Wordpress Tweaks

1. Delete (”trash!”) the first post “Hello World” which also takes care of the first comment.
2. Either trash the default about page or add something to replace the default text.
3. Change permalinks – under the settings menu. – be aware of any requirements that some plugins or datafeeds might have for permalink structure.
4. Upload and activate your chosen wordpress theme under the appearance menu.
5. Start installing some of these recommended wordpress plugins.
6. Look at the privacy menu under “settings”. Decide whether you want to hide your site from search engines until it is ready.
7. Delete the default links from the links section.
8. Set-up Askimet to ensure you will get less spam.
9. Under settings / writing, increase the size of the post box to 15 or more, and oh, while your there add these extra ping services under Update Services :

• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://ping.myblog.jp
• http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
• http://bblog.com/ping.php

Hope this helps. I will try and add to the post as I go through the latest site I am working on.

Obligatory wordpress plugins post

Here are the wordpress plugins I use most. Let me know which plugins you use, what am I missing out on ? !

HeadSpace 2 – Have also used All In One SEO and Platinum SEO and it took me a while to work out which was best but in the HeadSpace inched it.

Robots Meta – Easily instruct search engines which parts of your site to nofollow / noindex.

SEO slugs – Optimises your URL slugs (e.g. http://yoursite.co.uk/your-slug-is-this-bit ) and removes words which are ignored by search engines such as is.

Wordpress CSV datafeed import plugin – Looked around for ages for a good one of these. Costs £25 but well worth it if you want to populate an affiliate site with lots of content fast. Easy to use with demos and tutorials and easy to customise posts but what I like best is you can schedule posts. Also works for XML or RSS.

Broken link checker – Helps my users and is good for SEO by identifying broken links within my sites. From the dashboard you can unlink or edit the link to something that will work.

Easy Contact – Quite many affiliate websites don’t have a contact form. One of my sites was recently quoted in The Times thanks to having a contact form. This plugin uses a short code to place the contact form and can be configured to block spam and to go any email address you want.

XML sitemaps – Automatically builds a search engine friendly sitemap and updates it when content is added.

Sunpress – Easily add hotel / apartment content to travel websites (beach destinations only), the plugin also comes with a search box widget which uses xml to display search results on your site.

Feed Reading Blogroll - That’s what is powering the blogroll on your right. I liked the blogger blogroll because it ranks the blogs in your blogosphere by most recent post. This plugin can do that and a whole lot else.

Shockingly simple favicon – I love favicons. This plugin is simple – upload the favicon then tell it where it’s located and your favicon will be displayed.

Subscribe to comments – Helps build a discussion by keeping people informed of new comments.

Pretty link – The best link masking plugin I have found. Includes tracking and option to nofollow link.

Askimet – Stops spam. Fast. Love the germs you hate. That sort of thing. Since I have quite a few sites one setting I configure is to automatically discard spam after XX days.

WP Super cache – Speeds up the site loading.

YARPP - Yet another related posts plugin. This one is very good. Configurable and impressive matching of related posts. See below ?!

RSS footer – To try and stop the dreaded scrapers, lets you add a link & anchor text of your choice to the output of the RSS.

Redirection – Enables you to create 301 redirects for pages / posts when the URL has changed. Also useful is someone accidentally publishes your URL with a slight mistake in the URL slug and you can’t get them to change it. Comes with 404 tracking so you can see problems and take action.

Discount on StudioPress Themes

A lot of affiliates are keen on using wordpress for making their websites – it’s set up very nicely for SEO, your content gets indexed fast and thoroughly and the platform is constantly moving forward with upgrades to the core software as well as endless customisations in the form of wordpress plugins and wordpress themes. A lot of affiliates that use wordpress also are big fans of studiopress themes – they look very professional and again, thanks to some work by Joost de Valk who recently joined the studiopress team, they have been optimised for SEO.

This is really a post to let you know about an opportunity to do two things at once – 1.) support the fight against breast cancer by giving a donation to wordpress designer, Brian Gardner’s fund raising effort in which he is walking 60 miles. and 2.) Get a studiopress theme or thirteen!. ($50 donation = 1 theme of your choice, $150 gets you all of them and both offers include forum support).

Win a wordpress theme for red nose day

Wordpress Plugin Search fixed

One of the best things about Wordpress 2.7 is the way you can easily install plugins from the dashboard without having to download, unzip, extract to the directory etc.
It’s now so easy to add new wordpress plugins I bet people are having much more plugins than before.

One slight annoyance though was that searching for plugins was not set up in an optimal way, the results that came back were often far from what I wanted even if I was looking for a plugin by a specific name. Well the good news is that (the search function) is now much improved.