I use my weekends to take care of odds and ends. Laundry, housekeeping, blog shit. Shit I don’t want or have time to deal with during the week.

This weekend, I sat down and finally installed Disqus as the comments manager on both RedheadWriting and RedheadedFury. Feeling so-damn-good about having done that, I realized in the midst of the process (since it encouraged me to backup prior to installing Disqus)…

When’s the last time I backed-up my blogs?

That prompted me to set about cleaning-up my blogs. So, my readers get to benefit from my panic today and read about some simple things you can do to make sure your blog is in tip-top shape. Mind you, I’ll be addressing these from someone who runs a WordPress.org installation on a self-hosted domain. If you happen to run on another blogging platform, there’s still sound advice here for you but I can’t speak to the how-to’s.

CALL THE MAID: Backup your blog!

Oh. My. God. This is like, Computers 101. Considering I’m part of the legion who has not yet converted to a Mac and held captive by Microsoft products, I really should know better. Depending on how often you post, you may want to backup your blog once a week. It takes about five seconds and I’m pretty much an idiot for not having this on my ToDo app on my iPhone.
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• In your Admin Panel, go to Tools then click Export.
• Click Download Export File.
• You’re DONE.
• Optional step: pop-open a beer.

CALL THE MAID: Get an XML Site Map. NOW.

I don’t know what made me compare the plugins I had installed on my two separate blogs, but boy – am I glad I did. Holy Lost Blog, Batman – I had an XML sitemap on one and not the other! Aghast at my behavior, I put away the razor blades only when I realized it was a simple fix. But you ask – Redhead: what’s a sitemap? A sitemap is simply a file that makes it easy for search engines to find shit on your blog. It’s easy to add one to your blog, so why not do it today and do a little SEO housekeeping?
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• In your Admin Panel, go to Plugins.
• At the top right hand corner of your screen, there’s a blue button that says Install Plugins. Clicky-clicky.
• In the search box on the next screen, type in/paste XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress. (This is my personal sitemap plugin of choice.)
• The search results screen will give you Google XML Sitemaps (version 3.1.7 is the most current as of this post). Click Install on the right hand side of the screen.
• When it’s complete, click Activate Plugin.
• Don’t forget to configure the plugin (easy-cheesy) once it’s activated.
• Don’t forget to request an Application Key from Yahoo so that your blog updates are reported to Yahoo.
• Don’t forget to click on the link in the top of your configuration screen to initiate the build-out of your first Site Map.
• Optional step: give a little audible “Awwwwyeah.”

CALL THE MAID: Shut your yap and organize the yapping. Comments, comments, comments.

I’m an active blog commenter and I appreciate those who take the time to comment on my posts. This past month, I’ve seen more and more Disqus-powered comments on blogs. Considering how easy they make it for people to quickly leave a comment without typing in all their vital stats (ad nauseum), I finally took the plunge and installed Disqus.
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I like Disqus because for many reasons. Not only is the visual interface attractive, but as the blog owner, you can help your commenters leave more comments. You can let users authenticate their information by using their Facebook, Twitter or OpenID (bah! poop!). When you create a Disqus account, you can even see everywhere you’ve left comments, just by logging into your account. Now that’s scrumdiliumpcious!
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Disqus also minimizes the spam comments from unauthenticated users on your blog. That. I. Like.
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If you want to ride the Disqus train with me (woo-woooooo), here’s the step-by step:
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• Create a Disqus profile.
• In your Admin Panel, go to Plugins.
• At the top right hand corner of your screen, there’s a blue button that says Install Plugins. Clicky-clicky.
• In the search box on the next screen, type in/paste Disqus.
• The search results screen will give you Disqus Comment System (version 2.12.7121 is the most current as of this post). Click Install on the right hand side of the screen.
• When it’s complete, click Activate Plugin.
• Don’t forget to configure the plugin (easy-cheesy) once it’s activated.
• Cool shit? You can manage multiple blogs from a single Disqus profile.
• Optional step: do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight.

Final thoughts this blog-tastic Monday:

• Are you subscribed to this blog?
• Are you following The Redhead on Twitter?
• Did you turn the iron off?
• Are you a fan of Redhead Writing on Facebook?
• Have you checked out the blogs in Redhead Writing’s blogroll? (look in the right hand margin)

WordPress Plugins Come in All Shapes and Sizes

In this final installment of Your Website Sucks, we’re rapping about WordPress plugins. By now, you’ve read about Three Reasons Your Website Sucks (and one simple fix), some awesome premium WordPress themes and the power that CSS brings to a WordPress-powered website (thanks to Jason Nelson of Visual Adventures Web Design, WordPress-powered site specialists).

A WordPress plugin is simply an add-on for any self-hosted WordPress installation. Like plugins for Firefox. They are the Legos of WordPress, adding virtually limitless functionality to a simple WordPress-powered website or blog. Today’s post will list the ones that I find critical for my own installations and I’d love it if my readers added their own must-haves in the Comments section below.

SEO Nova

If you’re not running the THESIS theme, you’re going to need a kickass SEO plugin. I was turned on to SEO Nova by @Trypnotik, who had previously turned me on to the Headspace plugin to meet my SEO needs. SEO Nova goes beyond both Headspace and the popular All-in-One SEO Pack plugin by leaps and bounds. You can code the page title, description and meta keywords, but you can also specifically code each post and page of your site to varied index/follow settings. Oh. My. Gawd. It has a savvy master control panel to set some universal settings site-wide as well. Visit the SEO Nova site and grab a look-see. This site and RedheadedFury.com both run SEO Nova.

SocioFluid

Every blog or website should have a social bookmarking application. My choice is SocioFluid. Simply stated, I like the rollover/grow-shrink effect that catches a reader’s eye. You can custom select which social bookmarking sites show up in the bookmarking bar as well as set the size of the icons and designate whether they appear at the top of a post or bottom.

Social Homes

Wanna encourage visitors to connect with you on your other social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook? I use SocialHomes. Pick your sites, enter your site-specific information, drop it in a widgetized sidebar and you’re good to go.

Akismet Spam Control

Spam blog comments suck serious nuts and Akismet controls them (albeit, sometimes too well) with ease. Akismet is already installed on every self-hosted WordPress blog – you just need to activate it with a WordPress API key.

Google Analytics for WordPress

If you’re not running Google Analytics as a component of your site’s metrics, for the love of God, why not? It’s the Google Monster, granted, but it’s pretty damn savvy for tracking your traffic, sources and helping you determine ways to generate revenue from your site through AdWords and AdSense. Google Analytics for WordPress is a simple plugin that requires the cutting and pasting of a tracking code and BAM! You’re off and running.

This week’s guest blogger is Jason Nelson with Visual Adventures, a web design firm that specializes in custom WordPress-powered websites and blogs.

First, I must apologize for the use of acronyms – nobody wants programming languages spelled out, though. I’ll use some silly analogies in this so non-dorks can understand what the hell I’m talking about. (I would loose all my street cred if I didn’t make it sound just a little techy though.)

Most of the acronyms in this article will be referring to programming languages. Programming languages are just like spoken languages. If you want to order some nice wine, better learn French or Spanish. If you want to get into manufacturing, Chinese might be your best bet.

Let’s go over just a couple of these to clear the air for this article. HTML is your basic web page coding. It tells the computer that certain text is a paragraph, or a heading, or to display a linked image. We’ll leave it at that for now so as to keep this simple.

CSS and style sheet will be used synonymously in this article. We’ll explain what they are in the next part.

What is CSS?

“CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.” Thank you, Wikipedia. Whew!

In other words, CSS is a language used to make web pages display a certain way. Now why is that important or interesting? Read on and find out.

What Can CSS Do?

With a style sheet, you can tell certain page elements to display how you want them to. For example, maybe we want the text to be white and the background to be black. We could do the same with HTML with font and body tags, but by linking an external style sheet, we can apply those styles to the whole website and leave our HTML coding simple and clean. Now why would we care if our HTML coding was a few lines shorter? Well, search engines read HTML coding, but they do not read the CSS.

The simpler and clean your HTML is, the better off your website will be for search engines. The fewer lines of code you have, the easier things are for those smart, yet very dumb search engines to deal with.

You can even change out a style sheet linked to a document and voilá, your whole site has a completely different design! Check out csszengarden.com to see some amazing examples of exactly this. It’s the same webpage (HTML coding) with hundreds of unique versions created by changing the style sheet and some images.

Why is this Special? (and why should I care?)

Prior to CSS, web page layout was done with tables. Yes, those same tables you use to make a chart for something like financial data. Tables were put within table cells and it quickly became a mess of code (kinda like that last sentence if you don’t know anything about programming web pages in tables! Messy…). If you’ve ever had to work on someone else’s site that had a bunch of nested tables, you would know the disaster I’m talking about. For the non-dorks out there, nested tables = messy birds nest of code.

More interesting, however, is how it can be applied to a software system like WordPress (blogging and web page management software) or an ecommerce system. Most of these have been coded in PHP so that they can interact with a database. PHP coding has tendency to scatter HTML code like a toddler having a heyday with your recently completed 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle. If would be very difficult to track down all the pieces and put in your own various bits of code for colors and layout. Future updates would be an equal challenge. PHP code talks to the database, gets what it needs, and cooks you up an HTML page that you see on the screen. With a stylesheet, you can then tell the cooked up HTML page to display the way you want it to. No need to sort through the jigsaw puzzle. Not so sure you’ll want to let the toddler still have his heyday, though.

Life becomes simpler and the possibilities with design are endless. Think of how much more productive you would be if you actually knew where that stuff you’re looking for every day is located!

CSS coding goes beyond the skill level of your Average Joe with a website. More importantly, it lets Average Joe only have to worry about his content while some over-caffeinated-latte-addicted-loft-dweller (read: web designer) can relax knowing that Average Joe isn’t going to try and put blinking text on his beautiful design. (A design that he feels really belongs more in a museum than on the web, but seeing as the web has a larger audience, this situation is acceptable.) Most of the WordPress templates that you can purchase are built in CSS (stylesheets). That’s why YOU can go into Mr. Web Designer’s design and drop your content in without fear of screwing-up the page layout and graphical elements.

If you’re looking for a custom WordPress theme, it’s simple for a web designer to either tweak an existing theme (remember CSSZenGarden.com?) or develop a new one for you entirely. The themes Erika talked about in her last post (especially THESIS) can all have a custom CSS Stylesheet overlaid to meet your particular demands.

See? CSS is good for all of us! Mr. Web Designer can now let Mr. Site Owner update some of his content. Mr. HTML now has a more successful relationship with Ms. Search Engine. The web can be a more beautiful place. Can’t you feel all the love in the air?

Feel free to drop me questions below in the comments and I’ll check in throughout the day. You can also email me directly at jason@visualadventures.com. Thanks for having me!

Well, installment one of this series (Three Reasons Your Website Sucks and One Simple Way to Fix It) garnered 16 comments and over 200 retweets. Damn. I guess you folks want me to write installment two. Let me get right on that!

We’re going to talk about WordPress themes, and not all are created equal. A theme is essentially a templated design that you can upload into your self-hosted WordPress installation (read more about those at Stop Being a WordPress Whore). It defines all your fonts, color schemes and the overall look and feel of your WordPress-powered website or blog.

But all themes are NOT created equal.

Most often, themes are built by designers interested in creating “pretty things.” They’re not SEO-savvy and bogged-down with code that keeps the search engines from finding what they need most (your info and keywords). However, we’re going to talk today about three themes that I’ve personally used (two of which I currently run) that are the hizzy of da schizzy when it comes to design, functionality and SEO. I’m confident that there are many more themes that web developers and site builders enjoy – so PLEASE: add them to the comments section below so readers can have a solid collection of themes from which to choose when looking to use the smartest themes on the market.

A note about WordPress hosting:

Think that installing a WordPress-powered website or blog is hard? Think again. There are several hosting providers that offer one-click WordPress installations:

• GoDaddy – This site and RedheadedFury.com are both hosted with GoDaddy.
• BlueHost – I’ve heard brilliant things about Blue Host’s
• An Additional List from WordPress.org of one-click WordPress install hosting providers

Things to Look for in a WordPress Theme

• Widget-Ready: is the theme ready to accept additional sidebar widgets and plugins? Ask before you buy (all themes mentioned below are widget-ready).
• Clean Code: send an email to the sales team if you’re unsure or do a Google search for feedback on a theme. A theme bogged-down with poorly written code that’s designed to make a pretty theme versus a search engine/user-friendly one isn’t a wise use of your money.

Woo Themes – Mainstream Theme

The blog you’re reading right now is powered by Woo Themes Mainstream Theme (and…it’s FREE. Dang.). Why did I select it? Because it has some very powerful built-in features that are essential to RedheadWriting.com and my presence in the social media realm:

• Social Media Integration: just key in your info for Twitter and Facebook and it has slick home page icons that link directly to your profiles on those sites.
• Built-in Woo Themes Twitter Widget: Yeah, lots of the Twitter widgets kinda suck for WordPress. I think the one that you see over in the right hand side bar is clean and easy to read. It also includes a hot link to follow me on Twitter.
• Navigation: Built-in ability to have header or footer Category navigation (if you wish – great for blogs)
• Widget-Ready: Many WordPress themes are NOT widget-ready. This theme is 100% widget-ready and able to accept any plugin I throw its way. (Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the upcoming post in this series about WordPress plugins!)
• Dynamic Image Resizer: On my home page, you’ll see every post is accompanied by a graphic. Mainstream allows you to upload a custom graphic to display and automatically resizes the image to work on the home page, eliminating your need (and mine) to be a freakin’ image resizing wiz. Oh yeah.
• Integrated Banner Ad Management: If you’re monetizing your blog with ads, a big WOO WOO for this Woo Theme.

While the Mainstream theme IS free, I’d recommend becoming a Woo Themes member so you can enjoy support from their forums and more. All of their themes are ALWAYS buy one, get one free. If you’re a developer, you can buy a package that includes a PSD file for additional tweaking.

iThemes’ FLEXX Theme

Quite possibly the most versatile WordPress theme on the market aside from Thesis (saving it for last), there are over 1,056 possible layouts with FLEXX. Perhaps the most simple plug-and-play, customizable theme out there, RedheadedFury.com runs on the FLEXX theme (in sassy Candy Apple). Available is 15 different color schemes (any of which are easily tweaked by a guy who knows CSS), FLEXX is web design-ready with all of its built-in functionality. For only $79.99 (or $199.99 for ALL 15 versions), I have no qualms that FLEXX is money well-spent.

I personally love the fact that iThemes offers video tutorials on how to make the most of your FLEXX theme. The ability for a complete newbie to go in and customize a complete website using this cleanly-coded theme is astounding. Their help forums are especially useful and provide hints for tweaks as well as instant answers directly from other users of the theme.

Want to find out more about the plethora of features that FLEXX offers (and I enjoy oh-so-much)? Visit the FLEXX theme online and see for yourself!

DIY Themes THESIS Theme

Yes, I own THESIS. While it’s not up and running on any of my currently live sites, I can assure you that it will be at some point in the future. I was turned on to THESIS by both Brian Clark (@copyblogger) and Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan), both of whose sites are powered by THESIS. If you’ve reviewed their sites, they really couldn’t be more different – but they’re both clean, easy to navigate and the built-in SEO functionality is unparalleled in any other theme on the market without installing a widget. Don’t believe me? Google’s Matt Cutts runs his site on THESIS (no shit).

If you’re not opposed to working with someone who is savvy with CSS of if you’re a web designer looking for the bomb diggity of WordPress themes to wrap your own CSS code around, take a video tour of what THESIS has to offer.

Key selling points for me:

• Unparalleled built-in SEO functionality, virtually eliminates many of the plugins most themes require!
• Likely the most developer-friendly theme on the market
• Lifetime updates, no matter if you purchase the Personal or Developer Theme
• Personal Theme is only $87 (one installation), Developer Theme is only $164 (unlimited installs for your clients)
• View the Developer’s Showcase to see all of customizations available with THESIS

If you have favorite WordPress themes, leave a comment below. Next Wednesday’s installment of this series is by guest blogger Jason Nelson of Visual Adventures. He’ll be discussing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and how they’re used with WordPress themes. Whether you’re a developer or not, the blog is in plain English so everyone can benefit!

Subscribe to RedheadWriting today via either RSS feed or email at the top right hand side of this screen – don’t miss this ongoing series about WordPress and web design or the new series on web content (next installment: Tuesday, September 1!).

Hey pretty blogger…what’s your name?

Yeah? You’re a writer? That’s hot.

Why don’t you, uh…come on over here and chat with me for while. We can talk about…umm…about…

Gee, I dunno…we could talk about how pretty you look sitting in front of that little MacBook, the silver case reflecting the auburn in your hair.

Or…we could talk about why you’re a little whore.

There – I said it. A whore.

Last week I admitted that I’m Google’s bitch and this week, I’m going to give my speech to all you inner-city disadvantaged bloggers out there about being a Wordpress whore. Ari Herzog even called me out on it in the comments of last week’s blog. It was a shameful day for me as I was faced with what I already knew as both a writer and an SEO professional:

I am a whore for Wordpress.

By hosting my blog here at a Wordpress.com domain, I’m giving away all my take. My tricks – these posts – are giving Wordpress all of the SEO juice when you, my cherished and slightly skewed readers, visit my site each week when I post. At the end of the day, it’s like I’m walking the streets for Wordpress, turning tricks and acting like a freelance writer from India who will pound-out 500 word articles for $3 each.

I

am

a

whore.

I am pleased to announce that effective February 1, SEOCopywritingRedhead will be found at its very own domain. This has been in the works for awhile, but Ari lit the fire under my ass necessary to get me out of Wordpress’ stable and into the groove of being my own madam.

Now, for those of you out there using free blogging platforms (i.e.: http://blog.freebloggingthingie.com), I’m going to do a little “scared straight” on your ass and tell you what’s what.

• If you blog for fun and don’t care about the SEO juice, go ahead and whore it up on a free blogging platform.
• If you’re attempting to establish a personal brand or a subscriber base – you need to stop being a dirty little blogging whore and get your own domain.

But Erika (you ask…) HOW do I stop being Wordpress’ dirty little blogging whore?

C’mere little blogger…sit down. I’m going to have the same conversation with you that a wise man once had with me.

You’ve got your entire blogging career ahead of you. You’re young (kinda), you’re smart (after all, you’re reading my blog) and you write some damn good looking words. Seriously – if your words were legs, they could kick for the Rockettes. So with gams like that, sweetheart, were gonna get you walkin’ in the right neighborhoods.

If you’re on Wordpress.com, there are several hosting services out there with one-click install of Wordpress when you purchase a domain and hosting. I’ve heard wonderful things about both Bluehost and Dreamhost, and while I’m currently embroiled in GoDaddy’s rat bastard practices, I encourage you to check them out.

You can also redirect your current Wordpress.com blog to your own domain for a mere $15/year. Under your Dashboard, go to Settings/Domains and then tell it the url you want it to point to. Then it’ll ask you to buy 10 Wordpress credits and BAM! You’re on your way. (and yes, your page still gets the SEO juice this way)

So, the bottom line it that it’s simple to get off the streets and end your acceptance of sub-par take for all of your hard work. Writing is very (very) sexy stuff, and there’s no reason to be giving away the milk without making the search engines buy your cow first.

Get your own blog domain. Open your own brothel. Be your own pimp. Keep your link juice.

And you can keep Wordpress, too, if you like.

Please note: no bloggers were bitch-slapped in the crafting of this post.