plugins.  Dont hesitate, every single euro, dollar or pound will make a difference, and if we make these guys rich, well, dammit they deserve it, wouldn’t you agree?

And if they get rich, you think they will stop making great plugins?  I dont! By all of us getting together and pushing a donation their way it only serves as an incentive and gives them the ability to focus on developing more wordpress plugins for US making the whole range of plugins grow and serving to add more value to our own blogs, all for a small sign of appreciation.

Make a donation now before the WordPress Plugin Developers are forced to pull the plug – permanently!

I have, have you?

WordPress the Free CMS for your blog or website

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Adaptability, flexibility, user friendly, search engine friendly (even without adding plugins), there’s a lot to be said for the power of the WordPress CMS for creating and maintaining your blog.  I did just say blog, but I could also mean website. If you don’t know the difference between a blog and a website, quite frankly I wouldn’t be worried so for the sake of clarity I will try and explain.

Wordpress the Free CMS for your blog or website

The (traditional) difference between Blogs & Websites

The Website

Every business needs a website. They nearly all have one. They use the site to explain their product or service, display them in the appropriate fashion and market them to grow the business and convey the brand image and representation of the company in line with the physical business.

The site is usually contracted and developed by designers and coders and may or may not have a content management system to manage the information on the site although even today their are still sites that are completely static and do not update or maintain their information with Content Management.

That’s a website, plain and simple.

The Blog with WordPress (the free CMS)

Firstly lets explain something here.  WordPress is not only a free cms for blogs.  The perception is generally that blogs are a site which allow people to keep an on line diary of their experiences, but this perception is somewhat dated now. In reality, the flexible nature of the WordPress CMS and the Search Engine friendliness of the software has ment that businesses have begun to utilise its features in conjunction with their current websites or even as stand alone sites in themselves, meaning that they are not only blogs in the traditional sense, but also complete websites in form and function.

This goes some way to showing just how flexible a WordPress CMS is.

A full list of WordPress features are listed on the Official WordPress site.

As a business you should look at this extensive list of features and compare them to the description of the website above.  A website will not necessarily come with all these features included.  You will have to detail your requirements to a web designer who will then see to implementing and actioning all your requirements.  Then you will be considering the marketing and applications options for your site. Why should you when this free cms covers a vast range of these options already and is Search Engine Friendly from scratch!

But lets clarify something here.  While the CMS itself may be free, nothing in this world is for nothing. Someone with the right knowledge and experience needs to set up the site, edit the design and implement all the correct plugins and settings to get the software to where it really needs to be and that, I’m afraid, means putting your hand in your pocket and shelling out some cold hard cash.

The benefit though, is most certainly in the long term as the wordpress cms is open source, hence new plugins and additions to the site are constantly being added and developed allowing you the freedom to extend and expand your site as required, and with a little training, you can even manage to do all this yourself.

WordPress CMS site examples.

Check out just a few example sites being run on the wordpress platform:

Ford Autoshows
Harrington Estates
Collegian
Maryland Commercial Real Estate Investors
Kauai Rentals
IES Solutions
Z World

Other FREE CMS Options:

And Finally, just so you know, for a whole range of Free CMS options available check out this post by Paul Anthony from Web Distortion Ireland.