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How to turn your Wordpress Website into a Social Network

Lucian Apostol — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:19:58 +0000

I like Wordpress and i like the way i can do things in Wordpress. This is the reason i always look for ways to do greater things with Wordpress. Few weeks ago i proved that you can make a full featured Social Bookmarking Website with wordpress. Today i will show you how you can build a Social Network with Wordpress. Really!

The theory behind a social network is huge, but Wordpress makes everything so simple: just install a plugin and you’re done. That plugin is called BuddyPress and it is very customizable.

If you wonder how BudyPress looks, you can see an example here. You have people, you have groups, friends, wall, almost everything you have in facebook. Even the facebook design! I bet that in most cases you will not use the facebook design, as it is not professional to copy a design from a popular website.

You read this because you want to build a community. A good questions that is raised: “Why not just build a group or page on facebook instead of installing budypress on my own server”. There is not universal answer to this question. If you want just to build a small community around an event or website the facebook group may be the answer. You can have most of things you need inside facebook. But, if you want to develop a real community around a topic you should build a separate website. People visit facebook to see what their friends are up to, but when they are really interested in a topic they would like to see what people with same interest do, even if they are strangers.

You can’t have all your friends interested in the same topics as you are, so posting a message that is seen by all your friends is useless. They will ignore it. Joining a social network where are only people interested in the same subject as you are is priceless. You can talk and get advice from strangers, you can make new friends based on topics of interest.

So, if you are really passionate about a topic, you can set-up a community as easy as you set-up a blog. Long live Wordpress.

Are you tired of your shared hosting ?

Lucian Apostol — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:45:57 +0000

When you start your website you certainly go for a shared hosting plan. It is very cheap these days and you’ll find it perfect for your start-up. But what when your website grows ? You start to search for alternatives but there is no way to pay a dedicated server ? A VPS is the perfect solution for you.

With a VPS you can have your own dedicated RAM and your own dedicated disk space. Probably you are familiar with all shared hosting companies that gives you unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited everything for practically free ? Well, they are just using marketing strategies. That disk space is not available to you, and they hope you will never use more than few GBs. When you use too much resources you are advised to move to a VPS or dedicated server.

Sometimes they will not tell you this directly, but they will start to stop the processes that consume too much RAM and to limit the bandwidth for the resources that are used the most.

Probably you work hard to get your website on the first page of Google or featured on digg. Probably you heard many stories about websites that fail when they get a huge amount of traffic in a short period, like when an article gets featured on digg. Ten of thousands of visitors coming right to your website will make it crash due to lack of resources.

You can prevent this by upgrading to a VPS solution where all resources you buy are yours and you are not sharing them.

Top 10 Professional Themes of August 2010

Lucian Apostol — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:32:54 +0000

Waiting to see which are the best themes of the moment ? Wordpress recently upgraded to Wordpress 3.0 and many users are wondering how old themes are working on the new wordpress.

The good news are that old themes are working perfectly with the new wordpress, but there are few disadvantages: Old themes can’t take advantage of new features added to Wordpress 3.0. If you think about switching theme, now is a good moment to do it.

1. Manifesto Theme from WpZoom

With a fixed size of 920 pixels, Manifesto is perfect for a news site. A featured slider can show your most important ( or recent ) posts, and the main ability of the theme is that it displays news items in a professional way: small thumbnails with titles or description under.

Another important feature for a news site is that you can show featured categories on the homepage, where most recent post for specific categories can be shown.

Along featured post slider and recent post in the top section of the theme, you can use a nice widget made with jquery where your visitors can go trough your website topics and see recent stories posted there.

Here is a preview of Manifesto theme, you can get it from here.

You can get Manifesto theme from Wpzoom.

2. MyApp Theme from Elegant Themes

Since we live times when mobile market is getting bigger and bigger every day, with Android on a fly, there is a great need of Mobile related themes.

MyApp theme is small and nice, but it is not designed for articles or news. It is designed for app developers to sell their mobile apps. It is perfectly designed to make the visitor to click on the “buy now” button.

Click here to get MyApp Theme.

3. Delucide theme

Delucide is a different theme. It is an artistic theme with a great desing. Since the design is not designed for a great user experience, it can be used to impress visitors with high graphics.

Delucide theme is perfect for a photo/video portofolio.

You can get Delucide from ThemeShift.

4. Side Blog theme from Press75.

Looking for a theme perfect for a place where you can freely express your thoughts ? Side Blog theme is perfect for a personal blog, or a niche one.

Clear design where your visitors can focus on your content, and not on other design stuff.

This is the preview of Side Blog theme, click here to download the theme.

5. Wp-Prosper from Solostream

Prosper theme is great for a blog where you can write about anything but you have one thing in mind: the profit. The theme is well balanced so it can support many ads where you can sell stuff.

The design is clear and your visitors won’t get lost into the website. Has a lot of build-in widgets for social integration.

Click here to download Wp-Prosper.

You can get Prosper theme from Solostream

6. Enterprise theme from StudioPress

The Enterprise theme is perfect for a company website presentation, a project presentation or a campaign. The 2-tier menu provided represents an excellent navigation for a site with many pages.

At the top of the page there is place for a descriptive image and a description. Under the description box there are 3 small boxes where you can present main features for your product. The homepage can also be used as a landing page.

Download Enterprise Theme from Studiopress.

7. Technologic 2.0 from WpZoom

Technologic theme was just updated to support the new features from Wordpress 3.0. The most important: menu management.

Technologic theme is suitable for technology trending topics like Mobile market. Many mobile and technology news website appear these days. To succeed and stand out of the crowd you have to use a professional theme.

Download Technologic 2.0 from Wpzoom.

8. Homeowners Real Estate Theme from Gorilla Themes.

Finally, a theme for Real Estate market. The market is in a continuous falling, but this is not a reason to not improve your design to attract more visitors. A good design can make houses to look better, and a cleaner one can make your customers to feel liberty.

Homeowners real estate has both advantages: clean and good looking.

Download Homeowners theme from Gorilla themes.

9. Magazine theme from Studiopress

Magazine theme is great for news and short articles with good looking photos. It is made to catch the eye of the visitors with the clean design.

The advantage is that is not a normal theme, it is a child theme for Genesis Theme framework. The advantages of using a theme framework are many: you benefit from a lot of widgets to use in your theme, advanced customization directly from your wordpress administration panel. You can read more about the Genesis framework here .

10. Wp-Ellie from Solostream.

Wp-Ellie is a great looking professional theme designed to fit for a various topics and uses. The elements of design are awesome and you just forget you are on your computer.

If you judge by the design, Solostream is providing the best.

You can download WP-Ellie from Solostream.

I hope you like this selection and it helped you to find a good theme. If you enjoyed it please share it with your friends. They will appreciate.

Sell your products online with Wordpress

Lucian Apostol — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 12:58:59 +0000

E-commerce is very popular these days. Every store want to sell products online but most of them are held back because they don’t want to deal with technical stuff.

The truth is that if you try to do the things old-school way you will find out how much work is involved in building an e-commerce website.

I have good news for you: there is an easy way too. I know you think now: “There is no easy way to make money online”, or “It have to be hard to worth it”. While what you say is true, setting up an e-commerce website don’t mean you will get rich fast. Selling stuff online means to have a good product, a lot of visitors coming to your website, advertising, marketing. What i will say is: Save time on building the e-commerce site and invest it in marketing and advertising.

So, what’s the easy way ? Set up a wordpress website and install WP E-commerce plugin. That’s pretty much you have to do for the technical part. After installation you can make the desired changes to settings, such as payment options, display options, paypal ID.

Add your products and you’re pretty much done. You may want to make some design customizations but believe me, this is the fun part.

Wordpress to drop support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4

Lucian Apostol — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:54:13 +0000

Why wordpress is so beloved by non-tech people ? Because they never encounter errors like: “Wordpress does not support your PHP version” or “To use wordpress you need to have PEAR lib installed, contact your web hosting provider for support”.

Some people may never seen this, but if you are used to install different kinds of open source software you encounter these errors frequently.

This is happening because the software use some functions or libraries that are not by default in all website environments. If you used mostly Wordpress you did not encountered this kind of error because wordpress was built to work on all platforms.

This can be seen as a good thing, from the users point of view, but because it is made to work on older versions too we may miss a lot of performance.

Wordpress developers came to a turning point where they have to choose if they continue to provide support for older versions or they do everything to enhance the functionality and speed or Wordpress. It seems they have chosen the second way, the way of performance.

What does this means ? It may have no impact on you if you use a good hosting, like hostgator for example, but if you use a 7 year old hosting from and old school provider you may have some problems. They announced that the drop of support will happen in 2011, when they will release the Wordpress 3.2.

Last year i’ve built a software for a client and worked on my development environment. After 2 weeks of working when everything was complete and tested he told me to contact his hosting provider to set up the website on his main hosting. Everything crashed, the hosting provider had PHP 4 installed. I asked them why they don’t upgrade and they told me that most of their clients have websites optimized for PHP 4 and it will be a bad idea to change.

Sacrifice the performance for laziness. That was my thinking. Probably they weren’t aware that most of the functions from php 4 that are considered wrong was not deleted in PHP 5. New functions were created to replace the old ones but they have different names so they don’t interfere with the old ones. Websites built on PHP 4 should work fine on PHP 5.

How to test what Wordpress version you have ? Well, create a file, call it test.php and write iside. Upload it to your hosting ftp and run it in your browser. There you have it, all info. Make sure you delete the file after use.

It is better for Wordpress themes to be free ?

Lucian Apostol — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:34:44 +0000

You probably heard about the dispute between creator of Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg, and Thesis framework creator Chris Pearson. The real issue is that the creator of Wordpress have a point against Premium Wordpress Themes.

Free is better. You like free stuff. You like when you go to KFC and you get a free garlic sauce for every menu you order. The truth is that it is not free, it’s price is included.

It will be better if all Wordpress Themes are free ? Hell yes, on short term. If the creators will be forced to give themes away for free they will, maybe they will try some other monetize methods that will never reach the amount of money that they used to generate when they sold themes.

In the long run, more and more theme creators will stop creating top themes. And if you try to search, you already know that it is hard to find free good themes.

The lack of good free themes at this moment can have 2 possible causes:

All good theme creators jump in the opportunity to get some cash for their themes.
To create a good theme you need to invest a lot of time, and time is money.

These are 2 theories that can lead to the effects of having all themes available for free. If the real case is the one in the first scenario, we will have a lot of good free themes, but if it is the second, the free themes will be the same but we will no longer have premium themes.

My hope is that some premium theme creators will find a way to survive and to generate a good income and they will provide few premium themes that a lot of people will use. If it is used by masses they can generate good income. So my prediction is: Less good themes, but free.

Build a Social Bookmarking website with Wordpress

Lucian Apostol — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 09:04:50 +0000

How many times you wanted to start your own Digg ? In case you don’t know digg is a social bookmarking website: Stories are submitted and others vote for stories they like. When a story reach a number of votes it gets promoted to the front page.

It is widely known that if you get on digg front page you receive tons of visitors ? Where are these visitors from ? They like stories recommended by others, filtered. If they are so popular, why not starting a social bookmarking website for a topic that you like for your own ? And why not using your favourite CMS: Wordpress!

Is this possible ? Yes, with wordpress everything is possible. But i’m sure you didn’t wanted this answer when you asked. YES! It is very simple to start a social bookmarking website with wordpress. You don’t require any advanced skills, you only need a Wordpress Template, a theme that is built for social bookmarking.

Where to find one ? You don’t have to search, it is right here. Nominate for wordpress is a template designed to empower wordpress with social bookmarking functionality.

Maybe you heard of pligg. With pligg you can also build a social bookmarking plugin the disadvantages are that it is hard to customize it, lacks security, etc. You already love wordpress and having this functionality right into it is a great plus.

If you want a quick preview check WpVote. It is built with Nominate theme, full ajax control, good interface. So wait no more and start accomplish your dream to start a social bookmarking website that stands out of the crowd. Wnat to give it a try ? Get Nominate right now.

Watch and Learn from Top Bloggers

Lucian Apostol — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:40:48 +0000

If you want to do a thing the right way, but you don’t know where to start you should learn from others who are already successful in the area.

Right now you want to start a blog, you need good content, promotion and a good theme. The content depends a lot on what you are writing about and who are you writing for. The promotion also depends on your niche. The theme is the one who can work the same for many niches.

The theme should assure that the text can be read easily, the navigation is good, the search engine optimization is ok. These are some aspects of the theme.

The problem is that when you choose a good theme you have to take care of every of these areas, and this means you need solid knowledge in these fields. That can be very hard to accomplish, and you may need some friends to help you in the areas you don’t have knowledge.

But why not to take the simple way ? Look at top blogs that threat your subject or other subjects that are interesting for the same users. It is not stealing, it is “watch and learn“. Let me give you an example, if you are a baker and you see on TV a recipe and you decide to use it, can be called stealing ? I can call it learning.

These being said, when you start looking for a theme all they say that it is the best, SEO optimized, etc. You can’t trust what the developer say, he will say anything for you to use that theme. On the other side, if you analyze top blogs you will find out that most have custom themes, optimized so they will be ok with reading, seo and navigation.

What to do now ? Well, search on forums for discussions about wordpress themes and you will find reviews about good themes or bad themes, and reasons why people think they are good or not.

To save you the time searching on forums for discussions you can still find some top blogs that don’t use custom themes and they are willing to share with you what they use. I will give you only one blog: Copyblogger . He is a top blogger and more, he teach others how to blog. He is using Thesis theme. The Thesis template is good and highly optimized for useability and SEO. So get the theme, customize it and kick your blog up in the rankings.

Should i use a theme framework for Wordpress ?

Lucian Apostol — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:59:12 +0000

This question raises to many webmasters that want to start a new website using wordpress. There is not an universal answer, it depends on what you want to do with your website. It also depends on you technical skills.

If you want just to kick off a simple blog to post your toughts or you are unsure what you want to do you can go with a simple theme, but if you want to start a serious website and you don’t have high programming skills you should seriously think to use a theme framework.

What are the advantages of using a Theme Framework:

You can set advanced features like menus, breadcrumbs, featured post slider, social bookmaking directly from admin panel without changing a line of code
They provide advanced functionality that replace most common plugins
You can edit a lot of things directly from admin panel
You website will be well optimized for search engines ( SEO ) without using additional plugins
You can easily set to see an welcome page as homepage where you can describe your website before you send your visitors to your main content.
You can easily set up a website that is not looking blog-like.

Disadvantages for using a theme framwork

If you are a tech savvy you will find it hard to change things that are set trough the admin panel
Some things cannot be changed easily from code

If you want to give a try to a theme framework i recommend Genesis Theme Framework. You can also read a comprehensive Genesis Theme Framework review.

Is SEO Worth It for Blogs?

Lucian Apostol — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:19:46 +0000

When you start a blog you have to make a plan. A plan contain milestones and strategies used to reach the milestones. The milestones should be based on your capabilities.

Traffic is the most important for you blog. If you don’t have anyone to see your articles means you are wasting time on writing them. Some well known strategies for blogs to get visitors are: commenting on other blogs, social networking, get in touch with other bloggers, guest posting. They will all bring you traffic.

What about search engines ? Probably you already get traffic from search engines, but you are not too impressed. Your traffic comes from very specific queries that are searched once per month. The truth is that the more keywords a search query have the more targeted is that visitor.

Fair enough, but are you happy with the numbers ? You have 2 visitors/day for every article. You have 100 articles and you get 200 unique target visitors every day. The best conclusion you can make is to write more. When you have 1000 articles you will get 2000 visitors every day. The numbers look very well right now and you want just to start writing the 1000 articles.

This is a part of SEO. SEO achieved trough content. But, think a little about another approach of SEO. What if you could get on the first page for a popular keyword ? A popular keyword can have 300 000 searches every month. What if you can snap 50 000 visitors every month for a single keyword ?

The benefits of having a significant traffic from a single keyword is that you can give a special threat to them. The question is: is seo worth it for blogs ? what you should aim for; what you have to do in order to achieve that; is the competition of the keyword too high ?

You don’t have to spend day and nights and try to get link by link by submitting to directories or creating spammy links, follow these easy steps to optimize your incoming links:

1. Keyword Research

Do some keyword research to select few keywords related to your blog content. To to this you can use Google Keyword Selector Tool.

Once you have the keywords you want to use try to create some phrases to describe your blog with these keywords in it. You will find this very easy to do, as your keywords are already related to your blog content. The benefit of people finding you for a popular keyword that describes your business is great. Let’s say you have a blog about kitchen decoration and you select the keyword “kitchen decoration” to optimize for. When others in niches related to yours want to write articles, they will love to give links to something more specific. Everyone that will write articles about house decoration and they refer to kitchen decoration, they will do a search on google to find a blog who talks exclusively about this. What they put in the search box ? keyword decoration.

2. Basic On Page Optimization

So you have a goal on getting your website in the first page of a popular keyword. What to do next ? Change your blog headline to match the main keyword, from now on people will know and talk about you using YourBrand kitchen decorations. This can be also called a tagline. You have to clearly position yourself on the web. If you can’t categorize yourself no one will do. That means you are lost in the space.

3. Focus your incoming links to your main keyword

When you have the occasion to put a link somewhere, from now one use your brand plus the headline, main keyword. You don’t need to be a link building guru to get yourself on the first page for a popular keyword. You already have a big number of links pointing to your site. Maximize the link potential by using one or more keyphrases.

Some people who thought at this before already have the url with the keywords in it. That can be a good advantage if you don’t spam. Having the domain “TheBestMoneyMakerSoftwareEver.com” is a keyword spam, but having DailyBlogTips.com is not. It simply describes the business precisely, and that can be a great advantage over competitors. These days is hard to find such domain names, if you can’t find what your looking for don’t try to use hyphens, misspellings, numbers or other stuff that can make it hard to remember. Just go for something crazy that sounds familiar. For ideas you can go to Wordoid and you will get words that sound well in enghish.

Conclusions

Summing it up, what you have to do is to focus your links to the main keyword. On your facebook profile, on your twitter account, on forums, or anywhere you have the possibility to add your link just use YourBrand Main Keyword as anchor. This is not spam, you just tell to people who see the link what it is about. Another advantage is that your site will be perceived in this way and they will use the same words when describing your website. In the end Google will understand what is your site about and how important it is in your niche so it will rank higher.

Everything is natural, you don’t have to go and hunt links, just focus them.