Posts Tagged ‘Articles’

Why You Should Be Using WordPress on Your Website

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

If you do not have a blog, then you should. With a blog you can encourage user interaction, start conversations, ask questions, post content, and much, much more. Also, search engines love blogs, and therefore blogs can rank more highly than similar websites. You have probably noticed that you come across many blogs during your searches, so you should know that I am not lying.

You may have noticed that I tend to love WordPress blogs. In fact, what you are looking at right now is a WordPress blog that I have put onto my website. You may have also noticed that I have created WordPress themes that you can use for free.

Why do I like WordPress so much? Well, here are a few of the reasons that I absolutely love WordPress blogs and why I think everyone should be using them:

1. Anyone Can Use It

Anyone can add a WordPress blog to their site either using Fantastico or through WordPress.org. This means that anyone can add a WordPress blog to their website, or make their website a WordPress blog. It is also free, which means you can have a great blog set up on your website in no time!

2. It is Search Engine Friendly

WordPress blogs are designed in a way that is friendly for search engines. This means that your blog will get indexed quickly and rank highly with little effort on your part. You can also get plugins that can enable you to really set up your posts and pages so that they easily rank in the search engines.

3. You Can Choose From Thousands of Themes

With WordPress you can choose from thousands upon thousands of themes so your blog will look like whatever you want it to. You can even get themes that look like normal websites, but still have all the benefits of a WordPress blog.

4. No HTML Required

If you have no knowledge of HTML, it doesn’t matter with Worpress. At times it can be helpful, but HTML is not needed to have a fully operable WordPress blog.

5. Thousands of Plugins & Widgets

Probably one of the best parts of WordPress is that you can use thousands of plugins and widgets so that you can automate many processes including SEO, and you can add many cool features such as polls, surveys, language translators, and basically anything you can think of to your blog!

These are just 5 of the reasons you should be using WordPress blogs. If you are not already using one, you should seriously look into it right away. WordPress is an amazing tool that if you aren’t using, you are missing out.

To Your Success,

Shawn Horwood

If you would like to take your internet/affiliate marketing to the next step, then I want to help you! Visit my blog for more Articles, Resources, Product Reviews, Search Engine Optimization Tips, Profitable Niches, and more: Make Money Online Blog

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Can I Learn WordPress in One Week?

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

You own a small Italian gourmet store and are passionate about Italian cooking. You have been advised to start a blog for a long time and now that you have decided to do so, you are a little concerned about the technical details of the whole process. You just want to share your cooking passion with others through the blog and hope to hear about new recipes as well. Not being technically inclined, you wonder if you would be at the mercy of some technical person every time you are in the mood to write up something on your blog. Well, with WordPress, you have the power to build a blog and manage it just the way you want.

Learning the Basics of WordPress

You can certainly learn the basics of WordPress in one week, maybe even less. To begin with, there are two ways in which you can use WordPress. You can install WordPress on your website through your web hosting service provider and customize it to suit your needs. This will give you more flexibility and control over the website, but you’ll need some basic technical skills in setting it up. The other simpler option is to use WordPress.com which provides you free blogging services. You can begin your blog in a matter of minutes. Being a free service, it does have its limitations but is quite enough if you are just starting out. It offers enough customization to give a professional look to your blog.

Note that there are two WordPress sites: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The .com site provides the free blogging service and the .org site provides the technical support, free themes and plugins for more advanced users.

To start your own blog, visit the WordPress.com website and click on the ‘Sign Up’ button. You will immediately be taken through several screens where you will have to fill in simple details like your email address, user name you desire and your password. You will of course be asked if you would like to start a blog and if so, you will be asked for the desired blog name. You may want the name ‘ItalianGourmet’ for your blog and being on WordPress, the complete address will be ‘italiangourmet.wordpress.com’. Your site will be a subdomain because it’s part of the WordPress.com site.

As you log into your new blog you will be taken to the user dashboard. From here you will be able to customize the blog by changing the design, adding useful features – called widgets – like an RSS feed, search tool, area for user comments and so on. You can decide what content goes where on your blog. If you have any problems, you just need to click on the ‘Support’ tab and you will be given access to online help and will also be directed to many user forums where similar issues are being discussed.

Once you have finished customizing the look of your blog and have added enough functionality to it, you are now ready to write your first blog. All you need to do is type your thoughts, give it a suitable title and click on ‘Publish’ for your first blog post to go live. You have learned the basics of how to use WordPress! It’s that easy to get started.

Though WordPress is better known as a blogging tool, it can also be used as a complete website management tool as well. Most hosting companies now include WordPress in their hosting packages. Although this does allow for greater freedom in designing and developing your website on the whole, it does require some technical expertise. A good option is to start off with a blog on WordPress.com and get comfortable using it before moving on to a hosted option.

Kurt R. Hansen

Find out more at: TheWebHostReport

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WordPress Login Security

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

WordPress remains a very secure and stable blogging platform, but there is more that can be done out of the box to help protect your private data. There are many simple steps that can be taken, even by the inexperienced blog owner and a multitude of plug-ins available that can help. Once thing to be particularly aware of is brute force attacks. Brute force login attempts are one of the more common, rather annoying and potentially dangerous types that can occur.

Brute force happens when an attacker targets the login screen for your blog and repeatedly attempts to guess the username and password to gain access. By default, WordPress allows you to type in incorrect usernames and passwords infinitely. Since there is nothing to stop the attacker, they can try for minutes or hours entering a dictionary list of names and simple passwords in the hope of just stumbling upon the correct one. Installing something as simple as the “Login Lockdown” plug-in can combat this.

The plug in works by limiting the number of attempts you can make to enter your username and password in a given timeframe (typically 3 tries in a 5 minute period). Once that limit is reached, the IP address of the potential attacker is blocked for up to an hour. This is usually enough to discourage the would be hacker and make them move on to a different target. There are many plug-ins that can do this, but we recommend the plugin is recommended for three reasons:

  1. Easy to set up
  2. Easy to administrate
  3. It just plain works!

Brian Yurick

Need help installing, upgrading or optimizing your WordPress blog or site? http://easywordpressinstall.com can help. Try us out!

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Posted in Articles, Plugins | No Comments »

Add Google Analytics to WordPress

Monday, June 1st, 2009

So much has changed in the way business is done and viewed of since the internet and numerous internet-based technologies were introduced. And a fact is that a lot of entrepreneurs and marketers are doing very well with the help of the internet, whether the business maybe online or an ordinary company having a website for customer attraction.

Marketing certainly plays a very vital role in operating a business and this is one business aspect that entrepreneurs cannot afford to ignore. Marketing a company’s products or services does not end with creating advertisements or creating a website. But this doesn’t mean you also stop with just the creation of the website and having it up live.

Operating a website provides a very good opportunity and gateway for entrepreneurs to monitor how their products or services appeal to the general public, most specifically people who visit their websites. It enables entrepreneurs to check and analyze everything that goes on in the website and use this information to come up with ideas to improve or generate solutions for weak points that they could point out. This is all made possible by website statistic options available online.

For this very specific purpose, Google Analytics would be the best choice for any website operator or owner. It is one of the most efficient and effective website statistics services available on the net. The best part is that it doesn’t cost a thing. It’s completely free. It allows you to monitor and track the activities on your website and analyze this information in order to find ways on how to increase traffic and gain more customers. You can check the number of visits by the day of the week, the time period, the page view, bounce rates, the sources of traffic, the location of visitors and a whole lot of valuable information.

First things first, you have to sign up with Google Analytics. Make sure to use a Google account. If you do not have one, sign up for one and use this information for Google Analytics. Then go to the Analytics page of Google and click on Access Analytics. If you already have an account, you will be redirected to your Overview page. If you do not have a website registered yet, you should create one. Make sure to provide all necessary details required for the registration especially the URL. This information will be necessary for the monitoring and tracking of the WordPress site you will be registering. After filling up the necessary information, click on yes after reading and agreeing to the Google Analytics Terms and Services.

This will then take you to your tracking code information, which you will need to copy and paste for reference purposes. There are two kinds of tracking codes provided:  urchin.js script which is used for older versions of WordPress and the new ga.js script which is used for the updated WordPress. Also take note of all the instructions available in the same page.

For an existing Google Analytics user, from the Overview page you can access your profile and copy your tracking code by going to the Action column of the profile and clicking Edit. At the top right of the ‘Main Website Profile Information’ box, click Check Status. You can view and copy your tracking code from here and view the Instructions for adding tracking to your WordPress.

Now you’ll have to download a zip file for the Google Analytics plugin. The plugin is set up to automatically ignore authors that are logged in, and track special events that may occur on your pages, including newsletter subscriptions and also allows you to easily add Google’s web tracking script to your site.

This could be downloaded through WordPress.org where all you’ll need is the Analytics Account Id which is embedded in the tracking code. You could also get this through a company called Semiologic.com which effectively manages WordPress. You can download it from there and once you check your plug-ins section, you can see that you have a Google Analytics option where you can paste the tracking code.

You’ve completed installing and encoding Google Analytics into your WordPress. Wait for 24 hours till you start seeing reports and other valuable information.

For a video instruction on Add Google Analytics to WordPress visit: http://www.TheCustomerCompass.com/add-google-analytics-to-wordpress/

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Posted in Articles | 2 Comments »

Moving Your WordPress Blog to a New Directory

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
  1. Back up all the files from you old blog directory.
  2. Copy them to your new location.
  3. Go to the Settings General and change the location of the blog (‘WordPress address (URI):’ and ‘Blog address (URI):’).
  4. If you move wordpress from root directory to sub-directory(http://YOURBLOG.com/blog/), copy the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address).
  5. Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor.
  6. If you moving to root directory change the line to: require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’); If your moving to another directory change the line to: require(‘./YOURDIRECTORY/wp-blog-header.php’); Your must using your directory name.
  7. If you’re using PermaLinks, make sure your .htaccess file is updated with any necessary changes (eg RewriteBase /blog/ and to RewriteBase / if your use root directory).
  8. Logout of the blog, and login at the new location.
  9. Delete the old directory.

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Posted in Wordpress | 2 Comments »

What is a WordPress Blog and Should You Use WordPress?

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

If you are interested in blogging, you will eventually run across the name WordPress. WordPress is a very popular blogging application for many reasons, and the serious bloggers tend to go with WordPress. WordPress is powerful software not only because of the quality, but because of the ease of use. There are other blogging software applications out there, but bloggers will quickly recognize the power and benefits of using WordPress, and all of the features that come with it.

One outstanding benefit of using WordPress to create your blog is pinging. Pinging alerts the search engines every time you have placed new content on your blog. Pinging also notifies blog libraries. People use the blog libraries to direct them to the topics they want to read about. This drives traffic to your blog, and even better, it takes no time and effort on your part.

Another benefit of WordPress is you don’t have to be a blog designer to get a professional looking blog. There are hundreds of free great looking WordPress themes to fit any topic you want to pursue. Once you pick your theme, it’s advisable to get yourself a tutorial package to smoothly get your blog up and running, plus your tutorial package will save you countless hours, and a lot of frustration. After you get more familiar with WordPress, maintaining your blog will be fast and easy.

WordPress has a great plugin library that allows you to instantly add some amazing features such as image galleries, podcasting, statistics so you know how many people are visiting your site, and events calendars. The plug-ins will allow you to change the look and feel of your blog any time it suits you, and they can be installed in minutes.

These are just a few of the elements WordPress offers so you end up with a very attractive blog that is going to draw people to visit frequently and read the content that you have posted on your blog. WordPress is a powerful blogging environment that allows you the freedom to be as creative and as unique as you want to be.

If you want to make fast cash on the internet, visit us at: http://FastCashBlogging.com

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WordPress 2.6.2 Snoopy Vulnerability

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

A vulnerability in the Snoopy library was announced today.  WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard.   Although this seems to be a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users, we wanted to get an update out immediately.  2.6.3 is available for download right now.  If you don’t want to download the whole release to get the security fix, you can download the following two files and copy them over your 2.6.2 installation.

  1. wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
  2. wp-includes/version.php

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