If you are just starting out please heed this advice and change your Permalink settings before you write your first post! If you have a good number of posts and are getting traffic, don’t change anything without getting advice from someone in the know.
Every post and page on your WordPress site has its own address and can be linked too as well as come up as a separate search result. When title a post for your blog readers, WordPress creates a permalink for it which becomes the permanent address of that post on the web. It creates it by adding a unique identifier to your url. It creates it in lower case and dashes, no spaces. [click to continue…]
As an entrepreneur with a small business to run, everything we can do to streamline our work flow leaves us more time to get the “real” work done. I am going to share with you an example of what I did to manage a big freelancer issue. I had begun to be inundated with requests from people to “pick my brain”. How to handle these requests was a conundrum for me. Some of them would turn into clients or referral sources, yet many others just needed a bit of advise or coaching on their ideas and, either would not be a fit for me, or the cost to do business with me (coaching, web design, or social media management) would be out of their budgets.
I tackled this issue by making it easy for someone to get an hour of my time, but they must fill out a form with some questions in advance and they must pay for the session beforehand. If they choose to work with me on an ongoing basis, I will deduct the cost of that hour from their proposal. This works great because offering this session allows people an affordable point of entry to work with me. And it encourages people to contact me who may need just an hour or two to talk out some issue they are having. When I actually created this offer on a page on my site, it began to work like a charm. This also helps me to put boundaries on my time. It is really easy for me to get carried away talking to someone about the things that I love. Now, I can easily refer a potential client who wants to talk about their project to the “Talk it Out” form on my website and have them schedule and pay for the time they need.
Creating this page was good for my business, but even better was “how” I did it. There are several tools that, when working together, made the whole process streamlined for me. [click to continue…]
Wouldn’t you hate waking up one morning and finding that your whole website had been hacked, was missing or was riddled with some terrible virus? Yeah. Thought so.That would be a really bad day. In order for you not to find yourself having that kind of day, it is important to take care of your site.
Here is the short to-do list:
Do regular backups of your site’s database as often as you need to protect your content based on the frequency of publication of new content. .
Use FTP to backup your public.html file (where all your WordPress files are found).
Upgrade when new versions of WordPress are released. But only do so after making sure your site’s database and WordPress files are completely backed up.
Keep your plugins upgraded whenever they need it.
Use strong passwords on your hosting site.
Don’t use Admin for your site’s login user name and use a strong password.
In addition to upgrades that actually add content and function to WordPress, the WordPress team are constantly on the lookout for security breaches or vulnerabilities and regularly put out upgrades that take care of these issues. So if you see an upgrade release notice on your site you should take it seriously. It is very important that before upgrading your WordPress website, you must backup your site. There are two pieces of the backup process; the content and the styling. [click to continue…]
Before you Install WordPress you need to have a web hosting account. There is a way to have a WordPress.com website where you can get a site without having your own hosting account, but it does not have all of the functionality of the full software. When you are looking for a web hosting company you can be bombarded by many choices or can be swayed by the sites with a lot of advertising like Go-Daddy.
Whatever you do, don’t choose Go Daddy for web hosting. It really doesn’t matter who you get to register your domain name since you are really just leasing the right to use the name for as long as you pay the yearly fee. You can always point your domain name from wherever you registered it, to your web-hosting account using two numbers called DNS, that you get from your web hosting account and plug into to your domain account on your domain registrar. But where you have your web hosted does matter. A lot.
After you have searched for plugins and found some of interest go ahead and install them. Sometimes you won’t know if one suits your needs until you try it. Just be sure to deactivate and delete a plugin if you have no use for it as plugin conflicts or too many plugins can wreak havoc with your WordPress site’s performance. You can install a theme from the automatic uploader within WordPress under the Plugin, Add New tab on your dashboard or you can do it through FTP.
Plugins are little apps that extend the functionality of WordPress. The core of WordPress is designed to be lean, to maximize flexibility and minimize code bloat. Plugins offer custom functions and features so that each user can tailor their site to their specific needs. Since WordPress is an open source program, there are lots of people that develop plugins and offer them to the WordPress community, most of them for free.
Here are the ten essential WordPress plugins that I always include with each newly installed WordPress Website we build. For instructions and information on downloading, installing, upgrading, troubleshooting, and managing your WordPress Plugins, see Managing Plugins. You will want to activate each plugin that you import and then most of them have some easy configuration to take care of before they work. You can find their configuration areas on the dashboard after they are activated. [click to continue…]
Here is a great video that walks you through the process of inserting and editing a video into your posts or pages using upload/insert or going through the media library. In WordPRess version 2.9 and above there are built in editing features. I like the ability to scale an image to the exact size I will need. It is a bit awkward and although I go over this in training everyone always forgets how to do this. Michael Pollack from Solostream does a very nice job walking through the process.
I won’t go into all of the many reasons you might want to move your blog from WordPress.com to self-hosted version which is available from WordPress.org. However, some of the reasons are:
your url is www.yoursitename.wordpress.com rather than www.yoursitename.com unless you pay extra to have your own domain mapped to that .com account.
limited to the 60 or so themes that come with the .com account.
cannot customize the themes.
limited to the plugins that come with the .com account which reduces functionality of your blog.
can’t easily hit a button after posting to send to twitter or facebook ( that is functionality available with many with .org plugins).
The list goes on. I am assuming that you have made the decision to make the switch. Now What? [click to continue…]
I am Co-organizer of the Atlanta WordPress User's Group Meetup. We meet the third Wednesday of each month and try to have a little something for people at all levels.
Check it out! We now have almost 900 members!
As an entrepreneur with a small business to run, everything we can do to streamline our work flow leaves us more time to get the “real” work done. I am going to share with you an example of what I did to manage a big freelancer issue. I had begun to be inundated with requests from people to “pick my brain”. How to handle these requests was a conundrum for me. Some of them would turn into clients or referral sources, yet many others just needed a bit of advise or coaching on their ideas and, either would not be a fit for me, or the cost to do business with me (coaching, web design, or social media management) would be out of their budgets.
