One of the ways WordPress can be made to act like an all-singing, all-dancing CMS is with custom page templates. These give you the ability to make any page on your website look and/or function differently to all the others. Here I’d like to explain how you make a custom page template for Genesis.

Genesis is a premium theme framework for WordPress which I now use to build all my websites on. I do this because it has many cool functions and effects coded already that I can just pick and tack on to whatever kind of website I’m building.

Custom pages in WordPress

Creating a custom page template is super easy in WordPress. You simply copy your theme’s single.php file, call it something different like, ft-home.php, add the template name at the beginning of the file – using a text editor such as Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac) like so:

<?php /* Template Name: FT Home
*/ ?>

… and you can add or take away anything you want so that when you create a new page and choose the template you’ve created in Page Attributes (see below), it’ll appear differently to all the other pages.

But with Genesis you make child themes, so it’s slightly more complicated as we don’t have a single.php to copy. So I’ll go into it in a bit more detail.

Custom pages in Genesis

Below you can see two page layouts. On the left you have a standard blog template with a sidebar and on the right you can see a custom home page with no sidebar, a strip of images across the top and a jQuery slider next to the content.

Here is a video of me (stumbling and stuttering through) making a custom page template in Genesis.

An added benefit of creating a custom page for this page is that the tricky code to create the strip of images and the jQuery slider can be hidden away from the client in the custom page template, while the main text could be edited within the WordPress page editor as normal.

To create your custom page template in Genesis, open a new text document in Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac) and copy this code:

<?php /*
Template Name: FT Home (change name as you see fit)
*/ ?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php genesis_before_content_sidebar_wrap(); ?>
<div id="content-sidebar-wrap">

<?php genesis_before_content(); ?>
<div id="content" class="hfeed">

<?php genesis_before_loop(); ?>
<?php genesis_loop(); ?>
<?php genesis_after_loop(); ?>

</div><!-- end #content -->
<?php genesis_after_content(); ?>

</div><!-- end #content-sidebar-wrap -->
<?php genesis_after_content_sidebar_wrap(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

… and save the text file as your template’s name with .php on the end.

(I totally stole the above code from How to create a Custom Template In Genesis by Christopher Cochran.)

This file should then sit in your child theme’s directory next to the functions.php and style.css. Then, same as with any other WordPress page template, you can choose the template on a page-by-page basis within the Page Attributes section when editing a page in WordPress.

I added all the extra code in before the <?php genesis_before_content(); ?> line. But, as you can see, you can add content before or after the header, before of after the loop, before or after the sidebar or before or after the footer.

With Genesis you also have the added benefit of being able to choose a basic layout on a page-by-page basis, in this case I choose a layout with no sidebar:

But what if I want more differences in the custom page template?

OK, maybe you’re thinking this isn’t quite as flexible as all that. What if you want to change something within the header, put something else in the footer or mess around with the heading in some way. Well, don’t worry! You can do anything you what with Genesis child themes by way of the functions.php.

So, for the example above, I needed to put something in between the heading and the content on the page, I actually entered the HTML of the heading in the custom page template so it would appear in the correct place. That done I needed to get rid of the page’s heading that would have been spat out by the template as it stands.

To get rid of the heading from this particular custom page, I put this in the functions.php:

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'child_remove_my_template_page_title' );
function child_remove_my_template_page_title() {
if ( is_page_template('ft-home.php') )
remove_action( 'genesis_post_title', 'genesis_do_post_title' );
}

And even I with my appallingly bad knowledge of PHP can tell that the above code removes the page title from the custom page template with the file name ft-home.php.

Genesis comes with umpteen different “hooks” such as genesis_post_title which enables you to add, subtract or edit any page element on any page or pages you want. And the glory of this system is that it just lies on top off the powerful theme framework which remains untouched so it can be updated and improved – alongside WordPress – while your website will look and function the same as alway.

What do you think?

As you can see, I think the Genesis theme framework is a pretty rock solid way to approach WordPress. But what do you think? Do you prefer creating your own themes? Do you use another framework?

How do you create custom pages in WordPress?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The first time I saw WordPress widgets I thought “what on earth are these useless pieces of dog’s do?” Now I think that widgets are awesome website building devices that should have pride of place in any website designer’s toolbox.

What are WordPress widgets?

WordPress widgets are self contained bits of website code that can be applied to a widgetized area via an easy-to-use intuitive interface.

A fresh install of WordPress will give you some bog-standard widgets that you can drag-and-drop into your sidebar. For example:

• Search widget adds a search box
• Categories widget lists your blog categories
• Recent Posts widget lists the x most recent blog posts you’ve written (you decide how many)

… and many more. As you are no doubt aware, the Recent Posts widget is one of the most widely used WordPress widgets!

But you can also add other amazing widgets in your sidebar by way of certain plugins. For example:

• Latest Tweets lists your last x tweets (you decide how many)
• Facebook Like Box shows how many people like a certain Facebook page (the fan page for the site) and which of your friends like it
• Newsletter Signup Box enables visitors to join a mailing list

The list is endless. I use Genesis theme framework (affiliate link) which adds a lot of useful widgets. One widget can, for example, show featured or recent posts with thumbnail images.

Why should you use WordPress widgets?

Ease of use is the reason you should be using widgets. Not because it’s easy for you to use; but because it’s easy for your clients to use.

I always try to design websites that the client can edit because constantly updated quality content is the key to a successful website.

Of course, using WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System) is a great way to enable a client to create, edit and delete pages easily. But widgets allow another level of client interaction where they can control other, traditionally static, areas of the website such as the header, sidebar and footer. Here is an article I wrote about adding to a header widget in WordPress.

With widgets, clients can determine how many posts in which category get listed, decide on an article to be featured with thumbnail image and choose the running order in which all these elements appear. And all this is controlled within an intuitive back-end – let’s face it, it doesn’t get much more easy that the widget area!

How do you use WordPress widgets?

Well, as I’ve said, WordPress widgets are almost too easy to use that they don’t bear explaining!

If you go into Appearance > Widgets on the left-hand side of the back-end you will see a large list of Available Widgets in the central area and a selection of widgetized areas on the right (for example Primary Sidebar or Header Right).

And to place a widget in a particular area – you’ve guessed it! – simply drag the widget from the Available Widgets area to the Primary Sidebar (or the desired area). Then you can choose the title of the widget (for example, you may like to title the Latest Posts widget “My recent articles”) and choose the various settings of the widget (for example, you can choose the number of posts or category in the Latest Posts widget).

Note: if you leave the title area in the widget blank; the element appears on the page without a heading.

So, for example, here is a screen shot of me moving a Genesis Featured Posts widget in the first of my three footer widget areas:

And here are the easy to use settings. As you can see, I set the heading to be “Latest Articles” and get it to display the 5 most recent posts with a 40 pixel square thumbnail image:

If you want to get rid of a widget, simply drag it from the widgetized area back to the Available Widgets area. If you want to take it away from the widgetized area but would like to save the settings as you may want to use it again, drag it to the Inactive Widgets area underneath and it’ll sit there until you want to use them again.

In the video above I explain how to add text and Recent Posts widgets and style them with CSS.

If you’re thinking this is all a bit “off the peg” – think again! You have complete control over how widgets look both generally and individually.

How do you style WordPress widgets globally?

I use – my eternal favorites – Chrome Developer Tools and Firebug add-on for Firefox to find out what selector is used for the widgets. For example here are some styles for all the widgets on my site:

#sidebar .widget {
background-color: white;
border: 1px solid #E6E6E6;
margin: 0 0 15px; }

And here is the style for the widget headings:

.widget-area h4 {
background-color: #F8F5EE;
border-bottom: 1px solid #E6E6E6;
font-size: 16px;
padding: 5px 5px 5px 10px;
margin: 0 0 10px;
color: #783D00;}

Obviously the font-family of the h4 is determined elsewhere in the stylesheet.

How do you style individual WordPress widgets?

But, what if you want the heading or background of one of the widgets to be different to the others? No problem! By using the Chrome Developer Tools (View > Developer > Developer Tools) or the Firebug add-on for Firefox, you can identify the div id that the widget is wrapped in.

So, for example, the Recent Posts widget on this blog is wrapped in div id="recent-posts-3". This is a completely unique identifier for this particular website element. (So if, for the sake of argument, you wanted to have a second Recent Posts widget on the same site, WordPress would give that a different id – “recent-posts-4″, for example).

So if you wanted to change the color of the heading (in this case the h4) of this particular widget you would add this to the CSS.

.widget-area #recent-posts-3 h4 {color: red;}

In the CSS code the dot represents a div class (in this case “widget-area”) and the hash represents a div id (in this case “recent-posts-3″). In this case the div class called “widget-area” comes before the div id “recent-posts-3″ because that’s the order they appear in the HTML.

What’s the difference between “class” and “id” in CSS? The id should be applied to an element that is unique whereas class can be applied to multiple elements on the same web page.

So how do you put something else in the sidebar that’s not a widget?

Simple, use Text Widgets! Maybe you want to add a message in the sidebar to alert potential clients that you are taking new projects? Simply drag a text widget over to the Sidebar and type!

Text Widgets can take HTML so you can add images, forms, JavaScript, whatever! I’ve used Text Widgets for my “Connect with me” links box (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), sign-up form box, Adsense code, and all sorts of sidebar goodness!

What if you want different widgets appearing on certain pages?

You may think that this system of widgets is inflexible. I would say that the opposite is true – it actually adds flexibility.

You can use the Widget Logic plugin which uses WordPress conditional tags to specify which widgets go where. So you can can control the appearance (or not) of a certain widget on the home page, a single blog post, a blog post from a particular category, a particular page, etc.

Also, you can put a specific message on each page’s sidebar by using the PHP Code Widget plugin.

And, with the Genesis theme framework, you can use Simple Sidebars plugin to create multiple, dynamic widget areas, and assign those widget areas to the sidebar on a per post, per page, or per category basis.

What do you think?

Do you find widgets difficult or easy to use? Is there anything you want to be able to do with widgets that you haven’t found out how to do yet? If so, I want to know.

I think widgets are a great way to add client control over website areas that have traditionally been “no go”!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Every WordPress site is different. This is because everybody chooses a different theme or “look and feel” for their site. Creating a header and top navigation menu in WordPress will be a slightly different process for each site.

Here I am using the Genesis theme framework for WordPress because I absolutely love it. However, there will be important points in this article that wil help anyone with a WordPress website.

This is part of a series of articles and videos where I create a website from scratch. I first explained how to make a child theme for the Genesis framework and then I wrote about starting to style the theme by adding the background and logo.

Adding Facebook link, Twitter link and other information to the header

Having already added the logo to the top left of our site’s header, we will now add some extra information to the right hand side of our header. In this case we will add Twitter and Facebook links, etc., by way of a widget.

I’ve got to admit I’ve gone a little widget crazy lately, having been a little dismissive of them in the past. What’s a widget? Well, they’re self contained bits of a website that you can drag around and control via an easy-to-use widget area.

One of the many beauties of Genesis is it’s effortless ability to widgetize any area of the website. So:

• If you want a different order of boxes on the sidebar you can do it in seconds.
• If you want a featured post here, 5 latest category headings with thumbnails there on the home page, you can do it in seconds.
• If you want a search bar, social sharing, Twitter feed, calendar, tag cloud, etc., here, there or anywhere, you can do it in seconds. 

This intuitive, easy-to-use back-end functionality is particularly useful when creating websites for clients that want the ability to control all areas of a website but lack the skills to do this.

Anyway, in this instance we need to create our own custom widget and we do that by dragging over a Text Widget to the Header Right area in the Appearance > Widgets interface in WordPress.

And in this Text Widget you can put HTML. Here is the HTML I put for this particular site. I just has a Facebook page link, a Twitter link and a phone number.

<div id="connect">
<ul>
<li><a href=""><img src="http://site.com/images/facebook.jpg" style="border:0;" /></a></li>
<li><a href=""><img src="http://site.com/images/twitter.jpg" style="border:0;" /></a></li>
</ul>
<p id="tel"><strong>Tel:</strong> +44 20 xxxx xxxx</p>
</div>

And here is the CSS to style the above:

#connect {float: right;}
#connect ul {float: right;}
#connect ul li {list-style: none; display: inline;}
#connect p#tel {margin-top: 33px; font-size: 18px; color: #66504e;}

Here is what appears on the right hand side of the head as a result:

Video of adding heading info and navigation menu

In this video I show how to add the widget to the header and how to style up the menu in Genesis.

Creating the top navigation menu

Top navigation menus (or “navbars”) used to be the bane of my existence but now, with Genesis and WordPress menus, I have developed a really easy system of creating them which takes seconds as opposed to hours.

Genesis already has in place the ability to have a Primary and Secondary Navigation Menu. For this particular example, I got rid of the Secondary Navigation Menu using the Genesis Theme Settings as the client only wanted one.

In the video above I show how I amend the CSS to get the menu to look like the one in the PSD visual I did.

By using Chrome Developer Tools or the Firebug add-on for Firefox, you can tell which selectors in the HTML are being used in the CSS to style the menu.

#nav {-khtml-border-radius: 6px; -moz-border-radius: 6px; -webkit-border-radius: 6px; border-radius: 6px;
background: #745d5c url(images/nav.gif) repeat-x ;
border: 1px solid #745d5c;
width: 958px; }

As you can see in the above video, I increased the radius of the rounded corners, added a gradient background and changed the border color of the menu. So now the menu doesn’t look like the boring gray one you get with a vanilla Genesis install.

I also added the following CSS to change the color of the text in the menu to white.

#nav li a {color: #fff; }

There is also the ability to change the style of the current page links, the hover links, the sub-page links and the sub-sub-page links.

With Genesis, you can easily have drop-down menus for sub-pages (or child pages) and then fly-out links for sub-sub-pages (or grandchild pages). You can have these on both the Primary and Secondary Navigation menus.

Creating pages, child pages and grandchild pages

Here is my video where I add new pages to the WordPress menu so that they appear in the navigation menu as pages, child pages (as drop-downs) and grandchild pages (as flyouts).

You can choose a page to be a child or grandchild page under Parent in the page editor. And when you look at the pages (under Pages > All Pages) the child and grandchild pages are indented underneath their parent. Doing this will also give them a logical URL (for example, www.site.com/music/jazz/charlie-parker where the page “Charlie Parker” is a child of “Jazz” which is a child of “Music”).

Creating a navigation menu with drop-downs and fly-outs

To get these pages to appear in the navigation menu correctly, you just have to drag and drop them into their respective positions in Appearance > Menus. Again, child pages are indented under their parent. Don’t forget to give the menu a name (like “navbar”, for example) and set it to be the primary navigation menu.

So, arranging pages in the WordPress Appearance > Menus area like this…

… will create a drop-down menu with fly-outs like this:

Please see the video above for a demonstration of this.

What do you think?

What do you think of this method of editing the header and navigation menu of a website? Do you do it in a different way?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

In my last post and video I explained how to make a child theme for the Genesis theme framework in WordPress. In this article I explain how to start styling the Genesis child theme.

Here you can see where we left off last time with the Genesis child theme only just set up plus an image of the Photoshop visual I used to show the client how the home page would look:

Once the client was happy with the PSD visual, I started creating the child theme locally using MAMP, Photoshop and a text editor.

As you can see above left, the default Genesis child theme looks particularly uninspiring but it is actually very quick to style up the new theme using Genesis. I have made around 10 videos of 5 minutes each showing how I did this, so it can be done in less than an hour!

Genesis Theme Settings

If you look again at the Genesis default theme above (kinda ugly, eh?) you see 3 gray bars across the top. All we need is one top horizontal navigation menu – which is sort of standard these days.

We can get rid of the other two straightaway by going into Genesis Theme Settings on the left hand side of the WordPress administration area.

I will run down the basics of the Theme Settings from the top to the bottom.

• Firstly, I have the default Enable Automatic Updates checked. This means you can update Genesis with a mouse click when the updates come out – as with WordPress, you should do this every time an update comes out. This is one of the benefits of using Genesis – it is developed alongside WordPress and so will always work whatever happens to the WordPress core.
• Leave the Custom Feeds section blank.
• Default Layout is a cool Genesis feature where you can put a sidebar on the left or right, have no sidebars or two sidebars in various arrangements. You can change this on a page by page basis (even cooler). For this site I put the sidebar on the right.
• For Header Settings you can either have an image or the text of the site title. I chose “Header Image” for this site.
• In the Navigation Settings you can choose to have only primary navigation which gets rid of one of those ugly gray bars. You can also Enable Fancy Dropdowns which adds a rather nice Suckerfish delay to your dropdown and makes you look like a coder rockstar when you’re not. You can add other options to the navbar such as today’s date or a site search.
• You can choose which pages you want Breadcrumbs on (I turned these off to get rid of that other ugly gray bar).
• You can choose to have Comments and Trackbacks on posts only but not on pages (as is the usual way).
• You can alter the output of your main blog pages by choosing to have excerpts only and thumbnail images, for example, in the Content Archives section.
• In the Blog Page section you can choose to have only certain Categories listed. I left this with All Categories.
• And lastly you can add various scripts to your header and footer sections of the webpages in Header and Footer Scripts. This is useful for installing Google Analytics and jQuery scripts.

I generally like to do as little as possible here in the Theme Settings and as much as possible in the style.css and functions.php files. The Theme Settings, although important, are only very general controls. When you are creating websites for demanding clients. Most of the action takes place in CSS-land.

Adding a background color and image

This is, of course, straightforward CSS. The background is a light brown color with a gradient running down from the top where it is darker. In the video below I copy a slither of the background and then create a one-pixel wide GIF in Photoshop of the gradient and same that in the child theme’s images folder as bg.gif. The CSS to create the background is:

body {background : #f3ece1 url(images/bg.gif) repeat-x; }

This repeats the one-pixel wide GIF along the top of the background and then, under the repeated GIF is a background color of the light brown #f3ece1. This color I sampled with the Photoshop Eyedropper Tool (I) was the color of the last pixel at the bottom of the copied slither from the PSD. This means that the gradient runs down from the top to the background seamlessly.

Adding a background color to the main page wrapper

This actually makes most of the page light brown which isn’t much good, so, in order to get the main core of the page white I added some CSS to a div id in the mark-up that contains all the page elements. In most web page mark up there is a div id called “wrap” or “wrapper”. In Genesis it’s called “wrap”.

#wrap {margin: 15px auto;
background: #fff;
width: 960px;
padding: 20px ;
-moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px #aaa; -khtml-box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px #aaa; -webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px #aaa; box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px #aaa; }

This CSS above colors the central area white. I’ll go through the above, line by line:

• margin: 15px auto; puts 15 pixels on top and bottom and makes sure the whole website is centered – this is from the default Genesis theme
• background: #fff; makes it white
• width: 960px; makes it 960 pixels wide (good job I’m here!)
• padding: 20px; this adds 20 pixels of white around it so that the background doesn’t butt right up against the edge of the text (so it isn’t 960 pixels wide, it’s actually 1000 pixels wide – CSS will drive you mad!)
• -moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px #aaa; … etc. adds an even shadow around the wrap in all most of the main browsers

So that’s the background and the wrap finished, now it’s on to the header logo.

Adding a header logo in Genesis

As you can see above I chose “Header Image” under Header Settings in the Genesis Theme Settings above.

I saved the logo in Photoshop and put it in the child theme images folder and then added this to the CSS:

.header-image #title-area {background : url(images/logo.jpg) no-repeat top left ; }

This adds the logo to the top left of the header which returns us to the home page when clicked.

The logo for this site was deeper than the space allowed so I had to add a greater height to another two elements in the stylesheet.

#header {height: 126px;}
.header-image {height: 126px;}

Genesis themes are excellently coded and the CSS is just a joy to work with, however, this is one of the few cases where you have to add something twice!

Starting to style a Genesis child theme in WordPress

I actually did realise I was filming myself for parts of this video so I apologise for the unkempt appearance.

Here is the video where I change the Genesis Theme Settings and style the background and logo in WordPress using a Genesis child theme. It also may help you to view the previous video where I create the child theme and the following video where I move on to a header text widget and the top navigation bar.

What do you think?

Hopefully this contained some useful CSS tips for those that don’t use Genesis and was helpful for those that do! I’m always interested to hear about how you create WordPress themes or if you have any questions.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I often ask the visitors here what they would like to me write about and the most common subject people mention is making your own WordPress theme.

WordPress is a powerful publishing platform which can be made to act and look like just about any kind of website.

What are WordPress themes and how do you make them?

Themes are a collection of PHP, CSS and image files that change the design or “skin” of your website. But they also do much more than that. They can also change the interface, producing different templates for different pages, etc.

There are two main ways to create a new theme for WordPress:

• First you get use an existing simple theme like Starkers and modify it to produce your own theme
• Secondly, and this is the method I recommend, you can get a theme framework like Genesis or Thesis and create a child theme to run on top of the framework.

Setting up a child theme on a framework sounds more complicated but it actually simplifies the process of creating a website.

Using a theme framework makes your WordPress website future proof as these frameworks will be updated along with the WordPress core updates so there’s no way your site will suddenly stop working when you update WordPress.

Theme frameworks

The benefit of using a framework is that the core theme coding is already done and done right. When you create your own custom theme, you are responsible for everything – so if anything goes wrong it’s up to you to fix.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder developer: “Child themes are the only way you should build your WordPress site on top of a framework, and Genesis has great support for child themes and other WordPress functionality.”

I used to create WordPress themes from scratch but when I wanted to add improvements to them, like nested comments for example, I found it would conflict with another element of the theme and fixing it would mean starting again from scratch.

Even if you think you know everything, you will always be asked to do something you’re not quite sure how to accomplish. When using a WordPress theme framework like Genesis you have the support of thousands of top quality developers – and amongst them there is bound to be someone who knows the exact and best solution to any query.

Here are some other advantages of using theme frameworks:

• Good for SEO. Frameworks such as Genesis and Thesis are much better structured for SEO. WordPress SEO expert Joost de Valk gives Genesis 5 out of 5 for SEO. The SEO controls are so good you don’t even need an SEO plug-in, although if you do want one it’s fully compatible and transferable with Yoast’s WordPress SEO plug-in and others.
• Quicker to develop with. Because it is all expertly coded and follows best practices it allows you to cherry pick the best elements (drop down menus, post thumbnails, jQuery sliders) and drop them into your design.
• WYSIWYG controls. Theme frameworks have robust settings sections and widgetized areas, enabling drag-and-drop control over the website’s elements, allowing design changes without coding.

The reasons I use Genesis

I’ve been using Genesis for most of this year and I can honestly say that I’ll never go back to writing themes on my own again. I can do everything I want with Genesis and I can do it quicker.

Yes, I’m using affiliate links in this article so if you make a purchase through one of the links I may get a commission. However, I would never recommend something to you that I don’t use myself. And this is why I use Genesis:

• Support. The documentation and developer support is awesome. You can ask how to do something through their forums and an expert developer will tell you within hours.
• Future-proof. Studiopress are always looking to the future. The next release, Genesis 1.8, will be responsive and create different device-dependent versions of the site for mobiles, iPads, tablets, etc. This is a big winner for me because the mobile web is going to be huge and so far the WordPress mobile plug-ins are not very customizable.
• Compatibility. It’s totally compatible with all the major WordPress extensions such as Gravity Forms, bbPress, WordPress Multi-Lingual, etc.
• Price. It is, actually, rediculously cheap. And cheaper than Thesis or Headway. Just $60 for the framework – which is all you need. You can create as many sites as you want and have access to the support. $60 is a small price to pay for total certainty in SEO, security, and website development.

Darren Rowse – Founder ProBlogger.net: “Genesis lets me sleep easy. Knowing my blog is well optimized, secure and easy to update lets me get on with developing content, community and building a business from my blogging.”

Creating a child theme on the Genesis framework for WordPress

I have just made 10 videos explaining how I create websites – from the Photoshop mock-up to the finished site online. I’ll be writing blog posts about every stage of the process over the next few weeks. You can see all the videos on my YouTube channel now.

Here is the first video where I create a Genesis child theme for WordPress.

I always start to create a WordPress theme and website locally on my computer before loading it up to a host for final tweaking. It only takes a few seconds to install WAMP (PC) or MAMP (Mac) on your computer and run WordPress locally and I recommend you do so when creating themes.

Once you have WordPress up and running you need to install your Genesis theme framework and your child theme. You will get your copy of Genesis as soon as you make the purchase. Un-zip it and put it in the /themes/ folder which, as you know, can be found in /wp-content/ amongst your WordPress files. No need to touch that folder ever again – all your theme changes will go in your child theme.

And then to load your child theme download a sample child theme from the StudioPress website or here:

You may want to re-name the child theme by changing the folder name and editing the style.css and the functions.php, but put the child theme next to the Genesis theme in the /theme/ folder and activate it in the WordPress back-end.

90% of the changes you make to the child theme will be to the CSS file. The other 10% – adding custom page templates, removing certain elements from certain pages, adding widgetized areas, etc., these changes can all be put in the functions.php file. Here is the functions.php file of the above sample child theme.

<?php
/** Start the engine */
require_once( get_template_directory() . '/lib/init.php' );

/** Child theme (do not remove) */
define( 'CHILD_THEME_NAME', 'Sample Child Theme' );
define( 'CHILD_THEME_URL', 'http://www.studiopress.com/themes/genesis' );

If you add any code to the above, make sure it’s below the '/lib/init.php' ); line and that there are no spaces after the last character in the file.

Don’t worry about getting your hands dirty with PHP. The solution to any requirement you have of Genesis will either be in the documentation or will be sorted out in the forums. There are also a couple of Genesis plug-ins (Simple Hooks and Simple Edits) which further simplify the process. And once you start pasting in PHP you begin to understand the logic behind it.

What do you think?

I’m really looking forward to sharing my methods of developing websites – there are 9 more videos to come! Do you use a child theme on a theme framework to create sites or do you create your own custom themes? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing it your way?

And, is there anything else you would like to know about creating WordPress sites?

Be sure to leave your comments and questions down below and, if you wish, click on one of the buttons down there to share!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I moved a WordPress blog to a new server and a new address this week. It was one of those jobs that I dreaded doing but didn’t turn out to be too complicated. And I’ve not lost any traffic!

Why was I moving a WordPress site to a new domain?

A few months back I created a site about WordPress, blogging, SEO, SM and internet marketing. I called it (maybe I didn’t spend too long thinking about this) WordPressSEOMarketing.com – catchy, huh?

It turns out that it is illegal to use “WordPress” in a domain as it is copyrighted. I spent a lot of time trying to decide on a new domain name for the website. In the end, I decided on WPBlogTalk.com.

How to move a WordPress site

Here is a basic synopsis of what you need to do.

1. Register the new domain with GoDaddy or Namecheap or some domain name registrar
2. Point the Name Servers at the domain name registrar to the new host
3. Set up the new domain at the new host
4. Copy all files and database (see below) from old site to new site
5. Edit wp-config.php to have the right database settings and add code for new domain (see below)
6. Install the Search and Replace plugin to search for old URLs and replace them with the new URL
7. Go through new site checking links, etc., change logo and branding, create new email subscription, change any product URLs, etc.
8. Add 301 redirection from old blog to new blog
9. Change feed URL in Feedburner, set up new Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics accounts to monitor indexing and traffic of new site

Now, what could be simpler?

If you don’t count waiting for files to copy, the actual process of moving a WordPress site only takes a few minutes – but you need to spend time checking the new site and changing some superficial elements.

The first three steps of the above synopsis are simple enough. And copying the files is an easy job to do with any FTP client. However, copying a database is always a little more complicated.

If you have Shell (Telnet or SSH) access to the hosts this can be done with one simple command line:

mysqldump -h oldhost -u oldusername -poldpassword olddbname | mysql -h newhost -u newusername -pnewpassword newdbname

This maybe a good option if your database is over 7MB in size. However, I prefer a more “hands-on” approach and migrated the database with PHPMyAdmin.

Exporting a database with PHPMyAdmin

Firstly, you need to export the database from the old site. Once you have logged in to PHPMyAdmin, selected the WordPress database on the left-hand panel and clicked the Export tab on the top right, there are a few options you must set in this page.

Underneath the section marked “Export”, make sure you have clicked “Select All” and in the radio button list below, make sure SQL is selected (this maybe already done when you arrive a the Export page). In the section marked “Structure”, check the box marked “Structure”. Within this section check boxes marked Add DROP TABLE / VIEW / PROCEDURE /, Add AUTO_INCREMENT value, and Enclose table and field names with backquotes. In the section marked “Data”, check the box marked Data. Within this section check boxes marked Complete inserts, Extended inserts and Use hexadecimal for binary fields.

Finally, check the box marked Save as file in the bottom panel and click the radio button with compression as None. Then click Go bottom right and go and get yourself a coffee.

Here is the complete panel to export or back-up and WordPress database in PHPMyAdmin:

This is the same procedure as when backing up WordPress databases. You can get a plug-in to do this for you but as this is for a new WordPress website, I thought it was better to export it this way.

Importing a database with PHPMyAdmin

Secondly, you need to create a new database on the new server and import the database you just exported.

I created a database with completely different name, username and password but you could be clever and create one with the same names and passwords as the old one which would mean you wouldn’t have to change these in the wp-config.php file later on.

In order to import the old database into the old one you need to open PHPMyAdmin for the new database that you have just created.

Click the small SQL icon, select Import Files from the resulting pop-up window, click Browse, select the file from your computer that you’d downloaded from the old site, and then click Go.

Editing the wp-config.php file

If the database imported still has the old website URL in it, you need to add these lines to the wp-config.php file:

define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://www.wpblogtalk.com');
define('WP_HOME', 'http://www.wpblogtalk.com');

I also had to change the database name, database username and password in the wp-config.php file to the settings of the database I’d just created.

At this point you can have a look at the new site and click through a few links. There’s still plenty more to do, though.

Search and Replace plugin

Meet your new friend, the Search and Replace plugin. Install this plug-in on your new site to change all the mentions of the old domain and change them to the new one. There are two places you can do this in the plug-in’s options page. I performed the search and replace in both.

If you search through all your posts now you will find all the internal links and image paths are using the new domain.

Check the site

Have a good look through your new site, checking that all is as it should be. Here’s a few things that I needed to do:

• Change image paths and internal links in the text widgets (for some reason these don’t get picked up by the Search and Replace plug-in)
• Change the logo in the header
• Create a new Aweber list for email subscriptions
• Re-brand e-books offered for download on the site
• Change the download page in Clickbank for a premium product

I actually found that these actions took the most time of the whole process!

Re-direct old site to new site

This step is absolutely essential!

You now have two sites that are identical in content – a bit of an SEO no-no. You need to set up a 301 re-direct from the old site to the new site. Put this in the old site’s .htaccess file – which you will find on the root of the site.

Redirect 301 / http://www.wpblogtalk.com/

That’s all you need! That will redirect any URL in the old domain to the equivalent page in the new site.

Final steps

Finally, I performed these following steps:

• delete the files and database of the old site (keep that all important .htaccess file though!)
• change the feed URL at Feedburner
• set up a new Google Analytics account
• set up a new account at Google Webmaster Tools to monitor how many links are indexed and register the sitemap
• create a new robots.txt to point to the sitemap
• create a new email address for the site and make sure the content form points to it (and forward emails from the old email address for the site to the new one)

Moving a WordPress website from one URL to another

Here is a video I made for your viewing pleasure concerning all the main points of copying files and databases, setting up the new WordPress site and redirecting the old site to it.

You’ve made it to the end of the article now!

I hope that helped someone. Please let me know if you do it differently or if you’ve had a problem with this operation in the comments below. And, if you’ve enjoyed the article, please don’t hesitate to vote for it down below!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

WordPress is the best CMS (Content Management System) for business websites. There are many successful business websites that use WordPress, for example Ford, The Wall Street Journal and Sony. WordPress is usually chosen to power a company’s website because

• it creates websites that are well-structured for SEO and can rank highly in search engines
• it can be easily updated by multiple individuals with no knowledge of HTML
• it is the most popular CMS on the planet creating a community of users and developers that can help you out if ever in need

A business site should have a home page that explains the USP of the company in a few words. From this page users can easily navigate to other areas of the site to find out further information about products and services.

Every website should fulfil a purpose. The point of many business websites is to generate leads or get people to contact the business so that they might purchase something.

I try to get business owners to condense their pages in the top navigation down to 5 or 6. These will include, typically, a Home page, an About page, a Blog and a Contact page as you can see below on a site I designed recently for an IT company.

The static pages are the “shop window on the world” that should be endlessly tested, updated and improved. However, the more important pages are in the blog which should include compelling content that prospects will value. This will be the content that draws in traffic and converts visitors into clients.

Here are some tips and techniques that I’ve used for many company’s websites.

Put keywords in the site’s title

In the WordPress administration section go Settings > General and, instead of putting your company’s name (for example, “Harrison and Sons”), put some words about what the company does (for example, “Widget Manufacturers, Harrison and Sons”). This will increase your chances of being found in Google by people searching for “Widget Manufacturers”.

Create a static page for your home page and a separate section for your blog

Still in the WordPress back end, go to Pages > Add New and create a new page. With our example you would maybe entitle that page “Widget Manufacturers, Harrison and Sons” and create an eye-catching and succinct synopsis of what value you give to your clients with links to other pages in the site for further information.

Again, go to Pages > Add New and create a new page with the title “Blog” and publish it.

Then go to Settings > Reading and select your static page (as per our example “Widget Manufacturers, Harrison and Sons”) for the Front Page and select the “Blog” page for Posts Page.

This way visitors to the home page will see a well-presented business website. But the blog will eventually draw in new visitors as fresh content does better in search engines.

Contact page

If getting visitors to contact the company through the website is the main objective of the site, then you should have a clear call-to-action on the Contact page. Mention how contacting your business will result in a quick benefit for the visitor. You may wish to offer a 10 minute free consultation, this would increase the number of contacts.

Offer as many ways to contact you as possible:

• Phone (with international code)
• Mobile
• Contact Form
• Email address

With the email address, don’t just give out your email address or even present it in the mailto: tag. This will attract spam. Instead you can cloak it with this bit of JavaScript which will open your prospect’s email client and start an email with the word “Enquiry” as the subject. This will help you track the effectiveness of this page.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var username = "rob";
var hostname = "robcubbon.com";
var linktext = username + "@" + hostname;
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + username +
"@" + hostname + "?subject=Enquiry" + ">" + linktext + "</a>")
//--></script>

Replace “rob” and “robcubbon.com” above with your email name and domain. Here is how the above JavaScript appears in the browser:

Always use an email address with the same domain as the company, never use a free email service like Gmail for a business website.

The best techniques to use in business websites

Company websites need to walk the line between being professional enough to attract big businesses and down-to-earth enough to build a community that will comment and promote the site. There are various things you can do to achieve this:

• Turn off comments on pages but keep them on the blog posts
• Have a call-to-action in the sidebar with further reasons for prospect to contact you. For example: “we can either help or be able to recommend other companies for you”
• Other “Hire Us” links in the top navigation bar or in a Hello Bar. These extra calls-to-action should be subtle, well thought out and continuously tested. You shouldn’t put them everywhere and look too desperate!
• Do not have any ads on the site! Particularly not on the home or static pages.
• Use WordPress page templates to get rid of the blog-like sidebar from the home or portfolio pages.
• Social proof. Create a testimonial page including quotes from other companies that have used your services and have positive thing to say.

What about you?

Do you WordPress as a straightforward blogging tool. Or do you get clients to contact you through your WordPress website?

Do you employ any tips or techniques to get prospects to contact you?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

There comes a time when you have to fly the nest. Leave the safe but structured environment of your WordPress.com site for the freedom and responsibility of owning your very own self-hosted WordPress.org site.

What is the difference between a WordPress.com site and a WordPress.org site?

Having a WordPress.com site is like renting an apartment – you can live in it for a while but it’s not yours and you can’t do what you want with it. Having a WordPress.org site is like buying a house – it’s your place and nobody can tell you what you can and can’t do with it.

Anyone can head over to WordPress.com and set up a site within seconds. Everything is taken care of for you: setup, upgrades, spam, backups, security, etc., and it lives on an almost-indestructible cloud environment.

However, if you head over to WordPress.org you can actually download the software that powers WordPress and upload it onto your own webhost and use it as you see fit. However, you need to spend money on a host and do the setting up, backing up, upgrading, etc., yourself.

If you are serious about your blog or website, you really need a self-hosted WordPress.org solution. With WordPress.org you can do anything you want to your site. You can change it’s design by loading any theme you want, increase functionality with any plugin you like and customize it pretty much anyway you want.

How to migrate from a WordPress.com site to a WordPress.org site

Here is my tutorial video where I change name servers, set up WordPress, export from WordPress.com and import to a WordPress.org blog.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Get a domain name (try GoDaddy, NameCheap or 123-Reg) – it is possible that you already have this if your WordPress.com blog is www.something.com rather than www.something.wordpress.com
• Get a webhost I would recommend Hostgator, Bluehost or, my current host, Dreamhost
• Change the name servers at the domain name registrar
• Set up WordPress at your new host
• Export your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags in a file to your computer (XML file)
• Import the file you just exported from your WordPress.com site to your new WordPress.org site
• Customize your installation with all the lovely new themes, widgets and plugins you can get your hands on!

Get a domain name

Your domain name is the bit that goes after the www. You need to register this and it costs about $9 a year. I used to recommend GoDaddy as it is the cheapest. But NameCheap sells for exactly the same price or 123-Reg).

It may be that you already have purchased a domain name for your WordPress.com site in which case the name servers will be ns1.wordpress.com and ns2.wordpress.com.

Get a webhost

If this is your first time looking for a host you need to get a good shared hosting service for WordPress.

I would recommend Hostgator (fantastic value and good support), Bluehost (as per this example) or, my current host, Dreamhost. This will cost you about $70 a year.

You should get from these hosts the names of your name servers. In our example for Bluehost the name servers are ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com.

Change the name servers

Change the name servers at your domain name registrar. So whether you use GoDaddy, Namecheap or 123-Reg, you need to head over there and fill in the name servers you got from your webhost.

They usually say that this change takes 24 hours to propagate through the system. In effect this usually takes only an hour.

Set up WordPress

Once the name server change has taken effect, install a new version of WordPress at your new site.

In our example, Bluehost (as well as most other hosts) have a very simple one-click install of WordPress.

Export XML file at WordPress.com site

At your WordPress.com site, go Tools > Export (choose the free option!) and then choose what you want to export. I exported everything: my posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags into a WXR file or, WordPress eXtended RSS file, basically an XML file specific to WordPress.

Import XML file at WordPress.com site

And then, log in to the back end at your new WordPress self-hosted site and navigate to Tools > Import. Click the WordPress option, install the importer and upload the XML file you just downloaded.

Themes and Plugins

You may like to keep a note of any functionality that was added to your WordPress.com blog that won’t be carried through on the XML file (things other than posts, pages, comments, custom fields, users, categories, and tags).

For example, you will have to download and reactivate the theme you were using at WordPress.com to make your new blog look the same.

And you may want to install and configure Jetpack and other plugins to provide features that you had been using on WordPress.com. If you have comments enabled, the Akismet comment spam protection plugin is virtually a must.

Redirection

Maybe you have a lot of content that ranks well in your old WordPress.com site, the new site would lose all that value as the URLs will all be different.

If you would like to redirect the old URLs at yourblogname.wordpress.com to new URLs at yourblogname.com, WordPress.com does this for a fee of $12/year.

What about you?

Have you ever had to move a WordPress.com blog into a WordPress.org blog? Has this been useful for you? I’d love to hear your opinion in the comments section down below. Or you may like to Tweet or Like the post!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

One of the easiest ways to sell content online is with a membership site using WordPress as a CMS with WishList Member as the membership plugin.

A membership site is where visitors have to register or pay to access information in a password protected area. Paid for content has long been a lucrative revenue model (over 2 billion dollars spent last year on online content in the US), however even if you take away the paying side, a membership site is still a great way to develop a community.

Using WishList Member with WordPress

I spent a couple of weeks researching WordPress membership plugins before I decided to use WishList Member plugin. I purchased the Single Site Licence for $97 and overall I was very happy with the product.

The reasons I chose WishList Member were:

• the documentation (or videos) were laid out simply and setup is straightforward
• there is an active forum for support (I always like a forum because users give better answers about a product than the people who have created it!)
• it is used by David Risley, something of a membership site expert
• they are a well-established company and well-respected within the WordPress community

Set up a membership site in a few minutes with WishList Member plugin

After you’ve purchased the licence from WishList Member they will give you a download link for the plugin. This plugin should then be unzipped and the resulting folder called "wishlist-member" (1.9MB) should be uploaded to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder in your WordPress installation using an FTP client such as Filezilla.

Setting up membership levels

Once you’ve activated the plugin through the Plugins panel of the WordPress administration area the first thing you must do it is to create your membership levels. Further down the line you may want to create different membership levels (bronze, silver, gold membership levels, for example) but let’s say you just want to start with one.

Go to WL Member > Manage Membership Levels > Membership Levels and create a new level, let’s call it “Subscriber”.

Setting up registration/error pages

The next thing you must do it is to create your error pages. To do this go to Pages > Add New in the WordPress area. You may also see a new page created called “WishList Member” – ignore this page and do not delete it! I called the new page “Registration” and this is what was written in the text area of the page:

Thank you for your interest. Please register in order to proceed.

[register_Subscriber]

Please click the activation link in our email to receive email updates of our latest deals.

As you can see there is some shortcode in there – [register_Subscriber] puts in a registration form for the “Subscriber” membership level we just set up. This is the page where your visitors sign up so it’s good to also include reasons why registering will be beneficial.

Once you have saved this page set it to become the Non-Member error page in WL Member > Settings > Configuration.

Setting up the sidebar registration form

Now, all membership sites usually have a sidebar element that either tells you that you are signed up (usually with a “Welcome, Username”) or a message that says “You are not logged in”. WishList does this all for you with a widget.

The widget even gives you the option to register and a lost password link. Setting it up is easy, just go to Appearance > Widgets and drag the WishList widget into the area of the site you want it to go and fill it out:

Creating members only content

Of course, you’re going to have to create some content that only your members can view, otherwise there’s not much reason to register! There are two main ways you can do this. You either have whole pages or posts that are members only or you can have areas of pages and post that are members only.

If you scroll down whilst editing a page or post in the WordPress administration area, you can click a radio button to protect a whole page or post from a non-member:

If a visitor tries to access a protected page they will be taken to the registration page.

Alternatively you can protect an area of a page, usually the second half, by using shortcode in the WordPress text editor:

Content available for everyone (usually an introduction)
[private_subscriber]
Quality content that you want people to sign up for
[/private_subscriber]

You would need to register as the “Subscriber” membership level as per our example in order to view the content within the shortcode. Visitors will see a “Content protected for subscribers only” message where the protected content is.

Congratulations, you’ve set up a membership site in 5 minutes!

That is it! You have now set up a site with unlimited membership levels, a registration form, a sidebar sign-up form, a lost password link, content protection, secure RSS feeds … there is, however, more you can do. You can get members to pay for the content!

Monetize your membership site

There are many ways to get members to pay for the content with the WishList Member plugin. The most popular is through integration with you PayPal business account.

To do this go to WL Member > Integration > Shopping Cart in the backend and select PayPal from the drop-down menu. Follow the PayPal and WishList integration in this tutorial video. This is a pretty painless process that should take you 5 to 10 minutes.

Integrate with MailChimp and AWeber

It is also essential that you get your members onto a MailChimp or AWeber mailing list so that you can easily communicate with your community. This works very well with WishList. You will have to get API keys and other information from the email management service and enter them at the WishList backend. There are excellent tutorials available for AWeber and MailChimp integration.

Once this is set up the registration and email opt-in processes are merged so that members get an activation email on registration which, when clicked, will put members on the MailChimp or AWeber email lists. I was very impressed with the integration with MailChimp.

Creating a membership site

I was delighted to get a chance to set up this frontier market investing membership site as I was interested to see how WishList Member plugin would work. Overall it is a robust and excellently supported plugin.

On the downside, the forms it creates are slightly inflexible. For example I was unable to modify the sidebar sign-up form and main registration form to be anything other than Username / First Name / Last Name / Email / Password – it is not possible to take any of these away. However, just about every other aspect of the membership functionality I found easy to modify.

Have you ever created a membership site or used WishList Member plugin for WordPress? What are your thoughts?

There are affiliate links in this article. Photo credit.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

WordPress is constantly being upgraded, improved and securitized. You should change the functionality with plugins and the look with the theme so, whenever WordPress gets updated, the functionality and look of your site will remain whilst the engine that powers it gets an upgrade.

The number one reason for getting a site hacked is a failure to update the WordPress core. So, make sure you update your plugins, your themes and the WordPress installation regularly!!!

However, things don’t always run smoothly during an upgrade as themes and plugins can cease to work. Sometimes plugin and theme authors will release updated versions around the time of a WordPress update. Sometimes they don’t. This is why it’s important to choose plugins and themes that are well-used and well-supported.

Themes

Themes are a collection of PHP files, CSS file(s), associated images and sometimes JavaScript files and there are thousands of them. Typically, we are so excited about getting the site up and running that the choice of theme is hurried and not perfect.

The WordPress Free Themes Directory gives you an Average Rating as well as the latest links from the troubleshooting forum pertaining to that theme. Themes can be changed and amended through the Appearance section of the WordPress back-end.

Theme Frameworks and Child Themes

Another important way to ensure that your WordPress site stays functioning through multiple upgrades is to use Child Themes. Child themes are to your theme what plugins are to the WordPress core. They sit on top of the theme (in this case the theme framework) and alter things in it so that when the theme needs updating the changes aren’t lost.

I’m convinced this is the way to go when amending themes: “Child themes are the only way you should build your WordPress site on top of a framework” says Matt Mullenweg, the founder developer of WordPress.

So, what are the best frameworks to build on? There are a lot of great premium theme frameworks out there:

• Genesis is used by blogging heavyweights Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, Chris Brogan author of Trust Agents and Brian Clark of CopyBlogger. It claims that whether you’re a novice or an advanced developer, Genesis will provide a secure and search engine optimized foundation that takes WordPress to places you never thought it could go..
• Thesis is a rock-solid foundation beneath any kind of website. Over 36,319 people use the airtight SEO, incredible design flexibility and lightning-fast loading times that Thesis provides. Yes, that’s pasted from their website!
• Elegant Themes is another popular premium theme framework providing attractive and userfriendly WordPress templates.
• Woo Themes provide top quality, cutting edge themes on top of their framework with awesome customer support.
• PageLines is revolutionary drag & drop theme framework.

However, there are plenty of good free theme frameworks to consider:

• Thematic The ultimate in SEO-ready themes, Thematic is a highly extensible, WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, drop-down menus, grid-based layout samples, plugin integration, shortcodes for your footer, and a whole lot more.
• Atahualpa Pretty ugly out the box but it’s proponents swear by it. Fixed or flexible width layout, with min/max width, 0 – 4 sidebars, very browser safe (incl. IE6), create custom widget areas, import/export styles, javascript color pickers, over 200 options.
• Hybrid A user-friendly, search-engine optimized parent theme, featuring 15 custom page templates and multiple widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want.

The reason I am talking a lot about frameworks is because I’m sure they are the future of WordPress theme design. As WordPress develops the themes are going to have to get more adaptive as a result.

So how does this help us customize WordPress?

Whether you are customizing a theme framework or a theme, I would advise you to create a child theme. I want to show you a child theme I made for the default theme that ships with WordPress called Twenty Ten. You can see it in action here for this site called the easy way to give up smoking.

I think Twenty Ten has been overlooked by the WordPress community because most people have their own theme already so haven’t checked it out. Plus, the words “free” and “default” don’t always sound sexy. But I think Twenty Ten is a really intelligent theme to use and it is well coded in HTML5.

But, if you are thinking of using Twenty Ten, make sure that you create a child theme for it. Because, Twenty Ten will need updating in the future and if you’ve made changes to the core Twenty Ten files and update it, your changes will be lost.

How to make a child theme

So, here’s how you make a child theme. And, we’re going to call the child theme “Henry”.

The first step is to create a folder called “Henry” and put a blank style.css and functions.php in it. These blank files, of course, should be created by NotePad in Windows or TextEdit in MacOS as plain text. In the style.css insert the following:

/*
Theme Name: Henry
Theme URI: http://robcubbon.com
Description: A child theme of the 2010 default theme for WordPress.
Author: Rob Cubbon
Author url: http://robcubbon.com
Version: 1.0
Template: twentyten
*/
@import url('../twentyten/style.css');

Now you will need an FTP program (like Filezilla for instance) to upload the Henry folder into the wp-content/themes/ folder alongside Twenty Ten and activate Henry via Appearance > Themes in the WordPress administration area.

Congratulations, you have made your first child theme. If you check out the appearance of the site after having activated Henry you will see Henry looks exactly the same as Twenty Ten – only it’s not Twenty Ten, it’s Henry.

Changing design of WordPress Twenty Ten theme with a child theme

In this video I show how I identify the CSS that needs to be changed in the theme and how I add it to the child theme in the WordPress back-end.

You can add different styles to the style.css in Henry and they will override the Twenty Ten styles (if you add the styles after the call to import the Twenty Ten styles, of course).

Here again is a link to the site I created with a child theme of Twenty Ten: Quit Cigarettes for Free with this Easy Method.

As you can see, I’ve increased the size of the sidebar, added bullets, changed colors and generally messed around with Twenty Ten until it doesn’t look like Twenty Ten. It looks like Henry !

The beauty of styling a child theme is that you start out with a mercifully short style.css – as you have called the parents styles with @import url('../twentyten/style.css'); – so no endless scrolling and squinty eyes trying to find a line of code!

There are a few tools that are essential for styling websites. These are Developer Tools in Chrome or Internet Explorer and the Firebug extension in Firefox. Personally I use Developer Tools in Chrome. On the Mac a quick Command-Option-I brings it up, then I can click on an element with the magnifying glass icon and the styles and style sheet that is affecting it will show up in the panel.

These tools will also show you which CSS selectors effect an element and which are overridden. And you can make HTML and CSS changes on the fly and view those changes.

Changing the functionality

As discussed, functionality can be changed or enhanced with plugins. Make sure you choose popular and well-supported plugins. The WordPress Plugin Directory shows you the number of downloads as well as crowdsourced compatibility stats.

You can also use functions.php to add functionality and code using WordPress Filter Hooks. For example, here is my function for adding a favicon.ico call to the header. You can use functions.php to put just about anything anywhere in your site and change or enhance the actions of the WordPress core.

<?php function my_head_function() {
echo '<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.quitcigs4free.com/favicon.ico"/>';
}
add_action('wp_head', 'my_head_function');
?>

This all seems complicated but it really isn’t. And it is a great way of controlling every pixel of your site whilst leaving WordPress and the theme to produce your website with the some of the most clean, validated, search engine friendly code there is.

Sources

• Child Themes -WordPress Codex
• Theme Development – WordPress Codex
• How to Modify WordPress Themes the Smart Way – excellent four-part series on child themes by Ian Stewart, creator of Thematic.
• How to make a child theme for WordPress: A pictorial introduction for beginners – illustrated introduction to child themes
• Introducing Thirty Ten – guide to creating a Twenty Ten Child Theme
• Twenty Ten theme site

What about you?

If there’s one question I’m asked more than any other by the visitors to my blog it’s this: “How do you amend your WordPress website”. The reason this is only the first time I’ve tackled this issue is because all themes and plugins are different so it is difficult to advise people on what to do.

Has this been helpful? How do you amend and customize your WordPress site? I’m always keen to hear your comments.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The internet is a big space but the world is even bigger. Although English is the most widely used language on the internet at the moment, in less than 5 years it will be Chinese.

We read in our native language, search in our native language and join social groups who use our native language. Also, research suggests that we put more credence into the words we read in our native language.

I recently created a multilingual website for an English School in Goa, India and with WordPress and WordPress Multilingual (WPML) plug-in from ICanLocalize.

Video of a multilingual website with WordPress and WPML plug-in

Here is my video of the front and back end of the multilingual website.

This got me thinking how easy it is to make any sort of website multilingual and roll out the SEO benefits of WordPress into different markets. Here’s how you do it.

Install

First, install WordPress on your web host. Most hosts have good one-click installs these days but if you want to do it manually you can.

Secondly, you need to purchase WordPress Multilingual plug-in from ICanLocalize. Make sure you comply with their minimum requirements. These are quite stringent as you are required to make the WordPress permalink structure to be either the default or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/. And, definitely use a Linux/Unix server rather than a Windows one even though this is not mentioned as one of their requirements.

Then, the plug-in can be downloaded and installed just like any other plug-in.

Set up

Once installed, the plug-in will walk you through an easy process where you choose the default language (in my case, English) and the other languages you intend to translate the site into (which can be added to later). WPML (WordPress Multilingual plug-in) comes with over 40 languages to choose from but you can also add your own language variants.

Finally, you need to add the language switcher which is a drop-down menu for visitors to select their preferred language. This is available as a widget, but I inserted it into the theme using this code: <?php do_action ('icl_language_selector'); ?>.

Entering the translations

I had the links on the top navigation bar listed with the WordPress command <?php wp_list_pages ('sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ?>. Once this is set up the top navigation bar will change depending on which language is selected.

The administration area for entering the translations is very intuitive – it uses flags to denote the translated pages. There is no need to enter the different languages in every page. If you forget to translate a page it won’t be listed using a WordPress command nor will that language be present in the language switcher when the page is viewed in another language. So, no annoying 404 errors!

If you’re concerned with SEO (who isn’t?), the page and site titles can be translated so you have complete control of the most important areas for keywords.

You can even employ ICanLocalize via the back-end to do your translations for you direct into your site!

You can also translate sidebar areas, widgets, footers and every bit of HTML text in your website. Here is some code I used to identify the different languages with PHP:

<?php if(ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE=='en'){ ?>
...English content here...
<?php } if(ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE=='ja'){ ?>
...Japanese content here...
...etc...
<?php } ?>


Contact forms

If you require a contact form there is a very simple solution. Contact Form 7 plug-in and WPML plug-in are a match made in heaven! Contact Form 7 is translated into around 40 languages. So, once you have Contact Form 7 installed, click “Contact” and “Add New” and you can choose the language of the new contact form.

Here you will get a normal contact form already translated complete with the 15 or so success or error messages (“Your message was sent successfully”; “Invalid email address” etc.) in 40 different languages. So, no need to send the contact page to the translators!

Conclusion

I only tried the multi-lingual plug-in with WordPress pages but didn’t translate posts as this website had no blog but I’m sure the plug-in can handle this just as well.

The support at the WPML forum is OK but expect to wait at least 24 hours for responses. Online WPML can be a little confusing. There is no link to the forum at WPML and no link back to the main site from the forum. Plus there is the ICanLocalize site where you purchase the license. I found the distinctions between these separate online entities unclear.

But don’t let these minor quibbles put you off, the WPML plug-in has been around for a long time and is well-supported. It has only just become a premium plug-in, having been free for years, and the developers are committed and professional.

What about you? Have you ever created a multi-lingual site? Has anyone else had experience using the WordPress Multilingual plug-in?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

You have a web presence. You have a product or a service to sell. You need to create awesome web pages that will elicit a response… You need to know how to write for the internet.

It’s a devilishly difficult skill to master. I’ve been doing it for five years and still consider myself a novice. Here’s what I’ve learnt so far:

Grab the reader’s attention

Your readers are extremely time poor. You need to solve a problem of theirs quickly and effectively.

• The most important points should be made in the first few lines of paragraphs or directly under subheads.
• Headlines should be short, direct and eye-catching.
• The text itself should be scannable (with short paragraphs, loads of subheads, use of numbered and bulleted lists, bolded words, links, images, etc.)

Practice and test

The skill of internet writing comes with practice and testing.

• Use Google Analytics to see which of your web pages are the most popular and ask yourself why.
• Use Twitter and see which tweets are retweeted and/or answered the most.
• Use social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg to see which headlines work best.
• Use Google Keyword Research to find out which phrases are being regularly searched for. This will tell you what people are interested in.

Hone your blog writing process

• Keep ideas books Have paper and pencils/pens in every room of the house, at work and on your person every minute of the day. Every time an idea comes into your head, quickly write it down.
• Don’t start writing in a browser Start writing on in a text editor like Word or TextEdit (Mac) or on paper. Don’t start to write in the WordPress text editor — that’s a real creativity killer.
• Copy the formatted text (with embolden and italicized words) and paste into the WordPress Visual editor (the formatting will be kept). Click “Save Draft” on the right-hand side of the WordPress editor. You’re not ready to “Publish” yet. Not by a long way!
• Work on tidying, editing and adding graphics to the text in WordPress. Check progress by clicking the “Preview” button which will open a version of your blog post before it is published.
• Repeat this process multiple times. Read and re-read the Preview version in one tab whilst making corrections in the WordPress editor in the other tab.

Every sentence that you read in this article I will have re-read back to myself at least ten times.

Don’t write crap

We all do it. It’s time we stopped. Here is a great guide to writing well where I took the following quote and advice:

“Never use a long word where a short one will do.” (George Orwell)

• Be as clear as you can
• Avoid the passive voice “He was seen by Joe” should be “Joe saw him.”
• Use orthodox spelling, punctuation, and capitalization
• Avoid qualifiers: a bit, a little, sort of, kind of, rather, quite, very, too, pretty much, in a sense.
• Avoid long words when short ones will do:  Assistance = help; implement = do; referred to as = called.
• Avoid laborious phrases. Why use “at the present time” when you can use “now”?

Go to Copyblogger for further internet writing advice.

Conclusion

This is what I’ve learnt while writing online. But I’m sure there’s more out there. Have you got any tips for writing effective web copy?

Also, if you have enjoyed or learnt something from this article, you could tweet, like or vote using the buttons below.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Featured Images in posts or pages is yet another example of how WordPress is not only a brilliant blogging platform but also an adaptable CMS (Content Management System).

The basic idea behind Featured Images is the ability to set a thumbnail, or any size of image, to an article so that when that article is listed in the site the featured image can appear as well. It creates an easy visual reference (which is worth a thousand words!) alongside the text-based title and description of your post or page which is so much more enticing and will make your visitors more likely to stay and read more!

My main blog page is an example of using Featured Images in WordPress. For every post I have set a generic thumbnail image that sums up the content of the article. So for each post you can see the image, the title and the excerpt.

A really simple example of using Featured Images

First of all, you need a theme that supports Featured Images. If so, you will see this box on the right-hand side when you create a new post or page.

If you can’t see this box it means your theme isn’t set up to support Featured Images yet. You just need a small bit of code to put in your theme’s functions file which is located here: wp-content/themes/your-theme/functions.php – you can edit it by going to Appearance > Editor on the left-hand side of the WordPress back-end and then by clicking “functions.php” on the right-hand side in your theme’s template files.

<?php
add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
set_post_thumbnail_size( 150, 150, true );
?>

The first line enables the use of Featured Images on your site. The second line determines their size (in this case 150 pixels square).

So, when you’re adding a new post and want to assign a Featured Image to it, click “Set featured image” in the Featured Image box on the right-hand side. In the resulting pop-up box below, after choosing an image from your computer or one that is already in your Media Library, it is important to enter the post’s (or page’s) title in the Title field as this will ensure the correct text pops up when you hover over a Featured Image.

Once you are happy with the image, the alt text and the title click “Use as Featured Image” (circled above) close the box by clicking the cross in the top right-hand corner. Now you will see your Featured Image in the right-hand side of the WordPress post editing area. Publish or Update the post. You will notice that, if you selected a horizontal or vertical image and your set_post_thumbnail_size is square, WordPress will have cropped your image. If you are not happy with the crop of the Featured Image you will either have to crop the image yourself and upload another image or read on as I have another solution for this!

In order to get a Featured Image to actually appear in your blog you will have to put this somewhere inside the loop:

<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>

Here is an example of how I get my Featured Images to appear on my main blog page:

<?php if(have_posts()) : ?><?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

<div class="thumbnail">
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>
</a>

</div>


Followed by a div of the title which links to the post’s permalink div.

Followed by a div with the excerpt plus a “read more” link to the post’s permalink.

<?php endwhile; ?>

If you’re worried that you might not be able to assign a Featured Image to all of your old posts, you can use this code to display a default image if no Featured Image exists:

<?php
if ( has_post_thumbnail() )
the_post_thumbnail();
else
echo '<img src="default" alt="" />';
?>

Displaying Featured Images with two different sizes

If you look at the bottom left-hand side of my home page, you will see that I list my most recent 5 posts with much smaller thumbnails (40 pixels square). Here’s how I did this. In my theme’s functions file I put:

<?php
add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
set_post_thumbnail_size( 150, 150, true );
add_image_size( 'my_thumbnail', 40, 40, true );
?>

Above you can see in the third line of PHP a second size of Featured Image. And then in the template file I use for the home page I put inside a loop:

<?php the_post_thumbnail('my_thumbnail'); ?>

Which produced 40 by 40 pixels square thumbnails!

How to maintain the full width or height of a Featured Image

So, now we know how to set and display images that are generic to the post as small square thumbnails, but what if you want to use the Featured Images as logos which can’t be cropped? I came across this issue when a client asked me to set up a system where every time a new company used her product she could upload the company’s logo and display them on her website. This is what I put in the theme’s functions file:

<?php
add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
set_post_thumbnail_size( 75, 40, true );
add_image_size( 'bigger_image', 9999, 40 );
?>

This ensures that the images will be displayed with a maximum width of 75 pixels and a maximum height of 40 pixels and that none of the image is cropped. And, within the loop, this is how I called the logo image:

<?php the_post_thumbnail('bigger_image'); ?>

Video showing how to use Featured Images using the above example

The video below explains how to assign a Featured Image to a post and how to set up Featured Images within a WordPress theme. It shows the example above of displaying a string of logos that are linked to a blog post in a particular category.

Watch the video here!

Conclusion

I am just scratching at the surface of what you can do with Featured Images in WordPress. It’s an incredibly powerful function with real ease of functionality for the end user. I am hopelessly indebted to many helpful people from the WordPress community that supplied some of the above code. What about you? Do you use Featured Images? Or, if not, did this help you at all to understand the use of them? Does this seem easy or difficult to apply?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

WordPress is a blog publishing platform that can be used to run many different types of website. Every time I install WordPress I run through the same geeky routine to ensure that it is well-functioning and easily discovered.

So, aside from the theme (the way the website looks) and the content (what the website says) these are my next steps after installing WordPress…

1. Create a Favicon

A favicon is a 16×16 pixel icon associated with the website that usually sits in the address bar of your browser. There are many online favicon creators and a plugin you can download for Photoshop. No self-respecting website is seen without one. Once saved upload to the route of your website and call in the <head> of every page like so.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://robcubbon.com/favicon.ico"/>

2. Put keywords in your URLs

One of the most important things you can do to your WordPress site in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to get your permalinks looking pretty!

By default WordPress uses web URLs like this: www.your-site.com/?p=N. In the WordPress admin panel go Settings > Permalinks, choose Custom Structure and enter /%postname%/. Now your URLs will look like this: www.your-site.com/keyword-rich-post/.

If you are getting an error message when trying to do this or it doesn’t work, put this in your .htaccess file on your site’s route.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

3. Create an XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that lists the pages of your site and gives search engines other important information, for example, how often you add content, which is helpful in getting new pages crawled quickly.

Creating an XML sitemap on a WordPress site is incredibly easy. You just need to install Google XML Sitemaps plugin and follow the instructions.

Once you have created your sitemap you should submit it to Google and other search engines, see below.

4. Register your site with Google Webmaster Tools

This is something that will take 5 minutes and will tell you how many of your pages are indexed by Google, how fast your site loads in comparison to others, alert you to errors, enable you to pick a geographical location, submit your sitemap… really, the Google Webmaster Tools is a pretty awesome free service.

In order to register you have to upload a file to the route of your server so that Google knows you are indeed the webmaster.

5. Create a Robots.txt file

After you’ve submitted your XML sitemap to Google you need to tell other search engines out there of it’s existence by creating a “robot.txt” text file and putting in the route of your server. Here’s mine:

Sitemap: http://robcubbon.com/sitemap.xml

You can also ward search engine robots off certain areas of your site that aren’t for public consumption. So, for example, by adding Disallow: /dev/ to the file you can make sure the search engines don’t crawl or index any page inside the “dev” directory of your website.

6. Make a contact page

99% of websites require a noticeable link to a contact page which includes details of how to get hold of the website’s owner(s) as well as a contact form. There are various WordPress plugins that will help you with the contact form but the one I always use is Contact Form 7. It has an excellent default form ready to plug in and play or you can set up more complicated forms with extra fields and dropdown menus. It can also send an acknowledgment emails.

7. Install a spam filtering plugin

“Kismet” sometimes means a predetermined course of events – so take comment spam out of your destiny by installing the Akismet plugin that comes with WordPress. There are other comment spam plugins by I find this one usually does the trick. You will need a WordPress API key. You can use the same one for multiple sites. Just search your email client for “WordPress API” and you should find it if you’ve done this before.

8. Install a database backup plugin

There are two things you need to do in order to back up your WordPress website successfully: one is to back up the files on the server; the second is to back up the database. I use this WordPress Database Backup plugin to make copies of my MySQL database – you can get it emailed to you every week!

9. Install Google Analytics

Another Google service. The pro is cool website visitor stats that are absolutely free. The con is that Google gets to look at your bounce rates but that’s never bothered me. Again, registering takes five minutes, all you have to do it paste a bit of code given to you on the Analytics site into the footer.php of your theme.

10. Ensure good page titles with an SEO plugin

Search engines attach more importance to the title than anything else on a page so, for this reason, it’s necessary to get them right. A good SEO plugin like HeadSpace2 SEO, All in One SEO Pack or Yoast WordPress SEO will enable you to get the important keywords of a page at the beginning of the title as well as set the page meta information both globally and individually.

11. Install a related posts plugin

If you are using your WordPress site as a blog, one of the most essential plugins that will increase your site’s “stickiness” is the WordPress Related Posts plugin which creates a list of other articles with connected subject matter. I use a textual list here but there are other plugins that can show related posts with thumbnails like the nrelate Related Content plugin.

12. Add Subscribe to Comments plugin

Another great way to get visitors to stay – and return to – your site is adding the Subscribe to Comments plugin. This plugin enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries.

13. Add social networking and bookmarking buttons

And, staying with bloggy-type plugins for the moment, another great idea is to enable visitors to easily vote for your blog posts on various social bookmarking and networking sites. You may want a Twitter, Digg or Facebook button. Or you may want a plugin that displays multiple voting sites. It depends entirely on the type of blog and which type of social media it is drawn to. But without these buttons there is much less chance of traffic from social media.

14. Install a cache plugin

These plugins cache pages and deliver them without accessing the database making the site much faster. And, as speed is now a contributory factor in search engine results, it’s a good idea to install one of these. I use W3 Total Cache.

15. Mobile plugin

Everyone’s talking about the mobile internet revolution and, while it may not be as seismic as some commenters will have you believe, you’d better get onboard. A normal blog or website may take long to load and be difficult to view on many smart phones. There are several great plugins that will format your site with a mobile theme for mobile visitors. WPTouch is generally considered to be one of the better ones.

Conclusion

It’s a bit difficult to know where to stop here as there are other things I do but they depend on the type of site (for example registering the site on Google Places).

What about you? Is there anything else you see as essential to creating a WordPress site aside from content and design?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The job isn’t over when a blogger publishes a blog post. Indeed, for some it has only just begun. Many bloggers will try to maximize the exposure for each post through submitting the post to various social media sites. I will be talking about social media a lot but before that there are also a number of other ways I promote my site and posts.

Write eye-catching titles!

The most important thing about your blog post is the post’s title. Not only does it’s HTML mark-up mean it contains most important words on the page search engine-wise, but also it will be the point of reference on the various social media sites. So write a title that people will want to click on.

Make them short, snappy, descriptive, interesting and … put numbers in them(!) Strange, but true. People click on posts with numbers in the titles. My most popular post through social media was 10 things I wish I had known about web designing 10 years ago. This got 7,000 visitors through StumbleUpon in only a few days and the visitors continued for weeks to come.

Optimize your site for search engines

A well optimized blog will mean the blog post being indexed by Google within a few hours of publishing. Try Googling the title of your post the next day – it should usually come up on the first page!

RSS and ping!

Use FeedBurner to burn your feed so people can subscribe to it.

Use ping services to notify blog directories that you have published new content on your blog. WordPress is set up to automatically ping Pingomatic but you can add more blog directories to be pinged every time you publish – in the WordPress admin panel go Settings > Writing and at the bottom add directories in Update Services and Save Changes.

Other bloggers

Visit and comment on other blogs within your community and niche. I don’t mean you should promote individual posts in other blogs! Write constructive comments on other blogs and you’ll develop win-win relationships with other bloggers. If you’ve written a particularly good post, you could even email bloggers with good reputations and give them the link to it.

Discussion forums

Similar to above, participate in forums within your community and niche. There may even be a discussion where you could post a link to a specific blog post if it was absolutely pertinent. Otherwise, of course, put your blog link in your signature so it’s there every time you post on a forum.

Newsletter

Invite your users to subscribe to a mailing list and send newsletters to them regularly. This builds a community around you, develops a relationship between you and your readers and, if you inform them of some of your latest posts, it can drive more traffic to your site. Make sure each newsletter you write also contains valuable information that your readers would be interested in as well as links back to your best posts.

Email signature

Put your blog link in your email signature. You may also want to put a link to the RSS feed, a newsletter sign up page and even links to your profile pages on your favorite social media sites.

Social media

I left the biggie until last! All of the above are important for getting your blog posts noticed. But social media can send literally thousands of visitors in a way that will put all the other techniques into shade.

However, I would urge against spending too much time with social media and to treat it with respect and caution – engage with the community, don’t just shamelessly promote your posts all the time.

And, don’t forget to add social media buttons to your posts to make it easy for people to bookmark them on all the various sites.

Timing: I tend to do this in the morning UK time as this means the posts will gathering popularity in Europe and then America as the day progresses. I also think it’s best to do it on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Here’s what I do:

• Twitter: I was slow to get going on Twitter but I have got much traffic from a tweet! Encourage people to follow you by adding your Twitter link on your blog and email signature. Tweet your latest posts as well as other good material in your niche. Feel free to follow me on Twitter.
• LinkedIn: I look on LinkedIn as the thinking person’s Facebook. The key to LinkedIn is joining groups. You may join as many as 50 groups. So join groups in your niche and you can send your link to all of them at once as a discussion. Again, I would urge caution here. Make sure the post is relevant to the group and interact with the group personally as well. Used correctly this can bring in loads of targeted traffic. Feel free to connect with me at LinkedIn.
• General social bookmarking sites: I have profiles on and regularly post to: StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, DZone, Reddit and Delicious which are some of the biggest.
• Niche social bookmarking sites: These sites can often be a better bet than the big boys. It’s easier to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond so at the moment I post to WebBlend which then offers further links to CypherBox, FaqPal, ZaBox, DesignBump and DesignFloat amongst others. Posting to one and following the links to others means you don’t have to fill in all the post’s info multiple times which can get tedious.
• Other social media sites: Of course it doesn’t finish there. As there is also FriendFeed, Google Buzz and Facebook. But I think that’s enough for now.
• Form alliances with other bloggers: I get by with a little help from my friends. Sometimes it only takes a few votes to secure an prominent position on a social bookmarking site. So you can say to other bloggers in your niche, “if you think it’s worthy, please vote for my post at such-and-such a site” and send them the link to make it easy. I have created the Designers’ Social Media Partnership for this purpose – any newcomers are most welcome!

Conclusion

I’m sure every blogger has a little routine of what they do. I would love to hear what anyone else does!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

So you’re using WordPress and you are getting a nice amount of traffic, say a few hundred visitors a day. Maybe you love running many of the great plugins that add extra functionality for your visitors. There’s just one problem: your server is struggling with the load and your site isn’t just slow, it’s ssslllooowww!

Shared hosting maybe inexpensive but resources are limited and security can be compromised. Dedicated servers are very powerful, can require high levels of technical knowledge for customization and are extremely expensive. VPS hosting can be the happy halfway house.

A Virtual Private Server is a physical computer partitioned into multiple servers each with running its own operating system.

Here are the most recommended VPS hosts for WordPress

I contacted hundreds of WordPress experts to ask them about their experiences and recommendations for VPS hosts. Speed, reliability, ease of use and quality of support were considered in the following recommendations.

A2 hosting

Inexpensive and their support comes highly recommended. 256 MB (burstable to 512MB) RAM, 10 GB storage, 300GB monthly bandwidth for $14/month. Other packages are similarly competitive. You can get cPanel with much higher specs for $50/month with the super Managed VPS Packages. 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Sign up to A2 VPS hosting here.

Dreamhost

Reasonably priced, good support, fantastic recommendations. This is my choice! RAM starts at 300MB, unlimited space and bandwidth. Dreamhost have their own award-winning user’s control panel. Prices start at $15/month. You can change your resource levels on the fly… no reboot needed!

Use IWANTADISCOUNT7 as a coupon code to get 50% off your first month if you sign up to Dreamhost.

Liquidweb

Their VPS plans start at $60/month and include cPanel as well as root access, 384MB RAM, 20GB storage, 400GB bandwidth, 4 IP addresses. Their VPS packages support 100 percent network uptime, VPS monitoring and a 30 minute support response guarantee.

Use Liquidweb hosting here.

Rackspace

Their users had nothing but good things to say about Rackspace. Cloud Sites™ runs on a series of clusters so it has redundancy and protection built in. When you upload your site or web based application, multiple instances of it run so that even if an entire server goes down your site stays up and running. They have their own cloud control panel proprietary GUI to navigate you through the clouds. Cloud Sites™ start at $149/month.

Sign up with Rackspace here.

Used by the famous tech blogger Robert Scoble, who is an employee of the company. Your site will be super fast here.

VPS.net

This is all on the cloud – and affordable. Their experts will move your site to VPS.net for no charge. By default everything is command line; cPanel is an extra. 5GB disk space, 250GB network transfer, for an average 25k visitors for £13 per month (first month £1). 25GB disk space, 500GB network transfer for an average 125k visitors for £40 per month. Their users were extremely complimentary.

Sign up with VPS.net here.

Used by famous WordPress SEO blogger Joost de Valk (Yoast).

VPS hosting can be the happy halfway house

Virtual private server (VPS) hosting could be a solution if you have outgrown your shared hosting and don’t need to move to a dedicated server. It is the best option for small to medium sized businesses. A site hosted on a VPS gets its own RAM and disk space, however, it shares the processing capacity (CPU) with other sites.

Remember, Google includes a site’s speed into it’s algorithm – so a faster running site is not only advantageous to your visitors but also may push you higher in the search engine results pages.

To command line or to control panel?

A web host control panel (such a cPanel) provides a graphical interface designed to simplify the process of hosting a web site. It makes it easier to, for example, move files around, or set up or import MySQL databases necessary for WordPress. Alternatively you can type command lines through a Secure Shell (SSH). SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged securely between two networked devices. Anything you can do via cPanel is also doable via SSH without the overhead of the HTML, imagery and web server processing so it is therefore quicker.

Personally, I find the WYSIWYG nature of the control panel more familiar and intuitive, however, I’ve been using SSH as well and it can sometimes be a better way of doing things.

VPS hosting in the cloud or Standard VPS hosting?

Cloud computing is run on multiple of servers whereas on standard VPS hosting your site will sit on only one computer with associated backups. For this reason there is usually less or no downtime with cloud based services.

Conclusion

Deciding on a VPS host for WordPress is no easy business. There are many things to consider. Above all make sure you pick a host that other WordPressers recommend.

Use the following criteria to decide:

• RAM: 500MB RAM would be OK for a WordPress site that gets on average 400 visitors a day.
• CPU
• Band Width and Disc Space
• Server Software: if you want to use cPanel you may have to pay extra or maybe your favorite server software isn’t available
• Quality of Support
• Reputation

If you have any other recommendations or questions be sure to make them known in the comments section!

Shared hosting for WordPress

Alternatively, if you find these prices too expensive for you your can try shared hosting for WordPress.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

If you are either just starting out as a blogger with a self-hosted WordPress blog or you are frustrated by your current host – here is a list of the best WordPress shared hosting companies as voted for by WordPress experts.

Shared web hosting is a service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the internet. It is generally the most economical option for hosting, as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance.

Recommended shared hosting for WordPress websites

I contacted hundreds of individuals through the WordPress LinkedIn group. Members of this group are high end webmasters with hundreds of sites on their books who have been around the block as far as web hosts are concerned – many of them were using 3 or 4 shared hosts for multiple sites. If you’re into LinkedIn and WordPress I would strongly recommend this group as I have found the advice and discussions there to be top notch!

The four most important factors we discussed in the survey were: price, speed, reliability and quality of support. We’ve all had the terrible experience of a website not behaving as it should and sometimes a timely and considered approach by the support team is worth a thousand dollars!

Here are the four hosts who came out as the best shared hosts for WordPress by WordPress professionals:

Bluehost

The general consensus seems to be that Bluehost is inexpensive and has many powerful tools but support is maybe where it lacks the most. BlueHost is one of the 20 largest web hosts, collectively hosting well over 450000 domains with its sister company, HostMonster. I’ve used BlueHost for years and it is astonishingly fast for a shared host and I can highly recommend them.

Sign up with Bluehost here.

Hostgator

The company was founded in 2002 by Chairman Brent Oxley, who started the company from his dorm room at university. With over two million domains, HostGator hosts approximately 1% of the world’s internet traffic. They came up many times in our survey as being a reliable host.

Sign up with Hostgator here.

Dreamhost

Reasonably priced, good support, fantastic recommendations. Unlimited space and bandwidth. Dreamhost don’t have cPanel but they do have their own award-winning user’s control panel.

Sign up with Dreamhost here.

What not to do!

One hosting company’s name came up for all the wrong reasons so many times. The server sluggishness and all round poor performance at GoDaddy was mentioned again and again! So, by all means, register your domain name with GoDaddy, but don’t use them for hosting!

WordPress and Shared Hosting

As the internet becomes the preferred method of communication for businesses worldwide, the tool of creating and publishing the content is of increasing importance. WordPress is used by millions to deliver news, messages and articles to the world. It has become not only the blogger’s weapon of choice but also a hugely popular Content Management System.

Learning how to use WordPress is easy. All you have to do is to login, add a new article and either write in WordPress, or copy and paste from your favorite word processor. But WordPress hosting is not for every web service.

WordPress requires high standards from the web hosting provider which is why you should take a lot of time to discover the best hosts. But first here’s a description of shared hosting and why it might be for you.

A shared hosting account is cheaper and easier to maintain than a more expensive dedicated or VPS account. It’s considered typical for budget or entry-level hosting services but people can run successful websites for years on shared hosting. It can supply sufficient disk space, bandwidth and functionality for personal, hobby or small-business websites.

Disadvantages of shared hosting

However, being the cheapest package, it has its disadvantages. Firstly, it usually has a reduced level of security as you are sharing the server with several other websites. Shared hosting also has limited resources causing speed issues at both the back and front ends of your site.

Many individuals on the same server can lead to issues with blacklisting on email. I would recommend everyone route email through Google Apps for Business for this reason.

Remember, with WordPress to choose a host running Linux and preferably running Apache, using the Apache mod_rewrite.

Conclusion

I learnt a huge amount from doing this survey. However, I decided to turn my back on shared hosting for this site and went for a Virtual Private Server (VPS). My next post will be about the VPS hosts for WordPress.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I got a call from a potential client the other day and he asked me a very simple question.

“Once you’ve created the website for me will you charge me every time I want to edit one of the pages?”

And, although this is not the first time I have heard this question, it still amazes me every time I hear it. Some web agencies create websites which their client has absolutely no ability to change once completed. This isn’t standard practice in the industry but it does happen.

If you have a website, it is never a question of if you want to change it; it’s always a question of when you want to change it.

Get your website set up with a Content Management System that is easy to use

A Content Management System (CMS) is software, implemented as a web application, that manages web sites. It should have an intuitive user interface that makes navigating to the page and changing it as easy as updating a text document on your computer.

There’s many great CMSs that enable you to create, edit and delete pages at will and, there’s even better news, a lot of them are free!

WordPress

WordPress is a fantastic web publishing platform which focuses on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. And, as it is open source, it’s free. “Free and priceless at the same time”. As you can see from the screenshot below there is a WYSIWYG interface which can be mastered easily.

I have written extensively about the setting up WordPress and creating and editing web pages using the WordPress UI.

WordPress is actually blogging software that is fast being used as the most simple and robust CMS. If you just want pages, with sub-pages, and maybe even sub-sub-pages that will be created and deleted along the way then WordPress can be set up to do that for you. Your web designer will not have to be involved at all. And, if you’re interested in improving your site’s position in search engines and you’d like to publish more than just web pages, then add a blog to your site. WordPress will do that easily!

I appreciate that many of my visitors will know this already but I felt I had to state the basics of WordPress as it’s potential as a CMS is so awesome people should know about it. As does that potential client I mentioned earlier, who’s now a client!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Blogs are, in my opinion, the easiest and best way to get stuff on the web.

With a blog you can publish constantly updated information about yourself, your company or your interests to the world. And what makes it even better is that this information is chronologically ordered and categorized for search engines almost automatically.

Your blog posts should be delivered in the most beautiful and readable way to get the most out of this fantastic medium.

Here are some design essentials you can use to improve the look of your blog and your blog posts.

Body text size and line spacing

The body text is the text you are reading at the moment – a normal paragraph within an article. It’s the meat and drink of the blog so it has to be readable. Having said that it’s amazing how many websites have their body text too small. Some people will not read text below a certain size.

I’m going to stick my neck out now and say that the font size of body text on a website should never be smaller than 15 pixels or 1 em in size. Furthermore the line height (the line spacing or leading) should always be 25% larger than the font size or more. So if the font size of your body text is 15 pixels; your line height should be 19 pixels or more. If the font size of your body text is 1 em; your line height should be 1.25 em or more.

If you are not familiar with the terms pixels, ems, font size, line height, etc., or don’t know how to change them read on.

The file that controls the size of the body text on your blog is the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file. If you are are a WordPress user it will most likely be in your theme folder and called “style.css”.

You can identify the font size and the location of this CSS file as well as previewing the changes using your browser. If you’re using Chrome or Internet Explorer you can view Developer Tools. And if you’re using Firefox you can use the Firebug extension.

While using these tools’ cursor (it can be an arrow or a magnifying glass), click on the element that concerns you and then the styles and style sheet that is affecting it will show up in the Developer Tools or Firebug panel. So, if you click on a body text paragraph you may see that it is controlled by the body element in your main CSS file.

Above you can see in a screen shot from the Firebug panel in Firefox that the font size of the body text is 12 pixels and the line height is 20 pixels. You can actually change the values in this panel and the browser will render the changes live. This is a great way to learn CSS and mess around with different design elements. You can also see that the file controlling these styles is called “style.css”, hover over the file name in this panel and the web address of the CSS file will show as a tool tip.

Paragraph spacing

Paragraphs on the web should have a space between them. It should be around half the line height. So, if your line height is 20 pixels, you should add a 10 pixel gap between paragraphs. This is usually done with either padding or margin on the <p> tag. Here is a sample CSS code that adds a 10 pixel gap to the end of each paragraph:

p { margin-bottom: 10px }

Include sub-headings in your blog posts

If you are writing a post with more than a few hundred words then you should use subheadings. They improve the post for your readers as they break up and order the text and they are also good for SEO. Here is the HTML code for the above subheading:

<h3>Include sub-headings in your blog posts</h3>

As my normal blog title is wrapped inside <h2> tags my subhead text is therefore wrapped inside <h3> tags. This shows the hierarchy of headings – the subheading isn’t as important as the heading. Some blog post titles are <h1> in which case the subheadings should be <h2>.

As above, use Firebug for Firefox and the Developer Tools in Internet Explorer and Chrome to identify the title tag and then set up an <h2> tag or <h3> tag in your stylesheet accordingly. Here is the CSS for my titles and subheadings:

h2 { font-size: 23px; line-height:27px; color: #4c5464; }
h3 { font-size: 18px; line-height:22px; color: #243f76; }

Make your text scannable

Remember your visitors will typically spend a few seconds on your website so it is necessary to make them feel at ease and entrap them. So far we have talked about good body text typography, paragraph spacing and subheadings to do this. But you can also add bold text, italics, bullets, numbered lists, links, etc. to break up otherwise dull lines of text. These highlighted words jump out and may interest your readers. It also looks nicer.

Insert images

Blog posts are incredibly boring without images or video. Use them. Here is an article I wrote on how to add images to WordPress posts.

Conclusion

I wrote more about the technicalities of writing and designing a WordPress post here.

Font size, line height, paragraph spacing, subheads, images and other typographical elements can all be used to improve legibility and aesthetics in your blog posts. Have I forgotten something? Can you suggest other ways to improve the design of blog posts?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

When writing a WordPress post it is extremely important to make it as visually appealing as possible. Visitors are much more likely to spend a bit of time on the page if it has a nice image and the text is laid out in a pleasing way.

Images are important in terms of SEO. If they are uploaded with correct and keyword-rich names and alt texts they can pull in a valuable amount of targetted traffic from image searches.

Adding an image with text above and below

Click the first icon top left after the words “Upload/Insert”, if you hover over the tooltip will be “Add an Image”. In the resulting dialog box you can click “Select Files” to get the image from your computer. (I would choose the Browser uploader rather than the Flash uploader). Once the image is uploaded you will see another dialog box with the image’s thumbnail displayed.

It will usually be a large image (of, say, 400 pixels or more wide) that you will want to put on it’s own after a paragraph of text. Make sure you have hit Return (once in Visual mode; twice in HTML mode) before clicking the Add an Image icon. And, after uploading, in the Adding Image dialog box, under Alignment, click “Center” (alternatively you can select the image and click the centered text button after inserting).

Adding an image with text flowing around

If you have a smaller image of, maybe, 200 pixels width, you may want to insert it into a paragraph with the text flowing around it. If so, make sure your cursor is blinking next to the word at the beginning of the paragraph you want the image to go in when you click the add image icon. And whilst in the Add an Image dialog box click, under Alignment click “Left” or “Right”.

Your image should always have a descriptive file name with no spaces and a .jpg, .gif or .png at the end. For the image here, left, I would use the file name “brown-bear-in-woods.jpg”. Upper and lower case letters are irrelevant here so it is best stick to lowercase and use hyphens to separate the words. Spaces will be converted to hyphens after uploading via WordPress. And, hyphens are better than underscores.

Alt text

Always try to write an Alternate text for the image. This is how you would describe the image to a blind person. So, in our example the Alternate text would be “European Brown Bear walking through the forests of Finland”. Remember, this is crawled by the search engines so put keywords in where appropriate! The Alternate text is in the Adding Image dialog box which appears after an image is uploaded.

Image size

One last thing to consider when uploading images is their size. If you want the image to be the same size as it is on your computer click Full Size under Size. If you want the image to be a different size you can choose Thumbnail, Medium or Large. You can change these sizes in Settings > Media.

Finally…

If you want to write a caption you may.

Lastly, click “Insert into Post”. If you’ve made a mistake you can always click the image in the Visual editor and click on the “mountain” icon, then click “Advanced Settings” and here you can change some of the above variables. Otherwise, delete the image and start again.

Image is not displaying to the left or right correctly or the caption does not appear close enough to image

Put this code in your theme’s CSS:

.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.alignleft {
float: left;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
/* optional rounded corners for browsers that support it */
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}

It says in the WordPress Codex that “Each theme should have these or similar styles in its style.css file to be able to display images and captions properly”. But I can tell you many themes don’t has this code in there. Probably because theme designers like to style images and captions themselves and don’t realise that WordPress can do it for you.

This concludes my post on inserting images to a WordPress post. If anybody has anything to add or thinks I have missed anything please comment away!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I worked for quite a while on the design stages with the client. We went through 14 visuals for the home page before I started to work on coding the WordPress theme. Here is one of the last of them:

jQuery and the power of blogging

One of the most exciting parts of the website for me was creating an image slider with jQuery. The client was particularly keen on having clickable sliding panels like the ones that can be seen at BarackObama.com. So how was I going to find out how to do that?

The answer was already on my own website in the shape of a comment by Jaitra Gillespie on a post about JavaScript I’d written a while ago. In it he posted a link to a jQuery coda slider that had a particularly good accompanying tutorial and screencast. This is what I used for the panels beneath the top navigation.

If you click the above image to go to the website you’ll see that not only do the buttons beneath the panels operate them but also the links in the text below.

I’m grateful to both Remy Sharp for the excellent tutorial and Jaitra Gillespie for putting me on to it.

Designing and developing the website with WordPress

After I did the theme and the image slider there were still other things to do.

I used NextGEN gallery for the image gallery. There was a slight conflict between the JavaScript calls in the head for the jQuery coda slider and the NextGEN plugin which caused the Shutter and Thickbox image presentation effect not to work. I moved the <?php wp_head(); ?> (and therefore the NextGEN JavaScript calls) to after the jQuery JavaScript calls in the head and this seemed to get it to work.

I created different categories in the blog section, one being “Latest News”, and had the 10 most recent posts of that category listed in the sidebar. I also added a contact form with Contact Form 7 plugin, a chat room, various static pages and a site-wide social bookmarking and networking link.

What do you think?

Have you ever used WordPress as a CMS to create a site? Have you ever used jQuery to create a coda slider? What do you think of the way I did it?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The plugin was created by Alex Rabe who studied all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, he thought that some of them were really good and well designed, but missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums.

Here’s how you do it:

Download the plugin and, after un-zipping and uploading to my wp-content/plugins folder on my server, I activated the plugin in the WordPress CMS. For more explanation about WordPress and loading plugins consult the excellent WordPress documentation.

php.ini

I found that I had to edit my php.ini in order to get the plugin to work properly. php.ini is a text file that sits on your server (in this case on the root) that sets global variables such as memory usage. I have found that allocating more memory to PHP on the server useful to get WordPress working at reasonable speeds. That is why I have memory_limit = 64M in my php.ini. Here are the other commands I put in my php.ini to get this plugin to work.

file_uploads = On
upload_max_filesize = 20M
post_max_size = 25M
max_execution_time = 600
max_input_time = 600
safe_mode = 0

Setting up a gallery

On the left hand side of your WordPress navigation right at the bottom you will now see a section called “Gallery”, click on the triangle next to that and from the options that slide down click “Add Gallery / Images” and give a name to your gallery. Now, to upload images, click the last tab on this page entitled “Upload Images”, click “Browse” and locate the image on your computer. Very important: make sure flash based upload is not enabled! I found the plugin would not work properly otherwise. Choose the gallery you have just created and click the “Upload Images” button. I also used the “Upload Zip” method and I was really impressed with how it worked. You can upload potentially hundreds of images in one go and the plug-in will do the rest! Awesome!

Managing the gallery

At the bottom of the left hand WordPress navigation again, click “Manage Gallery” underneath “Gallery”, choose the gallery you have just created and here you can alter the title and alt tags for the images. This is not only very important for SEO purposes but also sets the text when the thumbnails are hovered over and captions when the bigger images are displayed. Once done, click “Save Changes”.

Adding gallery to a WordPress post or page

Easy! Simply add [nggallery id=1] while editing the post or page. The gallery id number can be seen on the Gallery Overview page. The first one you do will be number 1.

Options

I left the plugin options roughly as default but there are a few important things to consider. On the first page of the options I would leave “wp-content/gallery/” as the default path for all galleries. I would uncheck “Activate PicLens/CoolIris support” as not many people have PicLens or CoolIris installed and it creates an unsightly link above your gallery.

You can set the size of the images and the thumbnails here as well as setting a watermark onto the images.

The “Effects” option is very important. It sets the effect that displays the image when the thumbnail is clicked. Shutter and Thickbox will work if selected as these are installed with the plugin however you can use your own. I used “ShadowBox” which is similar to Lightbox and is nicer than the two that are bundled with it.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a format used to publish frequently updated content from the web on the web. The RSS feed is your posts’ content without any of your website’s style so it will contain just the titles, body text and image paths of your posts. So you better make your image paths absolute not relative!

The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of your favorite websites from multiple sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”, which can be on your browser or on your desktop.

How to set up a Feedburner feed

Google has bought FeedBurner, so you need to sign in to Google and then go to Feedburner and look for where it says something like “Burn a feed right this instant”. WordPress blogs already come with a feed so you can enter either your blog’s URL (eg: http://www.my-blog.com) or your blog’s feed (eg: http://www.my-blog.com/feed, http://www.my-blog.com/?feed=rss2), check a box if you are a podcaster and hit “Next”.

You will next be greeted with a page where you can change your feed title and feed address. Once you are satisfied with those hit “Next” again. After this there are further Feedburner options to choose from – most of which I ignore, it’s FeedBurner’s email subscription that rocks but I’ll come to that later!

Install the FeedBurner plugin

For the best results using FeedBurner with your self-hosted WordPress site, the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin is recommended. It will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.my-blog.com/feed/ or http://www.my-blog.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

WordPress settings

Feedburner can only handle feeds under 512K. In WordPress, make sure your feed doesn’t exceed this in the administration area, by going Settings > Reading, “For each article in a feed, show” – you can choose “Summary” although I like to have “Full text” and don’t put more than 50 in “Syndication feeds show the most recent” if you write long posts.

What is email subscription and how can you set it up?

Email subscription to your blog allows those who have signed up for it to receive your blog posts in their inbox. You can use Aweber to do this but I’ll show you how to do it for free with FeedBurner.

With your feed selected click the “Publicize” tab, then click “Email Subscriptions” on the left, making sure “Feedburner” is selected, and click “Activate”. This will then present you with some HTML code in the box which you will need to copy and paste somewhere in your website.

Once signed up a subscriber will receive your posts as emails shortly after they are published. Google/FeedBurner handles all the backend work – subscribers verify themselves by email and have the option of unsubscribing at the bottom of every email they receive.

Design your posts so they look great as an email

Underneath the “Email Subscriptions” link in FeedBurner whilst in the “Publicize” tab there is another link entitled “Email Branding”. Do spend some time on this page formatting text, headings and links – you can specify the font, size and color. You can also add your logo and specify the title of the email.

Advertise the RSS feed and email subscription on your website

On my website I advertise the RSS feed with the familiar RSS icon which is linked to my FeedBurner feed. And I use the familiar email icon which takes you to the page where you can subscribe to my posts by email. I’ve also got some general information about feeds on this page so that my readers can decide which is the best way for them to subscribe to my blog.

What’s the benefit of RSS and email subscription?

They are both fantastic marketing tools. RSS brings in traffic as it is, for some people, an easy way of reading a site’s content. Email subscription can work like a weekly newsletter to your subscribers with a link back to your site. A subscriber is always worth more than a visitor because, more often than not they will return to your site again and again. The added advantage of the email subscribers is that you have the list of their email address’s although I wouldn’t advocate sending them much in the way of extra mail.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Constantly updated quality content is the mainstay of any website or blog. I have already described how to set up a WordPress.org blog and what to write about when you have one. Here’s the “how to” for those new-ish to WordPress…

There are three things to remember when you are writing:

1. Make your text scannable! That means, by what ever means – using bold text, titles, italics, bullets, links, etc – break up otherwise dull looking text. Remember your visitors will typically spend a few seconds on your website so it is necessary to entrap them. These words and phrases that jump out may interest the reader. It also looks nicer.
2. SEO. Include your keywords in the title of your post or page, in the <h3> tags or subtitles or in bold. Keywords are descriptors of the page or the site. But you may want to emphasize the ones with which you want to be found by search engine. So I may want to put graphic designer in my headings more often than not as I mainly want to be found on Google for people searching for graphic designers. However, only include words that are relevant to the article.
3. Save. As soon as you start writing click the “Save Draft” button. And click this intermittently through the writing process. Also, click the “Preview” button (you can do this straight after even if it hasn’t finished saving the draft) from time to time and see how your post looks. This opens it in a different window of your browser (or tab if you are using them) and if you keep this window open it will update every time you hit “Preview”. Don’t worry, the unfinished post or page is invisible to your website’s visitors until you click the “Publish” button! WordPress does have an autosave function but I find this the best method.

Getting started: What is the difference between a WordPress page and a WordPress post?

Both WordPress pages and posts create webpages! However a WordPress page is for static content (typically the “About Us” or “Contact” page) and a WordPress post is for adding content to your blog, something that is dated and belongs to a certain category.

The process of writing a new post or page in WordPress 2.7 and above starts in the dashboard (the dashboard is the welcome screen which displays when you add “wp-admin” after your blog’s URL in the browser’s address bar). Look for where it says Post or Page in the left hand column. Under these headings, click “Add New” (you may need to click the small arrow when you hover the mouse over to the right of where it says Post or Page).

Adding the title of your post or page

OK, this may be pretty obvious. The box at the top of the “Add New Post” or “Add New Page” screen (just below where it says “Add New Post” or “Add New Page”) is for the title. Remember this title is very important for SEO terms so cram it full of keywords.

If you have your permalinks set to %postname% (as is highly recommended) the permalink will be displayed beneath the post title. WordPress is quite good at generating these pretty permalinks. However, if you’ve taken a while to write the title you may find that not all of the words are in the permalink. In this case you can type in all the words you want, separated by hyphens.

Writing – what all those buttons mean above your WordPress text editor?

Writing a WordPress post can be like writing in a word processing package. Well, nearly, but not quite…

There are two tabs above the text editor – Visual and HTML. If you are a beginner with HTML I would advise you to start to flick between the two. If you know about HTML you’ll probably stay on the HTML tab all the time.

The following bulleted list is my explanation of the buttons along the top of the Visual editor and their results in HTML.

• Bold: Fairly simple one to start with. It emboldens the text in Visual mode and wraps <strong> tags around it in HTML mode.
• Italic: You guessed it. This italicizes the text in Visual mode and wraps <em> tags around it in HTML mode.
• Strikethrough: This strikesthrough the text in Visual mode and wraps <del> tags around it in HTML mode, it usually means that the word was in the original version of the text but is to be discounted now. (No, I’ve never used it before.)
• Unordered list or bullet points: Click to add a bullet and then hit return for subsequent bullets. Hit return twice to end bullets. In HTML mode, click <li> when each individual bullet point is highlighted, then select all bullets plus <li> tags and click <ul>.
• Ordered list or numbered points: Much like above. Click to add number 1 and then hit return for the following numbers. Hit return twice to finish the numbered list. In HTML mode, click <li> when each individual numbered phrase is highlighted, then select all phrases plus <li> tags and click <ol>.
• Blockquote: This defines the selected text as a block quotation. It is indented and most themes will put in a colored background. It is a very good way of breaking up text and I must confess I don’t always use it for a quotation but also as a method of differentiating a block of text from the main article.
• Align left, center and right: Pretty obvious really. Adds style="text-align: left;", style="text-align: center;" or style="text-align: right;" into whatever element the cursor is blinking in.
• Insert link: This is very useful in both modes. Once the text you want to anchor the hyperlink is selected and this button is clicked a window will pop up with a handy (or not so handy) http:// already there. Put the whole link into this box (for example http://www.google.com/) and in the HTML mode you will see <a href="http://www.google.com/"> at the beginning of the anchor text and </a> at the end.
• Unlink: Select the colored underlined text in Visual mode and click this and it’ll get rid of the link.
• More: This breaks a post into “teaser” and content sections. Insert this tag after a few sentences of your post and on your blog’s home page you’ll see only those first few sentences followed by a hyperlink (more...), which when clicked displays the rest of the post’s content.
• Spellcheck: I tend to rely on Firefox’s spellchecker so I don’t know how good this one is.
• Fullscreen mode: Does what it says on the tin.
• Kitchensink: When clicked this will bring a whole second line of formatting options. Click here for further explanation of the kitchensink.

This is only a brief description of using the text editor in Visual mode. Remember to constantly flick between Visual and HTML tabs and you will learn a bit about HTML. One thing you will see is that most HTML tags consist of two tags – a start tag and an end tag. The end tag is identified by a forward slash (/) before the tag name (look out for this in your HTML editor).

Indeed, instead of selecting the text and clicking the button to apply whatever text style you want, you can position your cursor before the text, click the style button once, then move it to the end of the text that you want styling and click the same button again and the end result will be the same. It’s a case of opening and closing a tag.

Insertion of the <p> tag

If you hit the return key on your keyboard in the Visual text editor you will get a new paragraph. So it will wrap the previous text in <p> tags.

In the HTML editor, one hit of the return key will give you a line break or <br/> tag. (A slightly different type of tag, it stands on it’s own, is “self-closing” and therefore requires no start or end tag). Two hits of the return key in the HTML text editor will give you the new paragraph <p> tags just like one hit does in the Visual editor.

Any more hits of the return key won’t give you any more line breaks so don’t try it!

Insertion of the <h3> tag

Remember our important points to think of while writing a WordPress page or post? Breaking text up and SEO? The <h3> tag encompasses both of these in a big way.

In most WordPress themes, the title of your post is wrapped within <h2> tags which conveys to search engines that it is important text. Similarly, you can break up your text with subheadings or <h3> tags which conveys to search engines that it isn’t as important as <h2> text but is important nonetheless.

So I find these tags very important. But they don’t exist in the Visual editor so you’ll have to use the HTML editor to insert a subheading in your post or page!

Insertion of code into the HTML text editor

You can add any HTML code you like into the HTML text editor which is very useful. I’ve often added tables and divs. One word of warning when doing this: remember the <p> tags!

Say you want to put ordinary text inside a <td> tag. You will have to hit your carriage return twice to get the <p> tags to appear. In this case it is probably easier to add the <p> tags in the editor.

How to insert images manually into a WordPress post or page

OK. WordPress has great new options for inserting images, audio and video into your post. But I’m old-school and I want to show you how to do it the HTML way.

There are two main ways to put an image into a post. One way (see above) is to make the image straddle the whole width of the text. To be able to get the image to fit snuggly into the box you are writing you need to know the width in pixels of the <div> that contains the post text. Go to Appearance > Editor in the WordPress dashboard and click on <style.css> to find this out. In my theme the <div> that contains the text and headlines is called “entry”.

Once you have done this you need to re-size your image to that pixel width using photo editing software such as Photoshop and upload it using an FTP client to your website, preferably into a directory called “images”. Once that is done you can enter this code into the HTML text editor:

<img src="http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg" alt=""/>

Remember to add two returns above and below it in the HTML text editor. Also, don’t forget to write good keyword rich and descriptive file names and alt text for the image.

The other method is to add a less wide image to the left or the right of the main body of text and have the text wrap around it. In this case you don’t want to add any returns after the code as you want the text to run adjacent to it. Simply insert this into the beginning of a paragraph to insert an image on the left hand side of the text:

<img src="http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" alt=""/>

And here is the code for inserting an image on the right hand side of the text:

<img src="http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px;" alt=""/>

Conclusion – OMG this post has been so long and you’ve got to the end of it!

I’m sorry that went on for a bit longer than I thought it would. Just goes to show you there’s more to writing a WordPress page or post than just … writing!

If anyone has anything to add to this, as always, please do so in the comments below. I’m bound to have left some important things out and probably made a mistake or two – intentional, of course!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the fifth in the series where I explain how an individual or small or medium sized organization can get themselves noticed in the big bad world.

Other installments explained how to set up a web site from scratch, how to install WordPress and what to write on your site.

Before we commence a couple of definitions – SEO or Search Engine Optimization: is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via organic search results. Keywords: (1) descriptors that capture the essence of a topic or (2) the words you type into a search engine in order to find stuff.

WordPress is pretty well structured for SEO anyway but there are a number of things you can do to improve it’s performance thus winning you more visitors, collaborators and clients.

Get the right URLs

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them (for example: http://www.your-site.com/?p=N). It’s not good and it’s not pretty. In the WordPress admin panel go Settings > Permalinks. What format is the best to choose? I would go for /%postname%/. This is best because the URLs to articles should never change and it gets keyword rich page titles in there separated by hyphens (for example: http://www.your-site.com/keyword-rich-post/). But, remember, don’t stuff any area with your keywords. Just use them naturally.

Title tags

The most important part of a web page in terms of SEO is the title. Optimize what goes in between and on the top of your browser window. So the name of your WordPress blog to include the keywords that you want people to find you with when they enter them into a search engine. Do this in Settings > General > Blog Title in WordPress’s administration panel. My title is Freelance Graphic Designer London. That’s sort of what I am and I want to attract people who type those words into a search engine to me.

Search engines put more weight on the early words so it is better to have your page title (and then category) to come before your site title. There are many ways of doing this. I would recommend that you use the HeadSpace plugin to do this. Mac users beware that HeadSpace does not work correctly with Firefox, so try Safari.

Categories

WordPress offers excellent categorization of your content. Make sure the category titles are keyword-rich. Write enticing descriptions of your categories in Posts > Categories. Use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field.

Heading tags

Generally keywords are better off appearing within <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags than within <p> tags. The <h2> tags are the title of your post or page so put keywords in there. Within your posts and pages you can add subheadings (<h3> tags) which can also contain keywords.

Images

When including an image in the content of your website be sure to name it correctly. So make it “computer-screen.jpg” rather than “image01.jpg”. Also always put an <alt> tag description of about four words explaining what the image looks like. By all means put keywords in there if they are relevant but (as always with keywords) don’t force it. I get about as much traffic from Google image search as I do from ordinary organic Google search just from doing this.

Sitemap and robots.txt

Creating an XML sitemap is often considered a boost to your SEO. It is a widely adopted search engine standard that helps search engine robots crawl your site. It was created by Google and adopted by Yahoo!, Microsoft and others in the search engine industry. You can do this very easily with the Google sitemap generator plugin for WordPress.

So you’ve created an XML sitemap so now what do you do? If you haven’t already, log on to Google Webmaster Tools add your site and submit your sitemap.

You need to add a reference to it in your robots.txt so robots other than Googlebot will know of its presence.

Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named “robots.txt” (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider and where your sitemap is. Here is mine:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://robcubbon.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /wp-


I have disallowed the robots from directories that have either no relevant content or duplicate content.

Embolden words

Words within <strong> tags carry more weight in SEO terms (as well as visually) than words within <p> tags.

Meta tags

The meta tags provide structured metadata about a web page and exist in the <head> section. They are generally considered to be obsolete but the description tag does appear on the SERPS and therefore should be generated separately for each page. Keyword tags maybe totally ignored but HeadSpace makes creating them very easy so you may as well.

Write your .htaccess

You can choose whether your site should be a www or non-www site. Your site with and without a www could appear to be two sites with the exact same content. Search engines don’t like seeing content copied. You can divert your www url to your non-www url or vice versa by entering a small bit of code into the .htaccess document on the root of your server.

Follow standards

Make sure HTML and CSS code is standards compliant.

Further reading

Here are a couple of pages I have found to be very useful for SEO and WordPress:

• SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide by Jim Westergren
• WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk

These are only a few things I can think of in order to make a WordPress site optimized for search engines. If anyone knows anymore white hat techniques for SEO – let me know.

Apologies to my English brethren, forefathers and Shakespeare, I’m using American spellings from now on. Most of my visitors are American and with the pound down so low I’d be especially pleased to attract American clients! (As I am pleased to attract a client from anywhere!)

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

So you’ve got your WordPress blog set up and you are just starting to write – what you do?

Words are, in my opinion, the most important thing on a website. This is because the search engine robots that crawl the web every day can pretty much “read” what you’ve written, but they can’t look at your website and think “mmm, nice graphics!”

For me, there’s two things to think about when writing. One is keywords; the other is making sure you’re writing stuff that people are going to want to read.

Keywords in your content

Keywords are what people type into a search engine (Google, for example) in order to find websites. Now there are good and bad ways to introduce keywords into your website text for SEO purposes, but I’ll come to that in my next post. For the time being, if you are a designer for example, you should write about – guess what? – design.

But it’s not as simple as that. It’s virtually impossible to be found on the internet with just one keyword so you should think of your second most important keyword; for me it’s probably “graphic”. Your third most important keyword; for me, “freelance”. The fourth; “London”. And so on. Don’t sweat about choosing these you can always change them.

Use these keywords in the title and body of your articles with the most important being the most frequent. But, there is only one way to do this – naturally.

Write about the subject as you would normally, don’t struggle to add the keywords as many times as possible or even once more than is necessary. For one thing, search engines will penalise you for keyword repetition; for another, it will make your site very unpleasant reading for your visitors.

How would you rather read about a subject you’re interested in – in an ad or an article? It’s so much better to read the considered thoughts of an expert in a field rather than the hurried ramblings of someone who just wants to make money.

Here’s how you make money:

Write content that people will want to read

Write intelligently and lucidly about what you know most about.

Remember, you are an expert, we all are. You’ve spent your life doing something – it doesn’t matter what it is – that something is useful to somebody. This to me is the crux of what internet marketing is all about.

When you write about your specialities you will naturally attract to your website those who are your best customers. Let me explain, I do graphic design and marketing, now graphic design and marketing are huge fields, it would be nuts for me to market myself in this area and leave it at that. So I specialise – every organisation does. Web information about a niche area will draw in like-minded people and perfect clients through Long Tail keywords.

So I’ve written tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, blog posts about delivering advertising messages with graphics, articles about web and print production. Other articles have been solely responsible for melanding certain jobs. The subjects of these have been: interactive and rich media PDFs; pop art; creating countries’ map outlines and flags; WordPress for website creation. Quite a mixed bag. But if someone wants to ask me to do something I’m always grateful for the work!

When you are writing about what you know best, keep checking your facts. Constantly ask yourself when you write something if you really are sure about it. Very often in our professional careers it’s easy to believe certain things by hearsay or rumour. Use the internet and any other resource to back up your assertions thoroughly before you publish your post.

So when writing about your specialities, do you spill the beans and reveal all your trade secrets or do you hold back on certain information hoping to retain the power of knowledge from your competitors? I would always favour the former rather than the latter.

I would encourage anyone to put as much detail into their descriptive articles as possible. I’m sure it won’t harm your business to reveal the correct and best practices that you use. Transparency in governments is considered to be ethical so I would encourage anyone to be open as possible in their own organisation.

Your potential clients won’t have the time or the inclination to use this information to do the job themselves and this priceless insight will win you kudos for your generosity. (And, of course, valuable information on the internet will be linked to raising the profile of your site and have it appear higher in search engines’ results, more to come on SEO in the next post.)

I have benefited immeasurably for the community of designers and marketers who have explained techniques and solved problems in websites, blogs and forums. It’s only fair that I give back to the community.

For me this is kind of business karma. Take Matt Mullenweg, for example, the founding developer of WordPress – the most popular and best blogging software that has empowered millions of ordinary people to publish in a beautiful way for free. Matt is listed in Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web, is in Inc.com’s 30 under 30 – America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs and his company Automattic Inc is 123rd in TechCrunch.com’s list of Startups Best Positioned To Weather A Downturn. My point is that Matt’s initial and ongoing commitment to open source software – giving out good stuff for free – has helped him in his brilliant career.

So I would advise virtually anyone to get a WordPress site and start writing on the cutting edge of what they know best. The advantages you will see in your community, your networking and your client list will far outweigh the effort.

And in the area of the style of writing, here are ten tips for writing a blog post.

Some say write for a month when starting and then publish for the first time. Some say write every week once you’ve got going. Some say make every post no longer than 350 words.

I say … write!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

In the previous post in my How to market yourself series, I described how to set up a website on a host’s server. Here I will tell you how to set up a WordPress blog on that server. Read my introduction to this self-marketing series here.

This article is about how to set up WordPress manually. If you don’t wish to do this or consider yourself “untechnical” please use the WordPress one-click install that most hosts have.

OK, so this information exists elsewhere on the internet, so why am I writing this post? Because WordPress is the best way I know to market yourself on the internet so this post is hugely important for this reason.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a robust and feature-full web publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. WordPress, as it says on it’s homepage, is both free and priceless at the same time.

This is about a WordPress.org blog. What’s the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com? WordPress.org is where you can download WordPress to use on your own hosting service and have your own specific website address (this is what I’m recommending). WordPress.com hosts WordPress blogs and therefore puts WordPress.com in your website address and gives you generally less control over your website, for example, the number and kind of adverts and affiliate links are restricted.

WordPress is the best Content Management System for simple “shop window on the world” websites for small and medium sized companies, in my opinion.

What’s good about WordPress?

It’s free. It’s easy to use. There is excellent support documentation and forums because, literally, millions use it. It’s database driven so you can transport it to another CMS if you really want to. Anyone can edit the site (with a username and password) from anywhere in the world. There are many different themes designed that you can dress it up in.

You can add loads of functionality to your website very easily, for example, search, sitemap, RSS feeds, comment forms, contact forms, galleries, etc. Believe me, I could go on.

Still not convinced? Have a look at these websites that use it: StyleWatch at People.com, Martha Stewart, PlayStation’s US blog, Stephen Fry and NY Times blogs.

So here’s the nitty-gritty.

How to install WordPress on your host server

Of course, there is great information on how to install WordPress on the WordPress site. But here’s what you do.

First download and un-zip the current version of WordPress.

Then, create a database and a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it. For those with cPanel go to MySQL Databases and do this. Write down the database name and the MySQL username and password. Finally add the user to the database.

Go to your version of WordPress you had just downloaded and in the folder named “wordpress” look for a file named “wp-config-sample.php”. Open it in your favourite text editor (eg. TextEdit for Mac; NotePad for PC), making sure you are editing in plain text, and look for these three lines at the top.

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘username’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’); // …and password

Fill in the words you chose for your database name, username and password where it says 'wordpress', 'username' and 'password' in lowercase, keeping the inverted commas. Look back at your MySQL Databases page and make sure you have the database name and username exactly as it is there (there maybe prefixes added). Once you are happy with this Save As… “wp-config.php” back in the WordPress directory on your computer.

Now you have to decide whether you want WordPress to power your entire site or just a blog within the site. If you want your whole site to be a WordPress site then upload the contents of the “wordpress” folder but not the folder on the root directory of your host server. The root directory is sometimes called “public_html” or “html_docs”. If, however, you already have a site but just want to add WordPress as a blog then upload the whole “wordpress” folder to the root directory. You may want to re-name the directory “blog” so that the URL of the blog is forward slash blog after your website address.

Lastly, once the uploading is complete, simply go to http://www.mydomain.com/wp-admin/install.php if your whole website is WordPress, or http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/wp-admin/install.php if you put WordPress inside a sub-directory. (Replace “mydomain.com” with your own domain name and “subdirectory” with the name of the sub-directory you created, “blog” in our example).

Once at this page follow the prompts. You will be ask for your email address and website title, you can change these later. You will also be asked if you want to appear in search engines. I would check that option unless you want to view your website in isolation!

You will soon be emailed a password to access administration panels – keep a copy of this safe.

And now the fun really begins!

That was the famous 5 minute installation which took me at least half an hour the first time I did it and even now takes at least 10 minutes! Setting up WordPress on your host server is a task that prepares you for the process of owning and maintaining and constantly updated professional-looking website!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the second post in my How to market yourself series, a personal account of the best marketing techniques you can employ for yourself or your business. Read my introduction to this self-marketing series here.

There are three things you need to do when setting up your website.

1. Decide on your website address (URL)
2. Register it
3. Find a web host

How to decide on your web address

Many people spend hours thinking up a catchy URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or website address. The most important SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point is to include some keywords (separated by hyphens). Your URL doesn’t have to be your name or your company name so why not increase your chances of being found in searches before you’ve even written a web page? So, if you are a web designer, why not try web-designer dot com? (OK, it’s already gone, but you know what I mean).

You can test out domain names at any domain name registrar. Which brings me on to the next thing you have to do.

Register your website’s address

Once you have decided on the name of your website it is necessary to register it. I use GoDaddy. There doesn’t seem to be a much cheaper option and GoDaddy are the market leaders. You can also try 123-Reg, particularly if you’re based in the UK and want a .co.uk domain.

One thing I would suggest is not to use your domain name registrar as your host. I like to keep the two operations separate because if you have a problem with one it is easier to move.

Cost: You’re looking at around $10 a year. When you register a domain name, your contact details are included in a publicly available database known as the Whois database which can lead to spamming. You can spend slightly more to hide these details.

An important SEO point: Search engines prefer if the domain is registered for a longer time into the future so that you don’t look like a fly-by-night website. For this reason, it’s better to register for five years rather than the minimum one year.

How to choose a web host?

The web hosting industry is highly competitive with seemingly hundreds of companies offering similar packages. Here are some of the things you need to take into account.

A great way to market yourself and get search engines to include you in their search results is to blog. The blogging software I’ll be recommending in this series of articles is WordPress.

The minimum specifications for the hosting of a WordPress blog are PHP 4.3 or greater, MySQL 4.0 or greater and the mod_rewrite Apache module. PHP is scripting language; MySQL is a database server. These are fairly standard specifications and will be offered by most quality web hosts but make sure you check! WordPress recommends a few hosts here.

Other than that here are some more important points to look out for:

1. Disk space. Once you have a host you will find it useful for a number of things not just your website. It is another bit of computer space to use. You can use it as your own personal FTP site for storing information. If you think you need this facility go for a web host that’s offering tons of disk space.
2. Monthly transfer / Bandwidth. This refers to how much your website is accessed. For example, if your website consists of one page of 1MB (very unlikely) and is visited by ten people a month, you would need more than 10MB of monthly transfer to facilitate this. Of course most website pages are less than 100K so, unless you are expecting huge amounts of visitors, 10GB/month will be enough at first and your web host will be able to offer you more as your website increases in popularity. Keep your eye on it though. How?
3. A control panel. cPanel is the most advanced web hosting control panel in the industry, designed to simplify administration of a website and I would recommend choosing a host that offers it. Through the cPanel you can set up and read email, manage and edit your website’s files, monitor your website’s traffic (making sure you don’t exceed any bandwidth or space restrictions), and loads of other things including backing up a MySQL database which is essential for good WordPress maintenance. cPanel sometimes comes bundled with Fantastico which is a set of scripts which automate the installation of, but not always the update of, CMSs such as SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress and over 50 others, although I would not install WordPress this way.
4. The validity of your web host. I would only choose a web host that had a professional looking website. Also, I would definitely insist on 24/7 email support, personally I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t have phone support.

Cost: You’re looking at around 8$/month for a decent shared hosting package. Shared hosting is fine if you are only going to have one website and you’re just starting out.

An important SEO point: The most important point for search engine marketing is the location of your website. If, for example, you are interested in the UK market you should use a UK based web host. However, if for example, you are a UK company wanting to market your services internationally, then I would choose a US host.

Recommended web hosts for WordPress users

I’ve researched this by asking WordPress professionals in forums and LinkedIn groups about the most reliable shared hosting and the following three companies came up with the most votes:

• Justhost
• Bluehost
• Hostgator

So, I’ve got a web address and a host, now what do I do?

Your new host should give you 4 useful pieces of information so that you can set up a website.

1. IP address. An IP address is a unique number that every computer connected to the internet is assigned. It consists of 4 numbers separated by dots. This is the IP address of your server’s computer, not your personal computer.
2. Your username.
3. A password. These first 3 are necessary for uploading files to the server.
4. Domain Name Servers/System/Service (DNS). A very important link between your domain name and IP address.

If, as I suggest, you register your domain name with a company other than your host you will need to return to your domain name registrar’s website and and fill in the name servers (usually one primary and one secondary) you got from your host.

That done, wait 24 hours (usually much less) and you can create your new website.

Next, use your favourite FTP client (eg. Cyberduck for Mac; Filezilla for PC) and, with the IP address, username and password, you can log on to your host. You may find quite a few directories. Look for one called “public_html” or similar. This is where your website should go.

Use your favourite text editor (eg. TextEdit for Mac; Notepad for PC) and make a new plain text document, write a message in it and save it as “index.html”. Upload the “index.html” file. Now if you type in your domain name in a browser it will display your message.

Congratulations, you have just created a website!

As always, I welcome comments, especially to notify me of anything I’ve missed!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I have successfully been on the first page in Google for freelance graphic designer for a few months now and I’m quite pleased with this.

Marketing yourself is one of the most important things any professional or company will do. For this reason I’m going to write a number of articles about self-marketing, what I mean by it and how I do it.

I’m not going to go on about crafting a mission statement, identifying expertise and clients and creating a robust consistent identity. I’m sure everyone spends a lot of time on that and it’s specific to each organisation. What I wish to tell you about the details of how I think you can run a successful website and company in these challenging times.

Search Engine Optimisation

The first thing to remember with SEO is that you can’t cheat the system. What I mean is that there is no easy course of action that will make your website first on Google after having entered certain keywords.

However, if you have content specific to those keywords and it is proven to be, so other websites link to you in a certain way, then quality targetted traffic will come your way from the search engines.

A WordPress blog is well designed and structured already for search engine optimisation and this is my preferred method of creating and updating content for visitors, clients and search engines alike.

But SEO doesn’t start and finish with a blog. There are many things you can do before, during and after creating your blog that will mean success or failure with the search engines.

General Marketing

Once that is all explained I will go on to other things you can do to promote yourself and your organisation. By general marketing I mean promotion. I’ll leave the price, place, product, process and physical evidence to you!

I will explain how to design and produce HTML emails, flyers, business stationery, etc.

How do I get on the first page of Google’s search results?

I’d guess that there’s probably a million pages on the internet dedicated to answering this question. Come to think of it, there’s probably more than a million people in the world working in this area (SEO). I’m prepared to admit I’m prone to exaggeration but if someone would like to put me right on this then I’ll stand corrected!

It’s the 64 million dollar question but it has a simple answer although it’s a solution that involves hard work and eats up time.

Here is my answer: create a website with lots of constantly updated, quality, relevant content with lots of inbound links from other quality, relevant websites.

Now, this needs further explanation (for example, you my well ask: how many is “lots”?) and people may disagree with the “constantly updated” bit, but that is essentially it – as far as I’m concerned.

What now?

So, I will try to post the next installment in this series of How to market yourself soon where I will explain what to do in order to set up your website or WordPress blog.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I have just set up a quit smoking blog for my stop smoking website.

The blog is powered by WordPress – who else? – and I chose the ShadedGrey theme which is made by Web Hosting Bluebook.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon

Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.