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Has Blogging Become A Chore to You?

February 4, 2012 by 50 Comments

You blog often and spend time writing quality articles, but feel you are not getting traffic or your blogging seems all for nothing? Has blogging become a chore?

There could be several reasons why you might feed blogging is a tedious chore:

  • Creating a post takes too much time
  • Lack of motivation
  • Discouraged because you do not have any blog comments or socal interactions.
  • You have no passion for the topics you chose for your website’s focus.

Each of these are excuses! If you want to succeed as a blogger, you need to keep writing! It might take some time, and engaging people, but the reward is far more worth it.

If it has, then perhaps you need to look at your blog’s focus and plan. Much like most businesses have some type of plan in place, a blog should too. If you are wanting to build a reputable site that has at least decent traffic, you need a blog plan in place.

So, back to the excuses. What can you do to stop these excuses? Well, it might take going back to the basics with your blog’s plan.

Your blog plan should include at least these basics:

  • The focus of your site. This includes the topics you will write about, any products or services.
  • The design and structure of your website. This is what you will use for your site’s functioning in relation to design and development. This might mean if you choose to solely have a blog on WordPress or a total static site, or perhaps choose another content management system.
  • How you will reach your audience. You will want to think about whether you want to connect your website to social network sites, do social bookmarking, or even ad marketing.

Your first blog plan for your site can include your plans for monetization, in the case you will solely depend on advertisements, paid posts, and other revenue making tools. However, it should not be put in place from the beginning. Making money on your blog from the first day should not be your goal. You can always make money with traffic, but plastering your site with ads off the bat is a big clue that your focus is not on providing unique and quality content.

It should be reaching out and engaging with people. With integrating your site to post to social network sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as submitting those articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, you are literally putting out your content to the masses. If you already talk to people online, then they may be open to reading your blog posts.

Now, if you do not have any connections… come on… starting engaging. Unless you spam someone or come off as rude, connecting with people is not hard. Be prepared to listen. As a blogger and person in general, you can learn a lot, and even find topics to fuel your blog.

So, stop thinking of blogging as a chore! Get writing, engage, and have fun!

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With:

How To Display Two Columns For Categories In WordPress

February 2, 2012 by 16 Comments

Displaying two columns for categories in your WordPress is not too hard. Just takes a little php, html, and css. You can put this in your posts, pages, or sidebar.

We are taking the usual category code for WordPress.


<?php wp_list_categories(); ?>

and replacing it with the following code. This php splits up each category and into columns, much like splitting odds and evens. This code would go in your template where you want it displayed.


<?php
$cats = explode("<br />",wp_list_categories('title_li=&echo=0&depth=1&style=none'));
$cat_n = count($cats) - 1;
for ($i=0;$i< $cat_n;$i++):
if ($i<$cat_n/2):
$cat_left = $cat_left.'<li>'.$cats[$i].'';
elseif ($i>=$cat_n/2):
$cat_right = $cat_right.'<li>'.$cats[$i].'</li>';
endif;
endfor;
?>

After you have put the above code you are ready to add your HTML right after it. Remember you need to make sure to remember your css class definition, because you will be adding it to your theme’s stylesheet. Remember you can use your own definitions, but remember to make sure you are not already using them for another part of your theme.


<ul class="alignleft">
<?php echo $cat_left;?>
</ul>
<ul class="alignright">
<?php echo $cat_right;?>
</ul>

Now that you have the php and html done, you need to add your css. In the case of this tutorial, I have used alignleft and alignright for the classes.


.alignleft {
float: left;
}
.alignright {
float: right;
}

Of course, if you want to play with the css and do other things, by all means go ahead.

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: ,

7 Tips To Being A Better WordPress Web Designer For Your Client

February 2, 2012 by 17 Comments

I having been designing exclusively for WordPress for 5 years, before that, I designed both in WordPress, static sites, and with other content management systems. I am not the best in visual efforts, but I like to try to work with my clients and make sure they have a more than satisfactory product that they can use.

The problem is that I keep hearing from clients about past encounters with other WordPress designers and developers who will not go that extra step to make sure their client can efficiently use their website. In fact, they are turning to premium themes because they cannot find someone to make their project idea a reality.

Remember, WordPress is no longer a blog platform. It is a full fledged content management system that with coding and imagination, a site can become extraordinary!

Here are a few tips when stepping into designing WordPress themes:

  1. Know the code. If you are not familiar with HTML or PHP, you should not be designing as frankly, it makes other designer’s job a pain when they have to step in a correct your errors.
  2. Know WordPress. This goes for the coding, and how to use it.
  3. Design with the client’s experience in mind. Be prepared to offer them ways to use their WordPress in the easiest and more understandable way. You may need to walk them through it. Not all of your clients will be as WordPress savvy – some may not be as Internet savvy.
  4. Design logically. If you are designing for someone else and they have some coding experience, they might be a bit ticked off if your code looks terrible or you took the roundabout way to get to a solution. Streamline it. There will always be a better way to code a site. (Also, make hidden notations in the theme files case your client is familiar enough to make edits, but might not know where exactly to make them.)
  5. Be knowledgeable on site tools that will enhance the website. Whether it be an actual design or for search engine optimization, it is important to keep up-to-date on this type of news.
  6. If you do not know something, then ask around or do some research. The WordPress community is really friendly. You can either use the WordPress support forums or go to various WordPress related sites to find out.
  7. Whether it be WordPress, another CMS or static HTML, check your site in most browsers before handing it off to the client. Not everyone browses the same way as you.

Even if you are not designing for a client, you can take a lot of these suggestions with you.

What other tips can you suggest?

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With:

The Best Permalink Structure To Use In WordPress

January 26, 2012 by 60 Comments

I wrote Mastering Pretty Permalinks in WordPress with the intention to introduce the concept of the best permalink structure for WordPress powered websites. This was a call to try to encourage people to organize their website, but beware of how the permalink structure might be overrode if you have a file folder name the same as a post and you are using the post name permalink structure.

It is obvious that I am going to say that the post name (formerly known as pretty permalink) structure or the /%postname%/ option in your WordPress Permalink General settings is the best structure.

However, I am going to go a step further. Search Engine Optimization is fun to play with in regards to your domain’s URL structure. It can be a way to optimize what your article is, other than just organization.

What we know in basic WordPress use for structure purposes are as the following:

Permalink Structure for Posts

We can control how our permalink structure can look whether by post ID, month and date and more. We can even designate tags and categories to these posts and call them to pages using custom WordPress queries. For example you can call a category and show only tags and a certain number of many posts.

The reason why the post name structure (/%postname%/) works best for a post is because it shows the post title closest to the domain, showing how important it is to the site. The structure within the web page itself will also emphasize this using heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, and so on.) Now, if you listed by category (and I have seen people recommend that), depending on how your category is labeled, you are telling the search engine that the category is far more important to crawl than the actual title of the post.

WordPress naturally has the base “category” as a name and you can group posts under those categories. It is okay to display your posts on your site in a category. Most people believe including categories makes your posts duplicate content. NO! It is only if you are posting the same thing again on your site or the same exact thing on another site (like if you do guest blogging.) The search engines are not dumb.

Now, here is the fun part as well as the tricky part. What if you do use the category structure? How can you make it clever enough to draw more attention to your title. WPCandy actually exercises this clever way by naming the category’s slug an action. Yes, just the slug as you can designate a different name pointing to a different slug.

Just some examples:

News is reports
Opinion is thinks
Tutorials is teaches

Pretty cool, huh? As a note, the posts do group under the general “category/category-name”.

In this, we are telling (using the WPCandy example) that WPCandy.com reports such and such title, giving it an actual sentence. And you know, it nearly makes this former English major cry happy tears. (Oh I am such a geek!) ;)

Permalink Structure for Pages

Pages are kind of fun and since WordPress 3.0′s menu addition, your control over pages has increased with several options. You can use the older hierarchy structure with parent and child pages. Remember, pages in WordPress are normally known for being used for static content.

The older hierarchy structure adds the slug of the parent page into the URL structure. SO, if you have like a parent page and then three deep into children and grandchildren, your URL structure might get a bit long. That might not be a good idea for search engine optimizing as it takes away the importance of that page.

However, the hierarchy structure is not the only way. You can use the WordPress menu option in your WordPress administration (Under Appearance>Menus) to organize your website and keep your URL structure for your pages simple. You can publish a page without using the hierarchy and use the WordPress 3.0 menu to organize your website without adding more length to your page’s URL structure.

Now, both methods can be used and Google will pick up and group areas of your site that have been optimized as a group. For example, if you have defined that your main sections of your website are your ‘About’, ‘Contact’, and maybe… as an example say ‘Resources’, like I have here in Blondish.net, Google will pick up that structure if you do have a set up pages that are relevant to that main area.

As a note, We can also apply these techniques to custom posts types since WordPress 3.0.

In Summary

Your permalink structure is both a way to organize and help search engines, but can also be great in helping your visitors navigate your website. The best permalink structure to use in WordPress is one that is the most coherent for search engines to deliver the best results to potential visitors. Play around with your site and see what is best for you.

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: , ,

Display Posts From A Category In WordPress

January 25, 2012 by 10 Comments

Recently I had a run in with coding with a client who had a developer put together a sloppy custom WordPress query in place of a proper loop. In fact, it was amazing because it was put in replace of code on a great premium theme by StudioPress. By the way, no it was not StudioPress who did it, so let me get that out of the way. They are good at what they do. :)

Anyhow, the custom query was three different pieces of code: a section to show to first 5 most recent posts, and then two columns underneath to show two different categories that the site owner wanted to feature. The was done using a similar solution to the one At Weblog Tools Collection called Define Your Own WordPress WP-Query.

The problem was that this solution was not providing a good pagination. The “Next” and “Previous” did not work, and even if I wanted to use my favorite WP-PageNavi plugin, then I was pretty much – “sorry, out of luck.” This does not work well as a replacement for the regular loop, especially for what it was being used as.

So, I set out to put together a better solution. In the end, I displayed the most recent posts by normal Loop means. For the categories, I used the following:


<?php $recent = new WP_Query(); ?>
<?php $recent->query('cat=1&showposts=3'); ?>
<?php while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post(); ?>
<h3><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></h3>
<div class="attachment-post-thumbnail">
<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>
</div><?php the_content_limit(130, ""); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

We are still using a custom WP_Query, but only using it for the categories. You can replace the 1 after cat=1 to whatever category you want to display, and you can change the number of posts displayed by changing the number in showposts=3.

You can customize the code further with CSS and adding other attributes.

I left some styling to include the thumbnail, title, and a short excerpt, even using the_content. However, you can change it to the_excerpt if you have set your excerpts through your functions.php or excerpt plugin. This code goes in your WordPress theme template where you want it, however I use this normally for the theme’s template file that is for the front page of the website. This is good for sites that are more magazine-like.

Sound easy?

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: ,

WordPress Pages Versus Posts, Which to Choose

January 21, 2012 by 57 Comments

So you have content, but you are not sure you want to go with pages or posts. Well, it really is not that difficult. A lot of people put together a site completely in posts without few pages. Or they make a page and enable comments, depending if their theme has that coded into the page template.

Even you can customize individual pages, since WordPress 3.0, you can customize individual posts. You also have the ability to adjust your menu from your WordPress admin panel to whatever you like if you have the wp_nav_menu php call into the theme itself.

Posts are normally considered an area of your website that will be updated frequently, while pages are more considered to be static. The difference- while both pages and posts are included in a sitemap (if you have a sitemap plugin installed… and you should), only posts are included in your RSS feeds (RSS- really simple syndication.) With the RSS, you can feed it into social network aggregation tools that will publish your posts to your social network handles.

However, you have to ask yourself – do you want comments on a page you will rarely update? What type of content are you putting up and how much of it? Remember for those internet marketers who like to use landing pages, enabling comments on a squeeze page might not be ideal.

If you like to put up mass quantities of items, for example, pixel images where you have a lot of images, you may want to use a page. Or you could release a few at a time in posts.

This is really something you have to decide on how you want to organize your site. If you make a page, you will have to announce the page somehow, especially if you want to drive attention to it.

Navigation is a big part to most sites. It is often the source of a visitor’s problem if your site is confusing to go from one area to the next, and back again with ease. Both posts and pages allow you to implement elements like breadcrumb navigation (a navigation you put at the top that tells you the path from that page you are on, and gives you a way to go back to the home page), links for next and previous post, navigation with numeral navigation (instead of older or newer post links), WP 3.0+ navigation menus, subpage navigation (you can have whole sections as a parent page and then children pages related to that section) and more.

It boils down how you want to organize your site. In fact, your sites organization has pull on your SEO. If search engines see that you have sections of your site that are grouped, they will list those under you
I usually put posts for what I am going to talk about and pages for things I may not update a lot.

Here is a good example of what I was talking about:

How have you organized your site by using pages and posts in WordPress?

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: , , , ,

How to Display A User Welcome Message In WordPress

January 18, 2012 by 41 Comments

Whether you just like to put up a personal greeting or have a site that has quite a few users, something a welcome message is nice. I have seen a few people put this together and have a centralized paged where users can log in, read the personal message, and then go on their merry way using the website.

The code is really simple. This code calls the current user. If you want to only let people like contributors or other roles see the message, you have to adjust the level_0 to any of the levels corresponding with the roles. (Example: administrator is 10).

Please note that you need to be careful on what you greet your visitors. If your normal readers expect you to be goofy, or a little on the strange side, that is fine. However, I have seen a couple sites that have creeped me out with some weird greetings.


< ?php global $user_ID; if( $user_ID ) : ?>
< ?php if( current_user_can('level_0') ) : ?>

Welcome < ?php global $current_user; get_currentuserinfo(); echo ($current_user->user_login); ?>
< ?php else : ?>
< ?php endif; ?>
< ?php endif; ?>

You can edit the little welcome message to whatever you like.

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: , ,

WordPress Plugin Review: Theme My Profile

January 18, 2012 by 17 Comments

In fact, I have been exercising this on a few sites for clients that wanted their users to not even be lead to the WordPress backend, even to edit their user profile. Theme My Profile works well with the plugin Theme My Profile, and were both created by Jeff Farthing. Of course, you can use this plugin by itself as mentioned on Jeff’s page for the Theme My Profile plugin.

This plugin is a very nifty tool and eventually I will have it so profiles will be viewable too. Everything just takes time. The plugin works great and I have no found any bugs with it. You can even specify who has access to this feature and who does not.

My only issue is that I think there could be more added to this plugin to give the “theme my profile” that extra oomph. While it does let the user have a more uniformed experience with changing their profile, this plugin could also use options like adding social profiles, and the addition to work with a custom author page and author box for posts. (Please note that you can add extra social profiles through adding a few actions to your functions.php file, but I think it would be nice if bundled in this plugin.) I do not know what you would think, but for me, this would just be very enticing if these options were added.

Have you used this plugin? What are your thoughts?

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