This WordPress Theme Cost Me Just $35

Finding a good design for your website isn’t easy for most people – but if you are running your website on WordPress you are missing a trick if you are paying more than £50! The theme you see this site running on (at time of writing) was bought for only $35 (that’s around £22.50 according to today’s exchange rate) from ThemeForest, and on the whole it is a lot better than sites you can pay £1,000 or more for from a local designer.

What to Consider?

So what do you need to consider when buying a premium WordPress theme for your business?

[shortcodes]

Well firstly, you want to ensure it is flexible enough to meet your needs, look out for a thing called a shortcode, it’s a simple piece of code you can type in order to create a different effect.

For example, this is a shortcode called “blockquote”

David Whitehouse

As you can see shortcodes are pretty handy, especially when you want to the designer to do the general layout, look and feel and you would prefer to write the copy and style it the way you want.

Customisation

If you are well versed with PHP, HTML, CSS & WordPress, you may want a lot more customisation options by being able to change the code. If, however, you just want something that works and you don’t want something too technical then make sure it has the features you want, such as a logo upload facility.

I highly recommend ThemeForest, go take a look at their WordPress themes, you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

Find The Best Premium WordPress Themes / Templates For Your Business is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

In the last post I showed you how to get a theme for WordPress, now I want to briefly show you how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress.

First of all, I can’t stress how important it is that you use Google Analytics. It will allow you to track all your marketing and enable you to maximise sales through advertising. The best part is that it is easy to use and it is 100% free, so it’s all good! To install Google Analytics on WordPress, see the first video, then see the second short video to setup Google Analytics settings.

Once you’ve done that, have a quick read of my brief introduction to Internet marketing.

Installing And Setting Up Google Analytics On WordPress is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

You should already have installed WordPress with Cpanel, now we are going to run through the basic settings and give you a quick tutorial on posts and pages. See the following vdeos:

Once you’ve gone through that, try going through the following video.

Pages
I would recommend you create the following pages:

• Home Page – here you do your main sales pitch, remember to sell the benefits, include testimonials and have a call to action at the end.
• About Page – here talk about yourself, make it personal, also talk about any relevant qualifications, awards etc. boast a little – but in a modest way.
• Testimonials – Start getting testimonials off of your customers and asking them if you can put it on your site, if you want you can offer to link to them aswell – that way they get a bonus out of it and are more likely to agree.
• Pricing – Always include your pricing, you don’t always need a full page, but it may help.
• FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions, add as many as you can think of, you’ll probably add to this as you go on.
• Contact Us – For now enter your email address, phone number and contact address. Later on I will show you how to setup a contact form so you can track enquiries.

In the post I’ll show you how to get a new theme for WordPress.

Setting Up WordPress is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

By now you should have your domain name and setup your web hosting with EUKHOST, this video explains how to install WordPress. Questions and problems below please!

Once you have had a bit of a play you can move on to setting up WordPress.

Installing WordPress With Fantastico De Luxe Through Cpanel is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

The plugin after-the-deadline/after-the-deadline.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin akismet/akismet.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin blog-metrics/blog_metrics.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin breadcrumbs/yoast-breadcrumbs.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin google-news-sitemap/apgnsm.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin google-sitemap-generator/sitemap.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin google-website-optimizer-for-wordpress/gwo4wp.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin headspace2/headspace.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin like/tt_like_widget.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin nofollow-links/nofollow-links.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin omit-passworded-posts-from-search/omit-passworded-posts-from-search.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin redirection/redirection.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin robots-meta/robots-meta.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin rss-footer/rss-footer.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin si-contact-form/si-contact-form.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin stealth-publish/stealth-publish.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin to-do-list/to-do-list.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin wp-greet-box/wp-greet-box.php has been deactivated due to an error: Plugin file does not exist.

The plugin wp-status-notifier/status-notifier.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin wp-super-cache/wp-cache.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin wptouch/wptouch.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

The plugin yet-another-related-posts-plugin/yarpp.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.

Plugin activated.

Good Job There WordPress (and the Page Peel Plugin) is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

Ok guys, so lots of people out there post about various plugins and how they are “great” etc. But half of the time you get all excited, install the plugin, only to be disappointed. Even worse, some of you guys might install a plugin and actually think it is doing you some good, so I thought I’d write this guide to try to help you choose plugins that don’t suck (trust me, I AM an expert at this, I install crappy plugins all the time)!

Social Bookmarking Plugins

Don’t bother installing a plugin that completely covers your blog post in social bookmarks (see example below – I won’t say what site it is from, but it does rank on page 1 for “how to make money online” in Google.co.uk.)

There are a few reasons for this:

• Each one of those stupid links is actually leaking you page rank out of your site
• The majority of people only use Twitter of Facebook, so the chances of you attracting someone to your blog that uses one of these services AND will submit it is slim (unless your Shoemoney or Problogger, in which case you really don’t need to read this).
• Is having your blog post announce you’ve only got one re-tweet a really good idea? I did this earlier last year, it’s a bad idea. It puts people off, and they are likely to re-tweet you from Twitter or their Twitter client, not from your site anyways!

Instead why not try using one of those “share this” or “add this” buttons – they keep the social bookmarking up-to-date and it doesn’t cover your page in links. Alternatively use WP greet box – the reason why this is good is it only shows a message appropriate to that user, so they see a Digg box if they came from Digg. If you do use WP Greet Box, I recommend adapting it to encourage:

1. People to add you as a friend
2. Sign up to your email newsletter
3. Take action on your site e.g. buy something

SEO Plugins

Ok some SEO plugins are really, really, really, REALLY bad. First up, SEO plugins that remove stop words and numbers from the URL – this is unbelievably irritating and quite frankly, a bit pointless. We had a client at Bronco recently with one of these and they happened to require model numbers in their posts, but all of them were cutting short, so they were ending up with stuff like iPhone-1, iPhone-2 (for example) – yeah like that is better than iPhone-3gs?!?!?!

Next up is automatic link plugins, so basically you put in a keyword and a URL and it replaces all instances of that keyword up to a maximum of 1 or 2 per post with a link to that URL. Again I hate these – they slow your site down (my site is slow enough cos I’m a lazy bastard and I can’t be bothered to move it, so stop pestering me people)! They also create some stupid, stupid links, where you are writing a sentence and it just puts one in, but it looks totally inappropriate – not very classy seo.

SEO Friendly images plugins – HOW LAZY DO YOU HAVE TO BE THAT YOU CAN’T TYPE 50 CHARACTERS?! Plus it fills it with a load of crap, I have a horrible feeling I’ve got this installed still. Instead, when you upload an image, manually edit a beautifully crafted keyword rich ALT text.

Comment Redirect and Spam Plugins

I used these for a while, and quite frankly I think they are a little bit spammy. Comment Relish actually sends unsolicited email (unless you of course add a simple tick box on the comment saying “I don’t mind you sending me unsolicited email”) – which is obviously against all spam legislation. The other one, Comment Redirect – well to be honest I’m in two minds about it, but I think it pisses people off being re-directed after they are their comment to the post, I know it does with me – so why piss off your readers?

The Rest

Now I am the worst offender here, but I am learning through experience (I’m good at failing over and over – but thats called progress, right?). To finish this big long rant of a post off, and because I want to go to bed, I’m just going to list a few plugins I think suck to high heaven and should be avoided at all costs:

• Twitterupdater (I used this, it is pants – use Feedburner’s socialise functionality for Twitter, like Patrick Altoft does)
• Redirection plugin (again I used this, I’m pretty sure it slowed my site down even further, which is pretty bad as it runs at a snail pace anyways – learn to edit your .htaccess file instead, it’s much more fun)!
• The Odiogo plugin – great in theory, but super slow load times.
• Most of the plugins I recommend – as usually I haven’t tested them and I’m dead excited about them, but they turn out to be shit – see appendix A, B and C

Anyways, that is my rant for the night – perhaps I’ll do a post on some decent WordPress plugins, such as the superb Google Website Optimizer for WordPress Plugin (or perhaps that’s just me being excited again).

I’m off to bed. </RANT>

WordPress Plugins To Avoid is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

Sometime in 2008 I started a blog called Inventive Millionaire had over 120 posts on this blog and it was very similar to make money online kind of blog.  Anyway I have decided to resurrect it because I now wish to make money from blogging and in order to do so I am going to need a lot of content and a lot of blogs.

So in order to resurrect the content I had to remove a redirect from Inventive Millionaire to David Whitehouse and then I had to export the content from Blogspot and run it through a conversion process to get it ready for WordPress, then I simply imported it into WordPress.

There is a simpler way but it didn’t work for me simply go to tools imports and select blogger from there and its pretty straightforward from then on.

How to transfer your blog from blogger or blogspot to WordPress is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

In the last video I showed you how to setup WordPress, now I want to go through changing the WordPress theme with you.

When deciding on a theme for WordPress, you have a number of options, three in fact:

1. Use the default theme and customise it yourself
2. Buy a WordPress template from Template Monster or Theme Forest
3. Hire a freelancer to design you a WordPress theme for around £500 using ODesk, a freelancer website.

Which one you choose depends on how committed you are and what your budget is. The better your website is suited towards the product you are selling, the better it will perform and the more likely the chances of your advertising campaigns being profitable. So you don’t want to scrimp on this one – if you can afford it, buy a bespoke design.

Customising the Default WordPress, Theme Twenty Ten

Buying a WordPress Theme

Here are the links to Template Monster and Theme Forest

For freelancers try ODesk.

Make sure when you are buying a theme they understand it has to be a WordPress theme. This is important otherwise you will have difficulty getting it to work!

Next I’ll show you how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress, so you can find out how many visitors you are getting (and more importantly where they are coming from and what they do).

Choosing a Theme for WordPress is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

The Problem

Ok so I hit a bit of a snag tonight, I had ended up with the following predicament.

I had a url: http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blog/ which I wanted to redirect to http://www.david-whitehouse.org/ but when I used the following code:

redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.david-whitehouse.org/

I ended up redirecting pages such as http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blog/blogging-voice-recognition/ to http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blogging-voice-recognition/ – but I wanted to keep it where it was (plus this created a redirect loop, which I could have fixed).

Twitter Friends to the Rescue!

So I asked for help on Twitter – offering a free link for the right answer (at first a site wide, then I chickened out and said “just a post”). Thankfully I found the answer – so they can all settle for a nice link in this post (see below).

Many things were suggested, some would have worked but I felt they were workarounds and I wanted to solve this particular issue in this way. I had tried some regular expressions, others passed me some more and people were passing me mod_rewrite code too. Unfortunately none of it seemed to work, some gave 500 errors, where as others resulted in the page sitting their, not moving – laughing at me, mocking at me, whispering…

Anyways!

The Solution

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/$ http://www.david-whitehouse.org/

redirect doesn’t let you use regular expressions – RedirectMatch does (perhaps this is common knowledge, but I couldn’t find it anywhere and it wasn’t in the code anyone gave me). I found the fix here.

Thanks guys

For those that participated in helping me, I would like to thank (in no particular order):
Malcolm Coles
David Elstob
Will Critchlow
David Cumbor
Teifion Jordan
Jaamit Durrani

htaccess redirects with regular expressions is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.

I just got the WordPress error: Call to undefined function: _weak_escape() when trying to login to WordPress admin after upgrading to WordPress 2.8.

I looked it up and someone mentioned it was a problem to do with the redirection plugin – but to hell with disabling that, I love that plugin!!! So instead I looked into the file causing the problem:
wp-includes/wp-db.php

At a further look it didn’t seem to like the function _weak_escape, so I simply found what this function did, all it does is addslashes, so I embedded this into the code which was calling _weak_escape and hey presto! It works!

Here is the full code I used:
function escape($data) {
if ( is_array($data) ) {
foreach ( (array) $data as $k => $v ) {
if ( is_array($v) )
$data[$k] = $this->escape( $v );
else
$data[$k] = addslashes($v);
}
} else {
$data = addslashes($data);
}
return $data;
}

Hope that helps some of you out there!

I realise this isn’t the best fix for it – ideally you want to get it so it doesn’t believe _weak_escape is an undefined function – but I’m not sure what the cause of this is, I imagine I could try removing the underscore or searching at php.net – but it’s late and I want to go to bed! If you find the solution please let me know in the comments and I’ll give you a link

How to fix _weak_escape() error after upgrading to WordPress 2.8 is a post from: David Whitehouse a digital marketing consultant from the UK, based in North Yorkshire.