If you haven’t tried to make your WordPress plugin accessible before, this can seem a daunting challenge. Trisha’s talk will give you some quick pointers that are easy to start implementing, as well as demonstrate how Modern Tribe is tackling the accessibility of their WordPress products.

At the end of June, Dennis Cooper, (an experimental artist), found that his blog, including an entire decade’s worth of his content, was deleted by Google. I currently have a client who wrote an article for the Huffington Post and wanted to highlight that article on his newly rebuilt website. It’s gone. Not on the Huffington Post, not in Google’s search results anywhere, not on archive.org. Completely gone.

If you care about your content, on any level, (and surely you do, because you took the time to create it), don’t post it on a closed platform alone. Not Facebook, not Twitter, not AudioBoom, not SoundCloud, or any number of closed platforms that have come and gone over the years. If you want to post links to it on these platforms for the exposure, fine. But by all means, don’t turn over ownership of content you’ve created to anyone who’s not you. And that’s exactly what you’re doing when you post your content solely on closed platforms like Medium and the like. You’re getting exposure in exchange for content ownership, and, (depending on the terms of service for each platform), you’re handing over the usage rights, and you’re granting these platforms the right to use your content, your hard work, however they like. And it’s not their job to keep your content safe by backing it up for you.

Yes, hosting your content yourself has its inconveniences. You have to work for exposure. You have to learn how your self-hosted platform, (like WordPress or Drupal), works, so that you can add content. But at the end of the day, that content remains yours, and you control who does what with it. So if you’re willing to spend time creating that content, spend the extra time ensuring that you own it, and can therefore safeguard it.

As with everything else, there’s a plugin for that

With the Disable Blogging plugin, you now have the ability to disable all of WordPress’s blogging features non-destructively. This means that, if down the line you decide you want to add a blog to your site after you’ve disabled all the blogging features, you can do so by simply deactivating the plugin.

What features does it disable?

The plugin disables the following features by hiding them as long as it’s active.

• • Posts and everything related to them
• Comments and everything related to them
• Comments from pages
• Blog related widgets
• Pingbacks, Trackbacks, and XML-RPC header links
• Biographical info and Admin Color schemes on the user profile page
• Press This Bookmarklet
• Posts via email
• Howdy, help tabs, and query strings from static resources

Think of this as the nuclear option if you want to do away with blogging on your site completely.

There are two things that immediately stand out during testing. The first is that logging in takes users to their profile page instead of the Dashboard. Second, the Dashboard and the link to it are gone. If you’re used to seeing the WordPress dashboard, running WordPress with it disabled can be a jarring experience, and, if you use this on a client’s site, and you’ve shown them how to update the site before adding this plugin, you’ll want to explain to them what they should expect before you enable this.

The WordPress dashboard serves a useful purpose, especially on sites where you need to quickly glance at things like e-commerce data, so I would only recommend using this in situations where your client isn’t depending on getting easy access to their data snapshots. It’s not that it’s not possible for them to navigate to the various sections of the administration panel to find their various stats, but it can be seen to add a layer of complexity.

If you’re looking for some user testing data before you make the leap, check out Jeff’s post on WordPress Tavern to get a sense of what it might be like to activate this plugin on your site.

All of this notwithstanding, if you know that, (at least for now), you don’t want a blog on your site, this is a good option that allows you to disable it until it’s needed.

There’s a lot of writing advice on the web, and it can be hard to find out which advice is best for your situation. If you’re looking for a place to start, I would recommend the following from Copyblogger on writing with power and authority.

I would also recommend studying their archives. There’s a lot of free, actional content you can use to build your own content library, and you can use all of this material regardless of how successful you are right now, or regardless of how you measure success. All it takes is a serious time investment on your part, but if you’re trying to run a business and make sales, you already knew that you have to invest a lot of time and hard work.

I am very pleasantly surprised, delighted, and pleased to report that Automattic has been working on the accessibility of WooCommerce since they first acquired WooThemes a year ago. It’s got a ways to go, (especially since Select II is involved), but there’s definite improvement here. They’re using Aria in a few cases where necessary due to some custom controls, and they’re using it properly. I believe Automattic deserves praise for this, and encouragement to keep up the good work. Making WooCommerce accessible is going to be a long, hard slog, and I’m very glad to see things heading in the right direction. So keep up the great work Automatticians, and I’ll be cheering you on every step of the way.