Akismet

One of the best methods of catching comment spam is through the plugin Akismet. Akismet is installed with every WordPress installation and simply requires a key (which is free) to activate. You can get an Akismet API key here. Akismet checks each comment made against it’s own database. Its database gets smarter every day as users all over the world let it know what is spam (rare) and what isn’t. Spam comments rarely get through and since it started being bundled with WordPress I can’t recall a single instance when I’ve seen a spam comment get through, it’s that effective.

Contact Form 7

The nicest form plugin I’ve found is Contact Form 7 (available via your dashboard). It has a few extra add-ons such as The Campaign Monitor Addon which makes managing email campaign lists and collecting subscribers a breeze. Once the bots find your site it’s time to tighten up your form security. Contact Form 7 provides two different fields to stop bots. One is a CAPTCHA field, the other is a quiz field. Both of these work in different ways.

CAPTCHA

You’ve probably seen these around the web and have been frustrated at their complexity. They drive almost everyone to distraction and there are many articles documenting the hardest to read CAPTCHAs around the world. Luckily Contact Form 7s CAPTCHA isn’t nearly as difficult as those but it can still frustrate your users as well as exclude visually impaired people.

Quiz

This field asks a simple question. You can set the questions yourself and they display randomly on the form so that bots find it difficult to get the form submitted. This is my personal favourite and I use it here on the quote form as well as the contact form.

Updating

One of the best things you can do to beat back the robots is to keep your WordPress and plugins up-to-date. Robots can exploit software holes, luckily the WordPress community is quick to find the holes and patch them up. You get no benefit if your version is out of date and may become a target for the latest bug exploitation. Crafty Coding Blog Packages come with a Maintenance Package for a year which means you won’t have to worry about updating your software and you can concentrate on your own work.

In Conclusion

There are many other methods of combating spam, these are just a few tried and tested simple methods that stop the vast majority of spammers from taking advantage of your site. Crafty Coding customers automatically have these methods installed and are able to blog/ignore their site without worrying.

A 404 error page is a page that’s displayed when a web server can’t find the page you’re looking for. Usually this error page appears because content has been moved but links to the content stay the same. According to Google, 404 errors are the 5th most common error page displayed however it’s also the easiest one to predict and develop a damage-control system for.

Doing it wrong

Without a custom 404 error page, your users see something similar to the screenshot on the right. The default page doesn’t help the user (a.k.a your customer) at all. According to some surveys done, 79% of visitors will not make any effort to find a missing page once they’ve hit a 404 error page. That’s a lot of lost visitors.

Default 404 problems:

• It’s ugly and doesn’t match the rest of your site which is unprofessional as well as disturbing to users.
• It looks like a system error page and users may feel that they have caused the error themselves.
• It’s uninformative and doesn’t tell your user why they’ve arrived at this page.
• It doesn’t help your customer find what they were looking for in the first place.

Doing it right

The most important feature of your 404 page should be that it helps your visitor get to where he/she originally intended to go while at the same time apologising for the inconvenience.

Good things to include:

• An error message that explains what has happened that everyone can understand and that also implies that you’re apologetic about the error.
• A search box. It’s also possible to pre-fill the search box using a bit of PHP and advanced users could also do an automatic search and display the search results on the 404.
• Link to the main page of the site.
• A link to contact the webmaster to report a broken link. A better option is to automatically log all the 404 errors so that during site development you can see where the holes are.

Things to avoid:

• Too many links. It’s confusing enough for your visitors without bombarding them with options.
• Adverts. This is not the kind of page you want your users to see a Google Adsense box with a competitors advert in.

How we can help

Our default 404 pages are already setup for search and include a link to your homepage. We can also work with you to further develop your error pages to include automatic logging/automatic search. Your users will never see the default error pages and that goes for all the other error pages as well. Get in touch for more information about our web-design and coding services.

Some awesome resources

• 5 Tips to Make Your 404 Page More Usable
• Smashing Magazine – 404 Error Pages: Reloaded (a gallery of 404 pages)
• WordPress Codex – Creating and Error 404 Page (information on error handling and custom error pages in WordPress)

upPrev

You know how sometimes you find a plugin that does a good job at something without tooting it’s own horn? upPrev is just like that. Basically when a user is on a page or post and is almost finished reading or scrolls down to comment it’ll slyly swoosh in a popup at the bottom of the screen suggesting something else they might like to read. It can also integrate with Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. You can try out the plugin by clicking here and scrolling to the bottom of the screen. The official website’s in Polish so not much help there unless you understand Polish. As I started using this plugin around Crafty Coding I noticed one feature that I needed that the plugin didn’t offer, I wanted to be able to exclude certain posts/pages and categories from the popup. I did a quick and dirty hack for that, you can find it here.

• Plugin on WordPress Extend.
• Exclude posts, pages and categories from upPrev WordPress plugin.

Share Rail

This plugin makes it easy for users to like and share your content. It adds a bar to the left of your site showing how many tweets/Facebook likes and Google+ shares each page has. It’s quite easy to install and has an easy to use CSS creator so you can customise appearance. You can see it in action on the official plugin page.

• Official plugin page.
• Plugin on WordPress Extend.

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