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.

Out of the box, WordPress uses URLs that look like your url followed by random letters and numbers with a few question marks thrown in for good measure.  You would be likely to see something like this:” http://www.newtricks.me/?245″. This is not pretty.  Search engines do not like the default permalinks and they are hard for humans to read and remember. You can however change the default settings to create a more readable or “pretty” permalink structure.

I have changed mine and so the permalink of this post is: “http://www.newtricks.me/first-things-first-set-up-your-pretty-permalinks-on-your-wordpress-sites”. This type of permalink is SEO friendly, and human friendly as well.

WordPress provides a way for us to change this linking structure and offers several ways to set them up.  Go to the Dashboard under Settings. You will find Permalinks is one of the choices. You will see the screen above.  It shows that I use a  custom structure and put in the space: %postname%.

If you are likely to have duplicate post titles you may want to add the the, date and and post name by selecting the day and name option. But then you can never change the date of the post without creating broken links. I sometimes change the dates of posts to reorder them or not to have a particular post show on my blog page. Some people set up permalinks using the url, category name and the post name  . I don’t recommend that method if you are likely to ever recategorize  a post. This will result in broken links.

*WARNING*

Changing the structure of your permalinks affects all of the permalinks on your blog. This is important to know because search engines will have indexed posts on your site via their permalinks. If you change the permalink structure mid stream, you will end up invalidating all of those links.If you have already started your site and are getting a lot of visitors and comments and have a lost of posts you should careful consider what to do about this. There are ways to redirect the old title to the new one through making modifications in the .htaccess file or by using a 301 redirect plugin. So don’t do this without consulting someone with some understanding of the ramifications of changing them or not changing them depending on where you are in the life cycle of your site.

But, if you are just starting out Please heed this advice and change the settings before you write your first post!I’ve seen too many blogs out on the net that never changed their permalinks. Not only will you find benefits for your SEO by having your key words in the title of your posts,  it also makes it easier for readers to to see what the post is about when they see it in a search result or when you are sharing a link with  someone.

If you are using custom permalinks, I’d be very interested in knowing which configuration of permalink you have chosen to use and why.

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. First of all, I have a WordPress website that I  (or anyone) can easily update and add pages to. I created a page on my site for the “Talk it Out” Session, explaining the Talk it Out process, including who and what it’s for. Rather than manually going through each step of signing a prospective client up for a consultation or service,  creating an invoice for them and adding them to my database, I set up a “Talk it Out” sign up form, using  Gravity Forms and then added other apps, which automated all of the steps in the process, thus freeing me up to just do the consultation.

Gravity Forms is a great Premium WordPress Plugin that can be used to create any type of form. Although there is a fee to purchase it, it is far superior to any of the free form plugins, if you are going to be doing more than just your regular contact form, because it is easy and intuitive for non-technical people. It also is well supported and is continually being upgraded. Now it includes add-ons, which allow you to create forms which interface with other products that you may/should be using, such as Freshbooks, MailChimp, and PayPal.

Freshbooks is a great online application that I use to easily create proposals for my clients. It sends an e-mail of the estimate to the client who then can go into Freshbooks to see it and accept it. Once they do so, the estimate is turned into an invoice and it gives the client the option ( if you choose) for the client to pay using Paypal. I continue to use Quickbooks for my bookkeeping, but I have always found Quickbooks tedious to use to manage my invoicing.  When I get a check from a client or a Paypal receipt, I mark it as received in Freshbooks and then add it as a deposit to that clients name in Quickbooks.

I use MailChimp to send out my email newsletters and to e-mail prospects and customers. Mailchimp is free up to 1,000 people on a list, and is a great program to start off your freelance business with. I have a newsletter subscribe button on my website, but not everyone who works with me signs up for it. So I have to manually add them to MailChimp. With the gravity forms MailChimp add-on, I can have their name and contact information go directly into a prospect/client list on MailChimp, saving me valuable time.

My sales process runs smoothly and the “tedious factor” is minimized by automating these processes using Gravity Forms with these add-ons. My “Talk it Out’” process goes like this:  The  prospective client goes to my Talk it Out session page, where I have created a form using Gravity Forms. I have added the free Gravity Forms’ Freshbooks add-on and have designated which fields will map to Freshbooks. This allows the form to populate Freshbooks with the new client’s  information and fills in the data to the right fields to start their invoice. Once the prospect fills out the form on my page, they will be added into Freshbooks as a client and an invoice will be created for them. The invoice will not be automatically sent to them, giving me a chance to go in and preview it and tweak it if necessary and then send it out as an e-mail to the client.  Similarly, when someone signs up for my session  through this form, they will be automatically added to my prospect list in MailChimp. Using Gravity Forms will save you a lot of time and energy and will prevent a prospective client or step of your sales process from falling through the cracks.  Not to blow your mind but, you can also automate the back and forth of the appointment scheduling process using Tungle with your Google calendar, but we’ll save this for another day!

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:

1. 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. .
2. Use FTP to backup your public.html  file (where all your WordPress files are found).
3. 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.
4. Keep your plugins upgraded whenever they need it.
5. Use strong passwords on your hosting site.
6. 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.

Database Backup

In order to backup the database which contains all your content you can use the plugin, WP DB Backup.  Search for the plugin from your site’s Plugin area and automatically install it. Or you can download it to your computer, unzip it  and upload it using an FTP program like Filezilla to your Plugin Folder. To backup the content:

1. Click on “Backup,” which is under “Tools” in the dashboard of your website.
2. Select the “Email backup to” option.
3. Click “Backup Now”.

If you scroll down the page to the next set of options you can and should also set it to automatically create a backup on a regular basis. It is a good idea to use a gmail address to back up the files to so they are stored off the premises.

WordPress Site Backup

The next step before doing an upgrade is to backup the files which contain your theme files, plugins and your other WordPress files. This is so you could recreate your site and its styling should something go wrong. To do this you will need to use an FTP program such as FileZilla, which you can download for free. I have written another post on how to use Filezilla.

To backup your WordPress site files ( this does not back up the content which is stored on the server in the database) using FileZilla:

1. Click “New Site” (if you have an Apple, go to File –> Site Manager –> New Site).
2. Enter your URL (without the http://www.) in the host box.
3. Select “Normal” for the Login Type.
4. You can get your FTP connection “User Name” and “Password” from your web hosting account.
5. When you enter the information correctly and click “Connect”, if it works, the left side will show the content on your computer and the right side will show the content on  the server that houses your website files.
6. Create a new folder for the backup files on your computer.  For example, create a folder called, backup-1-11.  ( You can make it on your computer or make a new directory on your computer from the left side of the Filezilla interface ).  Be careful about storing your website backup on your computer if your are not regularly backing up your computer, which of course you should be doing and preferably to an offsite location each night while you sleep.
7. On the right side of the Filezilla interface, find the folder called ” public_html”  and drag it into the backup folder on the left side of Filezilla that you just created in the previous step.  This will put a copy of the themes and the plugins and the WordPress files on your site.  It will take a few minutes for the copying/backing up process to complete.
8. Check to make sure  it was successful.

Deactivate Your Plugins

Now that your site’s content and styling is backed up, your site is almost ready to be upgraded.  First though it is wise to deactivate your Plugins.  To do so go to Plugins in your dashboard and place a check next to all of the Plugins, then under Bulk Actions, select “Deactivate” and click “Apply.”

Sometimes plugins will not work with a new version of WordPress so this step is recommended so that you can make sure the upgrade works and then reinstall the plugins and see if  your site is still working as it should if not you can deactivate them again and activate them one by one until you find the offending Plugin.

Upgrade the Site To Latest Version

Once your plugins are deactivated, go ahead and do the Automatic upgrade to the latest version of WordPress right from your admin area. It will tell you if you have been successful. Check out your site and if all if well then go tend to activating your Plugins and you are ready to roll!

Premium Backup Plugins

There are two premium plugins which can do the backups of the database and the WordPress files:

Backup Buddy by Plugin Buddy. It costs  about $45.00 per year for a single site. It is a little tricky to set up and to restore things should they go wrong but it is a well recommended utility.

VaultPress Powered by Automattic and protects all of WordPress.com and now is offered to WordPress.org users at $15.00 per month. It has had rave reviews.

Check out these services if you really want to sleep at night knowing your site can be restored at any point.

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.

I use and wholeheartedly recommend BlueHost for all of my sites and my client’s websites. I have learned so much about web-hosting, databases, files, fixing problems, and general geek wisdom from their tech support that I should do a commercial for them or at least make them cookies or something. Here is a partial list of why I recommend them as a web host.

New Tricks Loves BlueHost!

Blue Host:

• answers the phone within a minute or two.
• knows a lot about WordPress and can fix things with your files if you have a problem.
• runs the right software on their servers ( latest versions of  PHP, My SQL and other scripts).
• has good performance, my blogs and websites are speedy.
• doesn’t try and up-sell you things you don’t need.
• uses  the C-Panel interface rather than some crazy one-off system ( Go Daddy).
• offers you a free domain for as long as you have hosting with them.
• offers you the option of using a one minute WordPress Install with Simple Scripts that is terrific and saves you from having to download WordPress to your computer and upload it through FTP back to the hosting company, a process newbies often screw up.You can have unlimited WordPress websites running on one 6.95 per month hosting account by installing WordPress again on a sub-directory ( I couldn’t believe this but it is true).
• gives me an affiliate fee for each referral I make to them. It doesn’t cost you more and I would totally refer them anyway.

CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR  YOUR ACCOUNT WITH BLUEHOST.COM
Once you have an account here is a video that will walk you through the easy way to install WordPress:

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.

I have written a post on the ten basic plugins that I recommend for use with each WordPress install and have included links to each of the plugins. I recommend that you download each of  them and unzip them and save them in a plugin file on your computer.  You can then upload them to your wp-contents/plugin folder in your WordPress installation on the server. That way you have them for the next time you need them. See this post for instructions of using Filezilla, a free FTP program to transfer files.

Instructions for installing  Plugin using your WordPress Dashboard:

1. Log in to your WordPress Dashboard and click on the “Plugins” tab and then “Add New.”
2. Click on “Upload” near the top of the page.
3. Click the “Choose File” button and find the  Plugin zipped file, then click “Choose” followed by the “Install Now” button.
4. WordPress will now upload and install your Plugin. Once the installation of your Plugin has finished click the “Activate Plugin” link. You will now see your newly installed plugin in “Manage Plugins.”

Instructions for installing the Plugin via FTP :

1. Upload the plugin via an FTP application to the wp-content/plugins/ folder in your WordPress directory online.
2. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
3. Activate the Plugin by accessing the Plugin Panel in your Administration Panels
4. Scroll down through the list of Plugins to find the newly installed Plugin (if not visible, start from the beginning to check to see if you followed the instructions properly and uploaded the file correctly).
5. Click on the Activate link to turn the Plugin on.

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.

1. Akismet - Essential as a spam catcher. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches on the  “Comments” admin screen. This is really important. This plugin comes with each WordPress.org  installation, but you must get a WordPress.com account (skip the choice to get a  blog and just get the account) in order to get an API ( application progam interface) number from your WordPRess.com profile page. You then  add this number to the Aksimet plugin on your website for it to start working.
2. WordPress.com Stats – There are a lot of statistics programs out there including Google Analytics, which we also suggest using. But this little program will show up on your Dashboard and give you a quick and easy snapshot of how you are doing each day. It is a great motivator. It also used that same API number that I mentioned above. So kill two birds with one stone. Get the API number and add it to Stats to make it start collecting data on your site.
3. WP-DB-Backup -  allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables to your server or to your e-mail. It backs up your content but it does not back up your theme files and modifications to them that make your site look a certain way. (You need to back up the wp-content file another way to protect that prior to an upgrade). But it will save your content on a regular basis, which is great. What I really recommend is a premium plugin called  Backup Buddy which does a complete backup of your database and the site files. It is less than 50.00 for the year and will keep you completely protected if you set it up correctly.
4. Gravity Forms-  This is a premium contact form plugin that I love!!! We use it for most simple forms. It allows you to flexibly design the form and add it to the site. You can manage multiple contact forms as well. In addition, it had addons that allow it to work with Freshbooks and MailChimp.
5. NexGEN Gallery – This gallery plugin allows you to add a variety of different gallery effects and a slideshow option. It makes a nice display without text or distraction. You also may want to check out WP Cycle which is another slideshow that works really well.
6. Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines crawl your blog. It makes it easier for crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. You do not have to add it to the navigation. It can sit undisplayed and still works fine. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
7. Google Analyticator – This plugin helps you to get Google Analytics to track the stats on your site. Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.
8. Sexy Bookmarks – This plugin is one of a couple of social media plugins we use depending on the style of the site. This plugin has fin icons that move up when you hover over them. They are very visible and help get readers of your blog to send your posts to social networking sites. It is not good for a more conservative site.
9. Add to any – This plugin is a more conservative social media pusher. It comes in various sizes and for a clean site without a lot of clutter it works fine to prompt people to send articles to social media sites.
10. Scribe - Scribe is not free but is a heck of a way to learn to write posts optimized for certain key words that you  would like to be found on a search. If you are writing posts you might as well learn to write them to get SEO. After a few months you will get the hang of it and not need it anymore. They offer a starter version at 17.00 per month.

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?

1. Purchase a domain. You get a free domain when you purchase web hosting through BlueHost, my favorite hosting company.
2. Get a hosting account with BlueHost. It costs 6.95 per month. You should go ahead and pay for two years since search engines like to see some evidence that you plan to be around for a while. If you bail on this project later,  BlueHost will give you a refund  prorated for time you haven’t used.
3. After getting the hosting account, go to the c-panel of BlueHost and go to Applications. You will see the WordPress “W” which will will take you through a 1 minute install process. Install  WordPress on the root directory not the subdirectory option ( unless that is what you want to do. ( root directory: www.yourdomain.com, not on the sub-directory: www.yourdomain.com/subdrectory name.)
4. Write down all of the passwords carefully; For BlueHost, for WordPress and settings for FTP ( file transfer program such as Filezilla which is not necessary but helpful).
5. You now have WordPress installed on your own domain. If you already had a domain registered with a different company, say Go Daddy, (do not get hosting on Go Daddy since among other things,  their database sites run slow) But leave your domain hosted there and go there ( or wherever your domain is registered,  to put the BlueHost DNS numbers in the nameservers  ( NS1.bluehost.com and NS2.bluehost.com)  This will point your domain name to your new site on the BlueHost account.
6. Go to your new WordPress site ( www.yourdomainname/wp-admin)go to the dashboard and set up all of  the Settings. Pay attention to the permalinks settings.
7. Now time to clean up your .com blog by getting rid of spam comments and such to prepare for the export.
8. Go to your old .com site’s dashboard to Tools- Export and export the blog file and save it to your desktop.
9. Go to your new site’s dashboard to Tools – Import and find the file on your desktop to import into your new site. Be sure you check the option when it presents itself to bring in all attachments.
10. Now you are ready to choose your theme and customize it as well as choosing your plugins setting them up and adding widgets to your site. There are lots of great tutorials as well as good books out on how to get the most out of your WordPress.org account. If you aren’t good with graphics, you can hire someone to spruce up a theme and get it all set up for you and then you can take it from there.

But you are not finished yet! What do do with your old site? Google does not want duplicate content sitting around the Internet so here is the plan to employ if your site has been going for a while and has a lot of traction. If it hasn’t been up long and you haven’t been serious about it then just delete the original .com blog. But if you have lots of search engine traction and links and so forth then there is a way to do this and keep all of your links pointing to the new site.

I have researched the answer to the best practices for making sure the original blog gets pointed to the new one. Until about a year ago there was a work around at WordPress.com for you to do this but they now have it as a service for 12.00 per year and it is very straightforward to redirect your old site to the new WordPress.org site automatically.

If you are local, please join us for the Atlanta WordPress Users’ Group to meet January 19 at New Tricks Word Headquarters in Inman Park.

Over the US Labor Day weekend, older (pre 2.8.4) versions of WordPress were reportedly attacked by a worm which inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

Here’s what the New Tricks Team recommends:

• From the WordPress dashboard, select ‘Tools; Backup’. If you don’t already have the WP Database Backup plugin, then install it from ‘Plugins; Add New’.
• Backup a copy of your WordPress site. You can download the backup to your local machine, send the backup to your email address or store it on your server.
• For double protection, go ahead and create an xml export of your content (‘Tools; Export’).
• Disable your plugins (from the WordPress Dashboard, select ‘Plugins’. Then, select all of your Plugins by checking the box at the top. Choose, ‘ Deactivate’ from the Bulk Actions Dropdown then ‘Apply’).
• Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 (Either follow the prompt at the top of your Dashboard or select ‘Tools;Upgrade’).
• Reactivate your plugins. We recommend reactivating them one by one in case one doesn’t work with the latest WordPress release.

Here is some additional info on the attack:

• How to Keep WordPress Secure by Matt at Automattic
• Old WordPress Versions Under Attack – by Lorelle – More info about the attack and how to backup and protect

Please note that the threat is just for WordPress.org users – if you have a WordPress.com blog, then there is no need to lose sleep.

We have written before about the evolution of WordPress’s use as a website development platform rather than, what most people think, as just a blogging program. Using WordPress for websites is cutting edge Web 2.0 and takes advantage of WordPress’s use of a My SQL database. It then becomes a content management system, otherwise referred to as a CMS, which offers much more to a business than a traditional old skool static or Flash website.

Today, I want to bring you what I imagine must be the first song in history about using WordPress as a CMS. I know it is a little rough and I understand there is a new version coming out with much improved production quality. In the meantime, I bring you a performance by Charles Williams from the Dallas WordPress Camp:

Using WordPress as a CMS from Charles Williams on Vimeo.