Michael Helmke | LinearWorlds

WordCamp Minneapolis 2018 Review

August 30, 2018August 30, 2018 by Michael Helmke

WordCamp is a series of regional conferences about WordPress and a couple of weeks ago I went to my first one: WordCamp Minneapolis 2018. I had a really great time, learned a lot, and met some really great people. Everything I had heard about WordCamp was true for me: it was a very friendly and open community of WordPress users. There were no egos or people trying to posture. Just a day and a half of WordPress users and developers, from beginners to masters getting together, teaching, learning, and having fun. I learned so much from the different sessions I attended. Most that I chose to attend were focused on business and building more efficient businesses. Of the 12 sessions I attended (my brain was full by the end) here were 3 that stood out: Nathan Ingram talked about “Taming the Whirlwind”: how to get client work done and keep your clients happy while still …

How to Find Your WordPress Login URL

August 30, 2018May 18, 2018 by Michael Helmke

How to Find Your WordPress Login URL If you’ve installed WordPress and can’t find the WordPress login screen or have clients who need help remembering how to login, this tutorial will help you. WordPress powers 20-30% of Internet sites and is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) for good reason: it is straightforward to setup for a simple blog and powerful enough using plugins and themes to power big, financially successful business sites. Even though it is relatively easy to setup, a common question I hear is how to find the WordPress login URL. There are a couple of ways you can get to the login screen. First, there are always three different URLs that will work. If your site is www.example.com, then you can try and of these three: www.example.com/login www.example.com/admin www.example.com/wp-login.php The first will take you to the WordPress login page. The second will take you to the admin dashboard if you …

The Fallacy of the Easy Website Creator

August 30, 2018February 1, 2018 by Michael Helmke

Can Your Business Really get a Great Website with some Simple Drag-And-Drop Tools? Unless your business is website design, it’s rare for a business owner to have the experience to create great websites. This is why so many companies promise to provide the mythical “Easy Website Creator”. Your business needs a website. You can use Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram to communicate with your followers. The problem is you don’t control those platforms. With your own website, you get complete control over your content, placement, and brand. Your website is where your potential and current customers can learn about you and your products and services, ask questions, get support, and so forth. Companies like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.com spend hundreds of millions of marketing dollars saying that with their platform, you just need to choose a theme, drag-and-drop in some pictures and design elements, write some marketing copy and you are done. The truth is, …

Rio Americano HS Band Website Refresh

August 30, 2018January 4, 2018 by Michael Helmke

Rio American High School’s Band program asked me to help out with the website for their multi-award winning band program. I had helped out with their site in the past when my daughters attended and before I knew much about WordPress. I offered to fix their urgent issue and look at updating their plugins and set up backups. As I talked to the parent volunteers more, I also agreed with them that the website needed an updated look. Diving in The first task was to get automated backups going. I installed UpdraftPlus as usual to send backups to Amazon S3 and cloned the site to a staging server so I could safely test plugin updates and other possibly breaking changes. Quite a few unused plugins were removed, the rest were updated, and I went through a set of tests to make sure the site was still running fine. Then these changes were applied to the live …

Are you stuck in WordPress maintenance mode?

August 30, 2018December 18, 2017 by Michael Helmke

Is your site stuck in WordPress maintenance mode after an update? Have you seen your WordPress site get stuck like this before? The first time I saw this it scared the crap out of me because it wouldn’t go away and I couldn’t get to the WordPress admin. As far as I could tell, my site was down and there was nothing in WordPress I could do to fix it. Next, of course, I searched online and learned what to do about it. If you have encountered this, that may be how you ended up here. If so, welcome. When you update WordPress or a WordPress plugin on your site, your site briefly enters “Maintenance Mode” so your users don’t see your site in an incomplete state during the update. Unfortunately, if an update fails or there is an error, WordPress may fail to exit maintenance mode and then the maintenance message gets stuck. This …