The main reason I moved http://www.hotva.co.uk over from a HTML site to a Wordpress site was because the way I had set it up meant that if I needed to change information on the menu, the header or the footer I would have to do it on every single page. You can imagine the time it took to do this.

It is so much easier now and only needs to be updated on one page.

It was also a bind to update my copyright year, every year on every page. That was until I found this snippet of code which does it automatically. The video above shows you how to insert the code into a Wordpress footer.

Below is the code to copy and paste into your website. You will need to replace the year and Your Company Name.

<mce:script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”><!– today=new Date(); y0=today.getFullYear(); // –></mce:script> </p> <p>Copyright &copy; 2008 – <mce:script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”><!– document.write(y0); // –></mce:script>Your Company Name. All Rights Reserved.</p> <p>

Instructions if needed
Click inside the box and right click and highlight Select All.
Right click and select Copy.
Right click and select Paste.

It’s funny how when you create one post you come across problems which can then be used for further posts. In my case it was embedding a Camtasia video into this post and also adding code into a post. These will be the subjects of my next posts!

If you haven’t got access to this course yet, go to Courses tab above and grab it while it’s still FREE!

Thanks

In brief he recommended that you should:

1. Set up Permalinks
2. Add the Plugin Akismet
3. Add Google Sitemaps
4. Add the All-in-One SEO Pack
5. Add a Web Feed Management Service
6. Add a Contact Form
7. Add Tags to a post
8. Keep the Design Simple

Below I outline what I have implemented on my blog and how I have done it:

Permalinks

This is the very first thing that I did before creating any posts or pages. Permalinks will give your posts and pages a meaningful name. If you don’t set up permalinks, Wordpress will name the post/page with an identifier such as yourdomainname/?p=5. This will not help the posts and pages to be found in searches. By setting the permalinks to name the post or page url to be the same as the title, it will greatly improve the Search Engine Optimization. For example this post will be have a url of http://www.hotvasoftware.com/8-must-dos-for-a-successful-wordpress-blog.html. If someone searches for help on what you must do to set up a successful blog then my blog is more likely to appear in the search results than a post with the url www.hotvasoftware.com/?p=5.

To set your permalinks go to Settings > Permalinks > Common Settings > Click on custom structure and add /%postname%.html. Patrick’s article stated to add /%postname% but I later read an article stating that adding the .html will allow the pages to be indexed quicker.

You must be aware that no blog post can have the same title.

Akismet Plugin

The Akismet plugin is a MUST. Akismet checks user comments to see if they contain spam or not. So far all my comments have been spam, so this is a lifesaver. The comments are moved into a spam folder for you to check.

When I downloaded Wordpress 2.8 and looked at the Plugins, Akismet was already there and required activation. To activate it you require an AKI key that is provided by Wordpress when you sign up for an account.

Where can I find my AKI key?

To find your AKI key log into your www.wordpress.com Account. Go to My Account > Edit Profile and your key will be displayed at the top of the page.

Google Sitemaps

As blogs are always changing, Google Sitemaps is an extremely useful plugin. It will keep an updated sitemap file of your blog. This contains links to all your Wordpress posts. This will help search engines like Google to crawl and index your blog pages more intelligently.

Google Sitemaps can be found at the Wordpress site. You must have knowledge of using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) in order to upload the plugin file to your web server. It was easy to download and I was able to generate a sitemap immediately. Google sitemaps will automatically update the sitemap according to the settings.

All-in-One SEO Pack

I decided not to add this as I found there were too many negative comments about it. Here’s the link All in-One SEO Pack for you to make up your own mind.

Add a Web Feed Management Service

I have recently done this and it was extremely easy. A web feed management provider will allow people to subscribe to your blog. They will then receive all the content from your blog without actually revisiting the blog.

FeedBurner is a free web feed management provider owned by Google. You will need to create an account (unless you already have a Google account) and then enter your blog URL and add “/feed/rss2/” at the end of it if you changed the permalinks as described above. If not, you can add “/wp-rss2.php” at the end of your blog URL. You are then given instructions on how you go about putting a link on your blog. Feedburner will provide you with information such as how many people have subscribed to your blog and what posts have been read. You can also add adsense to your feeds.

There are services available that allow you to see the content of multiple blogs in one program. One such service is Google Reader and if you already have a Google account just sign in with those account details.

Contact Form

I was glad to find out there was a plugin contact form to use, as I had so many problems in the past with finding contact form scripts and also spam. It is really easy to set up and can be found here. The user filling out the contact form has to answer a question set by you.

Add Tags to Post

Tags are basically keywords that relate to your page or post content. It is advisable to use tags from the start. They are micro-categories for your blog. If a user clicks on one of your tags then posts with similar tags will show. So how many tags do you add to your post? At the start I went a bit mad with tags and included every topic covered in the post. I have since discovered top affiliate marketers (or the SEO plugin they use) use about 5 tags for a post. I have just figured out that you can delete tags by using the Quick Edit feature.

Keep the Design Simple

There are so many free Wordpress templates about. If you decide to go down this route then look at the code before you start. I recently did a project and gave my client the option of using a free Wordpress Blog template or having a customised website created. The Wordpress blog was the cheaper option and this is what my client opted for. I selected a number of templates for her to choose from but didn’t look at the code. When I came to updating the template that she chose I found the code was very difficult to understand. In my opinion, this is not good code.

This blog was created using a Wordpress Theme from Brian Gardner that I decided to purchase after reading Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. The code was really easy to understand and it was well worth paying £37.29 GBP ($59.95 USD).

Good luck with your first blog and if you have any questions please ask.

It was a huge learning curve as it was my first Wordpress blog. The code was beautiful, until I got my hands on it! I am extremely pleased with what I have managed to do so far and with the quality of the theme.

I experienced problems with images from the start. When I first uploaded the theme it didn’t look right and none of the images were showing.

I contacted Brian on a Sunday evening and was not expecting an answer until at least the Monday. I received a response within an hour. He stated that the theme had been corrupted during the upload process and to try uploading it again. I did, but with the same result. I emailed him back and he uploaded the theme for me. It was all ready for me to mess up the code on Monday morning. Fantastic customer service.

Anyway, the problem with the images! I accidentally deleted all the images from my virtual assistance site . Being highly organised I had a backup. I uploaded the images and discovered that the images were being corrupted during the upload process to my web server (Brian was right all along!). I downloaded Filezilla, another FTP program, and uploaded the images without any problems.

I was uploading the images manually to my web server and all was OK. I then discovered that Wordpress could upload the images for you, via the Add Media link. But low and behold, it didn’t work.

After searching the internet for a solution and much investigation the problem was very simple. If you are experiencing problems, these are some of the resolutions I came across while investigating.

Try these:

1. Go to Settings > Miscellaneous > Store uploads in this folder. Check the directory where it is uploading your images to. This was actually my problem. It was pointing to hotvasoftware/wp-content/uploads. As my website is hotvasoftware.com it was creating a new directory called hotvasoftware. It is now using the default setting of wp-content/uploads and appears to be working.
2. Check the file permissions on wp-content. Here’s a good forum post on file permissions http://wordpress.org/support/topic/194297.
3. Apparently, plugins can cause problems. As I had no plugins on my blog at the time, I could take this out of the equation. If you have a number of plugins, try disabling them and adding them back, one at a time, to see if one of them is causing a problem.

I noticed that Wordpress 2.8.1. is now available so you could always try upgrading.