Archive for October, 2011

Benefits of WordPress Website Design

Friday, October 28th, 2011

by Arindra Datta | thewhir.com

WordPress is the quickest and easiest process to make your website operational in just a few minutes. You only need to install WordPress which is a free blogging platform. A WordPress website if implemented correctly can bring more clients to your business which would help your business grow.

WordPress sites are powerful marketing tools. WordPress allows you to get a free pre-built website which will showcase some of the targeted aspects like contents, profits, sales of your website etc. Here are few benefits of WordPress web design in detail.

Flexible platform: WordPress is a flexible platform which helps to create your new websites with the CMS (content management system). There are lots of benefits in using the WordPress blogging platform like quick installation, self updating, open source platform, lots of plug-ins on the database and more options for website themes.

Quick and easy to install: WordPress is quick and easy to install. You just need to follow some simple instructions to get your link and to install the WordPress application on your website. You may be asked some general information before the installation completes. This way you can easily install the WordPress on your website.

Self-updating: WordPress has different special features helping you to choose desired WP plug-ins, to get the upgraded operating system or any other related updates. You only need to click the links to automatically install the desired upgrades and updates.

Open Source Application: Since WordPress has been constructed in PHP, anyone using the application can view the source code. It allows the programmers to work within the code to get the required functions and operations. The application also has a comprehensive documentation on top of it which will help anyone with a little knowledge on PHP to work on its code, themes and plug-ins without much effort.

Website Themes: Many prefer to use the custom WordPress themes which allow changing the look and feel of the domain. Some people prefer the WP themes which have both paid and free versions. More than 1000 website themes are available today which can be uploaded directly to your website.

Third party apps as plugins: One of the most flexible features of wordpress is plugins. Various applications like calendar, seo pack, picture gallery, twitter share, sidebar etc. can be easily available and installed within wordpress. It not only enhances the look and feel of the website but adds a new improved features and functionality to your website. These plugins can be readily available in wordpress website (http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/) without paying a single bug. So, if you are intending to have a dynamic website with lots of advance features which can be controlled by the admin itself then WordPress will the best option to live up with.

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To get additional information on link popularity, link farms, and natural search, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.

To get additional information on search engine optimization, SEO company, and link farm, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.

The Best WordPress Hosting

Saturday, October 22nd, 2011

yoast.com

What you ought to know to find the best WordPress hosting

I have proudly hosted yoast.com on a VPS.net Cloud Server for over 2 years now. It is fast, affordable & has been rock solid – even as my traffic increased 20-fold over that period, growing to almost a million pageviews per month. Some sites will review services of inferior quality and tell you it’s the best WordPress hosting just to make a quick buck, but I recommend what I use. Trust me, I have tested many hosting solutions & anytime the upfront sticker price is low hidden costs sneak in, like unresponsive support, poor uptime & some hosts even sneak putting advertisements on your site without your permission!

So let me tell you why I love VPS.net and why I also use WestHost a lot and how this WordPress hosting business really works. In my case, I make money by promoting a specific company whose services I’ve been using for years, in other cases, people do “comparisons” or “listings of good companies”. Bloggers with a lot of reach are being offered $100-$150 per sale. I’d like to know how you feel about those payola recommendations now.

A warning: what to look out for

Hostgator has been accused more than once by clients of adding links to their sites pointing back to Hostgator without asking their customers, yet some of the review sites make them number one on their list, just because they pay affiliates so much money.

If it’s not clear to you yet, I’ll tell you now: this is a very aggressive (and thus lucrative) market. I’ve been offered $150+ per signup myself to promote other WordPress hosting companies. On packages of $5-7 a month, that’s pretty ridiculous… In truth, WordPress hosting is usually pretty easy: you don’t need much, and most WordPress sites won’t ever get more than a 1,000 visitors a day, so you can host dozens if not hundreds of them on one server. The only difference WordPress hosting companies can make is in speed and in customer support. And if they’re spending twice the annual revenue on paying off their affiliates, how much money do you think is left for support employees?

I encounter WordPress hosting issues all the time when I do my site reviews; certain plugins won’t work because they need more memory, servers are down often causing a loss in Google rankings, the plugin installer in the WordPress backend won’t work due to a poor setup; I’ve seen it all. So maybe offering the best WordPress hosting isn’t that easy after all and you should pick a host that knows what it’s doing and has shown that for a while already.

WestHost WordPress Hosting reviews

For quite a while now I’ve been working with and promoting WestHosts WordPress Hosting services, because they’re simply the best “simple” hosting party I know. If you want to set up a simple WordPress site, do it without a hassle and have someone you can call who actually knows what he’s talking about: WestHost is the best WordPress hosting for you. I’ve referred literally hundreds of people to them over the last 3 years and I wanted to share a couple of reviews on this WordPress hosting solution from those people, randomly taken from emails I got:

“I made the move this week. Everything Yoast says is accurate. So far WestHost has been awesome!” – Les Lynch

“P.S. I switched to Westhost for my WordPress hosting needs based on your recommendation…. after several ‘bad’ hosts it was the smartest move I ever made. The technical specs are great, the price is good… but its the customer service/support that makes all the difference. Thanks for the tip!!!” – Robbert Faber

That’s a simple 5 out of 5 star rating as far as WordPress hosting is concerned, usually there’s always something to complain over. Now why aren’t you hosted there yourself then, you’ll ask. The answer is simple: I do get more than a thousand visitors a day, a lot more, in fact. I used to be on WestHost, and when I outgrew it, I moved to VPS.net, a sister company of theirs that allows for more control and stronger servers:

VPS.net – Yoast Style – WordPress Hosting

So Yoast.com is hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server. As said, they’re a sister company to WestHost, both being part of the UK2Group. VPS.net allows you to basically build your own server based on a template of your choosing. Because I know you want your site to be as fast this one, I’ll tell you what you should be doing to your VPS.net server to get the best WordPress hosting solution:

  • get a cloud server at VPS.net, (Yoast.com is using 6 nodes at the moment, though 4 would probably be sufficient if I weren’t hosting 5 other sites on the same VPS);
  • start of with a clean CPanel image, and pick the location that is closest to the majority of your readers, in my case, Chicago;
  • replace Apache with LiteSpeed (this adds a fee to your monthly bill, be aware of that);
  • install APC so you can do object, database and output caching with the help of W3 Total Cache;
  • set up a CDN, using VPS.net’s CDN Service, again with the help of W3 Total Cache and a so called “origin pull” set up.

That might look like a lot of work to get the best WordPress hosting solution going. As I said, this is not needed for most blogs. Most bloggers will seriously be fine with WestHost. If you need a setup like this though, the best thing is this: VPS.net will help you set it up, and they’ll even migrate your site from your old install to the new one!

If you want to make use of that offer, email Rus Foster, he’s the Managing Director of VPS.net and he’d love to help you out, both in getting set up and in determining how many nodes you’ll need to start with.

A question I often get asked is why I didn’t use a dedicated server? Well, that’s pretty easy to answer: I can not scale a dedicated server, it’s either too big, or too small, and hardly ever perfectly right. Scaling this VPS.net server though is as easy as going into my control panel, and adding a couple of nodes. Either for eternity, or just for a couple of days, it’s all possible, and you won’t even have to reboot the server.

Let me also tell you this: I was on another “cloud based” WordPress hosting solution before I started working with the VPS.net / WestHost guys, and I didn’t like it one bit, when my site got too big, they moved me off to what they call a Dedicated Virtual Rage, and that was even more painful, resulting in lots of downtime. The experience over the last few years with VPS.net and WestHost has been entirely different, with the only downtime I’ve seen in the last 6 months being caused by my own mistake of developing one of my own plugins on the live site.

Conclusion: pick a WordPress host you can trust

So, to conclude all this: I know WordPress hosting can be painful, when it shouldn’t be. I’ve been with my own fair share of bad WordPress hosts, and I’m done with them. I’ve chosen to ignore the offers and stop thinking about the larger amounts of money I could make by sending people to other WordPress hosting companies that are willing to pay higher affiliate fees. You see, my reputation is worth more than that. If I refer you somewhere, I want it to be good, so I’d rather make less money and receive more e-mails like the ones I’ve shown you above.

My own VPS.net set up is as I put it down above, and yours could be that way too. If you only have to host a small WordPress blog, I’d recommend you go with WestHost, and if you click on either of those links, yes, I make some money, and you support me in blogging about WordPress SEO, the best WordPress hosting and WordPress optimization and in building WordPress plugins for everyone out there to use.

Good luck with choosing the best WordPress hosting solution that works for you, and if you follow my advice, please do let me know about your experiences by sending me a message through my contact form!

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To get additional information on link popularity, link farms, and natural search, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.

To get additional information on search engine optimization, SEO company, and link farm, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.

What Might be Coming in WordPress 3.3 (Features)

Friday, October 14th, 2011

wpbeginner.com

One of the goals of WordPress core team is to release multiple major updates every year with a fast development cycle. WordPress 3.2 was released on July 4th and boy did it come with some amazing features. The talks and work on WordPress 3.3 has already been started. WordPress 3.3 release is expected at the end of this year with a target date of November 15, 2011. Lets take a look at what could be coming in WordPress 3.3.

Media Uploader Enhancements

There have been talks of enhancing the media uploader, but it always got pushed back. Finally in version 3.3, we will see an improved uploader. The plans are to integrate Plupload into the dashboard. Plupload is a highly usable upload handler that lets you upload files using HTML5, Gears, Flash, Silverlight, BrowserPlus, and the good’ol normal upload.

This project is being carried by Jacob Gillespie as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project.

The potential new features that could be added are:

  • Multiple file transports, starting with HTML5, with a fallback to Flash, then to HTML4
  • Drag and Drop Uploading
  • On-the-fly image resizing
  • Hooks for in-browser image processing (so that a plugin could add pre-upload sepia tone for example)

This should definitely improve the overall user experience of the file uploader. This will also set a good base for future as it will progressively improve based on user’s browser and environment.

There is a good chance that we will see an improvement in our image manipulation and gallery management section. There is a suggestion to get rid of the thickbox and move everything inline, so we will see if that makes it in or not.

New User Experience

When you first setup Gmail or your cPanel Hosting account there is a first time welcome screen that guides the new user with helpful guides. WordPress lacks this much needed feature, and it will be added in WordPress 3.3. The proposal is to have a first time install welcome screen which will have introduction text and checklist of steps to get going; first time post-update welcome screen, and first time exposure popup for new features.

This is definitely good news for beginner users because the dashboard can be overwhelming for first timers.

(P.S. we are always here for WordPress Beginners as well, so don’t forget to follow us on twitter (@wpbeginner) and like our facebook page).

Responsive Admin Interface

We saw a user-interface overhaul in WordPress 3.2, and now the goal is to make it display nicely on devices with various screen size (including wider screens) and human interface mechanisms, such as touch.

Improve Admin Bar

WordPress Admin Bar was introduced in version 3.1. The goal in WordPress 3.3 is to improve the admin user-interface by combining the admin bar (in dashboard) with admin header to reduce duplication and save vertical space.

Performance Improvements

There is a huge deal around highly desirable permalink structures not being scalable. Chris Coyier had some major performance issues with his site and he explains the story on Digging into WordPress blog. Hopefully after the release of WordPress 3.3, you can have the SEO friendly URLs (Permalink structure) without any performance penalty.

A fix will be made related to the issues of special characters in permalinks using an upgrade routine. There are several fixes that will be made to improve performance of WordPress menus.

Language Packs

Provided that a translation exists, you should be able to download a language pack from Glotpress to localize your WordPress website. This would work for plugins, themes, and for the WordPress core. This is going to be derived from the work work of Marko Novakovic in his GSoC project. Here is a screenshot of what it could look like:

Until this comes out, you can always use Native Dashboard Plugin to change the language of your WordPress dashboard.

Child Themes in the Repository

There have been a strong push to use child themes to speed up development and make the codes more secure and optimized. However up until now, it is not possible for developers to host their child themes on the official WordPress repository. Things are likely to change in this area, as one of the most awesome WordPress developers, Otto, take charge and add this feature to the WordPress.org site in version 3.3.

Mixed Bag

There are a lot of updates that are worth mentioning, but don’t fit in a category of its own. So they are listed here:

  • When you change a theme, your widgets disappear. Hopefully in WordPress 3.3, we can keep our widgets and make the theme change
  • Dismissable admin notices
  • Improvements to the Settings and Meta API

Which ones of these features are you excited to see in WordPress 3.3?

Stay updated with WPBeginner on twitter and Facebook, so we can keep you in the loop with the progress.

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To get additional information on link popularity, link farms, and natural search, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.

To get additional information on search engine optimization, SEO company, and link farm, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.

Free WordPress Blog Setup

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

wpbeginner.com

Why would someone want us to install the WordPress for them when it is just a one click install from their fantastico cpanel page. If you think that WordPress setup only includes the installation, then you are dead wrong. WordPress is a great script, but to maximize the benefits and potential of your new blog, you need the plugins, and extra features that we offer.

We have a strong background with WordPress and seo, and the guide we use come straight from our founder Syed Balkhi’s expertise and experience in this industry. With our guide, we can make your WordPress blog more SEO Friendly, and user targetted, so you can maximize the potential that it has.

Don’t waste your time screwing up and learning from your mistakes. Instead just learn from our mistakes because we have made them already. Our motto is Everyone starts out as a beginner. We understand the frustration one goes through therefore we are offering professional help for you, so you can have a professional blog.

Still not convinced? Well then you will be after you see the case studies and results we have gotten from our guide that we are using.

What is included in our Free WordPress Setup Package?

  • Complete WordPress Installation
  • Optimize your Blog for Search Engines and Tips to increase your Search Engine Ranking Position
  • Making Your Blog Hacker/Spam proof
  • Automate Daily Backups for safety
  • Setup a Professional Email
  • Setup Feedburner account to handle your RSS Subscribers*
  • Setup Email Subscription Option and Embed it in your Blog*
  • Free Support via Email

* There are some other requirements for these.

We install plugins that your blog really need and suggest some that might help for specific niche. By using all these you will be off to a better start.

Results

This site was founded by Syed Balkhi who is known for his aggressive marketing, search engine optimizing skills, and web designing expertise. All techniques on this package is being used on his successful blog where he shares his expertise and methods. See the results

  • How did I increase my search engine traffic traffic by 258% in less than a month
  • How I increased my subscribers to over 1800 in ten months
  • Authority Status in Google

We hope you are convinced now. So keep on reading.

Free? What is the Catch?

Yeah that is the first thing that comes to mind when users are getting things online for free. You will be surprised when we tell you that there is no catch in this service. You are not going to be paying us a single penny.

Instead what we ask you is that you sign up with one of our partner webhosts that have proven themselves to be the Best WordPress Hosting Services in the industry (Note you must use our link provided in the next page). These hosts will in exchange pay us a commission. So not only you are getting a good web hosting deal which you were going to pay for anyways, you are also getting our service entirely free which will boost your blog to the next level.

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To get additional information on link popularity, link farms, and natural search, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.

To get additional information on search engine optimization, SEO company, and link farm, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.

Choosing the Best Web Host for WordPress

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

wpbeginner.com

Often overlooked web hosting is one of the key feature in running a website. You will find numerous free web hosts in web forums offering you their services for banner ads, or you might find really cheap web hostings which require a long term commitment, and then there will be the expensive web hosting services. As a beginner you already know that you need WordPress  hosting for your WordPress website, but what does WordPress require? What specifications do you need? We will help you through the process of analyzing and choosing the best web hosts in this article.

What Specification does WordPress Require?

You will be surprised to hear that WordPress is a very light-weight script and it is compatible with almost all web hosts. The simple requirements that WordPress put forth are:

  • PHP 4.3 or greater
  • MySQL 4.0 or greater
  • The mod_rewrite Apache module

As a matter of fact most linux web hosts come pre-installed with WordPress, so you won’t have to worry about what WordPress requires.

Your Needs

As we stated above, WordPress is a very light-weight script for a normal blog account, you won’t be needing a dedicated server. So don’t get that. Majority of top shared hosting sites are now offering unlimited resource, so take advantage of that. That is all what you really need. But if for some reason, you end up going with a service that doesn’t offer unlimited specs what will you do?

You need to evaluate. How much space you do need on the web. A WordPress site can run well under 100 MB space. If you are offering downloads, and hosting your own images then you will need more space.

Evaluate the bandwidth your site will be using? As a goal of every blogger, you want to hit the Front Page of Digg and other social media networks. When you hit that, you receive a lot of traffic. So how much bandwidth should you get? Start low and upgrade when necessary. There is no point of paying extra for something you won’t use in the early months. Once your blog starts to get influence in the industry then you can upgrade.

WebHost’s Reputation

Every host that we mention in this post has earned its reputation in the industry. They are top-notch services. If you decide to go with a service other than the ones that we list in this post, make sure you do an extensive research on their reputation, uptime history, and support reviews.

WPBeginner Web Host Recommendation

Below is the list of what we consider to be the Best Web Hosts for WordPress. All of these hosts have an unlimited specs for you.

  • Host Gator – Hosts over 2 million domains and is known as one of the well-reputed web host in the industry. They have plans that will suit all your needs. Use coupon “wpbeginner” to receive $9.94 off the first month.
  • Site5 – One of the most popular web hosts that have special plans just for the WordPress community.
  • Super Green Hosting – A very nice service that is not only WordPress friendly, but it is environment friendly. They have quality customer service and have a good reputation in the industry.
  • Blue Host – Another reliable web hosting company that has been around for a long time. Blue Host has proven it’s worth to the users, and it is a legit competitor of Host Gator.

Choose from any of the web hosts above, and we guarantee you that you will not be disappointed.

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To get additional information on link popularity, link farms, and natural search, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.

To get additional information on search engine optimization, SEO company, and link farm, please visit our Denver SEO informational site.