To install the full version of WordPress, you do need your own domain name, and your own hosting.

When you choose your hosting company, make sure you choose one that offers you a “one-click install” for WordPress as this will make it as easy as possible to get started.

(There is a version of WordPress that you can use for free at http://www.wordpress.com without having to get your own hosting, but to my mind its limitations mean you miss out on half the fun.)

WordPress comes with a default theme called Twenty Eleven. (A theme is a design, and one of the wonderful things about WordPress is that you can change your theme, and therefore the entire look of your site, with just a click.)

Twenty Eleven is a nice-looking, easy to read generic theme that has quite a few slick features. Twenty Eleven looks like this:

and you can see a functioning demo of it here: http://twentyelevendemo.wordpress.com/

It’s a suitable theme for bloggers and for many small businesses that don’t want too corporate a look. I can see it working well for writers, cooks, gardeners, musicians and many other types of small business. All you’d need to do would be change the header image to one of your own, and perhaps the background colour too.

If you need a different look, here is where WordPress comes into its own. There are hundreds of fantastic, ready-designed themes that you can install for free and transform your site into something as slick and professional as if it had been designed especially for you – at a cost.

Thanks to WordPress, now everyone can create themselves a professional looking website, quickly and easily, and with no expense at all.

There are a number of steps we can take right away to diminish this problem.  First….

Do you want to allow comments…

…on your site at all?  Usually, you will want to make it possible for your readers to make comments, but if your site is a business showcase this may not be appropriate in any case.  If you don’t want comments, you can switch this off globally, which is a great solution (although oddly, I do find myself getting some spam comments on pages for which I have disallowed comments…)

Go to the Discussions area of your back end:

and to stop people being able to post comments, uncheck the third box under “Default Article Settings”. As it says, you can always override this setting for individual posts.

Enabling and disabling comments for particular pages or posts

You may want comments, but you don’t necessarily need them enabled everywhere on your site.  To enable or disable comments for a particular page or a particular post, go to the page in the back end where you edit a post. If you can’t see a box labelled Discussion underneath the post, go to where it says “Screen options” at the top right hand side of the screen.

Check Discussion in the small row of checkboxes that come up, and you’ll then see a box appear underneath the post.

Check Allow comments:

and Update the page.

If you are allowing comments, you will also want to make the Comment box visible under each post in the  back end so that you can easily check the comments that people leave. Do this by checking the Comments checkbox in the Screen Options area, as above.

Setting comments to be moderated before they appear

To check comments yourself before they are visible on the site, go back to the Discussion Settings page and check the checkbox labelled “An administrator must always approve the comment”. This obviously means that no rubbishy messages can appear on your site without you knowing, but it can take away the immediacy of visitor’s comments and discussions that develop between visitors.  However, if you can’t check your web site regularly for comment spam, then you will need to do this to stop spam appearing and being immediately visible.

To moderate comments, go to the Comments area of the back end and Approve, mark as Spam, or Trash each comment individually. (Recent comments also appear on your Dashboard so you see them right away when you log in.)

Email notification of comments

I set my sites to send me an email every time someone posts a comment, but this does result in a lot of extra email, so you may want to turn this off, again in the Settings > Discussions area.

Akismet

Akismet is a very useful plugin that helps spam proof your site.  It now comes bundled with WordPress.  Using Akismet, you can leave your comments un-modified and the system will identify what it thinks is spam, and what it thinks are genuine comments.  You still have to check the comments to see that it hasn’t missed any, but already your life is a lot easier.

First, since the plugin is bundled with WordPress and you therefore don’t have to install it, you can go straight to your Plugins area and activate it.

Then click on where it says “Sign up for an Akesmet API key”.

You’ll get taken to the Akismet site where you can get your API key – click the big blue button:

For a small business site, you have to pay $5 a month, or for a personal site you can choose to pay what you want.  I am only choosing to pay nothing in the example below so I can use it on a demo site to show you the steps!

Next, input your personal info and click Continue…

Click on “Take me back to my WordPress account”:

Not quite done actually, but nearly!  Check your email, and copy the Akismet key they will have sent you…

Back inside your WordPress back end, paste in the API key, click “Update options”, and you really are done.

Do remember that it is important that you check your Comments regularly, and “Mark as Spam” all the spam comments, so that Akismet can learn to perform better.

Installing a CAPTCHA plugin

A CAPTCHA is a system where the person leaving a message or a comment has to type a word or series of letters and numbers into a box before their message or comment can be left.  I have recently installed a plugin called Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam which puts a CAPTCHA next to my comments boxes (see below). You have to install it manually, which is just a question of uploading the plugin to your site by FTP (as per the instructions on the WordPress site). Here’s the link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/peters-custom-anti-spam-image/installation/. I’ve found it’s made a big difference…

Good luck with your anti-spam techniques and do leave me some comments if you find other solutions or have any questions…

WordPress started out as a blogging platform but it has fast become a hugely popular CMS – that is, a content management system, or in layman’s terms, a website that the owner can log into and update without any special technical knowledge.  It’s true to say that WordPress has completely changed the face of Internet publishing because now anyone can create themselves an online presence quickly and easily.

As they say on the main WordPress website: “You’re in good company if you use WordPress”.  WordPress is used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites worldwide and the latest version, version 3.0, had been downloaded over 32.5 million times as of February 2011.  Huge names such as the New York Times, CNN, Down Jones, Reuters, The Financial Times, Yahoo, Flickr, Le Monde, Martha Stewart, Ebay, The Wall Street Journal use WordPress either as their official site or as their blog.  But millions of small business owners, bloggers and hobbyists are also online thanks to the creation and availability of this wonderfully user-friendly publishing platform.

• It gives the power to the site owner, no more relying on a webmaster to make updates
• It has an extremely user friendly interface – you need no special knowledge to use it
• It’s free
• You can host it on your own website so you have entire control
• It can be made to do anything you want it to – hundreds of thousands of developers work on plugins to make it more and more flexible
• Because so many people use it, there is a huge support network for users and developers
• It’s the most-used blogging interface
• … but it doesn’t need to look like a blog
• It’s highly customisable
• It’s a huge time saver – making updates is a sinch
• You can change the entire look of your site by uploading a new template – in a few seconds
• It’s robust and reliable
• It’s secure – any security holes are fixed with frequent updates to the system.

As WordPress designer Jeff Starr has said:

“There is no reason to use anything else because WordPress can pretty much do it all.”

Choosing a domain name

What’s in a name? If you can, go for your business name. If it is already registered, you could try a variant using a related keyword like yourcompany-communications.com, for example, or  your location, yourcompany-yourtown, and see if that is available.

There is a case to be made for choosing a domain name that includes your key search terms as this can be good for your search engine ranking (like b-and-b-paris.com, for example). However, if your market is already crowded, and you are therefore not relying primarily on search engine marketing for people to find you, I think your business name, or some other catchy name, is definitely preferable as it reinforces your branding, and the chances are you probably wouldn’t come up first in the listing in any case.

Be careful if the domain name you would have liked is already registered to a competitor – you don’t want to drive potential customers there, if in fact they are looking for you, and you have selected a less obvious variation. For example, if you wanted customcurtainmakers.com and you found a competitor was already using it, choosing customcurtainmakers-wandsworth.com (besides of course being too long) would risk driving potential customers to your competitors customcurtainmakers.com instead. Better to choose something alternative like bettyscustomcurtains.com – which is much more memorable as well.

If you can’t get the domain name you want, or if your business name is quite long and would look clumsy as your website address, you could go for a snappy and shorter alternative. For example, my friends who run the Hoopoe Yurt Hotel in Andalucia chose the catchy yurthotel.com instead of making their customers type out a fuller version of their business name – plus it has the benefit of making them look much more unique.

If you do have a long business name, seeing as domain names are relatively inexpensive, you might want to buy the long version of the domain, plus a shortened alternative, and redirect the longer one to the shorter one, which you then use for your communication, so that people do not have to type the entire long domain name when they are visiting your site.

Another thing to consider is spelling. I have been using my name as my domain name and my email for years now, so I am not considering changing it. However, having to spell out “Alannah Moore” each time I give my website or email address is a bore, and if I had realised this at the time of registering, I might have considered choosing both the full domain and some shorter variation such as “amwebsites.com”.

Which extension?

Is it best to have .com or a local extension such as .co.uk or .fr? Generally, I’d go for .com, unless your service is really local-based and won’t have a global reach, in which case a local extension is more applicable, and even advisable. There’s no point having people enquire about your services if you only cater to people in your local area. For example, a client of mine who runs acting classes in London purposefully chose act-up.co.uk instead of the .com version as she is only targeting people in the UK.  There is also the fact to consider that local search engines may prefer a local extension. So if you are using Google UK, a .co.uk domain may come up higher in the rankings.

I would always steer cleer of .biz, .info, .mobi and the like which I think look very unprofessional.  Even more so if you choose an extension like this because the domain you wanted is already registered with .com.  It makes you look like a poor imitation of the original – exactly what you don’t want – so go with something entirely different instead.

You may want to register other extensions of your domain name in order to stop other people owning them.  It could happen that someone buys the .eu version of your domain name (for example) and then asks you to pay them to release it to you.  Or one of your competitors could masquerade as you on another version of your domain name.

There is no official restriction on who can buy a .co.uk name, however to buy a .fr domain name, you need to be a company registered under French law, be a French resident, hold a French-registered trademark or be a French citizen living abroad, and have a contact name and address in France.

Registering your domain

Choosing your registrar is important. If you choose a smaller company, it could be bought out by another and you may find yourself unsure of who exactly is in control of your domain. The worst case scenario could be that the company disappears altogether. Since the large companies offer very good prices, it makes sense all round to go with a large company. I have used Namecheap* for years, but there are other very well known and trusted alternatives.

At the time of writing, the cost of registering a .com domain per year with the following well-regarded registrars is:

Namecheap* $9.98
GoDaddy $11.99 (This is by far the most used company, however it is sometimes criticized.)
Netfirms $7.99 for the first year, $11.99 thereafter
Register.com $9.99
1&1 $7.99 for the first year, $8.99 thereafter

One thing to be careful of is the email address you use when you register your domain. The only notification you’ll receive when it is time to renew is through the email address you signed up with, so be very careful to use an email address you actually CHECK regularly when you sign up. This can be a trap, as it is likely that once you have registered your domain, you will be using a new email address from that domain (e.g. yourname@yourdomain.com instead of yourname@hotmail.com) for your regular emails and may not check your old email address regularly.

Ways around this: mark in your diary or set a calendar reminder to alert you a couple of weeks before your domain is due to be renewed; divert emails sent to your old email address to your new one once it is up and running; or simply log into your domain registrar account and update your profile to your new email address, being careful to renew promptly to make sure your email doesn’t lapse. (You’d be surprised how often this does happen. I frequently get panicky emails from clients whose sites have disappeared for this reason. It is very rarely terminal, but it is a nuisance you can do without).

Hosting

If your domain name is your address on the internet, your hosting is the space in cyberspace that you rent for your website.

Many domain name registrars offer hosting, and many hosts also offer domain registration. You may feel you want to take up the hosting package offered by your domain registrar in order to make your life simpler – i.e. have one company to deal with, instead of two.

While I see the advantage, I do usually advise against this, as supposing you ever want to change your hosting company, or want to remove your domain name to another registrar, for whatever reason, it can prove complicated and time-consuming to disentangle the two. For example, if your host proves unsatisfactory – your site goes down frequently, or there are hiccups with your email – you will need to move the domain somewhere else as well as change the hosting, and they may make it difficult for you to do so. Several of my clients have experienced a real admin headache trying to do this.

What I advise is that you register your domain, take out separate hosting with a different company and point your domain to your new host.

Your choice of host is very important. You absolutely don’t want your site to keep going down or to experience problems with your email. While this can happen once in a blue moon, your site and your email are too important to your business for this to happen often.

My favourite host is Dreamhost* because they have a very reliable service, a unique easy-to-use interface and customer service I’ve found second to none.  At the time of writing, their service costs $8.95 a month.

I’m often asked if geographical location matters when you choose a web host. Yes, in theory, it may have a small impact on your search engine ranking where your website is hosted. This is because Google wants your site to be relevant, and it may consider that if someone from a certain country looks you up, you will be more relevant to their needs if your site is also hosted in that country. However, personally I have found this impact to be minimal, and judge customer service and other concerns such as pricing to be far more important to my needs.

For example, I have worked on sites for French clients that were hosted in France, with three different hosting companies, and have found the customer service and clunky interface for all three companies to be so painful it made the work far from a pleasure to carry out. In addition, throughout all the search engine optimisation I have carried out for UK sites I have never found that the impact of having a host in the US has had a meaningful impact on the search engine ranking achieved by that company, if the site also had a lot of good content, inward links, visitors, and all the other factors that the search engines are far more interested in.

In theory, load times are supposed to be faster if your site is hosted where the visitors are. However I haven’t noticed any load time difficulty in any of the sites I’ve worked on that are hosted elsewhere – on the contrary, the strength of the web hosting technology of some of the US hosting companies should ensure extra speed and efficiency.

Pointing your domain to your host

This is actually simple to do so don’t be put off by the unfamiliar terminology.

1. First register your domain and set up your hosting package with your chosen hosting company.
2. Go to your host, and from within your control panel, add your new domain name. (They may already have asked you your domain name when you set up the package, so this step may not be necessary.) It will be written somewhere what the “nameservers” are. They will look something like this:
   NS1.dreamhost.com
   NS2.dreamhost.com
   (There may be more than two listed, but you usually only need two.) Note these, or copy and paste them into a text document.
3. Now, log in to your domain registrar and find where you can change the “DNS”. (This will be titled something like “Transfer DNS to webhost”.) Paste in the nameservers into the spaces provided. (If there are more than two boxes, you can just leave them blank.) Save the changes, and you are done. Within a few hours, if you type your domain name into your browser address bar, you will see the holding page provided by your new host, meaning that you’re ready to go.

*The links to Namecheap and Dreamhost are affiliate links. This means that I get a reward for recommending you. If you sign up for hosting with Dreamhost quoting the discount code “Alannah”, you will get $20 if you sign up for a year, and $25 off if you sign up for two.

To get a gravatar, go here:

http://en.gravatar.com/

and click on “Get your Gravatar today”.

Your own image will now appear any time you post or comment, anywhere.

Firstly, while a skilled expert in SEO can work some wonders for your site, you should know that there are no magic tricks that can be employed to “get you a number one ranking”.

No-one knows exactly how the search engines – most importantly Google, since this is by far the most-used search engine – rank a site for a certain keyword.  All we can work with is what we know has worked, until now.  To add to the complexity of the issue, search engines change their “algorithms” all the time.  It is not (only) to shroud themselves in mystery that the search engines do not reveal exactly how they work.  It is because they do everything they possibly can to give good results, and if people know exactly how they work then they can cheat, and the search results will not be as good.  When I mean good, I mean listing the most informative and relevant sites for a certain keyword – the sites that you are looking for.

You can do a lot of work ON your site to make sure your site is as ready as possible for the search engines.  But did you know that what happens OFF your site is equally, if not more, important?

“Off-site” optimisation

Two essential “off-site” factors play a huge role in your site’s position in the search engines and you must pay attention to these.

Firstly, the amount of traffic you have will boost your search engine visibility.  If you have a site which attracts lots of visitors, the search engines will see that site as “important” and rank it highly.

You can increase your traffic by offline marketing (press releases, brochures, etc. – even word of mouth), as well as online marketing (paying for adverts or getting write-ups on other people’s sites, etc.).

The other really important “off-site” factor is the number of inward links, from relevant sites, your site receives.  Try to get your site listed in directories and on other sites with a similar area of interest, and engage in link exchanges.  This will boost your search engine position (as well as your traffic).

Let’s look the other aspect, what you can do to your website to ensure that it is as ready as possible for the search engines.

“On-site” optimisation

The best piece of advice is simply to create the best and most informative website about your topic that you possibly can.

But while doing this, you need to be thinking about keywords.  What are the most important keywords for your website?

What do I mean by this? Well, if you put yourself into the shoes of your prospective customers and think, if they are looking for a site that offers what you do, what will they type into the search engines in order to find it? For example, “walking tours in Paris”, “yoga class in English”, or “Wordpress training in Paris”.  You need to make sure these words are in the main heading on your page, towards the beginning of the text of the page and, if you can manage it, repeated again in the text, without it looking contrived.  If you have other keywords, then put them in the text as well.

Did you know that Google goes entirely, or almost entirely, by the text on the pages of your website, in order to decide the subject matter of your website and therefore how to list it?  So you can see how important the “copy” on your web pages is and how you need to think about this before you begin writing.  It’s no good thinking your webmaster will “fix it” for you by putting clever things in the code – that’s just not how it works.

When building your website, your webmaster will also ask you for:

i) keywords to put into the code of the pages. (These are for the benefit of the other search engines, who do use these for their results.)  Put your most important ones first and include other less important ones.  Do not go wild though, just a handful is perfectly adequate.

ii) a page title for your home page, which will usually be your business name plus your most important keyword or phrase – for example on my site my home page title is “Alannah Moore, WordPress training and website consultancy “.

iii) a description, which is a short sentence describing your business and including your keywords, which is what you will see in the search engines listings underneath your site name – for example, mine is “Wordpress training in English; website consultancy based in Paris, France.”

You can’t just leave these things up to your webmaster – they don’t know your business or your target market, and you can’t just leave them to guess.

As I have said, search engine optimisation and second-guessing Google’s algorithms have developed into a complex pseudo-science.  You don’t need to know everything – but you do need to know at least this much.

On a final note: you may depend on your search engine ranking in order to get new clients for your business.  If this is the case, I advise you to dive right into it, get up to speed, and liaise with your webmaster who will take care of the technical side of things, with your guidance on which keywords to focus on (there are other things that the webmaster should pay attention to and will do so with your assistance – the right way to name images, adding image descriptions, naming the links in the navigation, etc.).

But if the most important way business comes your way is via word of mouth, then you may not need to get overly worked-up about the search engines and your position in them.

Equally, if it seems that your market is extremely crowded and you fail to get any kind of reasonable listing in the search engines, I would advise you turn your attention to offline marketing methods to get traffic to your website and secure new clients.  Brochures, flyers, adverts – and all the other old-fashioned methods  – still work and you can use your website as a valuable tool to back you up with testimonials and other illustrations of your expertise.

You can’t just sit back and hope that customers will come – they won’t – and you have to use all the means you can to get them.

(Last updated August 17 2010)

This is a really good idea because it is highly likely that once people navigate away from your site, the chances are that they’ll forget all about you, and you’ve lost that once-only chance to turn them into a client.

I don’t know if this is true, or how statistics like this can be worked out, but it’s said that on average it takes six contacts between you and your prospective clients before they will actually buy something from you. (Did I get that right? Is it six?)

In any case, it makes sense to maintain some kind of rapport with people who are interested in your product, or whatever it is that you are offering.

There are two easy ways of managing an email list.

1. Handling your prospects’ emails manually

The most basic way is simply to handle the list manually.  Ask people to contact you if they want to join your email list, and then manually add their email address to a list of addresses that you keep in a plain text file on your computer.  You should separate the email addresses with a comma, like this:

email@emailaddress.com,joe@joebloggs.com,info@website.com

and so on.

When you send an email, simply copy and paste the list of email addresses into the bcc field of the email, and send the email to yourself.  You should take care to paste the list of addresses into the bcc field, rather than the cc field – you don’t want everyone to see the list of addresses.  It breaches the trust your prospects have placed in you, because you are supposed to keep the email addresses confidential.

People are sometimes wary of giving you their email address, so in order to reassure them, by your sign-up request or form you should write something like: “We won’t share your email address with any other party”. You must stand by your promise.

Similarly, you need to add a “how to unsubscribe” sentence at the bottom of your email.  You need to say something like “You are receiving this email because you signed up to receive email updates at http://www.yourwebsite.com.  Should you no longer wish to receive updates from us, please reply to this email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line.”  And you need to make sure you honour any unsubscribe requests you receive.

You can’t simply add people’s email addresses to your list.  You have to make absolutely sure you have their permission before you do so, otherwise you could be accused of spamming, which could be serious.

You may find that your server doesn’t let you send out emails to large lists of addresses.  In this case, you simply break up the list into smaller sections and send out two, three, or four emails.  However, if your list gets so long that it becomes unwieldy, it may be time to use a third party email list manager.

2.  Using a third party email list manager (an email marketing service)

There are several services that can handle your email list for you.  The advantages are multiple.  It is much less work for you, as the system automatically handles signup and unsubscribe requests.  You can also use a much more secure “double opt-in” system which means the person signing up needs to click a link in an email (also sent automatically) before they are signed up to your email list.  This makes double sure the person wants to be signed up to the list.

Another benefit is that you can set the signup form to ask for the person’s name (and any other details) which means you can send emails which say “Dear Joe” – much more personal and effective!  Also, you can ask the system to collect other information that may be useful to you, such as how they heard about you, where they live, what in particular they are interested in, etc. etc. – though you don’t want to ask so much information from them that it puts them off signing up.

Other benefits of third party email list managers are that you may be able to set an autoresponder sequence (a series of emails sent automatically to people who sign up), use highly professional-looking email templates, synchronise your mailings with Facebook and Twitter, turn your blog posts into email newsletters, track click-throughs within emails, and run online surveys.

Pricing and the features offered vary – have a look around and see which system best fits your needs.  Many offer free signup for a limited time which means you can log in and play around with the system before committing yourself.

Some highly-regarded third party email list managers are:

iContact
Vertical Response
Constant Contact
AWeber
Benchmark
GetResponse
JangoMail
Pinpointe