Dashboard Access

Creating a basic website with WordPress does not require you to know any coding or programming. If you want a simple website that people can read and navigate, all you need to do is use the default templates and tools available. When you create a website with this platform, you do everything through the administrator dashboard. This dashboard lets you add new posts and pages to the site, change font colors, add graphics and videos, and even change the appearance of your site. The availability of the dashboard is one of the things that make WordPress so easy to use.

Widgets and Plugins

If you have a traditional website, you probably have to hire someone every time you want to make a small change. If you don’t have the budget to hire someone, you have to try to change the code yourself, which takes a lot of time and can create a lot of frustration. WordPress users have access to thousands of plugins, which are tools that help you add features to your site. If you want to add a newsletter sign-up form in the sidebar of your site, you can easily do so by adding a widget. Widgets also make it easier to manage ad units from affiliate programs and direct advertisers.

Flexibility

When you pay someone to design a site for you, you typically have to use that design until you are ready to pay for a redesign. This may not happen for several years. When you use WordPress, you can change the look of your site at any time with just a few clicks. There are thousands of free and paid themes available for this platform, making it easy for users to change the appearance of their websites. Even changing the layout of a site is easy when you use WordPress.

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress makes it easy to optimize each post and page for the search engines. There are dozens of tools available to help you assign content to categories, assign tags to each post, create meta titles and descriptions and add keywords to your pages. All you have to do is fill in the settings for each post and WordPress takes care of the rest. There are a number of plugins available to help you link from one related post to another, which can also help you improve SEO for your site.

Easy Ad Management

If you want to make money with Google Adsense or with one of the many affiliate programs available, you have to display the ads on your site. If you have a traditional website, getting the ad code to work with your website code can be a nightmare. WordPress has plugins available to help users manage AdSense units, Amazon affiliate products and other affiliate program ad units. There is even a widget available that allows you to rotate which ads appear on the sidebar of your blog posts. Instead of showing the same ad on every page, you can customize your ad placement to generate more revenue.

Security

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress is the added security. When you run a traditional website, there is always the risk that you will not immediately identify a security breach, allowing unscrupulous people to steal your information and even disable your website. WordPress regularly updates its software and keeps security in mind when doing so. If a new version of WordPress is available, you will get a notification at the top of your dashboard. Installing new versions not only improves security, it also expands the functionality of your site.

Due to its ease of use and availability of thousands of customization tools, WordPress is ideal for personal websites or small business websites. With just a little time and some clicking, you can create a website that gives visitors a great first impression.

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.

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.

To see the list of other bug fixes in this release, please click here.

These changes have attracted many corporations to the software and for good reason. WordPress 3.0 is sleek, has an attractive default design, lots of new built-in functions, and now offers Multi-User capabilities. Granted, we’ve had access to WP-MU for years but the setup and use of that software has been complex for many people. WordPress 3.0 changes all that.

The features and security WordPress 3.0 offers is unparalleled. It saves companies money by being open source, has an amazing community of developers and users for support, knows no bounds for customization and functionality, is SEO-friendly, and now has many e-business features.

You already know that WordPress has been more than “just blogging software” for years and with 3.0 it has become official. It’s allowing big businesses to consolidate many websites under one easy-to-use interface. Controlling plugins, themes, and information… it’s truly changing the way we manage our content.

Some plugins, however, that you simply can’t live without. They help you improve your SEO score, keep up-to-date stats of your visitors, and much more. While these aren’t in any particular order we can assure you that you’ll find them extremely helpful.

1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Post is a plugin that automatically plugs similar entries you’ve created into your post. How does this help you? It allows you to keep your visitors around longer which, in turn, can improve traffic and even ad revenue and usually shows them you have more to offer on the subject they’ve came to your site to read about.

2. WP Super Cache

If you haven’t heard of WP Super Cache, what rock have you been living under? The benefits of this plugin are apparent usually within a day of having it installed. How does it benefit you? It lowers load times on your server (be it shared or dedicated) so there is less strain on your blog and server by creating static HTML pages of your entire blog. Then when visitors come to your site, it displays your HTML pages up instead of processing PHP and MySQL. How it benefits your visitors? Faster page loads, and what visitor wouldn’t love that?

3. Akismet

Akismet comes standard with all WordPress blogs. Use it and consider your spam troubles history. It runs various tests whenever you receive a new trackback, comment, or ping to see if it should be allowed in your blog. No blacklisting or work is needed from you once you’ve activated it and put your API Key into the system. The key can be obtained at WordPress.com by registering.

4. Feedburner

Replace your old RSS feeds with this amazing system. Your feeds get redirected to Feedburner and in return Feedburner gives you amazing stats on your subscribers. From what post they read, where they came from, and so much more.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Unless you’ve been on Mars for the last several years, Google is the top search engine out there. Sitemaps makes crawlers, those pesky little things going all over your blog, able to retrieve the data they need to update their pages about your site. It supports custom URLs and it even notifies all major search engines when you’ve made updates.

6. AddThis

AddThis is an amazing Social Bookmarking tool that allows your visitors to share the things they find most interesting on your site with the world. It supports all the major Social Bookmarking websites and dozens you’ve probably never even heard of. It has several options to let you adjust their button to match the look and feel of your theme.

7. OnlyWire

OnlyWire is one of those secret “tools of the trade” so many people don’t want you to find out about. Imagine a website where you can input login information to dozens of Social Bookmarking and Social Media websites then have new updates you make be automatically posted to them through the use of a WordPress plugin. Sounds to good to be true, right? Think again! OnlyWire offers free and paid services and is a true one stop spot to obtaining traffic, ranking, and so much more.

8. WP-Polls

There are any number of bloated poll plugins for WordPress. Many that add unnecessary graphics, text, and links to polls you’ve added when all you really want is a simple and easy to use feature to offer your visitors. WP-Polls is the answer to your prayers! Lightweight, customizable, and as easy, WP-Polls gives you what you want and leaves out what you don’t need.

9. SpamShiv Lite

SpamShiv Lite, being the free version, converts email addresses you input to your blog into an unrecognizable code for crawlers going around the Internet looking for addresses to add to their spam list. This plugin protects not only your email address, but any that is added to your blog from spam. A must have, some might say.

10. All in One SEO Pack

Words cannot describe what this plugin can truly offer. It allows you to control every aspect of SEO for your blog, internally, with several small extras. One extra being the use of “tags” as meta keywords in single entries. It would take a whole page to write about all the features and benefits All in One SEO Pack has to offer but until you try it for yourself, you’ll never really understand.

11. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 isn’t just a simple contact form, it’s a contact form which offers multiple form creations (depending your various needs), customization of exactly what you want, and an easy to use admin interface. Create any number of forms for your users to contact you and have those messages sent to any email address you require. Oh and it supports AJAX, CAPTCHA, and Spam Filtering.

12. Honorable Mention: Exec-PHP

Exec-PHP may not be something that you find yourself needing often but when you do it can be a life saver. It allows you to run PHP script within entries and pages.

While you may find only a few of these plugins useful for your needs, they are all truly amazing. They help increase usability and options you can offer your readers and even yourself. Best of all, they’re free!

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.

The merge! WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.

The new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.

Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up.

Bulk Plugin and Theme Upgrades.

Shortlinks API.

If you are planning to upgrade as soon as it comes out then be sure to make a backup first, just in case things don’t go the way you anticipated. For popular or business blogs it’s recommended to first make a development environment and test it there before upgrading your live blogs!

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.