Creation-1

We just launched http://Clearly-Balanced.com – a company offering professional organizing services to the greater Seattle area.  The site is a custom design powered by WordPress.

We recently had quite the experience battle with Facebook Open Graph Protocol.  From here on out we will refer to it as OGP.

Okay so what is it?

Well, to make a long answer as short as possible, OGP is a series of tags you can use in the metadata of your web pages to help push info to Facebook and make sharing more seamless between your website and Facebook.

How will I use it?

Most people use OGP tags on their website and blog posts to tell Facebook what descriptions, titles, and images to use when a user shares your content on Facebook.  There are many other advanced ways of pushing other OGP tags to Facebook.  You can learn here about more advanced uses: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

How do I implement Open Graph Tags?

If you are working in a CMS like WordPress, don’t bother entering your tags manually.  There are plenty of plugins to help you out with this.  If you need to enter the tags manually it’s pretty easy.  Go here and paste in the tags above the </head> tag in the HTML of your page.  Then just make sure to edit the metadata appropriately for your URL and info.

How do I check my work?

To make sure Facebook is reading your OGP tags go to the Facebook URL Linter and enter the URL of the page you entered the tags on.  The URL linter will catch any errors in your metadata and display the data you are pushing to Facebook.  Edit the OGP tags so that no erorrs are returned on the URL linter.

What else should I know?

• You need a unique URL to share an item on Facebook.  If you have a slideshow that does not display unique URL’s for each item, you cannot share slides from your slideshow.
• Keep in mind when you are testing your work that the title becomes fixed after you share something 50 times. So, if you are testing a URL too much and are not seeing any changes, that’s why.
• Also, sometimes the URL linter has to refresh its’ cache so don’t be impatient.  If you change something, and it’s not displaying in the URL linter, check your work.  If you are sure you did everything right, wait.  Log in tomorrow and enter the URL again.  Everything should be fine.

I would love to hear about your experience with Facebook Open Graph Tags.  Do you have any tips of your own to add?

We are ecstatic to announce the launch of http://sagementoring.org/ – A site representing a wonderful school based mentoring program based in Suquamish, WA.  Sage is a part of Washington State Mentors.  We developed this site working with the talented team at NPower Northwest utilizing WordPress as a content management system.  Look out for more collaborations between NPower Northwest and Creation-1 in the future!

Meet me at the Seattle WordPress Meetup at Techstars (511 Boren Ave N. Suite B, Seattle) at 630 PM.  If you have never been to a WordPress Meetup you are seriously missing out on a great network of users, developers, and designers who love WordPress.  We meet monthly and there is always time for networking and meeting new people.  See ya there!

We just launched http://MyNorthSeattleHome.com- The informative and playfully designed site of Seattle Real Estate expert Conor MacEvilly.  We designed and developed the site with Conor’s idea of having something equally loud and memorable as it is useful.  We teamed up with Terry Macintosh at IDXNW who built an amazing API that lets us search for Seattle Area homes within the site all while utilizing WordPress as a content management system.  The site is full of useful tidbits about buying and selling homes in Seattle.  Take a look for yourself!

Congratulations to our long time friend Melanie Duerkopp on her new WordPress powered blog!  Melanie is a talented photographer who specializes in weddings and portraits.  Check out her work- here and her blog- here

The long awaited major update to WordPress is now available for download.  Overall, the new version is faster, more intuitive and has a new default theme called 2011.  Take a look at the new version here:

This is a just a quick reminder to all of our friends using WordPress.  Make sure you update to the new version- 3.1.3.   This will likely be the last version before 3.2.  It has several security fixes.  One of the most common reasons for getting hacked is having as outdated (and vulnerable) version!  Here are some of the updates that were made:

• Various security hardening by Alexander Concha.
• Taxonomy query hardening by John Lamansky.
• Prevent sniffing out user names of non-authors by using canonical redirects. Props Verónica Valeros.
• Media security fixes by Richard Lundeen of Microsoft, Jesse Ou of Microsoft, and Microsoft Vulnerability Research.
• Improves file upload security on hosts with dangerous security settings.
• Cleans up old WordPress import files if the import does not finish.
• Introduce “clickjacking” protection in modern browsers on admin and login pages.

We are ecstatic to announce the launch our most recent project for the Group Health Foundation.  The Gift of Health wall engages Group Health’s supporters by having them answer the question and post it on the wall.  We designed and developed this site for the WordPress content management system.  The client has full control over comment moderation and website management.

Alicia McLucas at IntoMyOwn.com wanted to rebrand her company and target a new demographic with her life coaching and mentoring programs.  Luckily, we developed her website in the beginning with the WordPress platform. The entire site was able to be easily updated.  We change the page titles and updated the imagery to reflect her new idea.  This is a shining example of the benefits of building a custom WordPress theme compared to working with no CMS or even other platforms.  Starting with a good foundation can save you a lot of time and money in the long run!