My Recommended WordPress Plugins

• Aksimet – provides spam trapping; Akismet captures spam comments and puts them in a spam bucket; you’ll have to delete the spam manually; comes with WordPress
• Google XML Sitemaps – generates an XML sitemap (a robots.txt file) used by search engines; this helps the search engines read and categorize your pages and blog posts
• Maintenance Mode – turn it on and visitors see a page announcing that your site is under maintenance and will be back shortly; a good option if you’re making modifications to the layout or updating your theme; allows you to see your site while others will see the maintenance announcement
• WP-DBManager – provides a very nice tool set for managing you database; your page and post text is stored in a database; the database needs to be backed up regularly; DBManager also provides options to fix and optimize your database for optimal performance
• WordPress Backup – makes a zipped file of your theme and plugin files; has an option to email the files; note – it doesn’t back up all of your WordPress files, just the theme & plugin files
• WordPress Mobile Edition – creates a mobile phone friendly theme for your site; works with older phones as well as smart phones; install the plugin and the mobile theme and away you go; piece of cake! you may want to use WPtouch if most of your visitors will be using smart phones;

Other Helpful WordPress Plugins

• WP-SpamFree – prevents spam comments from being posted; you won’t even see the comments and don’t have to delete them; I recently added this to my site because I got tired of deleting spam comments trapped by Akismet
• WP Super Cache – creates a cache (HTML flat file copies) of your posts and pages so the data doesn’t have to be retrieved from the database; it may speed up a slow loading site
• All in One SEO Pack – creates site SEO options and individual post and page SEO options; allows you to specify content in the title tags, meta tags and keyword tags
• Bad Behavior – helps prevent bot spammers to your comments and contact forms; does a good job but doesn’t prevent everything
• Contact Form 7 – a widely used form creation plugin; fairly easy to use; a bit harder to style with CSS
• WordPress Table Prefix Rename – use this plugin to rename your database files; when WordPress is installed it uses default file names; hackers know the default file names and have developed some hacking techniques based on the default file names; you’ll need to use WP-DBManager to delete the old database files; if you do a manual WordPress install you can override the default file names and not need this plugin; be sure to delete this plugin after you’ve changed the database file names
• Viper’s Video Quicktags – an easy way to include videos from many sources (YouTube, Vimeo,Viddler, Blip.tv, etc.)

When selecting plugins, check the Last Updated date to verify that the plugin author is keeping it current. Also, look at the number of downloads. The more downloads there are, the more confident you can be that it’s a good plugin. Look at the Requires WordPress Version value to make sure it’s compatible with your installation.

What plugins do you like to use?

The best way to locate individuals is to ask around. Ask on sites where you hang out, ask others who have sites or ask your friends and neighbors. Word of mouth is the best way to find someone. After all, that’s really what the internet is all about. A big, gigantic community bulletin board!

What to Look For

1. Locate their web site. They gotta have one, right? Check it out. Does it have a nice design? Is it organized well? Is the information helpful? Does it have unique features? How does their portfolio look?
2. Determine how easy it is to contact this person. Is there a contact form? If not, you must be on the wrong site. Does the expert have a phone number? How about an address? Real businesses have phone numbers and addresses.
3. Determine if the expert does this for a living. If not, just have your neighbor’s son’s friend’s cousin set up your site. He’ll have it up and running in no time or when he gets around to it. You want an expert that is available during normal working hours not someone who sets up web sites at night and on the weekend. You may have to ask the expert to find out if he/she is full-time.

Try Out the Expert

1. Contact the expert using their contact form. How long does it take to get a response? Is the response helpful? Does their writing style work for you?
2. Call the expert. Does he/she answer or return your call within a reasonable period of time? How well do they communicate on the phone? Can the expert explain technical issues in an understandable way?
3. Start with a small job. If you want to try someone, ask if they’ll do a small job for you. It may cost you $25 or $50, but it may help you avoid a disaster. How quickly is the job done? Was the expert helpful in explaining what was done? Did they ask if you were satisfied before being paid?

Find a Good Mechanic

Most of us have cars. If you don’t, this analogy can be related to any other service provider. Anyway, most of us have an auto mechanic that we like to use. The mechanic I use is good, but I also think he’s expensive. However, I’ve had repairs done at other shops and settled on him. Even though I think he’s expensive, he does good work and I trust him. Therefore, I don’t care about the difference in price.

A good web site mechanic is worth their price. Find a good web site mechanic and stick with him or her. You won’t have to worry about the quality of their work. Besides, you can tell everybody your web site mechanic is the best, but boy is he expensive!

WordPress is a Great Start

WordPress makes the initial set up easy. Get a domain, get a web hosting account and install WordPress. The web hosting company may even provide a click and install option. How easy is that? Well, that’s just the beginning.

A basic WordPress, 5 plugins & theme install should be no more than $50.00. However, if you want a 100 page site, want to have memberships or sell hundreds of products that could be a bit more.

What Do You Want People To Be Able To Do On Your Site?

In order to determine an estimated price up front (notice I said estimated), you need to figure out what you want on the site. Just as important, you need to define what you want people to be able to do on your site. Here’s a beginning list of questions you need to ask yourself:

• How many pages do you want?
• Do you have a WordPress theme that you like?
• Is there anything you want changed in the theme?
• Do you have a custom logo to install?
• Do you have social links or icons you want set up?
• Do you want videos, audio clips or flash elements set up?
• Are you selling products? Hard goods? Digital?
• Will your site be a membership site?
• What do you want people to be able to do on your site? Sign up for a newsletter? Download your ebook? Sign up for your feed?

There are many more questions that you could ask yourself. If it’s not part of WordPress or your theme, that’ll be extra.

Start By Finding What You Like

The first thing you need to do is define what you like about certain sites. Second, find a WordPress theme that comes close to what you want. Determine what you want people to be able to do on your site. Last, find someone who can put it together for you if you can’t or don’t want to do it yourself. Once you define how much you want, how you want it to look and what you want people to be able to do, a price can be determined.

High FX Media offers a basic WordPress site for $399.95 or a complete hosted package for $64.95 per month. Check it out on the pricing page.

Some theme authors will put compiled code into a WordPress theme. Compiled code is a computer program that has been rendered for a computer to use. This compiled code looks like jibberish when viewed in a text editor. In the offending theme, removing the compiled code from the footer where it was located broke the theme. The theme wouldn’t display correctly when the offending code was removed. The author of this theme also had links back to his site hidden from view. Believe it or not, you can actually position web page elements (links, images, whatever) out of view. Weird, huh? Yeah, images can actually exist but not be visible on your monitor.

The purpose of putting this junk code into free themes varies. This particular author generated links to several sites which appeared in the footer. I must say that the linked sites were an odd collection of links. Very odd indeed. Other authors may actually put viruses into free themes. So the tale here is to only download free themes from sites that are mainstream. Also, if you know someone who has used a theme without problems, that’s a good source.

The absolute best place to get free themes is WordPress.org. If you’re familiar with sites like SmashingMagazine, this would be a good source also. Some premium theme authors offer free themes as well. My suggestion would be: If you don’t know the site, find someone who does. Otherwise, don’t download free themes from the site.

Okay, you want to know the culprit so you don’t download it. Here it is: Offending theme

The definition of a Content Management System (CMS) at Webopedia.com:

Abbreviated as CMS, a content management system, also called a Web management system is software or a group or suite of applications and tools that enable an organization to seamlessly create, edit, review and publish electronic text. Many content management systems offer a Web-based GUI, enabling publishers to access the CMS online using only a Web browser. Also, a CMS designed for Web publishing will provide options and features to index and search documents and also specify keywords and other metadata for search engine crawlers.

You may have noticed that the keys to a web site CMS are: 1) It’s software; 2) It manages content; 3) It has a user interface to manage the web site and content. These are the key elements of a web site CMS. WordPress is software. It manages your web site content. It has a user interface. Therefore it’s a CMS. It always has been a CMS!

Why do people use the incorrect statement, WordPress as CMS? I believe it’s being used incorrectly because WordPress was originally designed as a blogging tool. Bloggers create what are called posts rather than individual pages. Posts are the writings of the blogger. They are typically short (a few paragraphs) but may be longer. Posts are organized by categories which provide a mechanism to group related posts. A blogger typically updates their site on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The most recent posts are typically displayed on the home page. WordPress always had the ability to create pages but posts were emphasized for blogging. In the past, most WordPress users were bloggers who wrote posts.

Blogging is different from business web sites only in the way content is organized. Bloggers use posts and business sites typically use pages. The information on business pages tends to be a bit more static than blog posts. But there’s not a whole lot of difference.

In the past few years, people have begun recognizing how powerful WordPress has become. It’s being used more and more for web sites displaying only pages or mostly pages with a blog. Somewhere, somebody said, “Hey, this is like using WordPress as a CMS!” Ouch! They may have thought they discovered something new about WordPress. In reality they discovered nothing new.

To say you will use WordPress as a CMS is wrong because that implies a new use. It would be better to say you will be using WordPress for a page-based web site. WordPress is a CMS and it always has been one.

Ouch! You busted me. I’m an idiot. No, on second thought there are reasons why my site doesn’t validate. I wish it did and I wish I could make it validate.

Here are the reasons why it doesn’t validate as compliant XHTML:

1. Paypal buttons & graphics
2. Video plugin
3. WordPress WYSIWYG editor tag stripping!

I have a PayPal graphic in my sidebar that of course appears on every page. There are also some PayPal buttons on certain pages. These graphics and buttons are created by PayPal. PayPal creates them so they’ll work with any browser. In order to do that, they use older coding techniques. I could write CSS and modify the HTML so that it complies, but I don’t see the point. Besides, I don’t want to mess up the PayPal connection. I want the PayPal buttons to work.

I also have a video in my sidebar. There are videos on some of my blog pages also. The plugin I use for the videos generates the code for the videos. The author of the plugin uses the <embed> tag to define videos. This tag is not part of the XHTML specification. There’s a new one called <object> which would be compliant. Unfortunately, there isn’t good support in all browsers for the new tag. So the plugin author sticks with what works not what’s compliant. I don’t really want to hack the plugin just for compliance.

Last but not least, some genius over at WordPress.org decided to strip <p> tags out of the HTML editor. Really, you thought it would be a good idea to strip HTML tags out of an HTML editor? Man you guys are really smarter than the rest of us. I get really frustrated now when I switch between the WYSIWYG and the HTML editor. The <p> tags disappear and now my page is screwed up! Why? Why are you stripping tags out of the HTML editor? You’re wasting my time and messing with my pages! I feel better now, but sometimes there are missing <p> tags.

Some people place a high emphasis on compliance. I too would like to have my site comply but it would take a lot more effort than it’s worth. Compliance simply means that your code complies with a strict set of rules. If your pages aren’t compliant, they will still work and nobody will notice. It’s really not that big of a deal. Unless you’re one of those snob coders.

WordPress is great. I love it. But if you want to work with open source software, themes and plugins, it will be difficult to achieve compliance. Open source means most of the people who create WordPress, themes and plugins don’t make money. They create their products with what works, not what is strictly compliant. Deal with it. Or have your site hand coded at great expense.

July 2010 Update

I recently changed my video plugin to Viper’s Video Quicktags. Viper uses the XHTML compliant object tag correctly. Video elements on this site now validate correctly. Hmmm… how can I get PayPal buttons to validate correctly. Well, that’s just another task to add to my list!

This video will show you how to implement specific CSS fixes for IE6. See how to create a separate CSS file for IE6 fixes. See how to modify the header (header.php) to include fixes only for people running older versions of IE. This video uses the TealGray premium WordPress theme.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s Part 1:

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Here’s Part 2:

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View or Download the Files Used in the Video

Here are the files associated with this video. The files are saved as text files. You can download them by right-clicking on them and selecting “Save Link As…”. Save the HTML files with a .html file extension and the CSS files with a .css extension on your hard drive. Clicking on the links will open the text file in a new window.

HTML table: HTML Table

CSS row table: Row table HTML, Row table CSS

CSS column table: Column table HTML, Column table HTML

I hope you found this video interesting. Feedback is always welcome (good or not so good) so let me know what you think: Did the video help? What are you wearing (just kidding)? Was it incredibly boring? What other videos would you like to see?

WordPress is Software

WordPress is a free software application designed to function as a web site. It provides a web page layout that defines how your web pages look. It also provides the functionality to navigate from one page to another. Navigation can be in the form of links or a navigation bar. Lastly, WordPress provides an administration panel so you can add, modify or delete information on your website. The administration panel also allows you to install WordPress updates, add plugins or themes to your site, change default settings and other technical aspects of your web site. You can get it free here: WordPress.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress is open source software which means the code is available for modification. Plugins are programs which are added to the WordPress software to provide a specific function. When added to a WordPress site, the plugin remains separate from the WordPress code and works with it to provide that function. Plugins are designed to provide many different functions. You might add a plugin to make it easier to add videos or a custom contact form. There are plugins available for many specific functions. Free WordPress plugins are available here: WordPress Plugins.

WordPress Themes

WordPress comes with two page layouts. Page layouts are called themes by WordPress people. These themes determine where text, images, videos and other elements are displayed on a page. Themes can be free or cost money. Free themes are available on WordPress.org and many other sites. Themes that cost money are called premium themes. There are many premium themes available. People pay money for premium themes because they may look nicer, may be professionally coded, may have more features or may provide better technical support.

You Need to Select a WordPress Theme

If you’re in the process of setting up your first web site and want to use WordPress, you’ve made a good choice. The most important thing you need to do is to select a theme. You can find themes using the links at the end of this article or do a search on your favorite search site. Just search for WordPress themes, free WordPress themes or premium WordPress themes.

WordPress was originally designed as blogging software. As a result, many early templates were designed around the needs of bloggers. WordPress has gained widespread acceptance so there are many types of themes available today. If you want to set up a blog site you’ll find so many options it will boggle your mind. If you want to set up a web site for a business you’ll probably have a different look in mind. The wide acceptance of WordPress has encouraged theme designers to create many themes around a business look. People searching for business type themes will be impressed as well.

Can I Have a Custom Theme?

You may want your site to look like no other. Who doesn’t? If you want a custom theme you can have it. But it will cost you money. If you want a custom theme do a search for custom WordPress themes. You’ll find many companies that can create one for you. Or if you like the do-it-yourself approach, you can contract for a custom theme on Elance.com or Guru.com.

Don’t forget that any theme can be modified. Even though you’re using a theme that others use, it can be made to look unique. Also, some premium themes come with features that allow you to make design changes by selection options in their administration panel.

How Do I Select a WordPress Theme?

What type of theme depends on your customer or who you expect to visit your site. If  you want to blog, visitors will expect to see written posts, audio links, photos and videos about your blog topic. Blog themes are designed to emphasize the most current posts to a site. They typically have a number of current posts visible on the home page. Older posts are accessed by using links like the navigation bar.

Businesses on the other hand may want to have their products or services emphasized on the home page. This information wouldn’t change daily as it would on a blog site. Businesses would want to select a theme that has more flexibility in using pages than a blog theme might allow.

No matter what your intent with your site, color, fonts, graphics and animation all affect a visitor’s interest in your site. You have very little time to get a visitors attention. Using the wrong colors for example can drive visitors away. For example, what colors come to mind when you think of a funeral home and a video game retailer. They’re both businesses, but if the funeral home used lime green and orange as their primary colors you’d probably go to another funeral home site. Lime green and orange could be great colors to use on a video game retailer site.

When selecting a theme, focus on your customer or visitor – how old are they, what feeling or emotion do we want to elicit when they visit, are they mostly males or females, what’s their income bracket & what level of education have they achieved. Last but not least, what do they want to do when visiting your site? Understanding your visitor will guide you in selecting an appropriate theme.

How Do I Get Help to Set Up a Site?

If you’re not technically inclined, there are many people who are willing to help you install and configure your site. Non-profits can even have their site set up for free by the WordPress.org people. For the rest of us, there are two options. Figure it out as we go or pay someone to help.

If you want the challenge, learning how to do a basic WordPress install and adding a theme isn’t that difficult. Most web hosting companies have an automatic install program for WordPress. So installation can be relatively easy. After that, you’ll want to spend some time on WordPress.org or any of a number of other sites providing information on how to add pages, posts, install plugins, update WordPress, add images and many other topics. If you have some time you can do it.

If you don’t want to learn or don’t have the time, there are many people who will help you for a fee. You can search on a search engine like Google for WordPress help, WordPress installation help, paid WordPress help or maybe WordPress paid support. You should find many people available to help you.

You can also post your job on sites like Elance.com or Guru.com. If you use a site like Elance.com, be as specific as possible with your job requirements. Provide the theme name you’ve chosen or specify that you want the contractor to recommend one. Also, provide any other information like the number of pages or categories you want and any special features. You’ll get a better match between your expectations and the bid price.

Free WordPress Themes:

WordPress.org Themes

Themes2WP.com

Smashing Magazine 2009 Favorites

instantShift Favorites

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