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WordPress Themes and Styles

By on December 22, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress themes are styles and files that work together to form layouts that you see on WordPress blogs. Kubrick theme is used the Default Theme in WordPress for its innovative design and use of tags for people to customize their websites. Soon after that, custom themes come into the scene. Custom themes offer plenty of choices for users to take advantage instead of using Kubrick theme all the time.
Users are able to create their own unique WordPress websites without having to resort to Default Theme. The possibilities to more beautiful designs are endless if more time is spent in creating high quality blog layout designs. Instead of tweaking Kubrick theme, it is advisable to make your own design through available tutorials in the Internet.
Although Kubrick theme can be tweaked too, it is horrendous to read through long list of tutorial pages. Beginners are easily confused with the alien IT languages used in changing Kubrick theme that it is almost not possible for beginners to tweak Kubrick theme without giving up half way. Custom themes are so much easier to use and are available in readily downloaded form.
Another reason to choose custom theme is custom theme provides alternative template for specific site features such as category pages and search result pages without cramping everything into one column. Sometimes people would love to have things to click on their websites. This means that personalization is a better choice if people want to increase readership.
Using only Kubrick theme means that you are going to stuck with it whole year. It makes your website looks so boring and not well- updated. You can solve the problem by switching to custom theme. It is also easier to switch between two site layouts to allow users to change site layout according to occasion or season. Some people purposely switch to festive theme when festive seasons like Christmas and New Year are approaching.
You can also design WordPress themes as a service so that others can enjoy your design through public release. This is especially true for graphic designers who created many different themes as charity to others through their free websites. Users can take advantage to further customize the themes if no copyright is stated. If it does, all users need to do is creating design that has the some elements of the copyrighted design to make it truly a new design. It is that easy to make your own custom theme.
Building your custom theme rather than just using Kubrick theme helps you expand your knowledge in web building. It is an opportunity to learn more about CSS, HTML and PHP. To those who are already good in the mentioned IT knowledge, it gives you the opportunity to put your expertise to work. You will be surprised at your level of creativity once you lay your hands on customizing your site theme.
Kubrick theme is not a bad theme. Nevertheless, we need to create something new to make our sites less likely to resemble each other. Therefore, it is time for Kubrick to retire to give way to more exciting and interesting themes.

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Add an HTML Sitemap to a WordPress Website

By on December 20, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Add an HTML Sitemap to a WordPress Website

Here’s some easy to follow instructions on how to add an HTML sitemap to a WordPress website.

After scouring the web and nearly giving myself a headache I found a solution, so this will hopefully save others those near headaches.

I’ll ramble here a little to begin with, to make getting to the crux of the problem easier, but you’re welcome to just leap to the formula below.

You see, when you find the site that provides the code for a WordPress HTML sitemap, it gives all the information, but not quite all the information on how to implement it – this was the frustrating part.

So I was armed with the ‘plugin’ code and the ‘shortcode’ to activate the sitemap, but didn’t really get the installation instructions of: “”Add the shortcode to the page(s) of your choice””. You see an HTML sitemap is a page alone, it shouldn’t be added to specific pages, it should usually be on a page called: sitmap.php/htm/html &c.

I wanted my sitemap to be linked from the footer of every page of the site.

So to start with you’ll need the ‘plugin’ code, which is courtesy of Angelo Mandato (credit at bottom of article); there’s 2 options: you can go to the installation page, where at the top right of the page there’s a big red button, or use the instructions below, which I’ve stated as being easier.

Being easier, I’d advise you to log-in to your WordPress Dashboard and click on ‘Plugins’ (left-hand menu), a little drop down menu reveals ‘Add New’ click here, on this page there’s a search box, type in ‘HTML Sitemap’ and click on ‘Search Plugins’. At the top of the list you’ll see: ‘HTML Page Sitemap’, version ‘1.1.1’ – click on install.

Okay, 1st of 3 jobs completed.

Now to create the interaction between the ‘plugin’ and the ‘shortcode’ which is [html-sitemap], you’ll firstly need to click on ‘Pages’ (in the left-hand menu) of your WordPress Dashboard, in the drop down menu you’ll need to click on ‘Add New’, this will create the new sitemap page. Where it asks for ‘title’ enter ‘Sitemap’, in the ‘content’ box you need to add your ‘shortcode’, which is [html-sitemap], make sure you use square brackets. Now because you don’t want this page in the main navigation, it is advisable to give it a parent, so in the ‘Page Attributes’ (right-hand menu), click on the ‘no parent’ drop down and put it under ‘Other Info’ or something similar, click on ‘publish page’.

Okay 2nd of 3 jobs done.

Now we need to get the sitemap visible on every page of the site. Back to the WordPress Dashboard, in the left-hand menu click on ‘Appearance’, the drop down menu offers the link ‘Editor’, click on this. In the right-hand menu of the new page all the ‘Templates’ are listed, go down till you find ‘Footer’ (footer.php), click on this and you’ll see the content of your site’s footer links. You will most likely have the following in the footer already: Powered by <>a href=””http://www.WordPress.org””>WordPress<>

Right after this add the following: | <>a href=””http://www.MYWEBSITE.com/sitemap”” target=””_blank>Sitemap<>

Naturally change the ‘MYWEBSITE’ to your own website and the.com to.de,.nl or.co.uk. Click on the blue button ‘Update File’.

That’s it job 3 of 3 completed.

Go to your website, press the ‘F5’ key, you may have to do this twice (that’s computers for you), and in your footer you should now see your newly created link to your site’s HTML sitemap, click on the link to test it, and you should find a nicely laid out sitemap indexing all your site’s pages.

Now naturally you may want the sitemap to be more detailed, for this I will reference you back to Angelo’s site, where he explains this further, but for me I just needed a nice clear HTML sitemap and no further headaches.

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People do not want to feature only their blog contents

By on December 19, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

People do not want to feature only their blog contents. They also want to show beautiful things like inspirational header and pretty layout. This is a theme comes into rescue. WordPress is highly respected blog publishing software which is known for its well- structured layout. Its default theme, Kubrick theme, which is designed by Michael Heilemann makes a beautiful theme for your blog. However, custom theme is making its wave for being versatile and workable compared to Kubrick.
Custom theme is a theme that is altered into a new layout design. Kubrick is losing out in this case because it is difficult to customize. Even K2, the one version of Kubrick theme is not really improved in terms of workability. If you attempt to install upgrade, strange errors might occur when you explore the Options Page. Sometimes the blogroll and side bar disappear if you messed up with the application.
We are living in a world of convenience. This is applicable to changing your blog theme. You do not have to go through the agony of tweaking Kubrick theme that might take hours to configure. Everything that you ever wanted in a blog theme can be found via World Wide Web. The themes can be downloaded into your computer before uploading the theme into WordPress.
Also, it is not wise for beginners to tweak Kubrick codes if they are not good at codes. The changing process of PHP and HTML is a bit tricky which means you need to certain knowledge before tweaking Kubrick theme. It will be easier if Kubrick theme is plainer which unfortunately not the case in reality. The best thing is to use themes provided by free websites to reduce your agony and pain in tweaking Kubrick theme.
Custom themes are more practical to be used as compared to Kubrick theme. If you are bored of the theme you are using you can simply switch it with another themes that are easily available via the Internet. The best part is that you do not have worry about losing your blog content or some functions of the blog because WordPress has it all covered. Tweaking Kubrick theme blindly might jeopardize your bog if you did not save the default codes of the theme.
Blogging is not only a platform to rant and post about personal life, it is also a place for business and advertising. Giant advertising companies search for blogs that best represent the corporate world and the blogger. Kubrick theme is not a good theme for advertisement because it does not have the space for advertisement. Unlike custom themes, people have ample of space to put HTML and Javascript codes for advertisements.
Furthermore, custom themes come in wide range of selection. Whether you want your blog to look fancy, gothic or professional, it is up to your choice when it comes to design. Custom themes are really easy to upload and they function very well. You do not have to worry if there is no comment box in custom theme because there are some themes that re created for blogs with high readership. This means it is up to you to customize your own blog layout. The restriction is your imagination, not how the theme is set to be.
In a nutshell, Kubrick is great to start up a new blog but it does not shine when a blog needs a revolutionary change. Therefore, custom theme is still very much users’ favourite in layout makeover.

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WordPress Social Bookmarking

By on December 19, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Wordpress Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking has become very well known and many bloggers already understand how they can benefit from the use of social bookmarking sites, but then there are many who are clueless when it comes to finding and understanding the techniques to market there blogs. One of the best methods to market your blog is through the use of social bookmarking sites which can be found all across the internet, with more then 500 of them now it’s not hard to find a few. Many of them don’t attract much traffic and also don’t have much use which is why most people stress only to use the important ones. Now I also believe this is true, especially when you’re using your own time. I usually submit to about ten social bookmarking sites after every one of my posts to build backlinks and traffic and it definitely helps. Now if I were to be paying for the social bookmarks then I usually try finding someone who will submit to one hundred of the sites because then I will gain many backlinks in the process.

A lot of the social bookmarking sites offer do-follow backlinks which means they count to the search engines and the page rank juice will push to your domain. This can help increase your page rank and also helps give you backlinks in the search engines. Some of the bookmarking sites don’t offer do-follow links though and instead they give no-follow links which don’t offer any benefit in the search engines. You’ll still get traffic from these sites though which is why a handful of them have remained popular. Ideally you should submit to a minimum of five social bookmarking sites daily for your blog posts and I would recommend you to use.

– StumbleUpon
– Digg
– Reddit
– Propeller
– Del.icio.us

These five are among the most popular options for social bookmarking and millions of people use the sites. They rank very well in the search engines and can help you get higher search engine rankings and traffic. With such good benefits for blog owners it’s a surprise to me that not everyone is utilizing the social bookmarking marketing technique. Now I understand it’s time consuming but when you can benefit from higher traffic and more backlinks in the search engines its hard not to use the twenty minutes daily to submit your posts to these wonderful sites.

If you’re looking to achieve a higher amount of traffic to your blog then there aren’t many other superior methods when compared to social bookmarking and you should take the time to get registered with some of the popular sites and start bookmarking your posts. Once you become familiar with the submission process it also becomes a lot quicker for you to be able to submit posts and within a few weeks it will seem routine to submit your posts and you won’t even notice it.

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How to Use WordPress to Automate Your Business

By on December 18, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Use WordPress to Automate Your Business

If you haven’t heard of WordPress, listen. WordPress is an amazing blogging platform — but it’s so much more than that. In fact, this article will teach you some things as to how to use WordPress to automate your website and therefore your business, leaving you time to do the things you enjoy without having to keep your finger on every little “”nook and cranny”” job that needs to be done. Here are just some of the things WordPress can do.

AdSense

If you use AdSense to earn extra income on your site, the AdSense Integrator can both dad and then manage the AdSense ads you put on your blog, effortlessly following the last AdSense rules and updates without your having to keep on top of them. This is one way when it comes to how to use WordPress that you can really earn passive income without having to do anything except for adding the initial plug-in.

Google Analytics

When it comes to how to use WordPress to track your customers, Google Analytics will help you keep track of who’s visiting your page, where they’re from, and a lot more information that’s valuable when it comes to knowing your customers. The Google “”Analyticater”” offered by WordPress makes it very easy to add this to your website.

XML Sitemaps

The XML Sitemaps plug-in will make you much more visible to your customers — in fact, if your customers can’t find you, it’s not likely you will have any business at all to speak of. However, Sitemaps easily makes you visible to search engines as they crawl your site, which gets you seen on the web — and therefore gets you more customers.

AWeber

AWeber is a service that, although not free, can really help you explode your business. Used with WordPress, it’s another way you can really automate your business. With this service, you can basically turn autoresponder functions into guaranteed customer draws. You can create website sign-up forms, which will help you attract customers; instead of simply having visitors anonymously visit your site and then go away, you can simply include a sign-up form on your blog using AWeber’s simple “”point-and-click”” interactive functionality.

That’s not all, though. While most auto responders will send canned messages to subscribers after sign-up and other functions, AWeber actually provides you the ability to give personalized e-mails to subscribers or customers in an automated sequence that’s really going to give you the ability to connect with your customers — and your potential customers, too. What’s more, you can also schedule autoresponder functions so that they’ll go up when you know your customers are likely to be thinking about reordering, as applicable. Again, this is all automatic, and he will only rarely have to lift a finger after initial setup.

All of this and more is available if you know how to use WordPress and associated plug-ins and services to fully automate your business. Of course, your business is still going to need you to run it, but automating it as much as possible for the simple day-to-day mundane tasks such as those described above will to free you up to focus on the really important part of your business, which is to provide quality products and/or services.

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WordPress Plugins – What Are Their Security Risks

By on December 16, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Plugins – What Are Their Security Risks?

The WordPress platform owes a lot of its popularity to the availability of thousands of plugins that perform any function a site owner may need. Simply put if you need to do something there is probably an existing plugin to do it. But what are the security risks that come with installing WordPress plugins? I will tie these threats to the central principles of information security which include Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.

Confidentiality – Goal is to prevent the disclosure of information to unauthorized individuals or systems

Integrity – Goal is to ensure that data cannot be modified without detection

Availability – Goal is to ensure your site is available when someone tries to access it.

Plugins vary in code size from very simple to very complex. 99.9% of plugin users do not have the time or expertise to do a security review of the code prior to installing a plugin. That means you are at the mercy of the developer that nothing malicious has been programmed into the plugin that could affect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your site. For this reason it is best to stick with WordPress plugins that have a large user base and come from more trusted sources.

Plugins are primarily developed by individual developers or very small teams with limited budget for testing. That means if you are an early adopter of a plugin you are the equivalent of a beta tester so it is wise to avoid being on the bleeding edge of adopting a new plugin version unless there is a security vulnerability in the old version that is actively being exploited in the wild. Otherwise you risk something going wrong with the plugin that could negatively impact the availability of your site. For this reason it is important to have a viable backup of your site prior to installing a new plugin or upgraded a currently installed one.

When you install a WordPress Plugin you are installing an application. That means you should careful consider whether you need and intend to use the plugin regularly. Each plugin installed required additional site administrative overhead in the form of applying upgrades to ensure you are running the latest version. For this reason it is important to only install plugins that will be activated on your site and plugins not active should be removed to eliminate a potential source of vulnerability.

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Why is WordPress Blog Better than Blogger

By on December 15, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Why is WordPress Blog Better than Blogger.com?
Here, we are comparing WordPress Blog with Blogger.com and out of these two, there is only one winner that stands out. These are the two most well-known blog hosts in the blogging community. Both of these hosts provide free hosting services for quite some time and it is their unique features that distinguish the better one. It is their services and features that influences our decision to choose which blog host. Thus to start the competition, their features will be compared to come up with the winner.
Free and Tailor-made
Both are free blogging hosts and allow the users to create as many blogs as they want. With optional paid upgrade, users can utilize additional features to improve their blogs.

Principle
Blogger is Google-owned while WordPress used open source project. WordPress offers more flexibility and reliability as compared to Blogger, and it is very useful especially to more advanced blogging community.

Themes
WordPress and Blogger both offer a variety of brilliant themes for the users to choose according to their own theme and needs. Themes are useful in giving a blog its uniqueness as compared to other blogs, and even the fastidious users managed to find a theme that suits them from these two hosts. Both of them provide features that allow users to design their own web page.

WordPress has limited customization compared to Blogger in terms of additional coding. Blogger allows access to coding allowing more customization than WordPress. However, WordPress counter this weakness by allowing the users to change themes as often as they want in an instance. WordPress are constantly upgrading their themes based on feedbacks from users which enables users to select from a larger variety of themes.

Speed and easiness of blog creation
WordPress only requires 2 steps in starting up the blogging process and can be done within a couple of seconds. On the other hand, Blogger needs 3 major steps with longer time required to start blogging. WordPress wins over Blogger with it simple and fast start-up.

Defense against spam
Automatic Spam Protection in WordPress is a reliable protector against spam for published blogs. However, Blogger only protects against spam in the process of blogging, and not for published blogs. Thus, WordPress is better.

Feedbacks
WordPress offers notification of feedbacks from the visitors. This helps the blogger as feedbacks are a source of improvements. Blogger on the other hand do not provide such service.

Import
WordPress has importing feature which allows the users to import their previous blog posts in other hosts such as Blogger to WordPress. Apart from this, there are a few other importing options as well.

Page management
Page management enables users of WordPress to post up as many pages as they want in a blog post. Blogger again do not have such a features.
Additional features
WordPress has added features such as Words, Spell-Check and Autosave which are similar to those in Microsoft Word. This allows the users to edit their text blogs and check for mistakes without the need to read the whole post after writing. Autosave is important when power failures occur as it allows users to save the work and not losing everything. These features are definitely a convenience to the users and provide security over their works.

It is an easy win for WordPress over Blogger with their features which provide simple and easy to understand steps in creating blog posts. WordPress definitely has advantage over Blogger in terms of attracting larger number of users due to their unique features not provided by other web hosts.

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How to Set Up a Purchased WordPress Website on Your Hosting Server – Part 2 of 2

By on December 14, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Set Up a Purchased WordPress Website on Your Hosting Server – Part 2 of 2

In the fist part of the article I described why Bob purchased the WordPress website, how to transfer the domain and the setting up of the domain on his hosting server. Part two will take a closer look on how to install the WordPress websites database and configure some important WordPress Website settings.

1. Upload the WordPress Database files

Let’s break this part down into 3 simple steps:

a) Create the WordPress Database and access information

b) Modify the WordPress Database content

b) Upload the WordPress Database (cpanel)

a) Create the WordPress Database and access information (cpanel)

You could restore the database directly, but for this exercise Bob will also explain why he created the WordPress database himself. So here comes the tricky part. When you want to access the WordPress website, it will first try to connect to the WordPress database. The corresponding access information is stored in the wp-config.php file, located in the root directory of the new domain. You can look it up in the WordPress directory files you got. Therefore, you will need to change the following three variables inside the wp-config.php file:

/** The name of the database for WordPress */

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘bob55_ akkingb’);

/** database username */

define(‘DB_USER’, ‘bob55_ akdbadm’);

/** database password */

define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘xxxxxxxxxx’);

The DB_PASSWORD parameter I got is encrypted and of no use to me, therefore the connection will fail. To get around this problem bob will show you a little trick; Bob reused an existing user (and password) already assigned to another WordPress Database.

First he created the WordPress database, akkingb (in cpanel > Databases > MySql Databases) and added the EXISTING user to the new database(Scroll down to MySQL Users and add the user bob55_ akdbadm to the database he just created, bob55_ akkingb, and assign ALL PRIVILEGES.

Now you only needed modify DB_NAME parameter, copy the values for DB_USER and ‘DB_PASSWORD from the wp-config.php file of your EXISTING WordPress Blog, and the connection will work perfectly;-)

So, download or extract the wp-config.php file for your new WordPress blog, change the parameters and upload it again.

b) Modify the WordPress Database content

There is some information in the WordPress Website that you can either modify later on, when you have managed to access your new WordPress blog or change it directly in the WordPress Database file. I prefer to do the latter, as it is quite simple and a nice time saver when configuring the WordPress Website.

There are a few generic values that are used in diverse places so if you do a find/replace (all) it’s a matter of minutes to get this done. I will tell you what tables are affected, so you know where to look and change it manually, but you can simply do a global change too:

wp_options table – Change values of:

– ‘admin_email’, –> your email.)

– Path prefixes: home/uuuuuuuu/public_html –> home/bob55/public_html

wp_users table: Change value of user_email field for the admin user so you will be able to have the password reset send to your email

That’s it!:-) The user_email is especially helpful if you do not know the WordPress website’s admin password. Simply request the password to be reset and you will get the password send to the email you chose;-)

c) Upload the WordPress Database (cpanel)

The important point here is to name the WordPress database sql file correctly. When restoring via the cpanel it will use the database according to the WordPress database sql file name. Do NOT add a database prefix, as this will be assigned automatically, and should be your hosting server ID; in Bob’s case, bob55. Hence, Bob named his file akkingb.sql, and the resulting complete database name will be bog55_ akkingb.

Bob had problems with WordPress Database restores when the file was not zipped in the correct format. The restore either did not run at all or broke at any point. Therefore it’s a good idea to get the free Gzip file compression utility. For more information go to gzip.org. The syntax is “”C:Program FilesGnuWin32bingzip.exe”” DBname.sql”” and this will convert the DBname.sql into a DBname.sql.gz file.

To restore the WordPress Database, in cpanel, go the Files > Backup Wizard, select “”Restore”” > MySQL Databases, locate your local restore file, akkingb.sql.gz and click “”Restore””. Now a new browser window will open up and the DB restore should start within seconds.

You know that the restore should have terminated correctly if you see the whole WordPress Database file on this page. You can verify the DB creation also through the cpanel > Databases > Php Admin panel. All your databases are listed on the left hand side.

We are almost done!:-). You should now be able to see your new blog and enter the admin panel yourdomain/wp-admin.

2. Configuring your WordPress Website

Any WordPress Blog configuration is different, but following letsl name just some of the WordPress Website settings..

* WordPress SETTINGS*

General:

Membership: Anyone can register
Timezone
Writing:

Remote Publishing: set both values active if you want to use external publishing tools
Privacy: I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati)
Permalinks: you may want to change to i.e. /%category%/%postname%/ OR /%postname%.html, or any other values you use in your other blogs
All In One SEO Plugin

Use noindex for Categories: false
Use noindex for Archives: true
* WordPress PLUGINS*

Akismet Configuration: Enter YOUR Akismet API Key
Remove or add any other Plugins
*OTHER setting and configurations*

Copy your robots.txt to root folder or install the KB Robots.txt plugin
Monetizeation like AdSense, Amazon, will require even editing he corresponding theme files or configuration through plugins,…
That’s it, your WordPress Website has been moved and setup on your hosting server:-). To see the life example, go to kingkoilmattresses.net.

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