No surprise : people like things to be fast and easy !
So a new way of doing things is often resisted because it means there’s another learning curve that will take time. It takes time because you have to get used to the new routine.
But because technology is evolving so quickly, if you don’t test new ideas and workflows to see if they’re better, you can miss out on advances that do make things faster and easier.
The only certain way to know if something new is really going to make things faster and easier is to try it.
Nearly all online software, SAAS ( software as a service ) comes with free trials and free scaled-down versions ( where they make money by upgrading you ). Ultimately, you’ll save time and make thing easier for yourself by trying it.
( At the bottom of this post, I have a solution for decreasing overwhelm. Or you can email me at robert@spellboundweb.com if it’s easier to have a chat about any of the barriers you come up against. )
WordPress 5
WordPress 5 has been released. Did you know that WordPress now runs 32% of the websites on the internet ? The stats are here at w3techs.com
And because I use a LOT of online apps & editors, I can tell you that people are taking to WordPress because it makes things easier and faster – for the important things, to do with online promotion and interacting with people.
( You can read more about the reasons here. )
It comes with a new editor, called Gutenburg.
I had some resistance to using it for the reason mentioned earlier. But as in the long run it’s here, and I use WordPress on all my websites, I decided I’d better switch from the Classic editor and try it out properly.
It’s a beautiful bit of programming & I’m expecting to see aspects of it appear in other online editing software. Lot’s of apps are taking the best points from each other and moving closer and closer together as workflows get agreed upon and standardised.
And you can see how it’s take the best aspects of other editors, like Apple iMac’s Pages, duplicating the sidebar document and block views.
Here are some things that I find are saving me time as I write this post …
- Preview opens in a new tab by default.
- Draft autosaves periodically. In fact there’s a lot of saving going on intermittently, which is a great thing to prevent wasted work.
- When you click Save Draft, then flip to the tab with the live page, the draft page updates in a live tab automatically.
- In keeping with developing app standards, instead of the Screen Options at the top of posts and pages, options are now a top-right hamburger menu.
- The heading block starts from H2, which is great, because the page titles should be H1.
- As soon as you type a new line it gets placed in its own block.
The drag-and-drop blocks
A lot of page-building software like OptimizePress and IglooApp have featured these before. They take getting used to, but are faster when you’re editing what you’ve written.
New paragraphs are automatically placed in their own block when you hit a return. Then to change paragraph order, instead of cutting cutting & pasting ( multiple steps ) you can drag them using the arrows to the side of the block ( one step ).
You can also highlight multiple blocks with the shift key and then move them all up and down as a unit.
Information overload
The easiest way to prevent information overload is to have other people deal with it !
This doesn’t mean that you don’t have to read or study anything.
It means that you let people you trust sort out the important things from the useless stuff and all the duplicates of the same thing. This can reduce the amount you have to look through enormously.
Knowing who to trust is a result of reading what other people say about various opinion leaders and resources and verifying what they say yourself.
Subscribe to a few email lists; add people to your Facebook feed and see if they’re helpful. You can always unsubscribe from emails and posts later if you accumulate too many.
Once you’ve found a few stable people who know what they’re talking about, then stay in touch with them. Let them do the research and read the news and pass on to you what you need to know.