Know that by undertaking the coaching process, you are saying that it is time to move your life forward with absolute commitment and confidence. Be prepared for change. Coaching will have positive impacts on many areas of your life, not just the area you are working on. Be open and willing to change. Don’t hire a coach because someone has told you that you should or because it sounds good. Do it because you are ready to change and take full responsibility for engaging in the process.

Don’t forget that Item-9 offers one hour WordPress and marketing coaching sessions. Sign up for one today!

Related posts:

1. Trouble Updating WordPress or WP Plugins? Try Asking Your Host to Increase Your PHP Memory Limit
2. For the Best Development Experience, Get Your Clients Editing their Content Inside of WordPress as Early as Possible
3. How Freelancers Can Use Retainers to Remove the Guessing From Project Estimates

Landing Pages are the Keys to Improving Conversion Rates

Lately, I’ve been studying the illusive art of improving conversion rates on my clients’ websites. Here are two great infographics I pulled from the Landing Page Rehab Program article I recently read on SEOMoz:

• Rehab Scorecard
• Conversion Rehab

I think that these graphics prove that a webpage always has room to improve.

Translating Conversions into Sales

That’s a tough one.

Since it’s not always possible to make the sale the first time around, an additional goal of almost all websites should be to collect customer information (specifically, visitor names and more importantly, email addresses). Without that information, those visitors might be lost forever. With an email address combined with marketing permission, though, you have a variety of opportunities to:

1. Solicit feedback to improve your products,
2. Make future sales,
3. Build a community,
4. Encourage your community to sell your products for you.

Historically, bloggers and other web workers have given away their knowledge without asking for anything in return. I say you should always ask for an email address before giving visitors access to the most valuable information on your site. Even better–make them tweet or post on Facebook using Cloud:Flood from ViperChill. That will certainly alleviate a lot of the time and energy you spent working on building something interesting and useful.

Those are just a few little ideas and thoughts, but you want to go deeper, I suggest The Noob Guide to Online Marketing (another beautiful SEOMoz/Oli Gardner infographic-based novel of a guide). It’s insanely thorough and would provide your team of marketing interns at least two or three years of projects to increase visitors, convert customers and ultimately, make your company more profitable.

Products and Affiliate Programs are Key to Monetization

The final resource I’m suggesting is the Site Profit Domination learning package from Michael Dunlop. Although it’s a $47 product, I consider it an investment to learn how to begin moving from a service-based firm to one that’s more product-based (and hopefully, better at making sales).

A big takeaway from the first of Michael’s six SPD videos and accompanying literature is that compared to services, it’s much, much easier to create affiliate programs for products. To note, affiliate programs are absolutely crucial to monetization because they:

1. Create a motivated and inexpensive sales force for your products
2. Exponentially grow sales due to affiliates creating affiliates, creating affiliates.

On the flip-side, too, affiliate programs offer easy sales opportunities for products that you didn’t necessarily create but do endorse. It’s supplemental income for something that might have come up in normal conversation anyway and they fit right in with your email campaigns and blog posts.

Conclusion

I made a goal one year ago to begin focusing on improving my marketing skills. Understanding and applying the above three elements has been a huge part of that goal.

There is so much information available on the internet (how meta!) but unfortunately, a lot of it is either poorly written, poorly synthesized or just plain inaccurate. I’m going to keep weeding through the junk, though, to find the good stuff. If you have any special resources you’d like to share, feel free to post them in the comments. It takes a community to learn, and I would definitely appreciate your feedback. Thanks and good luck!

Related posts:

1. Glengarry Glenn Ross and Web Marketing
2. Five Ways to Improve ThemeForest and their WordPress Marketplace
3. Who Are My Marketing Heroes?

If you don’t mind, I wanted to get some input from you regarding the interactive/web community in Chicago. As you know, I’ve been interested in brushing up on this aspect of my design skillset and found what I think might be an intensive web design program. It has also been suggested that I look into the Art Institute and IIT Institute of Design. I like the idea of the down and dirty 1-year portfolio school, but I’m looking for inside info about it. I think it is the kind of thing where you get out what you put in, but I would like to know more.

Here is a list of the programs I’m looking at (scroll down to Web Design track).

• http://chicagoportfolio.com/p_design.html
• http://blog.chicagoportfolio.com/

Do you know anything about this place? Do you know anyone who has gone there/is going?

Any thoughts you have would be helpful or if you happen to know anyone in the local scene who has dealt with students or been in attendance themselves, I would love to talk to someone.

I wrote her back:

I actually took a course in javascript programming at the Chicago Portfolio “sister school”, Digital Bootcamp. While it’s true that I’ve yet to find a good mechanism to learn development, those classes provided some of the worst ROI of any educational program I could imagine.

I know you’ve got your mind set on school, but I don’t think that’s really the answer. I’ve never known anyone to gain much from using their Art Institute or Columbia College degrees, either. Those degrees don’t open any special doors. In a years time, you could learn a lot more just by reverse engineering the best web designs you can find–even if just as a hobby.

If you’ve got the cheddar to throw around, though, there’s no dearth of online programs from folks who are much more “with it” than 99.99% of classroom instructors. You could start with either ThinkVitamin or NetTuts. These sites cost well under $30/month. Another great option is Ben Hunt’s Pro Web Design Course. It may be slightly pricy, but it focuses on how to create conversation-oriented sites that are profitable (read: you can charge higher fees), so it’s definitely a great investment.

I never dropped money on either of those sites, though, because I knew I wouldn’t immerse myself to justify the cost. If you’ve got the dedication, I really do see them as great, less expensive options to traditional classroom learning. There are also lots of free articles and tutorials on those memberships sites, as well as many other sites you’ve probably read.

Keep in mind that video has another great advantage to live classes, too–your lessons will always move forward (and rewind) at the speed you’re most comfortable. That was my biggest gripe with my programming class; even with three people, we moved at the professor’s pace and I think he didn’t minded leaving us behind.

The other major issue is that these instructors are never going to be teaching you the latest techniques or technologies–that’s the nature of the ivory tower. You’ll never know it, but whatever you learn from these classes will have already been heavily devalued in the real world by the time you fully grasp it.

If you need any other suggestions, just let me know. Also, if you could, provide me with a rundown of the technologies you’re already comfortable with, as well as the ones you think you need to know. I’d be more than happy to help you find the resources to help you learn more. I’ve attached a few ebooks that you might like in the meantime. Good luck!

What do you think about the idea of a portfolio school or additional web design classes in general?

Related posts:

1. Glengarry Glenn Ross and Web Marketing
2. How Freelancers Can Use Retainers to Remove the Guessing From Project Estimates
3. What’s the Point of Facebook Fan Pages?

Basecamp boasts millions of users and even more importantly, it’s the software that all other project management applications (both web and desktop) are now judged. In short, it’s the lifeblood of many web workers, this one notwithstanding. I see a real need for formal documentation on Basecamp’s best practices, so I’m going to be publishing a series of posts about properly using the software, starting with how to use to-do lists. I hope you enjoy.

Creating To-do Lists in Basecamp

Basecamp makes it incredibly easy to split up responsibilities and keep your team on track. With Basecamp’s to-do feature, you can quickly create a list of tasks and determine who’s doing what. Here’s how to do it.

1. First, select the project you and your team will be working on. Make sure everyone you need to include in your project has been included. You won’t be able to assign your to-do items to people who aren’t included in the project.
2. Next, click on the to-do tab. It’s right under the name of the project and three spaces over from the leftmost side of the upper menu bar.
3. You should see two small red links at the top of the to-do list page. Click on the one that says “new to-do list.”
4. As soon as you click the link, you’ll see two boxes. One of them has a title field and another contains your to-do list description. There are a few other options like the ability to make the list private, but we’ll ignore those for now.
5. Enter the title of your list and your short description of the items in the list. Once you’re done, click on the “create this list” button at the bottom.

Congratulations, you’ve created a new to-do list for your project! Now you can start to add items and assign them to your team members.

Adding and Assigning Tasks

1. The “enter a to-do item” box should appear right under the title of the list. Enter a description of the thing that needs to get done.
2. Just underneath, you’ll see the words “who’s responsible.” When you click on the menu below it, a list of team members will pop up. Select the person who is responsible for the task.
3. You can also decide if you want this person to receive an email notification as soon as you post the new to-do item. You do this by clicking on the box next to the menu.
4. If more than one person is responsible for an item, you can just pick “anyone” under the who’s responsible menu.When you’re finished adding items to your list, click on the small red link below.
5. You can order the items in your to-do list by click and dragging the cross shaped icon on the left. You can also check items off of your list by clicking on the box to the left of each item.

Commenting on To-do Items

Another really cool feature in Basecamp is the ability to comment on individual to-do list items. That way, whenever somebody stumbles upon the to-do item, that person can see what others have said about the item in the past. This keeps everyone up to date on any recent project developments.

1. Move your mouse over the to-do list item. As your mouse hovers, a little speech bubble will show up on the right side. Click on it.
2. When you click on the speech bubble, you’ll get redirected to the to-do item’s page. If there are already comments on the to-do item, you can read them or you can add your own comment below.
3. Whenever you leave a comment, you can attach important files and pick who gets an email notification. This is handy when you don’t want to bother everyone with your comment.
4. Go ahead and leave a comment. Now head back to the to-do list page and have a look at your to-do list item. You should see a black speech bubble to the right of the item. The black speech bubble means the item has a comment (i.e. your comment silly).
5. Whenever you see a to-do list item with a green speech bubble, it means the item has new comments that you haven’t read yet. It might be worth your time to have a look at the item’s comments.

And that’s it for to-do lists in Basecamp. As you can see, Basecamp was designed to be simple, fast, and intuitive from the bottom up. With to-do lists, it’s remarkably easy to get things done!

Related posts:

1. Three New Potential Basecamp Replacements
2. Get the Image – A WordPress Tutorial
3. What’s the Point of Facebook Fan Pages?

I couldn’t download plugin updates, let alone install the latest version of WordPress without using a plugin like WordPress Automatic Upgrade. That plugin throws WordPress into a fancy maintenance mode, so you can go about your upgrading business. It works well, but it’s not meant for making quick plugin upgrades.

The final straw came today, though, when after manually updating a handful of plugins, I was unable to reactivate all my recently activated plugins. I tried activating them all at once and when that failed, I went in batches and finally, one by one until almost every one was turned back on. When I finally got most of my plugins going simultaneously, I faced another conundrum—couldn’t see any content on the plugins.php page on my WordPress backend.

I did a quick Google search to try to understand memory issues as they pertain to WordPress (and more importantly, how to get around this on a shared host). One forum explained that this was actually called a PHP memory limit.

I had dealt with this issue once before—a long time ago—back in my WordPress salad days. At the time, the PHP memory limit set by my work’s webhost was crashing my first WordPress site several times a day. Since I knew very little about WordPress then (or any kind of web development, for that matter), I never did figure out a good solution to keep that site from going down. I think I just ignored the downtime as best I could and passed the buck when I moved on to a new company.

Anyway, this time I had the benefit of four years WordPress and development environment experience. After learning a bit about PHP memory limits from the forum I mentioned, I checked to see if any plugins could solve my issue. It was a long shot, but I did find a plugin, WP Overview (lite) Dashboard Memory Bump Usage, that allowed me to see my site’s memory usage and limits.

So after seeing the numbers in front of me (32MB available, 31.3MB used) and making a final attempt at changing the values through CPanel, I was finally ready to submit a support request. When I finally contacted WPWebHost to see if they would up my PHP memory limit, of course they said yes. Within 10 minutes, I was ramped up to 64MB, my plugins page was working and I even activated Scribe, the plugin I originally gave up upon using.

I have to say, that it’s very cool to see everything working on the backend of my WordPress site. I bet I could even update my plugins and upload images to my posts without bringing down the whole site, too. So if you are having issues updating your site, contact your webhost. You may have a very low PHP memory limit that only they can change for you.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Plugins are About to Get Real
2. The Item-9 Big List of WordPress Themes, Plugins and Resources
3. Get the Image – A WordPress Tutorial

Most obviously, getting the client involved early on reduces the effort in teaching someone WordPress. I believe that WordPress doesn’t need to be taught; the clients just need to jump right in. If I empower my clients and don’t make excuses for them, I’ll usually end up with a better website and happier clients—all in a shorter time frame.

I’ve worked with both types of clients—hands on and hands off. I’ve enabled the hands-off clients myself, too and you know what happens? Clients that don’t participate early on never participate; their sites die or stagnate and they end up begrudging me for it anyway. These clients hate their websites because they don’t understand how to use them.

The clients that do get involved in WordPress early, though (either through coercion or volunteering) will never treat their sites like a leper. Plus, after they’ve spent the last year looking at their site a couple times a week, they’ll be a lot more likely to pay for a redesign (or new theme) down the road. I consider that a win for the developer, site owner and all the visitors who appreciate the site evolving over time.

Related posts:

1. Improving WordPress Theme Development through Standardization
2. Is it wrong to volunteer web development?
3. Trouble Updating WordPress or WP Plugins? Try Asking Your Host to Increase Your PHP Memory Limit

….Fast forward to the end of July. They hadn’t even hit the first milestone. My project scope was insanely detailed, they even said they didn’t have many questions as it was all laid out in the spec document. The problem was, the development of even some of the basic functions was beyond their skill set, or at least that’s what it appeared to be, when they were 1 month behind schedule on a first milestone.

The above quote is from Lindsey Harper’s blog Ramblings of a Web Startup in Progress, which I found today when it was mentioned in Read/Write Web’s article, Using a Virtual Personal Assistant for Your Startup.

I’ve already subscribed to her RSS feed and added it to my favorites list because even after only three articles, I think that she is writing about some really great topics that the larger blogs aren’t diving deep enough into to sustain their readers’ interest. One of her other articles is about how to use Mechanical Turk to solicit feedback regarding your startup ideas. You should read these articles if you’re trying to get your own ideas into action mode. I’ll think that they’ll inspire you to think outside of the box on how to cheaply get your gears into motion.

As for ODesk, I’ve forced myself to use it consistently throughout 2010, so I’ve developed a few best practices (but not many).

I love ODesk’s worker quality control features (screenshots of their work!), but in all, I think that it’s a tough service to navigate for a typical hiring manager. Most of the inadequacies of the site are directly related to the complete lack of outsourcing education most of us web workers/entrepreneurs possess, though.

If I had to give one really good suggestion to better hire freelancers (ODesk or otherwise), it would be to use the Mechanical Turk model and break down your assignment in the smallest task possible.

Truth be told, complicated projects need teams of workers to succeed and freelancing sites are more suited for hiring individuals. But…if you can find a great hire who completes a small task well, then you can give him a slightly larger task, and then another, etc. If you’re really lucky, that person will begin to understand your wants and needs and would then make a great manager for a larger project, maybe even helping you hire additional team members and break down all your tasks.

I’d also like to say that when you do find a great freelancer, don’t lose him. Give him bonuses and small raises and above all else, keep the work coming (even if only five hours a week). In the long term, it’s much better to pay $50/week to staff an A+ programmer (i.e. quick, smart and communicative) than to spend dozens of hours of your time to find new freelancers for each little task.

My advice comes from a lot of fails on ODesk (and a lot of wasted time), but no matter what, don’t give up trying to outsource repetitive tasks. If you’re going to launch a company and make it sustainable, eventually, you’re going to have to relinquish responsibility for doing everything in the organization. It’s better to learn this lesson now on a small scale than to learn it the hard way later on.

Related posts:

1. How Freelancers Can Use Retainers to Remove the Guessing From Project Estimates
2. Do Web Designers Need A Portfolio School?
3. How to Get the Most Out of Coaching Sessions

To a potential client with a very small budget

As a small business consultant, I can tell you honestly that your limited budget would be better spent directly (and daily) updating your Facebook Fan Page. It’s the cheapest, most effective advertising mechanism you can pursue.

Check out how Freelance Folder works their Facebook Page. They provide semi-daily updates on their page that mirror their blog, but they’re not using any auto Facebook blog posting feature to drive the page because it just makes sense to not fight people’s natural desire not to leave Facebook to go to a different website. On your Fan Page, your posts are cut off and that doesn’t encourage Fan participation (also, you haven’t updated the page in two weeks–it really needs to be updated several times a week).

If you’ll notice, Freelance Folder’s Fan Page posts are short and they often ask questions to their fans. When they’ve got a longer post, they do attach a link to it, but generally speaking, their goal is to collect comments (and “likes”), because your Facebook friends get to see when you comment on something in their own front page Facebook stream (which equals viral marketing).

Anyway, $1,000 isn’t going to get you a new WordPress web design (which usually takes 6-8 weeks to complete) or even much quality domestic development work in general. Plus, your site has limited return appeal (not just yours, but all businesses) and email newsletters aren’t worth the time it takes to publish them (nobody reads email newsletters anymore).

To reiterate, run with the Facebook Fan Page, and take it all the way. I bet you can double the amount of your Fans in two weeks if you post thrice a day (each post taking less than a minute of your time). Ask questions, solicit feedback or take pictures/videos of your products, your store, you–it doesn’t matter. This is also a great place to ask for articles from your Fans like you suggested.

So, I wish you luck with your efforts. If you have any other questions, please let me know. Thank you in advance.

I also posted this reply directly on my college’s Facebook Fan Page shortly after I wrote the above email

Marketing Thoughts: The Outside Eckerd Tumblog should probably have its own “Outside Eckerd” Facebook Fan Page. That way the official Eckerd College fanpage could properly focus on college events, news and maybe even athletic wrapups.

You can always cross promote the Tumblog, but again, this fan page should have more general updates and also, post them more often. By doing so, you’ll receive a lot more comments and “likes”, which is a great and inexpensive way to virally market the school (i.e. increase the fan number). I’m starting to understand that this is the unexplained (and most important) goal of creating and administering a Facebook Fan Page.

To note, I received my International Business degree from Eckerd in 2004, so if this advice is poorly received, you can blame my professors at your institution:)

The point is, I’m starting to really grok the power of Facebook Fan Pages, especially when used properly. It’s only been a while since Facebook introduced the Fan Page (moving away from the near-useless Groups it began with). Do you have any additional Fan Page best practices? Feel free to share them in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Improve Conversion Rates & Sales With These Three Marketing Strategies
2. For the Best Development Experience, Get Your Clients Editing their Content Inside of WordPress as Early as Possible
3. How To Create And Assign To-Do Lists With Basecamp

I had a one-on-one telephone session with Ryan Kovach yesterday about not leaving money on the table with clients, and I’m now thinking of calling the business model mentioned below “micro-retainers” since Ryan advocates using much larger retainers ($20,000+/year) to better sustain a web development business.

Anyway, I still advocate these “micro-retainers” for a number of circumstances, such as:

• You’ve just been introduced to the client and you want to test out the working relationship before you agree to anything long term.
• The client is a jerk and you want to do as little work for them as possible (in that case, you may want to think about firing the client outright. Getting rid of a difficult client is tough in the short-term but pays off richly in the long).
• You’re doing work for a friend

The issue is that these micro-retainers aren’t going to generate a lot of cash (which is fine if you’re working for friend) unless the client gives you permission to burn through the hours freely (eventually, you will run out of work to do, though). It’s probably best to at least double your normal hourly rate and round up your tasks to the nearest half hour (within reason, of course). That way, all the little things you do for a client, like project manage and provide quick responses to their emails, get accounted for in the end. It’s also important to note that your availability is worth something to the client (probably a lot, actually).

It’s nice not to have to burn out on a project to make rent, as well as give yourself the ability to count research, communication and other similar extracurricular work towards your clients’ workload, all of which probably accounted more fairly in a monthly/yearly retainer setup.

Now, back to the original post…

Lawyers love retainers, and as a web, print, copy or any other type of freelancer, you should, too. It takes a while to figure out a comfortable project pricing structure (not to mention the main variables that go into pricing, such as the hourly rate and estimated time), so I can understand any hesitation to try something new. But instead of forcing every project into a static, long-term contractual price, a lot of times it’s just easier to at first offer a retainer and see where the project goes from there.

This is an example of an estimate I’ve sent to a client in the past using the Ballpark web app by Metalab (to note, Ballpark is an awesome, affordable and beautiful estimate and invoice creator). This estimate, like almost all estimates, entails a lot of guessing. That’s exactly why it’s called an estimate.

Now, I, like most freelance web developers would have, used this initial estimate as my first, last and only bill to my customer. Of course, I turned the estimate into an invoice first, but hardly ever will the project price change from the beginning of the project to the end. That’s why I’ve always tried to accurately estimate time for web projects, but like Smashing Magazine wrote, underestimation is common because:

• The technologies required by the project have never been used before
• At the time of estimating, there are grey areas or complete unknowns
• The client operates in a specialized industry and the solution needs bespoke features that are not familiar to the supplier
• Splitting the project down into the detail would require as much as work as the requirements gathering phase that is chargeable

As well as:

• The client needs an estimate for their project tomorrow or they will go elsewhere
• Revenue needs for cash flow now trump the effects of not winning the new work now
• No previous project ‘estimated vs. actual’ data analysis has been conducted to draw on
• Estimating time for a project is not fun!

So, 90% of the time, the freelancer is going to get screwed on the estimate. My guess is that 9.9% of the time, the client gets screwed (I use the term loosely—as long as the site is completed within the contractual constraints of the project, the client is generally happy). That leaves 0.1% of all estimates that accurately reflected the correct amount of time it took to accomplish the project. (Of course, any time valuation should to be taken with a grain of salt because what takes an hour today might take 90 minutes or 45 minutes tomorrow depending on all external factors, not the least of which is distraction).

The bigger point here is that clients hate unexpected change, especially a price increase due to underestimation on your part. There are few things more likely to guarantee that you won’t be asked to do second project with a client than raising the cost of your invoice halfway through a project (in fact, most contracts aren’t going to permit this anyway, so again, you’ll likely eat the extra time and costs yourself, anyway).

Using a Retainer to Eliminate Guessing

Herein lies the beauty of the retainer block. You might already be using retainers after the project is complete for tasks like website maintenance or social media marketing (if you’re not, you should—it’s a great way to earn residual income).

I know some developers charge a monthly rate for site upkeep, but again, this is just another inaccurate way to price a project. What happens when the client needs something done, but it falls outside of the normal scope of maintenance? Chances are, the client is going to:

1. Be afraid to ask you and go elsewhere else with the task, or
2. You’re going to end up completing the task on your own time, AKA Scope Creep

Getting into the retainer habit after projects were completed allowed me to see an opportunity I was missing with my potential clients. I get a lot of work requests, especially from local business owners that tell me that they have a limited budget. In the past, I might have ignored these requests because I didn’t have much to gain. I would likely spend an hour giving them free consulting advice, but in the end, they wouldn’t have the budget to move forward with their project and work with me. It would have been a wash for both of us.

Now, once I figure out that the client’s budget isn’t going to garner a full site redevelopment (pretty much anyone talking below $1,000), I immediate push them towards purchasing a retainer block so at least we can address their most pressing website needs. This might not be perfect for every situation (some clients do not have websites at all or their sites might be completely useless), but for the most part, my team and I can accomplish some serious results in five hours of time, including:

• Adjust and simplify the site navigation to be more like what visitors expect when they visit a website
• Improve the home page to not look like a blog
• Clean up the footer and add useful information like a phone number and address
• Add a popover plugin to increase email or social media participation
• Update WordPress or plugin versions

The best part is, most of these tasks only take about 15 minutes for me to do, whereas the client either doesn’t know how to do these or more likely, doesn’t even realize how important they are to his site.

Another good feature of using a retainer is that if I outsource the task to one of my team members, I don’t have to think very hard about how to split up the tab (I hire my team using a retainer system, as well, just in the opposite direction and at a slightly lower rate than what I charge my clients).

At the end of the retainer block, my team and I tally up all the time and tasks we recorded using a time tracker client and submit the time sheet to the client. At that point, the client can re-up for another retainer block or we can choose to go our separate ways (hopefully, with a LinkedIn recommendation in tow, though).

In the end, I’m able to:

• Pick up work that I normally would have lost,
• Get paid accurately and fairly for any work I might do
• And maybe most importantly, I get to try out clients before engaging in a long-term contract with them.

I’m calling this system the Retainer Revolution and I truly think that all businesses will move away from the salary system (where work does not come even close to equaling pay) and into this retainer format for all personnel within the next ten years. I guess we’ll just have to see what the experts have to say about these matters. Stay tuned…

Related posts:

1. For the Best Development Experience, Get Your Clients Editing their Content Inside of WordPress as Early as Possible
2. Who Are My Marketing Heroes?
3. When Using a Freelancing Site like ODesk, Make Sure to Hire for as Small of Tasks as Possible

Breaking out of Blog Themes

We love WordPress at Item-9 Consulting. Although it began as a blogging platform, I would argue that it’s the most versatile, well-supported, user-friendly content management system available today. Need proof?  Here’s a link to 25 beautiful, unique, free WordPress themes, including a section for 1) blogs, 2) galleries (portfolios) and 3) magazines (news).

So you know about blog themes, but what differentiates those from galleries and magazine themes (which have become very popular in the last two years)? Besides alternative layout structures, the non-blog themes rely on prescient images to draw readers in and help them navigate the site. Even though it’s not WordPress, the New York Times website uses the magazine style layout and images perfectly to entice readers to jump to other articles, and subsequently, stay on its site longer (and of course, the longer a reader is on a site, the more likely he will be to click on advertising, thus generating revenue for the site).

Screw Custom Fields

Alright, enough background info. The reason I’m writing this tutorial is to show you the easiest way to automatically pull images into your WordPress site from your posts. A lot of themes use custom fields to handle this task, but I say, why enter information onto a post more than once? How long would WordPress have lasted if you had to enter the post’s title twice? Probably not long, because that would get annoying quickly. Instead of going the custom field route (and using non-WordPress resizing scripts like timthumb.php), I recommend using the Get The Image WordPress Plugin by Justin Tadlock. A quick list of reasons:

• You can still specify a custom field to pull—great for backwards compatibility with whichever technique you’re replacing, or if you are just super-picky about which image gets used.
• If you’re lazy like me, the plugin pulls the first (or second or third, etc.) image you attached to your post.
• If you’re using an image from another post, you can set Get the Image to scan your post and use whichever image it comes across first.
• No image at all in the post? Specify a default image to use in these cases so your layout never breaks.
• You can specify the images’ output size (both/either height and width).
• You can specify which WordPress resized image you want to work with (examples from 2.7 are thumbnail, medium, large and full size).

Sounds great, huh? It definitely is great, but first, there are a few caveats to note:

1. All this automatic image pulling needs to be coded into the loop. That means you need to be comfortable with the guts of WordPress and php or extremely patient in making mistakes and asking for help (Justin does provide support for all his plugins for the low price of $25/year—well worth it, IMHO)
2. The documentation is available but it’s incomplete. That’s inevitable considering the limitless possibilities a user could take with the WordPress plugin. Again, invest in the support forums.
3. You’re not currently going to find this built into many themes (excepting Theme Hybrid from Justin), so you’ll have to do the work yourself.

Zap Props Sandbox Site

The Code

Time for a practical example. I’m currently working on a new client’s site using the Foliotastic created by ThemeSnack, which I purchased from ThemeForest. The theme has a great design and great support, but I couldn’t get ThemeSnack’s image pulling solution to work. Just like several users on the ThemeForest wrote, I tried everything, but after several hours of frustration I said, “enough” and did what I knew had to be done—throw in the towel and try a new approach. I’ll skip the melodramatics and show you what I began with:

<a href="&lt;? the_permalink() ?&gt;">
    ID, "post_image_value", true)) { ?&gt;
        <img src="&lt;?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?&gt;/img_resize/timthumb.php?src=&lt;? echo get_post_meta($post-&gt;ID, 'post_image_value', true) ?&gt;&amp;w=620&amp;h=290&amp;zc=1" alt="&lt;? the_title() ?&gt;" />
 
    	<img src="&lt;?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?&gt;/graphics/default_thumb.gif" alt="&lt;? the_title() ?&gt;" />
</a>

And here’s my changes:

<a href="&lt;? the_permalink() ?&gt;">
       array('post_image_value'), 'default_size' =&gt; 'full', 'default_image' =&gt; get_bloginfo( 'template_url' ) . '/graphics/default-image.jpg', 'width' =&gt; '620', 'image_scan' =&gt; true)); ?&gt;
</a>

and according to Justin’s comment below, the code can be further trimmed to one line:

 array('post_image_value'), 'default_size' => 'full', 'image_scan' => true, 'default_image' => get_bloginfo( 'template_url' ) . '/graphics/default-image.jpg', 'width' => '620')); ?>

So Let’s Break it Down

Here’s what the above code does, in order of arguments:

1. “get_the_image” calls the plugin
2. ” ‘custom_key’ => array(‘post_image_value’)” pulls an image with the custom field value of “post_image_value”.
3. If that the custom field is not found, ” ‘default_size’ => ‘full’ ” finds the first attached image and chooses the originally uploaded size.
4. If no attached images or custom fields are found, ” ‘image_scan’ => true” will find any images that may have inserted from the media library.
5. If the plugin can’t find any other images, then ” ‘default_image’ => get_bloginfo( ‘template_url’ ) . ‘/graphics/default-image.jpg’ ” will use an image I uploaded to the theme directory (thanks for this code, Justin;).
6. And finally, ” ‘width’ => ’620′ ” resizes the width of the image to 620px. I could also specify a height here, but that would likely stretch the image. Instead, I use CSS to hide the image’s overflow and limit the height to 290px. You may not see the whole image, but it’s at least proportionate and I think it looks cool, anyway

That wraps up this tutorial. If you have any questions about the Get the Image plugin, I ask you leave them in the comments. If it’s too technical a question, I’ll refer you to Justin’s support forums I mentioned above. You may also want to visit his post describing the plugin in more detail.

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