The First Annual (Virtual) G+ Bloggers Conference - Blog Design, Plugins, and Tech Talk

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis and we are here with our final session of the first annual virtual G+ Bloggers Conference. You think I'd have that memorized by now but it's still like a tongue twister for me. But this is session 10, it's the final session of our conference and I hope you've gotten to see a lot of the sessions. If you haven't, remember they're all on YouTube and you can go to them anytime and watch them. You can access them from my YouTube account. Or from inside the community under community education events. But we're gonna finish it up with a really good topic, and it's something, you know, we all that have blogs— some of us are technical, some of us are very technically challenged like myself and, you know, have a hard time even updating a plugin. But tonight I have a blog designer on, and she is going to talk to us about blog design. She's gonna talk to us about some plugins and have a tech talk. So take advantage of this. Ask your questions in the comment bar. We'll get to them as soon as we can. We have comment tracker on, so we will be able to watch and see what your comment is and answer it as soon as we can. And have fun. You know, this has been a great conference so far. I'm looking forward to learning a lot in this one. I've learned a lot in every session, so I hope you guys are too. So I'm gonna turn this over to Akita Roberts from Pass the Sushi, and she also has her blog design company. Kita, very nice to see you tonight.

Hello everybody, I'm Kita. I run pastthesushi.com. I've been doing that for about 4 years now. I've actually been making websites since long before then, tinkering since I was in middle school with websites. WordPress is my program of choice. I love WordPress, but I do have some experience in Blogger as well. And so we are here tonight just to kind of go over WordPress designs, which would be themes, some of the plugins that I think are most important, and any questions that you guys have. Because I know when I sit in on conferences oftentimes I have a specific question that is not being addressed. And I think with WordPress and Blogger and blogging in general there are so many questions that we can probably just— if you are thinking it So somebody else. So I think first and foremost, the big question I get a lot from a lot of my potential clients or people that are considering changing or going to WordPress is, "Should we go to WordPress? I'm on Blogger. I've been blogging for years. How do I do it? Is it scary?" Things like that. "And what do I need to know?" And these are questions that a lot of people have. And what I try to do is go over all of that with my potential client before we even start the process. And I think if you're in the market for a designer, you need to have an open relationship and have someone you can talk to. Because if you can't talk to them, you're probably not going to ask questions, and then you're going to be left alone in the dark with the new website and not know how to use it. So I think having someone you can actually have an open conversation with is the most important thing. Um, I'm reading the comments. Sorry. I'm sorry if you're having a thunderstorm. So I think that first and foremost personality goes a long way when you're hiring a blog designer. Like I said, obviously you want education and their reputation and to be able to go through their portfolio and make sure that they're up to par with what you want. But mainly whether or not you can say, Hey, I don't know how this plugin works, or I want this feature or that feature, and how do I do it? Um, another thing I like to do with all of my clients before we go live, before we start to go back and forth about design, is actually have them look at other websites and write down the things that they do or do not like about other websites, because it gives the designer, myself, a clearer picture of their expectations and what they're looking for in a their overall product. What do you think, Dennis? Is that fair?

That's very fair. You know, I think one of the— the only way you get to know what they have in mind— I know you're doing mine, and I don't mind telling everybody that— is I gave you two websites that I wanted you to look at and kind of steal a little from both of them to build mine. And I think that's a good way to go about it. You know, we're not— you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You want to find something that looks good, that you like, and you you might take different pieces from all different blogs and put them all together. If you've got a talented blog designer that can do that for you, then you're going to get what you want out of it.

Yeah, I think it's very important to kind of have a clear list of what you want or what you don't want. I've had clients that, especially when I work with businesses, they aren't bloggers and so they're not as detail-oriented as we are. I'll present them with something and they're like, "Yes, that," and they don't really know what they're shopping for. I think it goes a long way. What was the ding? Sorry.

That was just me asking, getting somebody in.

Okay. Also, I think that just because everybody else is doing it doesn't mean you have to. So for example, right now white websites are the trendiest thing on the planet. White websites are beautiful. They're very, very pretty. They're clean. They're simple. And I like that look. But if you don't want a white website, just keep in mind that you don't have to. And I think that that's a very important thing. I'm speaking personally from somebody who has an entirely black website, even though white is the trend and I design a lot of trendy websites. Hi, Grace!

Hi, how are you, Akita?

Good, how are you?

Not bad, thanks. Hi, Dennis.

Hi, Grace, thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

Well, you want the website to reflect your personality too.

Exactly.

You want it to be what you're about. It doesn't have to be trendy, it has to be you.

Exactly. This is your home on the internet. This is your little front door to your life. And some people are pink and polka dots and some people are muted and maroons, and that's fine. That's absolutely fine. And I try to reflect that in my designs. I think that You want people to feel like they are walking into your kitchen or your environment. And that really goes a long way. And I think it really helps in the overall personality. Even though we all know that food looks really, really great on white plates, sometimes we use other ones. So that's my main tip is, you know, love your website. If you want pink and polka dots or in Kim's case if you want hearts everywhere, let's put hearts everywhere. Using a recent client of mine. Um, moving on, I think that the transition from Blogger to WordPress is a little terrifying. I think if you're doing it, there's a lot of know-how. And that's another thing that you want to make sure your designer knows. I know some people work specifically in the platform Blogger or WordPress and don't do transfers between. If you are on Blogger now and have never moved to WordPress or are considering it, there are some things you need to know. In that WordPress is self-hosted. And so you will have the additional expense of actually buying hosting. And this is something that I help people with all of the time. If you don't know where to go or who not, you can ask your favorite bloggers, "What hosting company do you use? Why?" I actually have a virtual private server for my own site because I do run multiple businesses and it's kind of awesome. But if you don't need it, I don't say waste the money on it. Registering your domain name, whether you registered it through Google when you started with Blogger and now you have to get it out from Google and actually register it yourself, or if you're registering it for the first time, these are all questions that can be a little intimidating if you've never done this process before. And I always, even if you guys aren't going to use me, if you have a question, shoot me an email. I'm willing to answer questions, even just generic, hey, I don't know what I'm doing. How do I do this? That's what we're— that's what I'm here for anyway. I think it's— an open door is the best policy to have. So there's that. That's Blogger to WordPress kind of in a nutshell, in a very short, little tiny nutshell, little tiny one.

I do have one question, Keeta.

What?

Do you do anything with Blogger, or do you just do WordPress?

I do. I don't do Blogger designs right now, um, only because I don't have the time for Blogger designs. Um, I can churn out WordPress much, much quicker. Um, I, I do work in Blogger though for specific needs. I have a few clients here and there that have specific needs, not overall, um, designs that I, I will help. And so if it's, um, you know, I have people that need help with the, the, with buttons and adding logos and things like that, and I do help with that.

Okay, good to know. In WordPress, I know there's different themes and things like Genesis, Thesis.

Genesis, yes, Genesis and Thesis are the, the two top dogs, top dogs hands down. Those two are the ones that everyone uses. I work in both. I have, I own, I own both. I own licensed versions of both so that I can build off of both. I Both have their bonuses. Both have their perks. I prefer Genesis. My site is a Genesis child theme. The site I'm building for Dennis is a Genesis child theme. The actual last 15 or so sites I built have all been Genesis child themes.

I've been hearing more and more people going to Genesis. Is there a reason?

Preference. They both— I hate to do this, but it's like comic books. In that some seasons Marvel has an upswing and nobody's buying Batman, and then next season everybody's buying Batman and nobody's buying Marvel Comics. So Genesis happened to have a few updates that were really good, and so everybody's swinging. But Thesis is still a fantastic design and a fantastic software to have, and they'll turn around in a few months and really have something to blow Genesis out of the water. I really love— Genesis, what's beautiful about it is you can have Genesis by itself. And once again, this is something that you could hire a designer for. You could try to do it all out of the box by yourself. And this is where I get into kind of being an anal blog designer in that you kind of have to have a savvy of PHP and not just CSS for Genesis and its child themes. But If you wanted to just use Genesis or any of those StudioPress pre-made themes that you can purchase and install, what's beautiful about Genesis is that it has this wonderful hook structure. And it's insanely customizable, even with little knowledge, in that there are plugins built. And built specifically for Genesis. I'm trying to read Kim's question right now. I'm sorry. And so even with little knowledge, there's plugins built to help you kind of navigate and customize Genesis in so many ways, which is amazing, from your homepage to your footer credits. It's everything. All right, I'm going to read Kim's question.

Sure.

Kim asked if she's only ever used WordPress and has purchased her own domain name, do I need another host?

And—

oh, is there any colors to avoid?

Neon.

Neon's horrible. Like, if you want to use neon as an accent color, it's awesome. But— and the problem is with all design on the internet, you're kind of— you're programming for the lowest common denominator in that operators— Safari is amazing. Chrome is amazing. Firefox is good. And a lot of people still use Internet Explorer. I don't know why. And Internet Explorer, unfortunately, kind of is the one that good designers break good code to actually work on. So what you're going to do is you're going to find that not everybody has a new awesome Mac with Retina screen. I don't even have a new Mac with Retina screen and whatnot. And even though some colors may look beautiful on your screen, you're You're building a website that no matter what someone is looking at your website on, if it's a 1992 Packard Bell, they need to be able to read it. So you do want to avoid colors that can be difficult on top of each other. Yellow and gray are really hard to read if you put them, you know, on top of each other. I have a client right now that is trying to do a lot of it herself. And she's got a completely black website. And you know, the basic bright, bright blue, and it's very hard to read that link, and we're talking her down off of that. You know, it's very 1992, and it's really hard. And so what you want to make sure of is if I'm on a little tiny cell phone or if I'm on my iPad at an airport, that I can open this up and read it. Because our pictures translate beautifully almost across anything. Unfortunately, the content becomes a little muddled if there's too much going on or too abrasive a color. I tend to stick to flats or neutrals as much as I can as far as the overall background goes if I'm going to influence what the text is actually laying on. As far as do you need another host, if you already have WordPress, I guess you wouldn't need another host.

Is there a not self-hosted WordPress though?

There is. There's WordPress.com. Then there's WordPress.org. WordPress.com is— limiting in that you can't do a custom theme. You have to use one of their themes, which you can shop around on. And there's actually a lot of themes that you can download for free via WordPress.com without having a custom design if you're not ready to— if you don't want to spend that money yet. And I'm probably the own— I shoot myself in the foot a lot in that I will talk people I don't want to take anybody's money if they're not ready to— I don't want to. That's not what I'm here for. And so a lot of people come to me with Blogger or WordPress.com and they're not sure they want to, and I'll talk to them about what they're comfortable about. And, um, and if they're not ready and they're doing it just because they think they're supposed to, I'll actually spend the time to talk to them and, you know, until you're comfortable with the move and until you are ready to spend that money, None of us here today, I'm sure out there there are, but none of us here today are making a lot of money on our blogs. As much as we love doing it, as much as we enjoy doing it, and I make enough, I wouldn't spend this money if I was still learning and things like that. What Maureen asked about, is it also, well first I'm going to do Molly. See, is it important to make the pages easily printable because some people want that Yes. Well, there's actually— so for as far as Molly goes, there's things that you can do for actual printing. My website, all my recipes have a print button in a separate print CSS file so that when it does open up, it is, you know, a white sheet of paper with just black text. And I think that's also, especially those of us in the food blogging community, very important to have a separate print CSS file or a perhaps a plugin that allows us to print because people do want to take home our recipes and print them out and try them out. Not everybody brings a computer into the kitchen like I do because they don't want flour on it and I— you don't even want to see this thing, it's hideous. I swear to God, I'm picking chocolate out of the keyboard. But yeah, so we need to make them pretty. Let's see. Yeah, ZipList.

Go ahead.

I'm sorry, ZipList is a fantastic one and I love how easy it is to customize ZipList. I'm actually old school and don't use a recipe plugin on my site. I just have a print feature built into how I format my website.

We have a question here from Susan Powers that we might have missed. What's the best way to learn basic PHP?

The best way to learn basic PHP. Don't sue me. Open up another WordPress site, one that you can get your server, build yourself another file and another folder, and break stuff. The best way to learn PHP is to become very familiar with FTP. That's a File Transfer Protocol. It's something you could download a program called FileZilla and have a play space, a space outside of your own website so that when you do break it, it's not your website. But, and what you want to do is you just want to learn. Unfortunately, I think that PHP and CSS and HTML and all of this is like any trade in that in order to put an engine together, you have to take it apart. And so even myself, if a new technology comes along and I understand why it works, a new feature comes along, I still open it up, pull it apart, rip the code apart and read the lines and the structure and take the time time to familiarize myself with why the code works in the order in that it does. Because with WordPress you're running lots of PHP files and one semicolon can bring your entire website down. And that's why I say do this in a separate area outside of your WordPress, your existing functional website. A lot of companies, Bluehost, HostMonster, HostGator, DreamHost, you can have multiple files. You can have multiple folders within your cPanel. You can have— I have one— my test domain for all of the clients that I use actually has a website for every client just on that domain. And they're all running WordPress. So you can build yourself separate files. Okay. Oh, and so Becky, I think that answered your question. I think ZipList is a fantastic plugin.

Here's one from Kim Baltman. She wants to know— and I don't know if you know that much about it— but she is on a satellite internet provider. And she's asking if self-hosted WordPress will work on that as well as with a satellite, if you know anything about that. If you need enough— how much bandwidth? I guess she's concerned about her site going down.

That's something I would call the hosting provider and ask. Every hosting provider is different, and I don't know enough about the satellite, but I would simply call them and ask. And see what they said. I can't see why you wouldn't be able to, but I would definitely ask them.

Okay. Maureen Trotter wants to know, what about all the security problems that have been on WordPress lately?

There are plugin security issues on WordPress recently. I've seen those. It's like, you know how computers in everybody's— there's always a virus attacking a PC computer because 90% of the population has a PC. 10% has a Mac. And so hackers are going to go after the 90%. So hackers are going after WordPress plugins because it's an easy backdoor. The thing is, once again, if— and I think FTP is a very important thing to learn. I think having an understanding of how to manually go in an FTP or your control panel from your hosting company would be how you go in your back door of your WordPress account and delete, shut down, or hide those, um, remove those plugins. Um, and, and so if you learn that, and that's just literally very simple, you log into your hosting provider and you find your control panel and you have to familiarize yourself with it. Um, but as far as plugins go, pay attention, know what's going on, and then know how to turn them on and off without logging into WordPress. Because 90% of the time if there's something wrong with your WordPress site, it's a plugin. If there's, if your site is missing, it's a plugin. If there's an update that went wonky, it's a plugin. So my big thing here, I see the question, what is, from Nicole, what are my top 3 plugins? I'll get to that in a second. But my big thing here is plugins are are awesome and amazing and yet at the same time terribly detrimental to any website. Keep that in mind when you are using them. It's like having a brand new fancy car and you needed 92 cup holders. You don't need 92 cup holders. It's not going to make the car run faster. No, well, I think there's more than 10% of people on Macs now, Adam, but for a while it was 10%.

Is there a number of plugins that you should limit it to? Because I know people sometimes say they have like 25 plugins.

Oh my God, I know, that's nuts. I'm sorry, Grace?

I try and minimize the amount of plugins because I've had so many security issues with the plugins that I just try and stay away from them if I can.

I have helped a lot of people with their websites and I will log into a website and see 40 plugins and things like that. My first piece of advice is minimize your plugins to only what you need. You do not need You don't need all those extra plugins. You don't. I just think that they're horrible at a point and they do increase your load time. They're slowing down your website. There's, you know, it's loading slower on other computers because of plugins. My top 3 plugins are the one that comes with WordPress is Askimet. It's a spam and it's been amazing. It blocks 500 comments a day. I wouldn't be able to live without it and it's free. Free and it came with WordPress. So everybody go get your key and make sure that Askimet is installed because it's my favorite plugin. That being said, delete Hello Dolly. None of us need it. That also comes with WordPress. My second one is I think having a very good caching plugin. And that's one that people were concerned about with security issues. I use— I don't remember. Hold on. I can answer that. But I do use a caching plugin because we do have such heavy picture-heavy websites. And those pictures take time to load. And you want to minimize that load time whenever possible. And with food blogs, you're looking at multiple pictures per post, multiple posts per week. And you want to limit that load time. I do not use W3C. I use HyperCache. That's what I use, HyperCache. And it's fantastic and I like it. Oh, am I able to work with people that love cilantro? Questionable. Adam, I see that comment. Very questionable.

I think Adam thinks it's cocktail hour again.

Well, no, in my About page it says I hate cilantro. So to be fair, I get the joke.

I have a question for you, Kida, with these plugins. Today I ran into an issue, a couple actually. One was with the minify plugin I put in to minify HTML. Well, it basically broke the code because everything was off-center on the source code. And I couldn't remember why we had turned that off. Now I know why we didn't minimize or minify the HTML. But I also noticed that a lot of these plugins throw a lot of errors W3C and the validation. How do you deal with that? Like, how do you deal with that in a design, or what happens?

Well, when I do a design, I, I only install the plugins that people need for that. Like with Genesis, with the Genesis thing, I will only install the plugins that are needed for that theme. I don't install anything additionally. I really, I'm not a fan of a minify or anything like that. I think just really clean HTML from the get-go, really clean CSS from the get-go, really go a long way. I think minimal PHP files, I think things like that all off the bat really are going to help in general. I mean, literally I think outside of the Askimet plugin, depending on how you like your social sharing, a lot of people are using social sharing plugins and that's fine right now. I think it's very important to do that. I, I don't have a social sharing plugin on my site because I have it all hardcoded in. I think that's the key. If you have the opportunity to hardcode the feature in and not use a plugin, then that's where you want to go.

Is that costly when you're— say, like for a share plugin, like, I mean, you pop in the share plugin, but if you hardcode it, is that an expensive option when you're having a site designed?

Depends on who you're working with. I know that Desperately Seeking WordPress, who I wanted to reference today, and in doing a little research earlier, couldn't seem to find them, which is heartbreaking. But I know that Desperately Seeking WordPress was doing these sort of additions for $60 a pop, which is amazing. That's fantastic. And they were doing these sort of customized little built-in additions for $60 at a time, which is fantastic when you need a little bit. So there are people that work and will do these things. A little bit at a time for you. A lot of people like to use the popular social sharing plugins though, and that's, you know, like I said earlier, just because everybody has a white website doesn't mean you have to have a white website. So Shareaholic is, um, Shareaholic is one that everybody seems to be using, um, and, uh, and I do have that on Girl Carnivore, my other website, but I don't have it on Pasta Sushi. Um, Simple— there's Really Simple Share Icons. It's also another very popular one that several very influential bloggers use.

There's—

and I think that those, as far as things go, if they're going to go wonky, like I said, you log into your FTP, you go to your backend, you turn them off, you delete them, you start over, and you see what's causing the issue. First and foremost, if there is a problem with your website, turn off all of your plugins and turn them on one at a time until you figure out which one is causing the problem. But yeah, I think that— I think minimizing the amount of plugins you have. Really take a step back and go, okay, do I need, you know, do I need 4 Pinterest plugins? No. Nobody needs 4 Pinterest plugins. Do I, you know, am I really using Triberr the way I used to? A lot of people are right now. Some people aren't. Take a step back. Yes, there's— Google Analytics should be hard-coded into every WordPress page. That's very easy. And that's just a line of code you put at the top of your website. How would— John asked, how would I rate WP caching plugins against something like Google PageSpeed? I don't know if I could rate them against one another. Google PageSpeed is fantastic in letting you know things like that. I think caching is just a backend helpful thing. Marine, you asked how to spell that. I'm not sure if you could—

What you want to spell?

Yeah, if you could maybe like help talk phonics that one.

We did have a question back here from Kim Pebbley too, and it says, why doesn't WordPress.com allow her to upload a custom design instead of piecing it together? So far their help department can't answer accurately.

Well, because you're not— it's— so when you have a self-hosted website, you have— you're paying a monthly fee with a hosting provider or a server to store files. And that allows you to upload images and store files, anything you want. Whereas Blogger and WordPress, you're— all you're doing is storing your images and your posts every day and your pages. But you're not actually storing them on your own server. And so with WordPress.com, you're actually— you don't have the server, which is what you need. You don't have the accessibility to the files that you need to make your own website. Because you don't have your own server. And you're on— I have to word this delicately because actually with HostMonster and Bluehost and a lot of these things, you're actually on a shared server. But everybody has x amount of space on that shared server that they're paying for. Whereas WordPress or Blogger, being that they're free, they're not going to give you more space than they need to. As long as you can post— ah, well, Askimet. It comes with WordPress. Sorry, I'm all over the place a little bit. I'm going to log in real quick and just check, make sure that I'm using HyperCache and get the spelling of AskMe for you. But yeah, with Blogger or WordPress.com, you're using a free service. And Blogger almost has the advantage there as far as free services goes because you're actually uploading to their Picasa or their Google+ now. Your images are living in those areas. As opposed to in Never Never Land.

Peter Booth asked a question. Would you limit the number of overall colors on a website, and if yes, how many?

I actually do. I do all of my theme designs in a 3 to 4 color design only because I think it helps consistency in creating a brand. I think— Kim, I will get back to that one. Consistency in creating a brand, I think that 3 colors and maybe a 4th, a neutral tone overall for all links, all header tags, all formatting, social icons, all of that. I think really if you get a little too wild and crazy— I mean, and to each their own. It depends. I've seen some awesome themes that use the entire rainbow, but personally I actually start all of my sites with a very simple color scheme in which I send out to my client to approve. They get 3 main colors and 1 kind of like neutral back.

Kim, you—

Speaking of colors before you go on there, what color should the text be?

Always the easiest, white or black. White if it's a dark and hard to read, or black or a very dark gray if— thank you, Stephanie. Black or— Dennis, thank you. I saw that. Black or very dark gray to read. I just think that, once again, due to screens across the world and you don't know what everybody has, make it as easy as possible. I think getting into colored text gets a little complicated sometimes. Once again, just because it looks beautiful on your screen doesn't mean that it looks beautiful on somebody else's.

The screen.

Yeah, you want to make it easy for them to read and easy on their eyes too, so I think that goes a lot for those colors.

Gary, I have not tested the comments plugin that allows you to post right to your feed with the Google+ stream. I can say that I used to have a plugin that allowed people to come right from Facebook and comment, and it was awesome, and it was very easy, and it actually got a lot more comments because of how easy it was. However, it was one of the plugins that ended up causing a lot of problems over time. And so I did disable that. So that would be one thing I would watch for if I was using the comments plugin.

Okay, here's another question from Peter. What should be the maximum size of images that you upload, and would you recommend PNGs or JPEGs?

Depends on what you're doing them for. I think your photography, you know, your food photography could be a JPEG. I think if you're building a website, you want to, you know, Obviously the size and the compression is going to come into play in how good the image looks. I use a lot of PNGs in website design and background and things like that. But as far as JPEGs go, it really comes down to your theme, your server, what your server will host, what your server— you know, your maximum width and how big your theme is, how wide your theme is. I tend to not make a theme wider than 1100 pixels. Which is actually really, really wide in the world of coding, but I guess people like wider sites right now. It used to be— I didn't—

It used to be 900, wasn't it?

Yeah, I used to stop at 900. And so if your blog area is 600 pixels wide and you want to make your images consistently 550 pixels, then I say make them consistently 550 pixels. And I upload it at that size as well so that I'm not uploading at 4,000 pixels and compressing down, things like that.

Can you talk a little bit about mobile?

Mobile sites?

Yeah. Or I guess I don't really know much about it or how it works.

Well, there's responsive sites, responsive designs, which means that your site You'll notice it sometimes, like if you play with the size of your screen, it kind of shrinks and gets bigger as your screen minimizes and maximizes. A responsive theme is supposed to shrink it or compress to, or adapt to rather, the, the screen that it's being viewed upon. So if I had a responsive website, if I open it on a mobile website, it's going to be formatted to fit the phone, the iPad, the Kindle. And that's fantastic. It's awesome. And a lot of sites are going responsive and whatnot. That being said, I've seen some errors with responsive sites, but I think, you know, we're very used to websites these days and we all adapt a little bit. So if we have to flip that Kindle or that iPad, then we'll do it. There's also, you know, the opportunity to actually have an entire mobile theme programmed into your site so that you're kind of stripping out the wide WordPress or Blogger theme and people are just seeing, you know, the headlines and the excerpt to the post and can click on the post as needed so that they're not loading too much onto their mobile device.

Is that expensive to do it that way or?

No, I don't— I mean, to me it's all part of the theme that you, you know, you're getting right now. And Genesis WordPress or ThemeForest or Woo, any place that you're buying a theme or if you're talking to a designer, it's kind of— it comes with the theme and Or you can make sure that it's coming with the theme that you're purchasing or the design you're buying from a blogger or a designer. I'm sorry.

Well, it would only get into more expensive if you were actually building a mobile site. Yeah.

Like, yeah, it would get more expensive if you took your site right now and you hired someone to take your site and you want to build a mobile website for it. Then you are paying somebody to do that because they— and they deserve to be paid for that because they're doing it.

And that will cost as much as a regular blog design will just on top of that too, I would assume.

I would say once again that comes down to the designer.

So would you basically have two versions of your site then? Is that how it works?

Kind of, um, yes, it kind of— in the files it just becomes a mobile website, so it's just pulling another CSS file for your actual website.

Okay.

Maureen Shaw asked a question and she says, "Are you suggesting that bloggers hardcode microdata on each recipe so the recipes will show up on Google's recipe view?" I think that a lot of bloggers are using the ZipList plugin or the HRecipe plugin and I think that those do fantastic jobs of, especially with Google and their updates and things like that, doing that. I think if a blogger does not have the knowledge to be hardcoding microdata in, then they probably shouldn't be and should be using one of the, um, the savvier SEO plugins for recipe SEO plugins for that.

Well, Maureen is Easy Recipe. Yep. And that's the one I use right now.

I get the impression that might have been a loaded question.

Okay, uh, Kim Bolt— no, Kim Boltman didn't have a question. She's talking about Mac to Adam. They're having too much fun in there, I think.

Hey, I'm sitting on the couch and my shoes are off. This is Tech Talk. We need to be having fun.

That's right. Absolutely. If you have questions, just put them in the comment section and we will get to them as soon as we can. Let's talk again about plugins. You know, you're talking about minimal plugins. What, what can we hardcode in besides the social shares? What other things can we hardcode in that we don't need a plugin for?

If you want to go as far as hardcoding a print CSS file, that can be done. There's a lot of things that really can be hardcoded in. It really comes down to You know, how much time and how much knowledge you have, any plugin can be, you know, if you understood how it worked, it wouldn't have to be a plugin. You could actually just do it. Kind of the joy of plugins though is like shoe shopping. You get to try them on and throw them away and that sort of thing. I think if you were really, really curious about features and things like that, there's things that, you know, you could do research and figure out what features you really wanted hardcoded into your site. OK. Derek, can you— yes, print buttons are really important. And I think that it's nice that a lot of the recipe plugins these days are coming with the print recipe plugins— print buttons. Because also what's nice about that is the person isn't obligated to print every single photograph and all of your text as well, because pictures do eat up a lot of ink. And so a lot of these recipe plugins these days are coming with— you can add a tiny recipe picture and people can choose to print that. I think that's really important.

Very good. We have a question here from Jeff Sai, I think. Do you recommend WPtouch plugin for mobile sites?

I actually use a different— I've used, I don't currently use— I've used a different mobile plugin in the past. I've not worked with WPtouch, so I can't speak specifically on that plugin, but I'll happily test it out and play with it. Most likely I'll turn around and go install it on something and see what it does because that's— I've Curiosity killed the cat.

So I mean, is that something we could do like with, with a free site then if we want to set something up and just play with it and learn? Can you do that on WordPress.com or no?

I would recommend that if you already own hosting to actually do it within your own hosting, just because you're gonna get a more accurate answer within your own files of how your thing's gonna do. And you can even— I don't recommend recreating your website. You don't need duplicate content. Being pulled on the internet that will just ruin your Google rank and things like that. But making a dummy site filled with fake language and maybe some just random images that you could just test out a few posts on.

Do you have to buy a domain then for that?

If you have a hosting company, say through Bluehost or HostMonster or any of these companies, you can purchase additional domain or you can make it a subdomain within your own. Because you have— so I have pastasushi.com. And actually within pastasushi.com, you can build other folders in your control panel. And you don't need additional domain names. You just need to actually segregate those files to their own folder outside of your existing website so that you can install and use it.

I'm getting a headache just thinking about that.

It's really— I know it sounds complicated, and once again, this comes back, you know, the question I get a lot, a lot of people come to me and they want to know how to do things, and they want to know how to install, how do I do this PHP, or how do I do this CSS and whatnot. I think it's awesome when people learn, I really do. I think it's amazing when people take the time to learn how to work their website. I think it's really, really rewarding. Actually, my current client is taking the time to learn everything I'm doing. And I think it's amazing that he has that attention span. Because sometimes I'm looking at semicolons and dazing and glazing over. But I also think that it's one thing to change the handle on your toilet when it's making that really weird noise. I think it's another thing to hire a plumber when your toilet's squirting water everywhere and you can't fix it. So, um, just keep that in mind. I think that a lot of people want to do everything on the cheap and there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's really important and we need to be savvy, but at a certain point, um, it's really hard for me as a designer to figure out where you put a piece of code or a line or a semicolon or why the site stopped working. I get emails all of the time. From people that I'm either not working with or just have a friendly relationship with, and they're like, my site's broken. Okay, well—

If you didn't build it, you have no idea.

So I actually spend a lot of time searching through the code, reading error logs and things like that, trying to pinpoint at what moment it broke. And so just keep that in mind. That's why I recommend doing it for as a separate test area. That way, if you are going to break something, it's not your website. So if you want to learn all of this stuff, if you want to test out plugins, things like that, do it on a side site that you can have. And you don't need additional domain names. You've already, you know, you already paid for that space on a hosting company. You have it. Use it. You don't need a separate account. So if you already have an account with any of these hosting companies, you do not need to go have another expensive account. You can do this all within the files that are allocated to you, the space that's given to you.

Kim Pebbley just asked about what the recipe sites were, the recipe add-on sites were again, and that was ZipList and Easy Recipe.

Yeah, there was, um, zip and there's HRecipe, is that still—

yeah, um, I don't see that at all.

There's a new one that someone emailed me about a few weeks ago, I haven't had a chance to test it out. I actually wrote an article for Perfume Blogger once about all of the— well, at the time, the existing ones that were out. And I kind of tested them all and took screenshots of every one of them so that people, if they wanted to, could come in and kind of get a preview of each and every one without installing them and uninstalling them and deleting the files on their own websites. Do I have any favorite fonts? And what could I recommend for good readability? Once again, because you're downprogramming for everything across the internet, across the world— this is a global platform we work on— stick with the basic Basics, Times Arial, Georgia, those fonts, the ones that come built into any system whatsoever. I think that Google Fonts are an amazing, beautiful thing. And I'm astounded that they've been putting these out. And we can import them and hardcode them into the website and make websites look really, really cool and have all these flashy fonts now. But at the end of the day, I think the main body of your text should always be in a— a font that is on every single computer, a font that comes with every single computer no matter where you are just for loading and speed. And heaven forbid Google ever take away Google Fonts. That would be the saddest day ever. You never know. Well, they took away our reader, so—

You never know.

And the other day, Latitude or something bit the dust. I'm sure we're all really sad about that. See, Adam breaks his site all the time. Totally cool. We all do it.

Gary Smith wants to know if you could talk about the importance of having a sitemap.

Yes. Sitemaps are really awesome and everybody should have one whether or not you're actively— it should kind of be itself and you don't have to do anything with it. But it's really important for indexing and things like that. Also, as a consumer, I use sitemaps a lot more than I'd like to admit. But I really find navigation on some of the fancier retail pages and things like that irritating. So I will go right to a page's sitemap if I know exactly what I'm looking for. And I will narrow it down. See, I have not seen Good Me Cookin' yet. I'll have to try that. But I think that it's just for indexing and SEO optimization, I really think having an up-to-date sitemap is important. Once again, that's something that comes with some themes. Or also it's a— you can get a plugin for that. Test them, read the reviews, things like that. But that's something that you can have a plugin for as well.

Great.

Okay, we're going pretty good here now. If you have any questions, now's the time to ask them. We have some time left on this, but we're getting a lot of information on blog design. And any other tech talk or questions you might have, throw Keita's way. And Grace, you have anything else you'd like to ask?

Or have you hardcoded recipe data for a site for anybody yet?

No.

Using a plugin?

No, I am, like I said, on Pasta Sushi I do not use a recipe plugin. I use my own formatting there. I'm sorry, I'm trying to read and do this at the same time.

But are you doing it with each recipe or are you—

Yeah, but I've also, I don't tell anybody but it's because I'm really lazy and I'm not going to go back through 3 years of recipes and reformat all of my posts. It's really what it comes down to. So I got into the swing of things, you know, when I first started and I do it my way and I write my recipe every day in my WordPress post and then I format it a certain way without a plugin and I've been doing it that way for 3 years. The only reason I have not gone back and built in a recipe plugin or added a recipe plugin to all of my older posts is that I don't want to. So really that's all it comes down to is I don't want to.

Well, it's a personal choice.

Yeah, I'm lazy. I tend to spend a lot more time on everybody else's website than I do my own.

Have they not reduced now the amount of items you have to have for the microdata to appear in recipe search? Is it like 2 or 3?

I'm not sure. I'll be honest with you. I don't know about that one.

I think there's only 2 or 3 that you need now. So it's— I don't really understand how it works or how you do it or whatever. But with the Google microdata, I think you only need 2 or 3 of the items out of the list to appear in recipe search.

For the actual recipe Google search, if you go to that tab. Correct.

Which, how many people really use that is the question. Are they using it, or is authorship going to replace that?

Yeah, and you know what's weird, Dennis, is I don't have recipe markup at all, and I end up in that recipe search. So I don't know if it depends on the recipe, if they don't have enough. People with the microdata set up, then I'll appear sometimes. So I don't know how popular it is.

I think the way that the Google searches are going, that authorship is going to determine a lot more of where you're going to show up. And I personally don't think I've ever gone to Recipe Search. I'll Google the recipe just in Google and look for someone that I know, that I know I can trust if I'm looking for something that I need to make. Or that I want to see how it's made. And I think that's the way the whole thing is going. So it may not even come into play as much as you might have thought, although it might be one of the parts of the algorithm that helps you with search.

Now Google is coming out with the— or they've been introducing the data highlighter, and the recipes are going to hit pretty soon, and it's going to be easy to mark up the data once they, you know, get to recipes, because you're just going to be able to click. I still think it's going to be of some importance to have it. There's got to be a reason.

Yeah, I think at the end of the day, Google owns the internet. Hate to say it, but it's true. So if they want it to work, they're going to drive it to work. And if it's something they are after, we're all going to adapt. At the end of the day, Google— I mean, we don't Bing it very often. We Google it. And unfortunately, they kind of, they are the elephant in the room when it comes to that. So if they want their recipe tab to gain influence, then they're going to start making it more important, and we are going to all jump on board. That's going to be the choice.

You won't have a choice.

It's another way for them to, you know, get to know you as an author, you know, what your specialty is, what your niche is, you know what I mean? All these things are going to point to authorship somewhere along the line, I think.

Yes.

We have a question here from Kim Pebly. I don't know if you saw it.

Yes, actually I'm reading that one. And, um, I, I— no, you don't want to lose readers. And, and no, but you shouldn't have to pay for a redirect. Um, I'm not— I'd have to work more closely with you and find out what your negotiations are with your existing site to what you're trying to transfer. But, um, A redirect can be— I code in a redirect for most of anybody who's transferring from one to another and things like that. So I'd have to more specifically answer that one for you. But in general, a 301 redirect or redirect, I don't— I'd have to know a little bit more about your situation to know why. You'd be paying for that.

Your old site should always just lead to your new site.

Exactly, exactly. So that 301 is going to be there and it's not going to go away. Should somebody come upon an old URL and click on it and whatnot, it would automatically be directed to the new site with the new URL. I would really have to see that specific situation to know what's going on there as far as paying for that.

John just mentioned something. John Shaw said Easy Recipe can automatically import your older posts. John, I didn't know that.

No, good to— that's awesome to know.

We'll have to talk more about that.

Helps my laziness.

Absolutely. And Becky Rosenthal wants to know if later you can leave a link to where you reviewed the recipe plugin.

Yes, I will hunt out that link and I will post that one for you. Once again, that was about a year ago, so keep that in mind. Everybody is updating their plugins all of the time and whatnot. So, but I think as far as just getting a general idea of what they all look like on the WordPress backend and on the frontend, it's a nice little way to do it. They're upgrading to 4G. I'm reading Kim's satellite.

Her HughesNet.

So you have a satellite internet connection. Is that your hosting company, though? Because I mean, I would think if you have a satellite internet connection, it just might mean that it's like old school DSL or plug-in. Even older, wow. And that maybe—

It's just the upload and download speed.

Yeah, it's the upload and download speed, not necessarily your hosting. So if you have just a very slow or an older internet connection or a satellite internet connection, which 4G isn't— I don't think that's terribly slow. Especially not nowadays. Um, that's pretty awesome. My cell phone doesn't get 4G most days. Um, I, I would think that it's actually more specific question for your hosting company, and unless your internet provider is somehow your hosting company too, not sure.

Kim Pavly says the redirect from WordPress.com is $12 a year.

Our—

I know when I moved from Blogger to WordPress the other WordPress, WordPress.org. Yeah, there was no redirect charge.

Yeah, no, because you just put in a code to redirect. So I would, um, you put it through, you know, you put that code in, so I would have to—

I do have to pay for my old domain name though.

Yeah, you're still registering your old domain name and making sure that, um, that's being, you know, if you didn't carry that domain name over, because a lot of people do actually just transfer the DNS records for their domain name But yeah, I would want to see— I'm very curious about the WordPress redirect and why we couldn't just put a redirect code in there. I would actually want to do a little more research for you on that one, Kim, because I hard-coded through redirecting to Blogger sites to WordPress and other dom— when people transfer domains and things like that. So I'd actually want to see why— what that service included.

Gary Smith says, "Ecommerce software plugins, what is your favorite? Some sites sell products.

Talk about accepting credit cards, security, and all that other stuff." I think as far as mom-and-pop bloggers go, things like that, I think if you want an ecommerce site, the easiest way to do it is to go to WooThemes and to buy an ecommerce website and to use the PayPal plug-in and use PayPal. I think that's just the easiest way out of the hat to do it. You can also add PayPal to your website. I have built commerce websites for people that have— they use WooThemes. They use their plug-in, the Woo technology, the Woo stuff. And Woo has a lot of stuff that you can add to a website for the shopping cart and things like that. And I think that just as far as until you know, until you want a team just for your, your e-commerce website. I think that one of those pack-and-play websites is the way to go with a PayPal account. PayPal, a, because you're trusting them with the security and you're not risking or obligating yourself to security issues that you really have no control over at certain points.

Good advice. Okay. All right. Well, we're coming to the close of this. If anybody has any other questions, now's the time to ask them. If not, we're gonna close shop in just a few minutes and bring this conference to an end. But Keita, if you had one last piece of advice for anybody that wants to change their blog or wants to move to WordPress, what would it be?

I think one piece of advice is, um, relax. Keep in mind that at the end of the day As much as we love our websites and things like that, nothing that happens on the website is the end of the world. Your readers like you no matter what. Your fans are going to find you no matter what. So at the end of the day, take a deep breath and relax if your post from 3 months ago goes missing or if your screen goes white because of a WordPress plugin update or a server error somewhere in Texas that you are not even privy to, just know that at the end of the day it's just a website. I know that's probably not the most business-savvy advice, but really it's my stay calm, eat a cupcake. At the end of the day it's all going to come out in the wash.

There you go. I could say you're one with the universe.

Exactly. I've repeated you 3 times this week.

Take a deep breath. That comes from the movie Slap Shot in case you're ever wondering. So to put it back into context, but thank you so much. You've offered us a great insight, Kita. You really— I'm so happy you could make it with us today and help with this conference. Grace, thank you so much for stopping in and asking some questions and being part of the conference. And I'm Chef Dennis Littley. You have been part of history. We have had the first virtual conference on G+. I'm sure you're going to see a lot more from this point on. But tell your friends, tell people that even aren't your friends, and let's get some more site— some more views on this. And if you have any questions about how we did the conference or if you'd like to hold your own conference, I'd be happy to talk to you and help you. But this is the G+ Food Bloggers Community that is holding this with me, and we're putting forth the first annual G+ Virtual Bloggers Conference. So I'd like to bring this to an end and thank you all for coming. Coming. If you haven't seen it live, stop on YouTube and check it out and share it, share it, share it. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.