First order of business – attendee introductions including name, what you are here to learn what WP topics you would like to see in 2017

Second order of business – discussion on upcoming topic ideas for January 2017 Meetup

Wordpress is delivering more interactive, point and click plugins and themes than ever before. This allows WordPress to deliver on the promise no programming, WYSIWYG website creation.

This Xmas meetup will show how Wordpressowners and starters have more control than ever over their websites designs and layout plus overall operations

5 Major Areas of Design Improvement

1. Page and Post creation, layout and refinement

2. Image & Video use in themes, sliders, galleries- WordPress has a massive lead in media shows

3. Refinement of Page Look and Style with point and click CSS Style editors

4. Managing 1 or more WordPress site operations

5. Promoting your website thru Analytics & SEO

Still No Substitute for Creative Ideas & Inventiveness

Linking Layout/Design to Content Message is still a marketing art and craft not easily mastered and applied.

Here is a website that has top design:

But very low traffic and conversion rate. Website effectiveness goes beyond good design.

First hour, will be on Galleries. They have seen some greatly improved image and media options. This acts as a follow up to slider plugins covered in Spring.

Second hour, will be on PageBuilders. This has been an ongoing WP meetup topic as breakthroughs have come at a fast pace.

Third hour, will be on CSS Style Editors. These point and click tools reduce but do not eliminate WP’s tough “pixel perfect” styling problems.

Bathroom break at anytime. Toilets are just through the entrance between elevators and Welcome Desk. Make a hard left & proceed down the hall and look for restrooms on the right

Coffee, Tea and Water are immediately outside the meet room at no cost. Try to time for breaks in presentation.

Questions are welcome at the start of each demo.

And if your topic is covered, you may exit at any time

WordPress’ default Media Library is weak. It now finally provides for video and audio media. It has some elementary editing functions: Scale, Crop and Rotate.

Media library has basic search and minimal bulk operations.

Media Library’s ability to display a variety of gallery of images is also very weak. 3rd party plugins provide the best slider, carousel, gallery, and animation display methods.

We look at Galleries for their vital role in many websites: portfolio of an event or products

Free and premium plugins add much value to weak basic WordPress offeringAdded display options: mosaic, masonry, justified

How to handle the “so many options” UI problem:Use shortcode generators to simplify operations

Use theme templates to manage detailed styling

Use drag and drop where possible

Problem: Browsers do not show the galleries uniformly – you have to test in all 5 major browsers on 3 OS: Mac, Windows and Linux.

5 Major Browsers are Chrome, Edge/IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. It used to be IE/Edge was the worst of browsers – now it is Apple’s Safari

Plus test on smartphones and tablets in IOS and Android using Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera

Please test http://testwp.louisepitre.net/ andhttp://wp2test.louisepitre.net/

But there is a second exercise – see next slide

Rate the Gallery software on display today

So not only test the software in different browsers but also decide which has features you would like to test out on your WordPress system.

I have copies of all the free and premium Gallery plugins. I can help install one on your WordPress website to get the gallery up and running with your images.

1 or 2 volunteers will make this of interest for all

Both Free and Premium plugins take galleries in WordPress to a new high level

All have mosaic, masonry & grid/tabular layouts

All add lightbox viewing features

All add captioning on front page or in lightbox

All add borders, background color, EXIF info, & image sources like Flickr,Instagram

Some add video clips into gallery

Some add paging features with button or scroll load

Some add dynamic sorting options

Some add dynamic filtering of images

Some add ecommerce selling of images

Gallery allows user to mix different sized images in mosaic and masonry layouts

Justified layout fits all images tightly within container but some images are cropped

Gallery plugins support some drag and drop operations primarily changing the order of images

Biggest 2 problem for gallery users:Managing all the settings and options

Doing all the SEO work to help promote website

Key to the surge in WordPress usage because WordPress now has best features and choices of tools that deliver fast design and development.

Tools deliver point & click website design thru frontend drag and drop layout using themes and templates of pre-built widgets

Over 30 tools, 4 new and good ones this year.

Frontend WYSIWYG, drag and drop Designer

Page and Post building are supported

All UI components are responsive, mobile ready

The set of UI components include WP Visual Editor and Widgets plus 10-16 other UI widgets

There are 3rd party UI Component tools

A set of Page and Post templates are available to kickstart page design for user customization

Users can easily create their own templates

Users can easily Undo design steps

1. Intuitive, interactive drag & drop Page design

2. Faster design time through the ability to try and reverse many design layouts and ideas

3. Agile development – ability to immediately test and see how different pages work

4. Less coding needed – no HTML, CSS, JavaScript , PHP or SQL required.

5. Get useful design work done for lower cost

6. Mobile Ready yet also speedy performance

7. DIY Website Creation and Operation

1. Themify Builder has solid interface & theme help

2. Elementor has best free features and very fast

3. SiteOrigin PB has revision history, huge 3rdparty add-ons

4. BeaverBuilder has theme and styling extras

5. Visual Composer has new section and row templates

6. Thrive Builder has nifty popup event feature

But this list will change in the next 6 months – the competition is fierce

1. Resize image with drag and drop of image edge

2. Right Click on image for full image editor

3. Switch contents with drag and drop operation

4. Resize contents of container by dragging edge as PageBuilder auto adjusts padding & fontsize

5. Point and Click to edit container contents styling – already happening for text fields

6. Faster operations

Many of these features are appearing elsewhere

1. Plugin-clash as some plugin’s features don’t work in PageBuilder but do in straight WordPress

2. Slow response time depending on Hosting Service and GB of memory available in common shared hosting service.

3. Learning curve is substantial for some “feature packed” PageBuilders - defeating ease of use

4. Bugs in code as PageBuilders ramp up many updates

5. PageBuilders do not solve the WordPress complexity problem

WordPress does not support tables and Databases well

Hard to do simple Table Add, Update, Delete data operations

Forms have been contracted out to 3rd party tools which charge for ongoing services

Complex use case requiring 2-4 table database joins are surrendered to the world of PHP and Custom Post Types

InterProcess communication is just being tackled

Will Build a website using your favorite PageBuilder on the web rightnow

Will do Landing/Home, About, Blog and Contact pages.

Opportunity to see PageBuilder in action

Any volunteers???

View LouisePitre.net for a recent example

SEO is a scourge because it adds as much work to website operations as the fun part, content creation

SEO demands a lot of tedious documentation work to meet Bing and Google’s requirements for a well documented page

SEO opens up the arcane world of keywords and site promotion for dubious fees on Bing, Facebook, Google, etc.

Creating perfect CSS styling is always a challenge on the Web

CSS standards are moving fast with some redundancy – eg. FlexBox of CSS3 duplicates much of row and grid CSS

It is much worse for Wordpress because each theme and plugin have their own stylesheets leading to conflicts and tough corrections

Finally adding to the fun are the 5 major browser do not implement CSS uniformly or in keep up equivalently

Use not one, but two very good, point & click CSS Style Editors. Choose from 4 CSS Stylers1)CSSHero is a premium styler but does not work with all themes;2)SiteOrigin CSS Styler is free and versatile;3)Microthemer is a premium styler with finely tuned finder of CSS selectors;4)Yellow Pencil free and premium styler.