Free themes

Starting out it is best to choose a free theme until you are completely familiar with how WordPress works. There are thousands of free themes out there and the hardest part is choosing one. I have spent days worth of hours clicking through themes directories. If you find a theme if like, bookmark it for future reference, and once you have a shortlist, go through each theme.

Free WordPress Themes directory – the first and most obvious place to start. This can be accessed through your blog dashboard and you can download themes straight to your site.
Free WordPress Themes directory

Beyond WordPress there are tonnes of free theme sites. Just Google “free wordpress themes”, and you will see what I mean.

Premium Themes

After using free themes for a while and becoming more familiar with WordPress, I decided it was worthwhile to pay for a theme that had the features I wanted.

I have gone through a few themes over many sites that I have developed. This is my short list of premium themes I like.

Catalyst – This is the theme that is used on Travel Bloggers Guide. This theme is simple and highly customizable, and I am now using it on most sites I develop.
Catalyst Theme

Woo Themes – I have used their free themes (which are still available), and they have a great selection of smart looking themes.
Woo Themes

StudioPress – They have a good selection of magazine style themes, if that is they way you want to go.
StudioPress

Sotostream – also good for magazine themes.
StudioPress

Thesis – You may have noticed this theme on some big hitting sites. Another clean and highly customizable theme, but I would only recommend using this theme if you are comfortable with PHP. I don’t know code beyond HTML, and I am not interested in learning, so I have difficulties with this theme. Web developers swear by it though.
The Thesis Theme for WordPress

Customized Themes

Maybe you have gone through 10,000 themes by now, free and premium, and still not found something you like. Then consider hiring a designer. I have not gone down this path (yet), but if I was to, I would be certain to have a very clear idea of what I wanted in a site before going to a designer.

What themes NOT to use

WordPress Default – The original default theme. Whenever I see this I associate it with either being on a spammers blog or as a holding page for a site under development. Using this is just lazy.

[Don't use this theme - ever!]

Travel Themed Themes – I have seen some free themes that are travel related. They usually have a palm tree, a cruise ship or airplane in the header. These images are embedded into the look of the site, so anyone else who has download this theme is going to have the same looking website.

Actually I would avoid any theme that has an image embedded into the site. You have no way of knowing how many other people are using the same theme, so your site will be looking like a whole bunch of other sites. It is better to just go with a plain theme and customize the site with your own images and colors.

“Free” Premium Themes -Sometimes you see a premium theme that is being being offered for free. Unless it is from the official theme page, do not download it! I learnt this the hard way. I once wanted to see why a premium theme was free. When I uploaded it to my site it then dumped a whole bunch of virus codes that took a good day to work out how to remove again.

Free themes with inbuilt spammy links – Some free themes come with built in text links in the footer. It is acceptable to have a link to the theme developers website, but when they are for insurance, mobile phones, dating sites and other unrelated commercial sites, don’t bother.

With so many people playing on Facebook rather than reading your wonderful website, creating a Facebook page is more important than ever. Even if you seldom use Facebook, for many people now Facebook is the internet, so Facebook might just be the only way they ever see your site.

A Facebook fan page is like RSS for the masses. I have posted previously about how to set up an RSS Feed for your site. I love RSS for keeping track of sites I have subscribed to, but most people don’t even know what RSS is. I always ask my non internet-biz related friends what RSS is, and the usual response is a blank stare.

A Facebook page is easier to understand for most people. Someone “Likes” your page, and when you update your page this appears on their newsfeed. If they are interested they will click on the link and visit your site. So by creating a fanpage you have just taken a set of eyeballs away from the almighty Facebook, and sent them to your site instead.

Create a Facebook Page
To get started, login to your facebook account and go to Create a Page.

Select: Create a Page for a: Brand, product, or organization.

In the drop down menu, select “Website”, then name your page.

When you create a fan page the URL will look something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Travel-Bloggers-Guide/127414583390

That’s an ugly URL there. Don’t worry, once you get 25 fans for your page you can then customize the URL, like this:

http://www.facebook.com/travelbloggersguide

Announce your new fan page to your friends and you should soon reach 25 fans. Once you have 25 fans, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/username/

From here go to “Set a username for your Pages”. Choose carefully as you can only do this once.

Set up automatic updates

Even if you don’t use Facebook often, you can set up you page so it updates whenever you have a new blog post.

For the travelbloggersguide page I use RSS Graffiti. Add this application to your page and it will automatically update your fanpage for you.

So there you go, you now have a your own page on Facebook. Be sure to “Like” me at http://www.facebook.com/travelbloggersguide.

Submitting your blog to RSS directories is another way to get backlinks and traffic to you site, so it is worth the effort.

Whenever you are submitting your site to directories, it is best that you have some content on the site first. Some directories require a minimum of 5 posts before submission.

RSS Directories List
Blogdigger
Feedage.com
FeedAgg.com
FeedListing
FeedPlex
Goldenfeed
Icerocket
Millionrss.com
Plazoo
readablog.com
RSSbuffet
RSS Feed Directory
RSS Motron
RSSMountain
RSS Network
SolarWarp.Net
Syndic8.com

RSS Feed Directory

Nomadic Notes Newsletter

If you would like your newsletter included in this list email me at: travelbloggersguide (at) gmail (dot) com

If possible please send your newsletter landing page URL.

If you don’t have an email based newletter yet then give Aweber a trial. The first month is $1, so you can test how good the system is for yourself.

To do this, in the left column of your WordPress dashboard go to:

Settings > General

In this section you will see:

WordPress address (URL)

Site address (URL)

In these boxes type in the full URL you wish to use. For example I have set this site as:

http://www.travelbloggersguide.com over http://travelbloggersguide.com.

Which ever one you choose, you need to refer to your site from now on as either with or without the WWW. Believe it or not, Google sees these two URL’s as two different sites, so it is important you use the right URL whenever you are promoting your site. You don’t want people to start linking to you with a WWW when you don’t have WWW. That will dilute your link count in Google.

Say for example you are leaving a comment on someones blog. If you leave your URL without the WWW, Google will count this as one link to the non WWW site. Over time you might end up having 50 links pointing to the WWW site, and 50 links pointing to the non-WWW site, when what you should be having is 100 links pointing to the correct site.

As far as improving your rankings go, it doesn’t matter which one you choose, though there are groups that are passionate about either side. Check out no-www.org and www.yes-www.org.

The most logical place to put your contact details is on a contact page, such as www.travelbloggersguide.com/contact/. Most people will look there, or on your about page as well.

When publishing your email make sure not to publish your whole email address. This is how spammers find email addresses. There are evil spam robots that crawl the web harvesting email addresses. To avoid being “harvested” you can format your email like this:

travelbloggersguide [at] gmail [dot] com.

If you prefer, you can use an image link to display your email address.

[This email address image was generated at E-Mail Icon Generator]

This rule applies anywhere public on the internet. Never leave your email on places that can be viewed in public, such as forums or your Facebook account.

Contact Form Plugins

A contact form is another way method of contact through a blog. With a form you can customize the text input box, and your email is hidden from view.

There are WordPress plugins that take care of creating a form for you. Fast Secure Contact Form is one example. Search in WordPress plugins under contact for more options.

Having a WordPress account is handy for 2 reasons:

- You can get an API key for the Akismet spam filter.

- Your WordPress profile is used at Gravatar.

Gravatar

What is Gravatar?

“Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog.”

Have you ever commented on a blog and noticed that other commenters have their image or site logo next to their name? On WordPress when you put your email address in the comments section, if it matches your Gravatar email, WordPress will automatically add your image.

When you set up a WordPress account, Gravatar will get you details from here.

[Travel Bloggers Guide favicon]

A favicon (short for favorites icon), is a 16×16 pixel square icon and it is displayed in the browser bar and in the favourites menu.

I blogged previously why you should create a logo for your site. Another great reason to have a logo is you can create a favicon from this logo.

How to make a favicon

A favicon is made up of a 16×16 pixel square icon. If you are proficient in paint shop you can make your own from a 16×16 square.

For everyone else, the easiest way to make a favicon is by using a favicon generator. I have found the Dynamic Drive FavIcon Generator to be the most useful tool for creating a favicon. It compresses your logo with very little distortion and is easy to use.

Favicon for WordPress

Once you have made your favicon you will need to upload it. If you have FTP access you can upload it to your root directory, so it will reside at yourtravelsite.com/favicon.ico

When you are creating a favicon for WordPress, the location will depend on the theme you are using. Many themes will have an image uploader where you upload site logos. It is here that you will also load your favicon.

Favicon WordPress Plugin

If you don’t wan’t to mess around around with loading the favicon yourself, there is a plugin that can do it for you.

The Shockingly Simple Favicon is a simple way to put a favicon on your site without messing with theme code.

When WordPress is first loaded to your website it is set to the default URL structure, which looks like this:

http://www.travelbloggersguide.com/?p=123

This is the “Ugly” URL (and that is the WordPress name for it). Before you get blogging you should change this to something more “pretty”.

In the left hand column of your dashboard, go down to the “Settings” section.

In the settings click Permalinks. There you will be greeted with these options:

Choosing the right URL structure for your blog

I as mentioned, we don’t want to use the default link. I would not use the “Numeric” option either, as that does not tell your readers or the search engines anything about that page either.

There are the two date URL structures:

Day and name: travelbloggersguide.com/2010/12/13/sample-post/
Month and name: travelbloggersguide.com/2010/12/sample-post/

I prefer not to use this link structure, but there are sites that are suitable for this method. If you have a personal daily/frequent travel blog and are blogging in real time, then the dates serves as a guide for when you posted your blog. The date structure also works well for news sites. As news is time specific this is a good way of archiving when the news broke.

Seeing that we have eliminated the first 4 options, that leaves us with the “Custom Structure”.

In this field you can place the following code:

/%category%/%postname%/

I use this in my travel blog at Nomadic Notes. I have a number of categories, including “Travel Blog” and “Travel Photos”. Here is what an example of a Travel Photo category looks like:

http://www.nomadicnotes.com/travel-photos/great-wall-of-china-mutianyu-china/

Here at Travel Bloggers Guide I use this URL structure:

/%postname%/

which makes this post look like this:

http://www.travelbloggersguide.com/wordpress-permalinks-create-a-custom-url-structure-for-your-blog/

When you are using the category/postname option it is important to have an idea of what your main categories will be. WordPress also has a default category, “Uncategorized”. This is also an ugly name so make sure your post doesn’t end up being “Uncategorized”.

A full permalinks tutorial can be found on WordPress: Using Permalinks

Changing your URL structure after you have started blogging

All this information is good and well if you are just starting out, but what if you have already been blogging away and have dozens, or hundreds, of posts already set on the “Ugly” structure. Fear not, there is a plugin for that – Dean’s Permalinks Migration.

Quoting from the developer: “With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and even doesn’t hurt your google pagerank.”

I have used this plugin on a site I run and I can attest that it works just like it says. I activated the plugin and it did all the work, no problem. I checked some of my blog posts in Google a few days later and they were already showing the new URL structure.

If your blog is established and other blogs have linked to the old URL’s, they will be redirected to the new URL’s.