Who loved homework when they were younger? Am I the only one raising my hand right now?!
As we have mentioned a few times, there are several things you can be working on NOW to ensure your website redesign process goes as smoothly and quickly as possible. These assignments break down to four main tasks:
- Categories / Tags
- Featured Images
- Display Ads
- Retired Plugins
In the sections below, we will explain each assignment in greater detail and offer resources to help guide you through each step. These items by no means need to be done in any particular order, so move through them as it makes sense for your capacity, resources and time.
If you have questions at any point as you move through these tasks, please have your site owner use the Question Form on the rebranding site and we will address those for you.
Assignment #1 >> Categories and Tags
As we’ve made mention throughout this process, categories and tags will play a large part in how your content is displayed on your new website, making it crucial they are properly organized.
Categories:
Your categories will need to be streamlined and likely downsized to 10-15. The goal of categories is to provide a way to group like content based on a theme. As a general rule of thumb, posts should really only have 1 category. This will likely be a shift in how you’ve currently been handling categories.
We have compiled a list of recommended categories and their sub-categories for you to consider as you reorganize your site.
<< Recommended Sister Site Categories >>
As it relates to Categories, you will need to determine which ones you are keeping, renaming and/or deleting. We’ve developed a VERY thorough guide on best practices for editing Categories. Please read through everything carefully and feel free to ask questions as needed.
** IMPORTANT NOTE: We are asking that you DO NOT delete categories completely. Simply make a note of the categories you would like to have deleted, submit a tech ticket and we will handle deleting them for you. Why? Since many of our sites use Categories in their URL structure, we will need to create redirects for the posts within that category. To save you time and a potential headache, we are able to handle those for you.
Tags:
Tags can get unruly rather quickly and they will likely take the most “cleaning up”! Tags, while not at the top of the food chain like Categories, are still an important piece in organizing your content as they have a closer relationship to the actual content. Think of them as keywords if you will. With that being said, tags are still often overdone, resulting in unnecessary redundancies. Watch this video for more information on why tags are important and the role they play in content organization: Tips on how to handle Categories and Tags.
<< Best Practices For Editing Categories & Tags >>
<< Video Tutorial On How To Edit Categories & Tags >>
Assignment #2 >> Featured Images
The other piece to the redesign puzzle will be your featured images. The design works best if images are free from text and larger than 600 pixels wide. This allows you flexibility in how you display your posts on the site.
Recommended Featured Image Sizing:
>> NEW RECOMMENDED FEATURED IMAGE SIZE <<
1068 pixels wide by 580 pixels high
This new featured image size will give you the most flexibility in the variety of layouts offered in the new theme builder. Utilizing this size will allow your featured image to appear in full-width slideshows to smaller thumbnail layouts seamlessly.
Here are a few example layouts to give you an idea of how blog feeds will look on the new site.
In this example, you can see how featured images will look with text on them. Likely they will get cut-off or have text overlaid on the top.
In this example, you can see how featured images would ideally look in the new design with the blog titles overlaid on the top.
Where to start, right!? Here are some action points as it relates to featured images:
- Start NOW! If you are currently using images with text, I would stop doing so ASAP. You’ll have less work to do!
- Look back at your most popular posts and start there, working your way down the list.
- Do you need to update the featured image on every.single.post? No! Stick to your most recent and your most popular posts.
NOTE: If you are needing to include text on images (i.e. Guide Graphics, etc.) we can create a display block that does not have the post titles displayed overlaid on the image. We can address this during our planning stages with your individual site.
Assignment #3 >> Display Ads
This assignment is a 2 part process:
- Cleaning up existing ads; and
- Updating ad sizes.
Cleaning Up Existing Ads & Expired Schedules:
Please go into your AdRotate > Adverts settings and archive any outdated or expired ads.
Select the ad by clicking the checkbox next to the ad and then in the dropdown menu select “Archive (permanently)”.
Next, we need to delete any expired ad schedules by going to AdRotate > Schedules. In a similar process as above, select the checkbox next to the expired schedule and select delete from the dropdown menu.
This will help tremendously with the migration process as expired ads and ad data can bog down the database.
New Ad Specifications:
Ad sizes on the redesign will also be changing a bit offering more variety in ad sizes and the addition of inline ad spaces. We have included an ad sizing guide below to use as you consider what ad sizes you’d like to offer on your site.
Overall, there are a lot of ad sizes available to you with the redesign. You by NO MEANS need to use all of them, however you do have them if you choose.
For those sites that are still under contract with advertisers for a given ad size, we can adapt as needed fitting in what you are currently offering into the homepage. If you’d like to start switching your current or prospective advertisers over to these new offerings, now would be a great time to start that process and those conversations.
<< Redesign Ad Specifications >>
Here is an informational video from Vicky Lane, Jacksonville Mom, and John Lane, Technical Director explaining some of the changes in ad space offerings.
Assignment #4 >> Retired Plugins
To clean-up the backend of the website, we will be retiring the following plugins:
- XYZ Snippet
- Recipe Card Plugin
If you are currently using these plugins, you will want to migrate away from using them by rebuilding team pages and removing any XYZ snippet codes that are active.
Here are a few resources on alternatives you can use to replace the above-mentioned plugins:
XYZ Snippet Plugin Replacement
You can actually use the Visual Composer HTML or Javascript element to place code in the middle of pages or posts. We have a script that we will run to scrub out all the XYZ Snippet shortcodes on your site. If you need to KEEP any of these snippets, then you will need to replace them with the HTML or Javascript element in Visual Composer.
Recipe Card Plugin Replacement
We have replaced this particular plugin with the WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin. A tutorial can be found here.
If you have any questions or comments on anything outlined above, please feel free to have the site owner reach out via the Questions / Comments form on the rebranding site.