WordPress is primarily known as blogging software, but it’s so much more. I know several web designers who employ it as the foundation for nearly 100% of their projects. It’s robust, it’s mature, it’s highly customizable, and best of all it’s free.

Once you’ve completed the installation of WordPress, your first step will be to log in to the dashboard and see what’s there. The first thing you’ll likely want to change is the appearance. While the default theme is fairly attractive, it’s not going to set you apart from the crowd who couldn’t be bothered to change it.

From the menu on the left side of the dashboard, hover your cursor over Appearance, and from the pop-out menu click on Themes.

The page you land on will have the Manage Themes tab selected by default. THis will be important later when you have several themes and you want to change/refresh the look of your site. For now, click on the Install Themes tab. Here you’ll find a variety of check boxes and search fields to narrow down your options. Although it’s not necessary to select any of them, I’d suggest you do, because there are literally thousands of free themes available for WordPress. It’s quite overwhelming.

Once your search returns some results and you find one you like, you can preview it without actually installing it. Eventually you’ll find one that pleases you, and you can go ahead and install it. You may not be able to accomplish this quite yet unless you’re familiar with FTP. Go ahead and give it a try, but if you get stuck don’t worry. Part 4 in this series will cover FTP.

Once you know FTP, you’ll be able to not only install themes, but all sorts of different plug-ins that will help you prevent spammers from leaving comments, optimize your site for Google, etc.

That’s it for this week. See you next week for SEO – Part 4.

-Iain

“Blog” is a generic word that covers pretty much any kind of online journal or diary keeping. It’s a mash-up of the words “Web log”. There are no concrete rules for blogs. They can be any format, any length, can contain pictures or videos, links to other online material, etc. A blog is what you want or need it to be.

Telling people you have a blog is like telling people you have a vehicle…it’s a borderline meaningless term, and needs to be further described in order to be informative. Do you own a red tractor or a yellow cab? If it’s a cab, is it a van or a car? What kind of car? The easiest way to provide a description is to provide a link to your blog.

In the case of Enertiahost, our blog (this blog) is intended to compliment the information we give on our front page. It’s not intended to be our primary content. Your situation may be different, and it might make sense to have the blog front and centre. Perhaps you are a cook and want to give away a recipe once a week. Put it in a blog. Perhaps you’re a sports fan and want to make your opinions about your favourite team public every day. Put them in a blog.

There’s no special knowledge required. If you can navigate the internet and know how to use a word processor, you can blog.

There are many good blogging software packages available. Believe it or not, the best ones are free (open source). My favourite is WordPress. The Enertiahost blog is written in WordPress.  If you’ve never installed it before, it can be a little tricky to get going, but the Enertiahost support team is always available to help. I’d encourage you to give it a try though. What’s the worst that can happen? You make a mistake and it doesn’t work? It already doesn’t work, so you’ve lost nothing and gained some experience. Simply download the software, follow the instructions (they call it “The 5 Minute Install”), and you’ll be ready to go.

Another alternative is to have your blog hosted somewhere other than under your own domain name, and then simply link to it from your existing website. Some companies that provide this service – again for free – are Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress. If you’re not comfortable installing software and monkeying around with stuff like that, go with one of these free services. You’ll be up and running in no time. Trust me…it’s easy.

Next post, I’ll be talking about ways to customize your self-hosted WordPress blog and make it do exactly what you need it to do.

-Iain

As a hosting company, we are often a first point of reference for our clients when they have questions about things related to their website. One thing that comes up fairly regularly is “How do I get on page one of Google?”. Well, if you can get that figured out you’re going to be very very wealthy. I certainly don’t know. Page one of Google is the holy grail of SEO.

What’s SEO? It’s the acronym for “search engine optimization”. It’s a specialized industry, and it’s not part of what we do here at Enertiahost. A quick Google search will deliver millions of results, ironically most of them will not be on page one.

In my opinion most of those people and companies are not worth the money. They usually charge a hefty upfront fee, do some work, and then ask for more money to continue “boosting your ranking”. In some cases your rankings will increase slightly, but getting from #100 to #80 is virtually useless, and certainly isn’t worth paying for. Most of the time you won’t notice any change.

There is plenty of information available online for free. If you just take the time to read through it, you’ll probably be able to get some improvement in your Google ranking all by yourself. But here’s an idea…how about building the traffic to your website “the old fashioned way”.

Word of mouth from your clients is very likely going to drive much more people to your site than Google is. Make sure your website address is on all your business cards and marketing material. Also make sure to keep your site updated with any changes to your business. A blog is a fantastic way of doing this easily.

I hear you saying “OK…but how do I blog?”. It’s easy, and we’ll cover that in my next post.

- Iain