My recommendations are what I consider the absolute basic things that you need to do as you start working with WordPress. There are a lot more things that you might consider doing and that others have recommended doing – Cenay Nailer in particular recommends 22 things that you should do after installing WordPress, while over at Pro Blog Design they recommend 10 things to do.

A lot of the things that others recommend I’ll find myself doing later in the design and development process. I don’t think they necessarily need to be done the very first time you log in to your WordPress admin panel, which is the perspective I’m coming from.

So without further ado, here’s my list of 8 basic things that you should do right after installing WordPress.

1. Change the admin password

After you’ve installed WordPress and configured the installation, WordPress gives you an automatically generated password to use the first time you log in. This should be a no-brainer, but make sure to change that password to something that you can remember easier.

Never changed a password before in WordPress? It’s quite simple – just go to the Users panel, click on the “admin” user, and scroll down the page to where you can change your password.

2. Enable permalinks

By default, WordPress generates a link using database strings – http://www.example.com/?p=N, for example. It’s not the most usable or SEO-friendly format, which is why most people choose to enable permalinks. That way, links will appear a lot nicer – http://www.example.com/about/, for example.

To enable permalinks, you need to upload an HTACCESS file to the root level of your website, and then give it read and write (0666) permissions, which you can easily do with most FTP programs. Then, go to Settings > Permalinks to enable them in any of the given formats or customize them in your own format.

For more information, including what an HTACCESS file is, read through the “Using Permalinks” page in the WordPress codex.

3. Activate the Akismet plugin

Akisment is plugin that is highly recommended for use on your WordPress website – so highly recommended, in fact, that it’s already included when you first install WordPress onto your server. It blocks spam comments from appearing on your website, which is a big concern, especially if you have comments enabled on your website.

When you activate Akismet, you need a WordPress API key in order to complete the activation. You can get one by registering your WordPress website at WordPress.com, which is different than WordPress.org.

4. Upload and activate plugins

Now might be a good time to install any plugins that you know you’ll need on your WordPress website. You can always add more or remove any at a later time, and of course there will probably still be some configuration that you’ll need to do in order to get everything working properly on your website.

If you’re new to WordPress and don’t know what plugins to install, take a look through my list of essential plugins for your WordPress website or blog for ideas.

5. Customize the login screen

I’ve written elsewhere about the benefits of customizing the WordPress login screen, and it’s something that I like to do for any clients that I build a WordPress website for. It helps make it easier for them to use WordPress, and is a little extra touch that can go a long way towards making the administrative experience more personal.

The method I detailed involves working with the PHP and CSS files that come with the WordPress installation. That’s fine to do if you want a fancier login screen, but the drawback to it is that when you upgrade your WordPress installation, you’ll lose all that work.

I found a nice plugin called WP Custom Login Form Image that I started using instead, which lets you customize the image that you’ll see on the WordPress login screen. This way, my clients will still see their logo on the login screen, no matter how many times the version of WordPress changes.

Why do this here? Because it’s a simple touch that might otherwise be overlooked later on, I think it’s just best to do it in the beginning.

6.  Change the default category

WordPress sets up a default category for your posts called “Uncategorized”. If you don’t want that to display the word “Uncategorized” to display on your website though, you might want to consider changing the name of the category.

This is generally a good idea to do because you never know when you might forget to select a category for your posts – it’s happened to me before, and I personally don’t like seeing “Uncategorized” display as a category on my blog.

There are two ways of doing this, both simple to do:

• Rename “Uncategorized” – You can edit the name of the “Uncategorized” category like you can any other. Simply go to Posts > Categories, and then edit the category name to whatever you want it to be.
• Choose another category as your default – Create a new category with a name of your choosing, and then go to Settings > Writing. Towards the top of the page you’ll see a drop-down menu where you can change the default category to the one you created.

7. Upload your theme files

Now that you’ve taken care of some of the preliminary settings, you’ll want to upload your theme files so that you can really start to design your website.

Use an FTP program of your choosing to upload the theme files to the wpcontent > themes folder. Then, go to Appearance > Themes, and activate that particular theme.

If you’re using an already-developed theme, then your WordPress website should pretty much be good to go. If you’re a designer, this is where you can start developing and testing your design.

8. Make theme files writable

When I’m creating a WordPress theme, I create the files in Adobe Dreamweaver, and then upload them via FTP to the server. After the website is launched and the responsibility for it gets turned over to the client, I have to think in their shoes. Not all them have Dreamweaver or want to use FTP, so they’ll need a way to update those files on occasion.

That’s where the theme editor in WordPress comes in – which in my mind is one of the more underrated tools in WordPress. This is the spot where someone can edit a particular theme file without needing any special software on their computers. (It just assumes that they have a working knowledge of PHP and CSS.)

The one trick is that you need to give write permissions to your theme files in order for them to be editable in the theme editor. You can do this the same way that you do with your HTACCESS file when enabling permalinks.

Thoughts?

After you install WordPress, what are some of the things that you do to get it set up? Are there things you do that are different for a client’s WordPress website as opposed to your own WordPress website? And finally, is there anything that you think should be on this list that I didn’t include?

Share your thoughts with everyone on these questions and more by leaving a comment below!

What is duplicate content?

Simply put, duplicate content is any text on your website that either completely matches, or is similar to, content elsewhere on your website. While there are acceptable kinds of duplicate content – print-only versions of a web page, for example – in other cases people intentionally use duplicate content across multiple domains in an attempt to get more traffic to their website from search engine results.

It’s the latter usage of duplicate content that is the reason Google and the other major search engines penalize you for having it on your website. There’s no way for them to understand the intent of why the content might be duplicate – even if you aren’t duplicating content maliciously – so they just penalize it altogether.

That being the case then, optimizing your website so that it avoids duplicate content is something you need to do if you’re interested in your website’s placement in search engine results.

(For more tips and explanations from Google about duplicate content, read through their page on the subject in the webmasters/site owners guide.)

5 ways to avoid duplicate content

When you install WordPress out of the box, it’s not duplicate content proof – and that especially pertains to your blog posts and how they’re displayed. For example, if you have your category, archive, and home pages all set up so that they display the full text of your blog posts, guess what you have? Duplicate content.

Here are 5 simple changes you can make to avoid duplicate content on your WordPress website:

• Display the full text once and only once – My rule of thumb is that the full text of a blog post should only be displayed on the actual page of the blog post itself. Everywhere else your recent blog posts are listed, you should either have the excerpt appear, or just the name of the post and a link the full text of it. To display the excerpt only, you can either update your theme files, find a plugin to do it for you, or just use the <!–more–> tag when writing your content.
• Fix your page header – You should insert the following code into your theme’s header file to make sure that certain pages (such as the homepage, posts, pages and category pages) are indexed by search engines spiders, while certain others (feeds, archives, etc.) are excluded :<?php if((is_home() && ($paged < 2 )) || is_single() || is_page() || is_category()){
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
} ?>
• Be aware of comment pagination – In WordPress 2.7, you have the option of separating your comments onto multiple pages rather than lengthening the actual post page. The only problem with this is that for every page of comments, you’re duplicating the content that people are commenting on. This function is enabled by default in WordPress 2.7, so if you don’t have a need for your comments to be paginated, go to the “Discussion” area under settings and uncheck that option.
• Add unique META descriptions to each post – I’ve written about META tag issues in WordPress previously, but the most important META tag to consider here is your description. If you have the same META description on all of your blog posts or pages, that’s duplicate content. I recommend the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin (what I use on this website) because it lets you use your excerpt (or whatever text you want) as the META description, thus avoiding duplicate content.
• Update your robots.txt file – If you don’t want search engine spiders to find unintentional duplicate content on your website, put some instructions in your robots.txt file that tells them what they shouldn’t crawl. In WordPress, that means making sure you exclude your feeds and any other auxiliary pages that duplicate content you have elsewhere. The following code will do the trick – just copy and paste it into your robots.txt file:
  User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/trackback/$

Thoughts?

If you’re a web designer or developer and have a WordPress website (or have built WordPress websites for your clients), how do you help them avoid duplicate content on their websites? Are there any tips or suggestions that I didn’t mention that you feel would be useful to others? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below!

(If you don’t know what breadcrumbs are and want to find out more about why and how to use them, read through my previous post on the subject, “Hansel and Gretel Would be Great Web Designers“.)

By adding some code

If you feel comfortable working with your WordPress theme’s files, here are 3 different ways to incorporate breadcrumbs into your WordPress website. Choose a method depending on what content you want to use them for on your website.

Simple breadcrumbs for individual blog posts

A post over at WP Hacks details how to make simple breadcrumbs menus using basic PHP template tags. All you have to do is insert the following code into the single.php file wherever you want the breadcrumbs to appear:

<a href="<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>">Home</a> &raquo; <?php the_category(); ?> &raquo; <?php the_title(); ?>

You can style this with CSS to make it look a little nicer; my recommendation is that you wrap everything in a list like as follows, which will give you more options when it comes to styling:

<ul>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>">Home</a></li>
<li><?php the_category('') ?></li>
<li><?php the_title(); ?></li>
</ul>

I include the code here because this method is so simple to use. I’ve used it before, and it serves it purpose if you only want to include the breadcrumbs on your blog posts. The only drawback is that there is no flexibility to use it anywhere other than the posts on your WordPress website.

Advanced breadcrumbs for both pages and posts

When you want to add breadcrumbs to more than just blog posts, you need something a little more advanced in order to do that. Here are 2 different methods; both incorporate more advanced code to display breadcrumbs on both pages and posts:

• How to: Breadcrumb function for WordPress
• WordPress Breadcrumbs

With both methods, you just have to copy and paste some code into your functions.php file, and then insert some PHP code into your theme’s files wherever you want the breadcrumbs to appear.

I haven’t tried either one of these out myself, so if someone has used them, or tries them out on their website, leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts.

By using a plugin

If you’re not comfortable editing the code in your WordPress theme’s files, there are plugins available that give you the ability to style and manage them through the WordPress admin section, such as:

• Breadcrumb NavXT
• Yoast Breadcrumbs
• Breadcrumb Trail by Justin Tadlock

I haven’t tried out any of these plugins myself, so I can’t speak from personal experience about how well they work or if one is preferable over another. If you have used one of them or have any feedback about these plugins (or others I didn’t mention), leave a comment about it below.

Thoughts?

Do you have a preferred way of creating breadcrumbs on your WordPress website? If so, share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

One of my big selling points about why I want to build a client’s website in WordPress is because it is so easy to use. The last thing I want is to have the client be dissatisfied with the website I gave them because they find don’t find WordPress to be that way. That makes me look bad, and dissatisfied customers generally don’t lead to repeat business or give out referrals to others.

Here are the things that I do to make it easier for my clients to use WordPress.

Customize the login screen

There are a number of reasons as to why you should customize the WordPress login screen, which I covered in a separate article on the topic. But the main one that applies here is the sense of familiarity that you can give a client from the very first moment that they go to manage their content. And since first impressions are everything, not only is it a nice touch on your part as the designer, it’s a potentially invaluable change you should make.

De-Clutter the dashboard

In WordPress 2.7, when you first log in you’ll see the administrative dashboard with all the options for what is displayed on the screen. Fortunately, you can customize what will appear, which is a nice feature that came along in this version of WordPress. Just click on the “Screen Options” tab in the top right corner of the page to make your choices.

Most users who aren’t technically savvy don’t care about such things as WordPress development blog updates, the latest plugins, etc., so you can safely remove them from the dashboard. The goal is to set up the dashboard so that when the client logs in, they’re not overwhelmed with unnecessary information (which might make them intimidated about using WordPress), but rather will see a clean dashboard with only the information they need to see on it.

Create separate users

If multiple people within your client’s business or organization are going to post content, then you’ll need to set up multiple user accounts so that each person can post content on their own. Make sure to select their user level accordingly so that they can only do what they’re supposed to; for a good explanation of the different user levels, read through the page on the topic in the WordPress codex.

The other reason you’ll want to do this is to separate the purely technical and administrative functions (managing plugins, overall site settings, etc.) from the purely content-related. What you’ll end up with is the default admin log-in, which could be used by whomever is managing the website as a whole, and then the separate user log-ins.

Just don’t forget to give a list with all of the user ID’ s and passwords to the client, so that they can distribute them accordingly.

Advise them of updates/upgrades

Working with WordPress means that there will occasionally be the need to upgrade something on their website – either a plugin or the actual version of WordPress itself. Although upgrades aren’t necessarily a bad thing, from a client’s perspective they might get nervous that what they’ve grown accustomed to doing will change.

The release of WordPress 2.7 is a perfect example, especially since it brought such a dramatic change to the administrative experience from previous versions of WordPress. When there are major changes that will be taking place, it’s a good idea to let them know ahead of time so that they’re aware of what’s going on and what, if anything, will change. (You don’t necessarily have to do this for every time a plugin needs upgrading.)

There is a business benefit to this as well. Keeping them updated after you turn the website over to them shows that you’re not just dropping it in their lap and running. Doing so gives them the impression that you’re thinking about them as your client even if you’re not working directly with them at the moment – a sentiment that might go a long way in the future.

Install the proper plugins

If there are any plugins that you know of that will make it easier for them to do something they need to on the administrative side, make sure to install those in addition to the plugins that function only on the actual website. The WordPress Database Backup is a great example; installing it and showing them how to use it could save tons of headaches later on.

Teach them to use it

This is the probably the most essential thing you can do when turning over a WordPress website to a client. Making the transition to a content management system can seem overwhelming at first, especially for those people who aren’t technically savvy or have never done it before.

You need to do everything you can to help ease your client into it and to show them how easy it is to use. Make sure that you show them (and by them, I mean anyone who will be using WordPress) everything that they’ll need to know in order to use WordPress as they intend to. I prefer to do this in-person if possible, since it’s much easier to teach something on the computer to someone when you can see it with them as they do.

While you should always be there if your client has questions, you might also want to provide them with some online resources that they can turn to for answers in addition to turning to you. That way, they won’t always have to come to you for answers to simple questions, but at the same time, they’ll know that if they can’t easily find the answer to something, you’re there for them to turn to.

Just make sure that you build this teaching time into your overall price quote, and that the client knows that it is as much a service that you’re being compensated for as the actual website is.

Thoughts?

If you build WordPress websites often for clients, what are some of your suggestions for how to make it as easy as possible for them to use? Share your ideas with everyone by leaving a comment below!

I’m working on a few WordPress websites for clients at the moment, so I’ve discovered these plugins as I’ve been searching for solutions to some of their design requirements. Finding these plugins just reinforces for me one of the best things about working with WordPress – that for almost anything that you’re trying to do, chances are that there’s a plugin that already exists to meet that need.

(I also wrote last year about some of the other reasons why I want to build your website in WordPress – the availability of plugins being only one of those reasons.)

Without further ado, here are 6 more plugins that you should be using on your WordPress website or blog…

#1: Easy Contact

Easy Contact is a good plugin to use if you’re looking to incorporate a basic contact form into your website or blog. What I like most about it is that unlike the previous contact form plugin that I had been using (the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form plugin), the additional CAPTCHA security question is an optional choice on the form.

Why is that important to me? I used the other form for one of my past projects, and they kept telling me they were having problems with the contact form – specifically that people said they had sent a message through the form, but the client never received it. Turns out what was happening was that people weren’t answering the required CAPTCHA question, so the form results didn’t go through, even though the form page refreshed – giving people the impression that the message had gone through.

In any case, the Easy Contact plugin should help avoid that confusion (the security question is optional to display), while still enabling the basic functions that you would expect from a contact form. You can style it however you want to as well, although that’s pretty standard for most plugins of this nature.

#2: Thank Me Later

Thank Met Later is a great plugin to incorporate into the functionality of your comments area. Once you install this plugin, it will send a thank you message to people who leave a comment on your blog or website. There are a lot of ways to customize your message, from the content to when the thank you note is sent out, making it really versatile.

Why would you want to send out a thank you note to people who leave a comment? I think doing so is useful as another way for you to reach out to, and interact with, people who are coming into contact with your website in some way. Sending a little note can put a more personal face on your website, encourage them to subscribe to your RSS feed or email newsletter, start fostering relationships with your commenters, etc. – all things you want to do to help build your brand and reputation.

#3: WP-UnitPNGFix

The name may be difficult to read, but this plugin is definitely getting added to my must-install list. WP-UnitPNGFix fixes the problem that occurs in Internet Explorer 6.0, where PNG images that are supposed to have a transparent background instead have a grey block behind them.

Firefox, Safari, and newer versions of Internet Explorer don’t have a problem rendering transparent PNGs, but since so many people are still using Internet Explorer 6.0, us web designers still have to account for it in our design. (Yet another reason why I hate Internet Explorer 6.0 so much and why I wish people would upgrade already.)

#4: Thumbnail for Excerpts

On some blogs, you’ll see photos used next to the post excerpts as a way to attract people’s attention to particular posts. A great example of a blog that uses this technique is PSD Tuts – visit their website and you’ll immediately see what I mean.

I think that this effect works nicely for when you’re using WordPress as a content management system for clients, rather than just a blog post. The current projects I’m working on fall into that category, so posts are really being used as news updates about particular events. When that’s the case, having a small thumbnail photo is a nice touch that can help accentuate the posts page.

What Thumbnails for Excerpts does in particular is look for the first image within the post, and that becomes the thumbnail that’s displayed next to the excerpt. You can easily specify the size of your thumbnail, and then it’s just a matter of styling the image for how you want it to appear.

#5: Multi-Level Navigation

Drop-down menus are always a contentious topic in the web design world, but I think they do have their uses and can be an important way to help your users dig deeper into your site’s content.

The Multi-Level Navigation plugin lets you have drop-down menus in WordPress, which otherwise would involve some complicated coding in order to have.  This plugin lets you customize everything through an easy-to-use interface. You can add up to two levels to your drop-down menus (which in most cases is probably the most that you should have anyways), style it however you want to, determine the contents for the menus, and more.

#6: Embed iFrame

The reason for using the Embed Iframe plugin is somewhat obscure, and truthfully most people probably won’t have use for it on their websites. Simply put, an <iframe> is a means of embedding one HTML page in another. The projects I’m working are regional websites for a national organization, and they want to be able to include content from the national website without having to duplicate it on the regional websites – so that’s why this is coming in handy.

But there’s also another more common use for an <iframe>, and that’s if you want to include a Google calendar on your website. Calendars are certainly a useful feature to have on your website, especially if they’re used to highlight programming and events. Google calendars are certainly popular and easy to use for your users.

In order to display your Google calendar on your website, after installing this plugin all you would do is reference the URL of your Google calendar within the iframe code on your page, and you’re all set!

Thoughts?

Do any of these plugins sound like something you would use on your WordPress website or blog? If so, let me know what you think of them. Or, if you have any other WordPress plugins that you think might be useful for everyone to know about, share them by leaving a comment below!

I thought it might be insightful to give you a list of the plugins that I use on this website, and that I commonly install for clients when I build a website for them in WordPress. They fall into four basic categories – commenting, SEO, administration, and content.

See how many of them you use on your WordPress website or blog or have heard about. If you don’t have some of these installed, give them a shot and see if they help improve your website or blog in some way.

One note – all the plugin links below are to that plugin’s page in the WordPress plugin directory. By going there, you can download each plugin, but you can also find out more information about installing or troubleshooting it.

Commenting

Want to make it easier for people to comment on your posts? Try some of these plugins, which help accomplish that goal.

• Subscribe to Comments – Lets commenters sign up to receive an e-mail notification when another comment is made to the post they commented on. The plugin also includes a subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, change their notification e-mail address, and more.
• Better Comments Manager – Allows you, as the blog administrator, to respond to comments from within the admin panel rather than by going to the website.
• No Self Pings – A pingback (or trackback) is a notification you receive when someone links from their website to a post on your blog. If you’re writing a post and include a link to another one on your own blog, there’s not really a point in notifying yourself about that.

Seach Engine Optimization (SEO)

These plugins help you accomplish some of the simple steps to incorporate SEO into your website or blog, as I’ve written about previously.

• Google XML Sitemaps – Automatically creates XML sitemaps of your website, which you can then submit to the search engines to help them crawl your website easier.
• All-in-One SEO Pack – Lets you optimize your title and META tags with content and keywords of your choosing, while also helping you avoid the duplicate content found on WordPress websites.

Administrative

As the administrator of a WordPress website or blog, there is plenty to think about in addition to just the content. These plugins help you with some of those essential tasks, making administering it easier and less time-consuming.

• Database Backup – Allows you to back-up your WordPress database in case something catastrophic happens to it. You can have the backups e-mailed to you or saved automatically to your server, and can schedule how often the back-ups should take place.
• WP Super Cache – Helps you speed up your WordPress website or blog significantly by reducing the workload on your server when someone visits it.
• Akismet – Checks your comments to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches in a separate section from your regular “Comments” admin page. If you have commenting enabled on your WordPress website or blog, this is an absolute must to install.

Content

You have a website or blog because you want to share content with your visitors, right? These plugins can help you do that in ways that emphasize the usability of your website – something I’m always in favor of.

• Similar Posts – Displays a list of posts that are similar or related to the current post. How the list of similar posts is determined can be customized in many different ways, but the basic way similarity is judged is according to the post’s title, content, and tags.
• Popular Posts – Displays a list of your blog’s most-viewed posts. This plugin was created by the same people that made the Similar Posts plugin, so you can use the same options to customize how this list is displayed as you can for the Similar Posts list as well.
• ShareThis – Provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to either add your post to many social bookmarking sites or e-mail the link to someone.
• Lightbox – Creates a sharp, modern-looking overlay for images on the page, useful when you have thumbnails of an image and want to allow your visitors to view an enlarged copy. This looks much better than having the enlargement open on a blank page.
• WP-Pagenavi – Adds a more advanced page navigation system to your blog archives for when you start to accumulate a lot of posts over time.
• GD Star Rating – Allows you to set up a rating and review system that lets your visitors provide feedback on how useful a particular post, page, or comment is. There are many different options you can set for how the rating stars should be displayed and how things are rated.

What did I miss?

If you have a WordPress website or blog, or design them for clients, what plugins do you use that I haven’t listed here? Let everyone know by filling out the comment form below!

While there are many other advantages to building a website in WordPress, when it comes to SEO, WordPress is lacking in a few areas. I’d like to talk about one of those problems in particular: the inability to customize the META description and META keyword tags in the basic WordPress installation.

Optimizing META Tags in WordPress

So why is it not possible to customize the META tags on a WordPress website? It has to do with the META tags being located within the website’s header.

Websites that are built in a way where each page of content is a separate file make it easy to customize the META tags on the different pages. The header areas appear on every single page, and are each totally independent of one another.

But when a website is built in a system such as WordPress, that won’t work. WordPress uses only a few pages to display the page and post content, and all of those files reference the exact same header file. So with the basic installation of WordPress, there is only one header area throughout the entire website that you could customize.

Are you beginning to see the problem yet?

When you use WordPress right out of the box, yes, you are able to manually go into the header file and insert your optimized META description and META keyword tags into the coding. But that only solves the problem on the macro level. If you want to optimize on the micro level on every piece of content on your website, this becomes a more significant problem.

What’s the solution?

Whenever there is a problem in WordPress there is a plugin available to solve it, and this is no exception. The All-in-One SEO plugin allows you to write your own custom META description and META keywords tags on each and every page or post on your website.

Once you install it, the plugin will add a field called “All in One SEO Pack” onto the “Create” and “Edit” screens for all pages or posts. Just fill in that field with your optimized META description and META keyword tags, and when you publish your content, you’re good to go!

(Incidentally, this plugin is the most popular and downloaded plugin available for WordPress – so it’s something that a large number of people are successfully using and recommend.)

I just installed this plugin on this website, but have yet to go through my pages and blog posts and customize each the META tags for each one. I’m still debating whether it is worth it to customize every single blog post I’ve written, or whether I should only focus on categories or the most popular things I’ve written. No matter what I decide though, I think in the long-run it is worth taking the time to do.

While we’re in the header…

There is one other thing I want to mention quickly while we’re talking about the header, and that’s the ability to customize your title tags for SEO purposes.

Title tags also go in the header, and face the some limitations in WordPress that the META tags do. You could manually go into the header coding and set them to display the name of your page/post along with some keywords. The problem with doing it that way is that apart from the name of the page/post, the remainder of the title tag will be uniform across everything on your website.

If you want to have a greater degree of control over the title tags and would like to make the title tag more relevant to the content on the page, there are two plugins that allow you to do that:

• All-in-One SEO plugin (as mentioned above)
• SEO Title Tag plugin

Which one you use depends on whether you think that optimizing META tags is worth spending the time on.

A lot of SEO professionals think that the search engines don’t give as much value to META tags as they used to. In the early days of search, websites used to stuff their META keyword tags with a ton of keywords or keyword combinations in the hope that the search engines grasped onto some of them and directed traffic to the website. So those professionals say that the search engines learned from that, and stopped weighing those META tags as much in their search algorithms.

Whether SEO professionals are right about that is still up for debate. If you agree with the idea that META tags don’t carry much weight anymore, then you might not want to spend the additional time optimizing those tags throughout your website. And if you don’t have the need for it, then why install the all-in-one plugin when you could get by with the SEO Title Tag plugin instead.

The only downside to using the Title Tag plugin only is that you still need a META description on the pages of your website, because that is what is displayed on the search engine results page. So you would have to go into the header file manually and add in one.

Thoughts?

If you’ve used either one of the plugins mentioned above to optimize the META tags on your website, have they helped your search engine rankings? Do you think it’s worth taking the time to create custom tags for each page on your website or blog, or are there other SEO elements that should have a higher priority?

Share your comments using the form below!

Evaluating Whether to Design with WordPress

When a client tells me that they are a small-to-medium business or organization, that they don’t have a lot of technical knowledge or resources to update the website on a regular basis, and that they want there to be some sort of way for them to post regular news updates – that’s usually all I have to hear before I start thinking: WordPress, WordPress, WordPress!

Am I saying that it’s an ideal solution for all clients, and that this is all I’m limiting myself to working with? Definitely not. But, for a lot of the potential clients who approach me about website work for them, it just so happens that it might meet their needs perfectly.

The Selling Points

So what are the reasons that I tell people for why I want to build their website in WordPress?

• It’s free. There are no additional costs that the client has to pay. What could be better than that?
• There is plenty of support availabile. From my point of view as their designer, whenever I’ve had a question about how to do something in WordPress as I’m designing a new website in it, all I’ve had to do is Google my question. In almost every case, I’ve been able to find an answer pretty much right away. And not only that, but with the sheer amount of blogs and other resources out there about WordPress, there are plenty of people writing on blogs, forums, etc., where they share their solutions and tricks.
• Availability of plugins. Want to incorporate a contact form? Photo gallery? Various internal search features? Google analytics? There are tons and tons of WordPress plugins out there that do pretty much everything that a client can imagine – all I (or they) have to do is search, download, install, and configure on their system.
• It’s easy to install. When setting up WordPress on clients’ servers, I’ve done it both automatically and manually, and in both cases, it couldn’t be easier to do. If you do have to do it manually, there are plenty of resources out there to help you – just type “installing WordPress manually” into Google and you’ll find all the help you need. I did it for the first time yesterday, and while I was intimidated by the process at first, by the end I was amazed with how simple it turned out to be.
• It maintains itself. When new versions of WordPress are available, you’ll be notified automatically, and it can upgrade itself automatically. The same thing applies to plug-ins you have installed; WordPress will automatically notify you when a newer version is available, and install it automatically for you.
• It has an easy-to-use web interface. Since a lot of organizations I do work for don’t have a dedicated full-time employee working on their website, they want something that makes it easy for them to update their content when needed. In fact, as soon as I hear them say that their current system makes it difficult for them to update regularly, that’s usually a good indicator that they need some sort of content management system such as WordPress.
• Anyone can learn to use it. The back-end portion of a website built in WordPress is really simple to use. Even for people who are very intimidated by computers, updating content is really as simple as 1+2=3. The main content window has a basic Word-processing interface, so there’s really no need for the person updating the content to know HTML – although it certainly doesn’t hurt if they do.
• It allows multiple users to update content. If you have more than one person who is going to contribute content for your website, why not give them separate access? In WordPress you can create different users with different levels of access (subscribers, writers, administrators, etc.), each of which has a different amount of access to what they can and can’t change on the site. So does the director of your organization want to post something occasionally, but isn’t the person who is regularly maintaining the website? Just give them their own user ID; not only will it empower them, but they’ll feel more of a connection to the website as well.
• You can write in it from anywhere. All you need is an Internet browser and the URL for your site’s WordPress administration, and you can access it from wherever you are – be it your office, or a coffee shop, or the beach, etc. You don’t have to wait until you’re at a particular computer to access it, and what’s more, you can even write to it by e-mail if you wanted to. Which, for those people who are toting their Blackberry’s around, might come in handy.
• You can better integrate content across your website. Do you want news from your organization to update automatically on your homepage? Once I set that up for you, you don’t ever have to do any hard-coding for your updates to appear. And, you can set up stuff like that on any page or section on your website that you want to. This makes it much easier for people to find the content that you’ve worked so hard on.
• There are minimal files to work with. Since the majority of your content is maintained as database content through the site administration section, there are a minimal number of actual files that you would need to touch in order to edit your website. This greatly simplifies things on the maintenance end of things.
• It puts an emphasis on usability. By being able to cross-integrate and automatically generate content throughout your website, WordPress makes it easier for your visitors to find what they’re looking for – the core principle of website usability.
• It’s as advanced as you want it to be. Want to manage various categories to cross-reference information? Or make your whole website searchable? Or install and configure numerous plug-ins? Or manage comments? The possibilities are endless, and you can use WordPress in as basic or as advanced a way as you want to.

So there you have it – those are some of the things I tell my clients when describing why they should use WordPress for their new website.

If you’re a designer and build WordPress sites often, what are some of reasons that you give your clients for why they should use?

One of the benefits of using WordPress is that you can find a plugin out there for almost anything that you can imagine. The purposes vary, but they generally fall into a few broad categories:

• Improving website/blog usability
• Better search engine optimization (SEO)
• Speeding up the back-end administrative use
• Importing photos, analytical data, etc.

Since I use it so often, I thought I would prepare a list of the top plug-ins that I use and install on the websites I build in WordPress.

What Visitors Will See

1. Secure and Accessible Contact Form

This plug-in is what I use on the contact forms on my WordPress-run websites. Once installed, you can create an accessible and usable form that has plenty of anti-spam and security features built in. You can also style it to look however you want it to, which is one of the nicer touches built into it.

Here is an example of the contact form as I used it on Etgar 36′s website:

2. Lightbox

This plug-in is used to overlay images on the current page, which is a nicer way of displaying full-size images that are linked from thumbnails. You can also group images together into an album, making it easier for your visitors to browse through multiple images on the same page. Here is an example of Lightbox in use in my portfolio on this website:

3. WP-PageNavi

This plug-in is one of the most popular WordPress plug-ins out there, and for good reason. If you have a lot of blog postings, it adds a nice, paginated navigation to the bottom of each page, allowing your visitors to browse through your postings easier. Here is an example of it in use on this website:

3. Similar Posts

This plug-in displays a highly-configurable list of posts that are similar in content to the current post that your visits are reading. The similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags, and you can have it display anywhere you want, although common practice seems to be to have them display at the end of your post’s content. You can see it in action on my website in this image:

What Visitors Won’t See

1. Manageable

This plug-in can make things much easier for website/blog administrators to update their page/post data (things such as the date, title, categories, and more) without actually loading each page/post individually. This is a definite time-saver, so I make sure that I install it on every WordPress website I build. You can see how it functions in this image:

2. Admin Drop-Down Menu

This plug-in transforms the regular WordPress menus into drop-down menus instead, saving the website/blog administrator time from clicking and waiting. See the before the after images below:

Without the plug-in

With the plug-in

What Do You Use?

If you’re a designer or web developer, do you work with WordPress yourself? If so, are there are any plug-ins that you include in your standard installation that others should include as well?