Even with all the themes out there in the market, we are never satisfied. Any theme we download is never complete although when we choose it, we make sure it is as close to what we want as possible.

Once we have downloaded it and put it into our WordPress, its time to look at it to see how we can make if fit our needs.

There are many and varied opportunities to change it by using various plug-ins and widgets to choose from.

The first thing we tackled after the set up, was the RSS feed as we wanted an accurate count.There were two options to choose from to alter the default, Feedburnercount and Feed count 12.

I chose the later as it looked and was easy to install. Once uploaded, there were several different options I could choose from, I went into the publicize area and made sure I checked the awareness API service. I chose where I wanted to put it, and I was ready. The theme I was using was an older one and sometimes the option I chose doesn’t work in that case you will need to use Feedburnercount.

If you wish to show how many subscribers you have you can do so by using the following bit of code.

Twitter

Do you want to display how many twitter followers you have? Rather than using the twittercountlet there is a plug-in you can use, which is called Tcounter. This uses the twitter API so make sure you have it. After extracting the file from the download, place it in the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory. After that it’s just a case of placing it where you want it viewed.

There are different ways of doing this, one of which is outlined on Sitesketch.

Sidebar

By using the plug-in Sidebartabs you can organize it as you want it to appear. To make it blend better with your theme you can then go to the relevant page on the WordPress plug-in directory and follow the instructions to enable you to alter the styles.

If you feel very adventurous, you can follow the instructions on WP Pro and build your own design of the sidebar. Be patient with yourself as it can be a learning curve.

The third option is to use a jQuery. This is fast and it looks good. You will find the full tutorial on the page as it shows you how to create the jQuery option.

Comments Area

Improve your comments area to make people want to interact with you. No extra plug-in is necessary with the up to date WordPress downloads. All you have to do is enable threaded comments. You also have the option of changing items around to suit the way you want to view it and CD Harrison has written an article explaining how to do this. As he has covered it so well I will just point you in the direction of his article.

You have now made a vast improvement to your overall theme, and made it more of your own.

Being Search Engine friendly is an extremely important part of your website or blog. If the search engines don’t find you or don’t like you, you are basically going to land on page 9999999 if you appear at all. As you can see from that it is important to grab all the info available and get yourself both seen and found.

The old fashioned methods of submitting yourself to the search engines and hoping they will list you are dead in the water nowadays. You need far more likely to be found methods.

We are going to tackle the ways to make your URL a little friendly than the structure that currently appears in WordPress. If you do this your chances of ranking higher in Google are so much better. Every little tweak count in the ranking’s game.

Head over to the URL option’s page. This is sometimes called the Permalink page. You will find this in your WordPress Admin Panel. Scroll down the options in the Permalink until you find the custom link or structure.   Find the documentation. Choose the structure that is:

The reason we choose this one is because it isn’t going to be a totally static site. If it were you could put the .html on the end.

You now have a URL that will contain both the category as well as the title. This means that Google will see you as real and with some knowledge to impart.

Now don’t forget to save your changes and then head over to .haccess to see the changes that have been accomplished. It is best to start your website this way, as this means you will be picked up as such on the web when you first get indexed.

This is just the start of your SEO setup. You also need to download All in one seo pack.
Install this plug-in and once installed make sure to check the alteration you made above to make sure it hasn’t altered it in any way.
Make sure all your alt tags for your photographs are optimized to the best of your ability. By this I mean make sure that the description in the tag is a good well labeled description relevant to the website. This way the alt tag will show up and be found by Google.  They pay a great deal of attention to Alt tags.

Your personal SEO duties

While you have optimized as best you can on your actual site your work for SEO doesn’t end there. It is an on going business of article writing and posting. Not just on your own blog but on blogs of others in a similar category to your own. Post to Twitter and Facebook and other social network links.  Make sure you put your free link on the Google Maps so people will find you there. All this helps to get you placed on Google.

Basic WordPress themes, especially free themes, often need to be modifies to suit your purpose.  Luckily this is very easy to do when you know what you want.

With the amount of plug-ins you have available on WordPress there is always something to suit your purpose. There are the few that you just have to get but most blogs will discuss them I am looking at the more out of the way type of plug-ins.

Some of the options available to you

For most of these you will need to understand some coding. These tend to be hacks of what is already in WordPress but that you can alter to suit you a little better.
Say now you only wish to display particular categories in the menu so you want to take some of them out but not the others this little snippet of code works wonders.

Changing your Drop down menus

If you have to have stuff that you need to change on your menus you can do this with
some alterations to the codex if you want to make the changes it’s a good idea to read the relevant section in the WordPress Codex

This bit of code should help your to do some of the changes you want.

If you want to exclude the display of some categories, you can do so with the subsequent code by altering the exclude number you want taken out of the loop.

Mostly this one isn’t needed because usually the very recent posts are automatically display but if you want to make sure you can put this code in to make sure a particular post is shown in a particular category. For example if you want it displayed on your home page area.

To be category specific use this code.

If you want certain areas excluded from going out on your RSS feed use the following.

There are hundreds of hacks you can use and by going through the codex you can learn a whole lot about WordPress and how to set them up. These are just a few of the items you can do by altering the code. There are a whole lot more you can do by using the different plug-ins. And the function of WordPress can be done to suit your particular theme like it was tailor made and just for you. It can take days if not months to go through all the items that are available and unfortunately we really only see the ones that get written about on the net. Most people don’t take the time or the trouble to go through them one by one and try them out. It’s a pity really as so much good work can get lost when they aren’t used and continually upgraded to suit the latest WordPress update. More and more people really need to get involved looking at all the widgets and plug-ins to make sure they are actually made use of. I know that the original person who wrote the code is probably using them and updating them for their own use but that need for that code is probably not even seen by someone who needs it desperately.

After you have been on WordPress for a while you will start to see your archive section filling up and showing more and more.

As this is actually a waste of space because you can make your own archive page and show things in a far better fashion than filling up the side bar, it is a good idea to do some clean up.

You need to make that space become a far more useful item in your blog rather than showing old posts that are probably way out of date.

To fix this problem you can put in code that will limit the archives you have on display in the sidebar.

You can change the code from this, which is pretty standard in themes.

To read like this.

Change the number to the number that you actually wish to show.

Now if you want to include a page in your categories to show your archives with a pretty good write up and also picture thumbnails, there is a great way of doing this.

The snazzy archives plug-in is a great tool for achieving something a little different in the way of archives.

With this plug-in, you have a whole page of archives, which feature as both a write up with the archive number as well as a thumbnail as I said. There are several layouts available and the effect is very good. I particularly liked the carousel way of showing the relevant achieves. It seemed so unusual but at the same time effective. If you want to show them all together, the full page with the write up and the photo is probably the best way. If you want to do it by month, you could probably do it as 12 different pages. That is as one page for each month of the year.
There are still two more ways of doing it with this plug-in but they are in the experimental stage.  One is with clouds and the other is with flash. Vladimir Prelovac is such a pro at what he does you really can’t go wrong.

Should you decide you want to do your own thing without a plug-in you can always create your own archives page. This is an extremely efficient way of doing things and actually scores you points with search engines as they can scroll through far more easily. Not only the search engines find it easier but so do your visitors. If you are going to do this make sure you do it in detail.
Making an archive page should be done in .php. First thing to do is make a blank doc. Name it as the blogarchievs.php for which you need to make a template just for it.

This shows WordPress it’s a different page.

Now create the necessary elements to it including the month by month and the tags as well as the categories.

Your code for months would be like this.

Also list by category to make it easier for the visitor.

Now save the page and place it in your templates folder. Then add a new page in your admin panel. Don’t forget to change the template name to the new template under the templates option. Link it into your navigation.

Dependent on what your likes and dislikes are, there are several different ways you can look at the headers on some of the WordPress themes.

The biggest problem with a write up like this is the fact that good bloggers change their themes and headers pretty regularly so it might not be there any more.

With the result, the photo shown here might not be the one on the website any longer.

Matt Mullenweg

The first one is the header on the theme of Matt Mullenweg, who was the original developer of WordPress. This gentleman’s profile reads like a who, who of the internet. However, the actually graphic which is a gif file at the header of his blog is an interesting mix which includes his name. Interestingly he has chosen his name to include the country extension to round of his name.  http://ma.tt

Number two in my list is Web Designers Wall

Again this is a graphic and a gif. It was designed by Nick La. It is one of the best on the web as far as easy on the eye is concerned. It is well balanced and doesn’t hit you in the eye but gives you a sense of business efficiently.
No harsh contrasts are in the design, but you have many colors without it being over busy.

Third on my list is Web Designer Depot

This design was created by Radim Malinic. It is in a jpeg and it is a little large in file size probably because of the strong colors used. Decreasing the colors would alter the effect of the design. Although it was created as a graphic, the final save was done in jpeg probably to save in a smaller format as a lossy format is a lot smaller in pixels.

A blog for Ayaka Ito

The creator of this blog is a media designer, and you can see why. This is more than a header it is the complete page. It is truly brilliantly done. This young lady is definitely going to go far. I really liked the work she displayed on her blog.

Another lady this time Deborah Cavenaugh

For the second time, it’s not just a header it’s a full designed page. She has used her talents well with the soft colors in this design. This is another really good header from a true artist, correction page.

A design studio is the next one up Ndesign.Studio

This again is a soft design. It’s just a pity they didn’t size it properly to the page as you can see the page on the left should still be going somewhere as it has the cut off effect. I know its Nick La again, but I was a little disappointed that he didn’t check that. And yes Nick we do notice.

The next is Jason Bradbury

This is a bit slow loader because it is interactive. It’s a bit on the bold and brazen side for me but the design itself is good. He is obviously a keen game player with all the videos he has on his blog. I am a little undecided on this one.

By giving you a small clue to the biggest part of your new life, we are going to take a little look at the innards of WordPress.org. I don’t mind telling you that blogging can take over a big part of your life once you get started.

To start correctly you really need to understand how the basic platform works and what you can find in various sections of the basic program and what you might have to look for in other plug-ins and widgets. WordPress is the ultimate in mix and match.

Let’s look at WordPress from a newcomer’s point of view.
For that we need to have WordPress installed either on your pc at home or on your host on the World Wide Web.

If you want to install it on your own PC you will need to install a server packet on your PC. You can use either Xampp or Wamp as your server on your PC and then install WordPress. You will need to download the WordPress file.

Now you need to install this file on your PC or on the host file. I am going to install on a host server, and I am going to use Hostgator as an example of a host server as that is where I mostly go with domains. It’s inexpensive and it allows you to pay on a monthly basis.

Once you have your hosting account and your domain name, which has been pointed to your servers you need to log into your account. Ok Log into your Host and go to the panel to find the “smiley face” of Fantastic de Luxe in the software services.
Click on it and then go to the left hand side. Find the WordPress link. You are now going to install WordPress on your domain. Next find the domain name and access your domain name data and choose both a password and a name for this.

Remember to make and keep a note of these passwords and names. Do not use the same names for everything but make a special file where you keep all your info. I would also suggest that you either keep these on a remote server as well or write them in your diary offline. This way if your PC crashes you wouldn’t have lost them all. Believe me it happens. Now we need to do the Base configuration. This is where we choose what identity we are going to use in our posts as well as the email id and the domain name of the blog. Once you have that all filled in, click on the install. Send the email for all this info to yourself and one off your pc email address. (That’s a backup).
The install can take a few minutes so be patient. Once it’s installed, we will log in using the name and password we entered earlier. You should land in your dashboard.

Ok set up your dashboard in WordPress now and find the theme you want to add.
Now you need to have an FTP uploader. I use one I purchased called WS_FTP_home but a free one that is available is FileZilla.

Upload your main file for your theme. Go to appearances in the dashboard and click on Add new theme. It will ask you to upload your chosen theme. Upload the zipped file you have downloaded when you choose your theme. Now click on install.
You should now continue installing whatever modifications you want to get into your theme.

When one thinks of WordPress, by and large, the public consider it a little company’s platform to do things easily and without too much trouble but in actual fact you will be extremely surprised to learn that far from being the little person’s blog this platform is used by many quite large corporations for their blogging platform.

Yes the famous companies do blog. And they are learning more and more that blogging pays better than those huge adverts in newspapers and magazines.

Blogging is a medium that the small man and the man in the street tend to pay more attention to as it is not conceived as an advert.  When someone gives you advice in a blog this tends to be more regarded as an advice rather than pushing of a product.

Let us take a look at some of the big guys that are using this platform for their blogging.

Ever Considered where eBay Blogs?

Yes eBay is on WordPress. EBay uses it for EBay Ink, which is situated on http://ebayinkblog.com where you will find both a twitter link and a blog showing you how to set up your eBay selling account. This obviously is a full blown advert, but it works because people trust blogs.

Yahoo also uses WordPress

Yahoo uses its blog to display its company achievements mainly. This is more company oriented than global news, and they use it as such. It’s not the headline news stuff that you will see on the main search engine page. It’s about their internal company achievements and its quite interesting read.

Digg

Yes Digg uses it too. They use it to blog announcements about changes to their programs and things like that. It seems to be done via subscribers.

Ford

Called the Ford Story this blog is about people who have purchased Fords as well as any question people want to ask about Fords. And yes its on WordPress.

Wall Street Journal

The big boys like WordPress that is obvious. It’s so easy for them to set up and monitor by just having on their desktop or on their phones.

Sony

Sony has a blog here too. They call it the Sony makes believe. It has video snippets and the like on it. It is probably aimed more at youngsters and gamers than the older marketeering blogger.

People Magazine

This is an interesting magazine style blog with lots of news on all sorts of subjects. It is obviously aimed at getting you to buy the magazine as it is on the same sort of theme.

Samsung

A basic do gooder site where the company has good things to say about things they are doing as the community service.  Though it is interesting to see what they are doing the actual presentation gives you the impression of let us show you how good we are to everyone. One thing I think they need to remember is to use bigger type. It is difficult for older eyes to read that tiny script even with glasses on.

WordPress as it is downloaded already contains all the basic functions you need to run the platform. It’s a great way of getting yourself online and blogging without the real need to understand a whole lot of tacky stuff like code and various languages. Of course if you do understand a little of it, it is a great help, but it really isn’t a necessity.

We are going to take a look at the basic functions that the WordPress platform offer you in its out of the box setup.  Once you know what is there you will better understand what you might still want to look for in the plug-ins and widgets that are situated on the website of WordPress.org.

Do not make the mistake of thinking these can be used on workpress.com. That is a completely different operation where you are actually using their hosting service rather than using your own domain name and your own host.  The freedom that wordpress.org gives you is the ability to alter and change the themes and abilities that the program can give you.

Functions

The first function we are going to look at is Navigation.
This is the basic navigation of the site. Although this has been built in, there is a new plug-in available which extends this function and allows you to do far more with it.
The Basic function allows you to set up the pages as you wish them to appear. By default they will appear in alphabetical order. Your posts are done by alphabetical order as well. Remember posts and pages are two different things. You can change this by choosing the sort-column item. Here you will probably find 7 different options.

* Post-title – Sort alphabetically (default value)
* Menu-order – Sort by page order
* Post-date – Sort by date of creation
* post-modified – Sort by the time last modified
* ID – Sort by page ID
* Post-author – Sort by the page author ID
* Post-name – Sort alphabetically by post slug
You then have 7 different ways of making the pages order appear.

How you display your info

Called blog info, this shows how your info was input for that particular blog. This is useful if you use the same theme on many different blog sites. It will give you the blog name, the email address and a description of the blog in question.

Next up is the Sites URL

This is one of the functions as well. Here you will find the various URLS that are used for your particular site.  This includes extension like the logo you use as well as any images used. You can obtain the theme’s URL as well in this manner, you would use the Template- URL selection to find this, and it enables the use of the same theme on many sites without worrying about a conflict.

Similarly, you can obtain the RSS feed link and link it in.

Content on your blog

Until you start actually using your blog not much will show, but word press is creating a loop to connect all the different items.  If, for example, you want to show a connection to a different post on a different page jQuery would come into operation. This is your way of connecting the various pages together by creating a category and putting them all together.

You can then display posts by category as well. Should there be any posts you want to exclude from showing you would use the minus sign in front of the id of that post.

After a while of working on your WordPress and getting all the bits and bobs that you need to fix and plug it. There will come the day that you are almost ready to publish. This is the time when you make your final decision as to what you are going to do on your blog. Is it purely a social interaction or are you going to monetize it by putting on ads either of your own or using Google ads.

Monetizing your blog

Personally, I would go for my own ads as you can sign up for programs that are connected to what you intend blogging about. These programs then pay you when someone actually buys after clicking through your ad. It might take a while before this starts happening but don’t give up. People tend to look, see first.

For example, if you are writing a blog about Cricket and have a few ads down the side for cricket related products like bats and shoes, etc. People, who are interested in cricket will make up the large percentage of your visitors and as a result when they need something will probably come back to your site to click on the link, or if they have clicked while they were there they will have a cookie already installed in their system and when they go to the site, you will be credited with the sale.

Once you have hit the publish button you need to make it visible to the world. You do this in the WordPress admin section. Go to settings and then to privacy. Now select visible to all. If you want to keep it private and available to family and friends only, click block search engines.

It is now time to use your twitter, Facebook as well as other social media websites and attach the link to your website to your name. Do not spam people. There is no harm in telling a few what you do but never spam. Look for other people with the same interests and on twitter click to follow them. 9 times out of 10 they will read your profile and follow you back if it is something they are interested in. Now is the time to build up relationships with folks. If they have a website or blog, go on and visit them there. Make carefully thought out comments on their blogs. If they get to know you this way they will start to visit your blog too. Be patient. It doesn’t happen overnight.

Start writing articles which you can submit for syndication. You won’t be paid for these but with your name and your web address on them, you will find more visiting. If they visit and like what they see they will be back. It is seldom an overnight success, but it will build up slowly. What you need to do now is get backlinks preferably one way links from others either in your niche or from blogs about a subject such as yours. Sometimes, you can get them by going on and finding high ranking sites, which have blogs where you can do a guest post, which allows you to attach your link. Try to get ones with rank 5 and above. 10 with that kind of rank will do more good for your blog than 500 that have no standing.

I guess I am almost paranoid about internet security. My Facebook for example (My personal one that is) is so shut down that not even I can find myself. Personally I have heard of and dealt with too many computers that have been hacked or corrupted by viruses. I can never understand what pleasure people get out of being so spiteful to others that they cause them monetary harm by attacking their computers. Many of those folks really enjoy using their computers and it is their only link to the outside world. A lot of them are not really internet savvy and as a result they end up with so many Trojans and viruses their computers crash.

That being said you need to protect your website as much as possible from outside attacks. Some of the things you can do will be discussed below.

Your Basic Theme Info

Your theme has code in the head tags which really needs to be replace so as to make it non visible by taking a couple of steps  so no hacker with bad intentions make use of it to target vulnerabilities.
Head over to your themes header.php and see if this line appears in your code.

If it is there remove it.
You will also need to remove it from the hook. To do this you need to head over to the functions.php area and paste the following code in there

That should deal with that but there are other areas.

Your Login info

Your Login info should not show any error messages. You need to head on over to the functions.php and then place the following code in there.

no more messages should appear now about you incorrect logins or passwords.

Searching on your Theme

Rather than using the default search install a Google custom search or one of the other search engines. There is a whole tutorial on how to install Google search on your site.

Hooks and Calls Reduced

By reducing the number of hooks and calls on your blog you can reduce the slowing down of your site. Do not put stuff on just to have it because each time you increase the load you slow your site down. One way you can reduce it is by changing the call on your blog info to that of your blog name.

In your header.php there will be a particular line of code which you can change.

Take out this:

and replace it with this.

Obviously you need to change the section to your actual blog name.

You need to check all the various function calls which you might need to change because each one adds to the load on your server.

You should also look into using something like WP Cache as this lightens the load because by caching there isn’t such a large server load pull. This is available from WordPress as a plug-in. What it does is store the pages in a static file (rather than having to reload them in php and take them from you database) and thus it can produce them in a far faster time.

A slide show on a blog is a very nice feature which can be enjoyed by all your visitors. People really enjoy seeing good photos from around the world. It enables them to see how the rest of the world lives and to have the fun of remotely traveling to a place by imagination.

This is actually something that is easily put together and, which can really enrich your blog. The amount of time spent doing it properly will be rewarded with repeat visits, especially if you update the photos regularly.

Google has provided a free download for a photo graphics tool called Picasa.
With this tool, you can in actual fact do many of the photographic items you require as it will alter the tag edit and place things on the web for you. In addition you can use it to create a slide show.

It is pretty simple to use this tool. You can download it from Google. It really is a full photo editor and what is more it’s free too. There is a free video to watch on the same page as the download but let me give you a brief rundown as to how to use it.  Picasa also has a free online site where you can upload your pictures and let your family or the world view them. Should you want to keep them private make sure you make them private when you load them. Once you have uploaded them you can then send the URL to your friends, so they can view them.

Once they are on your account, you can use the widget on your blog to share them directly from your Picasa account. The widget is available from WordPress. What you need to do with the widget is, install it on your blog.  Change the settings to suit you.  There are three different ones one, which allow thumbnails one with clickable titles and the last shows random photos.

You do need to use Flash to use this slide show so make sure that is enabled. Get your log in details for the Picasa to work, and then you should be ready to get it up and running. Make sure all your photos have been properly edited before you load them and don’t forget to tag them. Picasa now has a tagging option and makes it easy to name and tag your photos. This means photos are now search engine friendly.

The actual Picasa tool enables you to do your entire photo editing, and you can fix your photos like red eye, off angle images and slightly out of focus shots before you load them on to the net.  You can change colors and backgrounds as well as make albums and collages.

When viewing the slide show you can make it full screen or thumbnail. You can keep it circling with a loop, or you can have it play on demand.  When you want to exit the show all you need to do is hit the exit button.

Have fun with it. It is a nice tool.

SEO is one of the most important aspects of your website. If you don’t do it, or don’t do it correctly, you will never be found on the internet.  The simple fact of the matter with so many websites on the internet you require to have the right indications in your website for a search engine to be able to categories you and put your data into their data back to enable them to come up with your website when the particular group of words are typed into their search section.

They have to be able to pull the information out in a matter of sections and present a useful relevant selection to the person doing the search. This requires you to have put the right work into your website and into the various other areas of the webs to be able to be found.

The search engines use various algorithms to determine your rank on their sites and these are all brought into work when you are found.

When you are on WordPress, one of the most important tools you can use is the All In One SEO Pack plug-in. This tool enables you to put in tags (very necessary). Tags are one of the main items that the search engines use to give relevance to your website.

Make sure you make the title of your post the thing the search engine picks up rather than the blog name. When you have the post name you need to put it into the home title section. And the word or phrase you want to get ranked on and then.

* Post Title: %post_title%
* Page Title: %page_title% / %blog_title%

This should be about all there, but then we need to put in some good Meta tag keywords even though Google now says they aren’t using these any more. It’s important to remember although Google dominates it is not the only search engine.

Your description you will need to do yourself as appropriate to the site. You can, however, use Headspace to install them in each post.

It is important to use your keyword in your title tag as well as the heading of your blog. It should also be part of your logo and should be used in all your anchor texts when you do posting on other sites and in your links there. When you are doing a post try to use your keyword in the opening and closing sentence of your post and try to get it into the main body a few times.

Make sure that you turn your ping back on so when others come and post and realize you have done, it they will return the favor.

Make sure that all the photos are well named with relevant keyword tags. These are picked up by Google as Alt documents and are these are created as alt tags by WordPress.

Make sure your internal linking is done properly and the tags of links are similar or the same. Use a good site mapper or make a page into an index map yourself.
Make sure your 404 page links back properly to the main body of your website. Often someone makes a mistake in a URL they post and as a result anyone following it finds themselves on the 404 page.