1. Reinstall WordPress via WordPress Dashboard ‘Updates’ – click on ‘Re-install Now’ button
2. Search for a rogue .htaccess file in wp-includes folder and delete it
3.  Add the following to your wp-config.php file:-

/** Fix for no TinyMCE */
define('CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS', false );

In our case option 3 solved the problem.

Let us know how you solved the same issue if any other than the above!

Initially the work would be on a Freelance Basis, but Full-Time opportunities could be available for the right candidate.

You would be working directly with Glenn on a range of projects covering:-

• Logo Design
• Web Site Design and Wire-framing
• Mobile Application Layouts and Graphical Design & Illustartion
• Print

Pay: Good hourly and/or Project rates of pay are offered. 
Age: Unimportant (you could be an aspiring student or retired Graphic Designer looking for additional income)
Location: London & Milton Keynes Areas (or within travelling distance for periodic meet-ups)
CV: Is not required – you simply need to demonstrate high levels of competency and creativity

Please enquire to jobs@slickmedia.co.uk

You must be able to demonstrate a high level of knowledge of WordPress as a fully fledged CMS and be familiar with all aspects of a WordPress. We will require past projects and work to substantiate your position as a skilled ddevloper in this field.

Other useful skills include knowledge of Fireworks or Photoshop and an active knowledge of jQuery.

Ability to work under fixed timelines.

Initially work would be conducted on a Freelance basis with great opportunities to become part of a dynamic team.

Pay: Good hourly and/or Project rates of pay are offered. 
Age: Unimportant (you could be an aspiring student or retired Graphic Designer looking for additional income)
Location: London & Milton Keynes Areas (or within travelling distance for periodic meet-ups)
CV: Is not required - you simply need to demonstrate high levels of competency and creativity

Please enquire to jobs@slickmedia.co.uk

The mobile web is growing at a phenomenal pace, and is forecast to overtake the desktop web in 2014. In other words, more users will access the Internet using a mobile phone rather than a PC for the first time.

Approximately 900 million people currently access the web with mobile phones, compared to 1.4 billion desktop Internet users. In 2014, mobile web users will outpace desktop users (approximately 1.7 billion mobile users to approximately 1.65 billion desktop users). By 2015, the number of mobile web users is expected to grow to 2 billion.

Assuming an annual growth rate of about 2 percent annually between 2010 and 2015 in cell phone subscriptions (77 percent of the world’s population will have cell phone subscriptions in 2010 and 87 percent will have subscriptions in 2015), about 6.35 billion people worldwide will have a mobile phone subscription and approximately 1 out of 3 subscribers(or 2 billion out of 6.35 billion) will be accessing the Internet on mobile phones. (Source: Wikimedia)

And according to the August, 2011 edition of eMarketer, 33 percent of mobile users are looking to access local content relevant to their GPS positioned location.

Is Your Website Ready?

So, what does all of this mean to you? It means more people than ever will be viewing your website through a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer, via a wireless network. It also means that if you want to survive and thrive, you have to adjust and adapt, and make your website mobile web friendly. The good news is, it’s easier than you think.

“Within the Alexa top 1,000 sites, 40.1 percent of all sites are mobile-friendly. These sites represent the world’s most popular web properties, like Google, Facebook and Yahoo!

Beyond the top 1,000, mobile friendliness still holds strong but is not yet as widespread. Of the top 10,000 Alexa sites, 29.7 percent perform well on mobiles. Once the input data is broadened to include the top 500,000 sites, the total number of mobile-friendly sites drops to 19.3 percent.” (Source: mobiThinking.com)

If you haven’t already done so, the very first thing you need to do is bring your website up to speed visually. In other words, you want to make sure that users of mobile devices can view your site optimally.

The quickest and easiest way to do this is to run your site through the MobiReady online testing site. This is a free service that evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards.

The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device. There are also other tools that will allow you to test your site for mobile readiness. In fact, here are 10 Excellent Tools for Testing Your Site on Mobile Devices.

Personally, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of these types of testing tools. For example, I ran my site through MobiReady, and it gave my site a 2 out of 5 score which, according to their analysis is bad. I got the exact same score before and after I mobil-optimized my site.

Here’s the problem: I’ve had many friends and colleagues of mine, all with different makes and models of smartphones, on a variety of platforms, tell me that my site looks just fine on their phones. So while testing tools may be a useful resource, the true litmus test is what users of mobile devices are seeing – so be sure to ask them.

That being said, there ARE things you can do to mobile-optimize your website.

How To Make Your Website Mobile Compatible

1. Have a fast-loading site. Chances are, most mobile-web users who are using their phones to access the Internet are using a slower 3G connection. You can help these users out by making sure your website code is clean, which will not only make for a faster-loading site, but faster downloads as well.

2. Don’t use flash. Not all mobile devices can see flash? Personally, I’m not a huge fan of flash sites anyway. But if you absolutely, positively have to have a flash site, be both smart and considerate. Make sure you have an alternate HTML version of your site as well.

3. Have a clean, easy to navigate website. Remember, mobile users are viewing your site on a tiny little screen. In addition, there is no mouse and not all mobile devices are equipped with a touch screen. So don’t make it harder for mobile users to view or utilize your site than it needs to be. Clean up the clutter and streamline your content. Simplify, simplify, simplify. If you keep it simple, your site will be user-friendly for everybody.

4. Use HTML phone numbers. Don’t make mobile users have to type in your phone number. Use HTML so that they can simply click to dial the number.

5. Avoid horizontal scrolling. Mobile users prefer to scroll vertically as opposed to horizontally. It’s easier and less of a hassle for them. Always create your content as a single column of text that wraps for mobile users.

6. Use images sparingly. As I mentioned earlier, most mobile users are using a slower 3G connection. As a result, heavier images can take forever to load. To avoid this problem, you should use images sparingly on your website. But if you do choose to use images, they should be lighter-weight jpeg, gif or png format. Also, make sure to compress your images to avoid zooming.

7. Voice Search. Google’s Voice Search on smartphones, has increased voice search usage by approximately 600% in the past year. Since mobile devices don’t have a traditional keyboard like a PC or laptop, voice search makes searching quicker and easier for smartphone users. So you should definitely keep an eye on this trend for SEO purposes. Bear in mind, people tend to search differently when speaking as opposed to typing. For example, while you might type-search “best virtual assistants,” you might voice-search “what are the best virtual assistant services?” Again, it’s a trend you should keep an eye on.

From original article by: David Jackson

Custom Post Post Types or Custom Posts are a great innovation in WordPress that extend the standard functionality of ‘posts’ beyond that of the normal blogging sphere to make WordPress more of a fully fledged Content Management System (CMS). For example in the past where you may have used a custom query (such as page of posts)  to filter posts by say a particular category you can now define a specific custom post, which will have its own menu item in the WordPress Dashboard like so:-

So with Custom Posts what we gain is a higher level of specific functionality for a certain ‘Post Type’ – in our example we have ‘Restaurants’ as our Custom Post Type.

What are Custom Post Types Used For?

As above Custom Post Types are very useful where you want to separate off the normal post functionality of your WordPress Blog and make it a full CMS. Custom Post Types are often used for the following forms of functionality:-

• Portfolios
• Directory Listings
• News Items (as opposed to Blog items)
• Lists
• Custom Systems

We use Custom Post Types extensively in WordPress to give our clients much greater functionality and control of their site(s) content.

How are Custom Post Types Added to WordPress?

Custom Post Types are typically added directly to the function.php file of your WordPress theme and using our example of Restaurants this would be added as so:-

Custom Post Type Example (Restaurants)

// registration code for restaurants post type
	function register_restaurants_posttype() {
		$labels = array(
			'name' 				=> _x( 'restaurants', 'post type general name' ),
			'singular_name'		=> _x( 'restaurant', 'post type singular name' ),
			'add_new' 			=> _x( 'Add New', 'restaurant'),
			'add_new_item' 		=> __( 'Add New restaurant '),
			'edit_item' 		=> __( 'Edit restaurant '),
			'new_item' 			=> __( 'New restaurant '),
			'view_item' 		=> __( 'View restaurant '),
			'search_items' 		=> __( 'Search restaurants '),
			'not_found' 		=>  __( 'No restaurant found' ),
			'not_found_in_trash'=> __( 'No restaurants found in Trash' ),
			'parent_item_colon' => ''
		);

		$taxonomies = array();

		$supports = array('title','editor','author','thumbnail','excerpt','custom-fields','comments','revisions');

		$post_type_args = array(
			'labels' 			=> $labels,
			'singular_label' 	=> __('restaurant'),
			'public' 			=> true,
			'show_ui' 			=> true,
			'publicly_queryable'=> true,
			'query_var'			=> true,
			'capability_type' 	=> 'post',
			'has_archive' 		=> true,
			'hierarchical' 		=> false,
			'rewrite' 			=> array('slug' => 'restaurants', 'with_front' => false ),
			'supports' 			=> $supports,
			'menu_position' 	=> 5,
			'menu_icon' 		=> 'http://www.slickmedia.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/easy-content-types/includes/images/icon.png',
			'taxonomies'		=> $taxonomies
		 );
		 register_post_type('restaurants',$post_type_args);
	}
	add_action('init', 'register_restaurants_posttype');

Taxonomies (To split Restaurants by ‘Location’)

// registration code for locations taxonomy
function register_locations_tax() {
	$labels = array(
		'name' 					=> _x( 'Locations', 'taxonomy general name' ),
		'singular_name' 		=> _x( 'Location', 'taxonomy singular name' ),
		'add_new' 				=> _x( 'Add New Location', 'Location'),
		'add_new_item' 			=> __( 'Add New Location' ),
		'edit_item' 			=> __( 'Edit Location' ),
		'new_item' 				=> __( 'New Location' ),
		'view_item' 			=> __( 'View Location' ),
		'search_items' 			=> __( 'Search Locations' ),
		'not_found' 			=> __( 'No Location found' ),
		'not_found_in_trash' 	=> __( 'No Location found in Trash' ),
	);

	$pages = array('restaurants');

	$args = array(
		'labels' 			=> $labels,
		'singular_label' 	=> __('Location'),
		'public' 			=> true,
		'show_ui' 			=> true,
		'hierarchical' 		=> false,
		'show_tagcloud' 	=> false,
		'show_in_nav_menus' => true,
		'rewrite' 			=> array('slug' => 'locations'),
	 );
	register_taxonomy('locations', $pages, $args);
}
add_action('init', 'register_locations_tax');

Plugins that create Custom Posts Types in WordPress

If you are new to Custom Post Types and are looking for software/a plugin to add Custom Post Types to your WordPress Site then we recommend one of two plugins. Don’t waste your time looking for alternatives and choose on of the below.

1. Custom Press by WPMUdev

This is a great premium plugin covering all the bases including the creation of Custom Post Types, Taxonomies and Meta Boxes and these are all handled within a single tabbed admin area:-

This plugin is quick and simp to use and can be purchases on its own for a very reasonable $17 or alternatively you can signup to WPMUdev and get a whole host of other great plugins, great support and regular updates.

Get the plugin from WPMUdev and/or benefit form loads of other great Premium WordPress plugins

Easy Content Types for WordPress by Pippin Williamson on code canyon.net

This is a very comprehensive plugin that also caters to Custom Post Types, Taxonomies and Meta Boxes and is justifiably a best selling item on code canyon.net. The plugin is created by the author Pippin Williamson and he is a very well established premium WordPress plugin author offering a range of other plugins also on CodeCanyon. This one is the most popular and intuitively breaks down the process of creating advanced Custom Posts:-

What makes this Plugin a stand-out Custom Post Type plugin is the ability to export not only the Post Types, but also the related Taxonomies and Metaboxes. This makes embedding the Custom Post Types directly to your theme as simple as cut and paste.

Pippin provides great support for the plugin and also regular updates to codecanyon.net.

Get the plugin from code canyon.net and browse loads of other great premium plugins to enhance your WordPress site

We are very happy to announce that we have upgraded our server to significantly further enhance speed and performance.

As such you may have to make a couple of very slight changes to your email setup. These are as follows:-

1. Accept mail server certificate host4dev.com

The mail server is now under ‘host4dev.com’ and so you should accept any certificates originating from this server.

2. Outgoing Mail Port

The outgoing mail port is now 25 on all accounts. If you previously set the outgoing mail port to ’8025′ please revert this to 25.

All other settings will remain intact, but if you are experiencing any issues with your configuration please do not hesitate to request support.

*** Special Christmas Offer for our Clients & Visitors ***

It is surprisingly easy to take credit and debit payments on your web site and in some cases this can be done in a matter of minutes. Whilst there are a number of ways to achieve this we are going to focus on what we consider to be the best in terms of both cost and ease of use/application:-

Paypal – The Quickest and Easiest Method

Undoubtedly the quickest and easiest way to monetize your business by taking payments online is by using Paypal. If for some reason you haven’t heard about them, or already purchased for someone else using them then quite simply they are the most universal method of accepting payments online. Purchased by online retailing and auction giant eBay in 2002 for a whopping ¢1.5 billion they now accept over £50 million of transactions per day. With a vibrant and active online community and literally hundreds of shopping carts using the Paypal out of the box it is a sensible choice for any individual or business (old or new) looking to get online quickly or to extend their current payment options.

Applications are very straightforward too and as it’s near impossible to fail to meet Paypal’s acceptance criteria – on a basic level let’s just say that having a valid personal or business account will more or less cut it – and from here you can be requesting and accepting payments within a matter of minutes. And taking payments is quick too – buyers can purchase your products literally within two clicks if they already have a Paypal account, but if they don’t then they can simply enter their card details as normal or sign up for their own account so that making a purchase is quicker next time.

A major advantage of Paypal is that is a highly recognised brand, is accepted more or less universally and there are no less than 220 million account holders worldwide (which is a lot of potential clients). In addition Paypal shook off the image of ‘the choice of online Rouge Traders’ years ago and now offers a pretty substantial Dispute procedure for buyers who have received goods ’not as described’, or indeed nothing at all. This has built in trust, which means that you can use Paypal in the knowledge that buyers will be happy to transact with you.

Best For

• Individuals buying and selling on eBay or via smaller online shops
• Small Businesses Looking to get online QUICKLY
• Businesses of all sizes looking to extend their existing payment options

What you will need

A valid bank account

How do I sign Up?

Simply head over to Paypal and sign up in minutes

Sage Pay (& Paypal) – The Most Robust Method

PayPal is great, but it isn’t for everyone and for businesses that are transacting in higher monthly figures they will want something a bit more robust. This is where SagePay steps in.

Sage Pay, originally known as PROTX and then purchased by Sage (the well known accounting software company) provides highly secure online card payment services to over 30,000+ businesses of all sizes. Whilst like PayPal there are no specific requirements for successful acceptance it does help if your business has a good trading record. Established businesses with a good record will find it very straightforward to get accepted, whereas a Sole Trader or new business may find it harder or even be declined. In this instance using PayPal to take online payments and build up your trading history will be the best way forward.

Sage Pay is a great option as it’s both secure, highly affordable and also integrates seamlessly with your online shop. With Sage Pay Go it only costs £20pm and this suits small businesses very well, but for higher volume businesses (of more than 1000 transactions per quarter) where transacting can get really expensive it’s only £20 per month plus 10p per transaction. That’s really good value.

We think Sage Pay are an excellent choice for selling online, but when applying there is one thing we must tell you and that is that unlike Paypal there are other costs and parties involved that you should be aware of. To transact with Sage Pay you also need an Acquiring Bank (jargon as explained below). This isn’t any old bank, as accepted by Paypal, but rather a specialist bank that you must also sign up with. To Sage Pay’s credit they will assist you with this as part of the sign up process and if you don’t already have an Acquiring Bank then we do strongly advise that you go with Sage Pay’s preferred supplier and that is the Royal Bank of Scotland, or RBS – by doing this you can sign-up in one hit rather than to both organisations separately. Signup is pretty straightforward, but it isn’t instant – expect the whole process to take about 2 weeks and you will have to fill out forms with various financial information about yourself and your business. Granted the process is a bit more time consuming (to be fair anything is compared to PayPal), but it really is worth it to get a well established company, with excellent technical and customer support on-stream.

If you’ve used PayPal with existing clients and want to keep the flexibility of this service then you’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear that Sage Pay has resident support for Pay Pal and can fit it in seamlessly to their system. This gives your prospective buyers a further option for purchase (there is also the option for their excellent online terminal that is a replacement for the PDQ machine) and is a seriously sensible choice for any savvy online business.

Best For

• Businesses looking for a more robust and secure system
• More established businesses (but also available to businesses of all sizes)
• Businesses with high transaction rates (typically over 1000 per quarter)
• Businesses who want excellent customer service and technical support
• Businesses that need an online terminal or PDQ replacement
• Businesses looking to extend their current payment options / and with Paypal linking

What you will need

A Payment Processor (Sage Pay) and an Acquiring Bank (typically RBS)

How do I sign Up?

Simply head over to Sage Pay to sign up (and if you are an existing Slick Media client then we will happily assist you – we are an established Sage Pay partner)

Technical Jargon Associated with Online Payments

Payment Processor AKA Merchant Service

A payment processor is a company that attends to the actual processing of a credit card transaction, to be distinguished from the merchant (that’s you) account ‘bank’, which merely acts as the recipient of the transaction, proceeds. They come in various forms and the most common configuration is that the payment processor acts as the intermediary between you and your bank and you will pay them a small percentage and/or fee to take your payments and then pass it to your acquiring bank.

Acquiring Bank

An acquiring bank (or acquirer) is the bank or financial institution that accepts the credit and or debit card payments for products or services on behalf of a merchant. Again you will find that they will charge a percentage fee to accept the payment and you should be sure to factor this in as it will also affect your bottom line.

Next Steps – Your Online Store

If you now have a Paypal account then you can actually request payments for your goods directly via email, but of course that’s only one way to take people’s payments online. To be a serious online business you are going to need an online store to bring all this together and Slick Media are established specialists in this area. There are a great many options available to you as a business, but our aim is to make this as simple as possible for you with our new and highly affordable ‘Flat Packed, accessible online businesses’.

Our ‘FlatPacked’ E-Commerce sites start form as little as £800 and then scale up to £1,500 for a more robust model through to circa £3,000 for the ‘all signing all dancing’ model. We can integrate with a number of ‘payment providers’; with our favourites highlighted above and can provide high quality E-Commerce sites that will bring your business to the next level.

For more information on which FlatPacked E-Commerce model best suits you please contact us and we will be happy to discuss your specific requirements.

Already have a WordPress Site?

Check out our later post on Best E-Commecrce plugins for WordPress and set up your own store. We can help if you would rather have a professional set it up for you!

How the Scam Works

We are calling it a ‘Scam’ because the tactics used by this company are deliberately highly misleading and we are disappointed that as such they still have not been closed down despite years of operation.

You will receive a very official looking letter entitled ‘Domain Renewal Service’ and goes something like:-

“Registering your domain name with us will ensure you retain rights to it on the web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your name from your current registrar to the Domain Renewal Group’

Your domain names, that you have checked and found actually are coming round for renewal, obviously needs to be sorted by Domain Renewal Group – WRONG! Domain renewal group currently have absolutely no control of your domain name or its renewal. Rather, we, or your current actual domain registrar will renew the domain automatically on your behalf as usual.

By paying Domain Renewal Group you will almost inevitably get nothing in return. We know of no one to date that has benefitted from their service, which is actually merely a very crafty offer to ‘transfer’ to them. They simply cannot renew a domain unless they already have control of it.

Please don’t fall for this scam.

Unless you hadn’t noticed we’re busy updated our new web site. Yes, we were very happy with our old one, but this is being built on our new FlatPacked (http://www.flatpacked.biz) WP Framework. Why you say?… well we thought we had better practice what we preach and also we thought it important to be able to demonstrate what is possible with our new ‘Flat Packed’ option.

For those of you wondering what ‘FlatPacked’ is; well it’s simply an alternative to our bespoke web design and development services and offers “Accessible Online Businesses’ for less of a cash outlay. And don’t think of it as a limitation either, as the simple fact is that some sites really don’t need the “built from ground up” approach – these sites are still great and actually they are built on our fantastic E-Commerce CMS or the WP CMS system that allows the site to be  managed in-house. So it costs less and costs practically nothing to maintain also!