2011 March

WordPress Jetpack: Turbo Boost your WordPress Blog

March 15, 2011 By Paul 14 Comments

WordPress Jetpack logo

Introduction

WordPress have just released the extremely powerful JetPack plug-in. This feature will add quite a few useful utilities that were only available as a complete package to blogs on the company’s free blogging platform, WordPress.com.

I advise everyone using WordPress to install it for the WordPress.com Stats package alone which shows you in a simplified way the number of visitors you have, where they go and where they come from. There is also an enhanced spelling and grammar checker for the WordPress Add and Edit Post section as well as a number of other useful utilities.

The package is designed so that WordPress can add other utilities to the package. The features mentioned are all free, but it looks like there will be the possibility of adding premium enhancements in the future.

Overview of Jetpack

Gravatar Hovercards: Find out who’s commenting on your posts with enhanced information for Gravatars (includes full name, bio, other web profiles).
WordPress.com Stats: Keep on top of your traffic with powerful and simple to understand statistics for your site.
Twitter Widget: Keep your readers more up to date by syncing your tweets to your site via a simple widget.
Shortcodes: Quickly add movies, images, and more to your posts and pages with a single line of code.
Shortlinks: Automatically creates an easy to copy/paste mini-url for any post on your site.
$\LaTeX$ : Use the famous markup language to quickly create beautiful mathematical expressions and equations.
Sharedaddy: Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks.
After the Deadline: Your writing will improve thanks to this artificial intelligence based spell, style, and grammar checker.

Installation is easy

In you plugin menu click Add Plugin search for jetpack and select WordPress jetpack.

Then follow the process. For many this will mean joining WordPress.com, but the process is simple, but does require you to confirm your application by email.

Conclusion

Install the package today and you can then start checking you visitor statistics within half an hour.

Filed Under: Blogging

Five reasons why bloggers must use a cPanel Hosting Company

March 4, 2011 By Paul 7 Comments

Fantastico Goodies

OK let’s get a bit geeky: the vast majority of companies that host WordPress use LAMP technology, (see below). But don’t panic — as a blogging beginner you do not need to know very much.

Part of Cpanel screen

1 – cPanel is the market leader

It is the market leader by far. Most LINUX based hosting businesses, big and small, use cPanel to allow their customers to control their websites.

2 — cPane has a host of features

cPane allows the user to control e-mails, databases, accessed the website, check statistics and do a remarkable number of technical things that the majority of us do not need to do. However, as you develop your online career you will find that some of these features are useful when you load more complex packages.

Cpanel also allows the hosting company to add extras. So some hosts will give you links to programs that will let you build a website, give you access to clip art images or website templates. However, I find that most of these features are not very useful.

3 – cPanel makes it very easy to change host

Once you know your way around one cPanel host you know your way around them all. Therefore it is very easy to transfer to another host and know your way around the new system in minutes.

cPanel Fantastico Button

4 — The fantastic Fantastico

Fantastico it’s an add-on to cPanel. It allows the automatic installation of around forty different open source programs: these include blogging packages, mailing lists,discussion boards, e-commerce, customer relations software and many many more packages. All installed by the click of a few buttons plus entering your details on a simple form.

Do not subscribe to a host unless they have Fantastico.

Some of the Fantastico software available

5 – cPanel has fantastic support

As the package is very popular all you have to do is Google your problem and you will see dozens of solutions and tutorials.

If you belong to a technical support forum, such as the very helpful Daniweb, you’ll find dozens of people who will help you with any cPanel problem.

Personal story

For the couple of years I have a resellers hosting account with a respected company. Although the installation of WordPress was non-standard I was very happy with the service.

That was until I needed to install a couple of other packages. I then found at my non-standard host gave me what you technical problems. This involved me spending hours dealing with their support people and finding out but there were quite a few technical limitations from this company.

I then had quite an argument with this company getting part of the money back that I have paid, (as I had pleaded in advance for the year). Fortunately I know the English law reasonably well and was able to come to an agreement with the company.

I will now only use cPanel hosting and I’ll never pay more a quarter in advance. I hope you will learn from my problems.

My links

Blog Basics: Installing WordPress using Fantastico

Conclusion

Unless you have a good valid reason, (such as your uncle owns a hosting company), you need to use one of the many hosting companies that offers Cpanel with Fantastico.

Arghh – geeky stuff

A quick overview of LAMP technology

L stands for LINUX, A stands for Apache, M stands for MySQL and P stands for PHP.

LINUX is a free, open source operating system that is used to support Internet servers. From the user’s point of view it is harder to use than say Windows, but the experts tell me that LINUX is more secure and has more features. That’s all you need to know about LINUX, unless you want to go into developing computer systems at a high level.

Apache is free, open source server software. It is the most popular server technology on the Internet. It has a host of features and is very well supported. That’s all you need to know about Apache servers.

MySQL is a free, open source database package. It is extremely powerful and has been used by large corporations very affectively. Fortunately as a blogger you do not really need to get into detail with MySQL, unless you are into developing interesting plug-ins for packaged like WordPress.

PHP is a server-based programming language. This means that when you call a page of your blog the PHP does clever things such as finding the content, displaying the date, sorting out some of the layout and pulling in sections of your blog, such as the header, footer and sidebar.

WordPress is written in this language and it is possible that you may need to know a little about PHP if you get into customising your WordPress themes.

You don’t really need to know much about these technologies to use WordPress efficiently.

Filed Under: Blogging

Ten reasons why bloggers MUST use WordPress

March 4, 2011 By Paul 7 Comments

Woman eating chocolate instead of blogging

OK chocolate is better than blogging

WordPress is the leading blogging software. It has gained popularity because it was free, was well-designed and had a very active bunch of volunteers helping develop the package.

Rapidly it has become the most popular blogging package on the Internet. This has led to tens of thousands of developers producing thousands of plug-ins and themes, enhancing the package and the look of blogs in general.

Below are 10 reasons why you must use WordPress

1 - It is the most widely used blogging software around

WordPress is now the market leader in both blogging and content management, open source, free software packages.

Its popularity is growing and for the majority of bloggers it is the obvious choice to use.

2 – WordPress is free

Because of its popularity WordPress has a great deal of support in this has enabled it to develop fast. The package is now very sophisticated and has the appearance of a commercial product. The fact that it is free is a great bonus — and makes it a program that you can afford, no, it is a program that you cannot afford NOT to use.

3 – It’s incredibly well supported

Google ‘wp’ and then add any problem that you might be having with WordPress and I will be very surprised if you cannot find ten, twenty or more websites with the solution.

I admit that the WordPress support itself can be a bit intimidating for newcomers. But hey there are thousands of other places to get support — you are visiting one now.

4 — WordPress is designed to work we’ve search engines

The content on your blog makes easy reading for Google and other search engine spiders. Once on your site they will jump from post to post an index all of .

Even by itself WordPress works well with the search engines. However, this greatly boosted by plug-ins and some theme designers, like this one, which was designed by StudioPress.

5 – The amazing range of plug-ins

There are literally thousands of free plug-ins for WordPress. They range from simple plug-ins that allow, say the most popular posts to be displayed in the sidebar, to quite clever procedures to back-up the entire blog.

There are numerous enhancements to the basic WordPress package, which include automatically updating Twitter or Facebook with your latest post to a useful plug-in I found recently that allows you to merge all the posts in two categories — which saved me probably half a day’s work when I wanted to put all of the posts on a client’s blog into one large category called ‘Ald Blog’.

6 – The amazing range of themes

another great success of WordPress has been that it is relatively easy for a web designer to design a WordPress theme. There are hundreds of free themes available from the stylish, through the garish to themes for business, entertainment, to display photographs, be outrageous, girly or just nice and gentle or a personal blog.

7 – The amazing widgets

Widgets used to be a clever feature of WordPress that allowed even the most basic user to add things to the sidebar. The standard widgets include things like search box, displaying or recent posts and the archives of the blog.

Today widgets, usually linked plug-ins, can be quite sophisticated and so they may display a Twitter feed, advertisements linked to the content, a signup for a newsletter and interesting combinations of text and image.

8 – The great Plug-in Contact Form 7

This simple plug-in allows you to create a contact page within minutes, without having to display your e-mail address.

Once installed all you have to do is create a blank page, add a little text and add a simple code, given to you by the plug-in, enclosed in square brackets, like this [ code], and your contact page is ready for action.

9 – The wonderful Permalinks

Permalinks is the process which enables WordPress to make the page names of your blog more memorable. Instead of something like ‘post=134′ Permalinks converts the title into something like this: ‘ten-reasons-why-bloggers-must-use-wordpress’.

This process not only makes the page title more readable by human beings, but it helps search engines, such as Google, make more sense of the page, (one of the most important factors used by Google is the title of any webpage).

10 – It makes you look professional

An important consideration of the blogger is to appear professional to others. The fact that you have chosen to use the world’s leading blogging package demonstrates that you are taking a businesslike approach to your blogging.

Other bloggers may want to work with you; advertisers, the media, visitors, support workers and potential buyers of your blog could possibly be put off if you are not using the industry standard.

Conclusion

Unless you have a good reason to go for a different blogging software package, (such as you need the added business functions of Drupal and know to how to use it), then you should use WordPress.

I know that some of the rivals are very good, but none of them has anything like the range of support, the range of enhancements, (such as plug-ins) or the range of themes as has WordPress.

WordPress is also rapidly improving and each new version of the package has the number or enhancements, (so in a recent upgrade it is possible to link customised to sidebars to specific posts, specific categories and even specific tags.

Filed Under: Blogging

Blogging:Three terrific tantalising traffic techniques

March 2, 2011 By Paul 2 Comments

Make your visitors feel welcome

Introduction

True Confession: the reason I’m writing this post is that I am realising that I have got it totally wrong on this blog. I had some good ideas for developing navigation on this blog, but I allowed myself to be diverted on another project. These problems will be sorted out over the next week or so. Please forgive me.

One of the problems of new bloggers, and in fact many experienced bloggers, is that they write their blog posts but do not think how to keep the visitor on their site. Their blogs are like visiting and IKEA store. You know there are lots of goodies there, but you’re not clear where they are, and I am sure I am not the only person who tries to retreat within five minutes of entering this large warehouse masquerading as a shop.

Your visitor

It is likely that your first-time visitor will have landed on your site from a search engine or a link from another website. They will probably check out and read the post they have arrived on. They will then look around and see is there anything else worth clicking on — and if there isn’t something obvious then it it is click ‘back button’ and goodbye — sadly another bounce statistic on your visitor log.

Give them a reason to click and most will. Encouraging your visitors to stay on your site is a very important technique. It means dramatically more of your site’s pages will be seen, (good for page views, good the authority of the blog and also good for search engine ratings), makes it more likely that your visitor will subscribe to your feed or your newsletter and if they are in the habit of clicking, well they just might click on an advertisement or affiliate link.

1) Make sure your navigation is great

I’ve seen it — quite a few blogs do not even do the basics. I’ve seen blogs without a search box or using the basic widget, ‘Recent Posts’ — shame on you if your blog doesn’t have these features. You do not deserve to build up your traffic.

Do your categories help with navigation, (Confession two: my categories on this site need completely revising). If not then change them.

2) Tag everything that moves

Tags are really useful they help the serious visitor drill down to what they are looking for on your site. Usually tags are found underneath a post with a clickable link. Your visitor can then click on that link and see a list of posts with the same tag.

One of the people and helping at the moment, Philip, has a motoring site. He does not use tags. This winter in the UK has been remarkably cold and we have had much more snow and ice than normal.

He has written about five articles on winter tyres, which are unusual to use in this country as in most areas we only get one or two days of snow. However, these articles are mixed up among a great many other articles on this site. So visitors were landing on one of his winter tyre posts, but had no obvious link to his other articles. Therefore they read and left.

Had he had the tags then they would have happily read his other articles, which would have enhanced Philip’s authority on the subject and the links would have meant that search engines would have rated the articles much higher.

Philip is beginning to address this problem and also planning for next year to include advertisements for the suppliers of winter tyres. He will also write in the late autumn series of articles, ‘Preparing for winter’, which will be a lead in to his articles on winter tyres. Hopefully next year this linking will build his site’s authority and bring in some income.

You should use tags in all of your posts. Try and remember to use the same tag to describe a particular activity. If I was tagging a post about writing I would always include the tag, ‘content writing’.

If I use a variety of different tags, say ‘writing’, ‘writing a post’, ‘web journalism’ or ‘new posts’ this is not going to be helpful to your visitor. So try and be consistent with your tagging.

For most blogs a tag cloud, a box in your sidebar displaying the tags used in your blog. The more popular a tag is the larger it will appear in the box. This is another useful way a visitor can explore your site.

3) — Tell your visitor where to go

There is an amazing reluctance of quite a few bloggers to point to their visitors to specific parts of their site or to ask the visitor to do something, like make any comment, sign up to a newsletter. Don’t be shy become the tourist guide to your blog.

In your sidebar use a text widget to highlight your most important posts. Explore the WordPress plug-ins and find one that will display the most popular post on your site.

As important you need to put links at the bottom of each post telling your visitor exactly where to go. On many of my posts I have a section titled, ‘My Links’, where I display links to useful programs on my blog. I also have a section called ‘Other Links’ for external links.

Originally when I started writing this blog I combined internal and external links, but I plan now to separate them on this site.

Another thing you should do at the bottom of your posts is to direct your visitor to do something — in the blogging trade this is known as ‘Call to Action’. In most cases I use this to encourage my visitor to make a comment, however, I will be hinting that my visitor may want to sign up to the newsletter or ‘what does the visitor think about such and such a link post’.

Conclusion

Give your visitors as many opportunities as possible to stay on your site. Good navigation is essential making use of categories, links in the sidebar, tags, a tag cloud, a ‘My Links’ section at the bottom of every post and now again encourage your visitor to any specific post by a ‘Call to Action’.