Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

How to Start Your Own Blog

11
Aug
2011

{205} Blogging again A blog can be a great way to delve into social media or it can be a the centerpiece to an established social media campaign. It is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with customers, showcase your expertise, increase visits to your site, and create a friendly persona for your company.  You can add photos, how-to videos, whatever! The opportunities are endless. Plus blogs are easy to update, as it’s not abnormal for blogs to have multiple contributors posting throughout the week. More so than anything, blogs are interactive, allowing you to solicit feedback from customers and engage them in conversation. Great, right?! But now you’re probably wondering where to start.

First thing’s first. You need to select hosting, a domain name, and a blogging software platform. Our platform of choice is  WordPress, but there are many options out there that might suit your needs. What you use to create your blog isn’t necessarily the important part. Rather, you should make always make sure you self-host your blog. What does this mean? It means paying an annual fee to a service for hosting your blog. By doing this, you control your domain and the content, plus get the benefit of the traffic to your site.

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Blogging: To Get the Most, Self-Host

09
Feb
2011

BloggingWith so many well-designed free and easy blog hosting services out there (Blogger (BlogSpot), TypePad, etc.), it can be easy to be lured into using a network-hosted site instead of self-hosting your own. But, especially if you are promoting your business, the benefits of a self-hosted blog are numerous and important.

Using a self-hosted blog versus one that is network-hosted is roughly analogous to owning versus renting a house. When everything is going smoothly it doesn’t much matter if you rent or own, but if something goes wrong or you want to make a change, being a homeowner allows you much greater flexibility and security. Specific to blogs, a network host has the ability to censor your content and may shut down your site and delete its contents without warning if they see fit. More likely, if a network host experiences technical problems or terminates their service, your content may be lost and unable to be restored. You are also always at the mercy of your network’s policies and terms of conditions. Even if you find them agreeable now, they may change in the future and content you stored on their site may be very difficult or impossible to retrieve and move elsewhere. A self-hosted blog allows you to moderate your own content indefinitely and back-up your entries much more reliably.

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WordPress Widgets

21
Oct
2008
Screen Shot SnapShots

As promised, I recently tested out a couple new (to me) WordPress Widgets and the results are in – I really love these two: Snap Shots and WP Cumulus Tag Cloud. Snap Shots is set up fairly straight forward, but take the instructions literally and it will be more of a piece of cake for you than it was me. Apparently the interface doesn’t have controls through WordPress, with the exception of “activation.” Instead, the controls are on the Snap Shot website and “feed” to your WP site based on the key code. Once configured, if properly coded in your page, links to other pages will pop up a little window, giving a tiny preview of the linked page. Pretty nifty and makes your own page seem a little less static. A guest can actually move the Snap Shot page wherever they like on the page while viewing.

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My Fav WordPress Plugins

10
Oct
2008

Over the last couple months, I’ve become passionate about WordPress. I can thank Doug Wray, because having attended a class of his on the subject, he simplified a couple things that were vexing me, plus revealed how fun it was to build both blogs and websites using this great tool. Ever since, I’ve been singing the praises of WP, making some client sites and blogs, plus trying to help some adventurous people along the way. I’ve learned a couple key things I feel are worthy pieces to the puzzle; hopefully they will help lessen your learning curve.

First, This Important Message
This is just a nugget that helps me so I don’t blow up my own site: have a backup or test site in which you deploy and fiddle with things like plugins and changes to the css and php files. I use mine before using anything on my “real sites” and it’s saved me a lot of aggravation and embarrassment. I tweak it to death or I kick it to the curb, and my visitors are never the wiser because it all happened on a “pseudo” site.

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