So I was writing my 2013 WordCamp Las Vegas presentation a few weeks ago. Minding my own business as usual. And something hit me. Like a total eureka moment. My WordCamp talk is called “Your theme can do that too!“. It’s basically a talk showing people that you do not need to buy a new theme and spend the better part of your week converting anything and everything in your pages and posts over from one theme to another, when all you wanted to do was add a hypertext link at the bottom of the footer and some kind of date below the permalink. Now, my presentation is going to be a bit more advanced than that, but my last rant brings me to my total eureka moment.
In my presentation, I begin with a story that brought me to the decision to pick my topic for WordCamp. A client of mine wanted to upgrade her site. So she get’s on that thing you use when you want to find something, and stumbles upon this article. The article had some great advice. the only problem was that the advice was for any WP site running on 2.6 or lower. That article does not state that it’s for that version of WordPress. At Last! We come to my total eureka moment. Some article do a pretty good job of explaining that whatever advice they are offering, is best suited for a specific version of WP. But….Why doesn’t every article, good or bad, clearly state what version(s) of Wp this technique could be used for. I’ve never understood that.
Here’s the thing. In this age of SEO and need for attention, we write articles that are going to rank high in Search Results. But does that mean that the article shouldn’t clearly state what specific versions of WP you can use this for? If you look at all of the plugins in the CODEX, say Jetpack in this example, it tells you what version of Wp this plugin is compatible with. See my example below.
I know this was a really long winded way to say you should just clearly mark the compatibility of your advice to an install(s) of WP, but I needed the word count for SEO value. #jokesonyou.