Tag Archives | WordPress-blog

Creating a WordPress Theme

What goes into Creating a WordPress Theme? After making a WordPress Blog you want to know how to create a WordPress Theme. You’ll find out in this video tutorial. I’ll also show you how to: Set up a Blank Theme Place a Search Form Where you Want Create a WordPress 3.0 Horizontal Menu Place a Featured Banner Where you Want Create 2 Sidebars Display Recent Posts with Excerpts Pull Articles from RSS Feeds Dynamically Create Subscription Links to your Feed, Twitter and Facebook Set up a Dynamic Footer Code is Here: goo.gl

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How to Customize WordPress Theme

How to Customize WordPress Theme

Learning how to customize WordPress is not as difficult as you many think it is.

With so many themes out there it is fairly easy to find a new theme for your WordPress blog. But if you just can’t seem to find a theme that is quite right, you can always take matters into your own hands and learn how to customize WordPress yourself.

Keep in mind that if you have downloaded a theme you will have to check with the theme creator to make sure they approve your customizing the theme. Most will have no problem with it as long as the theme contains the link back to their site, but you want to check to be sure. If all else fails, you can always customize the default WordPress theme.

Now today I am going to go over customizing the graphics in the WordPress theme. This is the easiest way to customize a WordPress theme and make it your own. I believe in keeping things as simple as possible. As long as you like the layout why get into restructuring the whole site? In keeping with our simple theory, we are going to find the current graphics used on the theme and change them up to fit our new theme.

You will want to find the image files for the theme you are using. This will be simple to do if you installed the theme manually. If you installed the them automatically using WordPress then you will need to find the theme and download it to your hard drive.

Once you have the theme on your hard drive you will want to browse to the image folder. The image folder will most likely be located in an image folder within the theme folder. Each theme creator can name this folder whatever they choose, but most creators will name it ‘image’ or ‘img’.

In this folder you should be able to find the header, background, icon, footer and any other graphics files that are used on that theme. Make a copy of these images so you don’t alter the originals and copy them to a work folder on your hard drive. For me it is easier to make a copy of the image files and use them as my base. I already know they work with the theme and they are the correct dimensions I need and there won’t be any second guessing on my part.

To edit these files you will need a half way decent graphic editing program. If you have Adobe that is great, if not you can download GIMP for free. Once you have your graphics program fired up the first thing you should do is add a layer to the image to start your work on a ‘fresh canvas’.

From this point on it is basically putting your design skills to work. If you have other images you want to replace the images with you can just copy and paste them onto the new layer. There are no limits to the options you have when editing your graphics. I could go into detail here but graphic design is a whole tutorial in itself.

Once you have edited your graphics and are happy with them, it is time to reveal your customized WordPress theme.

There are two ways you can install your new customized theme.

You can manually upload your new graphics by using a FTP program. You will want to make sure you upload the graphics to the correct folder and overwrite the original images.
You can copy your new files into graphics folder of the original theme on your hard drive and then log into WordPress blog and install it automatically. If you already have the original theme installed, you may need to remove it to install the new one or rename the theme on your hard drive.

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The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness

The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness WordPress has come a long way in its journey to become the #1 blogging platform out there today. As the features and functionality have increased over time, the possibilities for what can be done with WordPress as a website solution have increased. With today’s features, WordPress can be used to create an entire site in most cases in addition to just a blog. This article discusses which pages should be created in any WordPress blog. The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness

1. Landing Page or Home Page The landing page or home page, depending upon the type of web site, is critical in being able to convert your visitors to taking a specific action. It is very difficult to do that with blog entries as the home page. When people land on your blog home page, they usually land on a page with a lot of content and nothing really directing them to do anything. If any of your blog titles happens to catch their attention, then when they click on a specific post, you may be able to convert that into an action, but only if your post is written up to do just that. If not, then you will just have a reader who may or may not come back to your site. Having a landing page will allow you to prepare the visitor and guide them through the site the way you want them to go. 2. Contact Us Page WordPress makes it easy to put a contact us form on your website that will get emailed back to you when the visitor submits the form. There are a few ‘contact us’ plug-ins that give the website owner a lot of flexibility in getting the kind of feedback that will be most beneficial to them. One of the contact form plugins that gives a lot of flexibility in creating great forms called ‘Contact Form 7’. The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness.

The benefit of having a contact form instead of your email is it is easier to manage communications, you can outsource your customer support much more easily and you can guide the visitor much better with the information you need from them so you can better serve your visitors, prospects and customers. 3. Blog Postings Page If you are going to have a WordPress website, then you should have a blog as well. WordPress is a blogging platform so it pretty much comes with the territory. In this case, you will need to create a separate page to direct the blog postings to. When setting up the blog page, you will need to be sure to label it something that is very clear and enticing if you want your visitors to read your blog postings. Labels like ‘Blog’, ‘Articles’ and ‘Content’ are fairly popular. This is the name that will be on the navigation link for that page as well. This is why it is important to make it something that is easy for visitors to understand. Creating an entire website from WordPress is easy to do with the latest versions of WordPress. It is very easy to create the basic pages that will allow a small business owner to get a website up and running very quickly. Having a landing page, a contact us page and a blog page is a great foundation to build from. Once that foundation is there, additional pages and features can be easily added. The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness

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So you have a WordPress blog

So, you have a WordPress blog. But instead of just working for the blog (writing in it, fiddling with the HTML codes to make it look good), you can also make it work for you. Did you know that your blog can bring in the big bucks? Well, now you do. The question is, how?
That question will now be addressed.
First things first. When I say that your blog can make money for you, I don’t mean the page where you self-publish whatever you like. No; plugins – also known as extensions – are what I’m talking about. Of course, the plugins have to be embedded in your WordPress page in order for them to be seen, and when they can be seen, only then can they work.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s get to the most interesting part of this article – monetizing your WordPress.
One of the most common methods of monetizing your WordPress is by allowing advertisements on your site, for example: adding AdSense ads to your blog. AdSense is a Google-run advertisement application which you can apply to embed in your page. It generates an income for you – the page owner – on a per-click basis, which basically means that advertisers pay you based on the number of times that ad has been clicked on; or a per-impression basis, where they will pay you based on the amount of traffic you have on your site.
Another money-making method is to market services, products, etc, on your WordPress site by way of using a shopping cart plugin. This plugin allows you to sell things and receive payment through the internet! There are a few available shopping-cart plugins for example Jason R Brigg’s YAK for WordPress which would link your product to the code of your blog entry, making the entry’s code the product’s identification number. It also provides modifiable payment options such as cheque or credit card, or the types of PayPal one might like to utilise.
Speaking of PayPal, it is actually yet another way to make your WordPress (and your readers) become your source of income! However, this method might work better if your blog experiences high traffic, as it is the donation method. That’s right, you can make money off of your site if you add a PayPal plugin where your visitors may make donations either with their credit cards or by electronic debits from their bank accounts. There are many plugins which would enable you to add a PayPal Donate Button to your page. Easy PayPal WordPress Plugin and PayPal Donate WordPress Plugin are two such plugins.
We have now come to the conclusion of the sermon; I’m sure some sort of enlightenment has occurred somewhere between the beginning of the article and this sentence, and the wonders of monetising your WordPress page have been exposed in all their monetary glory. I kid, I kid. Joking aside though, it is now time to view your WordPress blog as more than merely a space for self-published opinion-airing. With the right plugins, it can actually make you money!

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WordPress Themes – Should You Use Premium Or Free Themes

WordPress Themes – Should You Use Premium Or Free Themes?

You have probably heard the saying: Nothing good in life is free! WordPress offers many free themes, plugins, and widgets, but you will want to pay attention to the possible downfalls of using a free WordPress theme.

The first concern is what may be hidden or embedded in the code built within your theme. No matter how you are using your WordPress blog, the last thing you want to do is attach potential spam to your visitors. Unfortunately, some of the WordPress themes do have some sort of spam built into the theme. Also, the more elaborate theme creators may have embedded the spam so deep that if you try to remove it your entire site will fail.

You can expect that premium themes – or those you pay for – will usually be free of spam. After all, a designer likely would not embed spam because they have a reputation to uphold.

A second reason for using a premium theme is that you will have support from its creator. Since anyone can create and make available free themes, designers will not usually help with your problems regarding that free theme. WordPress has attempted to improve this issue by creating forums to seek help, but fixing or changing the site will be up to you.

Since designers of premium themes are paid for their design, they want to be sure it works and will usually be available through a dedicated forum or have another method that they can be contacted.

A third potential problem of using a free WordPress theme is that it often will not support the widgets or plugins you would like to use.

Designers of premium WordPress themes generally stay in contact with their users. They listen to the issues and make fixes available through upgrades. Since the designers know who has purchased their themes, they are able to send out notification of upgrades through e-mails.

Please understand that I am not stating that every free WordPress theme is full of spam. I am only suggesting that you should be aware of these possibilities and do some research before you jump on the first theme you come across. Also, using the themes offered from the WordPress Dashboard are generally safer than something you might find from surfing the internet.

If you are just beginning as a new business or blog writer, using a free theme available from WordPress may be your best solution to get your site up and tested. But as your blog or business grows, consider upgrading to a premium theme. This will give you a site that is more user and owner friendly without worrying about spam or support.

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WordPress Marketing

Wordpress Marketing

Blogging nowadays is a lot more then just jotting down your opinions and feelings onto a webpage in hopes of people finding it. Now you can take your blogs fate and rest it in your marketing skills and tactics. Every month there are new social networks being opened up for bloggers to interact with each other and to help each other with traffic. Many networks offer traffic trading programs for bloggers which can benefit your blog tremendously depending on which you choose. Sites like EntreCard and MyBlogLog are top picks for these types of programs. Besides traffic trading you can also market your blog using social bookmarking sites or social networking sites. Websites like Digg and Propeller allow you to submit each blog post to there website to receive a backlink and also traffic. People can vote for your post on whether they like it or not and you can receive very nice amounts of traffic from these sites if you have good content. Youtube is becoming huge lately to and many bloggers are using the Youtube platform to voice there opinions on topics relating to their blog topic. This helps them generate traffic to the blog and with millions of people using Youtube each day bloggers are beginning to adapt to marketing through video.

As you can see there are almost unlimited options when thinking of how to market your blog. Forums can be a great place to interact with people and the signature line can house your blog URL which will over time attract clicks and traffic. When you’re marketing your WordPress blog you should make sure that you try utilizing all the possible options that you can and make sure to get your link out there. Becoming active on other blogs is one way to do this and you should comment on the blogs in your niche that have traffic to get your name and blog out there. Often after you comment for a week or two straight the blog owner will take notice to you and may even offer you a link exchange. The more you get yourself and your blog out into the market the better chance you’ll have at obtaining traffic.

Article submissions are popular also when marketing your blog and especially in the beginning stages of your blog. Submitting to websites like EzineArticles can not only boost your traffic but it can help to get your blog indexed in the search engines. When you utilize article marketing make sure you include deep links into your articles and not just the homepage. Deeplinks are actually more important then homepage links and the more deeplinks you can get the more search engine traffic you’ll receive. It takes months to rank in the search engines but once you do the traffic will be worth it. Once you obtain the rankings in the search engines that you wanted you’ll need to continue marketing to keep those rankings.

Blogs have been known to help people get search engine traffic due to the many plug-ins available, and frankly it’s simple for anyone to do. Longtail keywords are easily attainable using WordPress and you shouldn’t have problems getting traffic from your longtail keywords. The most important part of your marketing when using WordPress is your keyword selection. You want to make sure that you’re targeting highly searched terms but with the least amount of competition. Using programs like Wordtracker will help you find keywords and keyword phrases for you to optimize on your blog.

Make sure you also use all the great plug-ins that will help you with the SEO of your blog and overall help your marketing efforts. There is plug-ins for choosing your search engine title, keywords and description which is a mandatory plug-in in my opinion and will help you rank for the terms you want to rank for. There is many more plug-ins you can utilize but I won’t go into great detail about them right now.

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How to Install WordPress Theme2

How to Install WordPress Theme

So you have hunted high and low and found the perfect WordPress theme. Now you need to know how to install WordPress theme or it will just be a pretty file collecting dust on your hard drive.

Installing a WordPress theme is not as complicated as many people think it is. The thing that tends to confuse people is that there are two different methods you can use when trying to figure out how to install WordPress theme.

Manually install WordPress theme

First I will go over how to install WordPress theme manually to help you get familiar with the WordPress structure.

To install a WordPress theme manually you will need to download the theme, which I am assuming you have done by now.
You will also need to unzip the WordPress theme to a folder on your hard drive (try not to forget where you put it).
Now you will need to fire up your FTP program and FTP to your site.
At this point you will want to navigate to the themes folder by going to the ‘wp-content’ folder and then the ‘themes’ folder.
Once you are in the themes folder on your web site, you will want to navigate to the theme you unzipped on your hard drive (you did remember where you put it, didn’t you?).
You will then need to upload the theme on your hard drive (folder and all) to the themes folder on your web site.
After your all FTP’d out you will want to go back to your browser and log into your WordPress blog on your site.
You will then go to the ‘Appearance’ option on the left side menu and select the ‘Themes’ option.
At this point you should be able to see your theme listed as an option. If not then you probably uploaded it as a folder within a folder and will need to double check it.
You should now be able to preview and then activate your theme by selecting the appropriate options listed under your theme.

Automatically install WordPress theme

If you are lazy like me you will want to let WordPress do all the work for you. So now we will learn how to install WordPress theme by letting WordPress get down and dirty.

To put WordPress to work you will need to first log into your blog.
You will navigate to the ‘Appearance’ option on the left side of the menu.
Next you are going to click on the ‘Themes’ option located under the ‘Appearance’ tab.
Once you are under the ‘Themes’ section, you will see ‘Manage Themes’ at the top of the page. Next to the ‘Manage Themes’ tab you will see the ‘Install Themes’ tab which will probably be grayed out. You will want to click on the ‘Install Themes’ tab to make it the active tab.
Now you have a couple options here.
Option one is that you don’t have a theme in mind yet and want to search for one. In this case you will select the options you are looking for and click Search. Once you have the results up on screen you can scroll through until you find one that you like and want to use. At this point it is only a matter of previewing the theme to make sure it is what you are looking for and if it is, then you can click Install and let WordPress do its magic.
Option two assumes that you have already downloaded the theme you want to use. In this case you will want to select the Upload option that you will find available under the ‘Install Themes’ tab. Once you have selected the Upload option you will want to browse to the theme file you downloaded and select it. (Yes WordPress will even unzip the file for you. How’s that for service!) Then it is just a matter of clicking ‘Install Now’ and let WordPress go to town.

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10 WordPress Plugins For Your Tech Blog

10 WordPress Plugins For Your Tech Blog

As a general rule of thumb most errors you’ll encounter with your WordPress blog are the result of excessive or incompatible plugins. While many find the selection of essential plugins a conundrum I believe in testing each plugin one-by-one with the latest version of WordPress so I can isolate the problem to determine the cause of the slow load times, call function errors or php memory limit warnings. The most valuable tool I can tell you when it comes to plugins is that when possible look for existing code that can accomplish the same result.

Of course there are certain plugins that even I use in my WordPress Blogs. I’ve compiled a list below of the top 10 plugins that I use on a daily basis that I believe will help any tech blog:

* AdSense Now – There are many ad insertion plugins for WordPress, but if your tech blog is using AdSense – this is the plugin I recommend. It allows you to insert your ad blocks aligned left, center or middle in 3 sections of a post. It also gives you the option to suppress ads on pages, category pages, tag pages, archives and more.

* Audio Player – Being able to insert mp3 clips or podcasts into your blog can be a problem. Audio Player is a plugin that makes this process simple – simply create a music folder on your site via FTP and then upload mp3 tracks to the directory. You can insert the built-in audio player into any of your posts or pages with a simple line of code – painless, simple and easy.

* Facebook Sharecount – It’s no secret that social networking sites like Facebook are effective ways to create a fanbase, but being able to harness that power relies on an easy way to share your great content. Facebook Sharecount will make it easy for visitors share your posts and monitor your content.

* Foliopress Descriptions – Once your tech blog has hundreds or even thousands of posts you will need a way to mass edit your descriptions. While the importance of meta descriptions is debated, I still believe that a hand written summary should be written for each post. Foliopress Descriptions supports post excerpt, These and All In One Seo meta description fields.

* Google XML Sitemaps – If you’ve read my previous post on how to get indexed by Google and Yahoo you know that having a sitemap is essential. This plugin auto generates your sitemap in a nice and neat XML file and let’s search engines understand the content on your tech blog. After installing and activating the plugin Google XML Sitemaps will take care of the rest.

* NextGEN Gallery – Managing your images and photo galleries can be a pain, but NextGen Gallery makes this simple. With features like auto resizing, watermarks, thumbnail creation as well as gallery effects – NextGEN Gallery is a must have plugin.

* Star Rating for Reviews – When you run a tech blog sooner or later you will start receiving products for review. Creating a solid review is as much about content as it is about presentation. Star Rating for Reviews allows you to create ratings for the products you review or even rate different aspects of the product and averages the ratings to determine a final score. The possibilities are limitless with the plugin – a must have for anyone looking to review tech.

* TweetMeme Retween Button – If you look at the posts on TechBlogStartup you’ll notice a yellow Retweet button aligned to the right. The power of Twitter is growing by the day so making it easy for your reader to ReTweet great content can prove very valuable. If you’ve installed Google Analytics like I explained in my previous post here, then you will be able to monitor just how many visitors enter your post through Twitter. If you are wondering why I haven’t included ShareThis it’s because I manually insert the code instead of using a WordPress Plugin.

* WP Super Cache – If you’ve heard of Digg then odds are you’ve heard of the Digg Effect where an article on a website becomes so popular so quickly that the flood of traffic to the website causes the server to crash. Since WordPress blogs are built on SQL Databases they are highly susceptible to this condition, but installing WP Super Cache can almost eliminate this threat. The plugin builds a cache of your posts and creates a static html page so that the server load is reduced and your site can handle more visitors. If your tech blog is brand spanking new I would install the plugin but not activate it until I started to see spikes in traffic or one of my articles was picked up by a major tech blog like Engadget or Gizmodo.

* All in One SEO – Search Engine Optimization is a key ingredient to driving organic traffic to your tech blog. Writting great content is key, but after you have created that content you need to make sure that it targets keywords and includes some basic optimization to ensure it is search engine friendly. All in One SEO does this job very well. If you are using the WordPress theme I use (Thesis) then you will not need this plugin, but for pretty much every other WordPressTheme I recommend installing it right away so that you can start writing your custom meta descriptions

All of the plugins I’ve mentioned above can be downloaded manually and then uploaded via FTP to your blog or you can add them from within your WordPress Dashboard – personally I prefer the latter. If you are wondering why certain plugins are not listed on my top 10 list – I just don’t find them essential to a tech blog. You will notice that I do somethings with TechBlogStartup that many people use Plugins or Widgets to do – eg. the top 6 articles aligned horizontally at the top of the site or the Recent Posts section in the side bar. For tech blogs that receive a large volume of traffic, limiting the plugins helps reduce the SQL memory load and if you’ve ever had a website crash you know just how important this is. Do you have some WordPress plugins on your tech blog that you think we should know about? Go ahead and drop your own list or links to the plugins in the comments section below so we can check them out.

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