Contentedly Maladaptive » building your own web site

Step 6 (Part 2) – A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website

Decidedly Maladaptive — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:00:59 +0000

This is the second part of the sixth post in a series of posts designed to help you set up your own website.

Continuing on from the previous post, where we discussed both the Contact Form 7 and the Akismet plugins, below is a list of useful plugins that you may or may not want to try out on your own website.

It is very difficult to screw things up completely when you try new plugins. Make sure you read the instructions when installing plugins. If you notice something that’s gone wrong with your site after installing a plugin, just de-activate it and see if that solves the problem.

If not, don’t call me.

This is not a good idea

Broken Link Checker – As your blog or website gets larger and larger, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of “dead” links.

Dead links are links that no longer work usually because other websites re-arrange themselves or just go off-line periodically.

Broken Link checker is an excellent way to discover which of your links are still valid and which are not. With this plugin, you will not only see a list of how many (working and non-working) links your site currently has, but you can also fix the broken link easily through the admin screen.

Google XML Sitemaps – One of the easiest ways to get more visitors to your site is to make it easy for search engines to look over what your site is about. Sitemaps streamline this process.

This plugin is very easy to use. You set it once and basically forget it. Every time you add a new post or update a previously-written post, the sitemap is automatically updated and Google is notified of the change.

Page Links To – This surprisingly useful plugin allows you to easily point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. It can be an URL on your site, or on another site. This is a good, simple way to set up navigational links to non-WordPress sections of your site or to off-site resources.

SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links is a neat little plugin that you can use to automatically link keywords and phrases that you put into your posts as well as those that people leave in their comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

This plugin also allows you to set up a list of keywords that you would like to always be linked to a specific URL. Like, say, an affiliate link. The plugin will do all the work in the background so you don’t have to worry about things.

You can also add the nofollow attribute to those links as well as force them to open in a new window, so people will remain on your site while visiting wherever you chose to send them.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

Registering a Domain Name
Choosing a Web Hosting Company: Hawk Host or Liquid Web
Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Web Host
Using cPanel and Fantastico to Put Up Your First Website
Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website
Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website
A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins

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Step 6 – Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website

Decidedly Maladaptive — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:41:21 +0000

This is the sixth step in a series of posts – a guide that I’m writing that will help walk you through setting up your own website, on your own domain name, using WordPress as a content management system.

Now that you have your website up and running, it’s time to explore the wealth of plugins that are available for WordPress.

Plugins are part of what makes WordPress such a great framework to build a website with. There are thousands and thousands of plugins out there that are each designed to do something that WordPress can’t do for itself right out the box.

Some of these plugins are extremely useful and some of them aren’t.

Some of these plugins are free and some of them aren’t.

Just because a plugin is free doesn’t mean that it isn’t as good as a plugin that someone is charging for.

For most people, the first two plugins that they are exposed to are “Akismet” and “Hello Dolly.”

Wordpress Plugin Management Screen

Akismet is a anti-spam plugin that is designed to prevent people from coming onto your new site and leave comment spam. Comment spam is very common on the internet. It involves people (or computer programs) coming to someone’s site and leaving a worthless comment that usually includes links to their own site. Usually this is done to promote someone’s viagra or cialis site.

Hello Dolly is, well, useless.

So first things first, we’re going to activate Akismet and then go on to finding other useful plugins. Go click on “Activate” right under the Akismet tab. That will bring up this screen:

Akismet Almost Ready

WordPress helpfully points out that you need to enter your WordPress API key for Akismet to work. So click on that link, and go to this screen and follow the directions on the detailed diagram below:

Detailed Explanation For How To Configure Akismet

Once you’ve done all that, Akismet will now constantly be working behind the scenes to keep spam off your new website.

But we’re not done adding plugins quite yet. Let’s add a plugin that will allow your readers to contact you via e-mail. First, go to the “Add New” tab under the “Plugins” tab:

WordPress Add New Plugins Screen

And then you search for what you’re looking for – in this case, a contact form:

Searching For A Contact Form

Once you click “Search Plugins” to the right, you get taken to this screen, where you can see the plugins that are available:

Selecting A Contact Form From The Install Plugins Screen

Usually it’s a safe bet to go with the highest rated plugin that performs a particular task, although not always. Due to the fact that I’ve used Contact Form 7 on several sites, I can vouch for it as doing exactly as it says.

So once you click on install, you’ll see this:

Installing Contact Form Plugin

Now that the contact form plugin is installed on your site, click on the “Activate Plugin” link to activate it and go to the next screen:

Contact Form Plugin Activated

Once a plugin is activated there is usually a place on the left-hand-side menu to change the settings for that plugin. Usually the new menu choice can be found under the “Settings” menu tab, but not always.

With the Contact Form 7 plugin, you get your own little menu addition. It looks like this:

Contact Form 7 Plugin Menu

Once you have this up, highlight and copy the code that’s pointed out for you to copy. Note that your left-hand-side menu has changed, it now has a settings tab for the contact form plugin. So once you grab that code up at the top of the screen, let’s set up your new contact form.

You may have wandered through this menu section before – the pages section. Pages are basically parts of your site that are intended to be more static than regular posts. Usually, pages are good spots to put “About Us” sections, menu items and contact forms. This is what the “Pages” section of your site looks like:

WordPress Pages Screen

It’s very important to remember that WordPress Pages are not the same thing as WordPress Posts. Right now we’re just working with pages.

As you get more comfortable with the different concepts, you can fiddle around with creating and deleting pages a bit more. For now, just do what I tell you or you’ll get a knife in the throat.

How To Create A Contact Page In WordPress

As you can see in the detailed and professionally-done image above, there are several elements to be aware of when looking at the “Add New Page” screen in WordPress.

First and foremost is the page title field. This is where you put the title of the page. In this instance, it’s going to be “Contact Allen” – because we want people to contact Allen. Because he’s so friendly and loving.

Once that’s done, click on the HTML code tab. This will show you everything in an HTML friendly way. If you put code into your pages at some point, you will want to use this tab. If you have your HTML tab up, you can paste that Contact Form 7 code that you copied earlier into the field that actually contains the content of the page. I’ve helpfully labeled it “You Write Stuff Here.”

For pages, you’ll probably want to go to the “Discussions” section at the bottom and uncheck “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings.” Contact pages don’t need to have the ability for people to leave comments on them.

Here’s what I added for AllenSelby.com’s contact page:

Contact Page Almost Done

Note the “Url” that I pointed out. If you ever want to send someone directly to this contact page, you can just send them that url. WordPress is nice in that it handles all that behind-the-scenes stuff.

So, once you have your contact page set up, hit “Publish” and go to your site. There, you’ll see something like this:

AllenSelby.com Now Has A Contact Page

Notice that I now have a new page – the “Contact Allen” page. You should have something like that on your site now. If someone goes to your domain, they will now have the opportunity to fill in the fields, hit send and magically send a message to you!

And that’s just awesome.

Feel free to experiment with plugins and see what works best for you. In the next post I’ll list a slew of WordPress plugins that I’ve used in the past and that I’ve found useful.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Step 5 – Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website

Decidedly Maladaptive — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:28:43 +0000

This is the fifth step in a series of posts – a guide that I’m writing that will help walk you through setting up your own website, on your own domain name, using WordPress as a content management system.

Now that you’ve completed the previous step and installed the basic WordPress installation onto your own server space by using Fantastico, you now should have something that looks like this up on your domain name when you type it into your browser:

What A WordPress Default Install Looks Like

Your new web page will not come up if you search for it using Google or Yahoo at the moment. This is good, because it is inconsiderately ugly. We will change that shortly, but right now we’re going to change the default settings that new WordPress installs always start out with. Because they’re defaults.

To change anything on your website, you need to log into the administration area of the site. You can do this from any browser, anywhere in the world. Simply go to “http://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin” and this is where you’re taken to:

Wordpress Admin Login Screen

Type in your administrator login name and the appropriate password (you do have that written down, don’t you?) and you’re taken to this screen:

Wordpress Dashboard Screen

What you have here is the WordPress dashboard screen. You will be seeing a lot of this.

There is a good amount of information on the WordPress dashboard. You can, if you click on the screen options tab on the very top of the screen under “Howdy, Your Name,” change what you see on the dashboard.

Dashboard Customization Options

I usually remove the QuickPress section, along with the Recent Drafts, WordPress Development Blog, Other WordPress News and Plugins sections. You can do the same, or leave them all up. You can, if you have a wide enough screen, make your dashboard have 3 or 4 columns and spread everything out however you like. It’s quite flexible.

Once you have set your dashboard up the way you like, it’s time to go to the WordPress settings tab down here to the left:

Here Is The WordPress Settings Tab

As you get more familiar with WordPress, you will undoubtedly begin to be more comfortable with the various settings and features within WordPress. Because this is your first website, however, I will give you a quick rundown of the settings you should change and the settings you should not change.

The first section of the Settings tab is the General settings section. Here you can change things like the title of the site, the tagline, the administrator e-mail and the date and time display formats. Right now we’re just going to change the time zone to whatever you feel is most appropriate. Since both I and Allen Selby are in Omaha, I’ll change the UTC time manually to -5 hours and click “Save Changes” on the bottom of the screen:

Change The UTC Time Setting To Your Own

That done, go to the Writing tab under the settings and change the size of the post box to 15 or 20. This is strictly a personal preference. I like to see more of what I’m writing and 10 lines makes me feel like I’m writing with a visored helmet on. Save the changes and go down to the Reading Tab.

Decide To Show Either A Static Front Page Or Your Latest Posts

This is the point where you have to start making decisions about what you want this website to be.

If this is a website for a brick and mortar business, it might be a good idea to choose to show visitors to the site a static page that tells them about the business, the business location and the services that it offers. You’ll still be able to have users read the individual posts that you’ll be making, but every time they go to the site, they’ll see the static page that you select instead of seeing a list of the 10 latest posts you’ve made.

If this is going to be a less formal site, maybe a personal site or something along that line, you can leave this as it is. When people go to the site, they’ll see the latest post you’ve made at the top, followed by every other post underneath it in reverse chronological order. The newest posts will be at the top of the page with the oldest posts being pushed to the bottom.

There are really no hard and fast rules for making either choice. Plenty of businesses run their website as a business blog, telling customers about the latest company news, offers, coupons and so on. Other businesses update infrequently and are more interested in just maintaining a web presence.

So make your decision, save the change and go to the Discussion tab, where you will see this screen:

Wordpress Discussion Settings Screen

On this page, you’re going to want to make sure these settings are checkmarked:

Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article
Allow link notifications from other blogs
Allow people to post comments on new articles
Comment author must fill out name and e-mail
Enable threaded (nested) comments

On your first website, you also want to be e-mailed whenever anyone posts a comment or a comment is held for moderation. You can always change that later if you start getting a lot of visitors and comments.

To the right of where it says Comment Moderation, change the 2 to a 1 in the box between Hold a comment in the queue if it contains and or more links. That will help filter out spam comments.

Everything else can wait for later. For now, go to the Privacy settings tab, where you will see this:

Wordpress Privacy Settings Screen

For right now, you should leave this alone, but you should be aware of what this is, because once you get your site set up the way you want it, and with some useful content, you’ll want to change this setting from the default. For right now, keep this set to: I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors.

Now go to the next tab down, the Permalinks tab, where you will see this:

Wordpress Default Permalink Settings

Search engines like Google and Yahoo like web pages to be descriptive of what they’re about.

Say I have a page on AllenSelby.com about how much Allen loves tooth whitening services in Omaha. If I want that page to rank higher when people search for “Omaha tooth whitening services” in Google, then I should do everything I can to help Google identify what that page is about – Omaha tooth whitening services.

One of the factors that goes into how high a web page ranks for a search term is the permalink structure.

Right now, with the default permalink settings, if I had a page on this site about tooth whitening, it could have an url of, say, “http://allenselby.com/?p123″ – which is not very helpful to Google when it comes to telling what the page is about. As a result of the poor permalink structure, if all other factors were even, Google would probably rank me a bit lower than a site with better permalink structure.

But if I changed the permalink structure to, oh, “http://allenselby.com/omaha-tooth-whitening-services” – well that would tell Google right off the bat to start thinking about Omaha tooth whitening services while crawling this page.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make your site have more descriptive titles for the pages you eventually write.

Click on the Month and Name radio button, like this:

Changing WordPress Permalink Structure

When you do that, the code – /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ – comes up in the box to the right of Custom Structure. This is good, but we can do better. Delete everything in that box but – /%postname%/ and then click Save Changes. Make it look like this before you save the changes:

Optimizing The Permalink Structure In WordPress

With that done, your blog is almost ready for you to put some content on it.

The next step is working with plugins. After that, I’ll show you how to change the look of your new site to something more interesting than the default theme.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Step 4 – Using Fantastico To Install WordPress

Decidedly Maladaptive — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:58:11 +0000

This is the fourth step in a series of posts that are intended to serve as a roadmap for those who are interested in setting up their own website for whatever reason.

By this point, you should have already have pointed your domain to your web host’s nameservers and allowed enough time for those changes to propagate. You should also have logged into your cPanel once or twice, using the login and password found on the e-mail that your web host sent you when you signed up for your account.

What we’re going to do now is install the basic framework of the website – the content management system, or CMS for short.

While there are quite a few choices you have when it comes to picking a CMS, the one I usually end up going with is WordPress, for several reasons.

WordPress is easy to use, making it simple to update content on your website without knowing HTML or how to use a complex editor tool like Dreamweaver, or hiring someone every time you want to make a small change to your website. You can actually update your WordPress website anywhere that you have internet access and a web browser.
WordPress is flexible and powerful because there are a ton of developers and programmers out there who are busy developing themes and plugins for use with WordPress websites. WordPress makes it easy to customize your website and do little (or big) things to set it apart from every other site that’s out there.
WordPress is easy to install, especially if you have cPanel and Fantastico, like you get with a Liquid Web or Hawk Host web hosting account.

Fantastico is a tool that you have at your disposal that allows for a quick, easy installation of the WordPress framework onto your domain name. Once you log into your cPanel, you can find Fantastico on your cPanel home screen, like so:

cPanel home screen with Fantastico helpfully pointed out

So look for the little smiley face Fantastico icon and click it to go to this screen:

Fantastico home screen with WordPress section helpfully pointed out

This is your Fantastico home screen, where you have any number of scripts that will install all sorts of fun things. I’d love to go into all your options, but I’m not going to because life is full of disappointment and you should be getting used to that by now. So just click on the “WordPress” link on the left hand side of the screen.

Fantastico WordPress installation section

Because this is the first time you’ve installed WordPress on your server space, this will be blank. Once you’re at this screen, click the “New Installation” link, which will bring you to the following screen:

Fantastico WordPress install - step 1

Fill in the appropriate information. Since I’m using the domain name AllenSelby.com, I select that from the drop-down menu. Then I leave the next space – the “Install in Directory” space – blank.

In the Admin Access area, select the login name and password that you want to use. I highly suggest that you select something other than “admin” for the login name and that you make the password as complex as you can remember.

In the Base Configuration area choose the name that you would like to appear on your posts. If you have a name you regularly go by on the internet, this is a good place to put it. Or you can use your business name, or whatever. This should be different than the admin login.

Choose an e-mail address that you check regularly.

Put the name of the website – in this case AllenSelby – and a tagline for the website.

Once you’ve done all that, click on “Install WordPress” to go to the next screen.

Fantastico WordPress Install Step 2

This shows you an overview of some of the options you selected on the previous screen and basically serves as a “Do you really want to do that?” screen. You do, so click “Finish Installation” to go to the next screen here:

Fantastico WordPress install - step 3

Ok, WordPress is now installed on your domain name and you have everything you need to get started on the next step. You can go visit your website if you like, although it will be very plain at the moment.

I recommend that you use that box down below to e-mail yourself the details of the installation for safekeeping and later reference.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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Step 2 – Choosing A Web Hosting Company – Hawk Host

Decidedly Maladaptive — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:44:42 +0000

This is the first part of the second step in a series of posts I’m writing that will help you set up your own website, with your own domain.

As I’ve mentioned before, setting up your own website involves following a short series of steps, and the second step to building your own website is finding a place to put your websites files – choosing a web hosting company.

If you do a search on Google for “web hosting” you’ll quickly find that there are thousands upon thousands of web hosting companies out there – all anxious to get the new webmaster (you) to sign on the dotted line and pick up one of their web hosting packages.

This is good in the sense that competition drives the price down, but bad in the sense that it confuses the hell out of the average person out there who is trying to sort the wheat from the chaff.

It seems like everyone’s offering “unlimited bandwidth” and “unlimited number of domains” and “unlimited storage.” Unfortunately, although those phrases sound great, they really mean jack squat.

Why? Well..

A web host that’s costing you $5 per month for hosting isn’t really going to offer you unlimited bandwidth – because they’d be out of business in a month if they did.

A web host that’s offering you an unlimited number of domains and databases that can be hosted on your shared space is still going to limit you in another way – to a small portion of the CPU power available on the server.

While both those limitations are normal in the web hosting business, they usually don’t come up as a problem for people until they reach the point where they get their service cut off with no warning. That’s hugely frustrating to most people, and is probably why World War 2 got started.

I’ve had several accounts with different web hosting providers and the two that I recommend to anyone are Hawk Host and Liquid Web:

A well-thought-out company has a target clientèle that they’ve set their business up to attract and support. While other types of customers can be attracted to their services, they’re not the intended customers and may find the company’s services either too limited or too costly.

Both these web hosting companies are looking for completely different customers, but I’ll give you the rundown on both companies and let you decide which is right for you.

Hawk Host Overview

I was turned onto Hawk Host by Michael Lankton – a friend of mine who likes to think he knows something about everything, like me. While he’s wrong when it comes to motorcycles and music, he’s right when it comes to web hosting.

Hawk Host is looking for customers on a budget who know what they’re looking for – a cheap, reliable web host with fast servers and no problems.

One of the things I like most about Hawk Host is that they keep the overselling to an absolute minimum.

Shared hosting providers are notorious for overselling their servers, in the hopes that all the people buying web hosting from them won’t actually use it. That’s fine for the majority of websites out there, but if and when your site starts getting some decent traffic, you don’t want it to be brought down because the server that it is sitting on can’t handle it.

Another thing I like about Hawk Host is that they have pretty generous CPU limits and, in addition to that, they won’t just pull the plug on you if you exceed them.

CPU limits are important. As your website starts attracting more and more readers, each reader that hits your site is going to cost you CPU cycles. If you start using up too many of those cycles, your usual web host will shut you down for an hour or so at the best, or permanently at the worst.

You do not want this to happen. It is bad.

Imagine someone coming into your house and turning off your computer while you’re finishing up your first novel and you haven’t saved for the last day or so.

Yeah, that bad.

So if you’re wanting to sign up for Hawk Host, here’s what you do:

Click the link here -> Hawk Host.

Click either the “Sign Up Now” button on their front page to sign up for their $5.95 monthly service, or go to the “Web Hosting” tab on the top of their page and select the hosting package you’re most comfortable with. You’ll be taken to this screen:

Hawk Host Domain Name Selection Screen

Because you’ve already registered a domain name, you want to select the “I will update my nameservers on an existing domain Or I will register a new domain” radio button and put in your domain name, like this:

Setting Domain Name With Hawk Host

Once you go to the next screen, you see this:

Selecting Hosting Billing Options With Hawk Host

If you’re really in a pinch for cash, you can go with the monthly billing. I would advise against it, however, just for the simple reason that you’ll be saving money over the long run if you pay for a year’s worth of service – especially if you use one of the discount codes that you should be using. So, follow my advice and pay for a year’s worth of service in advance.

My Preferred Hawk Host Billing Settings

Don’t worry about getting a dedicated IP address right now, unless it’s something you have experience with and know that you want. So select the 12 month price and either pick the server location that you like the best or let Hawk Host pick for you. Once you hit “Update Cart” you’ll be taken to this screen:

Hawk Host Confirm Order Page

Look this over to make sure you didn’t type your domain name in wrong or anything like that. Then focus on that little box that says “Promotional Code” and open a new tab.

You’re going to want to search for current Hawk Host promotional codes. Here, let me Google that for you. Look for a code that gets you 30-40 percent off the first payment and either write it down or highlight it, then right click and copy it.

I found a great coupon code for Hawk Host – october2009 – which you can just copy and paste into the little box there and enjoy a 45% off discount for your first year’s worth of hosting:

Price For A Year Of Hawk Host Hosting After Discount Code Applied

Hawk Host puts out a different set of coupons every month, and coupons expire regularly, so just keep looking and experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. It seems like you could try the current month and year format that they’re using and get a great deal, so try that first and see what happens.

Once you get a coupon code you’re happy with, click the “Checkout” button and go to this screen:

Hawk Host Checkout and Payment Page

If you don’t know what to do at this point, you’re better off making whistles in Uganda. Seriously, step away from the computer and take up lifting things as a hobby, or maybe take up thinking about how pretty rabbits are and how you’d like to pet them.

Pay with a credit card. They give you better protection than PayPal does and possible reward points.

Pick a good, secure password. Write it down and keep it in your wallet. Use a number/letter/symbol combination. It’s best to get into the habit of picking secure passwords now.

Once you pay, you’ll get an e-mail from Hawk Host with all the IP addresses, nameservers and other information you’ll need to complete the next steps. Save that e-mail, please.

Since this post has already passed 1200 words, I’ll split this post into two different sections, giving you the lowdown on Liquid Web in the next section.

Hawk Host Pros

Cost – If you can’t find a Hawk Host plan that fits your budget, you might want to either reconsider setting up a website or maybe start thinking about getting a second job of some kind. Selling some plasma, maybe. Hawk Host’s hosting plans are even cheaper when you factor in online discount codes and coupons.
Reliability – 99.9% uptime guarantee. This is good.
Fast Servers – In my experience, comparing Hawk Host’s servers to other shared hosting providers is like comparing a Lexus to a Hyundai.
Customer Support – It’s like the guy lives at the office. I’ve always had fast customer service with Hawk Host, with e-mails usually coming back within an hour with either a solution I can implement or announcing that they’ve already fixed the problem.

Hawk Host Cons

Does not offer the same level of technical support as companies that provide managed servers.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

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