Wordpress

PSD to WordPress Conversion Instructions

January 21, 2012 By Travis 1 Comment

Section 1 – Designing a WordPress theme in Photoshop

Designing a theme for WordPress in Photoshop is straightforward. In our example today, we will create a simple two column fixed width theme. Before we start, we need to decide what the width of our theme will be. I chose a 980-pixel sixe because it will fit on most screens without the need to scroll form side to side, as most screens today are at least 1024 pixels wide.

To get started create a rectangle that is 1024px x 768px. This will serve as our background for the theme. You can color your backgrounds or even add an image. For our tutorial, we will color the background blue.

Next, we will layout the theme container. Later this will be defined in the web pages we create, but now let’s add a white rectangle 980pxx768px. This represents the themes overall width and the container that will hold our theme.

Now that we have the basic layout done let’s look at the different sections we will be creating. Our theme will have four basic sections:

Header
Content
Sidebar
Foote

We will add each section to our theme layout starting with the header. For this tutorial, I have decided to create a header that is 175px tall and I will add 13px above the header also. To do this I will create a box that is 188px x 980px aligned with the top of the page.

I now have the basic header shape in place. Remember I added 13px for a border at the top so I want to represent that in my design. If you have an image for your header, you can now format it to the right dimensions and paste it into the PSD like this.

I have decided to put the menu right below the header and to make it approximately 30px in height. To do this, I will create a rectangle 30px x 980px under the header image.

That is it, we have a design we can now transfer to a theme. Before we start coding, let’s look at some of the basics of a WordPress theme. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Wordpress Tagged With: PSD, Templates, theme, wordpress

Jetpack for WordPress

January 17, 2012 By Travis Leave a Comment

The new suite of plugins called Jetpack (by WordPress.com) offers an all-inclusive set of features for self-hosted blogs.

One of the things I am asked most by friends and strangers:

That plugins do I need for my WordPress blog?

I get this question most often from people who have recently moved their blogs over from WordPress.com to the self-hosted WordPress.org version.

The core of both platforms is nearly identical with the exception that the self-hosted version requires you to install all of your own plugins. Most, but not all, of the features available in WordPress.com are available as one-off plugins in the open marketplace.

Unfortunately, you are responsible for updates and anything that goes wrong if they experience bugs.

I’ve used WordPress for about 7 years, and in all that time I have always wondered why certain plugins do not just come with the core WordPress.org download. I know the reason is that WordPress.org is an open source program that does not want to play favorites with certain developers. It makes some sense.

Finally, Automattic released a solution under the brand name, Jetpack.

Jetpack includes:

Subscriptions – Let users subscribe via email.
Image & RSS Links Widgets – Add them to your sidebars.
Gravatar Hovercards – Enhance your Gravatars by allowing users to hover over a Gravatar to see more information about that user.
WordPress.com Stats – The good old stats program you are used to from WordPress.com.
Twitter Widget – Tweet Tweet
Shortcodes – Add embeddable content, like video players, to your posts with easy shortcodes.
Shortlinks – Utilize the WP.me link shortener.
Sharedaddy – Add social media sharing buttons to your posts.
After the Deadline – Hands down the best spelling and grammar checker for WordPress.
Vaultpress – A premium (paid) service for backing up your entire blog.
Beautiful Math – Allows you to add geeky math equations in posts.
Enhance Distribution – Ping your content out to all the search engines and content aggregators.

There is a pretty significant benefit of automatic updates. The group of plugins will automatically update as new features and bugs are fixed. Jetpack also claims that new features will automatically be included as well.

I’m also glad to see that Automattic is starting to take advantage of their name…and making things Automatic.

Filed Under: How to..., Wordpress Tagged With: plugins

Top WordPress Plugins and Widgets for Bloggers

September 29, 2011 By Matt Leave a Comment

WordPress is the best blogging tool anyone can use. The most exciting part of WordPress is that it is flexible to use and has many options. Users can get more plugins to have much more fun while blogging. Here are some recommended WordPress plugins to make the blogging experience more adventurous.

WordPress plugins and widgets are categorized based on their usage.

Manage Comments with WordPress:

Subscribe to Comments: To allow readers get notifications of latest comments posted on an entry.
WP AJAX Edit Comments: This allows wordpress users to edit commentary on posts inline.
WP Grins: Allows users to include clickable “smilies” on posts and comments.

Prevent Spam with WordPress:

Akismet: This plug-in intelligently prevents users from receiving spam.
Bad Behavior: These are a set of PHP scripts to prevent spambots from accessing the site.
Digital Fingerprint: This helps in detecting theft of your content.

Expert SEO with WordPress:

All in one SEO Pack: This helps users by optimizing the WordPress Blog for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Broken Link Checker: This helps one to monitor and notify them when the links on blogs are broken.

Easy Navigation with WordPress:

Homepage Excerpts: These make both posts and excerpts flexible to use on the homepage.
WordPress Mobile Edition: This indicates when a visitor logs on to your site through a mobile device.
Random Redirect: This plugin allows the user to create a StumbleUpon link to the posts on the blogs.
Wp-Cumulus: Makes 3D tags and categories in a rotating sphere.
Clean Archives: This displays the archives in lists with uniformity and clean presentation. Visitors can easily find the article or blog they want by checking in the category according to content, day, month and year.

Twitter Plugins with Twitter:

TweetSuite: This incorporates twitter into your blogs along with other tweet plugins and widgets.
WP Twitip ID: This allows users to put in their usernames to the comment forms on blogs.

Admin Management Tools in WordPress:

PodPress: This enables the user to add many designed features to make their blogs exciting and ideal to host Podcasts.
Admin Drop Down Menu: No more double clicking on the admin screen. This plugin allows you to choose from a list making things easier and quicker.

There are many more plugins for various necessities. You can easily download those which work best for you.

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: plugins, wordpress

Your Blog Traffic Blueprint – Part Two

September 19, 2011 By Ellen Leave a Comment

In the last post I explained a number of different ways you could get your blog optimized for traffic and then methods in which you could drive traffic through the use of backlinking. The good thing about a lot of backlinking methods is that not only do they help your blog to be recognized as important by search engines like Google; many of the methods drive traffic directly to your blog because of the insightful content you are providing.

In this post I am going to lay out a blueprint for you that you can follow step-by-step and then in later posts I will give you more details on how to actually set up each of these methods to maximize their impact on your traffic stats.

Do the preparation steps in the previous blog post.
Write five articles related to your niche – this is not as hard as it seems – you can simply rewrite your blog posts to create unique articles.
Use Camtasia Free software and PowerPoint presentation slides to create videos out of your article content – don’t mind being in front of the camera? Then use that, but you want to create five videos based on your five articles and you will need five PowerPoint presentation slide shows for traffic generation as well.
Create an audio file of all five of your articles. If your article content is quite short just make one audio file including the information in all five articles.

Okay so at this point you will have five articles, five videos, five PowerPoint presentation slide shows, and at least one audio file. All of these files will contain backlinks to your site and if you can include a call to action (without sounding spammy) in the content as well all the better. Now you have to get these out on the net.

The Articles

Your articles are going to provide a hub for the rest of your traffic efforts. Firstly you want to submit them to Ezinearticles.com. Unless you are a premium member this is going to take a few days for the articles to be approved. You are also going to submit your articles to the following sites:

But wait until your articles have been approved on Ezinearticles.com first – EZA does not like duplicate content. Don’t forget to ping your article links (the actual link of the page your article is on) as well as Stumble it, Twitter it and put the link up on Facebook.

Next you want to find some graphics to go with your article content and then head over to Squidoo.com and set up five lenses using your article content and the pictures you have collected. Each article will make an individual lens. If you have not made a Squidoo Lens before then check out the help tutorials they have on their site which are very good or courses by people like Tiffany Dow or the PotPieGirl. Again once you have your lenses finished then ping them and use your social media links to put the word out about them.

Well that should be enough to keep you going for the moment. In the next post I will explain more things you can do with your articles and also where to post the other content that I had you create.

Filed Under: How to..., Site Traffic, Wordpress Tagged With: blog traffic, traffic generation

Your Blog Traffic Blueprint – Part One

September 18, 2011 By Ellen Leave a Comment

Generating traffic to your blog is something a lot of bloggers have trouble with. But if you use the traffic blueprint I have outlined below then you will have swarms of traffic hitting your site every time you write a new post.

Setting the Groundwork

Getting prepared for traffic to your site is something that you should be thinking off from the moment you install WordPress on your new domain. Before you start generating traffic you want to make sure that you have installed all of the plug-ins outlined in our previous post here [Link to 5 Essential Plug-ins You Blog Must have]. To keep Google happy your site will need to have a Privacy Policy page, a Terms and Conditions Page and a Contact page at the very least. You should also make sure that you have a minimum of three blog posts on your blog, with more scheduled or planned before you put this traffic plan into place. Ideally you should aim for one new blog post for your blog daily for about a month, and then at least three times a week thereafter so that your blog always has good fresh content coming in.

Setting Up Backlinks

If you are not familiar with SEO then it is unlikely that you have come across the term “Backlinks” before but these are a vital part of your blogging success. In a nutshell backlinks are links on other sites that point back to your blog, or a specific blog post. The more backlinks your blog has the more valuable it is considered by Google and other search engines. So you need to set up a system to start generating backlinks as quickly as you can.

Warning: There are a lot of companies online that claim they can get you hundreds or even thousands of backlinks for the price of a cup of coffee – Do not use these methods. They are considered spam and can get your blog banned from Google permanently if you use these “Black Hat” methods.

Your pinging will already be creating backlinks for you but you can go a lot further with this. Just some of the methods you can use include

Putting articles on article directory sites like Ezinearticles and GoArticles
Putting up videos on YouTube and other video sites (TubeMogul is good for this)
Creating audio files and placing them on sites like iTunes
Blog commenting on other blogs in your niche
Forum posting on relevant forums in your niche
Posting an ebook of your content on free ebook sites like Free-ebooks.net
Setting up related pages on Squidoo.com and HubPages
RSS feeds
Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon

Now before you go thinking that this could be a lot of work, remember that you can outsource a lot of these tasks and as we will show you in the next blog post – a lot of these ideas come from recycling and repackaging content you have already created. See you on the next post.

Read Part Two

Filed Under: How to..., Site Traffic, Wordpress Tagged With: blog traffic, blogging, traffic to your blog

The Best Six Facebook WordPress Plugins

April 13, 2011 By Matt Leave a Comment

Facebook is the largest social media website and thousands of users update their accounts as often as possible. Therefore installing Facebook plugins in WordPress helps users to provide the “share posts on Facebook” option for their visitors. There are six really amazing Facebook WordPress plugins:

WP-FBConnect: This plugin adds the Facebook functionality to WordPress Blogs through Facebook Connect APIs. To use this plugin you have to link your Facebook account to your WordPress and then sign into it again. This will allow you to publish comments through the Facebook newsfeed and avatars displayed in the comments field using WordPress.
Add to Facebook: This plugin provides a link at the bottom of your blog posts for users to click on. Once they click on this link they can add the post they are currently on to the mini-feed on their Facebook home page. All they will need to do is sign into their Facebook account.
Facebook Dashboard Widget: You have to be interactive on Facebook, and this application provides you with all the updates from friends. This widget allows users to work with both Facebook and WordPress to keep you updated about friends even if Facebook is blocked.
Facebook Comments: This is a very useful plugin which imports all the comments made about your post which were shared on Facebook. These comments will be posted directly into your WordPress blogs so that you don’t miss any of the comments.
Facebook Photos Plugin: Everyone likes images on posts; it makes them interesting, attractive and sometimes help people understand things better. This plugin helps you by making it easy to add photos to your blog posts. You simply have to link your plugins to your Facebook account using the WordPress blog. Once this is done, whenever you edit old or new posts in WordPress, a new icon in “Add Media Section” will appear. You will be able to see the uploaded photos in your Facebook account by clicking on the new icon visible on your screen. You will be able to insert your images as small sized, medium sized and large sized images. You can also align the images if you want.
Gigya: This is a very important plugin and all its features are configurable using the WordPress Administration Panel. Once you use this plugin you can enjoy secure signup and login to your website. Additionally you will be able to update your status on different social media sites and invite your friends to the different social media sites to join your blog.

Beyond doubt, WordPress is the best blogging platform anyone can use with Facebook.

Filed Under: Strategy, Technology, Wordpress Tagged With: facebook, plugins, social

Using the Ping List to Increase Your Blog Exposure

April 11, 2011 By Ellen 3 Comments

Many new blog owners don’t know what a ping is, let alone how to use this quiet little function to increase traffic to their blogs. Put simply a “ping” is an automatic notification of new and updated content to sites that collect RSS feeds for their own subscribers. By pinging these sites you create backlinks for your blog and you have the chance to increase your organic (that means free) traffic figures.

To utilize this function in your WP blog you need to go to “Settings” in your admin panel and click on “Writing” in the drop down menu that comes up.

writing 480x295 Using the Ping List to Increase Your Blog Exposure

This will bring you up a page like the one above. You need to scroll down this page until you find…

pinglist 480x223 Using the Ping List to Increase Your Blog Exposure

You won’t have anything in this block when you install your new blog – you have to find a ping list to copy and paste into it. To help you here are ten you can include by simply copying the links below and pasting them into that box: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Site Traffic, Strategy, Wordpress Tagged With: blog traffic, ping, pinging

How Personal Should You Get in Your Blog Posts?

April 7, 2011 By Ellen Leave a Comment

One of the questions that I get asked quite often is about how personal should you get in your blog posts and honestly my only answer is “that depends on what your blog is about”.

For example if you are writing a review on a product or service then your point of view is important. If you are writing a site on relationship problems and how to solve them, then your own personal experience might be relevant and helpful. If you write about politics you can be opinionated but if you are updating your workplace blog then third person anecdotes and factual information might be more appropriate.

Personally I share as much of myself as is necessary to get my point across. If I am writing about “make money tips’ then some of the things I have done and tried would be good examples to use in a post.

When I write book reviews I give my opinion and the reasons for it. There are times, like in the relationship niche for example, where I have used life experience to illustrate certain points but personally I don’t think that topics like what I had for breakfast, what I watched on TV last night, or what my mates and I got up to at the beach last summer is really important – because none of my blog topics are based on television programs, food or hijinks. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Don't Do It, Wordpress Tagged With: blogging, personal blog posts, writing posts