What Is Managed Hosting?

This is where a hosting setup is created and optimised just for WordPress sites.

There are 1001 different types of hosting and website packages, a commodity hosting company like Godaddy or even the one I use Bluehost, is configured to keep as many people happy as possible.

WordPress managed hosting companies focus on WordPress, and WordPress alone.  They provide a highly optimised service just for good old WP.

Here are the ways managed hosting companies are optimised:

Security

Hacking of WordPress sites is a major problem, I’m called in all too often to tidy up hacked WordPress sites.  It’s expensive, time consuming and embarrassing for site owners.

These hosting companies monitor for and repair any hack attacks as they happen.  They are also very tightly secured to stop the hackers getting access in the first place.

All of the services I mention below also offer a full backup and recovery services.  There is no need to manage your own backup it’s done for you.  Peace of mind in a working archive of your site is priceless.

Performance

Many commodity hosting platforms are slow, they are slow because they share resources (often limited resources) with a large number of sites.  The web servers are not optimised or cached for WordPress requests.

Once your site begins to get some traffic you need to upgrade and this begins to costs.

These hosting services are optimised and performance tuned just for WordPress.  They are all very fast.

Load time matters both to your site visitors and Google.

Support

Have you ever contacted your hosting support only to be treated like an idiot, or find that they have no understanding of your site config?

WordPress managed hosting companies are staffed by WP techies who understand how WordPress works.  They will be able to help you solve your problems because they understand your platform.

Plus there webservers are optimised for WordPress and only run WordPress so they will do exactly what it says on the tin – host a WordPress site correctly.

Managed Migration

All of the companies below offer a managed migration service, they will take your site and migrate it into their platform (for a fee) so you know the migration will go smoothly.  This is a sticking point with many people they don’t know how to move hosting so they stick with the shitty old system they are used to.

The Downside

Specialisation costs, these managed hosting companies have created a none standard environment.  Expect to pay 2-3 times the amount you would for a commodity hosting package.  If you have a more advanced hosting package you will find these companies comparable.

Charge per domains is a common model whereas a standard hosting company lets you host as many domains as you like.

The Players

There are three key players that I can see at the moment and they are:

• wpengine.com - my preferred company
• page.ly (no link added I do not recommend this company see below)
• websynthesis.com/ - this is operated by the people who built Genesis theme, and as a result it is super optimised for

My Recommendation

I was pretty blown away by what I saw at wpengine.com, I migrated a client’s site into their environment and immediately it was super fast and optimised for WordPress and their support was great.

I’ve seen a lot of hosting companies and I am very, very reticent to recommend one but wpengine.com comes with my stamp of approval.

When my Bluehost hosting is up for renewal I will probably be moving over to wpengine.com.

If you have been hacked, your site is running slowly and want technical support from people who understand your site go for a WordPress managed hosting solution.

A word about Page.ly – I had nothing but trouble working with their technical support and the domain getting “domain provisioning errors” this may just be my experience, but when someone is joining your premium hosting for the first time I expect it to work first time you dropped the ball Page.ly guys.  I’m more than happy to heare positive page.ly reviews from people in the comments, but I cannot recommend something that fell over (several times) during the migration.

 Image by bluesparrowhawk2008

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

The Rise Of WordPress Managed Hosting

While creating web pages on WordPress, the assortment of capabilities can make you a proud owner of one of the best designed websites on the Internet. However, if you forget to look into some simple basics, you may find yourself on the receiving end. This makes it extremely vital to remember some vital points while designing a web page on the WordPress platform.

Listed here are certain principles to follow before you design an awesome WordPress theme:

1. Validate your code properly

This is one of the basic principles to follow before designing a WordPress theme. You need to validate your work and ensure proper validation of the code too. HTML, CSS is the other areas to pay attention to where proper validation is concerned. This will be definitely appreciated by a knowledgeable surfer who is on the lookout for great and systematic validation of the WordPress themes.

2. Make your design work across browsers

It is always wise to make your WordPress theme work well in any of the popular browsers. You need to keep in mind the important browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera while preparing your WordPress theme. It is a well known fact that compatibility with popular browsers will fetch you an increasing number of visits across various browser platforms.

3. Comment your code regularly

This is a healthy practice in WordPress theme especially if you have made major modifications to your basic WP theme. This is akin to regularly servicing your code, so that you know what changes you have made along the way from the initial designing of the WordPress theme.

4. Be original

It is always wise to come up with something original if you want to attract visitors to your web pages. Internet surfers are more intelligent than you think and can easily identify a basic WordPress theme that is simply modified to the basics. This makes it unimpressive and the net savvy users may simply ignore your website. With thousands of websites built on the WordPress platform, you cannot expect web surfers to visit your page unless there is something eye catching or unique about your theme.

5. Be prepared for a test run

While formatting your content code, make sure it can handle all the default content of the Wordpress theme without any hassles. This can be achieved by a Test Run that will give an accurate feedback of your newly designed WP theme. If you feel that your design looks awkward in the Test Run then it definitely needs to be given a second look.

6. Make content a top priority

A beautifully designed WordPress theme with no quality content is like an empty vessel that makes more noise. Therefore, it is extremely important to put in some valuable content and quality stuff on your WordPress theme, if you want to run a long race. It is pointless having too many images with hardly any content to match it. Give top priority to the content on your WP.

The latest trend is to make your WP theme widget ready to keep up with the stiff competition amongst good websites. Most of the techno savvy web users love to use widgets and are impressed if you provide them with the same. Widgets have become an important means of cross communication and reference on the Internet and need to be given their place.

8. Customize the 404 page

This is one of the most vital principles to be followed since any bad experience by the user will keep him or her away from further ventures to your website. You should make it a point to always customize the 404 page to improve the user experience. Remember, once bitten, twice shy!

9. Provide Support and quick response

It makes sense to follow user response in order to keep upgrading your themes. For this, you need to provide the user with a quick user response and adequate support. If you respond quickly, chances are that the ser will keep coming back to your page and remain there for a longer time. You can do this by constantly administering your web pages and regularly reviewing them.

10. Customize unimportant pages

To have a good WP theme, you need to customize all the easy pages such as main index templates, search result page, attachment template etc. Make a detailed check list and customize all the easy to forget and unimportant pages for a better user experience. All these pages are always required but remain in the background. However, lack of customizing these pages may result in shoddy work and keep visitors away from your website.

11. Like it yourself

Before finalizing your theme, make a trial run and visit it yourself through any browser to check whether you like it or not. Simply put, unless you like what you have designed, chances are that other users may not like it too. This will give you positive feedback and you can make the necessary changes that are required. Following this principle will definitely help you in bringing out the best in you and give way to an increased web viewership to your WordPress themes.

To design a great and outstanding WordPress theme requires you to follow certain guidelines before you come up with the final theme. This will not only bring out the best in your creativity and innovation, but it will also help in attracting the choosy customers.

About the author: Claudia is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on luxury and technology. She recently read an article on nautical theme that attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on facebook themes.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

11 Principles to keep in mind while Designing a Great WordPress Theme

If you are marked as suspect,  you get a suspect site tag, and it will affect your sites rankings.

A common side effect of a WordPress hack is malware being inserted into your site to download viruses or redirect your innocent site visitors to a nefarious site.

Chaka Khan Let Me Rock You

Singer Chaka Kkan’s site was hacked and marked as suspect, when this happens, you will see this additional line added to your search results

Click for full size image

Browsers

Certain browsers like Google chrome and Firefox are keyed into this suspect site system and if you click through to a site marked with malware a huge red screen appears warning you that malware may infect your machine.

Imagine if your clients or site visitors see that?  It only takes seconds to ruin your reputation and that definitely would ruin you.

Check To See If You Are Marked As Suspect

There is a very simple way to see if Google has marked you as suspect, and that is to use the following URL, replacing the red text with your own domain.

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://wpdude.com

What Do You Need To Do

You need to clean the malware from your site and then ask Google to reconsider your site and remove the malware stigma.

If you open a Google webmasters account from google.com/webmasters, under the diagnostics->malware tab is a reconsideration request form.

Hack Recovery Course

I cover this topic in much more depth in module nine of my hack recovery course.  Check out this page for full details WordPress Hack Recovery Course

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

When Google Marks You As Suspect

WordPress editorial calendar; What Does It Do?

The WordPress editorial calendar allows you to setup a schedule of posts to publish or write in the future.  It also allows you to create a schedule of posts that are in outline or draft that you intend to write at a later date.

A new tab is added to the posts menu called calendar, and underneath that you have a wordpress editorial calendar layout of posts, these can be draft, scheduled or published.  You can editr you posts from this screen but I don’t recommend this, rather use editorial calendar as a drafting tool and edit your posts from the normal post editor.

The Problem Is Solves

I often get excellent ideas for a blog post and I immediately drop it into WordPress as a draft post, it will sit there for some time and often it is forgotten about.

Once it drops off the front page of the list of posts, that idea is lost, but with editorial calendar I can set a time when I want to write that post and I’m reminded about it from the visual editor.

I can drag and drop my ideas to different dates if I change my mind, a great post publishing tool all in all.

If you have time sensitive offers or content that needs to go out at a particular time of the year the WordPress editorial calendar will be an excellent tool for you.

Imagine sitting down at the start of the year and planning out all of your content and dropping it into the editorial calendar.

Here’s What It Looks Like

Click for full size image

How I’ve Been Using It

I use it to draft out an idea, and drop it into a publishing slot, you can then spread your ideas out over a period of time.

I brainstorm lots of posts and leave them as drafts and the trouble I have is that they drop off the front page of the post editor and they are lost.

I have not been scheduling my posts through it, but I can see how that would be very useful if I had time sensitive content that I could write now and drop into a calendar in the future (of course you can also use the schedule date function on the normal post editor).

Get A Copy

Editorial calendar is a free plugin available at the plugin repository at this URL

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/editorial-calendar/

Image by 42931449@N07

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Plugin Review: WordPress Editorial Calendar

I’ve been called in by a number of clients recently to build these types of sites and I want to share with you the easiest way to do this.

Multilingual Plugin

There are a couple of techniques to build multilingual sites, but by far the easiest is to use the premium plugin available from WPML.org.

This is a brilliant little plugin that does most of the heavy lifting for you.  It’s a premium plugin at $29.00 for the blog license, this is the cut down simple version or $79.00 for the full monty CMS version.  I’m going to talk about the $79.00 version in this post because of the powerful theme and plugin localization functions.

Install and Config

It’s just like any other plugin to install, you download the file(s) from WPML.org and upload them to your site.  Because it’s a premium theme you need to add a license key into your config so you can obtain updates.

Once installed the next step is to select the desired languages you want to support.  You will have a default base language, for example English, and other supported languages such as French

Language Switcher

Once the plugin is installed you need to give the option to switch languages, and wpml gives you a language switcher widget, this can be installed in your sidebar, in your header or can be coded into your theme.  Check out this site I worked on for an example of what the switcher looks like.

Once your site visitor selects their desired language, WPML is aware of that language setting and displays the corresponding content, see below the types of content you can translate.

Post and Pages

Once WPML is installed you are given the option to then create a translation of all your posts and pages, once it is translated, the appropriate version will be displayed to your site visitors.

There are tools to manage the translation process and ensure all of your content is multilingual.  There are filtering systems so you can not bogged down by the many versions of  your content.

Internationalize Your Theme & Plugins

WPML comes with a brilliant tool called the string translator.  What this does is give you a list of strings it finds in your plugins and themes.  You can then set the appropriate translation

An Example: it’s probably easier to give you an example.  Perhaps your theme comes with a widget to show calendar dates, and the title of that widget is event calendar and that displays in the sidebar in English.  Using the string translation tool you would search for event calendar, this would return a hit from your theme files, you are then able to add translations into this tool so that if italian were selected the string calendario eventi would be returned.

Using the string translation tool you can go through all the plugins and theme items to ensure all content not just your posts and pages are translated

CAVEAT: I have found that certain dynamically generated content is not translated. for example if your theme pulls data back from a database table it sometimes struggles, in this event you can hard code items in your theme or plugins using this simple code

if (ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == ‘en’){

do the english version

}

if(ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == ‘fr’){

do the french version

}

Repeat this process for all languages you support, there are more elegant solutions to coding up themes, if you are a developer you may want to check out http://wpml.org/documentation/support/creating-multilingual-wordpress-themes/ but the solution above is the quick and easy way.

Many theme developers are making their themes WPML ready, check out this list http://wpml.org/documentation/theme-compatibility/

Menus

WPML CMS comes with an in-built feature that lets your code up multilingual menus.  So the idea is build a base menu then duplicate this changing strings and pointing to different pages or custom links depending upon language

Once the language selector is made the appropriate translated menu will be shown.

Sidebars

WPML comes with it’s own set of text widgets so you can control what text aspects are shown for which language, but if you want to set how other widgets display, check out widget logic.  Using this you can set which widgets is displayed depending upon conditional logic.  For example if you wanted a particular widget to only display to german readers set the following in the logic box

ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == ‘de’

Comments

WPML will give you a translated comments box too so your none base language readers can understand how to join the conversation and leave comments for you.

Translation Services

The company behind WPML Icanlocalize has also embed professional translation tools in WPML, using this service you can get your content translated for you at what seems to me a pretty reasonable price.

You set the posts or pages (or strings translations for plugins and themes) into a queue, these are sent off to the translation service and your text is re-written for you and added back into your site.  I’ve not used this function other than to checkout the workflow, but it looks like a great solution to get your copy in a foreign langauge if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself.

Other Bits and Pieces

I’ve found the google translator service to be invaluable, whilst not 100% correct, it has helped me to translate menus and certain plugin strings http://translate.google.com/

Here is a list of the international language codes http://webpageworkshop.co.uk/main/language_codes

The WordPress Dashboard

You can set your dashboard to display in different languages too, so if you have a team of writers using different languages, the back end menus can be translated too.

Wrap up

WPML.org. is my recommended plugin of choice for multilingual sites, check it out.  If you are a bi-lingual country like Canada (En, FR), or live in a region with many people who have english as a second language (Southern US states En, Es) or are competing in a market where many languages are spoken like European Union (bg,cs,da,nl,en,et,fi,fr,de,el,hu,ga,it,lv,lt,mt,pl,pt,ro,sk,sl,es,sv) this may be invaluable to you.

I carry an official contractor status from WPML, so if you need help creating a multilingual site, check out this page for details

Image by mukluk

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Case Study: Creating A Multilingual WordPress Site

I thought a plugin review was due.

What Is Cart66

It’s a plugin that allows you to sell physical or digital products.  It also allows you to create membership sites and protect content.  I’m not using that function, so I’ll just concentrate on the e-commerce side of things.

Lite and Pro

There are two versions of the plugin, the lite free version and the premium version with more functionality.  The premium version starts at $89 for a single license and goes up to $299 for a developers license.

Minimal and Simple Setup

Some of the e-commerce plugins I have used are a little unwieldy, but cart66 is very minimal, I plugged in a couple of details like my paypal information, create some products and I was good to go.

I like low overhead simple plugins like this.

Downsides

It doesn’t have as good a set of product display options, so you need to create post or pages for your products and embed a buy now button.

This is not that bad, the way I have overcome this is to create a course category, and list all of my courses with a category link wpdude.com/category/premium-courses.

Cool Features

What set’s it apart from the other e-commerce plugins in my mind are some of the cool feature they’ve built into the plugin, see below a few that I’m using:

Paypal Express Checkout

Using paypal express checkout you can complete the payment process and stay on your own site.   By adding a couple of API keys I can keep people on my site and not send them away to paypal to complete the checkout.

Amazon S3 Integration

I’ve written about amazon S3 a number of times in the past, but it’s a great and cost effective way to store large files.  The beauty of Cart66 integration is that it allows me to store my large course zip files on Amazon S3 and then serve them up only to people who have bought them.

Mailchimp Integration

I can automatically add people who buy from me into a Mailchimp list.

Digital Product Delivery

Built in to the system is the ability to host and download digital products upon checkout.

Wrap Up

I’m really happy I’ve chosen Cart66 to manage my new store, it a simple yet incredibly effective solution.

Check it out cart66.com (aff link)

Image by polycart

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Plugin Review: Cart66

Content Delivery Network

CDN stands for Content Delivery network and it is a way to speed up the load time of your WordPress site.

The CDN is used to host static content like images, videos or unchanging script files like theme files.  The CDN is highly optimised for these types of files and they are served up to your site visitor very quickly.

Parallelise Content Delivery

WTF does that mean?  It means you off -oad part of your WordPress site to the CDN so that your site is loaded from your normal hosting account and the rest is sent from the CDN.

The two parts of your site are sent in parallel so your site loads much faster, content is sent from two URLs and a browser can stream multiple downloads in parallel meaning rapid delivery of your sites content.

How I Use CDNs

I like to use the plugin W3 Total Cache, this has inbuilt CDN support for a number of common solutions like Amazon S3, MaxCDN, Rack Space cloudfront, the list goes on.

Using this plugin you tell it which CDN you want to use, and your content is exported to that system, then w3 total cache changes the URLs of the appropriate files to serve them up from the CDN instead of yoru local hosting

This is all done automatically but you will see a huge performance boost by adding A CDN

On wpdude.com I export attached files (post images) my theme files and wp-includes directory up to Amazon S3 so this static content can be served very quickly and my host at bluehost only has to serve up dynamic content such as post and pages.

The Point Of It All

Slow sites turn off site visitors, and they are less likely to buy your products or services.

Google are making overtures about site load time and how it affects your rankings for SEO so speedy sites (most probably using CDNs) will get the Google Juice.

Is Your Site Running Slowly?

If you need help speeding up your site give me a shout, I have a fixed price performance tuning service, for a no obligation quote go to my WordPress technical support page.

Image by autohistorian

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

What Is A CDN?

All your hard work is gone, you will have to recode the changes and I bet you have no documentation or memory of how you did it.

How Plugins Auto Update

There is a regular checking job on your WordPress site that compares and current version of a plugin with the recorded latest version in the repository.  If the plugin has been updated a notice is fired off to you.  if you are not careful of the changes, you can accidentally overwrite the plugin.

How To Stop A Plugin Auto Updating

There is a very simple way to stop a plugin auto updating and that is to increment the version number of your plugin to a very high number.

To do this go to plugins -> editor and select the drop down at the top right to select the plugin to be protected, then edit the version number See screen dump

Click for full size image

Happy Hacking

Image by petercastleton

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

How To Stop A WordPress Plugin Auto Updating

Social media is truly changing the way things are done online. Companies are beginning to truly wake up to the idea that it’s not enough anymore to just broadcast a message to an audience, and today, being successful on the web is all about how well you engage people in dynamic dialogue, which is driven by contributing to conversations, participating, and influencing the buzz that is going around for merging trends. So what makes for great share worthy content?

You need to offer value to your content. Anytime that somebody sees something on Twitter and Facebook that they find interesting, funny, or something that enlightened them, then you offer them value to your posts, and there’s a good chance that they’re going to want to like it or re-tweet it. What you will want to be able to do is to create content that breaks news, gives surprises, sheds light on a confusing and complex subject, as well as being able to create amusing content. So what are you doing to make sure that your content that you’re putting on your website is going to benefit your audience, and offer value to them?

Your content must create investment, and we know that content that is user generated is not just a way that we are able to keep copyrighting overheads low. From site additions that are very simple such as guest blog posts, to things that are more technical, such as forums that are created for users, or content that gives advice and opinions from customers, the more that you’re able to make your users feel like they have contributed content in some way, the more they are going to feel invested, and the more likely they’re going to continue to share the conversation.

When people come to your site, you need to know where they came from, and you need to know where they land. Once you know where they are landing and where they came from, you should discover what they are doing next, and which types of content are holding their attention for the longest amount of time. At any given time, you need to be able answer these questions confidently: what does your customer base respond to, and what generates the highest level of engagement on your content?

Staying relevant is extremely important for share worthy content, and clearly, social media monitoring has many applications for your own brand, and by tracking keywords, you can answer many different questions that will help keep your content relevant to your readers. You need to know what is interesting to your target audience, and you need to know the questions and the concerns that are growing around in your industry.

Creating share worthy content is something that will rarely remain static for very long. You’re content may be relevant for weeks, days, hours, and truly could even be minutes before the conversation shifts, or develops, giving you a whole new light on your content strategy. Conversations are dynamic, they are ongoing, and they are very exciting. Your content strategy needs to be the same as this.

This is a guest post by Tommy Bussey The SEO Coach

Image by carlos_maya

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Share Worthy Content

Really Simple Syndication

RSS stands for really simple syndication, and it is a system that allows people to subscribe to your content.  Whenever you add a new blog post an update ise automatically sent out to your subscribers.

WordPress Comes With RSS By Default, if you go to yourdomain.com/feed you can see the RSS feed in action.

Push not Pull

It’s a push technology, it sends out an update of your content whenever you add new stuff automatically to your subscribers.  This means your people get the new stuff without having to visit your site checking for new posts.

This is a great way to ensure your newest posts are always in delivered to your readers.

Who Uses RSS

It tends to be people who are comfortable  and aware of  the technology that use RSS, so if you have a tech savvy audience, they will expect that you have an RSS feed available for them.  Increasingly this means anybody who reads a lot of blogs.

Imagine the scenario, your reader subscribes to a dozen blogs, their email inbox is already full, they discover that RSS removes some of the clutter and they want less stuff in their inbox.  If you don’t have the RSS option, chances are you are going to lose a reader.

How People Use RSS

People setup a feed reader, this can either be a desktop system or an online service like Google reader.  People then click on the RSS icon on a site they like,  this allows them to add that feed into their reader of choice.

People like RSS because it allows them to follow multiple sites from a single aggregated feed reader.  You can read your content when you like without having to visit multiple sites.

Lets face it who is going to sift through the noise to come back to an individual site.  Providing an RSS feed to your readers lets them consume your work at a time that is right for them.

Why Use RSS

I’m not going to say abandon your email list for RSS, it’s not that widely adopted, and it is not as effective a marketing tool as email,  but I would put RSS in your marketing arsenal for the people who like the technology to ensure your content gets to as many people as possible.

Subscribe To My Feed

You can subscribe to my fee from the following URL WPDude RSS Feed

Want More Information?

I’m running a live coaching workshop this week to teach people more about using RSS on their site.  I will be teaching you:

• What is RSS in more depth
• Configuring your RSS feed
• Displaying your feed to your users
• Collecting Stats from your feed
• RSS / Email integration
• RSS plugins
• Q & A

This training is for members of my WordPress coaching program the WP Owners Club and I’m offering new members a 14 day free trial of the club.  So you can check out my coaching style, watch some of the members only pre-recorded workshops and get a feel for the club at no risk to yourself.  If it’s not for you, simply cancel your subscription before 14 days are up and there is nothing to pay.

Image by kiewic

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

What Is RSS

Favicon is a small icon that displays bright on the browser URL bar, bookmark list or navigation tab. Favicon (the short form for favorite icon) in all its certainty will bring a drastic modification in your website’s outlook, if created with thorough research on the interests of the visitors to the website.

Below I list the steps required to create a new favicon.

The basics

Concentrate on simple images and letters while designing the favicon. The favicon is a 16 pixel by 16 pixel icon with .ico extension. Complex graphics get adjusted in such frame with rare difficulty.

The color of the favicon should be in sync with the basic theme of the website. This makes it easier for the visitors to associate the icon with website and will also reflect your passion and sincerity for your
work.

Use of MS paint and web tools

Favicons being simple image icons, one can create the same with Microsoft Paint. The first step in the series is to create a 32 into 32 pixel JPEG image with help of paint. The same can be converted into favicon .ico file with the help of an online service “Favicon from pics”.

Using Photoshop to create favicon

Another alternative for a well designed favicon is Adobe Photoshop. As, the standard photoshop cannot handle .ico, download the Window Icon Photoshop Plugin. Install the plugin and you can create 64 by 64 pixel canvas with this.

Once the designing part of the favicon is over, one needs to resize the image. Click the Image Size menu. It will show various options, including resample image. Click on the same. By clicking on the resample image option, you ensure that image does not become blurring, even as you scale it down.

Save the 16 by 16 image as favicon.ico.

Upload the favicon.ico file

As the favicon.ico file nears completion, it’s time to upload the same to your site. The only thing one needs to ensure is that the favicon.ico files are placed in the root directory, as the index file is located in the root directory.

Change your header

Change header, as you upload favicon.ico file. Header is the code that goes between the head tags. The following line is to be added:

link rel= shortcut icon

href = favicon.ico

type = image/x -icon

Installing a favicon in wordpress

The new favicon.ico file is to be uploaded in current theme’s main folder. An FTP client helps upload the new Favicon.ico file. Another copy can be uploaded in the main directory of your site. In case, an old favicon.ico file exists in your current theme’s main folder, the same is to be deleted using FTP clients. The same can be deleted by using mdel command under FTP.

The final check

Open the browser, pointing to the site if the favicon is appearing or not. It should appear in all circumstances. Open up a few tabs to check the new look of the icon. Need to check the new favicon for the first time. Clear the browser’s cache. If the favicon does not show up, restart the browser.

Neil’s 2 Cents Worth

There is a really good resource at http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Favicon with techie details on adding the header details, you need to add the following line in your header.  I recommend you put the favicon in your theme directory.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/favicon.ico" />

Another good resources is favicon.co.uk, there is a library of premade icons and a generator  where you can upload an existing logo and have it build a favicon for you.

Author BIO

About the author: Rebecca is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. Beside this she is fond of gadgets. Recently an article on New Android Apps attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on Silver Bracelets the latest fashion trend.

Image by orphanjones

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

How to Create a Favicon in WordPress

Once you have fixed the hack, there is the lingering problem of getting Google to update it’s index and remove all reference to viagra, cialis and all the other disco drugs these scum buckets are trying to pedal.

In this post I want to share with you the techniques I have been using to speed up the process of getting the pharma links removed.

First Up

Make sure you have completely cleaned up the site there are three areas to fix, if you miss one the infection comes back and none of these techniques will help, see my previous post.

It Takes Time

First up I want to tell you there is no quick fix it usually takes a couple of weeks t0 clean the entire index up.  Be patient, it will clean up.

Assessing The Problem

A good way to check the extent of your problem and also measure your solution you need to do a search like this in Google

site:yourdomain.com (viagra | cialis)

This will return a list of all infected pages, it gives a metric you can work on to recover your site. Here is a screen dump from a real site I’ve been working on

Get Inside Google’s Head

Google plays it’s cards close to it’s chest they don’t want people to fully understand their listing process so people cannot game the system for their own ends.

The techniques I’m showing here are what I have found to work, I have no evidence this is the best way to get your site re-indexed, if you have any insight please leave a comment.

Google Webmaster Tools

All of the techniques I’m about to describe happen in the Google webmasters tools system.

Submit A SiteMap

A sitemap is an xml file containing a list of post and pages in your site, if you submit a sitemap it appears that your site is re-indexed more quickly.

I like this plugin to automatically generate the sitemap every time you add a new post or page http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

If you go into Google webmasters you can submit a sitemap for your site and get Google to re-index your site

If you already have a sitemap you can re-submit it and hopefully get the same result.

Fetch As Googlebot

Another useful tool  I have found is the fetch as googlebot feature.  If you use this to retrieve your hacked pages, as Google sees them, great to check the hack is gone, but also great to re-submit the page.  Once the post or page is retrieved, there is an option to submit the

I have been going through all the hacked pages from a pharma hack attack fetching them as Google bot and re-submitting,

Removal Tool

You can get google to removed cached copies of a page from the index with this technique.  Go to the following URL

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

Type in teh post or page with hacked details, Google sees the page is still live and asks you to type in a word that is on the cached page but not on the actual page.  I typed in viagra on my test and the pages are submitted for review.

Wrap Up

A nasty hack with a very slow recovery process, if you have any other techniques for speeding up re-indexing please let me know.

Need More Help Fixing Your Hacked Site?

I’ve create a WordPress Hack Recovery Course

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Refreshing The Google Index After Pharma Hack

Before you upgrade to WordPress 3.3 watch this video.  The update has a lot of changes and I’m seeing a lot of plugins crashing my clients WordPress sites.

I’ve pulled this over from my premium members only site the WP Owners Club for you to watch before you upgrade to WordPress 3.3 this is the methodology I recommend you use whenever you upgrade WordPress, this will save you a lot of heartache and expensive technical support if things go wrong.

Overview

In this module I will take you through the maintenance tasks required to keep a WordPress site up to date.

Video

[flowplayer src='https://s3.amazonaws.com/WP_Owners_Club/module_six_maintenance/wpocmodule6maintenance.mp4' width=640 height=480]

Downloads

Download the presentation slides

Download a text transcript (coming soon)

Further Reading

The recording, text transcripts and downloads will be made available soon after the session on this page

WordPress file backup - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-backup/

WordPress Db Backup - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

Backup Buddy - http://pluginbuddy.com/purchase/backupbuddy/

VaultPress – vaultpress.com

Image by dasqfamily

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Before You Upgrade To WordPress 3.3

In this post I want to talk about the business of WP, and where money is being made supporting and developing WordPress for the million of sites built upon open source software.

There is A Huge User Base

It was estimated that 13% of the internet was powered by WordPress sites, a huge statistic which I have no way of verifying,  I did some digging and found this page http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ which suggests there are 69 million plus WordPress sites.

This number is growing by the day, there is a huge user base for you to work with.  The business of WP is an evergrowing business. at least for the next few years as far as I can see.

There is a huge user base for developers designers, consultants and trainers to help people build their websites.

The business of WP is a growing business.

80/20 Rule Applies

WordPress is great, about 80% of the knowledge needed to build a WordPress site is not very technical, that is one of the beauties of the system, if you can use a wordprocesor you can publish on the web.

The final 20% is where the money is, the difficult development, the graphical design, the hosting, the hack recovery, the premium themes and plugins.  This is where the everyday site owner begins to struggle and the professionals are called in.

Show Me The Money

The rest of this post is all about where there are business opportunities in the WordPress world can be found.

The Biggie WordPress.com

Probably at the top of the heap is the hosted version of WordPress at wordpress.com.

This is still free for most of functionality of a WordPress site, they use the freemium model, you can have an excellent basic service for nothing, but if you want the bells ans whistles you need to buy the add-ons.  Things like premium themes, your own domain hosting and more space are all addons.

This is where the money is made in free software.

Hosting

The business of hosting WordPress sites is a huge business.  Lets toss together an estimate, if there are 30 million self hosted sites (the other 30 million live at wordpress.com) they all need hosting services. lets say an average hosting fee is $100 per year, there are cheaper and more expensive options, so I think $100 is about average, that conservatively gives us a market of $3,000,000,000.

That’s not small beer that is a huge industry, my work brings me into contact with about a dozen big players, one of those players runs Super Bowl ads, normally the domain of huge brands.

Theme Design

The design of custom themes is another area where people can make real money.

Again I think the 80/20 rule comes into play here, I think 80% of people will be happy with free or premium themes.  If they use a framework theme like Headway of Thesis many people can bring together a custom look.

The final 20% without the technical or design skills turn to a designer to bring them a custom look and feel.

Custom theme development is not cheap, expect to pay $2-5K for your bespoke look and feel.  This is still great value, compare that with a static HTML ground up build of a website.

WordPress has turned the web development scene on it’s head, and made development quick and costs less for the end user.

Web Development

This is the market I live in, technical support of WordPress sites, fixing problems and coding up solutions to peoples problems.

This is a very lucrative market sector, this is definitely not an area the normal site owners wants to dabble in.

If you have the technical skill to fix php errors, remove malware from hacked sites, performance tune a site there is a big opportunity.

Premium Themes

We are moving from services to products now, and the premium theme is a great example of a product

Write once and sell many times.  Setup a great customer service experience and you have a brilliant product line you can sell.

This is a very scalable business model.

Premium Plugins

For some reason plugins never caught up with their premium theme cousins for some time.

The ones that have come out of this are great.  Things like backup buddy, WishList Member, Scribe SEO are amongst some of the great premium plugins I have worked with.

If you can code up and support a great plugin that fixes a real problem you can make money, but expect grumbling, the plugin scene has traditionally been open source and free.

The Licensing Issue

The sticky problem anyone building premium offerings be it themes or plugin is the GPL license WordPress works under.  Anyone can take your premium work and fork it to a new project.

I don’t want to get into the argument, but Thesis’s  head butt with Automattic and the Jigoshop/WooComerce fork are two examples of the GPL license causing problems with the development of premium plugins and themes.

This is probably an area I will cover in-depth later, but be aware of the license if you are building a business around WordPress.

Training

The provision of training to the end user WordPress community is another big business opportunity

This can take the form of traditional print books, the respected WordPress for Dummies for example.  It can be info products like e-books or online membership communities.

Coaches and consultants selling their time to educate and solve problems comes under this heading too.

There is also the old classroom based training that still lives, but is a dying model in my opinion (feel free to discuss this in the comments I’m open to debate on this subject).

Misc. Services

There are other great services out there to help manage your site too, I’m thinking of things like VaultPress.com the backup and security service, Akismet etc etc.

This additional service sector is one I see booming, I’m thinking performance management for critical systems, security monitoring, backup and recovery, analytics, e-commerce, I’m sure many are already in development.

Wrap Up

The business of WP is huge, there are opportunities for many people.

I’m facinated by the business of WP, I work in it everydat and I would love to help people build their WordPress related businesses, please leave a comment if you would like to see more posts about building business around open sources tools.

Image by littledebbie11

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

The Business Of WP

This of course would never happen to a professional like me ehemmmm, I would not for example import the entire contents of my premium members only site the WP Owners Club  into my public site here at wpdude.com (yes I really did that, note to self close all the damn browser windows you idiot).

The Ooops Moment

I was having my regular morning check in with my RSS feeds to read all the interesting stuff people are publishing only to see about a dozen entries from wpdude.com which should not be there.

I had deleted the posts as soon as I noticed they were on the wrong blog, but feedburner had them and was airing my dirty laundry in public.

How To Get Your Posts Out Of Feedburner

I see this all the time, people publish test posts, or things they probably didn’t want the world to see.  Once it’s in the feed and cached by feedburner even if you delete the post it is still there for the world to see.

Luckily there is a solution.

Resyncing Your Feed

If you login to your feedburner account and go to Troubleshootize, there is a big old resync button towards the bottom of the page.

Click on the button and Feedburner will go off and refresh your RSS feed.

Click for full size image

Other Things You Can Do

A couple of other things you may want to think about.  If you have a cache plugin, disable this before doing the refresh just in case RSS is cached.

You can force WordPress to republish the RSS feed by going to settings-> reading and changing Syndication feeds show the most recent  to a different number.

Twiddling Fingers

As I write this my posts are still in the feed, ti takes a little time to refresh them, don’t panic they will go.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Refreshing Your Feedburner Feed

The problem – site visitors could not see his videos.

Flash Doesn’t Work On iThings

Apple and Adobe agreed to have a battle, said Apple to Adobe you broke my brand new rattle (excerpt from Apple through the looking glass).

Apple and Adobe had a big falling out recently when Abode created a development process where applications could be run in flash on iThings.  The problem is, they could circumvent the Apple app store with this process.

Apple protected their platorm/spat the dummy to stop uncontrolled |un monetised apps (delete as applicable) and as a result removed support for flash from their mobile devices. Here is what Apple have to say http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/.

A lot of WordPress video plugins which use flash will not show video on iThings.

How Much Traffic Is Mobile?

You may be thinking meh! I don’t get much traffic from mobile devices, but I think you will find you do, a quick check of my stats in Google Analytics shows that 3% of my traffic is from mobile devices.  Not a huge amount, but significant enough to take notice.  Some of my clients have mobile traffic at 10-15% now that is worth taking note of.

This will be growing at an alarming rate over the next few years so it is imperative that you make your site mobile ready.

Many Video Plugins Use Flash

Many of the popular video plugins like WordTube or any of the flowplayer plugins use flash to show the videos on your WordPress site.  They take the native format wrap it in a video player then stream that content in flash.

Try to view that on an Apple product and you will get an error.

The Solution

You need to stream your video in a format iThings play nicely with, this could be a native foramt like mp4 or from a platform the Apple likes.

Here are some of the ways you can get around this

YouTube – embed your videos directly from YouTube rather than using a flash player.  Appel devices recognise YouTube content and open it in the YouTube app that comes with the device.

Stream in a format acceptable – You could encode and stream your videos with Apple’s Quicktime format http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/embed-quicktime/ but this may cause you issues on other browsers without the correct plugin

Find An HTML Video Plugin – A quick search on the plugin repository and you will find plugins like this one http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html5-and-flash-video-player/ (caveat I’ve not used this one before, don’t give me grief if it does not work).

HTML5 For The Rescue

The new HTML5 standard has video streaming built in, thsi will solve our problems eventually. many plugin developers are scrambling to to an html5 re-write, but this doesn’t help us right now.

This will be the way forward but the plugins are not here yet.

What I Did For My Client

We swapped out the videos to embed YouTube.  I installed and configured the Jetpack plugin and we used the YouTube embed short codes.

He was already using YouTube to host his videos and JW Player to play them, so the chaneg was not that huge just a little tedious to swap over all the code.

Wrap Up

Even the most ardent Apple Fan Bois cannot think banning flash is acceptable, it’s a format generally accepted across the net, but when you buy inot a closed eco-system like Apple’s Apps they get to call the shots.

People love their iThings (I’m and iPhone fan) so you are swimming against hte current if you try to make them match your site choices, my suggestion adapt and make your site mobile ready.

A Mobile Ready WordPress Site

I’ll be talking more about making your site mobile ready in the very near future, it’s a huge thing as more and more people consume internet content, why not join my mailing list to keep up to date with my new posts.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Case Study: Flash Video and iThings