Expanding Text for FAQ Pages

Frequently Asked Questions pages are difficult to handle well. They tend to be long which means readers have to scroll a lot (not good web practice). As readers are usually looking for the answer to only 1 or 2 questions, ideally you should have  just the questions displayed where they can easily be seen without too much mouse work.

The Expanding Text Plugin from DagonDesign lets you hide the answer until someone clicks on the question. Once you click on a question, the answer text appears underneath, click the question again and it disappears. Your page looks clean and organised, your answers are easy to find and you don’t have to think about creating new pages for each answer  and linking each one.

View this plugin in action at www.orbisflash.com

Create Expanding Text

1. Download the Expanding Text Plugin
2. Rename the file with .php on the end instead of .txt
3. Using ftp, upload the file to your plugins folder
4. Activate the plugin
5. Click on the html tab (top, right of your post’s content box)
6. Use the following code around each question you want to expand

Click on the questions below to see the plugin in action.

How do I create a monthly newsletter showing my WordPress Posts?

What are WordPress Plugins and what do they do?

What should I include on my homepage?

Other Uses for this Plugin

This plugin would also work well for pages listing distributors or branches by region, staff directory pages, product pages, testimonial pages, basically any page with a lot of information grouped with headings and summaries. Let me know how you’re using this plugin to improve your website.

Online Forms Plugin for WordPress

The Gravity Forms Plugin for WordPress works for almost any form you can dream up, is unbelievably easy to use and has so many extra features I am planning several more articles dedicated to this plugin. You do have to pay for this plugin but the $39 is well worth it. Click on the banner below to purchase or find out more.

Why Use Forms?
Forms are very “take action now”. If a potential client is visiting your website, reading about your product, you don’t want them to have to wait until 9am to call you or print an application to post/fax because chances are they never will.

Important Form Elements
Online forms should be easy for clients to fill in but include enough fields to provide you with the basic information you need. Once sent you should receive the information via email and your client should receive an email with your personal message as appropriate to the form they filled in.

My Favourite Gravity Features

• Linking to MailChimp to add newsletter opt in to all forms
• Being able to personalise the user confirmation email with their name etc
• Using post fields to create a form which becomes a blog post

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WordPress to MailChimp E-Newsletter

MailChimp lets you send daily, weekly or monthly e-newsletters containing your blog posts. It is all done using their ‘RSS to Email’ function (Translation: Blog Posts to Email Newsletter).

Email Newsletters with MailChimp

Once you have setup your free MailChimp account and customised an email template with your logo etc, just create an rss campaign. Enter your website’s feed address (if you use WordPress you have one), decide whether you want to show entire posts or just summaries of each, then select how often you want your newsletter to send. Any fresh content/blog posts you’ve published since the last newsletter will slot into your branded template and send automatically every day, week or month. If there is no new content, the newsletter wont send.

How to Create an RSS to Email Campaign

Unless you want to change the frequency of your newsletter or layout at some stage, this is the one and only time you will need to do the steps below. Everything after your rss campaign is scheduled is automatic.

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1. Get a free MailChimp account.
2. Click on Campaigns tab, then on the big orange Add Campaign button
3. Select RSS Campaign from the drop down list
4. Add your RSS Feed address and choose how often your newsletter will send
   
5. Design/customise an email template – Before you create your campaign, you’ll want to customise one of MailChimp’s email templates with your colours, logo, links to your website, images etc. This is all done on site and is easy to use.
6. Add Your content Edit the content section of your template and insert an rss merge tag (this will be already there if you choose rss campaign) to display either post excerpts or full posts. You can also insert your Twitter feed, add images, special greeting etc.
7. Send Yourself a Test .
8. Add a Subscriber List - Add any email subscribers you already have by importing the entire list or adding them one at a time.
9. Schedule Your Campaign – Select the date you want the first one to send. Eg. Mine is monthly and sends on the 2nd of every month. [Read more]