Add Product to WordPress/WP-eCommerce Website

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to add and edit products using the WP-eCommerce Plugin on a WordPress site.

Login as WordPress Admin

Go to Products–>Add New

Step 1 – Add Product Information

1. Enter name of product in ‘title’
2. Enter description of product in editor area
3. Tag product to one or more categories
4. If adding a new category, make certain that you assign it to the correct parent category.
5. Enter Price the price of the product.  You may also enter a sale price if this item is currently on sale.
6. Enter Shipping Weight and Dimensions or alternatively set a Flat Rate shipping amount for this product.  Make sure these setting are accurate to ensure a reliable shipping estimate for the customer at checkout time.
7. Optionally enter SKU under Stock Control if you want the system to track inventory for this product.
8. Taxes are typically setup in the Store Configuration and calculated automatically during the checkout process.

Step 2 – Adding Product Images

1. Under ‘Product Images’ tab, click ‘Manage Product Images’.
2. Choose the ‘From Computer’ tab
3. Click ‘Select Files’ and choose one or more files you have stored on your hard drive
4. Enter a short description of the product in the ‘Alternate Text’ field. Be sure to include a keyword or two for Search Engine Optimization purposes.
5. Click the ‘Use as Product Thumbnail’ link
6. Click ‘Save Changes’
7. Exit by clicking outside the ‘Manage Your Product Images’ box

Click ‘Publish’ to add the product to your store, or select ‘Save Draft’ if you want to save changes, to publish later. Once saved you can click ‘View Product’ to view the item in the store as a customer sees it.

Fix GIF Thumbnails with Black Background in WordPress

I have a few website that I’ve designed in WordPress using a shopping cart plugin, and then trained the owner how to insert new products along with images of the products.  After the client uploaded a hundred or so products we found that all the thumbnails WordPress automatically generated had black backgrounds.  All of the client’s images were gifs.  Here’s a quick fix:

Step 1 – Edit WordPress media.php

Edit the WordPress file /wp-includes/media.php and edit starting on line 422:
$newimage = wp_imagecreatetruecolor( $dst_w, $dst_h );
if(IMAGETYPE_GIF == $orig_type){
$black=imagecolorallocate($image, 0,0,0);
imagecolortransparent($image, $black);
}
imagecopyresampled( $newimage, $image, $dst_x, $dst_y, $src_x, $src_y, $dst_w, $dst_h, $src_w, $src_h);

This doesn’t preserve the tranparency, but sets the black background in the image to transparent just before the thumbnail is created. FYI, this will most likely be overwritten next time you update WordPress.

Step 2 – Regenerate Thumbnails

Step 1 only covers thumbnails that will be created in the future, so we need to regenerate the thumbnails. Luckily, you don’t have to do all of this manually, you can install the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. Once you run that plugin, all your thumbnails should be fixed!

Sources: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/13461

How to Properly Structure Web Content

Audience

This article is intended for people who use a content management system like WordPress to blog or create & maintain your website, but the overall concepts apply to all web design, regardless of what platform you use to create/manage your website.

Goals

1. Create an ideal webpage structure for easy reading
2. Maintain style consistency throughout entire site
3. Help search engines understand what the web page is about

Structure your Web Page Like a Newspaper Article

A few key points:

• The most important story a newspaper has is on the front page (think home page).  Other articles follow in order of importance.
• If you were to read only the headings and subheadings of newspaper articles, you would have a fairly decent idea of what the story is about.  If you read the paragraphs below the headings, you get more detailed information as you go.

Use Heading Tags for SEO & Readability

Search engines look at your web page in a similar way – they assume if you put something in a heading tag (h1, h2, etc) then it’s probably important, and is a good indicator on what your web page is about.

If you use a content management system like WordPress, and you just make some words a different color and bigger, that doesn’t make it a heading (as far as a web designer or search engine sees things).  You must actually declare it as a heading tag, which is usually available under the ‘Format’ menu in the editor.

To create a heading tag:

1. Highlight the words you want to make a heading
2. Go to ‘Format’
3. Select the desired heading tag

Typically you have the options for H1 (main heading) all the way through H6 (subheadings).

Why Using Heading Tags vs Manually Styling is Better

• Search engines won’t recognize it as being important text in relation to other paragraph text surrounding it.
• Far more effort involved up front
• Far more effort involved if you decide to change the color of every heading site-wide
• Sloppy HTML

But How Can I Change the Color/Font/Size of the Headings?

Typically, that is a web designer’s job.  The font, color, size, etc of headings are declared in the cascading style sheets for the website.  A style sheet is a separate file that’s included on every page of your website that says, for example: “style all H1 tags as Times New Roman, 20px and blue”.

If you wrap all your main headings and subheadings in heading tags, your web designer can quickly & easily change the color, size, etc of all the heading tags for your entire site in one place, which is certainly easier than going through every single page of your website.

Companion Video

I created a companion video for this tutorial – looking to improve it over time, but this should help out!

WordPress Auto Update Problems

I always say “WordPress is a double-edged sword”.  It’s pretty cool that you can get a website up and running so quickly, but there are so many problems that are a result of so many versions, incompatible plugins, and server configuration issues.  I just finally solved one issue I’ve been having for quite a while – WordPress failing on an automatic update.

The fix that is quoted on so many blogs was to delete the wp-content/uploads folder and try again, which never worked for me.  I then stumbled upon a blog which pointed me the right direction – change your server configuration to use  proFTP instead of pureFTPd.   I have a Storm on Demand account (Through Liquid Web) and was able to change this in WebHost Manager in under a minute.  Violia!  Now I’m able to do auto updates as intended!

Cudos to Darcy for figuring this one out!  View source