James has been busy recently with some new features for our OM4 websites.

With our new Image Rotator facility you can use a simple shortcode to put a group of images into a rotator set that will gently rotate in any page or post.

Too much movement on a web page can distract a visitor, so I recommend you use rotators wisely. We’ve provided an easy way to set the display time and transition time for the images so you can have a nice gentle rotation.

How To Article: Adding an Image Rotator

James has built the image rotator using WordPress (which has jQuery libraries incorporated) and definitely no Flash.

New Image Rotator Feature

If you want to make it easy for visitors to your WordPress site to share your posts across social networking sites, you should use the Share This plugin.

Once activated, a single green icon appears at the bottom of each blog post and web page. If a visitor clicks it they get the big list of social networking icons you can see to the right.

Simple and easy.

Using the Share This Plugin for Social Networking

Content marketing is all about using your content to attract attention and engage visitors in a conversation. A blog is a brilliant tool to help you generate new content over time, with each new post acting as a new web page and drawing search visitors.

But there are two problems associated with blog posts:

• Categories: the category pages are not that useful. Just a list of posts. And to avoid confusing search engines with duplicate content, it is a good idea to stop them being indexed anyway.
• Invisibility: once posts go into your archives, they can lose visibility. You want your great blog posts to be visible at the right time.

We’ve recently come up with a new WordPress plugin that tackles these problems.

It lets you match up Blog Categories to pages in your website:

• When a page is linked to a Category, the latest posts from that category will automatically be linked at the bottom of the page.

• Each post in that category will automatically have a link up to the the related page.

Once the plugin is activated, under Dashboard, Manage, Categories you can simply associate any page in your website with a category, and the automatic behavior takes over.

This makes it possible to create a page with a lot of rich content about a topic, and then each time you post on that same topic, the post is automatically linked on that page. It is a bit like a souped up Category page.

Our first implementation of this plugin is specific to the OM4 theme. In the future we hope to make this more generic so we can publish the plugin.

Two Problems with Blog Posts