Creating an Awesome Home Business

More Good WordPress Plugins

WealthyDragon — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:21:08 +0000

Back here and here I listed some plugins that I generally use on new blogs.

Since then I’ve come across some more.

However, as I’ve mentioned previously, you should be thoughtful about the plugins you install.

Not all of them are faultlessly coded and those that rely on external sites for data (e.g. related sites type plugins) can slow your blog down quite a bit.

For example:

I recently dropped the ‘Share This’ plugin, one that I’d used for a long time.

The reason was twofold:

It frequently slowed down page load times
Social bookmarking has changed in character over the past several months and people are becoming more focused on one or two networks. For me those are Twitter and Facebook, and their respective plugins don’t slow my site down.

Another I recently removed was the Related Sites plugin. This caused a few PHP errors on new posts and slowed down load times. So it’s gone too.

As I’ve mentioned before, a plugin needs to demonstrate a very clear benefit to me before I install it. And if it causes me any problems it’s out.

So be thoughtful about the plugins you install.

Having said that, here are a few more that I’ve found recently and do like:

1. Raw-HTML. I reviewed this plugin here and I absolutely love it. Finally, I can use the HTML view to write posts and not suffer arbitrary editing by WordPress.

2. Contact Form 7. A contact form plugin. For a while I used cforms11 which, to be sure, is more flexible than CF7. But it was fiddly to upgrade and it signed its own death warrant when it threw a wobbly after I upgraded to Thesis 1.5. CF7 is simpler, but still quite flexible, and easy to upgrade.

3. Add to Facebook. A nice, light-weight plugin that enables Facebook users to share your posts with their friends.

4. MaxBlogPress DealDotCom Widget. A neat plugin and widget that automatically displays a new ‘deal of the day’ in your sidebar each day. It promotes Clickbank Internet Marketing related products, so this won’t be of any use to you unless your blog is Internet Marketing related.

5. Really Simple CAPTCHA. A CAPTCHA plugin that was originally part of Contact Form 7 but is now maintained separately. It can be used with other plugins. It integrates seamlessly with Contact Form 7, but I’ve not tried it with any other plugins.

6. WP-Greet-Box. It adds a greeting to visitors in the same way as the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin does, but it’s more flexible. It can identify which site a visitor is clicking through from (Digg, Twitter, etc) and enables you to create a tailored greeting for visitors from each source. You can also restrict the frequency with which it displays to the same visitor to cut down on nagging.

The down side of WP-Greet-Box (and this is irritating) is that it’s fiddly to upgrade: you have to re-set a couple of the settings after each upgrade and re-do any styling you’ve set up. It becomes even more frustrating when upgrades come in quick succession, which usually happens when an upgrade contains bugs.

OK, that’s it for now.

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What’s All This SEO Stuff?

WealthyDragon — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:47:30 +0000

When you first start working online the amount of jargon and acronyms you see can be extremely off-putting.

Which is no different from starting any new type of activity, by the way, but for people who may be a bit nervous of technology it can be enough to keep you from getting started.

So let’s de-mystify one today – Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

Here’s what SEO is about.

This first thing to understand is that SEO is not a black art. It’s common sense, nothing more.

The second thing to understand is that the search engines see their customers as the people doing searches for stuff. They do not see webmasters (anyone building a website or blog) as their customers.

But they do encourage webmasters to work with them to help provide a good search experience for their customers.

So how does that knowledge help us?

Knowing that the search engines are competing against each other to provide the most relevant and highest quality information in response to a search, tells us that good quality content is one of the basic building blocks ofÂ a site that’s well optimised for the search engines.

Or it should do.

The volume of actual business done on-line is growing day-by-day, but the majority of people still use the Internet as a source of information.

And they’re looking for the most relevant and highest quality information they can find.

As a result, and in their drive to gain competitive advantage over their rivals, the search engines are getting better and better at assessing the actual information on a site.

Often called contextual relevance, the search engines can dig deep into your site and assess the depth and breadth of information you have there.

In fact, it’s reasonable to assume that it won’t be long before the search engines are able to assess the quality of articles on a site – meaning spelling and grammar – and give greater priority to better written sites.

After all, spelling and grammar checkers have been around for years and it’s unusual now to find a website where you’re entering information that doesn’t highlight what it perceives to be mis-spelled words.

So the first and most basic rule of good Search Engine Optimisation is this: plan and develop a site that has in-depth, good quality, well written information.

And, while weâ€™re on the subject of rules, here’s the second: if anyone tells you they can guarantee to get your site into the top spot on Google within a week/month/or whatever, don’t believe them.

No one can do that, and here’s why:

The only people who know the algorithms that the search engines use are the people who program them.Â And, because of the competition I mentioned earlier, those rules are kept more secret than the CIA’s information sources.

Plus – the algorithms are changed on a regular basis for two reasons:

To shake off the black hatters – people who try to game the system
To improve the quality of search results they can deliver.

So claiming that a specific SEO technique will get your site into Google’s top 10 may be possible one week – but it will probably see you down at page 150 the following week.

Which brings us back to content.Â It’s all about content: good, regularly updated, accurate and well written content.

Having said all that, here are some things you can do to help (and work with) the search engines:

Site Navigation

Just as people use the navigation (menus and links) you provide to find their way around your site, so do the search engines.

So make your navigation clear and easy to follow.

Avoid using Java or DHTML based drop down menus – you can do those using CSS. The search engines can’t read Java and, if someone has scripts and flash disabled in their browser (as many do), they won’t be able to read your navigation either.

Page headlines and sub headers

Headlines and sub headers help people to understand quickly what your page is telling them. By using your H tags to style your headers and sub headers you will also help the search engines get a quick understanding.

META tags

META tags are standards-defined bits of information that tell the search engines what your site is about. They’re also used to tell the robots that crawl your site where they can and can’t go, how often to re-visit and a whole lot more.

There are loads of free META tag generators available on-line. All you need to do is fill in the template they offer with information about your site, click the button and – hey presto – youâ€™ve got an entire set of META tags that you can copy into your site.

Use them.

Many will tell you that META tags are no longer relevant – in which case I’d refer you to basic rule number 2 above.

At the very least, using them tells the search engines that you’ve taken the trouble to structure your site properly, and within the agreed standards.

Create a sitemap.

There are lots of free sitemap creators online too. Create and install a sitemap for your site, and remember to create a new one each time you add or remove a page.

Sitemaps tell the search engines about all the pages in your site, so if they miss a page in your navigation menu they can find out about it here.

Read Google Webmaster’s Tools

Google Webmaster’s Tools is the way Google extends the hand of co-operation to webmasters.

There’s a huge amount of very valuable information in Webmaster’s Tools and I strongly recommend you activate it within your Google account and absorb as much as you can.

At the very least read the Google Webmaster Guidelines.Â It expands on the principles I set out earlier.

So how would I summarise all that?

Step 1: Plan and build a site which contains high quality, well written articles. Update it frequently as new information comes out.

Step 2: Look at your site from an outsider’s perspective: is it logically structured? Is it easy to find your way around?

Get a friend to give their view as to how easy and intuitive your site is.

If it’s easy for people to find their way around your site, it will be easy for the search engines.

Step 3: Create and use META tags

Step 4: Create and use a sitemap

Step 5: Absorb as much as you can from Google Webmaster’s Tools – and implement it!

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Changing a Theme on WordPress

WealthyDragon — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:59:19 +0000

I wrote a post a while ago describing how to change a theme on WordPress.

When I re-read it today I discovered that it was written for WordPress 2.6 and we're now on WordPress 2.8 - so time for an update!

So here's a video on changing themes in WordPress 2.8:

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Backing Up Your WordPress Blog

WealthyDragon — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:41:54 +0000

Here’s a question I saw today: can someone explain how to back up my WordPress blog?

Backing up your blog is an essential housekeeping task that you should do at least once a week.

If you’re a hyper blogger (2, 3 or more posts a day) then you’d probably want to back up your database each day, although you could probably leave your system files to be backed up on a weekly schedule.

So here’s how to back up your blog:

The first thing to appreciate is that your blog is broadly split into two sets of files and they both need to be properly managed:

Your WordPress files (or system files). These are the files that deliver the functionality of your blog
Your Database files. These are the files that contain your content – your posts and comments.

The database is where all your hard work has gone. If you don’t have backups of your database and you lose it, you’ve lost all your work. You’d have an empty blog.

The system files are easy enough to restore if they get corrupted: you can just install another copy of WordPress, adjust the database parameters in your config.php file and you’re all set.

Having said that, you’d still have to reconfigure all your settings, re-install your plugins, re-update them and so forth, so it’s going to be a pain.

But not the disaster that losing all your content would be.

I publish 2, sometimes 3 articles a week so I back up both my database and my system files once a week.

I also keep the original copies of the articles I publish so if I did lose those 2 or 3 articles I’d just have to re-post them – no big deal for 2 or 3 articles.

Back Up Your Database

OK – to take your database first:

There are a number of good plugins for managing your database. The one I use is WP-DBManager, but there are others.

The reason I like WP-DBManager is that, in addition to all the backup functionality that most of the database plugins offer, it also offers me the ability to repair, optimise and restore my database.

Optimising your database is one of the ways of keeping your blog running quickly, so in addition to backing up my database each week I also optimise it each week.

You can find WP-DBManager here.

So install WP-DBManager, activate it and then go to the ‘Database’ item in the menu on the left:

Click the second link, ‘Backup DB’ and the first thing it will do is run some checks to see if everything is configured correctly.

It will highlight any problems, which you may be able to fix in the ‘DB Options’ screen – there are some hints there to follow.

The problems are likely to be related to the paths to your database or backup folders, so if you can’t fix them from the DB Options screen you may have to ask your hosting provider for the answers. They should be able to give them to you very quickly.

Once everything is set up you can just click the ‘backup database’ button at the bottom and in about 15 seconds you’ll be all done.

By default the back up file will be stored in the backup-db folder which will be inserted into the wp-content folder.

As a security precaution I always move this file from my server to my PC immediately after taking a back up.

If I need to restore my database in the future I just need to copy the latest version from my PC back to the backup-db folder and the plugin will do its thing.

Back Up Your System Files

Backing up your system files is just as simple but, unfortunately, can take up to an hour or more. Still – you can set it running then go and have some breakfast, which is what I normally do.

To back up your system files you simply need to copy everything in your ‘wordpress’ folder, or ‘blog’ folder, or whichever folder you installed WordPress into, back to your PC.

This means firing up your FTP client, dragging your WordPress root folder and all its contents and dropping it into a back up folder on your PC.

This will retain all your settings and configurations, including your database parameters. If you then need to restore your system files for any reason (for example if a WordPress upgrade bombs out), you can just copy the ‘wordpress’ folder back to your server again.

As I said earlier – copying your system files back to your PC will take up to an hour or more, depending on your connection speed, your FTP client and so on. So set it running and go for a cup of coffee.

How Often and When Should I Back Up?

I back up everything once each week as a matter of course. I also back everything up before making any major changes to the site – e.g. upgrading WordPress.

A good principle to work off is that you can’t back up too often.

I while ago, before WordPress included auto upgrading in the core, I wrote a manual on how to upgrade WordPress manually. Part of that also included how to back up and restore your database manually.

If you’d be interested in those database management steps let me know – I’ll happily give you a copy for free since the manual itself became obsolete when WordPress introduced auto upgrading.

OK – that’s it – hope it was helpful!

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Google Webmaster’s Tools – a Quick Tour

WealthyDragon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:50:26 +0000

Google Webmaster's Tools has always been a fantastic (and free) resource for webmasters and bloggers. It recently got even better.

If you're not using Webmaster's Tools it's very easy to activate: just go into your Google account and add it to the services you use.

You'll need to fill out your site details and they'll give you a piece of code that you can put into an HTML file and upload to your site. This is so they can verify you're the site owner.

Do that and you're up and running.

Here, then, is a short video that summarises the information and help you'll get from Google Webmaster's Tools:

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How to Beat the WordPress HTML Police

WealthyDragon — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:07:08 +0000

WordPress has always frustrated the life out of me when I try to use the HTML view to write posts.

I like writing in HTML. It’s a precise language and you’re able to control exactly how you want your page to look, especially when you combine it with CSS.

But WordPress has always had these filters in place that reckon they know better than me. You want to do HTML? Ha – you do it our way or the highway.

But no more.

I was never that fussed about WordPress’ HTML police because I mostly wrote straightforward articles with a couple of images in and the visual view is perfect for that.

But I recently started with Jing – the free screen capture video app that lets you record up to 5 minutes of video.

And it’s so easy to use that I thought I’d put a couple of videos up as posts – which I did for my last two articles.

But that entailed moving over to the HTML view and pasting in the YouTube code. And as soon as I started messing around in the HTML view the WordPress HTML police moved in.

Because I enjoyed doing those video articles I’ve decided that I’m going to do them more often in future. But to do so, I somehow needed to neutralise the HTML police.

I’d read somewhere that there was a plugin that removed the filters, allowing you to do everything in conventional HTML. So I went searching.

And what I found has worked brilliantly.

It’s called Raw-HTML and it allows you to do entire posts in HTML or just pick out sections of posts where, for whatever reason, you want to insert some specific code.

It only works with HTML, CSS and JavaScript – but that’s all you need for styling and laying out your articles.

After installing the plugin you can simply wrap the section you want to hand code in these tags:

….

And you can do everything between those tags in proper, conventional HTML. The WordPress HTML police are completely neutralised.

If this would solve a couple of your problems you can download it here.

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Adding and Managing Plugins in WordPress 2.8

WealthyDragon — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:11:55 +0000

Here are two videos on adding and managing plugins in WordPress 2.8

Firstly – adding plugins:

And secondly, managing plugins:

If you have any questions or any other subjects you'd like to see videos on leave a comment!

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Widgets in WordPress 2.8 – a Video

WealthyDragon — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:10:44 +0000

The post I wrote a few days ago on widgets in wordpress 2.8 received a lot of views, so I thought it may be helpful to make a video. So here it is – a video on managing widgets in WordPress 2.8.

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Do I Need to Learn HTML?

WealthyDragon — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:45:54 +0000

Do I need to learn HTML and SEO? This was a question I saw in a forum today.

For people new to working on-line learning these new skills with strange acronyms can be daunting.

In another post I talked about how I tried to start my Internet business without a website because I didn’t want to learn about FTP.

But the fact is, if you’re serious about working on-line, you do need to learn the basic tools of your trade.

Here’s why:

Tools and services that are readily available today mean that you can get a website up and running with zero technical skills. Setting up a new blog on Blogger is the perfect example.

But even tools like these will get you better results if you understand how to make use of the basic tools of your trade.

Take SEO.

On page SEO is about setting your website up according to the agreed web standards. These are not complicated. In fact they’re straight-forward common sense.

But if you don’t understand SEO, and how the search engines work, you can still put the wrong information into the template fields that many of these tools provide.

And that will reduce the SEO effectiveness of your site and penalise you in the search for traffic.

And if you don’t understand HTML it’s going to be more difficult to sort out things that go wrong.

Take, for example, publishing articles in WordPress.

WordPress is another tool that enables you to build great looking websites without using HTML. But even using the excellent HTML editor that WordPress provides can still sometimes lead to things going wrong.

For example in a recent article that I wrote, the first few words of the first paragraph were a link. I later decided to add an image that would be positioned to the left of the opening paragraph, so I used the ‘Add Image’ tool to do that.

But, even though I put the cursor absolutely in the ‘home’ position, when I inserted the image I found that it had been made into a link. It had got mixed up with the HTML for the first few words of the article that were already a link.

Nothing I did in the text editor view would fix it, but fixing it by switching to the HTML view and editing the HTML code was an absolute piece of cake – it took less than 30 seconds.

If I didn’t understand HTML I would have had a problem – even with an application as friendly as WordPress. But because I do know HTML fixing it was a breeze.

So my response to that question on the forum was a resounding ‘yes’.

Learn HTML, SEO, CSS and all the rest, because if you’re serious about working on-line they’re the basic tools of your trade.

You don’t need to become the world’s best expert in these technologies – but learn enough to know how things work and where to look when things go wrong.

A great place to start learning about these web design technologies is w3schools.com. You can find tutorials there on HTML, CSS, XML and a whole host of other technologies you’ll need.

They’re all well structured and easy to follow – and you can find them here.

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How to Install Widgets in WordPress 2.8

WealthyDragon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:36:59 +0000

For more details on Widgets – what they are and what they do – see this post.

The introduction of version 2.8 brought some big changes to the way widgets are managed in WordPress.

It basically restored the functionality that was available in versions before 2.5, but it’s wrapped in a much nicer looking interface now.

And it’s a great improvement.

Here’s how to install and manage widgets in WordPress 2.8.

Go to the Appearance>Widgets screen and choose the sidebar you want to add the widget to. Click the down arrow on the right of the sidebar title to see what widgets are already installed there. (See 1 below). If there are no widgets installed you’ll see a blank space.

From the list of widgets on the left of the page, click and hold the one you want to add and slide it into the blank space at the bottom of your sidebar panel. (See 1 below).

When you drop the widget into the sidebar the editing screen will open automatically (2 above).

Alter or update the settings, or add your HTML code if it’s a text widget, then click ‘Save’ (bottom right of the edit window) and then ‘close’ (bottom left).

You can re-position a widget within a sidebar, or move it to another sidebar, by simply clicking, holding and sliding it.

If you want to deactivate a widget, but you don’t want to lose its settings (or its HTML code if it’s a text widget), simply click, hold and slide it to the Inactive widgets area, which is just below the list of widgets. (See below).

This is a much neater way to manage widgets than was available in WordPress 2.7, but if you have any questions leave a comment!

Update: 19th June, 2009

This post triggered quite a few views so I thought it would be helpful to create a video on managing widgets in WordPress 2.8 – I hope it will make things clearer. You can find it here.

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