Real Estate Blog Lab

I’ve now updated the big guns in my arsenal of WordPress sites.  The only one that had any difficulty at all was the Lab.  I had a custom menu disappear from the menu editor.  It still existed, and worked on site, but I couldn’t view or edit the menu.

It was simple, I rebuilt the menu in about 5 minutes and activated it for the sub-nav below the header image.  This experience caused a few hours of research on how to backup just the custom menus.  Not much out there on them.  A great plugin would be the ability to export and import custom menus.

I found one small post mentioning a conflict with All-In-One-SEO with custom menus causing them to disappear on update.  But I couldn’t verify this and I updated a few small sites with it still activated and had no difficulty.

The big guns have several custom menus and up to 70 pages in each.  I didn’t want to rebuild those menus.  Therefore here is what I did:

1. Backed up the entire database using SQLAdmin Export function.  I did the entire database and just the options table (that’s where the menus reside).
2. I updated all plugins
3. Updated the theme files
4. Deactivated all plugins
5. Ran the upgrade
6. Reactivated all plugins

Everything went of without a hitch.  All menus are there and functioning.

Take the recommended precautions (and don’t shortcut the process this time by leaving the plugins activated) and everything should upgrade without a hitch

When you reactivate the plugins, make sure you check your site.  If it doesn’t look right, deactivate the plugins again and start adding them back one at a time.

Mailto @: = “SPAM IN MY INBOX”

You want people to contact you don’t you?  Well of course you do.  You want to plaster your email address all over your site in hope they will contact you “For All Their Real Estate Needs”. (Yes, that’s sarcasm).

But you want to make it easy for them so you make your email address click-able.  So you or your “Webguy” use the HTML command mailto: to make the link click-able.

However, there are two things you should be aware of before you do this:

Spam bots crawl sites looking to harvest email addresses

They look for “mailto:” and harvest email addresses so they can begin sending you offers by the thousands to enhance certain body parts.  Sell you drugs from Canada or invite you to “personal webcam chats” in Russia.

This is one of the reason we have contact forms that never display an email address, the contact come to you and you can respond accordingly.

Annoying as HELL

Well, it’s  not as bad as HELL but it really is annoying when a website opens my email client so I can send them an email message.  If you happen to be on a computer that isn’t yours and suddenly the email client is opened and you are viewing someone’s email messages. Even worse is when they don’t tell you the link is not to a site but instead mailto

With all that said, I still have clients that want those email addresses displayed and click-able.  Now there’s a nifty (yes, I said nifty) plugin that will encode the email address so Spam bots can’t read it and send you all those desirable offers.

Email Address Encoder

This plugin (Click Add New under plugins and search Email Address Encoder) is simple to use.

1. Install the plugin
2. Activate the plugin

That’s it, no settings or configuration.

Enter an email address in a page or post and then look at the page source.  You won’t find mailto: or the email address, instead just a lot of sweet gibberish.

Now it doesn’t solve the Annoying issue  (I really try to NOT piss off annoy my site visitors).  But if you are still stuck in the 70′s & 80′s way of embedding your email address believing this is “The Way” to effective lead capture . . .