Why manage users and multiple authors in WordPress?

From media companies to big CPG brands, many of our clients have an entire department of content creators. This content can include regular page content, specific landing pages, blog posts, press releases, and more.

Often, our clients’ teams will already have a editorial workflow that looks something like this:

• Draft
• Review
• Revise and edit
• Review
• Approve
• Publish

Normally, each task is completed by a different person. Therefore, each task requires a different level of access to the platform.

This type of editorial workflow keeps users from accidentally publishing unfinished content. Proper management of users and multiple authors in WordPress helps to maintain an easily sustainable editorial workflow.

Imagine you are a reporter for one of the largest news networks on the planet. You accidentally publish a story before editing and approval. What kind of impact would that have? You can see why it’s beneficial to keep certain users from accessing editorial functions for the good of the company and the process.

How does WordPress handle this?

WordPress, at its core, is designed to democratize publishing. The idea is to make publishing content accessible to everyone everywhere.

Because WordPress is a content management system, it comes with some basic functionality for managing said content. For example, out of the box, you can have multiple users. Each user can be assigned a separate role that only allows them to do certain things.

Here are the default user roles:

• Administrator – somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site
• Editor – somebody who can publish and manage posts, including the posts of other users
• Author – somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them
• Subscriber – somebody who can only manage their profile

As you can see, you’re already set up for success. If you need to break out access for different users, everyone gets their own secure login. Additionally, everyone is limited to designated access to specific functions that you assign.

This gives you flexibility to allow your team to focus on their part of the content process as needed. What’s more, if you need flexibility or control over your user roles or editorial workflow, there are plugin solutions for that.

What tools are available to help manage users and multiple authors in WordPress?

PublishPress

Let’s take a look at two different types of plugins. First, there’s PublishPress.

For teams that need to manage multiple user accounts, different types of authors and editors, and an authentic editorial workflow, PublishPress is the perfect WordPress plugin solution. Here are some of its features:

• Editorial Calendar: Calendar view for planning and scheduling content
• Content Notifications: Triggered by many different activities to keep your team alerted
• Content Overview: A more thorough look at the existing planned content from the calendar
• Custom Statuses for Posts: Status labels include pitch, assigned, in progress, or create your own
• Editorial Comments: A super powerful option for internal comments on each post
• Editorial Meta Data: Use meta labels like First Draft Date, Assignment, Needs Photo, Word Count, or create your own
• User Roles: An easy way to allow individual users access to multiple user roles (not to be confused with User Role Editor, that we’ll discuss later)

Using PublishPress can seriously increase communication and productivity from your team. For teams that relied on email, Google Documents, Slack, phone calls, and in-person notes, we found that implementing this type of workflow improved efficiency.

User Role Editor

User Role Editor is one of the more powerful plugins for managing users and multiple authors in WordPress. It is especially useful for a team that needs to specify capabilities.

WordPress allows users access to specific functionality from WordPress core, plugins, and themes through capabilities. When you need to limit those capabilities, User Role Editor helps. Having the power to allow users specific access (or no access) keeps your team focused and the wrong people out of places they shouldn’t access.

The best part about the User Role Editor plugin is the power it gives you to build a custom user role. While this is certainly possible by manually writing some code, having a GUI interface inside your WordPress dashboard makes this a simple step that most users can manage.

In other words, you don’t have to bother your developer every time you need to create or update a user role for your organization.

Actual Tips

Now that you have seen what opportunities are available for managing users and multiple authors, how should you get started? Here are a few simple tips to get you going.

Write out your ideal workflow.

Consider this workflow outlined on WordPress.com as a starting point. It’s very generic and covers most bases.

• Pick a topic.
• Create a content brief.
• Assign a writer.
• Write the first draft.
• Edit, refine, and review the draft.
• Schedule, publish, and share the content.

Assign specific users to the steps.

Using the steps above, assign specific people and their user accounts to those steps.

Next, outline what types of functionality requirements (i.e., drafting, editing and commenting, scheduling and publishing) that user needs. Then, assign that user account a role that includes those.

Most of the time, the default user roles will be enough. If not, you can always create your own.

Outline a content schedule.

Maintaining a content schedule not only keeps your team organized, but you can also assign authors and editors to the specific content pieces at the same time. Visibility of the content schedule will help keep everyone focused on their parts and not overwhelmed thinking about everything at once.

Conclusion

When it comes to managing users and multiple authors, WordPress takes the cake. Furthermore, it’s extremely flexible with the default user roles and the ability to create your own from scratch. You can customize as much as needed.

Clearly outline your desired workflow upfront. By doing so, you save a ton of time in the long term.

The more people required for managing content, the more efficient you’ll need to be. Let the tools work for you so that you and your team can focus on what’s important—the content!

Contact WebDevStudios and allow our team to set you up with a platform that makes it easy to manage users and multiple authors in WordPress.

The post Managing Users and Multiple Authors in WordPress appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Just recently, Colorado became the first state in the US to pass a bill that requires state and local government websites to meet accessibility standards. This is huge news in our industry and something we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on.

Even if you are not a government organization, or there are no laws requiring this in your city or state now, the time is coming. Much like GDPR, this will spread and eventually become the norm. It’s worth taking the time up front to ensure that your website meets accessibility standards now so that you are creating a solid foundation for the future.

What are accessibility standards?

We won’t get into every specific detail, but we can point you in the right direction. The newest version of the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines, created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web, is version 2.2. However, at the time of writing this article, 2.1 is what the majority of website agencies and developers are working towards.

In the abstract from the 2.2 version of the guidelines, W3C breaks down website accessibility standards like this:

“Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities. These guidelines address accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines will also often make Web content more usable to users in general.”

As you can see, the intention is to make web content more accessible to all users, but there are some more specific considerations. For example, listed early in that abstract is blindness and low vision. Typically these are the driving force behind these guidelines and a great place to start.

Why are accessibility standards important for your website?

If you have never paid any attention to this before, your website might be riddled with issues that make it hard for these specific types of users to actually get to the important information on your website and something you should begin to consider.

Let’s start with what we recommend not doing. There are some ‘plug and play’ types of tools out there that claim to be a simple solution to meeting accessibility standards, but more often than not they will cause more problems for the user than you would find by building your website and it’s content out thoughtfully in the first place.

For example, if you are using WordPress as the platform for your website, you can find some plugins that will allow your users to make changes to the front end of your website on their own (i.e., change font sizes, switch between light and dark modes, etc.). I highly recommend staying away from the one size fits all type of approach to accessibility and, instead, really put some time into making foundational changes that will ensure it’s done correctly.

Now let’s talk about a couple of things that you can do or focus on.

• Accessibility statement
• Navigation menu
• Images
• Links
• Styling

Accessibility Statement

An easy first step is to put up an accessibility statement. To be honest, this does absolutely nothing to immediately benefit your users in any way. It’s simply a statement and commitment that you are keeping accessibility standards top of mind and are making an effort in that direction. It’s easy and, if nothing else, will be a way to hold you, the website owner, accountable for keeping your word.

Navigation Menu

When you tried the screen reader, were you able to successfully tab through your navigation menu? If you look at the code for your menu, is it simple to read or is it a jumbled mess of unnecessary classes and animation features? W3C provides a simple breakdown of recommendations for navigation on the Menu Structure page of their web accessibility tutorials.

Using the WordPress menu system, it’s easy to organize your navigation menu in a thoughtful way and change it up as needed. Your theme could have an impact on how it’s presented so just double check this area and see if any simple changes can be made now. Otherwise, make sure this is a priority as you rebuild in the future.

Images

One of the key areas of focus for meeting accessibility standards is how you treat images in your page content. As you can imagine, a blind or low vision user isn’t going to be able to process much about an image. It’s important then to ensure that you are using the available HTML tags to add a description to those images.

This will communicate a description of what the image is instead of showing the image itself. “Making Images Accessible,” an article from the University of Washington, lays out a few helpful examples.

Links

Similar to images, there are some simple steps you can take to update your existing links in your page copy. These steps will ensure that a screen reader can give a little more context to the user.

First, consider the styling of your links. If a person with limited vision is still reading your text, you’ll want to ensure a high contrast between the text itself and the background. As well, you may be familiar with website style where there is no underline under a link. While this may look good to someone with full visibility, someone without might not notice that it’s a link.

Next consider the context of your links. Here is a quote from an article by Yale:

“While screen readers can read a full page to a user, screen reader users may prefer to instead listen to a list of links. In that case, a screen reader may only read the link text and not the surrounding text.”

As you can imagine, simply hearing the text of a link might not be informative enough for the user to know what it means. The idea here is to ensure that your links are contextual words or phrases.

The text “click here” as a link doesn’t tell the user very much, but “you can find our contact form here” as a link tells the user plenty of information.

You should also consider ARIA techniques, which allow you to add additional context specifically for screen readers. This would allow you to keep a “click here” link text while including “you can find our contact form here” context specifically for the screen reader.

Styling

One of the most simple updates you can do to your current website now is make style updates. Style updates would apply to things like colors and fonts. In regards to accessibility, it’s important that fonts are an appropriate size and that colors meet specific contrast ratios.

For users with visibility issues but not using screen readers, larger font sizes are helpful. There is not a specific size that they should be, but the recommendation is that it is not smaller than 9pt or 12px. Lately, our designs have been using a body font size of 18px.

In regard to colors, contrast ratio is the key. To meet accessibility standards, the contrast ratio between text and the background must be at least 4.5:1. Unless your designer specifically spent time to ensure this is the case, it’s likely that you have areas of your website that do not meet this requirement.

An easy way to test is using a contrast ratio check application like WebAIM contrast checker. You can also find specific color combinations that work together from your existing branding guidelines is by using the Accessible Color Palette Builder.

What happens if you do not meet accessibility standards?

At this time, if you do not live in Colorado, nothing happens. However, as time goes on, this will become law in more states and across the globe.

Using GDPR again as a reference, we will likely see government organizations tagged first, then public organizations like schools and universities. It will eventually trickle down to any for and non profit organizations.

That said, you have users right now that have trouble using your website. This isn’t something that you should be doing because the law says you should; it’s something that should be a priority as part of the user experience of your website.

What can you do to understand website accessibility standards better?

My first recommendation would be to step into the world of screen readers. These are the tools that users with blindness or limited vision use to navigate websites.

For example, while the Screen Reader Chrome extension is no longer supported, you can still install it and try it on your own website. I encourage you to try to navigate through your website with this tool to get a better understanding of how a user with limited or no vision has to navigate.

Unless you’ve taken specific steps already to ensure that this process is smooth, it’s likely going to be difficult. Additionally, we recommend spending time going through the actual guidelines themselves listed on the W3C website. Here are a few links to get you started.

• Guidelines Overview
• 2.1 Standards
• Quick Reference

Work with a team that knows accessibility matters.

As you design or redesign your website, consider enlisting help from a team of accessibility experts. Contact WebDevStudios. We know accessibility matters and work hard to ensure your website project meets accessibility standards.

The post Website Tips for Meeting Accessibility Standards appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Sixty-eight percent of consumers say COVID-19 elevated their expectations of companies’ digital capabilities.

–Social Media Today

If you are not focusing on a website strategy for meeting the expectations of 68% of consumers, you’re missing a huge opportunity. To get you there, we want to help you get clear on your goals and make sure you are putting your best foot forward in this digital world.

Let’s go over what you might consider in your website strategy for 2021.

What are your goals?

The first and most important thing to consider are your goals. It’s important to think about your business goals at a high level to start and not just your website goals (we’ll get to those, too).

• Has your business been required to shift this past year?
• Were you a brick and mortar that suddenly found themselves doing 100% of business online?
• Are you selling products, services, or both?

It’s important to get really clear about the ‘what’ here so that you have your north star that will help drive decisions as you work through your website strategy.

Some examples could be:

• Drive more sales to a specific sector of your business
• Build a more targeted email list
• Allow previously face-to-face services to become digital

Why are you setting this goal?

Having goals is great, but without a backing ‘why,’ you’ll have a harder time staying the course and hitting those goals. Sometimes the ‘why’ can take some work to get to but you really should take the time to get there.

Let’s say you’re a marketing manager at your company, and your boss comes to you and says, “Our goal for 2021 is to update the website!”

Okay… that’s great and all, but why? “It’s time and something we should have already done before.”

Hmm… but why? “We are not getting enough leads.”

Why not? “We’ve had to move from in person sales to digital sales and we’re not showing up on Google when people search for our services.”

Now we have an idea of what’s going on!

Leads that were coming from face-to-face business meetings because sales people were flying all over are no longer coming in. The website is not optimized for search engines, so it’s not showing up. Our goal is now to update the website, making sure it’s SEO optimized and things are in place to capture leads. Dig in and ask why as many times as you can until there are no more answers.

How do you plan on reaching these goals?

This is where the fun part begins. We’ve done the hard work of creating the goal and stating the why; now let’s figure out how to pull it off, specifically with your website.

• What do you need to reach your goal?
• Will it require updated branding guidelines?
• What third-party services might be helpful?
• Do you need to take payments online?
• Will people be booking to your calendar from the website?
• Is there some business process automation that could be helpful?
• Do we need to create something custom?

It’s important to list out all of the needs of your website strategy up front so that we can plan how all of those things will work together.

What does the outcome of a great website strategy include?

A great website strategy team will work with you to ensure that all of your ducks are in a row before you begin the project. This will allow the team(s) doing the set up, building, and integrations to have a clear vision of what the expectations are.

Here are a few things you would see:

• Project overview and timeline
• Branding guidelines
• User personas
• User paths or journeys
• Design mockups
• Technical and/or functionality details
• Level of effort
• Resource or people Requirements

Some of these may be items that you or your company have already prepared, or they may be things you need help piecing together. Having all of these packaged together will greatly increase the likelihood of a team knowing what success looks like for building or updating your website, and when you’re ready to work with a team to get you there, contact us!

The post Plan a Website Strategy to Meet Your 2021 Goals appeared first on WebDevStudios.

1. What will your website look like?
2. How will your website work?
3. How long will it take to build?
4. How much does it cost?

Answering these questions and defining the scope of work requires:

• An understanding of the needs and requirements for the project
• A series of meetings with the WDS digital strategy team
• Documentation of a fully realized list of ideas, features, and requirements
• A precise review of mock-ups provided to ensure all potential scenarios for every user type have been accounted for
• A plan that targets your timeline and budget
• A prioritization of the deliverables to ensure a smooth development and release process

WebDevStudios Digital Strategy Team

Identify Requirements

The first step of our digital strategy team is to understand your website project goals, the success criteria of your project, as well as the current state of things in your current environment. We’ll do this through a series of collaborative meetings with you over a specified period of time.

Example Client Goals

• An increase in newsletter subscribers.
• Improvement and reworking of the user experience
• Take newly-created website designs and turn them into a working website
• Push website data to a CRM

During the strategy process, our aim is to uncover things you might not think to consider.

Example Questions We Ask

• What does your website’s content hierarchy look like?
• When a user lands on a specific page, what do you want them to do?
• How will users on your site interact with a particular element?
• Do you have multiple user types, and do they each have unique ways of interacting with the website?
• How are specific elements managed on the backend by your administrators and editors?

We also do a deep dive into the actual functionality and technology requirements for your site. For example:

• Third-party API connections for passing or obtaining user data
• Support for eCommerce either onsite or through third parties
• Custom forms
• Business process automation
• CRM integrations

Our goal is to exhaust all questions that could be asked in order to bring us to our next step of defining solutions.

Define Solutions

In the world of technology, there is not always just one way to accomplish something. Once we have identified the goals and requirements for your website project, we can begin to determine how we’ll meet those goals and explore the different paths to meeting them.

The intention of defining solutions is not to choose the first opportunity. Instead, it is to find all opportunities and weigh them against the timeline and budget so that we can make the most educated recommendation. The solutions presented by our digital strategy team are based on our strong technical experience, especially in the WordPress space, and use the most innovative tools and technology.

Recommend Approach

No two projects are the same; so, it is not as simple as defining a single set of tools and workflows for every project. The technologies used to complete those projects may differ as we tailor our recommendations to each individual project.

Our recommended approach will be a combination of a focus on project goals, the timeline that needs to be met, and the budget allocated for the project. The details of the deliverables will vary per project but will always be delivered as a project plan. The project plan is a comprehensive document containing all of the low-level and high-level requirements for the project.

What a Project Plan Includes

• Design(s), if needed
• Documented functionality requirements
• Documented user experience for that functionality
• Recommended third-party tools, if needed
• Research and feedback for existing functionality
• Plan for launching
• Timeline for completion, including phases
• Budget requirements

The intention of our digital strategy team is to strip away all possibilities of vague or unclear language around development requirements, so that both of our teams are set up for success. Once the project plan is complete and approved by the client, it will serve as the guide for our engineering team to take the next steps for development kickoff.

When you are ready to start your next website project with WDS and strategize website goals, requirements, and user experience, contact us! We can’t wait for you to meet our extraordinary digital strategy team.

The post Why Digital Strategy Is an Important Part of Your Website Project appeared first on WebDevStudios.