Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> First Steps On A Fresh WordPress Install

As I’m sure most of you do too, I’m now managing a good handful of sites which are running WordPress. I’ve now got a solid routine going when it comes to getting WordPress up and running and in this post, I thought I’d share it with you.

Get the backups set up

On every site I run, I’ve got a double backup combination of WordPress Backup to Dropbox and BackupBuddy for complete peace of mind. One, as the name suggests, sends a nightly backup to my Dropbox, and the other one sends me an email with the backup attached.

With some of the sites I’m running these days, losing even a day’s work would be absolutely catastrophic. For example, along with six of my friends, I’m writing a book this year and we’re using a little WordPress install I’ve got set up. Losing even one day would more or less ruin the entire project; whilst backups in duplicate might be a little overkill, it’s my way of ensuring I’ve got complete peace of mind. With your site, you might decide you only need weekly backups; whatever it is, a regular backup schedule is essential. It doesn’t really matter what tools you use, either. Just so long as you’ve got something, that’s all that really matters.

Get your SEO on

The next plugin I get up and running it Yoast’s excellent SEO plugin. I’ve talked before about why I’m such a fan of the plugin; it pretty much does everything you could want in an SEO plugin, plus a couple of other things you didn’t know you wanted in an SEO plugin, but would like anyway (such as the ability to add content to the start and ends of RSS feed entries).

It’s definitely worth taking some time to set up the plugin correctly. Again, as I said in WordPress SEO Tips:

SEO plugins aren’t the set-it-and-forget-it kind of plugin, unfortunately. You actually have to do something with them in order to get them to work for you.

For years I had the All In One SEO plugin installed on another blog, but I never actually did anything with it. In hindsight that was incredibly silly, but at the time I thought I was improving my SEO. I mean, I had the plugin installed and everything!

I can’t stress enough the importance of taking the time to get these things set up properly. It might take an extra ten minutes, but if you don’t do it, you might as well not bother in the first place.

Get some cache

The final in my trio of essential plugins is W3 Total Cache. Total Cache is my caching plugin of choice and for a host of reasons, I love it.

As well as providing all the usual caching goodness, I’m provided with minifying, browser caching and — most handily — CDN support. I’m running WPCDN on WPShout and it just makes it a breeze to use. Enter a couple of details and it’s done.

As with our SEO plugin, this is something I’ve talked about before. Further as with our SEO plugin, unless you set it correctly, it’s useless:

It is worth noting, though, that unless you set it up correctly it will have little or no effect and may even slow your blog down, as this post shows!

Get rid of wp-content for uploads

You’ll notice that images and other media on WPShout aren’t stored in /wp-content/uploads/, they’re stored in /media/, which I think has a much nicer look to it, especially when people are going to be looking at the sources of images for higher resolution screens.

This is actually really easy to do — you can set the upload path to whatever you like; under Settings, Media, use the field “store uploads in this folder” to set the name of the new folder. Save your changes, and that’s it. Just a simple way of getting a slightly more professional look.

Wrapping up

Four quick tips! A trio of plugins and a new destination for uploads. If you’ve got any quick tips you use when installing a new copy of WordPress, let me know in the comments.

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Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> WordPress SEO Tips

I’ve always had questions about SEO, but nobody’s ever been able to explain it in such a way that sets out what it is, why it’s important and how I can benefit from it. This post aims to do exactly that, with the help of some people much more qualified to tell you about it than I am.

My thanks to three awesome people for their help in writing this: Nathan Rice, Lead Developer at Copyblogger Media, Jeff Starr, WordPress Editor at Smashing Magazine as well as author of the excellent Perishable Press and co-author of Digging into WordPress and finally Alex Moss, Head of SEO at Banc Media and a Partner at Pleer.

So what is SEO?

 SEO: “The optimization of web pages for success with search engines.”

Jeff hits the nail on the head when he describes SEO as “The optimization of web pages for success with search engines.” That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Alex’s definition takes us through the slightly more complex definition:

“SEO is a process where you try to make a page, pages or domain as a whole get as high up as possible in search engines for the keywords you choose to target. These keywords would be chosen through research based on how hard it would be to get to page 1. The effect of SEO is made from 2 sources – one being what you do to the site/page itself and the other is based on how other websites link to you.”

Why is it important?

It’s about optimizing your code and your content in a way that search engines find easy to understand.

I asked Nathan why SEO was so important: “To me, SEO is about optimizing your code and your content in a way that search engines find easy to parse. I know there is so much more to SEO, like acquiring backlinks, interlinking your content, pagerank sculpting, etc., but in terms of return on your time investment, code and content seem to matter the most, in my experience. ”

I also asked Alex whether you or I — average bloggers — should be paying for SEO to reap these amazing benefits:

“It depends on what you blog about and what you want to rank for. If you blog about iPads, it’s going to be practically impossible to rank on page 1 for iPad. This is because you will be in competition with companies who have more money and more resources. However, if you are a blogger who writes about a certain niche it would be easier to rank for the less competitive terms.”

The answer is more or less no, unless you’re trying to rank highly for a competitive keyword, in which case you’re probably not an average blogger.

So how do I optimise my content?

“My current SEO strategy is mostly aimed at optimizing for people not machines. Great content is still king.”
– Jeff Starr

Clearly, there’s something to be gained from “doing” SEO. I asked Jeff what he does to optimise content as Smashing Magazine WordPress Editor.

“Smashing Magazine has an existing SEO strategy that involves keywords, meta descriptions, permalink and title optimization, internal linking and much more. Additionally, I like to focus on anchor text, keywords, and above all quality content that will benefit the WP community. My current SEO strategy is mostly aimed at optimizing for people not machines. Great content is still king.”

I also asked Nathan to what extent having an “SEO optimised” is important, or whether just having a sensibly coded theme will do the job:

“A sensibly coded theme, along with a decent SEO plugin, will work for most people.
–Nathan Rice

“A sensibly coded theme, along with a decent SEO plugin, will work for most people. But all things being equal, a person with a theme coded with SEO as a specific goal (and data to back up the choices they make) will have an advantage. Markup output (HTML) matters. Speed matters. Control matters. These are things that only a well optimized theme can offer.

So yeah, any sensibly coded theme will do. But for a small investment, you can really step up your odds by going with a theme that is built for SEO.”

How can I benefit from it?

SEO plugins aren’t the set-it-and-forget-it kind of plugin, unfortunately. You actually have to do something with them in order to get them to work for you.

There are a couple of places I’d recommend you start. WPCandy has an excellent guide which runs down the basics.

It’s likely you’ve got some sort of SEO plugin installed; pretty much everyone has, and they improve your SEO, right? I mean, that’s what everyone says so it must be true. For years I had the All In One SEO plugin installed on another blog, but I never actually did anything with it. In hindsight that was incredibly silly, but at the time I thought I was improving my SEO. I mean, I had the plugin installed and everything!

SEO plugins aren’t the set-it-and-forget-it kind of plugin, unfortunately. You actually have to do something with them in order to get them to work for you.

I’m a big fan of Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin, which has a number of awesome features — as well as the usual changing of the <title> and description, it handles XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs and can insert certain content at the beginning and end of your RSS feed.

Have a browse through WPCandy and get Yoast’s plugin. Read up and it’s likely you’ll not make the same mistake I did all those years ago.

Thanks again to Nathan, Jeff and Alex for their invaluable contributions.

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Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Affiliate Marketing For WordPress

In recent weeks I’ve been trying to diversify WPShout’s income — you’ll notice that Shout now sports some links in the sidebar pointing to WooThemes and WPWebHost, both using affiliate links to do so. There are a couple of ways I’m now handling my affiliate marketing through my WordPress Dashboard and this post will run down the different ways I’m now doing this.

As I did earlier in the year, I’ve kept this one relatively brief and I’ve used a screencast to show you how I do it.

Making links nice

The first thing I’ve now got is all my links in one place and standardised, all going: wpshout.com/go/product-name. I’m doing this with a plugin called Thirsty Affiliates. It’s the only premium plugin I’m using on WPShout and it’s a great way of sorting and organising affiliate links, as the picture below shows.

Using custom post types, Thirsty Affiliates provides an awesome way of giving your affiliate links a really professional look. You can sort all your links in one place and change them universally if the seller changes affiliate provider instead of having to go into every single post and page you’ve mentioned. It’s also got a neat little addon for the post editor screen which gives you all of your links in one place so you can easily add them into a post.

It really is an awesome little plugin and I thoroughly recommend you check it out.

Automatically linking

All we’ve achieved so far is make our links look nice, but that’s not too much of a help; we want to have our links added automatically to certain words or phrases for maximum profit.

I do this by using a slightly unorthodox method: a plugin called SEO Smart Links, which is meant to be used for setting up internal links to improve SEO, hence the name.

Install the plugin as usual from the Plugin Directory and activate it. Then, under Settings find Automatic SEO Links. You can then add a word to automatically link and a URL to link to, and that’s it.

That’s all there is to it

This really isn’t complicated stuff and I’m just using two plugins here to make links look nice and then automatically add them into posts. It’s another one of those things that could have been really complicated, but with the right help from a couple of plugins isn’t.

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Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> The WordPress Hosting Review: Results

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Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Why WordPress?

Nearly two years ago now, I asked a number of members of the WordPress community why they used WordPress. Over those last two years WordPress has changed vastly and thus it’s time to update that post with the reasons I still use WordPress in 2011.

1. The themes

Nodoubt you’ve heard about WordPress’ free and premium themes. These are undoubtedly one of the main attractions to WordPress and certainly the reason many people use it over other CMSes.

If you’re after free WordPress themes, the likes of Smashing Magazine are the places to look. Be wary of downloading themes from sites which exist solely to link to batches of themes as they often sneak in their own backlinks, using encrypted PHP to do so. Stick to places like the WordPress Theme Directory and roundups from reputable sites such as Smashing Magazine.

However, a huge market has sprung up around paid WordPress themes and you can get some exquisitely designed themes for $50 or so. Even if you don’t want an out-of-the-box theme, you can still use one of the many frameworks available to build your site around, thus saving time (and money!).

My personal recommendation is WooThemes. WPShout runs the WooFramework, something I’d thoroughly recommend. WooThemes have over 100 paid and free themes and their monthly subscription is great value, so you should definitely check them out.

2. The hosting

WordPress is supported by virtually all hosts, but some are vastly better than others. On WPShout I recently conducted an independent survey to find the best WordPress hosts; I’d thoroughly recommend you check out the results in order to find out which host is best for you.

WPShout is hosted by WPWebHost, on their $7.95/month “Freedom Plan”. Since I moved to WPWebHost, I’ve had fantastic customer service and as I’m on a commercial package, I can honestly recommend it as something well worth getting. They’ve even given me a discount code — WPSHOUT — which will give you 30% off the Freedom Plan.

3. The ease of use and flexibility

The chief reason remains its ease of use and flexibility. Whether I want to create a fancy portfolio, a simple e-Commerce site or a straightforward blog, WordPress is the easy option. The “famous five minute install” isn’t really true anymore — it takes me about thirty seconds to install a new WordPress site with my host, but we’ll come onto that later.

Developments such as custom post formats have meant WordPress is now much more than a blogging platform; it’s now a fully fledged CMS.

When I want to do something that would be more complicated, the vast number of plugins can just be dropped into my setup and allow me to do just about anything I could think of. If the plugin you want doesn’t exist, there’s likely to be someone with the same problem as you and a solution on its way.

4. The speed

WordPress has the potential to run extremely quickly. WPShout loads in roughly one and a half seconds and there are a couple of little tricks I use. The chief “trick”, if you can call it that, is to use W3 Total Cache. It’s an absolutely brilliant plugin which caches your site, thus reducing the amount of “work” that has to be done each time somebody loads your site.

I’ve often heard accusations levelled at WordPress of the code being “bloated”, but I’ve never seen anything to back this up nor have I seen this reflected in load times. WordPress can be slow if used irresponsibly, but a couple of simple steps and you’ll be flying.

I’ve written a fair bit about making WordPress run quickly on Shout and I wrote a fairly comprehensive tutorial for Noupe on the subject. Good places to start, though are Faster WordPress and a nice overview How To Make Your WordPress Site Load Faster.

5. The community

None of the things I’ve mentioned thus far would exist without the wonderful WordPress community. They’re the people who help you when you get stuck, make the free themes you use on your blog, develop the plugins you rely on and ultimately make the platform you use.

It’s worth mentioning the license WordPress uses — the General Public License – which gives you immense freedom to do more or less anything you want.

One of the reasons I originally chose WordPress myself was because of the active community and it remains the single main reason why I continue to use WordPress; from a great community, all else flows.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Why WordPress?

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Single Page Portfolios With WordPress

I recently needed to make an easily editable single page portfolio (this kind of thing) for a friend. As the budget was essentially nil, I headed over to ThemeForest and chose one of the awesomely designed HTML templates there, only spending about $10 and saving a ton of time in the process.

I then went about the usual porting HTML to WordPress, but I need some way of splitting up the various portfolio sections — about, “what I do” etc — into a separate page for each one so my friend could edit the About page and the about section would change, edit the “What I do” page and the what I do section would change and so on.

I had thought this would be a pain to do, but happily, I was wrong.

Using WP_Query (and not query_posts)I was able to output the contents of one page straight after the other. The code looked something like this:

And so on and so forth for all the different pages — it was just a case of getting the page id and putting in a query every time I needed the actual content.

This is another case of simplicity winning the day — this could have been horribly complex, but it was literally a case of just changing one little bit.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Single Page Portfolios With WordPress

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Email Newsletters For WordPress

As you may have seen in last week’s competition post, I recently created an email newsletter for WPShout. You may have also noticed I ended up using MailChimp instead of a built-into-WordPress solution.

Something which used just WordPress was what I was originally after, so I set out the following criteria:

• Powered by WordPress, ideally with custom post types or a simple admin interface.
• Double opt-in, with a nice bit of code I can put in my sidebar and style for signups.
• Import and export of lists as CSVs.
• Shortcodes or similar for unsubscribe links.
• Some sort of performance tracking.
• Cheap; either a premium plugin or something with low monthly costs.

It turns out this was a fairly comprehensive list of criteria and it wasn’t possible to fulfil all of the criteria.

This left me with two options:

• Use a premium plugin, such as WordPress Email Newsletter, and sacrifice functionality I wanted such as tracking.
• Or use a third party service such as MailChimp or Aweber and not be able to send out newsletters from my WordPress dashboard.

In the end I went with MailChimp as I didn’t want to sacrifice functionality and it’s not too much of a hassle to send emails out from. I went for MailChimp over Aweber simply because I’m familiar with it (and it’s free!).

Creating a signup popup

One of the things I wanted to be able to do was create something similar to what the likes of Darren Rowse on ProBlogger use — a little modal popup which shows to first time visitors inviting them to signup to the newsletter. I initially tried to do this plugin-less, but it didn’t turn out well and so I ended up using a plugin called WP Super Popup, which essentially does the same thing as the Popup Domination plugin on ProBlogger, just there aren’t pre-designed forms.

Not having pre-designed forms was fine, though as I wanted to show my MailChimp signup form which I embedded by using an iFrame (as there’s no embed code for larger forms on MailChimp, oddly). Obviously I don’t have any historic data to go on, but so far the popup has accounted for 1/3 of new subscriptions, so seems to be doing relatively well.

Signing up in the sidebar

The other thing I wanted to do was set up a sidebar subscription form. This too was relatively easy — I just grabbed the embed code off MailChimp and pasted it into the sidebar. I did then do a couple of tweaks though — instead of adding another stylesheet to Shout by using MailChimp’s stylesheet on its CDN, I put it at the bottom of Shout’s. I then had a play around with the styling to make it look like the rest of the site, moving the buttons around so they fit in Shout’s lovely uber-wide sidebar.

Get the newsletter!

It’s been a fairly straightforward process setting up the newsletter — there were times when I had no idea what I was doing, but it all seems to have turned out well in the end! I’m now going to tell you to go and subscribe, of course. If you’re quick, there are hundreds of themes to be won, too!

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Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Humongous Premium Themes Competition

Last year to celebrate WPShout’s first birthday I ran a competition on the site where I offered readers the chance to win one of nineteen premium themes. Today is also a cause for celebration as WPShout has surpassed two thousand RSS subscribers! This actually happened a couple of months ago, just I don’t obsess over stats so hadn’t seen

The nineteen-theme-giveaway from last time was in retrospective a little small. This time round thirty readers can win several hundred themes between them.

The prizes

• ProThemeDesign and Viva Themes have both offered two winners the theme of their choice.
• Elegant Themes have offered two subscriptions to their theme club.
• WooThemes have offered three winners 12 month Developer Club subscriptions.
• StudioPress and Gabfire Themes have offered five winners the theme of their choice.
• WPZoom have offered nine winners the theme of their choice.

But how do I enter?

An excellent question! You’ll need to be subscribed to the lovely new WPShout newsletter in order to enter!

What’s the WPShout newsletter, though? It’s unlikely you’ll have heard of it, actually. I quietly added a subscription box to the sidebar last week and so far ninety of you have taken the opportunity to subscribe. A couple of times a month you’ll get an email with details of little competitions, theme discounts and other bits of original content. At this stage I’m open to ideas and suggestions, so let me know in the comments what you’d like to see.

To enter the competition, you’ll need to be subscribed to the WPShout newsletter on Monday 14th November. Winners will be chosen at random and a newsletter will be sent out notifying the winners, who will then have a week to get back to me, or their prize will be redrawn.

There’s a box below for you to subscribe — good luck!

Thank you to all the lovely people at all of the theme companies above for providing the prizes!

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Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Integrating Facebook With WordPress

Despite Facebook being the most successful of all of the social media sites, I’ve never made WPShout a presence on the site or attempted to integrate Facebook onto WPShout in any way. I tend to view Facebook as more personal and other sites such as Twitter more appropriate for both marketing the site and interacting with the people who read it.

However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t integrate Facebook with WordPress. This post will attempt to outline the various ways you can integrate the two in question and answer format.

Which are the best Facebook plugins?

Is an excellent question and one which over the course of this post I shall attempt to answer. Regular Shout readers will know, though, that I’m a strong advocate of doing a little bit of coding and not using a plugin for everything, a trend I shall follow in this post.

How can I add a Like button to posts?

Facebook has a series of “social plugins” which are an excellent place to start for all sorts of little code snippets — and this includes Like buttons.

Their website explains it much better, but the basic embed is:

But of course, manually changing your URL isn’t practical, so replacing YOUR_URL with <?php the_permalink(); ?> will automatically add the current post’s link:

There are, of course, an endless number of plugins  which will do the same job for you. If you’re after one of the aforementioned plugins, Like seems to be a solid option.

How can I let users comment with their Facebook profiles?

Excellent question! There are quite a few neat little plugins which will do this for you. Facebook Comments for WordPress looks like an impressively comprehensive choice. Whilst this is never something I’d do on Shout, I will admit it could be quite handy to let your visitors comment with their Facebook profiles to save them filling out the Name, URL and email every time they visit your site (although a lot of visitors will have this saved with their browser, so don’t use it for that reason alone!).

How can I embed content from Facebook into posts?

The trend of oh, there’s a plugin for that continues here, with the Embed Facebook plugin providing this function.

The plugin literally takes any link to a public page, album or whatever and embeds the content into your post — the plugin’s site has the picture below showing you how to use it:

This could get a bit annoying — personally I would have preferred a shortcode so if I wanted to link to something on Facebook without embedding it I could.

How do I get a widget like box?

Ah, the old “like box” in convenient widget format that everyone has!

This is another case of get the plugin cause it’s vastly more convenient. I’m sure there are ways of doing it manually, but in this case, the plugin is just so much easier. Facebook Fan Box seems to be the one to go for here.

How can I automatically post to Facebook?

There are all sorts of plugins that’ll do this for you and they’re not very interesting so you can just read them in convenient list based format on this handy website.

How do I…

And that concludes today’s post. If you want to know how to do other exciting things, comment and I’ll see what I can do!

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Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Plugin-less WordPress e-Commerce

Naturally, I looked to WordPress to handle everything — the products, the blog and the pages. With custom post types, this wasn’t a problem; a custom post type for the products and then an individual entry for each of the products, with standard posts being used for the blog and custom page templates for the pages. We’re not going to look at those, though, instead we’re going to look at how the e-Commerce part of the site worked.

Choosing a shopping cart

The problem was going to be the shopping cart itself. I was only after something lightweight — a full plugin like WooCommerce would have been overkill — and thus I turned to my (trusty?) friend PayPal.

The first thing to do was to sign up for a PayPal Business account and then get started with Website Payments Standard, the free PayPal checkout tool. There is a pay-monthly version, but it’s more complicated than we need to worry about.

Creating your button

The button creator tool is surprisingly easy and versatile. You can choose from a couple of different button types — shopping cart, recurring payment or just buy it now are the ones you’re likely to use — depending on what you want to sell. I used the shopping cart button.

You can then add an item name and ID, price and currency.

We’re then onto the useful part: customising the button.

I needed to be able to select different types of bracelet (which cost different amounts), so the first customisation was adding drop down menus with a price option. I then needed sizes, so a drop down menu with the different sizes was the next customisation. If you need text, add a text field.

It’s all fairly standard at the moment, though. Clicking the “customise text or appearance” button will open up the important section, though, which allows you to use your own image instead of the PayPal “Add to Cart” button.

Here I headed over to GraphicRiver and picked a button pack that suited the design, customising a little in Photoshop. Once I’d uploaded it, clicking the “use your own button image” option and then linking to my button let me use my custom button instead of the standard PayPal look (the end result is below).

The rest is something you’ll have to do yourself: shipping, tax and adding inventory. Once you’re done, click “Create Button” and copy the code you’re given.

Adding to WordPress

Actually adding the button to WordPress was quite simple, with the help of our good friends custom fields.

For each bracelet entry, I added a custom field paypal, where I pasted the button code. I then added the following to the single-bracelet.php file (as I’m using custom post types):

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'paypal', true); ?>

This gets the custom field and spits out its contents, adding my lovely button! I added a div around the code above in order to let me style the button; once the styling was applied, I had a lovely new button!

No plugin here

I’ve slightly over-simplified things here; there’s slightly more to it than just creating a button, putting it into a custom field and watching the money roll in — I also used custom fields for the images you see on the product page and had to add a second button for international postage as PayPal wasn’t quite flexible enough. I also had to add a div to each button code in order to get my styling how I wanted it; it’s not a perfect system, but for a simple shopping cart, it’ll do just fine.

Over simplification or not, though — plugin-less e-Commerce is a cost effective, quick and easy way of setting up a shopping cart on any WordPress powered site.

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