How to Upgrade to WordPress Painlessly

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It never fails. WordPress releases an update and all hell breaks loose. You will see thousands of tweets and blog posts about when it happens. Usually there are more people in pain and agony as the photo shown right than those who are rejoicing “Hooray! I somehow did it with no problems!”

It is not uncommon when WordPress rleases a new update, you will notice an increase in people swearing and cursing and calling WordPress all sorts of nasty names and in a huge panic that their entire site is down.

Despite what many people may think, WordPress is not the one to blame.

If you are one of the people who had no problems: Yes, you are lucky. Not lucky by accident, but lucky that you either have a good webhost, don’t use many third party plugins/themes or have learned from previous past experiences (whether be your own or from others) a couple of useful tricks to avoid these hassles everyone else is  experiencing.

And if you have had these problems, well now you are just lucky to be reading this :) Hopefully it will help you upgrade successfully for every future wordpress upgrade and avoid the pain and heartache.

Here are a few tips for upgrading painlessly:

Good Hosting is EVERYTHING.

While the cost of hosting often has a lot to say about its reliability and ability to run WordPress efficiently, it is not always the case. I have had some $10/month shared hosting providers do better than $35/month VPS services or $20/month “cloud servers”. Often, most upgrading problems can be completely blamed on hosting.

These things will greatly affect your updating/upgrading experience:

PHP Version & Settings: The most recent version of PHP should be used. Why would use buggy and/or outdated PHP to run your WordPress software? It doesn’t make any sense, yet many webhosts don’t use the latest version OR you have to do a song and a dance to get it. (Most people don’t even realize there are multiple versions to choose from!) Settings also vary greatly for things such as php memory limits, max execution times, etc. etc. If using shared hosting, you may not have much flexibility here.

Server Resources: Shared hosts especially see issues on WordPress upgrade/update days, simply because there may be hundreds or in some cases thousands of WordPress powered sites on 1 server. When all these sites update at the same time, it causes a lot of extra stress on the server, and it is usually not pretty. If you use a popular webhost famous for overselling space or resources, you should probably wait a few days or weeks to avoid this issue.

Checking Third Party Plugins and Themes

Any reputable theme and plugin developer should and will test their plugins and themes with the latest versions of WordPress before the official release. Because WordPress is open source, most plugins and themes can be tested against beta releases to ensure compatibility with the update before it happens. Unfortunately, most don’t do this. Don’t assume a paid/commercial plugin will work with the latest version of WordPress! If you are not 100% certain, either proceed with caution, or email the developer directly to find out for sure or check the forum.

Helpful Tips for Painless Upgrading:

Make a BackUp First! Having multiple backups of your site is always good. That way, if it fails, well, you can always start over and try again. While automated backups are nice, be sure to do one manually yourself for times when it is really important, or at the very least, check that the “automated backup” did indeed backup and is working and stable :)

Switch to WordPress Default Theme Before the Upgrade: You can always count on the WordPress default theme to work with upgrades. After a successful upgrade then you can switch back to the old theme you used. Often times the “blank white screen of death” is due to a theme or plugin being broken.

Deactivate All WordPress Plugins Prior to Upgrade: WordPress will automatically de-activate and then re-activate all plugins when it does the upgrade. The problem of course, is when re-activated they may not be compatible! I find it is best to re-activate them all one by one until I know they are all safe. It is usually best to start with those you know are “safe” (ie: Askimet or Hello Dolly) – then start tinkering with the ones that are more important.

Timing is Everything: You don’t have to upgrade the moment you learn the new version of WordPress is available. If on a shared host in fact, I recommend waiting if possible. You will likely notice for the next few days your sites will be a bit slower than normal due to so many people suddenly running backups and upgrading. Obviously, if it is a crucial security update then you shouldn’t wait – but for others it probably won’t be disaster if you wait 2-3 days, maybe even 4-5 or 7-10. Also, if you have 30 WordPress powered sites on the same hosting package, you’ll probably also want to space them out or at least do 1 by 1 if possible if server resources are a concern.

Be Patient: Don’t try to multi-task while updating. A careless accidental click in the WordPress panel may leave you stuck in maintenance mode. Don’t visit other websites while upgrading, because if they have a slow/unresponsive script that makes you end up having to shut down your browser or laptop in the middle of an upgrade, you could find that the whole wordpress updating process may go incomplete. Try to avoid running other “prone to freezing” programs on your computer as well.

Do you have any additional tips to share about how to upgrade WordPress without the pain and struggle? We’d love to hear your tips and suggestions below!

How to Make Posts Into Multiple Pages in WordPress

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I tend to write really long posts. It’s not unusual for one of my WordPress posts to be over 1000 words long – and I’ve written some posts that have been over 3000 words long! While this is certainly good to help have lots of keywords and content for search engines, it definitely has some drawbacks, especially if your content might be slowing down the speed of your site.

Reasons Why You Might Want to Split WordPress Posts Into Multiple Pages

The big reason is because most blogs who are in the business of writing content and selling advertising space know that more pageviews means more $$$. If you sell ad space based on cpm (cost per 1000 impressions), there’s a lot of potential to get more impressions without getting more traffic.

For example, if you get 500 visitors who reads an average of 2 pages each, this equals 1000 pageviews/impressions. Getting 500 readers to read 2 pages is usually much easier than getting 1000 unique visitors, depending on what type of site you have.

There are also other advantages of splitting up posts into several pages:

  • Reduces Bounce Rate – Visitors Will More Likely View 2 pages than just 1
  • Increases Time Spent on Site – more opportunity to click on ads or subscribe
  • Makes Loading Time Faster, especially on posts with multiple images, and we all know site speed is important!
  • Organize a Series of Posts so users can find relevant information they need quickly without scrolling endlessly

How to Add Multiple Pages to Posts

Many people don’t even know this feature exists, but by using WordPress’s built in Page Links Functionality, it’s actually not very hard at all :)

The first step is to edit your posts to decide where you want the pages to be split up at. For example, if you were making a top 100 list, you might split it up between every 20 items. All you do where you want the pages to split is to write this code:

<!--nextpage-->

By default, when you go to publish the post, it will then display pagination below that says “Page 1 2 3″ and etc. If you don’t see the pagination for the post at the bottom, you’ll want to check your theme’s single.php file to make sure it includes the template tag shown below:

<div>
<?php wp_link_pages(); ?>
</div>

If you wanted something a little more advanced of course, you could also pass a number of variables through the template tag. For example, this adds the div class in the function itself and adds the phrase “Continue Reading”:

<?php wp_link_pages('before=<div class="pagelinks">Continue Reading&after=</div>'); ?>

Now, most likely, you probably will want something with a little more style than the WordPress default. Fortunately, that can be done pretty easily with a little CSS as well.

In your style.css sheet, you could add something like this:

.pagelinks {
padding:20px;
margin:10px;
text-align:center;
color:#663399;
}


.pagelinks a {
color:#cc0099;
font-weight:bold;
border:1px solid #663399;
padding:3px 5px;
margin:2px;
}

And you will get something that looks like this:

SEO, Social Sharing, and Other Factors to Consider

Of course, creating multiple pages out of posts makes some worry a bit about things like userfriendliness, SEO and social sharing. Some people for example might not like seeing multiple pages for an article. Others might worry about how Google will index and display the posts.

Here’s some tips to address common concerns with multiple page articles/posts:

Determine if Hierarchical Pages Might be Better: In instances where you are making a series or will have multiple “sections” about a topic, hierarchical pages might be better for organizing the content. Keep in mind that posts are individual blocks of content “looped” by taxonomy sorting – with pages you can assign parents, children, grandchildren, etc.

Use Rel Attributes: Google’s Suggestions About Multipage Articles suggests to use link rel attributes for next and previous. There are a number of SEO plugins that can do this for you.

Provide Print Friendly Solution: If people don’t like the multiple pages, they can choose a print friendly version instead. Again, a number of plugins available for this.

Concentrate on User Experience: Don’t be one of those sites that creates a new page for each paragraph of a post – that will likely get you much less pageviews instead of more or cause your cpms to drop drastically due to poor conversions for advertisers. But if you’re going on toward 1000+ words on an article, you may want to make it easier for everyone to read/sort/reference.

The Most Important Thing to Remember:

Splitting a post into multiple pages isn’t a feature everyone is going to need, but for some sites it makes a lot of sense. If you see that it can benefit not only you but also your readers and your advertisers, then it is worth implementing.

What are your thoughts on splitting up wordpress posts into multiple pages? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

WordPress 2011 Default Theme: The Good, Bad, and the Ugly

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The WordPress default theme ships with every single download and installation of WordPress. While it’s come a very long way in features and design aesthetics since the early days of the Kubrick theme and others, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

The Good:

It’s free.
No hassle to install.
You can add your own custom header image.
You can change the background to an image or different color.
It has widgetized sidebars and footer.
It supports featured thumbnail images.
Really nice typography.
It works with just about any plugin or script for WordPress because they all use it as a “standard” for testing
Will teach you all sorts of nifty things about WordPress hooks and filters.

The Bad:

Everyone has it. Hard to feel unique or special, even with a custom header and background.
Makes it easy for hackers to find you and likely leaves some noticeable footprints in SEO if you believe in those types of things, especially since it is used on so many sites.
Doesn’t validate at w3schools – this is not major and easy to fix (and html 5 is still considered experimental anyways)
Not compatible with microformats – not everyone needs these or cares about them, but if you’re trying to do microformatting, and keep failing the Google Rich Snippets test, it’s because there is something called an hfeed class in the theme that Google’s rich snippets tool does not like!
Need to create a child theme if you customize it at all because it gets updated all the time
SEO still needs some tweaking – everyone has their own preferences on this. Personally, I like the SEO that comes packaged in the default theme, just because it makes me easier to outrank you if you use it :) It’s definitely “better than it was before”, so if you know nothing about SEO, you could probably still have good results with it. Hard core SEO’s will still have to modify quite a few things however.

The Ugly

The “ugliest” thing about the 2011 default theme, no doubt has to be the Pinecone Header Image. The significance of using a cropped photo of an ordinary pine cone is one I will likely never understand. I don’t have anything against pine cones, the photo itself, or the photographer – it just doesn’t make sense as a blog header photo, unless you’re writing a blog about camping. Otherwise, it really just makes no sense at all. While the other photos are not going to suit most blog topics either, they are at least a little more “generic”. I don’t know why, but when I see a pine cone I just instantly think of lumberjacks and forests and National Parks and Smokey the Bear. That’s not a good impression if you’re writing a blog about say, women’s fashion. Or technology topics.

The other thing that irks me is how BIG the featured header image is. It’s a popular design trend, I get it – but it’s not one I like very much. Those big photos could possibly add to the “wow” factor for some sites, but they also take up very valuable “above the fold” content space. So if your photo doesn’t grab them (or if its too generic or not relevant to the post image) – you’re going to see a high bounce rate.

I don’t know, I’m sure this seems petty to a lot of people, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. It’s probably just me. I think I only notice it just because of how many new site installs I do on a regular basis, and one week when my server got hacked into badly, I had all of my sites using the default theme “as-is” (which is a way better alternative than having my sites down for too long).

And the good news is the default theme does make it easy to add your own images instead – or even remove them completely :)

So anyways, those are my thoughts on the 2011 Default WordPress theme and things to consider if you are building websites and wondering whether you should use it or if you should instead get a different theme. It has some pros and cons to think about, but all in all a definite good starting point for your own theme development as well as decent enough to use if you want to start a site without wasting much time thinking about design.

What do you think of the 2011 WordPress theme? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

WP Robot Review And Discount Coupon

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There are plenty of WP-Robot reviews out there, but after using it myself, and not quite experiencing all the “positive hype” you’ll read elsewhere, I’ve decided to write my own WordPress Robot Review.

Plugin We are Reviewing: WP-Robot Autoblogging Plugin
Plugin Homepage: WPRobot.net
Price: $169 regular price | $129 with coupon at end of article

About: WP-Robot of course is the most popular of the autoblogging plugins. I decided to try using it for a site I wanted to create about fashion – I thought this would be a great way to grab products from Amazon, Shareasale affiliates, YouTube videos, without necessarily having to create each post myself. It has a number of modules to grab content from a number of popular sites.

My Experience
So I spent $129 to buy the plugin (I found a coupon code, which I share at the end of this article), installed the plugin as directed, and spent about an hour playing around with the settings and everything else only to realize:

1. I Have a Guilt Complex: I didn’t have API keys for a lot of the popular services (such as Yahoo Answers or Flickr) and when applying for them, I really did not know what to write, especially after reading their terms of use and trying to figure out if my intended use was even allowed. Some sites like Shopzilla now actually very clearly state that you cannot use WP-Robot with their program, which makes me think a lot of people have probably abused their service in some way or another at some point. I am really not “normal” – I am sure I could have applied for all the programs, gotten approved, and made it work without any TOS violations…I am overly neurotic however and decided to skip this part.

2. I lack complete focus to use this plugin: One of the reasons I wanted to experiment with autoblogging is because I’m often easily distracted and sidetracked. It should not have been a surprise then that I am also too unfocused and distracted to use the plugin!

This is not a plugin that you can just choose a couple of settings from and go. There is plenty of documentation, and support was very timely and helpful, but there are just so many options and possibilities that it kinda makes your head spin. If you have excellent focus, maybe you can make it work easily. I however, am far too easily distracted and scatterbrained to really use this plugin to its full potential. Granted, I get distracted by a 2 and 4 year old every 30 seconds and usually have Dora the Explorer or Spongebob SquarePants yakking away in the background, but it was still hard for me to figure out all the settings and figure out just exactly what to do with it.

3. Auto Blogging is Not for Me! The plugin does work (once I got my settings figured out thanks to support answering some of my questions) so I can’t really complain about the plugin at all. The problem? I am not an auto-blogger. I am a “control freak blogger”. I care about how content looks and how it is displayed and what words are chosen. I didn’t really like how the products were displayed once they were posted. The didn’t look bad, they just weren’t up to my quality standards. This meant, if I was going to use this plugin, the way I wanted to use it, I’d be spending a good solid 10 hours editing & messing around with coding.

Now, if you are not a scatterbrained, control freak blogger with a guilt complex like myself, then you might be able to find some unique uses for this plugin. Here are some ideas for things you could do with this plugin:

Members Only Content: Maybe you don’t care about search engines, but you have visitors who need content. I think this could be very powerful if you combine it with a membership plugin. For example, you could create a “members only section” of auto pulled posts from the article directories which you could make sure are blocked by search engine robots. You could post original articles from a number of the directories or publish all the PLR in the world to your heart’s content without sacrificing quality or worrying about duplicate content penalties.

Excellent search/planning tool: I was really impressed by how this plugin found really relevant items based on my keywords – things I couldn’t find if I searched the actual sites themselves! So, it could be useful in that regard, if you used it to find items for you and save them as drafts for you to go in and edit/adjust as necessary later. It could potentially save you on the research time involved in setting up sites if you still want to have all unique content.

Use to Drip Feed Your Own Content: I wouldn’t buy this plugin only for this purpose, as there might be easier or cheaper ways of doing it, but it is a neat feature that it can drip feed your own original content as well as import CSV datafeeds. In essence, you could upload hundreds of articles at once, and WP-Robot would auto publish each and everyone for you based on whatever schedule/publishing rate you want it to publish at.

Good Learning Experience: You can learn a lot of things about APIs and WordPress plugins from this plugin. If you are someone who likes to dig into code to see how things work, you’ll likely find some useful things within the plugin files itself. If reading, writing, editing, and breaking php code is out of your comfort zone however you may not get this benefit.

Create a Link Farm/The Best Splog Ever: Of course, I would not recommend anyone to do this, but this plugin would make it super easy to do and if you’ve got sites you’re not afraid to experiment with. Say you have 50 domains just kinda sitting there doing nothing. It would be easy to set up this plugin and start adding spun articles like crazy. The problem? I don’t know if you would get traffic, how well you would do in search engines, if it is worth the risks, or if any human visitor would find any value in your site. But, damn, you sure could build a nice splog!

While WP-Robot (and auto-blogging/borderline splogging in general) isn’t for me, I will say it does do as advertised. Support is good. I just can’t bring myself to create an auto blog. So while I am too much of a control freak blogger with a guilt complex to use it as intended, I feel no guilt about using affiliate links while writing about it, as I do think that for some people it can be an invaluable and fascinating plugin depending on the needs – as long as you understand it’s NOT going to magically help you make money or create high quality sites with no effort on your part and you ARE playing with fire when it comes to SEO.

If you are a slightly neurotic, control freak type of blogger, who practices safety first, I suggest you do not buy it and continue making sites the hard way to ensure that you have quality, original, well presented content. Hopefully my honest review here will save you a lot of money that you could spend more wisely for another aspect for your online business.

If you DO want to buy WP-Robot, if for nothing else than maybe to try and experiment with it as I did, I would recommend using a discount coupon to do so – I happened to find a few floating around the internet that might work for you:

Click Here for WP-Robot Autoblogging Plugin and use Coupon Codes WarriorRobot OR SPRobot

(If these coupons stop working let me know and I’ll try to find some new ones)

Have you used WP-Robot? What were your thoughts on it?

How to Choose Between WordPress, WPMU, and Buddypress

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Rock, Paper, Scissors

If you are planning a more advanced project with WordPress, you might be having a hard time deciding whether you need to use regular WordPress, WordPress Multisite or Buddypress (a wordpress plugin that enables social features).

To help make it a little bit easier to decide whether you’ll need to set up a complex network of blogs or just install a plugin or explore other options, I thought I would go over the differences between each one here to help explain the differences and how each one is most commonly used.

WordPress multi-site is the same setup they use on wordpress.com, where anyone can set up their very own blog for free. It’s best purpose is for making it possible to run many blogs with one master administration panel. Each individual blog also gets its own WordPress dashboard, and has the ability to choose its own themes, plugins, and settings.

When to Use Multisite:

WordPress.com clone: If you want to create your own version of wordpress.com where you allow users to create free or paid blogs or their own websites, complete with their own dashboard and ability to customize settings, might as well use what wordpress.com uses.

You Want to Manage Multiple Sites Your Own on One Server: I usually do individual wordpress installations for each site I own, even if they are on the same server. But some people find that with the help of domain mapping or other tools it can be an easier way of managing multiple sites, even if not related, with one “master admin”.

You are managing a site with many subdomains or primary topics: If you wanted to create your own version of About.com for example, you could create a blog for each subdomain to tie into the main domain or a specified folder for each topic. This may be easier to organize and manage content if you have multiple primary categories with multiple subcategories compared to using a standard WordPress install.

You want to give each person in your organization their own blog: If you are an organization, such as a school, newspaper, or company and planning to give each person in your organization their own individual blog, using multisite will help ensure that each person has their own separate admin area to manage their own posts and content displayed on their pages.

Multisite has a bit of a learning curve as some things are handled differently, and depending on your use may require advanced hosting or customization. But it is an option for many depending on the project.

Buddypress: Compatible with both Multi-Site and regular ole WP, Buddypress is a popular plugin that allows users to connect with one another in a social networking fashion. It adds profile pages, user groups, forums, etc. etc. There are tons of add-ons that go with Buddypress for advanced features, such as user messaging or status updating.

When to Use Buddypress:

Make Your Own Social Network: Think you can build a better site to rival Facebook or Linked In? You probably can. :)

Help Groups Connect: One of the things that Buddypress can add to a site is the ability to make “groups”. This is nice to help others who share similar interests and topics stay informed on these topics.

Regular Ole WP: Besides just normal blogs, wordpress on its own can be used to create your own “community” site. You can have multiple users, create user profile pages, display user content, and a number of other things without even touching much code if you find the right themes and plugins. You can also add forums to regular wordpress, just install the bbPress plugin or Simple-Forums plugin.

When to Use Regular WordPress:

Multi-Author Blogs: If you want for all of your authors to be able to collaborate on one subject, edit and manage posts, then chances are a multi-author blog would be a suitable choice for you. Each blogger can still have their own “blog” set up with author page templates pretty easily, but this method makes it so everyone uses one dashboard (though capabilities can be managed with user roles)

Membership Sites: If you don’t need the social features, but just want to be able to make some content available to certain members, then chances are regular WP is a good fit for you also in conjunction with one of the many popular membership plugins.

Do you have any suggestions for helping someone to decide whether to plan their next project with Multisite, Buddypress, or WordPress? Share your thoughts and experiences below!

WordPress Stuck in Maintenance Mode

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Photo Credit: Joe Zlomek

You login to your wordpress dashboard, all excited to write a new post and you see your blog has some updates it needs. So, maybe you update your plugins or a theme, and usually all goes well without a glitch. But sometimes, you do things to cause errors, or sometimes a plugin or theme or WordPress itself does not update perfectly on its own due to server time outs or other issues.

You now have a “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” page where your site should be, and you can’t even login into the WordPress dashboard.

Fortunately, while you are stuck in maintenance mode and locked out of the WordPress dashboard, it can be fixed relatively easily. Be sure you ALWAYS, ALWAYS have a back up of your site before proceeding!

If This Happened While Updating Themes and Plugins:

99.9% of the time, all you need to do is delete the plugin/theme from your server via FTP. You’ll be back into WordPress in no time. Do however make sure that you make a back up of the theme/plugin if you made customizations. Otherwise, you should be able to re-install it with a fresh/updated copy and be on your merry way. You may lose some of your settings, but unless you are using a very complex plugin or theme, this should get you back up to speed quickly.

If the theme or plugin you use stores information in your database, you may also need to visit phpadmin. This is usually done within your webhosting control panel, and it varies for all hosts as to where it is located. Once there, click on the database name, find the plugin or theme specific tables, and after making a backup, delete them as well to try a completely fresh install. Unfortunately, there are just too many plugins and too many variables for me to give you step by step instructions or guarantee this will work for all plugins – so if your attempts to simply delete and then reinstall a plugin do not work, check with the plugin/theme author for specific instructions.

If the thought of deleting a plugin or theme completely (even when you make a backup first) makes you nervous, you can first try disabling all plugins by using either phpadmin or ftp. More details at WordPress.org codex here

What to Do When WordPress Core Upgrade Fails

This greatly depends on the version you are upgrading to. Generally, the first step is to look for a file in your blog’s directory through ftp called .maintenance and delete it. This should hopefully remove the Maintenance warning and you can access the WordPress dashboard to continue the upgrade (you may be prompted by a message to click a button to upgrade the database first)

If that does not fix it, and you’ve already tried deactivating themes and plugins, you are probably going to have to restore your site from a database backup. There are a number of wordpress database backup and restore plugins you could use as an option, or you can do it the old fashioned method of creating a new database and reuploading your old files from before doing the upgrade.

How to Avoid This Problem

While there’s no sure fire way to avoid this, there are things you can do that will greatly minimize the possibilities of this happening later:

1. Upgrade with Each Release: Usually, if you upgrade say from version 1.2 to 3.4 of a plugin or theme or WordPress, it’s going to break and go haywire, regardless of the plugin or theme. It’s much better to upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4 as new releases are made available – so always stay on top of updates!

2. Do not navigate away from the page or click on any other links until update is complete: I just recently made this mistake – I updated a plugin, and then before I got the updated confirmation page, I accidentally clicked on the comments link – therefore locking me out of WordPress. Just be patient :)

3. Use good webhosting: Some shared hosting plans just can’t handle automatic updating at all. This is especially of hosts that have outdated php versions or limit your php memory to only 20MB. See our list of best hosting for WordPress.

4. Always Have a Backup!: You can’t have enough backups of your website, especially before doing changes that can affect the database or files on your server.

Do you have any tips for someone who’s stuck in maintenance mode or has been locked out of WordPress? Share them in the comments below!

How I Plan a WordPress Site

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Having built hundreds of WordPress sites, I have learned that proper planning before creating a site will save you a lot of headaches and wasted time later down the road. Trust me, there is nothing worse than having to manually review/edit 300+ posts because you decide later to change your category structure or you started using shortcodes and then switch to not using them or you decide to change post templates that uses automatic images. Plan your site right from the very get go, and it will save you hours, days, and weeks of frustration later, I promise you!

Since I’ve got planning and building websites down to a science, I thought I would share my method here. These are steps I usually take before I even register a domain name or set up hosting or install WordPress – you will waste far less time and be far more productive if you make a plan first!

Step 1: Research Keywords & Content Topics:

Content is really all that matters on a website. People don’t care what your site is about or how it looks – all they care about is whether or not anything on your website provides some sort of value. Whether you plan to be a SEO maverick or not is completely optional – you should always research keywords first to make sure 1. Other people might actually want to visit your site for some reason and 2. get an idea of the best logical manner to organize your content based on search phrases.

So, before I do anything else I go to Google’s Keyword Tool. It’s not perfect, but it’s plenty useful enough. I type in some very general words, and I also type in some more specific phrases related to my keywords. For example, if I wanted to create a website about cats, I might research “cats” and then I would research phrases like “cat training” or “cat scratching posts” or “cat food”. I would keep doing this experimenting with different phrases until I have about 200 good solid keywords that will eventually become either pages, categories or inspiration for posts on my site.

Once I have 200 unique keyword phrases (more or less, really depends what the site will be about – obviously if you are a in a very specialized field you likely will have much less), I then start grouping related keywords together, as this will give me a good idea for what categories and navigation links I need. For example, if I do a super site all about cats, I might decide to group my content into: cat breeds, cat care, cat toys, cat behavior and cat food. These all become categories, and then I will just add content for these categories for the site. If I am planning a site for an auto mechanic, I might instead decide to skip the categories all together and just create pages that are relevant, such as directions, hours of operation, services offered, etc. etc.

Because the keyword research is the most important part of my website planning process, I try to keep everything neat and organized. I’ve yet to find the perfect software for this, but I’ve found that either an Excel workbook or a plain text file are easy enough. In Excel, I create one page with all keywords (you can download a csv of the keywords from Google), and then I add a new sheet for every category where I start grouping like terms together. If I notice a lot of similar posts in a category, I may break it down further into sub categories. If I use Notepad, it’s just a long list I then start grouping/sorting together. Excel is more organized, but Notepad works fine too.

Step 2: Make a Feature List

Once I have a good solid plan for content, the next step is to start thinking about what functionality and features the website needs. For example, you probably might want an email newsletter or a Facebook/Twitter page. You might plan on showing ads. You might want to create a community for people to network together with and need a forum. Maybe you want to sell digital goods on your website. There are literally a zillion things you can do with WordPress, so it’s a good idea to have a clear idea of what functionality you want and need from the very beginning. It’s not fun to spend 2 months developing and building a site only to decide later to add something and find out its not compatible with all the work you’ve done so far.

This is also a good time to start researching potential plugins or third party API’s you will be using. If you are building a basic site, it will be pretty easy and you won’t need to do much research. But if you’re building something more advanced like an ecommerce site or forum or membership site, you’re going to want to carefully research what is already available that meets your needs and whether you might need custom work done to achieve what you want.

Step 3: Decide What the Visitor Action Will Be

Every website needs a visible and obvious call to action. What do you want visitors to your website to do the minute they visit your page? In most cases, it is one of these three things:

1. Sign up for a Mailing List/Connect on Social Networks: Any savvy sales or business person will tell you that building relationships and connecting with other people is the best way to market your business or website. People are more likely to do business with someone they know and trust, and the only way to know and trust someone is constant communication. Getting permission to email people or having them follow your updates makes it easier to stay in touch. Otherwise, they will probably forget your website exists, even if it is completely amazing.

2. Buy Something or Generate Leads: Most sites do not have “instant conversions” where someone comes out of nowhere and immediately buys something or calls you to book an appointment. This will only happen if you happen to provide a specific, specialized service that has urgency – for example you’re the only 24 hour plumber in town or you do same day computer repair or you’re the only site on the internet that sells blue widgets with same day shipping. If this is the case, make sure it’s very clear and easy for someone to buy the item or to call you.

For everyone else, it might be better to generate leads. For example, if you’re an online store, you might want instead to direct them to sign up for special discounts. If you design websites, you would probably want to encourage people to request a quote. If you offer a digital service or product, you might offer a free trial.

3. Get Straight to the Content: This is especially common on news and magazine and blog type of sites. If you are updating a site often, and you’ve already got enough traffic to not worry about building more, then you might as well get straight to the chase and show off your content. Making your content the spotlight will increase traffic and pageviews, things that can help you earn more if you are following an ad network revenue model.

Once you know the primary call to action you want someone who visits your website to take, then you can start thinking about the overall design, look and feel.

Step 4: Choose a Site Layout/Design and WordPress Theme

This is usually the hardest part. How are you going to display all the things on your site? What do you want the overall look and feel to be? There are thousands of WordPress themes – how do you choose?

Here are Some questions to consider when choosing a layout and site design:

What should be “featured” content, and how will you display it?
Do you need 1, 2, or 3 columns?
How will you display media such as photos and videos?
What is going in the header, footer, and sidebar areas?
What do you want on your homepage?
How will you make it easier for visitors to instantly know the “call to action”?
Will you divide content by categories or show all recent posts?
What is the overall look and feel you want? What colors and fonts do you want to use?

Once I know all the answers to these questions, I start thinking about which WordPress themes to use. There are so many different WordPress themes and just sorting through all of them could take hours to do. Some are well coded, some are poorly coded or outdated, some may harm your web server! Always use themes from a trusted and reputable source.

Step 5: Hosting, Domain Name and Branding

Sometimes I already have hosting, a domain name and logo in mind when I first start building a site. Usually I don’t have any of these things. You’ll want to first make sure that you choose the right hosting setup. Most sites are fine to start with shared hosting, though more advanced sites (such as ecommerce or application type of sites) might need a VPS, dedicated servers, or external file storage such as Amazon s3. Generally I advise starting off small and moving up as you need to – why pay $199 a month for a dedicated server when you can get by on $6 a month for shared hosting? Very few sites get millions of visitors the first 6 months. Once you have the right hosting, you can get your domain name and should start thinking about things like logo design and branding.

After all of that, it’s just a matter of configuring the settings for your new site and start writing.

What steps do you take when you plan and organize a new site? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

Getting Started With WordPress Checklist

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You’ve successfully installed WordPress and you’ve logged into your admin dashboard…now what? How should you configure all of the settings for your site?

Since I have set up well over 200 wordpress sites, I thought it might be good to share my basic checklist of things I do for every single wordpress site I start. This does not include the pre-planning phase nor does it include any considerations for specific types of sites, but it will help you get an idea of my general workflow. (Note: If you are setting up multiple websites, you may want to consider using a service such as managewp.com to save on time or use a database backup plugin so you can build one site then make multiple clones with all of your settings intact).

Step 1: Configure WordPress Settings

There are several settings for WordPress, and they will likely vary depending on your individual preferences.

First I begin with general settings and enter my website name and a general description for it. If you’re concerned about SEO or will be using SEO plugins later, it’s a good idea that your description contain the primary keywords for your site.

Writing, Reading, Media, and Privacy settings I typically don’t change, unless I plan on adding services to ping or want to configure a static homepage without using a theme template file.

For Discussion Settings, I always uncheck the boxes to be notified of new comments, simply because I own a lot of websites and I don’t have time to reply to each comment individually when I check my email. I usually set it up so avatars display and make it so comments go to moderation if they contain 1 link and that all comment authors need to have approved comments first before being trusted.

Permalinks are important, because WordPress does not come with pretty permalinks out of the box. A permalink is the address you see for the pages in your website. For example: http://wprain.com/1/hello-world.I usually go with a /%post_id%/%postname%/ structure. You can also go with a date. Numbers are better than words, as it reduces the likelihood of database strain and pagination/custom post type/category/page name conflicts. You may need to configure this with an htaccess file or with your webhost if you get any warnings when you activate a new permalink structure.

Step 2: Skipping Past Tools and Users

I don’t normally use these for many things unless I am transferring a site from another host or domain and need to import posts. If I plan on having multiple wordpress users I will create them user accounts. If you plan on displaying an author resource box or author page on your site however, you may want to update your profile now with a brief bio.

Step 3: Onto the Plugins!

There are many great plugins for WordPress out there, and you will definitely need some! These are the plugins I install/activate with pretty much every single WordPress site I set up:

Google XML SiteMaps: Several plugins can do this for you, basically it helps search engines find and prioritize content on your website.

Contact Form: Definitely a requirement for any site – see my post on forms for wordpress. Some themes also include a contact form page, so if that’s the case you can likely skip this one unless you need advanced form capabilities.

Askimet & Other Spam Blocking Plugins: Activating Askimet is your first line of defense against spam. I also recommend using a plugin with a captcha or other method of keeping spam robots away.

Google Analytics: I’ve found it is best to keep analytics in its own separate plugin file instead of in a theme, because if your theme breaks or you change themes or the theme updates you might lose your tracking code and it could be days, weeks, or even months before you realize you have no analytics data. I like the super simple ones best – just ad your ID and go.

There are hundreds of others, but these ones are the bare bone minimums for any wordpress site.

Step 4: Set up A WordPress Theme

It’s really easy to upload a theme to your site and activate it, or you can search the thousands available from WordPress.org. If you plan on customizing a theme, you will want to create your own child theme or a completely different version of it so it won’t get overwritten from updates. I will sometimes skip this step and come back to it later if I want to first organize my content and then think about what I want the site to look like.

Step 5: Set Up Pages

Every WordPress site should have these pages: About, Contact, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and FTC Disclosure statements if it’s a site where you will be making money from affiliates or advertisers. You can either delete the default sample page or update it with new content.

Step 6: Start Writing Posts

If I have a clear plan of action for content, I will set up categories first. Otherwise, I just start writing. You can delete the Hello World blog post or start adding new content to it. A lot of people get hung up on the first blog post to write – I know I once did when I first started blogging. Don’t worry about it – Just jump in. Write whatever is on your mind or write “Pillar Articles” – content that you will likely reference back to over and over again while you keep adding new content.

That’s It! You’re all set up and ready to go!

It sounds like a lot of work, but it really gets much smoother and easier the more often you use WordPress. It took me about 6 hours to do all of these things when I first started – now I can do most of this within 20-30 minutes (unless I’m doing heavy theme customization or using specific plugins that require advanced configuration) – and that’s if my kids distract me while I am working.

Once your site is setup, all you have to do is keep adding content – once you have enough content your next step is onto marketing your site to get more traffic and visitors!

Have any questions about configuring the settings for WordPress? Any tips you might like to share or add? Comments are always welcome below!