For a new user, however, it can be a little overwhelming once they log in for the first time. The WordPress backend is a little bit heavy and offers so many tools that it can be confusing for those new to the system.

At first I was spending a lot of time on the phone talking clients through the same basic issues over and over. How do I add a new post? How do I create a new category? While these were new issues for them, I had to repeat myself over and over. So I put together a document that provides basic instructions for using WordPress and I have been providing clients with a .pdf version to help guide them through their new site.

Now I am making it available through DocStoc. Feel free to share it, embed it, pass it on, whatever you want.

Keep an eye out for my next one, a .pdf version of my Optimizing WordPress post.

Basic WordPress –

I started to write back, but in doing a couple quick searches in the name of research, I found enough interesting information that I decided to write a post explaining it all.

Subdomains vs Subdirectories

photo credit: Tim Dorr

First, let’s define what we are talking about: “blog.domain.com” is a subdomain while “domain.com/blog” is a subdirectory or a folder within a domain.

A subdirectory is used as a folder within one domain to organize smaller pieces of content, like a category of several pages. For most people they will only ever need subdirectories.

A subdomain creates more separation than just a folder, basically creating a stand alone site that could easily be it’s own domain. However, you may want to piggyback on the main domain name. For example, google.com is the main site. Gmail actually lives at mail.google.com. Google Maps lives at maps.google.com, and Google Documents at docs.google.com. These are each stand alone sites and could be their own domains but they make more sense under the google umbrella.

On my own domain, I setup several subdomains to handle different aspects of my business. One contains all the temporary websites while I build them, including several installatons of wordpress and a few standard html sites that I use to test things on. This allows me to work on projects without making the under construction site visble on the client’s domain. Another subdomain was specifically setup to handle my project management. I use a system called ProjectPier, an open source project management app that allows me to share and store files, messages and task lists with an entire team and with the client. Each one of these subdomains is basically a site in and of itself. I want to keep everything within those subdomains separate from my main site.

So there are some different reasons at the hosing/server level for keeping your site organized. But as far as the url, it doesn’t make too much difference to me whether something like a blog lives at blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog.

How do subdomains effect SEO?

According to this article, subdomains used to help with SEO because there was a chance domain.com AND blog.domain.com would show up in results while there was (and is) a limit on two pages per domain in a search engine results page (SERP). You might see two pages from one site rank really high for books, but amazon is not going to take up the whole front page. However, setting up subdomains apparently used to trick the search into thinking it was looking at a new site so technically several subdomains could all end up on the front page, which would look really good. Of course, google is all about trying to provide relevant results, so a page of subdomains should no longer happen. For example if you are a national construction company that wants to get listed for each city, you might setup subdomains like losangeles.mycompany.com and boston.mycompany.com, then just copy your site over and over, swapping out the keywords and every mention of the city to match the the site. The problem is that there is no real interesting or different content on all these sites and in fact it is very obviousy duplicate content so the SEO effect is actually negative. Or you might try cellphones.myphonestore.com, mobilephones.myphonestore.com, and on and on hoping that all of these ‘sites’ might rank high, but the best result anywhere within “myphonestore.com” is all that would show up.

One strategy that could make sense would be to create a subdomain for a section of your business or site that could really be a standalone site. If you are a department store, you may have “mystore.com” and use “electronics.mystore.com” to create a site with great SEO specific to electronics, since the searches will see it essentially a stand alone site about electronics. Then use “food.mystore.com” to target searches specific to food. If you had those things combined (along with ten others – shoes, jewelry, etc. ) the content is not as specific and may be confusing as to what the site is about. Meanwhile, they all still help pump up the image of the main domain “mysite.com”. You have created several specific relevant sites all benefitting from the main brand of “mystore.com”.

Which one should I use?

For most situations and for the average website, the easiest solution is a new subdirectory. If you are setting up a new blog, you can create a folder called “blog” install wordpress and you have your blog at “mydomain.com/blog”. There is no reason to use a whole subdomain for that. I like the simple idea that if you could almost justify starting an entirely new (but related) site, then use a subdomain. If you are simply adding a new category of pages with similar content, then just use a subdirectory. Save the subdomain for something that is big enough and clearly separate enough that it needs to be its own site.

What is your experience with subdomains?

If anyone has a set-up using subdomains, why did you go that route? Do you see any benefit or negative effects of setting it up that way?

One of the things it was lacking was the ability to add links and other html to the messages. It used a simple text area and did not allow any formatting at all. In the past I had used TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor which can turn any text area into a full-fledged WYSIWYG text editor.

I wasn’t looking forward to digging through an entire application to figure out how to add TinyMCE but I found a post by Matt Gibson which detailed exactly which files needed to be edited. He does a great job of walking you through the initial addition of the TinyMCE files so I won’t repeat it here.

Following his steps adds the WYSIWYG editor, but ProjectPier uses something called textile markup to allow some formatting and the information TinyMCE was passing into the application was getting mixed up. In the comments to that post someone suggested a quick fix to allow the html added by TinyMCE to be passed into the app and be recognized in the messages. If you follow those, you will see that the htnl is now recognized.

Now we have links and lists and all of the formatting shows up on the message pages but when I went back to the overview page, the display was broken again. I realized that one of the functions which I had commented out was working working great for one area of the site, but not for another. So I had to dig a little and tweak a few more files.

I tested it and it seemed fixed by adding back in the commented function. But in case that function should be avoided somewhere else, I created a second function and altered it a little.

In the main folder of your Project Pier installation go to:

/environment/functions/general.php

And replace the newly commented ‘clean’ function at line 72:

[sourcecode lang="php"]
function clean($str) {
//$str = preg_replace(‘/&(?!#[0-9]+;)/s’, ‘&’, $str);
//$str = str_replace(array(”, ‘”‘), array(”, ‘”‘), $str);
return $str;
} // clean
[/sourcecode]

with this:

[sourcecode lang="php"]
function clean($str) {
//$str = preg_replace(‘/&(?!#[0-9]+;)/s’, ‘&’, $str);
//$str = str_replace(array(”, ‘”‘), array(”, ‘”‘), $str);
return $str;
} // clean

// Added this extra function to return the ability to clean strings when needed.
// Listing the comments on the front page needs this in place.

function clean2($str) {
strip_tags($str);
$str = preg_replace(‘/&(?!#[0-9]+;)/s’, ‘&’, $str);
$str = strip_tags($str);
return $str;
} // clean2
[/sourcecode]

I then had to change the call to the ‘clean’ function on line 27 in
application/views/application/render_application_logs.php
And simply replace the word ‘clean’ with ‘clean2′.

The other day I was messing around with Greasemonkey, an add-on for Firefox that allows you to add your own scripts to websites. I am a sucker for stuff like this and wanted to try out a few of the scripts that make Gmail more functional, including one that added a little sidebar for Toodledo (another of my favorites – a great todo list app). In the midst off all that I noticed one that could turn all the email links you came across in your browser into links that would open in Gmail instead of on your desktop with say Outlook or Entourage.

So that got me thinking… If they can do it, why isn’t Batchbook doing this? I went onto the forums at Batchbook and suggested that maybe they could add an option where Gmail users could get their mailto links to be coded so that they open straight into Gmail. I thought for sure that I was missing something and would maybe never get this request. Even if it was a good idea, it must be hard to add something into the code across an entire site like that, right? But by the next time I logged in, they had done it and activated it across their entire service! It is now an option right in the user’s account settings. It turned out they had been struggling to find the exact way to pass the info in the URL and one of these scripts I had found did it, right. It was as easy as it had looked after all.

This has been just one example of how this company offers some of the best customer service I have seen. They are very active in the support forums and acted on my little suggestion before I even had time to log in again. And on top of all of that, they wrote a blog post to thank me and a couple other users for their help in masking it happen!

Check out Batchbook CRM if you are at all interested in staying on top of all the emails and phone calls that you are always forgetting to make. This isn’t an all around CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution but more of a networking manager. They have a free account (for up to 200 contacts, I think) and for 10/month, it really does a lot. They have tutorial videos on the site that will explain what they do better than I can here. But make sure you look into their ‘Supertag’ system.

photo credit: Robbie-73

Danny Brown has been a recent find of mine in the social media and PR world and a great addition to my reading. He is a PR consultant who writes some great articles with a very personal approach.

Continuum or Spectrum?

He recently had an interview with Tom Cunniff. The idea was The Continuum of Social Media. Being a physics geek, I had to check out anything with the word Continuum. The basic idea was that there is relationship between the size of the company (and the size of that company’s needed audience) to the percentage of their media being social media vs. traditional paid advertising. Small companies or individuals could benefit from 99% social media and 1% (in some cases, like mine, 0%) paid media. Meanwhile large corporations selling to huge markets would be more like 99% paid advertising to 1% social media. In between there is a whole continuous range of needs and uses of media. Continuum works but I keep coming back to the word spectrum as better representation of something that ranges from one end to the other. A continuum to me would suggest something wraps around on itself with no clear beginning or end.

In one of the responses to his own article, Danny left a comment mentioning the potential for bad word of mouth to spread very quickly. While the article was interesting in and of itself, this comment is what got me to thinking, and to respond with a comment of my own. Briefly, I pointed out that small companies can make use of social media to broadcast and advertise essentially for free like never before. The largest of companies would not benefit from the advertising they get from a few thousand followers on Twitter, since they need an audience of millions. What they do get however, is a chance to respond to the bad word of mouth on a personal basis that they have never had access to and potentially turn around some of that bad word of mouth.

Some New Ideas

After leaving the site, I kept thinking about this because it is the other side of exactly what the original article was talking about. Going back to my math roots, I realized this creates a great inverse relationship between a few things. To make it simpler, let me list the basic concepts:

• The smallest of companies (or individuals) can use social media to broadcast and start conversations that greatly help them.
• The largest of companies need a mass audience and will not benefit as much, needing to advertise on some level.
• The largest of companies will still be at risk of bad word of mouth, which can spread like wild fire now. On the other hand they can make use of social media to engage the consumer on a very personal level and possibly turn that around.
• The smallest of companies (or individuals) will still be at risk of bad word of mouth but their reach and their audience is limited. At first I thought this meant the damage would be limited. But now I have reversed that and think the damage could actually be GREATER because their ability to respond is limited.

This last point is the one that struck me. A good comparison would be a contractor who rips someone off. The word of mouth will spread around that customer’s group of friends and relatives, maybe that neighborhood (let’s use the word community), but the reach is limited. The contractor can go to the next community and do the same thing. Of course this kind of behavior will catch up with the contractor eventually but the idea is that they could keep hopping from community to community for a while. Compare that to a large international corporation whose brand could be tarnished forever because their scope is global. They have no next community to go to.

The Spiral

On the other hand, let’s take this into social media and see how things change. A small time individual (maybe a freelance web designer, like me?) could face a serious problem if bad word of mouth spreads. If some type of rumor, bad client experience, or anything negative were to somehow spread, it could very quickly grow beyond the reach of their small social circle. Now when that contractor goes to the next community there is a much better chance that the word has gotten out. Someone’s reputation and branding could be tarnished before they even have one. In addition to all this, they have no ability to take out a full page ad or 30 second TV spot to make sure their side is heard.

Final Thoughts

So we have something like this:

• Small companies benefit from Social Media with a better ability to market themselves and start conversations but could risk a limited ability to respond to and change or stop conversations.
• Larger companies might not need or even care about the small impact of Social Media on their initial marketing but could find a great way to connect directly to the conversations that are started about them.

Both of these are taking things to the extreme ends of the spectrum and there is a whole range of possibilities in between.

Can anyone add to this or relate some real world examples?

Some Qualities to Look For:

cPanel: This is a control panel system that you (or your designer) will use to setup email, control usernames and ftp access. The technical side of things is made MUCH easier with this. I won’t work on a site without it.

Fantastico or Simple Scripts: These are services that allow simple one-click access to many of the most popular web site scripts out there, like WordPress, mailing lists, e-commerce plugins, etc. Most quality hosting services offer this.

Unlimited (or essentially unlimited) Everything: All of the services I will recommend will come with Unlimited Storage Space & Bandwidth. They either have unlimited or HUGE amounts of the following: domains, sub-domains, email addresses, MySQL Databases. Some limit you to something like 5000 email addresses, but what would most sites ever need with 5000 email addresses? It is just good to know that you can use as many as you want.

Ease of Use: No real way to tell this until you sign up and sign in. I have learned the hard way that it makes a BIG difference on the time it takes to accomplish basic tasks. GoDaddy? Horrible. Yahoo? Really bad. See more abut that below…

Some Hosting Services To Avoid:

Siteground.com: I had a client who hosted their site there and it was down so often that we had to sign up for a new account and throw away the money they had paid for the year of hosting because it just wasn’t worth having the site there any more

GoDaddy.com: A very popular and inexpensive solution, especially for domain name purchasing, but their site is SO user-unfriendly that it takes FOREVER to find and change anything. I also has a few major problems with WordPress sites so if you are looking to use WordPress at any point, avoid GoDaddy.

Yahoo.com: One of the bigger names in the internet world and they offer a pretty cheap solution that allows you to host some basic sites. It might be fine for doing your first site yourself, but to install and work on a site on a professional level, your web designer needs easy access to things that they just don’t make available or make very difficult to use.

If you host your site at GoDaddy, Siteground, or Yahoo and hire me to work on it, you will most likely end up paying me MORE than a year of hosting at some other places just to mess around with the problems of these sites. While it would seem like a waste to pay for another hosting service before your time runs out, it ends up being better to just make the switch and allow your web designer to work faster & easier (and in the end, allow them to charge you less!).

The Hosting Service I Recommend:

I used to recommend a few different hosting services, but now there is only one – Hostmonster.com

I have used Hostmonster for a couple years now and love it. They offer one-click installation of WordPress (as well as a bunch of other great scripts, like mailing list managers, e-commerce, forums, and more). Their customer service is amazing, with phone and chat support that always answers my questions.

For any potential clients – signing up with Hostmonster through this link is enough to cover the time it takes me to set-up your hosting account. Using this affiliate link allows me to keep the cost to you as low as possible.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT HOSTMONSTER.COM.

There are three sections to the site: the ‘Website Grader’, the ‘Twitter Grader’ and the ‘Press-Release Grader’. I have only used the website and Twitter sections, but would like to focus on how to use the Website Grader and walk you through the results for my site.

First thing is to go to the site: website.grader.com

Once you are there, you will see a form to input your site.

Make sure to uncheck the email box before submitting unless you want to end up on their mailing list. They actually offer a lot of great info, so it might be a good idea. I subscribe to their newsletter and RSS feed myself.

By the way, you will notice that you can tyoe in any site so type in mine if you want to see my whole printout. OR – and this is where the site gets really powerful, it allows you type in competitors’ sites and see how you differ. Give it a shot!

Next, we wait while their fancy animation tells us that our site is being analyzed. It might take a few minutes, so you can go answer an email or grab a fresh cup of coffee and come back.

When it is done you will find a whole page of information that rips apart every aspect of your site and grades it. It starts with the overall grade:

Below that, there is a lot of stuff. I just want to point out a few key areas of interest.

The first section is called the ON PAGE SEO and includes info about the metadata, number of images, number of headings and the structure of the site. It will spell out what is good and bad about each area of interest. For example, it has the following to say about my keywords:

As you can see, it is warning me that I have one too many keywords. I guess I will have to choose one or two to take out.

One element that I never thought of is the age of the domain and the amount of time until it expires. The grader was able to find that my domain expires in less than a year. The search engines actually factor this in when they rank the relevance of a site, assuming that a new site that will expire soon is not serious, whereas a site that has been around and WILL be around is more important. So, if you can buy up that domain name for a number of years at once.

It is telling me that my Google Page Rank is Zero, which is not surprising since this is my newly lauched personal site to showcase my web design and video work, which I get mainly by word of mouth. Google Page Ranks go from 0-10 and you can find out more about how that works here.

The printout goes on to detail whether or not your site is listed in four major search and listing sites: DMOZ Directory, ZoomInfo, DIGG, Del.icio.us. If you haven’t already, go make sure your site has been submitted. You may need to sign up for an account, but most will let you submit a URL. They also mention Yahoo Directory, but I left it out since that costs $299 to submit to. Not worth it for me.

Overall, I think grader.com offers one of the best starting points for improving the visibility of your sites. But strictly trying to enhance your SEO is not really enough anymore. Even this site points out blog listing sites and bookmarking sites, which are sometimes more important, depending on your site.

There are also an increasing number of ways to use social media and word of mouth to get people to your site. For an example of one of the best methods out there right now, I only have to point to this very post. I came across an interesting post on PIF. I commented. I recieved an email asking me to write a guest blog post. Now I have the chance to link back to my site and say, ‘For more information you can check out my post on Why SEO is Not Enough.’

Hopefully this post pointed out a new resource that will help you improve your site and your knowledge about SEO and web traffic. Please explore the grader.com site, they have lots of free articles and downloads (and of course paid services) that will help you along the way to improving the visiblity of your site.

Here is my feed of tips about Using, Designing and Promoting blogs.

All in One SEO Pack – Great options for manipulating meta data and search engne robots right from the admin panel. By Michael Torbert.

the_excerpt Reloaded – Allows small excerpts to be displayed instead the whole content of posts.  By Kaf Oseo.

WP Post Thumbnail – One of my favorites. You have to see in action to appreciate it. It allows you to upload, crop and name up to three thumbnails for each post and then use those thumbnails when you display posts in different situations. I use it for the big featured image on my home page, & the smaller images when I list recent posts. By Stanley Yeoh.