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How to Upgrade WordPress Themes Without Anyone Knowing1

By Randy R on May 26, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Upgrade WordPress Themes Without Anyone Knowing

How to find, fully test, and setup new WordPress themes on your blog without anybody knowing. Don’t put it live until it’s ready!

One of the worst things about WordPress is that when you hack your blog, or your theme, or try a new plugin or theme you’re doing it “”live””. In other words – everybody sees it. So if you want to try a new theme you have to switch them live while visitor are going to your posts and pages. I hate that. I’ve heard of guys keeping a “”test”” version of WordPress installed in another folder just to test new themes and hacks – and that’s not only more effort than I’m willing to do, it’s just a bit ridiculous.

I have a one web site where the WordPress theme was causing too many problems, it was old, and not worth hacking and fixing anymore. I have too many web sites and way too much to do to create a new theme from scratch. So I went theme shopping, and within 10 minutes I found one that really impressed me. You’d be amazed what you can find just Googling “”WordPress themes””.

Next, I downloaded the free open source Theme Test Drive WordPress Plugin, and installed and enabled it. This plugin allows you to set a theme for your entire blog that only the administrator will see. In other words, when you are logged into your WordPress dashboard as the admin account, you can test any post or page in your site under a theme and nobody will be the wiser. You can hack the test theme pages and nobody on your site using your normal theme will see what you are testing. Of course, if you make changes to widgets or plugins, everyone will see them on both the public and test themes. Once you enable the plugin all you have to do is go do “”Presentation -> Theme Test Drive”” in your WP Dashboard and enable the theme you want to test.

So in another browser window I went to my dashboard, and one by one enabled and tested 6 new WordPress themes I had uploaded to the server. I found and settled on one that I really liked. Luckily in this web site I use theme widgets, so everything updated beautifully because I didn’t need to make any changes to the sidebar. Now, all I’m missing are any customizations I made to my current theme pages manually by adding code. So I looked at the code for my Main Index, Single Post, Archive, Comments, etc., to see what I’ve added over time to make a list.

It turns out I added quite a few things, but they’re easy to put into the new template:

Print this page
Ratings
Threaded Comments
Post Views
Feedburner Flare
Breadcrumbs
AdSense

Then I went through the pages in my new theme and added in the code to add these functions one by one. I tested each one as went, because with “”theme test drive”” installed as admin I could view any page in the site with the new theme and see these changes as I went. After I added the code and uploaded the updated theme files to my site – I tested everything one last time. Looking through the pages the only other thing that I saw was in the sidebar(s) of my new theme the category pages weren’t listed, and in my current theme they are. I did a little shuffling of the sidebars, and then I set the theme live! So instantly when I enabled the theme for the first time, people saw a fully functional ready to go blog with nothing broken! I did all the testing and updating behind the scenes on my WordPress blog without anybody knowing it, and when I put the new theme live – voila, there is was! Now that I have this routine I’ll do this every time I update to a new WordPress theme, and I’m so happy I no longer have to do it “”live”” where current visitor’s see!

How to Set Up a Purchased WordPress Website on Your Hosting Server – Part 1 of 2

By Randy R on May 18, 2012 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 1 of 2

This is a two part article describing how to move and set up a purchased WordPress website on your hosting server. The first part explains why you may want to purchased a WordPress site, how to transfer the domain and setting up the domain on your hosting server. Part two will take a closer look on how to install the websites database and configure some important WordPress settings.

Have you ever tried moving and setting up a purchased WordPress Website on Your Hosting Server. In case you purchased an existing WordPress website and domain and has no clue on how to move and set up WordPress website on my Hostgator hosting account, read on…

The reason you may not want to setup your own WordPress website from scratch may be because you want to speed up implementation time and take advantage of the fact that the domain has already some age and AdSense monetization working. So you would only have to use your SEO experience to improve Search Engine ranking for the niche keywords.

Lets take a real example but change the names. Bob is the guy who purchased the domain and blog and the lady, lets name her Maria, that had sold Bob the domain and corresponding WordPress website told him she would send him all the information needed, but what Bob received were two zipped backup files, one with the database sql import file and the other was the WordPress domain directory. The only indications regarding setting up the WordPress website Bob got were that he had to upload the files to his server. Was this all he needed to do? What do you think?

Even though WordPress is very easy to install and manage, moving an existing WordPress Website to your hosting server should be a little more complex than that. So Bob thought that there must be more to it, especially as the MySQL database file had another database prefix, which is usually your hosting account ID. The format is something like MYHOSTID_MYDBNAME; so let’s name Maria’s database file maria89_wpbd123.sql. Bob’s Database prefix is bob58.

I know that when you restore a MySQL database in cpanel that it takes the sql file name to import the tables it into the same-named database, or creates a new one. Bob tried it out and as a result a MySQL database named bob58_maria89wpbd123 was created. The database restore had stripped out the underscore and added Bob’s database prefix. Not very nice:-(

Bob then wrote Maria back asking for more details, and whether there were any specifics that he needed to take into account for moving, setting up or configuring her specific the WordPress website. She apologized and replied that she did not know how to handle this and suggested having a live chat with my hosting support provider. Maria probably thought that moving a WordPress website from one hosting server to another would be as easy as she initially said, so Bob could not count on her and did not insist futher. Bob’s hosting provider has an outstanding support, so this was not a too bad idea, but then he decided that he would first have a go on his own.

So here comes how Bob proceeded for moving, setting up and configuring her WordPress website on his hosting server…There may be a quicker way, but it worked great for him and, in the end, if you know some simple but important details, the set up is pretty straight forward. Let’s first outline the basic steps required to transfer the domain to and set up the WordPress website on your hosting server.

Transfer the domain to your domain service provider
Set up the domain on your hosting server
Upload the WordPress database files
Configure your WordPress website

What do you need before you start?

WordPress Database MySQL restore file, DBprefix_DBname.sql
The complete WordPress website directory
The current WordPress admin userid and password

So let’s go a little more into detail on each step of the set up process…

1. Transferring the domain to my domain service provider

If you have also purchased the corresponding domain, the very first step is to get the domain transferred to your domain service provider. This will be done by the owner. If you have the same domain service provider, this is usually very simple; it’s called “”pushing””.

Unfortunately Maria had another domain service provider than Bob is using. So to make things easy he created a free account with her domain service provider and would take care of transferring the domain to his provider later on. Maria then “”pushed the domain into his account, Bob accepted it, and then pointed the domain to his DNS server. That was the easy part.

2. Setting up the domain on your hosting server

Bob has a hosting plan, which includes unlimited add-on domains. He logged into his cpanel and created the new add-on domain. This is pretty simple, so I won’t go into more details here. Bob did NOT need to create a WordPress Blog Website installation. This is done by restoring the WordPress database and uploading the WordPress website directory files he got to the domain’s root directory.

Bob then entered my new domain name in the internet browser’s address bar and saw that all was working so far, because he could see the empty cgi-bin directory that is created by default.

Now Bob could upload the WordPress website directory content to the domain directory, located below the root directory; in his case KingKoilMattresse.net. You can either do this via FTP or use the cpanel > Files > Backups wizard.

Bob reentered the domain name in the internet browser address bar and got the expected database connection error. First of all he did not have the DB installed yet and the connection information would be incorrect anyway. We will see how this part of our WordPress website setup can be achieved.

In the final part of the article we will have a closer look on how to Upload the WordPress Database files and Configuring your WordPress Website.

How to Make a WordPress Website – Make a Brand New Website By the End of Today With These 4 Steps

By Randy R on May 2, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Make a WordPress Website – Make a Brand New Website By the End of Today With These 4 Steps

Want to know how to make a website in just a few hours or less? WordPress is the answer. Here’s a basic 4 step process to that will help you make a website from scratch and be online by the end of today.

Step One) Buy a Domain and Cheap Hosting Plan- In order to make a website, you need these two things. There is no way around it. But the good news is, these are both cheap things to purchase. The hosting account will be the place where you place your website files. The domain name will be the name of the website.

Average Hosting Cost- Less than $10 per hour.

Average Domain Cost- Around $10.

Step Two) Install WordPress on the Domain- What? Install it on the domain? Don’t worry, this is as simple as clicking the WordPress button, then choosing the domain you want to put it on from a drop down list. Done.

Step Three) Customize The WordPress Site- Click on Appearance and choose from 1,000’s of Themes that will change the look and functionality of the website itself. Some themes are very customizable, whereas others are just “”plug and play””.

You can choose between thousands of Plugins as well, which help to further enhance the usability of the website. Some plugins will help you insert YouTube videos, or add star-ratings, or tables, or anything else under the sun you can think of.

Step Four) Publish the Site- All you have to do to put the website onto the web from here is click “”Publish””. Voila! You are on the web with a fully functional website.

The most important step is to find a quality hosting plan that will give you everything you need to make a WordPress website.

How to Build Your Traffic on a Blog

By Randy Roedl on April 13, 2012 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

How to Build Your Traffic on a Blog

Blogs have become a webmasters best friend and it’s allowing everyone with or without programming skills to create very appealing websites. With the content management system so flawless on WordPress and so many different themes that you can choose from, a lot of the work is already done for you. Most people had to design there websites by scratch which limited them in the amount of time they had to build the traffic on their websites. With blogging you’ll have lots of time to build the traffic on your blog and it will be one of the main projects of making your blog successful.

Traffic doesn’t magically appear, well it could I suppose but if you want targeted traffic then it’s going to take time and work too accomplish. The first thing you need to do as a blogger is make sure you have added a nice amount of content onto the blog, you should also be posting new content on a daily basis in the beginning so that people can see you’re adding new content regularly. A lot of people will just leave the blog if they notice that there hasn’t been much activity going on, and this is what you’re trying to avoid. You want the traffic to stay on your blog and come back in the future so you need to offer lots of great content to do this successfully.

Once you have the content generation down to a science then you need to work on the actual building of the traffic. This will consist of building links in high traffic areas and also in areas that will help increase your search engine rankings. Traffic from the search engines is the most targeted and valuable traffic that you can get for your blog and you should be focusing on ranking for keywords that will bring you traffic. It’s not easy to take over search engine rankings and you’ll need to do a lot of link building in order to take over your competition, but in time it’s definitely possible.

There are also some other traffic generation methods that you should look at for your blog which consist of social bookmarking, article marketing and traffic trading. Sometimes trading traffic isn’t the best choice, but it’s an option so always keep it in mind because you’ll never know when it could work out for your blog. Social bookmarking and article marketing are both ways to increase your traffic and also increase your search engine rankings, so doing these two things are very important. The traffic you get isn’t the best, but it all helps and the backlinks you build from doing it will also help you get traffic from the search engines.

Your blog traffic is always at risk, which means if you decide to stop posting for some reason then over time you might lose all of your traffic. People go back to blogs because they like what you’ve written in the past and want to see what else you have to say, but if you don’t post then people will quickly stop coming. A blog takes constant work, and even though you might like the idea today in a week you may have changed your mind which is what most webmasters do. If you’re in it for the long haul though then you’ll find it takes at least three months before you notice any steady traffic from your blog.

How to Create a WordPress Theme

By Randy R on February 28, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Create a WordPress Theme As most bloggers know, WordPress is an amazing platform for blogs, personal sites, businesses and portfolios to publish content, news, pictures and anything it comes to your mind. It’s very powerful and nowadays, it’s not just for blogs, most people are using it as a CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is for free & incredibly secure! It’s open source and one of the best thing about it, is that you can integrate plugins very easily from your WordPress admin panel. You can search for plugins all over the web, in the WordPress official website (WordPress.org) or anywhere else. How to Create a WordPress Theme

Designing a theme can be a hard task, specially because you can get a bit lost if you know nothing about html or php, but it’s definitely not impossible. With patience and perseverance anything is possible. Looking around the web you can find several interesting tutorials, very useful and easy to understand, they guide you step by step on how to use the codes and tags, but very few of them are precise about what it takes to build a WordPress theme from scratch and what you need to know beforehand. They usually assume you already know about html and CSS. First of all, you need to understand how HTML works. HTML is essential to learn how to create a WordPress theme. You need to find a way to learn and get familiar with the basic html tags and commands. How to Create a WordPress Theme

Use Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage to play around a bit and get used to the html structure. Without HTML, you are completely lost, because you are going to deal with a lot of coding! Simply Google and key something like this ""learn html from scratch"", ""html for begginers"", ""html for newbies"", ""html step by step"". After learning the basic html tags and functions, you need to learn how to style a webpage, that is to say, in other words, you need to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets ). Learning how to Style an html page will allow you to style a WordPress theme, with pics, colors, font sizes, etc. Why is this so important? HTML + CSS = CSS TEMPLATE. In order to build a WordPress theme, we need to create an HTML CSS layout first. It is the easiest way to build a WordPress Theme. How to Create a WordPress Theme

That would be an html page styled using CSS. As we already mentioned before, with CSS you can control the different font sizes, font styles, colors, layer positions, margins, etc. Once you’ve created a CSS template, THEN you will be able to easily convert it to a WordPress Theme. So, to sum up the first phase: 1- Learn html. 2- Learn CSS. 3- Create a CSS Layout. 4- Convert the CSS Layout to a fully functional WordPress Theme. Remember it’s a process that takes time but it’s definitely worth it if you aim to work freelance to make some extra money! don’t be afraid, use Google and search for tutorials, play around with Dreamweaver, and you’ll be able to create a WordPress theme! How to Create a WordPress Theme

How to Change a WordPress Theme

By Randy R on February 20, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Change a WordPress Theme

One of the first things people want to learn when it comes to WordPress is how to change WordPress theme. The main reason being that people love to tinker around with the design aspects of their blogs and websites.

The good news is that WordPress has a built in theme system that makes changing your design a really easy process. Believe it or not, you can install and activate a theme in a matter of minutes. It sure beats trying to design a website from scratch!

The first step in learning how to change WordPress theme is to understand how to add new themes. By default, WordPress only comes with a couple built in themes.

To add a new theme to WordPress, you can either download a theme you find on the internet or use the built in search function in WordPress. The next step is to click on the add new theme link which is found under appearance in WordPress.

If you downloaded the theme yourself, WordPress will ask you where it is located on your computer. Once you select the file you downloaded, it will automatically upload the theme to the proper directory on your computer.

If you prefer using the theme search function, all you have to do is click the install link by whatever theme you wish to use.

Last but not least, you need to learn how to change WordPress theme that your blog is using. In other words, you have to activate the theme you wish to use. To do this, just click on the themes tab in the WordPress navigation menu. Next, simply hit the activate link found by the theme you wish to use. WordPress will automatically activate the theme and make it live on your website. That is it!

How to use WordPress to design to a website.

By Randy Roedl on December 23, 2011 in Randy Roedl

Learn to design a website using the popular blogging program, WordPress. Follow along with veteran web designer, Matt Hackney, as he creates a racing website from scratch that is simple enough for anyone to do. For more videos, check out our website: www.hardmagic.com

How to Create Themes for WordPress

By Randy Roedl on December 18, 2011 in Randy Roedl

go.tagjag.com – If you have a blog, you have a theme. Chances are, you downloaded a theme off the web somewhere. It’s okay that you don’t know how to code your own customized theme from scratch! Very few people are capable of doing this. You want your blog to say “YOU”, but you don’t want to pay a designer a ton of money to accomplish this. It’s a good thing Artisteer now makes it simple for you to create and customize your own WordPress theme with just a few clicks of the mouse. twitter.com – chris.pirillo.com

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