Main Street Enterprises offers eBusiness Expo

Edmond, Okla. - Main Street Enterprises is offering a one day eBusiness Expo Nov. 20 at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, OK.

The conference will discuss how companies can utilize the Internet to increase business at little or no cost.

Topics include using social networking, search engine optimization, blogging and podcasting, rapid site development, email newsletters and micro-advertising.

“These techniques will help businesses reach new customers and better serve existing ones regardless of who developed your site or where it is hosted,” Terrell Sanders, president of Main Street and a presenter at
the conference said.

Other presenters include Adam White, an experienced graphic and Web site designer and Internet consultant, and Chris Forbes, a certified guerrilla marketing coach.

The cost is $99 per person.

Main Street is a privately held, for-profit corporation, headquartered in Edmond, Okla. It was founded in 1998 to develop sophisticated web interfaces and database applications for commercial, public and
government clients.

For more information or to register for the eBusiness Expo call 405-330-0800 or visit www.eBusinessExpo.org.

#1 Cause of Web Site Failures

What is the number one cause of web site failure? Stale content — by far. No other factor even comes close.

You hear people complain about “hard to use content management system”, “bad graphics”, “excessive downtime from host”, etc. These are all factors, and in some rare cases can kill a site, but almost always the real killer of a web site is bad content, stale content, or no content.

Fancy graphics are nice, if they are wrapped around good content. Reliable hosting is a real plus, but only if people are coming to your site in the first place. An easy to use content management system makes life easier - if you’re updating content. Otherwise it’s just an excuse for not posting new material.

Look at some of the most high traffic sites on the internet: Google, Facebook Youtube, etc. Which one has the best graphic design?

Google doesn’t have ANY graphic design. Text over a white background. Any good graphic artist will tell you that’s the kiss of death on a web site. You need flash animations, video teaser and fancy AJAX to get visitors to your site. Obviously Google doesn’t know anything about running a successful web site. Yeah, right.

What about Facebook? Still a pretty lame design. IBM blue, gray shading, ruling lines, busy layout. Any Design 101 student will tell you that site is a disaster. Nobody young and hip would ever use that site.

Youtube does a little better. But we’re still taking about a lot of plain text on white backgrounds and default blue links. You’d think a site that specializes in video would be more hip.

So why are these sites successful? Content. People use Google, Facebook, and Youtube for the content, not to be impressed with the web experience.

I’m not against good design. We have a full time graphic designer on staff. A good design does enhance the web experience, but it can’t make up for bad content, stale content or no content. If your organization will spend half as much effort on the content plan as you do on the graphic design, I can almost guarantee significantly improved results from your site.

Why don’t my images align properly?

Many people have run into a problem when they try to center their images or have the images float to the left or right of the text. This is a common problem with many themes. After the break is a scenario that describes the problem followed by the solution to get your theme to play nice with your aligned images.

The Problem

You’re writing a new post, and you decide to spice this one up by adding a neat image. It’s not a full-width image, so you decide to float it over to the left and let the text flow over it. “That would look great,” you think.

You start writing the post, you add the image, and you set it to align to the left. You look at your new post, and it does indeed look great.

You then publish the post all exicted to see you new fancy post. It doesn’t look great. It actually looks really bad. What happened?

What happened is that your theme doesn’t have the CSS settings needed to allow your pages to render properly based on how WordPress aligned your images.

The Solution

There are three classes that WordPress uses to align those images: centered, alignleft, and alignright. If your theme doesn’t have definitions for these classes or doesn’t properly define them, your aligned images will look a lot like the image above.

The following CSS can be added to your theme’s style.css file to add the CSS settings that the default theme (Kubrick) uses for image alignment:

/* Begin Images */

/* Using 'class="alignright"' on an image will
   (who would've thought?!) align the image to
   the right. And using 'class="centered', will
   of course center the image. This is much
   better than using align="center", being much
   more futureproof (and valid) */

img.centered {
        display: block;
        margin-left: auto;
        margin-right: auto;
        }

img.alignright {
        padding: 4px;
        margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
        display: inline;
        }

img.alignleft {
        padding: 4px;
        margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
        display: inline;
        }

.alignright {
        float: right;
        }

.alignleft {
        float: left
        }
/* End Images */

Of course you can modify this to meet your own specific needs. At a minimum, you need the following in your style.css file:

img.centered {
        display: block;
        margin-left: auto;
        margin-right: auto;
        }

.alignright {
        float: right;
        }

.alignleft {
        float: left
        }

After adding the default CSS styling from the Kubrick theme to my theme’s style.css file, my post now looks much better.

warning: cannot modify header information

Everything with your WordPress blog is working great, but suddenly the entire site stops working and gives you an error like the following:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/site/public_html/wp-content/themes/my-theme/functions.php:49) in /home/site/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 770

Maybe you just made a change to your code. Maybe you just changed something in your theme. Maybe you just touched the wp-config.php file. Whatever you did, it killed your site and you can’t find any errors in your code. What is going on?

The problem is a blank line in the file mentioned in the error at the line number specified. Keep in mind that the first file and location listed is where the error is, not the second file and location. So, going by my previous example, the problem is a blank line at line 49 of the current theme’s function.php file.

If you were to have the following code in your functions.php file, you will get this error:

<?php example_function(); ?>

<?php example_function(); ?>

To fix the problem, you would remove the blank line:

<?php example_function(); ?>
<?php example_function(); ?>

You could also group the PHP code together such as the following:

<?php
    example_function();

    example_function();
?>

Happy coding.

WordPress 2.6 and Full-Width Images

WordPress 2.6 has a number of great new features. One of these features helps prevent full-sized images that are added to your posts from breaking your theme. By default, the full-width images will be limited to a width of 500 pixels. There are a couple of different ways that you can fix this.

Modify the theme

If you are a theme author or know how to modify your theme, you can set up your theme to tell WordPress what the maximum width image your theme will accept for display in posts. The key is a new global variable named content_width. If the content_width global is not set, WordPress defaults to a full-size width of 500 pixels. You can see the logic that they are using in the following code snippet from the wp-includes/media.php file (note: I refomatted it a bit to fit the post):

// we're inserting a full size image into the editor. if
// it's a really big image we'll scale it down to fit
// reasonably within the editor itself, and within the
// theme's content width if it's known.  the user can
// resize it in the editor if they wish.
if ( !empty($GLOBALS['content_width']) ) {
    $max_width = $GLOBALS['content_width'];
}
else
    $max_width = 500;

So, as you can see, the way to have your theme inform WordPress of the maximum width is by supplying a value for $GLOBALS['content_width']. This can be easily done by adding a line of code to your theme’s functions.php file. For example, adding the following line of code to a theme’s functions.php file will tell WordPress that full-size images should be limited to a width of 460 pixels (the width of Main Street Open’s posts).

$GLOBALS['content_width'] = 460;

Cori Schlegel has correctly pointed out that this feature has been present since 2.5. Thanks for the correction Cori.

Modifying the image after adding it to the post

If you aren’t the author of your theme and aren’t comfortable modifying code, you can manually change the size of the image after adding it to the post. After adding the image, you can change the size by doing the following:

• Click on the image and select the “Edit Image” button
  

• Click on the “Advanced Settings” tab. You can either click on the “Original Size” button to set the image to be full-size or you can manually set the width and height for the image
  
• Click the “Update” button at the bottom of the Edit Image view.

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