Well, who would ever have thought I would be writing WordPress plugins as was, and still am, not really convinced that WordPress is the best system to build websites. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not against WordPress or something. Even this whole site until now has been built with WordPress. I just don’t believe WordPress is the best system to build e.g. company websites, especially not for company websites that don’t change that much and need to be search engine friendly.
But I have to admit that the WordPress theme has built an efficient and user friendly framework with which it indeed is possible to build websites in a user friendly way. Just keep in mind that I am a web developer (and a control freak) that prefers to build websites from scratch in html/php straight away. And with my skills and knowledge that is often the most efficient way, especially for more advanced websites or websites that need to be dynamic based on structured data and for websites that need to be search engine friendly.
And that was exactly what I was missing in standard WordPress: the option to be able to set title tags, meta description tags and meta keywords tags on a ‘per page’ basis. And that is also the reason that I built my second WordPress plugin: IFS SEO Simple (ilnk to current download here).
The plugin is based on previous modifications to the theme in combination with the custom fields we normally set for posts and pages as I was not very knowledgeable about the WordPress framework before and just needed some quick fixes for SEO. So that’s what I did before, but whoever knows me might know I’m kind of a perfectionist, so of course the SEO stuff should be in a plugin and not in the theme as that’s just where it belongs.
Anyhow, the whole WordPress plugin stuff just started with a suggestion from John to create a plugin to promote the project Inspiration for Success. So that’s where I started my mass mailer plugin with which I send the daily quotes that I think could also be useful for bloggers with a limited audience. That plugin still needs some fine tuning, for myself as well as for other users, but I’m using it and it basically suits my needs.
And so now we also have this little SEO plugin for setting titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords and I just installed it in the site to replace the theme changes and it seems to work fine.
And of course I hope it will be useful for others also, maybe even you.
Looking forward to your comments and feedback by the way, as this is just my thinking and there may be a lot more ideas around it.