Categories, Pages and Links…

These are the basis to your blogs navigation, and if used properly they will enhance your blog and make it an easy place to navigate. If you take a look at the top of this blog you’ll see them in action, above the name of the blog you’ll see my pages and underneath the blog name or header you’ll see my categories. Lets look at them more closely:

Categories

Obviously a blog is like an online diary and you can scroll down the page, to read previous entries, but it can only show so many posts on that one page. Once they move off the front page they will fall into the blogs archives, and archives are not the easiest or nicest place to search through. But if you use categories well on your blog then your readers have a very easy time finding the information that they are looking for. Take this blog for instance, maybe a reader doesn’t want to know about Wordpress.com which I have been talking about a lot recently, but they may want to learn about my case study blog or about marketing for blogs. It’s easy for them to find that information because all they have to do is click on the relevant link in my navigation bar, and it will take them to all the articles that have been assigned that category.

It’s very easy to assign or create categories. Just select or create a category when writing your blog post using the category tab on the right side of the text box where you write your post.

Beware though when writing articles make sure you assign a category in the first place and then make sure it’s relevant, there’s no point in having a messy category system. Of course some articles will overlap and need to be in 2 or more categories but just make these decisions carefully. Try and think like a reader would visiting your blog, put yourself in their shoes.

Pages

This is where I think Wordpress stands apart from other blogging platform providers like Blogger. Pages was also the reason I moved my blog to Wordpress in the first place. Wordpress gives you the ability to create pages for your blog, you can see them in action in my navigation bar at the very top of this blog. At the moment I have an about, archives and an articles page for popular articles and article series to be easily found. This expands the potential of your blog enormously and gives you the ability to add a lot of information, and therefore expanding your blog making it into a real site and not just an online journal. Use pages to add an about page, contact page, popular articles page, recommendations page, photo galleries, reviews, podcasts, etc… it’s limited only by you! Just remember to keep them updated and fresh!

Links

Links or your ‘blogroll’ is a place where you can add a link to anywhere you like. Link to your other sites like your flickr page, twitter, del.icio.us, digg, or facebook page, friends and family, photoblogs, favourite sites or sites or products that you want to promote. Make categories within your links section and then you can add more than one links widget to your sidebar, one for each category? It gives you really good control over how you want to display your links.

If you look down the sidebar you’ll see that I have ’sites I like’ as my link widget and I’ve made it a combination of my other sites, my social media, family and sites or products that…well that I like!

This is the part of blogging and Wordpress that I really love! Features like these give you tremendous flexibility to customise your blog and be as creative as you want to be. I personally would never be able to do any of this with a traditional website, never mind do it so quickly.

Mandy

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Categories, Pages and Links – Are you using them properly?

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Widgets are the best and easiest way to add features and functionality to your blog without having to know any code or PHP to do it. Here’s a list of the widgets that are available for the test blog – Build a Blog with Wordpress:

Akismet – helps block spam from your blog and provides stats on it
Archives - monthly archives of your blog posts
Authors – if your blog has more than one author
Blog stats – show your stats
Blog subscriptions – add an email sign up form to subscribe to your blog
Box.net – file sharing
Calendar - calendar of your blog posts
Category – your blogs categories, list or drop down menu
Category Cloud - category cloud
del.icio.us – add your favourite bookmarks
Gravatar – add a Gravatar image
Image - add an image to your sidebar
Links - add your Blogroll (list of your favourite links) to the sidebar
Meebo – Meebo
Meta - admin login access
Pages – your blogs pages
Recent Posts – add your blogs most recent posts
RSS - add entries from any RSS Feed
RSS Links - links to your blogs RSS Feed
Search - a search form for your blog
SocialVibe - Get sponsored, support a charity
Text - add any text or HTML to the sidebar
Top Clicks - your blogs Top Clicks
Top Posts - your blogs Top Posts
Top Rated – a list of your blogs top rated posts, pages or comments
Twitter - display your tweets from Twitter
VodPod videos - add Vodpod videos

How Do I Add One to my Blog?

Go to Appearance –> Widgets and take a look around, it should look similar to the image below. Which is the widget page for the test blog Build a Blog with Wordpress. As you can see on the left is the list of available widgets and on the right is the places on the blog which are able to have widgets added to them. For this blogs theme they include sidebar, footer left, footer middle, footer right and header. Then it’s a simple case of drag and drop the widgets that you want to use to the corresponding menu on the right. They will then appear in the drop down menu and you will be able to arrange them in any order you like.

Below are some screen shots to show you where the widgets will appear on the test blog when I add them to the corresponding areas on the widget page in the blogs admin:

The red area at the top next to the blog title is the header area for widgets and the red area on the right is the sidebar area for widgets.

This screen shot is of the footer of the blog and is at the very bottom of the site, the red area is the footer area for widgets and it offers 3 widgetised areas, left, middle and right.

These positions will differ though depending on the theme that you are using and how it has been coded. That can be a big factor when choosing a theme and an even bigger one is to make sure the theme is widget ready in the first place or you won’t be able to add anything.

Adding Widgets

Now lets add some widgets to Build a Blog with Wordpress and see what it looks like:

As you can see from this screen shot I’ve added just a few widgets to the sidebar and footer areas of the theme: an email blog subscription form, recent blog entries, my links, my Twitter feed, my Flickr feed, archives, categories and a tag cloud. They can also be easily removed from the menus by either drag and dropping again, or when setting the options for each widget it gives you the choice to delete the widget from the menu. Take a look at the test blog to see what they look like, and you’ll see how easy it is to add some great features and functionality to your blog.

Mandy

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What is a Widget and How Do I Use One?

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1. Go down to the Appearance tab on the left hand side of the dashboard and go to Appearance — Themes. It should take you to the Manage Themes page:

At the top it shows the theme that you are currently using and then underneath you can browse the themes available for your blog on Wordpress.com. You can either randomly browse, A-Z or by popular. At the moment there are 81 themes available but that figure grows all the time. You’ll see under the name of the theme there is a link for activate or preview, it’s pretty self explanitory click preview and a screen will appear with a preview of what your blog would look like using that theme. If you like it you can activate it, or you can close and keep looking.

For example here is what Build a Blog with Wordpress would look like using the Connections theme:

I changed the theme already from the Kubrick theme to the Pool theme and now I want to find one that fits the blog a little better. The only must have for me is that the theme is widget ready so it can be easily added to. Remember all themes are not equal, check it out before you decide. And in my opinion no theme is perfect, lets face it, it never is there’s always something that could work better or differently – or maybe thats just me?

Here are my 3 favourite themes:

It takes two minutes to actually change the theme – and two days to decide which one to use!!!

If you want to see a Photoblogging theme in action then you could take a look at my new photoblog which I created on Wordpress.com – Mandy Jones Photography.

Mandy

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How to Change Your Theme with Wordpress.com

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So lets get back to basics and break a blog down into it’s component parts. Below is a screenshot of our test blog using the Kubrick theme which comes as default with every new Wordpress blog, Build a Blog with Wordpress:

1. This is the blogs header area, it contains the blogs title and tagline and can also display images. The header is the first element of your blog that a reader will see, and with this theme it includes the blogs title and tagline.

2. This is the content area for the blog where your posts will appear. With the most recent post at the top and the rest in date order underneath. Blog posts can be just text but they can also contain images, video’s or podcasts.

3. This is the blogs sidebar where you can add widgets to add functionality to your blog. For instance with this theme as a default you get a link to the blogs pages, archives and categories. The blogroll is a list of your favourite links and the meta widget is a quick link to log into your blog. Or you could add widgets for Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or advertising the list goes on.

4. Is the blogs footer with a link to RSS subscriptions for posts and comments to the blog, and a link to Wordpress.com. But this can differ depending on the theme. You can also edit it to include copyright information.

Now take a look at the test blog with a different theme installed in this case the Pool theme, notice the slight difference in layout between the themes:

1. Header area, this time it just contains the blog’s title.

2. This is the blogs navigation bar containing tabs for the blogs pages, these can be added to as you build your blog. The navigation bar normally appears below the header but in some themes it can be above.

3. The content area including blog post and title, tags, category, date the post was published and a ‘leave a comment’ link. Commenting is a very important part of blogging letting you interact with your readers easily and vice versa.

4. The sidebar, depending on your blogs theme it could have 1, 2 or even 3 sidebars.

5. The footer, this footer has a link to the Theme developer’s site.

There are around 80 different themes to choose from with Wordpress.com, these themes can be customised and changed to make your blog look exactly how you want it to, which makes Wordpress extremely flexible to use. But the raw elements of a blog will always stay the same.

Next time we’ll look at how to select and change a theme with Wordpress.com

Mandy

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Anatomy of a Blog – Jargon Buster

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Right, so here we go, I’ll take you through step by step how to create the blog in the first place, by creating a test blog with Wordpress so you can follow and see exactly what we are doing at each stage. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments at the bottom of the post.

Step 1. Go to Wordpress.com, on the right it says, ‘Express yourself. Start a Blog.’ click on the ’sign up now’ button.

Step 2. It will take you to a form to create a Wordpress.com account. The Username and Password will be used to login to your blogs admin or backend where you’ll post and edit articles to your blog. It can be anything you want just make a note of it.

Step 3. On the next page you’ll choose the blogs domain name or URL (they all end in .wordpress.com) by default they put the username in that you’ve just picked, delete it and replace with whatever you want (you can’t change this). Here you’ll also choose the blog’s title which appears at the top of the blog (this you can change). When you sign up they will check if the blog domain name that you have chosen is unique before proceding, if not you’ll need to tweek until you find one thats not taken. At the bottom you can start filling your profile in now or wait til later. Last thing to do is activate your account by going to the email that they’ve just sent you and click the link.

Step 4. Voila, it’s done the blog is live! After activating the account you can login with the Username and Password that you just created. At the top of the Wordpress dashboard click on the blogs name and it will take you to your newly created blog, take a look around the blog (not much to see yet) and the dashboard, (all the major links are down the left hand side of the dashboard) this is where all the behind the scenes magic happens. At the moment it’s using the default theme that comes with every installation, the Kubrick theme (but we can soon change that).

Right, now we can start to make some changes. I’m going to change my blog title and blogs tagline (the line underneath the blog title – just another wordpress.com weblog) to start with, go back to the Wordpress dashboard and down the left hand side at the bottom go to Settings – General. Here I can change the blog title and blog tagline and then update.

Step 5. Next I want to get rid of the welcome post and the welcome comment that automatically appears whenever you start a blog. To do this you go to the dashboard again and in the middle you’ll see ‘right now’ with the number of posts, pages, comments etc.. underneath. Click on ‘1 post’ and wordpress will take you to the edit post screen, then hover over the title. Wordpress will give you the option to edit, quick edit, trash or view, just click on trash and it’s gone. Now you can write your own welcome post instead.

Now for the comment. Because you’ve deleted the post that the comment was attached to it deletes the comment as well. But while we’re on the subject here’s how to delete a comment: Underneath ‘right now’ you’ll see recent comments, again just hover over the comment and you’ll see 5 options: unapprove, reply, edit, spam or trash. You’ve got it, click trash!

Step 6. Last job to do is go and finish updating your profile. In the top right hand corner of the dashboard you’ll see Howdy [name] that link will take you to the profile page. Personally I scroll down to ‘Name’ and change my nickname and how my name displays publicly to something other than my username, so it’s harder for someone to hack into the blog. Fill in the rest to your own taste and then update profile at the bottom. Done.

Ok that’s it, for now anyway. It’s a very easy process and an easy blogging platform to use – especially when you know how. Here’s what the blog looks like now with the changes:

That didn’t take long. Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments…

Mandy

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How to Create a Blog Using Wordpress.Com

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A blog (a contraction of the term “web log“) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts. (Wiki)

Blogs are used for everything from an extension of a business and promoting it to a personal diary online that can only be seen by friends, so they’re extremely flexible. But what if you’ve never used one before, or want to start one and have no idea where to start or how to do it?

Choosing the Right Blog for You – What do you Want?

Well that reminds me of a conversation I had with my sister a couple of weeks ago. She’s an artist and has had a ‘proper website’ for a while, but like most people she has no experience in web design or maintenance, therefore no idea how to change or update it when needed so she has to rely on a friend who knows some web design, which is very limiting. That’s where blogs step in becuase anybody can create a website/blog and have full control over adding and changing the content very easily without having to know any web design. Realizing this she asked me for help with starting a blog, her only requirement being that it had to be free!

Obviously to have a blog on the internet it needs to be hosted so it can be seen. I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now and I feel Wordpress is the best blogging platform (software) out there and that’s what I use, and that will be the examples I use. Now there are 2 ways you can host a blog either you:

1. Use a service that hosts the blog on your behalf  (Wordpress.com) or
pros: it’s free
cons: limited features
2. You pick the blogging software that you wish to use and arrange your own hosting through a hosting company. (Wordpress.org)
pros: ultimate flexibility and features
cons: you have to pay for hosting

Wordpress For Absolute beginners

My advice for her was to start a blog at Wordpress.com which is a good place to start, and get used to how blogs work. It’s also the free version of Wordpress.org which I use on my blogs and I think is the best platform for blogging. So that sorts out her requirement – Free. Also if you want to upgrade to Wordpress.org in the future it’s easy to import all of your Wordpress.com blog over to the new Wordpress.org blog, so no worries there.

But while I talked her through setting the blog up I realised how much I take for granted when it comes to blogging knowledge, she knows nothing about blogging (I’m sure she won’t mind me saying that). So one question then leads to 20 more and one answer is a lot longer and indepth because it raises other issues. So with that in mind I’m starting an ongoing series of posts for absolute beginners using Wordpress.com, and I will be starting my own test blog to show step by step what to do.

So if you are interested in following this series then subscribe to my posts by RSS or email and you won’t miss any of them (I’ll get my sister to do that as well!).

Mandy

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Do You Need Help With Wordpress.Com?

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Anyway, I thought it was time for a change and a facelift for Build a Blog. It’s not just a cosmetic change that I’m looking for, I wanted some specific features for the blog. Like better integration of social media as well as the usual RSS feed, out of the box SEO optimisation and built in ad management. Mostly I wanted to find a theme that would work straight out of the box and was full of features, now that’s a nice little wish list on it’s own but I wanted all this in a free theme, if I was going to buy a theme then I already knew what I’d use (more of that to come). I suppose in one way this was quite a lazy approach but I didn’t want to have to fiddle about in the backend of the blog alot because I wanted to concentrate on content creation instead.

I know how hard it can be to find a quality free Wordpress theme so I’m sharing what I’ve found with you. Luckily I came across the Thrilling Theme for Wordpress by Cody McKibbon and knew straight away it was what I was looking for, it’s very neat and clean which makes it easy to use and has all of the main features (and more) that I was looking for. Here are some of my favourites:

• 4 Color Schemes – Shades of Grey, Thrilling Orange, Black & White, Icy Blue
• Search Engine Optimized
• Add your own snapshot image to the header
• Easy integration with Twitter and Flickr
• Tabbed features/popular posts & more in the sidebar
• Integration with FeedBurner email subscriptions
• 125×125 and 300×250 ad management
• 3 widget-ready sidebar areas
• Gravatar support in comments
• Compressed CSS & minified JavaScript for faster load time
• Custom page templates for archives, sitemap & photo galleries
• Easy customization with the integrated theme options page

Some of these features help cut down on the amount of plugins that I would use because they are already hard coded into the theme, which is great because that’s less to go wrong and have to maintain. The best part is that it’s free to use which surprised me because of the quality of the theme, you can donate though. Although there’s no proper support for the theme with it being free (it’s pretty straight forward) there is some help available in frequently asked questions that have been answered and bug reporting.

I’m really happy with the results and it was very easy to set up – So please take a look around and see what the theme can do? Let me know what you think in the comments…

Mandy

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A Thrilling Wordpress Theme…

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And here are 4 very good reasons why it’s a good thing to do:

1. Fix or remove broken links

Over time it’s easy for links to become broken, I even found one of my RSS links had broke and that’s obviously not good. So I checked through all my links to see if they still worked and if I wanted to still use them. The last thing I want to do is get my readers interested in my blog, only to run into a dead end or something off topic.
2. Tidy up sidebar

The same is true for the sidebar, again it’s easy for it to get cluttered with different elements that I am testing. So I did a de-clutter of the sidebar and looked at what was most useful. I think this is definitely a less is more scenario, because I want the sidebar to be clean and easy to search through for important information, like my RSS subscribe.

3. Update Plugins

I’ve noticed for a while little update messages appearing on some of my plugins in plugin management, obviously periodically authors will update their plugins and it’s important to update them when they are released. I kept putting it off and my Google Sitemap stopped working properly because of it. This caused all kinds of problems until I realised it was the missing upgrade that had caused it. Also if I am going to be upgrading Wordpress (which I was) I will upgrade all plugins first in case of compatibility issues.

4.Update Wordpress

I have now upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1. I did wait until the first update after the major upgrade had happened, before I upgraded just so the major bugs were fixed. But it is the biggest upgrade for a while and the whole look of the backend has changed. So I had to have a look around to get used to it and find everything again. I have to say I like the new look and I think it’s easier to navigate around.

Again the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin saved the day and I upgraded quickly with no problems (thank goodness). One thing I have noticed and I don’t see how there is any connection, but since upgrading Wordpress the traffic stats for the case study blog have increased. I’d imagine it’s just a coincidence.

This was quite a personal view of how I have given my blog a spring clean and the advantages I have seen because of it. I hope sharing it has been helpful.

Mandy

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4 Good Reasons for Spring cleaning your blog

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Wordpress 2.5 has just been released for the Wordpress.org blogging platform. And it looks to be a major upgrade to version 2.3.3 with lots of new features. You can read about them here.

If you would like to watch a 4 minute screencast showing you more then here’s the link. I really like the sound of the new uploader and gallery features.

I’m definitely going to be upgrading to it. There’s been over 90 people contributing to this version and they have been working on it for 6 months. So I’m looking forward to using it, it may take a while to get used to though.

Obviously there may be some teething problems, but the last 2 upgrades for 2.3 have been for bugs and they have both come out quickly and seemed to solve any problems.

Here’s the link for the download. Or do what I do and use the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Mandy

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Wordpress 2.5 is Here…

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And now I have just come across another extremely useful plugin, the RSS Footer plugin which adds a link back to your blog in your RSS feed. That is helpful in two ways:

1. To combat Scrapers, these are people that scrape the content off your blog and place it on theirs pretending that they produced it! So this plugin places a link back to your blog in the feed of your blog, telling everyone and more importantly the search engine bots who wrote the post originally.

2. It helps with rankings as each feed that is read with the back link in is helping with the blogs rankings.

RSS Footer Plugin

This is a really simple plugin to use and very effective. You just download the plugin and unzip, then upload the RSS Footer.php to your Wordpress plugin folder and activate. If you are not sure how to upload a plugin to Wordpress then take a look at the is article: How to install Wordpress themes and plugins.

Then you can choose where you want the link to appear in the feed, before or after and also if you want a link to the post itself as well as the blog.

I have just installed and activated this plugin on both of my blogs and I am amazed at how easy and quick it was to do. Just to make sure that Feedburner picks up the changes I also went to my Feedburner account and the troubleshootize page, and pinged Feedburner so it would go and check the blogs immediately.

Mandy

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RSS Footer Plugin – An Essential Plugin

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