Category: Web site

Picking your Blog Theme : “My top Six Themes”

Paul

In the last few blog post we talked about:

When your visitors come to your site the first thing they see is your blog theme.   So I thought we would show you a few themes to make your site a little more nicer for your visitors.  You see if you can get them to come back your are more likely to get more readers.  So here are a few that I have played with that I have used in the past:

xplosives

xPlosive Reloaded [ Demo ]

bluesensation

BlueSensation [ Demo ]

greentech

GreenTech [ Demo ] Download GreenTech with 2 Sidebars

Mandigo141

Mandigo 1.41 [ Demo ]

wp-premiere-theme

WP Premiere Theme [ Demo ]

passionduogreen1

PassionDuo Theme (3 Colors) – Green: Demo | Download, Red: Demo | Download, Blue: Demo | Download

As you can see In most cases I wanted to have some place to advertise and I finally picked PassionDuo with the Blue background.  Why have advertising and affiliates on my website because a lot of time people will click your links and you will make a little money.    Webspace isn’t always free but with these themes at least I am making a little money for each person who clicks my adsvertising.   As you can see each of these have their good and bad it also is good to test them out and see which one you like.

So why worry about Theme’s?

Like I said before if you want to get your readers to come back you have to make it appealing to them and make it looks a little more professional.   As a blogger who wants to retain the readers, it is important to make it clean and sharp as possible.    It is also recommended that you make it easy to navigate, so any person coming to you site will be able to find the information they are looking for.  You should find a theme that also promotes your RSS feed easily and make it stand out.   This way they don’t have to look for the link to subscribe to your blog and thus makes them part of your family.

It is this hope that helps gives people a chance to come back.   Each person who stays a while will be one more person to join my family.   If you like these themes by all means recommend this page to your friends.

If your looking for some Premium Themes then Check these Links Out:

These are just a few good themes for those who want to get a theme that isn’t public or one that isn’t hardly used.   It is up to you if you want to buy or use the Free Themes.   If you are looking for more free themes I would suggest using Google to help you find even more themes.

Securing Your WordPress blog

Paul

In the last few blog post we talked about:

This post we discuss securing your WordPress blog and creating even more of a WordPress Firewall, as I call it.   You don’t know what bot or person might be lurking around your blog to get access to installing malware or worse off taking control over your blog for there own nefarious reasons.

Photo by: Terry Mun Photo by: Terry Mun

Now since you have installed WordPress and have it working now what do you want to do blog?  Blogging will be coming later in this series but for right now we want to take a good look at removing your Default Admin user.   Like the default routers admin profiles and password this makes it even easier for a hacker to try to find out the password.  Although You should never use a simple password.   You should always use numbers and letters in random order to make a really strong password and have it at least 8 characters long.  The longer it is the better off you at preventing unauthorized access to your blog and your blog posts.

Prevent access to Wp-admin and or image directory from bots.  This can be good you can also use this in combination to disallowing every IP but yours to help prevent people from gaining access to your pictures or you admin login page.   This is all preference and how secure you want to control access to admin page.   I feel if you have good security in place you should be in good shape.   If you don’t have a permenant or static IP and have a rotating IP you can however increase your security by password protect the wp-admin directory from unauthorized people.

I’ve also been using a few plugins to help protect your admin page from hackers, they can help prevent unauthorized access by limiting how many times you can attempt an a login:

  • Login Logger – keeps track of recent logins to WordPress for all users, as well as all failed logins. It records username, time, IP address and how long since each login attempt as well as time since last active for each user.

  • Limit Login Attempts – Limit the number of login attempts possible both through normal login as well as (WordPress 2.7+) using auth cookies.  By default WordPress allows unlimited login attempts either through the login page or by sending special cookies. This allows passwords (or hashes) to be brute-force cracked with relative ease.

I have talked about [intlink id=”3698″ type=”post”]Wordpress security plugins and other things[/intlink] you can do to better protect our WordPress blog.   I would suggest looking at that and make sure you harden your security for WordPress so that you don’t have a problem with hackers.   Although these are just a few you should go check out the WordPress article from the creators of WordPress and also consider using some of those recommendations to keep your WordPress blog secure.

On the next blog post we will talk about Blog themes and how they help your audience.   We are almost done but do stay tuned.

Setting up WordPress

Paul

In the last few blog post we talked about:

Now we can talk about setting up WordPress, although this probably won’t be a long topic.  I feel it is necessary to help people feel less stressed in setting up a blog.   Most of my family don’t have a clue how I set mine up, and I am thinking they are uncomfortable because this is foreign to them.   I intend to try to easy everyone’s stress levels by explaining it in a more relax atmosphere.

As most people will know I started my blog 3 Years ago, and haven’t stop blogging sense.   Some would call this what a blogger does.   I call this an experience, because what I’ve learned over the last three years is priceless.  As you can tell when I started my blog I was clueless about how to blog.   Over the 3 years I’ve learned a lot and a glad to be part of the blogging community.   It’s been a long process but a really fruitful one.

Photo by: Terry Mun Photo by: Terry Mun

Now I am wanting to pass the experience onto new users on.  Most people will expect a website management to be hard.   Creating a website even harder, here I will talk about installing it.

One way to install WordPress is through some Hosting providers website tools they offer to install WordPress for free.   They basically use a script to install WordPress.   Usually they are a version behind the last release of WordPress, now since WordPress has also integrated upgrades you can easily upgrade after your install the older version.

The other way is just as simple, You can install it using an FTP upload.  Now I am so glad WordPress has a tutorial for this.  I had to use it at least once in the three years to install WordPress.  You would however have to download the WordPress zip file and make a sub directory, calling it WORDPRESS and extract into that then upload that whole directory to either your main or sub directory.   If you’d think it is hard, I would argue it isn’t.    This way only took me 10 minutes at best to upload and install.

Anyway you choice is a quite a simple setup, If you follow the instructions and tutorial step by step.   There should be no problems.   Although no matter how good you are there have been problems in the past with installation and that might need to be dealt  by the hosting provider technical support.   Each hosting provider should have a way to contact them to resolve and you should not hesitate to call them for technical support they are there to make you succeed.

In the next blog post we will talk about Securing You WordPress Blog and why.

Picking The Hosting Provider & Setting your Domain

Paul

In my Previous Post we talk about the process I am going to use to guide you through it. So we already see what we need to do. In this Post we need to talk about Hosting and Domains.

When it comes to hosting a website it all depends on who you want to go through. Here are a few Hosting Providers that I recommend:

  • Hostgator ($4.95 a Month)

  • FatCow (Yes that is a Hosting Provider. Starting as Low as $5.50 a month)

  • IxWebhosting (Starting as Low as $3.95 a month)

These three hosting providers have programs to help you install WordPress.   For those who want to understand what a Hosting provider does, these are basically servers who host your blog content. They all have their own way of helping the customers.

They each will have a different way of setting up WordPress so you may have to look around their site for the specific details, but that is coming up in a future blog post. I will be walking you through using Godaddy.

Photo By: Terry Mun Photo By: Terry Mun

Now you’ve picked and bought who your hosting provider is. Now we need to pick your domain. Most all hosting providers I have recommend can also buy domains for there customers. So depending on the Hosting Provider you pick can help speed up the process.

Once you have a hosting provider with a server, you now have to buy a domain or I like to call it a brand-name. You should have a list but if not you can still make the list. This process of trying to find the right domain name can take the longest because some of the domains or all of the domain name on your list could be taken by another person. So you will need to go through the list on your web browser and put each one in at a time. For this example, I would recommend just using a [Listname]”.com”, working your way down to the bottom. See if it is taken if not this domain may be bought creating a new list of available domains that you might want to use. Just remember the domain might not be there much longer so You will have really short period of time before it could be taken by some other person.

Once you eliminated the ones that are used you can now figure out if your want to use one of the unused domains for your brand-name or if you want to start another and see if you can’t find a better one. This step is can usually be the ones that take the longest because there is a high chance the first list is usually no good but not always it just depends on what your brand-name is going to be.

Once you’ve picked the domain that you want use, it is time to go back to the hosting provider you choice and go about buying the domain. Each Provider is different some will charge you a setup fee for the domain others will be free.

Lastly You’ll want to make sure the domain is linked to your hosting server. The way you’d do that is go to login into your hosting account and checking the DNS Settings, or some host providers call it CNAME Records. This tells the Domain name that if you type it into the browser to go to a certain IP. This is where your hosting your provider provides and will most likely be part of registration confirmation.

On the Next Post I will talking about Setting up WordPress.

How to Setup your own Blog, The Easy way

Paul

Over the weekend I had a chance to talk to my sister who was interested in having setting up her own blog. She didn’t know a thing about setting up her own blog and asked me to walk her step by step. So I thought I would also walk my readers through this whole process and help you set up your own blog to.

This process will take approximately an hour to two hours, each step will be talked about in detail through a series of blog post. This shouldn’t not take long for anyone to do, depending on the speed of your internet. In fact if you follow my directions, it should be really quick and easy. No mess or fuss.

  • How to Setup your Own Blog, The Easy Way

  • Picking the Hosting Provider & Setting up your Domain

  • [intlink id=”4118″ type=”post”] Setting up WordPress[/intlink]

  • [intlink id=”4122″ type=”post”]Securing Wordpess[/intlink]

  • [intlink id=”4135″ type=”post”]Picking your Blog Theme[/intlink]

So now with that being said, I would like to talk about domain names. If you want to have your own domain you have to make it unique. It should be something personal and go with what your looking for. Do you know your domain is almost like a brand-name? Just like Nike, Adidas, and McDonald’s people who hear that come back with the knowing that no matter where you are in the world. This also goes for your Domain, before you start this think of a what you will be blogging about and make a list possible domains. This is always the first step into creating a blog. Now I must warn you this process may take long or it might be short. Some or All of those domain names you come up with may be taken or they may not. The Most common name extensions can be seen through Wikipedia.
Now with that said on my next post we will talk about Picking your hosting provider and Setting up your Domain.