05/31/10 by admin | Recent Posts, Wordpress | No Comments »
I decided to list the 6 main reasons why I feel WordPress is the perfect platform for small business beginners. Even if you have some knowledge of web design, as a small business owner you’ll find many other benefits such as how fast you can be up and running with little to no real learning curve, how affordable it is and how it can be expanded easily as your business grows.
6 Reasons Why WordPress is Perfect for Small Business Beginners….
#1 WordPress is Easy on the Budget – Besides the fact that the wordpress platform itself is 100% free, you’ll find that most of the extensions and themes are also free. So the only thing you are really paying for is your hosting and domain name.
#2 WordPress is Easy to Install and Set-up – Within minutes you can have your site set up and ready to go. If your hosting includes “Fantastico”, the installation can all be done automatically with no further knowledge of databases or installation process required on your part.
#3 WordPress is Easy to Customize – Do a quick search for “wordpress themes” and find one that suits your needs and tastes. Then simply install the theme of your choice within seconds . You can further customize it using widgets and plugins if you choose.
#4 WordPress is Easy to Expand – As your business grows and changes, so will your website needs. WordPress is scalable and can easily grow with your business. You may want to grow your own community or start selling your own products. Both (and others) are easily done through plugins.
#5 WordPress is Easy to Maintain – As time goes on, you’ll need to backup and clean-up. It’s so easy with wordpress! There are plugins that will allow you to automatically backup your database (a very important task) right from your admin area. And removing redundant plugins, links or content are a matter of clicking a button. No messy code to muddle through.
#6 WordPress is Easy to Add Content - content can be added in minutes from any computer with internet access, even your phone. It uses a WYSIWYG editor so you can write, edit and create beautiful content as if you were using Microsoft Word. Add images, audio files and videos directly into your posts and pages and create even more appealing content for your readers.
What do you think? Can you think up more reasons? Leave me a comment.
~Toresa
ps. Don’t know what WordPress is? Want a step-by-step guide to setting up your own WordPress website? Take my 7 Day Video eCourse Free…Get Details
05/16/10 by admin | Recent Posts, Wordpress | 2 Comments »
Today I was working away behind the scenes when all of a sudden out of no where my site was down! 500 Errors and no access to my wp- admin panel.
There can be a few reasons this happens, but the first thing to do is NOT Panic.
The majority of the time it’s either:
- Permissions
- Plugins
- or your .htaccess file
After checking my .htaccess file and the permissions on my site using my ftp, my last resort was to head over to my phpMyAdmin from my Cpanel and disable all of my plugins.
Disabling Your WordPress Plugins without Admin Access – Method 1
- Login to your Cpanel account and find the phpMyAdmin button or link. This should take you to your wordpress database tables.
- Look for the table called wp_options
- Then look under the option_name column (field) and find the active_plugins row (you may need to go to page 2)
- Once you’ve found that row, click on the pencil icon to edit.
- Under the option_value field you will see a whole bunch of data which relates to your plugins. Highlight the whole field, then copy and paste to a text document.
- Once you’ve copied (backed up) the data, replace the current data with a:0:{}
Hit GO
You should now have complete access to your wordpress admin.
The next step is to re-activate the plugins one by one to see which one might have cause the problem.
Another alternative method is:
Disabling Your WordPress Plugins without Admin Access – Method 2
Here you’ll be creating a dummy folder called Plugins so you can gain access to your wp-admin.
- Using either your FTP or your host’s control panel, navigate to the wp-contents folder (directory)
- Now, rename the folder “plugins” to “plugins.hold”
- create a new folder called “plugins”
- You should be able to login to your WordPress administration, so try now
- Once you are able to login, either by FTP or your host’s control panel, delete the empty “plugins” you
- rename the folder “plugins.hold” back to “plugins”
Hope this helps and remember….Don’t panic!
~Toresa
12/17/08 by admin | Recent Posts, Wordpress | No Comments »
Do you want to increase the search engine ranking of your WordPress blog? Check out these 9 SEO WordPress plugins that Shawn Jooste from Elite Blogger has pulled together for us.
The best place by far to find traffic is from search engines. The art of Search Engine Optimization is often very daunting for new bloggers. Even some experienced bloggers just see SEO as a cloudy puddle of mud they would rather not play in.
WordPress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of other things that can be done to make your blog rank better. Fortunately there are plugins available to help you get better rankings for your blog, so you don’t have to go digging into the code of your blog to get some results from search engines.
I’m not going to explain the validity or effects of each of these SEO tactics in detail. There is more than enough of that on the Internet already if you want to do some research. I’ll mention briefly what the benefits of each plugin is, and why you need it.
1. All in One SEO Pack
This allows you to set the basic SEO stuff for your blog. You need page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.
2. Redirection
From time to time you make changes on your blog. Sometimes these changes end up breaking your Permalink structure. This often happens when you make a change to an old post, or do an upgrade to WordPress and make some changes to the permalinks. It’s very very common if you move your blog from one host to another.
Basically what happens is that each post has a unique URL, called a permalink. When this changes, visitors who go to that blog post won’t find it. The redirection plugin helps you fix these problems by redirecting the visitor to the new permalink. This reduces the amount of traffic you get to pages that don’t exist.
3. Robots Meta
By default search engines crawl and index ALL the pages on your blog. This isn’t ideal, because it creates duplicate content and you can get yourself punished by search engines without knowing it. What the Robots Meta plugin allows you to do is tell the search engines which sections of your blog to crawl. This means that you’ll get more respect from search engines, and likely more traffic.
4. SEO Smart Links
One of the key issues with SEO is your internal linking structure. The more you link to a certain page on your blog, the more important it is to your overall content. Search engines treat your internal links as an indication of how well structured your site is. The problem with this is that if you had to manually go and create links to relevant and important posts you’ll spend hours and hours doing it.
SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘SEO’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word SEO appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.
5. SEO Friendly Images
Images also play an important role in your SEO strategy. So it’s important that you tag them correctly. SEO Friendly images allows you to do this, and saves you hours and hours of work. If, like most bloggers you use images in your posts, then this plugin is essential.
6. Google Positioner
It’s important to know your keywords. And this handy plugin allows you to track the keywords you’re getting searches for. It’s pointless selecting a few keywords, then writing some content for those keywords and hoping that the rest goes well. SEO is about being proactive and tracing what works and what doesn’t.
7. Permalinks Moved Permanently
A common mistake bloggers make is choosing the wrong permalink structure. When you start your blog you think you know which is best, and as time goes buy you want to change your permalink structure. The problem with changing your permalink structure is that your traffic will come to a standstill until your site is reindexed, and that could take months.
This plugin is similar to redirect but is an easier and better way to manage permanent permalink changes.
8. Nofollow Case by Case
The nofollow attribute over the last year or two has had a fairly large impact on the blogosphere. All comments in WordPress by default are nofollow links. This means that no Page Rank (PR) is being given via the link. This plugin changes that and makes comment links valuable again. There are a number of reasons you would want to give away link juice. It’s often used to attract people and encourage them to comment. It can be very useful for new blogs who need some exposure.
9. SEO Slugs
Stop words are ignored by search engines. So most of your post titles have them in, but they are meaningless to search engines. So when you have a post title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” you have a permalink like this: ‘/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings’ but what you really want is for your permalink to look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings.
This plugin automatically removes stop words from the permalink, helping you to rank better.
Conclusion:
Getting better traffic from search engines will help you boost your blog. You’ll get better income, rank better, and be able to build a better brand.
Courtesy of problogger.net
