Before making any changes to your blog, however, we highly recommend making a backup. This will ensure an easy fix should something ever go wrong.

Luckily, many pre-designed themes are structured more or less the same when it comes to editing. To edit your blog colors you need to click Appearance then Editor in your WordPress Dashboard. At the very bottom of the right hand side look for Styles. By default, most are labeled Stylesheet (style.css), this would be a good place to start making small changes to the appearance of your blog.

Many themes today have the Options page where you can easily change the logo, and modify the structure of your blog to your liking. It is advised to at least have some standard HTML and image editing know-how when attempting any changes to a theme. However if you feel like trying then first create a development area (a copy) of your blog, and start learning how to make these small changes to your theme without affecting your live blog.

From President Obama’s campaign right up to the State of the Union address in 2011 he has been a proponent of blogs & social media. Businesses should take notice.

Saving my critque of the President’s blog for another day, I love how the current administration used social media tools with the recent State of the Union address.  The strategy included a unique, content generated  “Your Interview with the President” YouTube video.  Over 142,000 questions were submitted and 1,382,00 votes were cast to select the final questions for the interview.

For lack of a better description, I think this is a really cool use of social media. Imagine a prominent member of your business being featured in a similar campaign. Along with serious issues submitted to President Obama other more human questions were used. Some examples included:

• What is you favorite and least favorite part about being President?
• What was your favorite class in college?
• Who will win the Superbowl, Pittsburgh or Green Bay?
• What did you get Michelle for Valentine’s Day?
• What is your favorite YouTube video, and why?
• It is cheaper to feed kids Fruit Loops than fruit. What are you going to do to reverse that?

The President’s example of open and prevalent use of social media is a great success story.

Take Our Poll

Use a secure password and change it often

I bet your password is your last name and some characters? Your dogs name? Your favorite flower? If your password is even remotely as easy to guess as my examples then you should consider using a different password. Ideally it will be at least 8 characters long and include letters and numbers, both lower case and upper case.

Don’t use “admin” as a username

This is obvious to hackers. This is setup by WordPress as the default login name and many people don’t change it. Login and change your username.

Hide your WordPress version

WordPress automatically shows what version you have in your meta tags. Anyone looking at your page source can see it, then exploit potential security bugs your version may have. Instead, hide it.

Go to Appearance then click Editor. Make sure your theme is the one selected and click header.php

Look for:

Change it to something like:

Protect your directories

Some directories may not have an index file. This leaves them open to anyone viewing them. Just add the following to your .htaccess file:

This will return a 403 error when someone looks at a directory that doesn’t have an index.

Use your Security Keys!

Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor (i.e. notepad) and locate the following:

A Security Key makes your site harder to hack and access harder to crack by adding random elements to the password

You can use online code generator, then simply copy and paste into your wp-config.php file.
The four keys are essential for enhanced security. The four salts are recommended, but are not required, because WordPress will generate salts for you if none are provided.

Happy Blogging!

Themes Themes Themes

Free or Paid, WordPress has the theme for you. Even more amazing is that having a custom theme created doesn’t break the bank. In fact, it’s relativity affordable to have a customized theme made (depending on your needs of course). Check our blog design services for more information.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of amazingly free themes to choose from and with a little html know-how you can turn it into your own creation.

User-Friendly Interface

If the multitude of free themes available wasn’t enough then how about the fact that WordPress has one of the most user-friendly backends for blogging? It’s pretty straightforward. You want to make a new post? Then click Post then Add New. Want to add a new link? Then click Links and click Add New. The ease-of-use just continues.

Plugins

The plugins are what really makes this software really stand out. It goes above and beyond “blog software” when you see what the plugins can do. There’s one for nearly any task you can think of. You can turn your WordPress into a forum, arcade, user-submitted video site or joke site, and so much more.

Permalinks

The feature is, in fact, known as “pretty permalinks” in the WordPress community. You can create your permalinks almost any way you like. From the standard, to ending in .html, or category/date/postname and more. This feature really help with your SEO and is yet another feature that makes WordPress an incredible platform.

The features and functions of WordPress don’t stop there. Check it out for yourself.

As previously mentioned, blogging software not only keeps up-to-date content on your website, but provides an unparalleled source of traffic as well. Search engines like Google thrive on it. Their bots (a software that collects information from the web) continuously check for new posts on your blog, and those updates keep them coming back for more.

What does this mean for you? More thorough indexing on Google, better SEO and higher rankings on search engines, especially for targeted keywords. Having up-to-date content will provide the optimal setting for your website to succeed. Well-written and researched material will not only give the professional feel that your readers have come to expect, but will also portray you as an expert in your field.

In addition, it creates an open environment for your company where past, present and future clients can communicate with you directly by utilizing blog post comments. This will help in accommodating the ever-changing needs of your customers. What more could you ask for? All of this is possible with the power of blogging—up-to-date content, professionalism and putting a human face on your company. The benefits of blogging are vital to increasing traffic to your website and retaining relevance in a new era of communication.

So what’s changed with WordPress 3.0? For starters, they’ve created a new default theme, Twenty Ten. It proves to be much more robust and eye pleasing than the previous default theme, Kubrick.

In addition, the interface is lighter and has over 1,200 bugs fixes and enhancements. That’s only the beginning of the myriad new features. Creating a custom theme for WordPress is now easier than ever before thanks to new API integrations. Customized backgrounds, menus, headings, and more are now simpler to implement in new designs.

Another notable feature is the ability to perform bulk updates with the internal upgrading system. You can upgrade 15 plugins at once!

Probably the most significant change is the integration of WordPress MU (multi-user). WordPress 3.0 offers the multi-user system built directly into its structure. You can now run millions of blogs from one dashboard. Some of our notable customers are already taking advantage of this functionality.

You can learn more about new features and changes, including an exceptional video about the latest and greatest WordPress 3.0 by clicking here.

We highly recommend you upgrade immediately or contact us for further assistance.

If you think about it, RSS feeds are very similar to email newsletters, but without all the fuss of collecting your visitors email addresses and manually sending them out. Now lets look at what we can do if we add Google’s FeedBurner to the mix.

By registering (also called burning) your blog RSS feed with FeedBurner, you’ll see how many subscribers you have; how may people click on your links to get to your blog posts; you can see what kind of tools your blog readers are using to read your blog updates; a geographic view of where your feed items were viewed in the most recent full day. You can even make some cash with your feeds by including Google Ads between the posts! So if you have a blog and are not using FeedBurner yet – I urge you to go ahead and sign up right now. You’re missing out!

Another popular resource for website designs as well as blog designs is the popular Template Monster where themes come with a download fee and are generally better quality if that’s important to you. My personal favorite would have to be Elegant Themes. For a small membership fee of just $19.95 you’ll have access to over 35 professionally designed themes. When I say professionally design I really mean professionally designed. The themes are simply stunning, well coded, well documented, and even come with a Photoshop file so you can make any design changes your heart desires.

For even more themes there’s always Google or the place called Woo Themes featuring a number of different themes that come with a small fee. What most people do is buy or download a theme, and then hire a blog consulting company to personalize that theme matching their specific needs. This method saves them quite a bit of money comparing to hiring a blog design company to design one from scratch.

This post however is not about consumer products and cheap cell phone plans, don’t worry. It is about taking payments online. If you have a personal website or a blog, you’ve probably heard about PayPal. If not, PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. Up until a year or so ago PayPal was pretty much the only choice for someone who wanted to accept payments online in a matter of minutes, without dealing with merchant banks, payment gateways etc.

Today, PayPal has a competition from Google with their Google Checkout service. It is just as easy to setup, and even faster (based on my experience) to pay for a product or a service. In fact, one of Google’s requirements is to let your visitors buy something on your site or pay for a service with one click of a button! We all know Google makes great, solid products and services, and you can rest assured Google Checkout is just as good as any other Google product. Again it’s all about choices, so if you’re already accepting PayPal on your site, why not add Google Checkout and present your visitors with a choice? Who knows, maybe you’ll increase your sales by gaining a share of Google Checkout fans.

Another benefit of Google Checkout is the ability to link it to your AdWords account, and any time you run your AdWords it will display Google Checkout logo making your Ad stand out from other sites that don’t accept Google payments on their website or a blog. It also adds trust and recognition to your site, which is a must for any e-commerce site.