What is a CMS?

That’s a legitimate question for beginners so let’s see it from a webmaster point of view. A CMS is a software platform (piece of software) that once installed on a website allows you to manage content on that site: publish content, edit it, delete it, move it. A more complex CMS allows for customization of the way content is presented to the user and add functions like comments, social media sharing, user accounts, forum etc. Other functionality can be added via plugins.

What makes wordpress suitable for your website?

Let’s see now the reasons wordpress is the best choice now for building a blog or a content site.

• It’s in constant development and evolves with any new version adding more functionality (see here how wordpress evolved). Also bugs are quickly solved by a dedicated development team
• Everyone uses WordPress so you get support easy because there are a lot of experts in WordPress. A lot of plugins are available to extend its functionality
• Easy to manage content because of the refined interface which allows for mass moderation of comments, bulk edit and such
• Customizable templates which are easy to modify if you know HTML and PHP. Also wordpress core files are left unmodified so upgrades are always easy, especially since automatic update was introduced. Also by using advanced wordpress functions you can make your site look like a magazine with ease.
• A lot of plugins to make your website a shopping site, download center or online publication. Your imagination is the limit here.
• Advanced post editing allows for text formatting and media inserts (pictures, movies, slideshows etc). Most of the media can be edited (basic actions) from the wordpress admin

These I believe are the most important motives to use wordpress or switch to it if you want to build your business online for cheap. If you think I’ve missed something let me know.

WordPress can be downloaded for FREE here

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First screen of the Intelligence section

This section of Analytics (placed under the Dashboard in the upper left menu) displays in the first page your site traffic by days and the number of alerts for each day. Once you click on a day it displays the main events that took place that day. All automatic alerts can be seen here, so you have to check out this section from time to time, but you can also create automatic alerts that you can receive via email, to notify you about events that happened today/this week/this month.

Creating a custom alert

As with all Google products and features the Intelligence reports area is still in beta and is awaiting your input. I consider it useful, but I would like for now to be able to set up some notifications also for Automatic alerts, which seem pretty well made as they register any anomaly (sudden change in your website trafic), compared to past evolution.

Sugestions for custom alerts

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Anonymous on Internet?

Many people choose to make this step while they are still work a full time job. If you’re one of them you’re confronted with the dilemma of disclosing or not your name when purchasing the domain name for your future website, as you might not want your employer to know you’re working overtime to build your own business. So you want to buy a domain anonymously.

WHOIS domain name privacy

Here’s when WHOIS privacy comes in handy as it uses your domain name registrar’s identification data when someone queries the WHOIS database to find out who is the domain name holder. Almost any Internet registrar (the company that registers domain names) offers this WHOIS privacy, but it doesn’t hurt to check first if it’s available or how much it costs as some charge extra for that.

WHOIS privacy is by far the best way to remain anonymous on Internet, but don’t be fooled as if you do things the wrong way the registrar can disclose your personal information to governmental agencies or other companies you’ve done harm with your actions. In none of those cases apply to you then WHOIS privacy is the best way to buy a domain name anonymously and also helps protect your email address used for registration against SPAM as the registrar provides its own address that will forward emails directly to you.

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What I want to do with this post is make a list of  websites that offer Free or Premium (paid) themes for WordPress, the most used blogging platform in the world. Even if ‘free’ sounds good I recommend you choose a paid theme (that will be used by few blogs) or pay someone to make a custom theme that best suits your blogs’ target audience.

Free themes directories for WordPress

Let’s see what are the best free WordPress themes websites around the web:

• WordPress.org website – the official website of WordPress offers some good themes to choose from. Unfortunately the new version offers few sorting options so you’ll have to browse each page
• Topwpthemes.com - you can sort theme by number of columns, adsense ready, fixed width, widget ready and so on.
• Bestwpthemes.com – it’s not a collection of themes but a collection of articles that point to themes by different criteria: best themes for small businesses, best themes for freelancers and so on. It also has premium paid themes
• Themespreview.com – a themes directory with nice previews, many sorting options and user ratings

Paid premium WordPress themes directories

Here’s where you should look if you’re planning to get some income from your blog. A premium WordPress themes guaranties that you won’t find if on your neighbor’s blog. Let’s see some websites that offer this kind of service:

• Premiumwp.com – this is the place for themes that will change the look of WordPress so bad that users won’t know that you use a free CMS platform
• Woothemes.com – as the name says, here you’ll find themes that will make you say “woo, that looks nice”. You can buy one theme at a time or signup for membership
• Dailywptheme.com – a collection of themes from various providers with a few sorting options

What I didn’t find

…is a website which offers extensive sorting options. Many times I know what I’m looking for: for example a simple theme, two column, light colors, widget ready, WordPress 2.8+ compatible and without needing any plugins. When you know what you’re looking for is hard to filter all the themes around without proper tools.

What websites do you use when you look for a WordPress theme and why?

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Congrats Matt, but that’s not what I want to write about in this post. I want to write about committing to do something right. I’ve been familiar with WordPress since version 1.something (1.3 or 1.4 I believe) and it was not my first CMS to use (PHP Nuke was the first one). I’m mainly a content guy, meaning that most of the websites I’ve created or worked for were  content websites or websites that used content in a significant percentage.

Committed

WordPress was by far the most efficient, optimized, bug free and simple to use CMS. It was also flexible trough plugins and that’s one thing that matters. Trough time I saw the WordPress team listening to users and implementing features that some used trough plugins and also offering excellent documentation and support for free.

WordPress is now more than a CMS, it’s a real platform that can adjust to different website profiles, not just hard-core content.

Not Committed

One example of not committed, at least for me, is Microsoft. I can’t look at Vista and not think that they didn’t solved problems years and years after being discovered. Even now windows animation for minimizing and maximizing is activating itself for no reason.

Rockstar is also one such example, not being able to solve disappearing textures in GTA and managing to make the game run smoothly on mainstream PCs.

WordPress is the example that with committment and dedication you can build big things with little help. Congrats again!

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That was till two days ago, when I realized I should write about what I do and I’ll be doing at work in the near future. I haven’t told you yet, and also didn’t wrote on the About page (hopefully this will change soon), I work in Romania at one of the biggest online publishers, MediaPRO Interactiv (official website isn’t online yet, so you have to believe me we’re big).

Here I’m managing Romania’s first gadgets and lifestyle website, go4it.ro. So I’m always connected to computers, Internet, SEO, web development, management and a little bit of marketing (you can’t promote your website if you don’t know how). I’m also working on finishing some other websites, but that’s not my main occupation.

So what I propose to you, on months to come, to compose a guide to making a business plan for an online startup. Why do you need a business plan is simple: it lowers the chance of failing, without eliminating it. Without a business plan you have great chances to fail if you invest your own money or you won’t get a loan, if you haven’t got the finances to start up your business.

So, for the next post I’ll prepare some short steps, like a summary. Bear in mind that I’ve did in past business plans, but nothing too complex or correct as I want to write on JohnPope’s. That’s why I need your help. I think we all have to learn something from doing this. So don’t hesitate to contact me, write a comment and of course subscribe to my feeds, to see when I’ve got something new.

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Some weblogs, like JohnPope’s did that from start, but that didn’t happen with all my weblogs. That’s when you realize that it would be nice to have a plugin that automatically redirects your old feed to the current Feedburner one.

Well, you don’t have to hold your breath anymore. Just grab the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin from here, copy it in your wordpress plugin FTP folder and then activate it from your management plugins page. The options for FeedSmith are located in Options -> FeedBurner FeedSmith. Here you have to enter the Feedburner RSS URLS and the one for comments if you’ve switched them to Feedburner too.

The result may amaze you. My romanian blog, Ionutpopa.ro got from 44 to 169 subscribers in just one day.

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First let’s see the requirements:

• A host which provides the storage space, an Apache with PHP support server and MySQL databases (I use Dreamhost but the connection is pretty slow as I’m located in Romania, not USA, where the host is)
• The latest WordPress version. (currently 2.3, which can be downloaded here).
• A text editor (you need to modify some files). Use something that doesn’t inserts spaces and other junk chars (don’t use Notepad, I use Dreamweaver).
• A FTP client. You need it to upload the WordPress files
• A domain name. Usually the host allows you to buy one, but you can use a registrar like GoDaddy.

Now let’s get started. First enter your Control Panel, on the shared hosting environment. Here you have to set up a FTP user (here you access the storage space. The FTP address is provided by your host), a directory on your space where the website will be hosted, a MySQL host, an MySQL user, a database which allows the previously created user to access it.

I can’t tell you how to do those settings as the Control Panel differs from hosting to hosting, but usually is pretty self explanatory, as you don’t need and programming and networking skills.

Now, once we have all the above let’s see how to start up your blog. First connect to your FTP account (you need the FTP client, FTP address and FTP user). Navigate to the website’s directory and copy there the content of the WordPress directory inside the archive you’ve downloaded from here.

Now rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and edit it with your favorite text editor. The file will tell your WordPress blog the settings to your database. Let’s check step by step what you have to write. In 99% of the cases you only have to fill the bold italic part.

_____
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’ );   // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’);     // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);    // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix. Let the default "wp_" if you don’t want to host more than one blog in the same database
$table_prefix  = ‘wp_’;   // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
___

Now you’re ready, almost. Open a web browser and go to http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php. Now you only have to name your blog and create your admin account. Once you’ve done that login in your admin panel at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/. Here you can customize your weblog.

To add more themes upload them via FTP to the /wp-content/themes/ starting from your website root directory. Plugins go to /wp-content/plugins/.

That’s it. If you encounter problems don’t hesitate to ask me. I may be able to help you. Also bear in mind that some hosts, like Dreamhost, have one-click installs, that can set up your blog automatically. This small tutorial is not in vain, as you need the above data when you want to customize your blog in greater detail, to make it even more individualistic than a common weblog.

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