What is not to love about Wordpress? It is extremely extendable, an open source project, has a selection of thousands of plugins, in addition to the support community being simply massive. Wordpress has proved itself as a great blogging platform and content management system.
For us developers and techies the out of the box capabilities is more than we ever need to manage, edit, and add content in any shape or form. However many of us don’t simply build website for ourselves, and we have to think about our clients as well.
While Wordpress has a user friendly interface it is still blogging focused, and there are some usability enhancements that could be desired when those who are not technically savvy (which fits the bill for most clients) will be the primary users.
In this situation there are a few steps to improving the interface to make it easier for our clients.
The administration panel is with out a doubt focused on blogging, which makes sense since Wordpress is a blogging platform. Any time you aim to create more content, “Post” is always listed before “Page” and even the labeling “Write” feels more journalistic than page focused.
While it is not a perfect solution, there is a great plugin out there that greatly enhances the layout of the latest versions of Wordpress called Leopard.
With icons and a simple sidebar it will likely be more familiar to non techies or journalists.
If you like the existing interface just fine, you might want to look into the Simple CMS plugin instead. Simple CMS is a quick and easy way to change the focus from Posts to Pages.
If you want to take it a step further, and wish tweak all labeling and names to feel more “CMS” focused, the Admin Menu Management plugin will let you configure a lot of the dashboard elements to be more client friendly.
Finally cleaning up the interface can go a long way. By default Wordpress has a lot of irrelevant information on the dashboard. Information that the average client doesn’t need to be bothered with. The dashboard editor plugin lets you remove some of these unnecessary elements.
Hopefully when Wordpress 2.7 is finally released we won’t need to install these types of plugins as the interface is greatly improved.
If you are building Wordpress CMS sites then chances are you are using the wp_list_pages(); method of creating navigation. This is an excellent way to let clients extend their site and add pages to the site architecture with out any editing of code.
The function does leave much be desired. There are times where you don’t want particular pages to show up in the main navigation, or only include the top level of pages. Normally this requires code tweaking, which is not client friendly. Additionally your client may want several different types of navigation? For example top navigation, utilities, footer navigation, etc... these all might be slightly different.
Again you could do some hard coding, but that makes it difficult for the client to control. So ideally we would like to give some of that control to the client.
The Navigation List plugin gives you complete control over your navigation, including graphics, styling, ordering, etc.. You can create several different navigation blocks and it all done through a great drag and drop interface.
Now clients can have powerful and easy control over their navigational blocks and areas.
Some web sites only need a homepage and a typical text/image page for content. However many sites do need “custom content” types. Typical examples may be “houses for sale” or “product pages.” Clients could try and craft the pages in the same way for every page, but that is extremely difficult and cumbersome. It would be much easier to take some of the work away from them and simply have them fill out the details (product title, cost, description, and add a picture) rather than trying to do it manually through the write panel.
There are two ways you can create custom write panels to make creating specific types of content easier for clients.
You can do some manual hard coding, like this tutorial
Or take a look into the flutter plugin
Flutter also has some great front end editing capabilities that you could look into as well.
While Wordpress does make it easy to have additional templates for different types of content, allowing clients to customize templates as needed is a nice touch. A common need for example, is to allow clients to pick which sidebar to use on any given page that they are creating.
Additionally a major drawback with the format of Wordpress style pages is that you can edit / modify a pages main content but there is no easy way to edit any other areas of content. The most typical area would be a sidebar.
Side Content is another plugin that lets you have and define different sets of widgets as “side content” that can be edited on a per page basis.
The PageMash template lets you select and customize sidebars based on widgets as well as providing an easy to use interface. It features a drag and drop ajax interface for ease of client use.
Many clients love the idea of revision control. There is a sense of safety that comes with being able to revert back to a previously flawless page/post. Many clients who are not tech savvy are worried about making a change that breaks the site. Being able to switch back to a working page in a worse case scenario is very reassuring.
There are two great plugins that extend the capability of Wordpress revision control.
If you have ever had to teach a client how to link to another interior page in Wordpress you will know how difficult the linking interface of Wordpress can be. It would be much easier to get a list of links to pages that exist for selection, rather than having to type it in manually.
AWS Easy Page Link lets you do just that.
The web has become a rich multimedia experience, so it is no surprised a lot of websites not only need the ability to have multimedia on the site, but also add multimedia over time.
Two of the most common multimedia needs are the ability to add video, and to work with images. In a perfect world all clients would have the tools and knowledge to open, edit, resize and save images. However rarely is this the case.
So the Scissors plugin is a perfect fit for all your basic image editing and resizing needs, all through the administration panel.
And for those sites that need video the all in one video pack makes working with and posting video extremely easy.
It is rare to come across a site that doesn’t have at least one contact form. Many sites now have several contact forms. Beyond that, simply working with contact forms can be a pain.
Why not give the client control over their contact forms? Contact Form 7 makes it easy to create different contact forms and insert them into posts and pages. It features some worthwhile CAPTCHA spam protection.
I just wrote an article about branding your administration area. What came out of that were some great suggestions for plugins to brand the login / registration panels and the administration panel.
The Custom Admin Branding plugin will let you swap out logos in the administration panels for your own, or your clients (depending on how you want to brand Wordpress).
WP Admin Theme Extended will let you easily adjust and tweak the color scheme of the administration panel. Again this will let you either pick your branded colors, or your clients for the administration panel.
You never know what, when and why something will happen to a website. You can’t count on clients to backup their site themselves, and I doubt you want to be in the business of managing backups for all website you create.
The DB Backup plugin has auto scheduling with a wide variety of options and methods for backing up your important Wordpress database.
Glad you found something useful here David,
Feel free to subscribe, I am going to have some great new posts on wordpress shortly.
Also you may want to check out my latest impressions on wordpress 2.7 which has a greatly improved interface, especially from a client perspective.
I’m glad I continued to search, even through my favorite “Family Guy” episode.
What a dilemma to have bragged to a client about how easy WordPress is only to realize that the client needs an even easier interface, specially the “Post vs Page” question.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Great list. As for shifting the focus from posts to pages, that is key. And now w/ WordPress 2.7, its even easier to do that without using plugins.
Nice article! Wordpress is a great tool for web designers to empower their clients.
Also important to use the ‘remove’ category plugin, this allows the urls for categories to be just the name of the category rather than cat/name.
With this website http://www.baumannsign.nl/ I have used Wordpress as CMS, please let me know what you think of it. Thanks in advance for taking a look.
Great article! My work involves using Wordpress as a simple CMS solution and this post would definitely help. Thank you.
my thumb up goes for the last , i mean the DB backup plugin is just great! Anyway there are others ways to get a regular backup of your blog. in the Cpanel there is the CronJob. I dont useit because i dont know what code to write down there but it is a cool feature…have you ever thought to write a little article about it? 
Another thing to suggest might be the installation of an automatic upgrader for WordPress - I find it quite a hassle to run around like my pants are on fire updating multiple customer WP installations every time a new release comes out!
— Mr. DOS
Great article - thanks for putting it together! I know I’ve definitely worked with clients where they’re not as proficient in Wordpress as I am, so sometimes I take it for granted that I know where to go to do something. The clients don’t always know this stuff, and with the admin panel plugins that you mentioned in particular, it will definitely help simplify the experience for them and not make it as intimidating to use. Overall this is a great list of ways to help improve things for my clients. Thanks again!
This is a perfect example of a fantastic post, thanks for the list of plugins to check out!
I’ve been looking around a lot at finding a consistent CMS to use for client projects and can’t seem to find anything that is better suited than Wordpress. Plugins and ideas like these that you listed simply put together a perfect package for just about any small business site.
i don’t comment much
but this is an excellent post
great content
to the point
thanks for the insight, i hadn’t seen the navigation list plug till now
Well let’s see what 2.7 has to offer.
Revision control is something I would definitely like to see soon, especially when WP is being created for a client to (man)handle!
Please see the plugin Adminimize, many functions for customize the admin-area. The plugin is ready for WP 2.7.
I haven’t read the article yet because I am bowled over by your websites design. I love it.
Or check out cushycms.com
Great list and well done. Upcoming WordPress 2.7 has a UI which is more suitable for CMS usage plus ability to hide and rearrange the panels on dashboard. Morever, clients usually have problem with the terms inside WordPress admin such as trackbacks, custom field and excerpt (although WP provides simple explanation for them). So it will be better to tweak the WP language file to change them.
I will have to agree with Travis on cforms. It’s much better and user friendly than Contact Form 7.
Great list, but I’d have to recommend cforms over Contact Form 7:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cforms/
It is far and above the best and most sophisticated form plugin available for WordPress.
Another option for linking is the RD internal Links plugin: http://www.blograndom.com/blog/extras/rb-internal-links-plugin/
We have been using the Improved Include Page plugin with some success (http://www.vtardia.com/blog/improved-include-page/) to simulate multiple write panels. It works OK, but I suspect the options you give work better.
I would also add TinyMCE Advanced to the list: http://www.laptoptips.ca/projects/tinymce-advanced/ Most of the users we have dealt with like having the added editing features.
This is an awesome list of tips - many I haven’t thought of!
@Morten - Thanks! The more I use wordpress the more little tweaks / tips I come across to increase the user experience of the software.
Even little things can make a clients use of the software so much easier. And while of course their needs are the most important, it does also cut down on the support calls that are likely to come in if something doesn’t make sense to a client.
Great list. I regularly create WP based sites for clients and I’ve been wondering if there are more things I can do to make them more user friendly. Definitely checking out Leopard Admin and some of the other stuff.
I have to say. It’s fucking good post!
on January 3, 2009
thank you