Posting content on WordPress is almost too easy. You paste text into a box and click publish, and your post is instantly pushed to your thousands of Twitter followers. Then you check the published post and find a grammatical war-zone…

Being an unashamed stickler for textual accuracy, I’ve put in place a system to catch occasional lapses by my team of WordPress content editors at LCF. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Status notifications

Download and install the WP Status Notifier plugin. This plugin is in charge of sending emails to and from contributors and a specified approver when the status of a piece of content changes. The settings screen (Settings > Status Notifications) should look like this (fill in your admin email address of course):

WP Status Notifier settings panel.

Step 2: Roles and Capabilities

First of all, read up on the Roles and Capabilities documentation in the WordPress Codex. Next, install the Capability Manager plugin. You now have to configure the plugin to ensure that all those users whose posts you want to moderate are prevented from doing so automatically. Go to Users > Capabilities.

Most of my contributors are in fact WordPress ‘editors’ – and by default they can publish posts and pages. Therefore we need to uncheck these capabilities from the editor capabilities table.

Managing roles and capabilities in WordPress.

I would recommend installing the Roles and Capabilities plugin in any case – it’s often useful to strip out options and menus where they’re not needed, or to give certain capabilities to a user you don’t necessarily want to make an admin.

Step 3: Moderate and go

Provided you’ve configured your users’ capabilities correctly, you should now receive an email whenever a post is ready for approval. This will happen the first time a user clicks ‘Save’ (be wary here about jumping in to approve instantly – the user might still be editing the content). Once you’ve had a chance to check the content and click Publish, the author will receive a confirmation email.

1. Writing & editorial
2. Holistic circumspection
3. Graphic design theory
4. Listening & discernment
5. Self-learning
6. SEO
7. Graphic design: original/creative graphics
8. Web page production in HTML/CSS
9. Business sense
10. Typing

A couple of snippets I liked:

I’m convinced the #1 most important skill for a web designer is the ability to use words effectively. A truly effective web designer is more highly skilled with writing and editing copy than with producing graphics in Photoshop.

Writing skills are also much rarer in the world of web design, which is good news for me, Ben Hunt and you, prospective client!

Web design is one of the richest, most diverse domains you can choose. It’s a giant pile-on of visual design, technology, psychology, coding, human factors, all that jazz. And the technology doesn’t stand still from one day so the next. That’s what makes it so frustrating – and so fun! One thing’s for sure. If you want to perform well in this mental soup, you’ve got to be capable of learning on a daily basis. You need to pick up new styles, new techniques, and new constraints every time you sit down to work.

I haven’t read a better summary of the multi-faceted world of web design – and the reasons it appeals to me – than the first two sentences of this quotation. It’s exactly this mixing – of business stuff with human stuff, graphic design with code – that means it’s never dull. Most people regard ‘web design’ as one of the following:

• a weird Hoxtonite practice for people with funny hairstyles, indy specs and beards.
• a black art involving impenetrable ‘coding’ (a friend recently believed me when I told her I could read binary code).
• IT

But really it’s about providing for people’s appetite for information. The web has grown so fast, and the domain of web design is now so broad, that, as Ben points out, ‘there’s no one who can teach you everything’. As a web designer, the best you can do is to keep learning and share knowledge and expertise with others – in the hope of keeping pace with the pile-on.

About three months ago I embarked on one of 37signals’ workplace experiments: the 4-day work week. At London College of Fashion, I’m lucky enough to be able to take advantage of a flexible working scheme, whereby an employee can work his 40 weekly hours around the 5 available working days. I’ve been working 4-day weeks, 10-hour days, from 8.30am to 6.30pm.

It’s awesome, because it means:

• Your work becomes something you knuckle down to for a 4-day burst. You can approach it as a block of time and separate it from your 3 days off, and you start to think of your job less as something that basically dominates your life, and more as a temporary activity that you’re going to focus on and get satisfaction from. 
• Long weekends. Sundays are so much more spacious with a free Monday to follow; alternatively, they can be truly guilt-free if you used your Friday for domestic admin. 4-day weekend trips now don’t require taking annual leave.
• More time for freelance web projects – this may seem self-defeating if it means I’m doing more work, but really it’s about the ratio of focussed, proactive working vs wasted, bored time ‘at work’.
• More time for biking.

Well, great, but from LCF’s point of view, am I getting as much done? Yes, here’s why:

• Longer days mean more hours to really get your teeth into a project. My most productive work arises not from grazing on different bits of tasks but from focussing on a single task exclusively until completion.
• I’m on average fresher and more energised (or at least more committed) during 4 days than I am during 5. I can see the carrot of the weekend dangling clearer than the 5-dayers, I’m incentivised. 
• I get early nights during the work part of my week and save parties for the weekend – hey, I’ve got the time! 

Jason Fried makes a useful point though – that by adopting this schedule you’re not necessarily talking about cramming as much work into a shorter time. In fact, you’re looking for better, smarter, but shorter working.

A quick shout out to Jotta (formerly Fifzine), the creative arts portfolio website that has recently relaunched. I like the new design: it’s certainly more navigable, and the lightbox widget seems to work well. Generally though I think Jotta are OK because they’ve featured one of my photographs on the home page! 

However… I could do with more ways to browse other profiles – that big ‘advanced search’ box in Explore feels at odds with the idea of browsing freely. This is something we in the University of the Arts London web team thought a lot about when designing Showtime. We modelled the site on FFFound, because we liked the way you can casually browse without having to think of search criteria or narrow your search in advance. 

I’d also like to see Jotta plugging in to some APIs – Flickr and Linkedin for example – to lift it above being ‘just another (closed) network’…

Photo: Andy Budd

On the train back from a workshop in Brighton for dConstruct, a programme of events and a conference hosted by design agency Clearleft. The theme of this year’s dConstruct is “Designing the Social Web” – and my workshop was Wireframing 2.0: Designing for Definition.

Wireframing isn’t a design technique I’ve personally used before (although I get the idea), so I was keen to learn more. Or rather, from what I’d been reading online about designers debunking old-style ‘grey box’ wireframing in these days of AJAX and complex, multi-state user interactions, I was keen to know what methodology I should be adopting in its place.

Rich Rutter and James Box from Clearleft presented the differences between wireframing and the approach they preferred – interactive prototyping. Prototyping is essentially building a clickable website, using HTML, CSS and Javascript (mainly in the shape of jQuery or another Javascript library), that closely resembles the layout of the final design, but with the minimum of visual adornment. A key stage in the web design process, prototypes follow on from the early stages of brainstorming and basic sketches (Clearleft’s mantra is ‘Identify > List > Cluster > Sketch’).

Prototyping expressly dispenses with the model of:

1. visual design (in Photoshop and pdf)
2. development
3. user testing
4. delivery

Naturally, flat visual layouts are often reshuffled and reconfigured during development; testing, again, frequently throws up surprises. The logical way to build a website is through a series of iterative prototypes, that puts user experience (or ‘UX’) at the core, instead of shoehorning it in later; users can feel the way the site behaves, and feed back on their experience of it, before any visual design decisions are made. Prototyping also ideally draws input from both designers and developers, as opposed to having a rather cagey back-and-forth relationship between the two.

So – I’m sold. Hand me the stickies. I’m particularly chuffed that Clearleft have provided a zip file of the prototyping code framework they presented. If you’re a UX-er you’ll be interested in their Polypage tool, developed in collaboration with Rails developers New Bamboo, that allows prototypers to manipulate user states (e.g. logged in vs logged out) by adding classes to their HTML elements.

All Flickr photos tagged dConstruct08.