When we build our websites we try to use the best plugins and resources that we can. Over time we have chosen what we consider the best to use on our clinets sites. It is interesting to see so many of the tools we use being voted as the best in class.

There are some differences (especially SEO and Caching plugins) but we believe our set of development tools works best for both us and our clients.

Here are the winners in full:

• Astra – Best WordPress theme
• Elementor – Best page builder
• Gravity Forms – Best form plugin
• ACF Pro – Best dynamic data plugin
• Kadence Blocks – Best Gutenberg addon
• Crocoblock – Best Elementor addon
• All-in-One Migration – Best backup migration plugin
• RankMath SEO – Best SEO plugin
• Wordfence – Best security plugin
• MemberPress – Best membership and courses plugin
• FluentCRM – Best marketing automation plugin
• Automatic CSS – Best developer tools
• GiveWP – Best WooCommerce tools
• Cloudways – Best hosting service
• WP Rocket – Best performance plugin
• WPML – Best content tools
• ManageWP – Best WP support and service
• WP Beginner – Best WordPress blogs
• WP Builds – Best WordPress podcast
• The Admin Bar – Best WordPress community
• WPTuts – Best YouTube channel
• Website Owner’s Manual – Best WP learning and resources
• The Events Calendar – Best event and planning plugin
• WP Social Ninja – Best niche plugin

The post Winners at the WordPress Awards 2022 first appeared on SAJE.

Join plenty of others who seem to be having the same issue.

If you are running the latest version of Outlook (Office 365 subscription users like me are upgrade to the latest version automatically) then a change to the way Microsoft displays account settings has hidden the more advanced settings with no clear way to get to them.

In the past you would go into your Account Settings and look for the \”More Settings\” button, this would give you a popup window with port numbers, SSL choices and the ability to save emails on the server.

Now you get the following:

As you can see it provides a very limited set of options.

So if you see the above screen, don\’t worry, the real settings are a few keystrokes away.

Where are they Hidden?

To get to the settings, press Ctrl+Alt+S to open the Send/Receive Groups settings

Ckick on Edit to take you to pleace where you can choose the account you want to edit eg:

Highlight the email account on the left and click on the Account Properties button at the top right and low and behold, our friendly settings screen of olde appears:

Now you can make you changes as before and save/apply when finished

The post Where have my Outlook Settings Gone? first appeared on SAJE.

We have just finished Phase 1 of a website using Elementor as the page Builder inside a template called Phlox. It took me a good 10 days to get my head around all the functionality available and even more time to learn how to use it! However having worked out most of the Blocks that I needed I am now keen to build more websites using this massive system. It has Blocks for almost anything you can imagine and a few more things I didn\’t know I could do! There are so many layers that can be added to an image that you can quickly become lost trying to revisit what you have created. However, I started off unable to make anything work, I even broke the template and had to start again to now, loving how much I can do with this combination of template and builder that I even think I can now fix the first template that I broke! It is not a cheap option, with a starting package near the top of our range but it has created a sleek, almost magical website that I can\’t wait to show everyone!!!

Walker & Co Real Estate – Check it out!!!

The post A Different Way To Build Websites first appeared on SAJE.

One of the limitations of Dropbox is it is all under a single folder, which is all fine if you start from that, but in our situation we had legacy locations for data on our PC.

So along comes Boxifier, a neat application that allows you to choose as many folder around your PC to be added to the Dropbox folder.

It\’s a simple solution that just seems to work.

But then it didn\’t.

We had a drive crash on the drive that had these folders that Boxifier was enabling for Dropbox.

I wanted to change the location of my Dropbox folder to a new drive and re-sync the data, unfortunately it came up with Access denied. After a bit of mucking around, I realised that there is a setting in Boxifier that prevents Dropbox from editing those folders you have enabled in Boxifier.

Given my situation, I removed that restriction and Dropbox started syncing again.

This also prevented me from moving my Dropbox folder from it\’s default location to my new drive.

So hopefully if anyone else has the same set of variables, there is a solution.

The post Access Denied Error in Dropbox first appeared on SAJE.

I have always struggled to find a to do list program/app that helps me in my day. I have tried a number of them, tempted by their features and claims of increasing productivity.

But I have found many of them actually slow me down.

Take Evernote for example; a brilliant application that does so much stuff. But for my needs it seemed too much, all of the fantastic features just seemed to get in the way, I needed something simpler, so simple and easy to use, it encouraged me to use it.

So I stumbled on Todoist on one of those \”10 Apps to Increase Your Productivity\” kind of articles. I wasn\’t actually looking for it, but found it after I had stumbled on another quirky productivity app called Coffitivity (more on that in another post).

On first glances Todoist looked simple and clean, just what I was looking for. Gone were the other features that gets you away from the core function – making lists.

It was as easy as typing a list item and hitting enter, nothing else was needed. So far so good.

But there are options to categorise and add other information to your list items, but they are not required and this was the key for me. I could just type out a list of items and not worry about the other information, I could go back and do that later if I needed to.

Suddenly I had a list of items and as things came in, whether it be by phone, email or talking to someone in person, I could quickly add it to a list.

I have a tendency to try and keep things in my head, to which I am mostly successful, this has been a great way to get those lists in my brain down in a more permanent form.

So now I have these items on my lists, I can work on them and tick them off. What\’s better, is that Todoist records your completed tasks and lets you know how many you have done per day and per week. You can set your own goals and it will keep track for you, this is a great way to incentivise the completing of tasks and improving your productivity.

There is an accompanying app for most devices and also integrations with popular mail programs too.

As with many of these things, there is a Free version and a Paid version, I ran the free version for quite a while and it was great. In the end I upgraded to the premium version, because you can create shared lists that are great for collaborating in teams. Each user costs USD29 / year, but it is a small price for enhancing your productivity.

So, in a nutshell, Todoist is an awesome app for me: simple, quick and I can quickly see the improvements it has made for me

The post Great Productivity Tools – Todoist first appeared on SAJE.

All thanks to those that have provided these resources, it seems silly to replicate these over and over on the web.

If you know of a better one than what I have listed, let me know in the comments and I can look at them and add them in.

I am only listing one set of instructions for each Mail program version that I think is the easiest to follow.

Remember, these instructions will need to be supplemented with your own specific settings such as login / password and mail server settings. Contact your hosting provider for these things.

Mac OS

• Mac Mail
• Outlook

Windows

• Thunderbird
• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2007
• Outlook 2010
• Outlook 2013
• Outlook Express
• Windows Live Mail

So if you have other clients, other operating systems, let me know and I\’ll add them to the list.

The post Instructions for Adding an Email Account first appeared on SAJE.

However, some things have had me scratching my head.

One in particular was trying to test the payment gateway to DPS\’s Payment Express. (PxPay)

After choosing the right one (There is PaymentExpress and Payment Express???) I kept receiving the error message:

\”error – failed to get token – message was MerchantReference too long\”

The problem lay in this instance with the Shop name.

The client had a shop name that was 42 characters long, I reduced it to just 15 characters and this worked.

Given the Reference limit is 64, there is obviously other information added to the end of it, what this is I am not sure yet it may appear on the clients statement, but may include product name or a unique code.

Unfortunately, DPS did not write the code and so they are not able to provide any help with any issues connecting to their product via Shopify. I haven\’t tried the Shopify support, but I am not sure if anyone in their employ wrote the code either.

The post Shopify and Payment Express first appeared on SAJE.

You can read the official announcement here

Significant in this release is the breaking away of support for old technologies including older versions of MySQL, PHP and even old IE6.

This part has me really excited (especially the IE6 part) as backwards compatibility has its drawbacks. The ability to embrace new technologies is limited while trying to keep people using older technologies happy.

IE6 is incredibly old in technology terms (It has it\’s 10th birthday on the 27th of August) and the sooner developers stop catering for this the quicker things will move forward.

The new look of 3.2 is smart, more clinical (professional?) but initial thoughts are good.

But the best thing about it? The upgrade went flawlessly.

The upgrade process in WordPress is one of the best out there for stability and reliability.

I\’ll keep using it for a while and post back an update later.

The post WordPress 3.2 Now Released first appeared on SAJE.

I had a rant about this a while back, where a journalist accused web designers of ripping their clients off if they didn\’t provide the ability to update the site themselves.

I stand by my comments that for some clients, a content management system is not wanted, nor is it in the best interests of that client.

However, for those that do want to update their site, we need to provide a solution that is both easy to use and delivers the complexity required for their needs.

These two facets, ease of use and complexity can be seen to be at loggerheads with each other, and in some circumstances that can be the case. But I will propose two solutions that cater for both ends of the spectrum.

In the past, due to the lack of affordable and easy to use CMS\’ we have provided Adobe Contribute (Formerly Macromedia) as a way to allow our clients to edit their sites.

The reason for choosing Contribute was it\’s simplicity. In tandem with Dreamweaver (which we use to develop with) it allows for areas of the site, such as menus, header, footer and overall structure, to be protected from the end user.

This allows for editing to be done, knowing that catastropic mistakes can\’t be made.

The interface is simple and allows for most functions to be performed including editing of text, images, links and if allowed HTML snippets for things like Youtube videos or Paypal buttons.

The biggest downside is that it costs around $400 NZD for a retail copy. This is also a per license price, so if you want to edit from multiple places, you need additional licenses.

For the schools that we have done sites for this was an issue. Some paid for additonal license to get the software into key locations, but for others it was restricted to the office.

This is where web based content management systems have a significant edge.

Especially open source software, that is free from licensing costs, makes this a much easier proposition.

We currently propose two different CMS\’ for our clients depending on their needs:

WordPress – The easiest to use, easiest to modify, my choice for brochure style sites.

Joomla – More complex, but manages user management much better

Overall I like WordPress better. Around a year ago, WordPress became a system that you could leave with a user and they would be able to manage their site with little input from their designer. Before that, upgrade and installation required a level of tech knowledge that was no suitable for all users.

That and the well presented plugins system, mean that a user can improve their site and feel in control of their site, without a reliance on an IT person.

There are plenty of complex sites designed with WordPress as their base system, but there are some things that Joomla does much better straight out of the box.

Joomla seems to be able to manage a multitude of types of data much easily. Especially when their are user logins involved.

Extensions like Community Builder allow for a mature user system to be maintained on a site. Plus add-ons for payment and subscriptions mean you can monetize your user base easily.

So depending on the functionality you are wanting for your site, you can find a system that will make the development of a website easier to develop and easier to use.

There are plenty of other systems out there, I have heard good things about Drupal (though I found it less rich than Joomla, it\’s direct competitor) and have seen some great implementations of Expression Engine (a paid CMS, so check out prices)

But for my money, choose WordPress for a simple business website, or Joomla if you need to manage a community of users.

The post Tips for Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) first appeared on SAJE.

It was all going so well, good memory management, it was fast and had great addons. It was a no brainer to use Firefox as my default browser.

Version 3 was better than Version 2, this is how software evolution was supposed to be.

And the only reason I still had Internet Explorer on my machine was that I needed  it to test my websites.

Chrome was good and fast, but Firefox had all those great addons: FootieFox for my Football scores, WHOIS tools, ScribeFire for writing my blog posts and the best of the lot FireBug.

Alas, since 3.6.8 was released my Firefox utopia has been shattered.

It has gotten to the point that I have had to shift to Chrome. Had to, not wanted to.

The memory leaks were so bad, that after coming back from being away from my desk for half a day, Firefox was consuming over 1gb of memory, for only 4 tabs!

It got to the point where I was rebooting 3 times a day to maintain any speed.

Luckily, since I have moved to Chrome, my work experience is much better, the speed is back and I found that there was an extension for Chrome called Firebug Lite, I am Saved!

If Mozilla sort out the memory problems, I may go back. But the major problems need some serious tweaks.

Have you found your favourite Browser or other software made by non monoply (Microsoft, Adobe) etc has succumbed to bloat and decreasing performance?

Have they gotten lazy as market share has risen?

The post Firefox is an Abomination – Unfortunately first appeared on SAJE.