Wordpress is a fantastic blogging platform, and as I showed you yesterday, it can be a great CMS platform too. Wordpress works great as it is, but one of its greatest assets is how extendable it is. There are hundreds of great plugins for Wordpress, but these are the 12 most useful in my opinion to anyone building an online business:

Askimet

Coming as standard with recent versions of Wordpress, you simply need to enable it from the plugins page. You’ll also need a Wordpress API key which you can get for free at Wordpress.com

Once activated, Askimet will check comments against a spam database and will significantly reduce, or even stop spam comments all together!

Feedburner Feedsmith

If you’re using Feedburner (and if not, why not?) this useful plugin will detect all the ways to access your original WP feeds and redirect them to Feedburner so you can track every single subscriber.

Google XML Sitemaps

Pretty obvious from that name what this one does, it generates a sitemap of your blog (or Wordpress CMS site) which is supported by Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo!

Link Cloaker

If you promote any affiliate services or products from your site this plugin is invaluable. It automatically cloaks outgoing links in your posts and pages so that your ugly affiliate URLs are replaced with something much more friendly!

Social Bookmarking Reloaded

Want to easily add social bookmarking icons to your posts? Not a problem, simply install this plugin to get Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and more icons added to each post and page (and of course you can choose which ones to enable!)

WP Contact Form

Easily add a contact form, protected by an anti-spam question, to any of your posts or pages.

StatCounter

You may have read in previous posts that I’m a big fan of StatCounter, and this plugin makes it very easy to add your tracking code throughout your site.

Google Analyticator

And if you prefer Google Analytics to StatCounter, or want to run them both, then this is the plugin for you!

Simply Exclude

This is a very interesting plugin. Quite simply it allows you to exclude posts or pages from specific categories from appearing on your front page, archives, search results or feeds. You can set exactly what is and isn’t enabled and where, and it’s great for stopping one time offers and time specific posts from clogging up your archives and search results months or years after they are no longer relevant.

SEO Title Tag

This one does pretty much what it says on the tin! It allows you full control over your title tags.

WP Super Cache

Ever clicked on a link on Digg and found that the page can’t be found? More than likely the server collapsed under the deluge of traffic that front page exposure on a site like Digg can produce. In order to protect yourself from this, and speed up delivery of your pages, a page caching system like this is just the ticket. Basically it creates and serves static HTML versions of your pages, rather than bogging down the PHP engine with thousands of requests. Lots of options and easy to use so give it a try.

Database Backup

Personally I like to do my backups from phpMyAdmin, but if you want the convenience of running backups from your Wordpress control panel this is the plugin for you. Just beware that you’ll need to write enable folders to use it so I suggest enabling them (CHMOD 777) only temporarily for the backup, the CHMOD back to 755 for security purposes. Of course that prevents you from using the built in scheduler, but a small price to pay for keeping your site secure.

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Wordpress is my favorite blogging platform, and until fairly recently that’s all I thought it was, but these days I build entire websites using the Wordpress platform. Whether it’s a simple static brochure site, a ’sales letter’ product site, a review sites or anything else, Wordpress is so versitile that it can be used for just about anything. There are many advantages to using Wordpress over a more traditional approach to creating sites – it’s easy to setup, even for non-techies, you can maintain your site from anywhere, it’s great for SEO and best of all it’s free!

Since Wordpress is a blogging platform, there are a few tweaks that need to be made if we’re going to build successful sites with it. Here is my method, step by step, for creating great looking, effective sites that are suitable for your Internet Marketing business.

Using Wordpress as a CMS

Download and install Wordpress

OK so this step is pretty simple. Head over to Wordpress.org and download the latest version. Once you’ve done that, unzip it create a database on your server. If you have a web control panel (like cPanel or DirectAdmin) then create a new MySQL database and jot down the details, if not don’t worry just ask your hosting company for one and they should email you with some login details and a database name.

Next you’ll need to edit the file wp-config-sample.php with details of your database. Use Nvu or Notepad (or similar) and edit the following lines:

define('DB_NAME', 'Your database name goes here');
define('DB_USER', 'Your usernamename goes here');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'Your password goes here');

You should also change the line:

define('SECRET_KEY', 'Type anything you want here');

Everything else should remain the same, although if for any reason you have a problem check with your host that the DB_HOST should be set to localhost (Will be correct 99% of the time!). Save this file as wp-config.php

Once you’re done, upload the whole lot to your server (the root directory, assuming you’re using Wordpress for the entire site). Now you need to run the installation script so point your browser at yourdomain.com/wp-admin/wp-install.php

You’ll see the Wordpress welcome screen which will prompt you for your Blog Title (title of your site) and an email address. Fill these out and click Install Wordpress.

Next you’ll see a success screen telling you that Wordpress has been installed. It will give you your default username, admin, and a temporary password. Write the password down carefully, or copy it to the clipboard (it is a randomly generated password and without it you can’t login!) then go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin (this is the URL you’ll use every time you want to maintain your new site) and login with these details. Now before you do anything else, click on admin and change your password!

Make files and directories writeable

In order to make updating your site as simple as possible, you’ll want the ability to upload images and make changes right from within the control panel. In order to do this, certain files and folders on your server need to be given the right permissions. Fire up your favourite FTP client (I use AceFTP) and connect to your site. Next make .htaccess and /wp-content/uploads writeable by giving them a CHMOD value of 755 (in AceFTP right click and select properties). Do not set 777 as this is a potential security risk. This allows Wordpress to make necessary changes to these files. If you want to use the theme editor in Wordpress then set the same permission to your theme directory (/wp-content/themes).

Note 1: Depending on your server configuration, 755 may not be enough to allow Wordpress to write. While the Wordpress documentation suggests CHMODing to 777, I would suggest otherwise as it is a potential security risk, basically allowing anyone to upload anything to your server. You would be much safer uploading changes manually via FTP

Note 2: By default, many FTP clients have .htaccess as a hidden file and you may need to allow hidden files from properties before you can see and edit it!

SEO friendly URLs

Wordpress is great for SEO, but it needs a little tweak. Login to your admin control panel and select settings from the top menu, then click on permalinks. By default, URLs on your site will have the format:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123

but what would be much better for SEO purposes would be:

http://www.yourdomain.com/category/postname

so that’s what we’ll do. Select custom structure and in the box enter /%category%/%postname%/ then click Save Changes. If you set the permissions of your .htaccess file above OK you’re all done, if not you need to copy the code which you’ll see at the bottom of the page into .htaccess and upload it. Now your URLs will be much better looking, and include your keywords!

Static front page, with separate blog

As a blogging platform, the index page (homepage) of your site will, by default, display the most recent posts in reverse chronological order. If we’re not running the entire site as a blog we want more control than that so here’s what to do…

First, create a new page (in the control panel go New > Page) as opposed to a post, call it Home and enter whatever information you want (text, images, links, whatever…) and create another new page called blog (or news). Now go to Settings > Reading and change the settings for Front page displays. Select static page, and set the front page to the new home page you just created, and posts page to the new blog page. What you now have is a homepage which you can have total control over, and a news/blog section which shows all your latest posts on the new blog page!

Conditional tags (advanced users only!)

If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty with a little PHP coding there’s one more very useful feature of Wordpress which I want to mention – conditionals. These are really useful when you’re working on a dynamic theme as they allow you to control what content is displayed on different pages. For example, you might not want a title on your homepage (so instead of ‘Home’ you can set it to whatever you want in the HTML instead) or you might want all pages in a specific category to have a submenu.

Here’s an example of how to use them. To display a different <title> tag based on which page is currently being displayed try this:

<title>
<?php
if (is_home()) {
        echo bloginfo('name');
} elseif (is_404()) {
        echo 'Error - 404 Not Found';
} elseif (is_category()) {
        echo 'Category:'; wp_title('');
} elseif (is_search()) {
        echo 'Search results';
} elseif ( is_day() || is_month() || is_year() ) {
        echo 'Archives:'; wp_title('');
} else {
        echo wp_title('');
}
?>
</title>

As you can see conditionals like is_home() and is_category(’reviews’) can be very useful in making your site more dynamic. If you’re not at all familiar with PHP or coding, or the above code scares you don’t worry – just ignore it, but in the back of your mind remember that Wordpress allows you to change content based on page type. That way if you get someone else to modify your theme you can ask them to do it for you!

So there we go, in no time at all we have a complete site based on the Wordpress platform. Of course, there are loads more features and tweaks but this is a great start. Tomorrow I’ll go through some of the best plugins for an Internet Marketer so you can really get the most out of your Wordpress site.

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If you’re new to blogging, or Internet Marketing, you may have heard the term RSS bandied about but not really understood what is means or why you ought to be using it. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a way of syndicating your content via an XML feed, or subscribing to feeds from other blogs and sites. By subscribing to a feed you can consume the content without actually visiting the site, either through an online service like Google Reader, or in an offline RSS client or aggregator. That means you can collect the feeds from all your favorite sites, and read them from one place without having to visit each site in turn. As you can imagine, this really speeds up your research and time spent reading blog posts which means you can be much more efficient and read more blogs.

The reason having an RSS feed for your own blog is so important is that in this day and age, many people are consuming information on the Internet in just this way. They don’t want to, or have time to, visit every blog they are interested in and so they simply subscribe to the feeds. If your site doesn’t offer a feed you may be missing out on a lot of regular readers.

RSS - Really iS Simple

The great news is that you don’t need to know any technical stuff, or even understand XML, in order to have a feed on your site, or to subscribe to other feeds. As with most things, we humans learn best by doing, so let me show you how to best use RSS.

Subscribing to feeds

First of all you need a reader. As already mentioned you can use an offline reader, or a web service. I like to use the free Google Reader so head over there and get yourself an account. Once you’ve done that subscribing couldn’t be easier. Just head to your favorite blog (this one would be a great start!) and click on the orange RSS feed logo (you may see more than one, look to the top right of this blog and you’ll see one feed for entries and another for comments, so click the entries button). You will then see the feed page which will look something like this:

If you’re subscribing via Google Reader, or one of the other services listed in the dropdown menu on some feeds just select it and click the button. Otherwise, copy and paste the URL into your reader and you’re done! Now every time you visit a site that you want to keep track of, simply subscribe to their RSS feed.

RSS on your own sites

The great news is that your blog probably already has an RSS feed as standard. If you’re using one of the mainstream blogging platforms such as Wordpress or Movable Type, or if your site is built using a CMS like Drupal then you’re in luck. If not then you can still create a feed without too much trouble by using a feed editor such as FeedForAll.

If you want to check your feed for errors there is a free validation tool at Feed Validator, and once you have done that, you can promote your site by submitting your feed to blog and feed directories. There is a long list of sites allowing RSS submissions at RSS Specifications.

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This is a question I get asked all the time, and since I’m in the process of setting up this new site it seemed like an ideal case study to show you how to do it properly.

Many times I have a client who wants to register more than one domain, and have them all point to the same site. Often done to protect the domain from possible abuse (hijacking by someone else taking a very similar domain to ’steal’ your traffic) or simply to catch mis-typed type-in traffic (where a user keys your domain into their browser address bar).

For this site I registered both the hyphenated, and non-hyphenated versions of the domain, primarily since in my experience the double S will often get mis-typed in the non-hyphenated version, while in the hyphenated version it’s easier to spot the mistake!

Now, the problem comes from Google’s penalisation of duplicate content. Google, and the other search engines, are in the business of offering quality and unique search results to their users. Therefore multiple sites with the same content are penalised and don’t rank well. The way to get around this is to use a 301 Redirect on all but the primary domain. In this example, online-business-logic.com is the primary domain and actually hosts the site while onlinebusinesslogic.com has a 301 redirect which ‘points’ the domain to this site while being ignored by the search engine spiders. The code 301 is interpreted as ‘page permanently moved’ and is also used if, for some reason, you have to move content on a site, perhaps if you move from a static site to a CMS and the structure changes, or you change file extensions from .html to .php in order to add dynamic content.

Here’s how to accomplish this…

In PHP

<?php
// Permanent redirection
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.your-domain-here.com/");
exit();
?>

In ASP

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.your-domain-here.com/”
%>

In CGI Perl

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.your-domain-here.com/");

In JSP

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.your-domain-here<.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

Simply create a new page using the code for the method of your choosing and save it as the index file on the domain you want to redirect, changing http://www.your-domain-here.com to the URL of the page you want to redirect to.

The redirect can also be done using a .htaccess file (on Linux servers which have mod-rewrite enabled) with the following code:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^your-domain-here.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-new-domain-here.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Create a plain text file with the above code, save it as .htaccess (That is the entire filename, ‘.htaccess’, with nothing before the period.) and upload it to the root directory of the domain you want to redirect.

Et voilà, clean redirects and no duplicate content penalty!

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One of my primary motivations for starting this blog was to share some of my techniques and favorite tools for creating websites. Recently I’ve been building almost every site in Wordpress, whether it be blog based or not. In a future post, I’ll give my ‘no brainer’ method for quickly setting up a CMS style site in Wordpress, but sometimes you need to break out the HTML editor and get your hands dirty!

I’m a big fan of Dreamweaver and Photoshop and they form the cornerstone of my studio, probably for the simple reason that I’ve been using them for so many years. If you’re new to creating websites though, and don’t want to spend thousands on software tools don’t worry - with these opensource tools you can start building great looking, functional websites in no time.

Nvu HTML Editor

Nvu (pronounced N-View) is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor based on the old Composer editor from the Mozilla Application Suite. It’s actually discontinued now but that doesn’t make it any less useful. Nvu complies with W3C’s web standards and by default pages are created in accordance to HTML 4.01 Transitional and use CSS although these are all user selectable. There’s also a built in validator which uses W3C’s online validation tool to check for compliance.

While Nvu might lack many of the features found in high end products such as Dreamweaver, it’s still a very powerful application, more than capable of creating fully functional and professional looking web pages. It’s also very compact, the Windows installer being just 6.6Mb, and easily carried on a USB pen drive.

While Nvu is no longer supported, Kompozer is a community driven project based on Nvu and freely available from Soundforge. It has a bunch of newer features such as a new auto spell checker and can create slightly cleaner code with less annoying <br> tags. That being said, it’s still Nvu that I carry on my USB stick because it’s so quick and easy to use.

GIMP Image Editor

The GIMP, or Gnu Image Manipulation Program, is the perfect partner for Nvu and a great substitute for Photoshop. This really is a superb package capable of everything from touching up photos and converting file formats to creating animated GIFs.

Photoshop users, especially those used to Microsoft Windows, may take a while to get used to the user interface as each individual window (such as the toolbar or color palette) are displayed in their own, separate window. This can lead to confusion with windows getting hidden behind each other, but once you get used to the interface you’ll soon realise the power of this incredible free software resource.

GIMP saves to it’s own native XCF format but is also compatible with a wide range of useful formats including JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF and Photoshop PSD making it perfect for web authoring and editing templates.

FileZilla FTP Client

While uploading files is pretty straight forward from within Windows these days, a dedicated FTP client still comes in handy and makes many jobs a lot easier. There are plenty to choose from, both free and commercial, but FileZilla is a great starting point and will cope with pretty much anything you ask it to do - and of course it’s opensource so it won’t cost you a penny!

Audacity Audio Editor

We’ve looked at tools to create HTML web pages, create/edit and add images and upload everything to your server but there’s one thing missing… Audio! Audacity is a fully functional recorder and image editor, great for podcasting or adding music and voice to your projects. Capable of importing and exporting WAV, AIFF and MP3 among others it’s the ideal partner to the other opensource web authoring tools mentioned here. It’s also very intuitive to use and although I have a commercial editor installed on my desktop computer, I very often open Audacity to do a quick job because I find it so quick and easy to use.

Build sites for free

Of course, some of the top end packages have more features and are more powerful than the applications discussed above, but they come with a price tag to match. In my 1 Day Webmaster seminars I teach my students using these packages exclusively and they create some astounding sites. If you’re just getting started online, if you’re wanting to learn how to create websites, or if you just want to save your hard earned cash then these packages will serve you well. You can always move to commercial packages later if the need arises but to be honest, you’ll probably find you can do everything you want with these!

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