Wordpress

Blogs are currently all the rage in the internet marketing world. They have seen a rise in popularity so sudden and forceful that even brand names companies are getting in on the action. Movie stars, writers, television producers, and a myriad of highly respected individuals are using blogs as part of their every day lives. Starting a blog may seem like a daunting task for someone who doesn’t know much about them, but they’re really not that hard to setup. Wordpress blogs in particular are very user-friendly, and the Wordpress CMS (content management system) makes the process even more simple. The very first thing you want to do before you setup your Wordpress blog is come up with a name for it.

Naming your blog is a very important first step in the blog creation process. If your blog is going to be about a particular niche or subject, then your name should be based on that. For example, if I wanted to start a blog that promoted fishing hooks, I would come up with a catchy title such as ‘Fishing Hooks: Necessary or Unnecessary?’, and then design my content around that phrase. You’ll also need to choose a website address. If you’re signing up for a free blog on Word press, then the title will be something like ‘fishing hooks word press’. If you’re using the Wordpress software for your own website, then you’ll have to check for the available domains and use something that you think is fitting to your niche.

After you’ve come up with a name, you’ll need to pick a template (called a ‘theme’ in the Wordpress blogs universe) for your blog. Wordpress has many free and professional-looking templates for you to choose from from it’s main website. If you’re looking for something more original though, for more details visit to www.your-own-blog.com or a template that no one’s used before, looking for a designer who develops templates or a website that sells pre-made templates to budding bloggers would be your best bet. Once you have the code for your template implemented and setup, you’ll then need to configure the necessary widgets that you want displayed on your blog.

Widgets are a big feature of the Wordpress CMS that allow you to do stuff like add different pages (e.g. Home, About, Contact, etc.), or content to your blog. Some of the content widgets include del.icio.us, Flickr, and Meebo, among other things. You can also add a calendar, links, a search feature, or an RSS feed button to your blog. Utilizing these widgets on your Wordpress blogs will give them a slight step up from other barren, mundane blogs out there. People like to be able to mess around with the content and features of the blogs they visit, and yours will not be an exception to that rule. If you want to know how to start a blog, for more details visit to www.blog-and-ping.com keeping your potential visitors in mind at all times is something that you should start doing immediately.

These are pretty much the main things that you have to do to start posting on your wordpress blogs, and start making money (if that’s your goal). Most people think that creating the content for their blog is the first step, but as I’ve shown in this article, there’s a lot of pre-foundational work that has to be done before you can get your blog out into the world. From naming your blog, to choosing how it will look, to choosing what kind of interactive features you want on it, it all goes towards teaching you how to start a blog. If you want to start learning more about Wordpress blogs, then you’ve already taken a step in the right direction by reading this article.

Rajesh Kumar Chouhan
http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/naming-your-blog-is-a-very-important-first-step-in-the-blog-creation-process-731458.html

Technorati Tags: All The Rage, Best Bet, Bloggers, Brand Names, Catchy Title, Cms Content, Content Management System, Daunting Task, Fishing Hooks, Free Blog, Internet Marketing, Movie Stars, Niche, Own Website, Phrase, Popularity, Television Producers, templates, Website Address, Word Press

In this screen cast I show how you can use FileZilla as an FTP client to upload plugins and templates to a wordpress installation.

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Technorati Tags: Filezilla, ftp, Plugins, templates, wordpress

There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is Wordpress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress, the earliest now termed as “Wordpress” at Wordpress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed “Wordpress.com” which is of course available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We’ll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of Wordpress. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

Gobala Krishnan
http://www.articlesbase.com/publishing-articles/blogging-wars-wordpress-vs-blogger-part-1-65060.html

Technorati Tags: blog, Blogger, Bloggers, Blogosphere, Choose One, Configuration Script, Domain Account, Headache, Newbie, Platforms, templates

Blogging is extremely popular these days. And the most popular stand-alone blog engine is Wordpress. It is flexible, has many useful featires and there is a lot of eye-catching templates for it. But those who have a Wordpress blog must be aware of a serious problem that can cause your blog to be removed from Google’s search results. The problem is: Duplicate Content.

WordPress content management system which, when used with the default configuration, is not duplicate content proof. In fact this CMS is capable to render almost 100% of your content duplicate. As usual the fault of the system has roots in its advantages. WordPress has many features facilitating blogging and linking, such as RSS feeds to posts and comments, trackback URLs, monthly archives and so on. In the same time this variety of URLs returning similar or identical pages represents a clear case of duplicate content.

WordPress And Duplicate Content

The first evidences of duplicate content produced by your WordPress CMS can be found in your sidebar. They are category pages and monthly/daily archives. Category pages store your articles posted under the same topic-a category. Such pages have no unique content; they are just a collection of your previous posts. Monthly and daily archives also simply group your previous articles by the date of posting. Sometimes when you have only one post in a given day, the archive page for the date and your post are totally identical.

The next case of duplicate content is even more prominent. It can be your home page itself. If it contains not excerpts but the full text of your posts, then it duplicates your post pages. This also applies to the “next/previous entries” pages-those accessible via /page/2, /3, /4 etc.

Feeds. Search engine spiders crawl all the content they can reach and of course this includes RSS feeds too. The additional problem with them is that Google may choose to display your RSS URL in the search results over the link to the original post. In this case the user who clicks this result will see an XML formatted page which is not “human-friendly”.

Trackback URLs. Many wordpress templates add trackback links after posts. This links enable authors to track who links to their posts. Usually, if your post URL looks like “yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/” its trackback URL will be “yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/trackback/”.

Identical meta-description. By default WordPress doesn”t provide a tool to add unique meta description tags to your posts, and they either have none or share a single site-wide description. Having no meta description at all is a disadvantage, as a properly written one can make your snippet stand out in a SERP. Having an identical description for all your pages is a threat, as Google might get them filtered out as too similar.

Because of the duplicate content Google search can return less desired URLs (such as feeds or archives instead of original posts); your pages can be moved out of their index, or placed into the supplemental results, which are rarely displayed to users.

Oleg Ishenko
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/a-threat-to-your-wordpress-blog-duplicate-content-80088.html

Technorati Tags: Archive Page, blogging, Clear Case, Cms, Content Management System, Default Configuration, Evidences, Excerpts, Google, Lot, Problem Management, Proof, Roots, Search Engine Spiders, Sidebar, templates, Url, Wordpress Blog

I know basic html, but I don’t know where to start. I saw many wordpress blogs has been professionally customized and I want to do so.

You can find pre-made themes here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes/Theme_List

You can find basic instructions on making themes here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_Design_and_Layout#Themes_and_Templates

In all honesty, if you are new to HTML and CSS, and you don’t know much about PHP, your ability to edit themes is going to be severely limited.

Technorati Tags: Amp, Basic Html, Basic Instructions, blogs, Codex, Customize, Honesty, Html Css, Limited, Newbie, Php Edit, templates, Themes

Hi guys,

i searched the net and found nothing but a few softwares like artisteer which is very limited
and u can’t design what u want exactly, it’s a samples nothing more or less, plus i couldn’t
find the full version of the softwares so it’s making watermark on the saved templates.

so, i’m a good photoshop designer, i want to design a wordpress theme

what am i suppose to do ?

thank u & srry for the english
Thank you guys, good answers.

You’re contradicting yourself.
A "professional" wordpress theme is not automatically generated. Likewise, you don’t jump straight into doing "professional" wordpress themes. You start by learning how to code in html and css (photoshop isn’t actually play that big a part), then design your first wordpress theme, and slowly improve your own skills, until you get good enough to be considered "professional"
Happy learning

Technorati Tags: Amp, Design Professional, Happy Learning, Hi Net, Limited, Photoshop, Srry, templates, Themes, Watermark

http://wptheme4free.com

Free Premium wordpress Themes!

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I would like to setup wordpress blog that would allow people to sign up to receive news letters and updates? Do I need to download wordpress to my computer? Is there any pre-made templates for this type?

Here’s a plugin designed to do just that:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members-only/

Let me now if you need any help. I’ve been building WordPress websites for my clients for years.

Technorati Tags: Building Websites, News Letters, People, Plugins, Sign Letters, templates, Wordpress Blog

Are you tired of the boring default theme that comes with WordPress? Do you want to customize it and brand your site? This tutorial from wordpressforWomen.com at http://WordPressforWomen.com offers quick and easy ways to customize any theme.

Duration : 0:9:47

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Technorati Tags: blog, customizewordpress, templates, website, wordpress, wordpresstemplates, wordpresstheme