BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

Image by Andrew Wilkinson via Flickr

Sometimes its nice to know who’s been visiting your blog and where they came from, rather than just a numbers game – “i had so many visitors last week” etc. Making good use of visitor statistics can help you fine-tune copy and content if you’re a serious online marketeer.

And if you’re not, then there’s still nothing more satisfying than seeing daily visitor numbers rise week on week. If nothing else, it proves you’re doing something right.

Blogger and Wordpress blog platforms make it really easy to quickly add stat programs like Google Analytics and StatCounter through their Admin User Panels. In Blogger’s case, you simply need to add a html/javascript gadget and copy and paste the StatCounter tracking code into it. It really is that simple.

However, when I came to add StatCounter stats to my Tumblr account, I found it rather more challenging. Read the rest of this entry →

Image via Wikipedia

By Gino

1. Blog Post Graphics

While great content and catchy titles are important, eye-grabbing images work best of all. Many people respond very well to visual graphics, so if you can find colorful, clever graphics that work well with your blog posts you should be able to pull more people in and then keep them there once they read the title and post.

You should not only have thumbnails, but also work interesting graphics into the post content to help break up large blocks of text.

2. Easy to Read Post Formatting

Many readers like to scan blog posts before they commit to reading the entire post and some people will just scan posts for quick info and won’t even spend the time to read. This is why it is essential to use proper formatting such as sub titles, bold and underlined text. Read the rest of this entry →

Image via CrunchBase

I use several plugins to promote WordPress blogs via Twitter. They mainly fall into three categories:

Getting users to tweet individual posts.

Getting users to follow you on Twitter  (so they are reminded to come back).

Automatically tweeting about every single post.

Getting Users to Tweet Your Posts

There are others, but the plugin I use to get readers to tweet my posts is Tweet This. It offers a nice selection of buttons. I get to select which button it will insert at the end of each post.

Getting Users to Follow You on Twitter

The Twitter badge that remains in the upper right (or the left, if you choose) corner of the blog window is one of my favorite Twitter-related blog add-ons. It is attractive and can be eye-catching without being intrusive. Basically it takes up no space.

You get the badge for free at http://www.go2web.com. You select the color, the wording, even the exact position (left/right, and distance from the top). The site generates the code to create the badge on your blog.

The Twitter badge is not technically a plugin, because you have to use the Appearance > Editor and insert it in the PHP code (usually on the footer page), but that is actually quite easy. And the thing just works.

You can edit the color on your own site (instead of regenerating it at Go2Web.com) if you want to. Simply change the hex code in the tiny script you pasted on the footer page.

Tweeting Posts Automatically

Automatically tweeting a link to each post seems to be the most effective of all the Twitter tie-ins I have tried. There are several (at least) plugins that do that, and all of them that I have tried work just fine. Here are the ones I use:

Twitter Autopost

Tweet This

Twitter Tools

Twitter Autopost

Twitter Autopost is the simplest automatic tweet plugin I’ve ever seen. It is not free. I bought it with another automation plugin for less than $5.

Tweet This

Tweet this is free. You can find and install it, using the Add New feature in your WordPress dashboard. Besides adding a Tweet This button as described above, it can be easily set up automatically post to a Twitter account. Just enter a Twitter username and password.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a whole complex of tools. It allows you to not only tweet automatically when you make a blog post but also to automatically post tweets to your WordPress blog. You have to be careful in setting up this plugin, or your tweet-post-cycle can become circular.

Related articles by Zemanta

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• Sponsored Tweets API Challenge – Our entry (u-g-h.com)

Image by Peregrino Will Reign via Flickr

The WordPress blog software has taken the Internet by storm. There are so many things you can create with it—automated blogs, static websites, article directories, advertising sites, and more—using easy-t0-install plugins and themes.

For many people, though, WordPress remains difficult to install, despite the huge number of tutorials now available. One answer is the Fantastico feature offered by some web-hosting providers.

Unfortunately experts say that blogs installed by Fantastico are not secure. Such blogs may be able to be made secure, but if you are expert enough to do that, you will not be using Fantastico.

And WordPress blogs need all the security they can get. Now that WordPress installaitons have become so popular, hackers and so-called “script kiddies” are constantly trying to break in and vandalize them.

Blogs must be carefully installed and maintained to fend off outside attack. Otherwise, not only is your blog endanger, if it is on a shared server, an unsecured blog endangers all the other sites on that server, because hackers could use your blog as an entry point to attack the server.

The best protection against outside attack is to do two things: install your blog in a secure way to begin with, and then quickly install each WordPress security version as soon as it is available. There is no such thing as a set-it-up-and-forget-it blog that is secure.

Expert WordPress is a service that lets you install a safe, secure WordPress blog in a couple of minutes—just as fast as Fantastico, but with a completely secure database and blog. And the blog you install with Expert Wordpress is also monetized with built-in Adsense and provided with an easily customized special theme. You can, of course, change the theme if you want to.

Over the last three years, I have tried many blogging packages, including a bunch of WordPress tutorials. Expert WordPress is by far the easiest and best I have found. Expert WordPress makes it actually fun to create new WordPress blogs.

The only catch is that the instant installation feature works on only Cpanel hosting software. However, even without using the instant install feature, the Expert WordPress package is so comprehensive , with a complete installation package, including plugins, plus a manual and the absolutely best step-by-step videos I have ever seen.

I love using Expert Wordpress to install blogs on Hostgator, but I also use it on IX Web Hosting, which does not have Cpanel. It takes a little longer, but it is still by far the best blog-installation solution I have ever found.

Further, the members area of the Expert WordPress website is comprehensive, and the support is prompt and courteous. Over the years, as both a beta tester and a customer for his products, I have found owner Alex Sysoef to be tremendously responsive and helpful at all times.

Free monthly webinars offer advanced training and give everyone a chance to ask any questions we may have. Expert Wordpress even provides a huge package of free articles for blog content, plus a monthly blog content package. Plus, there are promotion tools and other member perks.

I highly recommend Expert Wordpress (in case it is not obvious). It is so much fun to make blogs with EWP; I often build them just for fun.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that the basic Expert Wordpress blog package (with the recommended plugins included) is free? Yep. You really should check it it.

A blog, believe it or not, when properly prepared creates content, and quite often is put very fast in the top ten of Google. Why it is so, try reading the following contribution to enlighten yourself:

A blog of domestic implements from a few features, allow search engines to crawl the content very quickly. The result was the fastest I have ever witnessed, added a new post within 20 seconds (including the top 10 ranking) for relevant phrases. How can this come about?

BlogPing

BlogPing is a protocol that implements any popular blog system. It serves primarily two things:

1. Blogs to notify each other (They were linked)

2. Notify search engines (Google Hello, I have published a new page)

Especially with the integration of Google Sitemaps that go on WordPress with a click of the hand, you need a search engine’s new content page to look once more. Sitemap opens directly to crawl a new page. Read the rest of this entry →

Securing website is a big challenge for web master. It includes server protection and website protection itself. Situation becomes more difficult when you are using some famous platform for your web site.

As wordpress expert, my aim is to secure and give maximum protection to my clients’ web site. We have to think as a hacker to block all possible ways of hacking a wordpress.

Let’s go through the complete process of securing our wordpress installation.

Securing User Name:-

Most crucial and important part of securing wordpress is to change its default user name “admin”, making your website vulnerable to brute force attach and hacking scripts. If you have access to cpanel use phpmyadmin and go to table containing name user. Edit this table and change the admin name to choice of yours.

Or create a new user with full admin power and login through that id and delete the admin user. Read the rest of this entry →

I recently upgraded some of my WordPress sites to WP 2.9. Now I’m having problems with WordPress inserting trash code in posts and pages when I edit them.

That is, if all you do is type text with very little correction, you are fine. But if you type some text, save it, and go back later to add photos, you may be in trouble.

Whenever I start having strange problems, I check the source code. When I do that, I am finding repeated, redundant coding.

On one page I finally had to manually strip all the formatting code and reformat. That worked, but it took time. And that was a simple page with no photos.

When saving changes, after clicking the Update Page or Update Post button, I have actually watched as WordPress randomly inserted extra blank lines in awkward places.

Since 2.9 is not a security update, I am not updating any more of my WP sites to that version. I’m waiting and hoping the bugs get fixed in the next version.

I wish I could revert my WP 2.9 sites to the previous WordPress version, but I think it would take more time than I currently have available for maintenance. I’m not even sure where to get the previous version of WordPress.

Have you been experiencing this problem? If so, how did you solve it?

Note: I am a big fan of the plugin TinyMCE Advanced. I have been told that it can cause problems. Any comments you may have on these issues would be much appreciated.

Meanwhile….Happy New Year!

Kathleen Gresham