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WordPress is powerful but can also be confusing. In this video, Toastmost creator David F. Carr, DTM, covers the things new users often find confusing and how to navigate past them.
The video starts with tips on navigating the WordPress dashboard. Key moments farther in:
Links made the web great, so why are they missing from so many social posts where the person posting clearly has a book, or an event, or a course, or a product to promote? The category of post I’m thinking of may include a QR code or a lovingly crafted promo “poster” (sometimes with a URL embedded in the image) but not a simple link for me to click on if I’m interested?
Is not the point to make it as easy as possible for people to do the “right thing” by reading your article, signing up for your event, or considering your product?
The QR codes mystify me as much as anything. To me, a QR code makes perfect sense as a way to direct someone to a URL without making them type in the address, particularly when conveying that message in a different medium such as print or TV. Wave your phone’s camera at a QR code and get directed to the right address for the promotion, or the registration form, or the restaurant menu. I’m reasonably technical, but I don’t know how to extract the URL from a QR code that pops up as an image in a social message stream on my web browser or my phone. It’s not immediately obvious. I’m told there is a way to do it, but wouldn’t it be simpler to include a link — in addition to the QR code, if not instead of it.
A variation on this puzzle is the webinar / online event promo that includes the Zoom meeting ID and passcode as text embedded in an image. The experienced Zoom user knows they can go to the Zoom website and enter those coordinates, but how helpful is it to make them retype that information when it could be included in the text of the post? Better yet, why not include the Zoom meeting link in the text of the post?
Certainly, there are times when the programmatically preview image and snippet a social platform generates by default when you include a link is not ideal. So you upload a custom promo image instead of relying on the default. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t include a link also in the text of the post.
On platforms that limit the length of a post, there may also be cases where you want to focus the initial post — the one people are most likely to read — on text introducing your subject or concept, along with an attention-grabbing interest. Then, if you have an article that expands on the topic, that link can go in the first follow up comment in the thread.
These are the pet peeves of a direct communicator. I should acknowledge that some social media marketing strategists talk about creating “curiosity gaps” as a way of creating greater engagement, in which case forcing users to reply to your post by asking how they can learn more might not be a bad thing.
If you’re withholding the link as a strategy, and that works for you, great.
Most of the time, though, if they desired action you want people to take is to visit a website, or a product page, or a registration page, why not make that as easy as possible? Why make people post a follow up query or a do a search to find their way to the resource you want them to find?
What’s wrong with a good, old fashioned link?
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
One minor victory in the latest updates to my RSVPMaker plugin was figuring out a block transform to turn a single block, RSVPMaker Upcoming, into a variation on the Query Loop block.
With this configured, the Transform To options displayed when you click on the calendar icon in the button bar include Query Loop — complete with a preview of what the transformed block will look like with my defaults applied.
The tricky part was turning a single block (rsvpmaker/upcoming) into a version of the Query Loop (core/query) with preset InnerBlocks for the Post Template (a container for the blocks representing the post title and other elements, in this case including the event date and time).
This related post explains what I was trying to achieve:
The official Transforms documentation covers a number of use cases, including a scenario where you are transforming one block that contains InnerBlocks to another — you take the InnerBlocks object passed in by the source and pass it in to the createBlock call for “Transform to” operation. In my case, I needed to create the blocks from scratch.
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