I’d like to give my Word Press blog a nice look, a home page with photos, each one of my article should be in an independant page; how can I upload videos to my home page.
A few questions in one short comment.
You can change the look of your blog by adding a different theme. Just upload it to the folder wp-content/themes then log in to your dashboard, click design and then click on the theme you want to use.
Not sure why you would want to use a page instaed of a post for your articles. You can set the blog to only display one page at a time inside your dashboard. Click settings, Reading and select to show one post.
Finally, to add video I use a plugin called Viper Video but there are other good ones available. It is more a matter of what you get used to using.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
I recently was able to launch my blog (thanks to this site). Well I ran into a problem: apparently the site loads perfectly with firefox, but with Internet Explorer the middle column, where my content is shows up all out of whack (under the left link column). How does I fix this? I did edit some of the css in the theme so I hope I didn’t make an error.
Well as I don’t have a link to the blog or know the theme it is a bit hard. Most likely it is the change in the css file but I have seen themes do that without touching the css file.
I try to always make sure that I check new themes in both along with Safari and Opera. If it works in those 4 browsers I really don’t care if there is a problem in any of the other minor browsers.
IE and Firefox parse pages differently and treat the same code differently. So much for standards.
Now to fix your problem, (hopefully), go to the the current css file and download or make a copy of it so you know what changes you made. (No sense doing the same work twice ).
Overwrite the css with the original css file that you downloaded. Check the blog in IE. If it displays okay then go through and make one change at a time to add back in your changes.
Now if the blog still displays wrong in IE with the original css file it can be one of two other things. First check the size of any images you have added and if they exceed the width of the post area or the side bar. If so you have found the culprit.
If it exceeds widths IE will break where as Firefox will forgive that. If that is not the case then it is time to get a new theme.
Good luck.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Does or should a Blog have a sitemap? I see too many blogs that are all over the place in their design. I want to be able to follow some kind of “order with a purpose” in designing my blog but not too busy that it drives traffic away. It seems as though there is a delicate balance here, right.
A very good question but I think you don’t quite have the terminology quite right.
I do recommend that you use a sitemap plugin so that you can automate the spidering of your site. I do not use a sitemap for people to read.
One of the things that WordPress does quite well is to organize the navigation of your blog. The more tightly targeted your content is to a single subject the better a blog performs with a few exceptions.
One of the things I like to do especially for my niche blogs is to pick out the major areas I want to emphasize and use them for categories. If you are dealing with a very specific topic this will probably give you between 4 -10 categories. These would be your upper level keywords you want to target.
Now if you are doing a general blog like I do with my name blog it can end up being many more because it tends to be more eclectic and cover a much wider range of topics. (Not something I recommend except for name blogs.)
If I understand your real question and unfortunately this means I have to use that ass/u/me word, you are looking for a checklist more for your side bar so that it doesn’t become too overwhelming.
The key will be how you are using the blog and what your monetization is. For most I use something like this but it does vary from topic to topic.
Lead capture form - If you have followed me at all you know why.
Pages - this is where I will have things like about but it will depend on the theme as this theme lists pages in a top header so this would be redundant on this particular theme.
Categories
Recent posts
Recent Comments
Links
Subscribe Me
Tag cloud
That would be the basics but if you use things like My Blog Log I would use their widget too.
The key though is not to copy the order but see what your primary goal is. If it was to attract people to my links then that would move up as an example. It really depends on your own goals and testing and tweaking to see what gets the most attention and putting your primary goal in that position.
Hope this helps as I hate answering questions where I use that ass/u/me word. If not resubmit or leave a comment here and we can continue the conversation.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
P.S. I just updated the 7 Tips book and if you have bought it before you need to login and download the latest version.
Yesterday we discussed how to find your niche or topic for a profitable blog. The next step is to get your blog up and running.
Now there are a variety of choices to get a blog some free some paid but if you are serious you really need to have a blog on your own domain. If you have a Cpanel server hosting account with Fantastico this is a point and click set up.
The problem is that if you stop there you would be better using a free service like MyCCBlog with the proper plugins already installed.
At the very least you will need the following plugins if you are using WordPress.
All In One SEO
Google Sitemap
Google Analyticator
Smart RSS Pinger
Now there are a ton of others but these are the absolute minimum that you need to make your blog friendly for the search engines.
There are a few other things you need to do to improve your blogs effectiveness. Next is to use custom permalinks.
This gives you more places to have keywords to get you ranked for the keywords that you generated for your blog posts.
Next you will want to change and tweak out your theme. This way you can customize the look of your blog. Appearance counts. If you go to a site and it is the standard Kubrick theme .
Compare that to the look of this blog. There are thousands of Kubrick’s floating around and when I see one I am usually gone.
Now there are a lot of other plugins that you can add to your blog to make it do just about anything that you might want.
For example - podcast, video, contact forms etc.
If you need help doing things like installing WordPress, upgrading WordPress, adding plugins and adding themes check out WordPress Made Easy.
Next step is creating your posts.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Saturday at 2pm edt I will have a free teleseminar on Step One that will expand what has been offered here. You can call in or listen on the web. Details are available at Profitable Blogging - Step One.
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