Beginners Guide to Using Wordpress by Michael Fletcher

Wordpress is a blogging platform. With each new version Wordpress is becoming a serious contender as a fully fledged Content Management System for blogging and non-blogging projects alike. Because Wordpress is database driven, unlike traditional HTML websites, users can focus on the quality of content without having any web design knowledge.

Posts and Pages

Wordpress sites are made up of Pages and Posts. Pages are generally for information which needs to be constantly available. Examples of pages are "About" or "Contact pages" these contain information which the author would want to be available regardless of which page they're on, on the blog.

Posts on the other hand are the standard format of, you guessed it, blog posts. These are typically stored in date order. The most recent posts are stored on the front page of your wordpress blog by default, though this can be changed if needs be.

Posts are organised in Categories and with tags. Categories organise posts into broad sub-topics. Tags are keywords which may be of special interest to readers. They will then be able to view all posts tagged with a particular word which interests them.

For example had this article been on a Wordpress blog about Wordpress blogs, the Category for this post might be called For Beginners, and the tags might be:

Beginner, plugins, pages, posts, themes, dashboard

The Dashboard

Everything in Wordpress is controlled from the Admin area. From the Admin area you can can create posts and pages, install and change themes, install and edit plugins and manage all of your Wordpress settings and administrative tasks.

Plugins - Adding Functionality

Plugins are the custom parts typically written by 3rd party developers that add functionality to your Wordpress blog. Plugins range from solutions to increase the performance of your blog to plugins that will turn your blog into a membership site or e-commerce solution.

Once you've installed Wordpress you may be slightly underwhelmed by what it has to offer. It is important to remember that Wordpress provides the basic blogging functionality. In order to emulate the sleek and sexy blogs out there you'll need to put some time into installing the right plugins to make your wordpress blog work for you.

Plugins can be installed and configured from within the admin area.

Themes - Adding personality

The entire look and feel of your wordpress site is determined by theme files. The best themes have a number of options which can be changed from within the admin area. The less options a theme has the less you will be able to customize it without specialist knowledge and the more likely it is that you will end up with a bland or unoriginal looking site. Good options to look for in a first theme are options to insert a logo and adjust the number or width of columns. If you can find a theme with colour options that is very useful as well, as you'll be able to change your theme look without having to learn a new set of theme options.

Be a blogger not a web designer

These are the basics of Wordpress. The whole purpose of Wordpress is to make your blog setup as easy as possible so you can focus on content. The beauty of Wordpress lies in the fact that you can be as technical as you want. If you are very interested in the inner workings, you'll find there are more than enough resources on the web that will show you how to do pretty much anything in Wordpress. If you're just interested in writing you'll find that if you put a bit of time into setting Wordpress up correctly you won't need to do anything but write content until you next decide your blog needs a facelift.

About the Author

As a long time Wordpress user I have seen Wordpress develop into a winner in the CMS market. Ideally suited to Beginner Blog Builders Sign up to my Newsletter for additional information about building your first blog as well as 30 of the best Ebooks available for bloggers.

7 Important Step To Start Your New Blog by Ryan

The most common question that you should ask yourself when starting a new blog is how to get it quickly exposed to as many readers as possible. You can use Google AdWords, Bidvertiser, AdBrite, Chitika or even Facebook ...to advertise your site but what happens if you do not have enough budget for such expensive marketing campaigns?

I asked myself the same question when I started this blog. It is new and maybe no one knows it if I do not take any actions. There are a lot of advertising networks out there but I do not choose any instead of using my own knowledge and experiences. You can do that too without any investment. Your blog will surely be indexed by almost search engines and traffic will definitely be generated. How to do that?

1. Submit your URL to search engines

Most of bloggers that I have ever talked with told me that their major source of traffic are from Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. Direct traffic and referring sites are not much. That is why you should submit your URL to these search engines once your blog is launched.

Submit to Google Submit to Yahoo Submit to Bing

Your blog can not automatically be indexed by these search engines. If yes, it will take long time to have your blog exposed. You do not need to wait until then, just take a small action and see your immediate results.

2. Sitemap to guide search engines to crawl your blog properly

No matter what platform your blog is using either WordPress, Joomla, Blogger or Drupal, sitemap should be a MUST for any blog. You can follow these link to add your sitemap to these search engines to track its effectiveness:

Google Webmaster Tools Yahoo Site Explorer Bing Webmaster Tools

These tools will show you how frequently search engines crawl your sites and how many URLs have been indexed among total links of your blog...

3. Add your blog to relevant directories.

There are thousands blog directories on the internet and most of there are free of charge. You can sign up and add your blog to relevant niche directories. These directories usually require a backlink from your blog, however, it is win-win strategy and you will get traffic and backlinks from them too.

I can not list out all blog directories in this article and I will share with you that list in the near future. You can do a research with Google and following this link to get most of them.

4. Make up your blog

You hate ugly design? Most of us love professional design with standard coding and our readers do too. There are a lot of free or paid themes that you can use for your blog. If you are using Thesis theme, you can customize your layout with over 130 thesis theme tutorials. I have done this step for my blog and it looks no longer ugly.

Frankly, the first impression is very important and your first time readers can be your loyal ones too if you show them that your blog is a professional one and you are doing a real job.

5. Using some plugins as a stepping stone.

Your contents are unique and original but are you sure it can be easily and quickly exposed to the world? It can be but very slow. However, you can use some plugins to reduce your time.

All in one SEO pack Google XML Sitemap Generator SEO Friendly Images Social bookmarking tools like Digg Digg, ShareThis...

These plugins will help you fix the GAP that you can not do or accidentally forgot. You can create compelling contents but you can miss something during your writing process like wrong coding, missing ALT tag for image...These plugins can do that for you.

6. Parasitic with social media and bookmarking sites

Social media and bookmarking sites are big source of traffic if you know the right way to maximize your submission. However, many of you have never thought that you could parasitic with these networks to get your articles quickly indexed and building more backlinks to your blog. If your blog is new, I am sure that your blog will quickly be indexed if your submit your first article to several sites like Digg, Mixx, BlogEngage...

I have done this successfully and my blog's first article got indexed in just 5 minutes even not registering with Google, Yahoo or Bing. That is also a good way to build relationships with other readers and they can be your potential clients later on.

7. Blog commenting

Many bloggers are very lazy and not checking around the internet to see what blogs they should leave comments on. There are a lot of blogs that you can share ideas and feedback on their articles. However, my advice is that you should leave valued comments on high profile blogs with high PR and ranking. These HOT blogs are extremely fast indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing and your link will have good opportunity to co-indexed too.

Don't spam links as your URL can potentially be blacklisted and never eligible to leave comments on these sites too.

About the Author

My name is Ryan and Im an admin of Blog Tips World

Introduction To Blogging(earn money) by Hassan Waheed

Introduction To Blogging

The best blogging is defined in the most precise way by wordpress as following

What is a "blog"? "Blog" is an abbreviated version of "weblog," which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog features diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites, usually presented as a list of entries in reverse chronological order. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.

Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, home staging, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all types of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author's daily life and thoughts.

What's In It For You

There are several reasons a person might choose to blog some of them might be as under

<strong>Hobby</strong> Blogging can be the favorite pastime of any blogger. They love to spend time on internet to research new ideas and then they want to follow to share these ideas with other people beveling that "sharing is caring"

Exposure Blogging has to offer lots of exposure with all the other perks on the table. From east to west due to the spider web it is easier to get recognized from japan to the USA. And the rise in popularity brings happy moments as a prize to the blogger.

Speak your voice One of the most effective ways to say out loud to the people your opinion is the blogs in this era. You can make up a community to speak on any topic and it can act as a newspaper or some kind of media to convey your message to general masses.

Socialization When you step foot into the blogging world you get to meet new people from different corners of the world of different backgrounds and you develop a social circle.

Money Money is one of the most delightful outcome of blogging. There are a number of ways to make money online. Most of the blogger out there did not started to make money but with the time they realized it's importance and started to monetize their blogs. But some still think it's not fair to commercialize their blog well it's all upto you and now a days a number of people are targeting this outcome of blogging. And following the theme of earningspider we will be going through all the steps to start a blog.

About the Author

check out at Earning Spider

Creating a Functional and Appealing Senior Space in Dallas, TX by Ruby Bhayani

Creating a Functional and Appealing Senior Space in Dallas, TX Most senior spaces, if focused on function over form, start to resemble medical facilities characterized by neutral shades, sparse decoration, and almost no effort to disguise items that remind seniors of their health conditions. While it's indisputable that seniors need certain pieces of furniture and layouts in their spaces, these elements don't have to be devoid of style and attractiveness. The following tips for designing successful senior spaces are both practical and sensitive, helping you to make the most of a room or building to satisfy seniors' needs and desires.

Getting the Functional Elements in Place * Stairs are an obvious challenge to seniors, so keep everything they need on one level of the home. If you're preparing to have a senior relative live in your home, you can convert an office or college son or daughter's bedroom on the first floor into a bedroom for your senior. * To enhance a senior's sense of independence, lower countertops for those confined to wheelchairs so they can continue to participate in activities like cooking. * If possible, create a "wet room" instead of a bathroom for your senior. This means eliminating all curbs and obstacles in the bathroom so that seniors with wheelchairs or other mobility aids can use the shower more easily. A drain in a gently sloping floor can help accomplish this. You might also consider placing slip prevention mats in the shower area. * Make sure that you have traction strips on any stairs or walkways outside your house so that your senior won't be confined to the house in bad weather. * Low storage areas are a must. They should be well above knee level, but still within reach of someone in a wheelchair. Make sure that you have these storage areas in kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom areas. * Install railings and grab bars. If you have stairs and your senior isn't wheelchair-bound, some railings on both sides of your stairwell can help increase their mobility from one level to the next. Grab bars should be installed for wheelchair-bound seniors to enable them to pull themselves to a standing position. They should be located near the shower, toilet, and other areas that might warrant standing up. Incorporating a Pleasing Aesthetic * When painting areas designed for seniors, choose bright colors and stay away from neutrals. You might consider using colors that evoke memories, so try to picture an area that your senior enjoys and paint with those hues. Ceilings don't have to be white and trim doesn't have to blend in, so don't be afraid to add some extra interest with contrast. * Choose colorful window treatments to help brighten up a room. You might look for fabrics that have bold patterns to keep a room's appearance attractive. * Try to evoke a vacation theme like a lakeside cottage or beach resort. Although this may be difficult to achieve with functional senior furniture, you can use creative lighting, bedspreads, pillows, sofa and chair coverings, and other decorative but unobtrusive items like posters and framed pictures to enhance your theme. * Consider adding a large corkboard to your senior's bedroom wall. Pictures of favorite memories, a calendar, and other mementoes can be placed on the board for your senior's enjoyment.

Author: Alexis Bonari, a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching areas of online education. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

Visit us at www.seniorcarecompanion.com or www.seniorcaredallas.net for more assistance with your aging loved ones.

About the Author

Rubyna Bhayani ,Registered Nurse ,Certified Case Manager with extensive clinical experience in the fields of Geriatric Case Management, Long Term Disability Management and Home Health Services. Proud owner and manager of Senior Care Companion, in-home Personal Care Assistance Provider.

Three Must-Have Internet Business Tools by Greg McGavock

When starting or expanding an internet business, there are a number of tools that an entrepreneur must have at hand to help guarantee ultimate success and profits. Just like a carpenter or a plumber, there are a number of companies or brands that offer similar products and services and each individual will have his or her own preference. However, the types of tools required generally remain the same. Whose tools you decide to use is a decision ultimately left up to you, but please make sure you've familiarized yourself with all of your options before selecting the items you'll be using to sculpt your internet business.

Among the easiest ways to begin making online is through a website or blog of some kind. Whether you're looking to write reviews of the different cell phones you've used over the years or offering recipes to those willing to read them, every website has the potential to bring in some extra cash. Unfortunately, creating the website can be the only barrier between internet entrepreneurs with a million great ideas and the visitors anxious to read his or her content. It doesn't have to be that way.

There are a number of platforms out there that make setting up a website so simple that many newcomers to the internet business world are able to do so in a matter of minutes. These types of platforms, often referred to as CMS or Content Management Systems, are offered by a number of different groups and can allow you to setup your own site, customize it with a theme of your choosing and begin adding content the same day. My personal favorite, WordPress, allows you to setup a site on their servers or upload your own to a shared hosting account for even greater control. Blogger, Joomla and Drupal are some other top names in the CMS category, but a quick online search will reveal the staggering number of options you have when selecting a website platform.

Because launching a website has been made so easy, entrepreneurs everywhere have already made the internet business leap by launching one or more sites of their own. WordPress currently powers millions of websites, and that's not including any businesses launched around the dozens of other popular platforms. With these sorts of numbers, you may get the impression that competing with everyone else is near impossible. While getting your website noticed online has been made a bit more difficult over recent years, there are a number of tools that have been developed to help entrepreneurs scope out unfilled demand among consumers worldwide.

Since many entrepreneurs will initially look to big name search engines like Google and Bing for traffic, a successful internet business owner pays careful attention to the keywords he or she hopes to get noticed by. All online searches begin with a keyword or keyphrase of some kind, and internet entrepreneurs have learned to strategically target these important keywords when creating content and purchasing ads for their sites. A powerful keyword research tool makes the process of finding untapped keywords a quicker, less painful task.

There are a number of tools out there that allow you to perform this kind of research, both paid and free. Google AdWords Keyword Tool is among the free options and allows webmasters to search for and retrieve data on a number of keywords and keyphrases related to their business. A good keyword research tool offers up important data like level of competition within that keyphrase and the amount one would expect to pay for paid traffic to a website targeting those keywords.

The last type of tool I'd like to discuss is probably the least utilized out of the three but offers the greatest potential for residual internet income. Email marketing platforms provide a simple way for entrepreneurs to collect names and email addresses of visitors to their site for future use. Similar to a good keyword research tool, an entrepreneur could expect to pay a one-time or even recurring cost for a powerful email marketing platform. However, services like MailChimp provide entrepreneurs with a great way to try out email marketing until they've grown to the point where they can afford to pay for a larger solution.

With a quality collection of visitor emails and names, an internet entrepreneur can continue to pitch valuable products and services to visitors long after they've left his or her website. Just keep in mind that you'll need to provide an incentive for visitors to hand over their email addresses. Many successful entrepreneurs offer exclusive downloads or premium content to those willing to sign up to their email marketing list.

About the Author

Whether you're already running a successful internet business, or interested in launching your first one, be sure to strongly consider each of these tools for your online arsenal. For additional tips and tools, including a detailed list of additional internet business resources, be sure to visit the internet business opportunities HQ.

Get On The WordPress Trend With Most Demanding Features by Kabir Bedi

When it comes to blogging, Wordpress is considered first. This application is available as open source download, which can be setup and install on the server as well as on a hosted platform at WordPress.com.

According to Google, “WordPress.com is titled as the 12th most visited site is the world, with nearly 120 million unique visitors in a month.”

After the release of latest WordPress 3.0, the open source effort continues to move beyond its basic blogging system and includes expansive content-management capabilities. WordPress 3.0 allows you run as many blog as you wish to by deploying a single WordPress installation across those many sites. This addition of multisite capability is something which is favorably welcomed by blogging community, despite of having some limitations to it. Here are few features of WordPress explained that are most in demand among the bloggers;

An In-Built Welcome Note

Many WordPress Users have often highlighted their inconvenience while setting up their site for the first time. So, the first time registered users suggested to built-in “Welcome to WordPress” guide for people who are new to this. It will help them learn how to change sites, edit comment options, add profiles, add widgets, pick themes or an ability to skip, if required.

Multi-Domain Support

Since the latest version of WordPress has been introduced, it was observed that the merging of WordPress and WordPress MU is not designed by keeping common blogger in mind. It is more suitable for bigger reasons like organizations and universities where they have to offer blogs to their staff and students respectively under one domain. This feature that helps manage blogs with different domains with included multiple domain capability is the one change that people are favoring it for.

Reordering of Page and Post of Content

In WordPress, to include a drag and drop page editor for reordering pages is long awaited. With this feature, reordering of pages would surely become much easier. Some users have more than 1000 posts in their blog site that makes it impossible to manage their content. This tool will help arrange them as per their themes, for audience.

A New Theme

Users usually get bored of using something for long time. Therefore, people welcomed a new default theme added to WordPress 3.0. Some of the users have called for a skeleton default theme suitable to their needs. Also popular is having a default theme, especially suited to non-blog sites.

Increased Security

This feature, without a surprise, is high up on list of many bloggers. With new WordPress 3.0, security has become a greater concern. To execute this, few things like improved registration with configurable features and extra fields would be of some help. Also, people are unhappy with the way WordPress stores passwords in plain text.

Advanced Back-End Support

A quicker-to-load-and-run back-end support to WordPress is most in demand. Particularly, the setting and tool tabs that are available in the open source application demands a particular attention, as they get overrun quickly with links from plugins. In addition to it, if users would be able to try the back-end of a wholly new theme for few period of time without visitors notice any change on the site.

Galleries

Can be called as the most talked about subject when it comes to WordPress. Bloggers want their image content to be controlled by them similarly as they have power over their written content. This will encourage the ability to share your albums with others, which is an interesting idea.

WordPress 3 is an awesome CMS application and provides greater control in terms of management, presentation and organization of content. However, they need to incorporate above features, as suggested by most bloggers, to make it more flexible and usable.

About the Author

Kabir Bedi is a senior web consultant at LeXolution IT Services, best web design company in India. He supporting his team for creating easy to use web based Content Management Systems (CMS) to facilitate the management of his client's websites.

WordPress Self-Hosted Blogs - Part 1 - How to Create a Page by Poncho Boojo

These step are based on the WordPress 2.7 version, which is the newest version to date.

CREATING A NEW POST

1. New Post button: Click on the New Post button and then type in your title in the title field. Titles are seen in summaries on RSS feeds, so it is very important to have a strong title with keywords whenever possible.

2. Blog Post: Now write your blog post in area provided and format it with font colours, headers, paragraph font, and add media such as pictures, video, and/or audio.

3. Excerpt: Go to the Excerpt field and write a quick, keyword-rich excerpt or summary of your blog post.

4. Trackback Links: If you have discussed another person, especially a blogger or their article, be sure to put a trackback link to let them know.

5. Discussion: Go to the discussion field and allow or disallow comments on your post. I always allow comments on my blog but do not allow them when I create a page. By default, "allow pingbacks" is set. Leave the setting and allow pingbacks.

6. Tags: add tags as per the previous instructions and remember that they are particular to each post you create.

7. Categories: choose and select the most appropriate category for your post

8. Publish: go up to the publish box and adjust the settings as you want them. You can publish immediately, set a future date, or save it as a draft.

Congratulations!! You have just created a blog post!

CREATING A NEW PAGE

1. New Page: Click on the drop down arrow on the New Post button and click on New Page. As with creating a new post, type in your title in the title field.

2. New Page Content: Now write the content for your new page in area provided and format it with font colours, headers, paragraph font, add media such as pictures, video, and/or audio. Remember that pages are static content and are used for "About Us", "Contact Us", and so on.

3. Discussion: Go to the discussion field and allow or disallow comments on your post. I normally do not allow comments on my pages, but do allow them on my blog posts. By default, "allow pingbacks" is set and you can leave it at that.

4. Attributes:

a. Parent: you can choose to have this page be a main page, or a subpage of an already established page. Read the example they give in this area.

b. Template: If your theme has custom templates for pages, you will see them in the drop down list-you can apply a template to the page you just created if you want to. See the example given.

c. Order: you can change the order of how your pages appear on the navigation bar. Read the example given.

5. Publish: go up to the publish box and adjust the settings as you want them. You can publish immediately, set a future date, or save it as a draft.

Congratulations!! You have just created a New Page!

About the Author

To learn more about Kathleen, Virtual Assistant and founder of The Savvy VA, go to her site address is: http://thesavvyva.com
Check my services page for details about Blogsite Design, Ebooks, 1Shopping Cart, and Social Networking Management. Get your backlinks indexed with Pingback Optimizer.