B6S.net

I started doing “this” back in 1997.

“This” means creating websites, promoting them and monetizing on the traffic (as opposed to creating websites for other people’s business need). It’s a pretty common business model for most of us.

The Age of Webmasters

Back then, we were called webmasters.

As a webmaster, you were expected to have a variety of skills, including:

1. Web Design
2. HTML coding
3. “Advanced” coding skills (or at least how to hack away at javascript)
4. Search engine optimization know-how (it was pretty basic back then)
5. Social media skills (at the time, it was participation in online forums mostly)

We were jacks of all trades. We had to know how to work with Photoshop, flash, HTML editors (or the code itself), run newsletters and much more.

Oh, and we had “websites” – remember those? Just good ole’ HTML web pages, where you had to change the HTML code and re-upload files via FTP to keep them up-to-date.

The Age of Bloggers

Things sure have changed!

Websites today are complexed dynamic creatures, relying on a variety of technologies to deliver unique customized pages to each visitor. They do a lot of clever things. One of them is that they allow users to interact and leave their own key-print.

What’s more, design standards have changed. You can no longer get away with cheesy web pages with animated gif’s for a background (thankfully, I may add!) Visitors expect a higher level of usability and an overall sleek look. To a great extent, design has become the realm of professional web designers and coding these smart sites has become the domain of professional coders.

These changes brought along the CMS’s, or Content Management Systems. And these beget Wordpress – a fully customizable and relatively easy-to-use CMS.

So, what’s left for us, content publishers? Well, mostly, but not only, creating content.

We write, we promote, we interact with the net. We have the ability to quickly and easily update our websites.

In fact, our websites are now called blogs, and we call ourselves bloggers.

So, How About You?

I still consider myself a webmaster first, and a blogger second. I still enjoy tweaking code and design and I still create static web pages too.

I think the title I prefer the most is a web publisher.

How about you? Are you a blogger? a webmaster? something else?

I finally gave in to peer pressure and bought the Thesis theme for my blogs.

All the cool blogs seem to be running on Thesis nowadays, so I figured it’s worth a shot. Total disclosure moment: I honestly am not that enthusiastic about it on the get-go. There is a lot of hype on the thesis website and I’m more of an understatement kind of person. Sorry, but “check out the new awesomeness” is just the kind of phrase that makes me wary.

Still, I just paid $164 for this, so I’m going to give it a fair chance and hopefully be pleasantly surprised. I’m going to install it on some new blogs, while jump starting a few others with regular templates. Here’s what it looks like, fresh out of the box, on a new blog with just one post -

I wonder how much of a difference thesis is going to make in terms of traffic and specifically search engine traffic. One of their top claims is the SEO qualities of this theme. Personally, I believe off-page SEO is much more important than on-page optimization. With off-page promotion being roughly the same, let’s see if Thesis provides any unique traffic edge.

My expectations in the design department are even lower. With all due respect to the theme’s fabled design “customization”, I can ALWAYS tell a thesis design. Something about the navigation system, and often with the fonts, layout and overall feel to the site that gives it away.

So, I just installed the theme on a new blog (on an aged domain) and will start hacking away. This product is definitely not an “out of the box” solution. Just looking at the new page in front of me, it’s already offering an unrelated image on the main page, and the widget areas have text directed at the site owner. You can’t just activate this one – you need to prepare everything in advance, unless you want your users to see unrelated content on the blog.

Oh well, better get to work then. I’ll let you know how it’s going and reveal the result in a future post.

What about you? Are you using Thesis? Love it? Hate it?

I’ve never actually tried to add a file for people to download on any of my Wordpress blogs. Until today, that is. I guess there’s always a first time? I had a cat-themed template designed and I wanted to share it with site visitors.

Now, with HTML, it’s fairly simple. I have done that before. All it takes is linking to the .zip file and voila. But when I tried that on a Wordpress page all that happened was an annoying 404 message.

Turns out, you can’t just allow people to download from anywhere on your Wordpress installation. It’s not a matter of uploading the file anywhere on your domain names and linking to it.

Instead, you have to upload the file via Wordpress, which will then make it available for download. The way to do that is using your “Add Media” button here:

I confess, with buttons there to add pictures, movies and audio files, I never quite understood what the “add media” was for. Now I know.  It allows you to upload files to your upload directories and create a working download link for your visitors.

Gotta love Wordpress – always a new trick up its digital sleeve!

Oh, and if you’re looking for a cat theme – you can find that one right here:

Wordpress Cat Themes

This post is for people who are new to Wordpress and are not webmasters or computer geeks. If you have a Wordpress blog that your host, or maybe a friend, installed for you and you’re looking into customizing it, read on. Steve and Aviva, this one is for you!

I will start with a general tutorial about how to add plugins followed by one about widgets widgets. Once we’re over that, I’ll do a separate post specifically about adding Facebook and Twitter widgets to your sidebar.

You folks don’t know just how lucky you are. I still remember the days when you had to hack at ugly PHP code to make changes to your Wordpress sidebar. Yeah, I am THAT old. These days, everything is automated, so you don’t have to know any code in order to customize your blog.

What’s a Wordpress Plugin

A plugin is a component that can be added to Wordpress. It is optional and does not come with the basic software, but it is created to fit in, or plug into the application, hopefully seamlessly.

Plugins can customize your basic Wordpress installation in literally thousands of different ways. You can find a huge library of plugins right here on the official Wordpress site. You can download any plugin and upload it to your Wordpress installation. Once you have it online it should show up in your Admin Interface under the Plugins menu where you can switch it on or off as you wish.

How to Add a Wordpress Plugin to Your Blog

An Illustrated Guide for Beginners

Essentially, you have to choose your plugin, upload it to your server into the right location and unzip the files. Fortunately, the entire process is built into the latest versions of Wordpress. Let me walk you through the steps:

Step 1 – Access Your Plugins Panel

On the left of your admin panel screen you’ll find the collapsible navigation menu. It has titles such as “Posts”, “Media” and so on. If you click any of them, the menu opens up to show you the options for that item. Find the one that says “Plugins” and click on it.

Step 2 – The Plugins Interface

You now see your Plugins Management screen. Here is where you see the list of all your installed plugins. You can activate or deactivate any plugin from here and tweak the settings for some of them. Your next move is to click where it says “Add New” in the Plugins menu box to your left.

Step 3 – Choose Your Plugin

From this screen you can potentially upload any plugins that you had previously downloaded elsewhere on the web and saved to your own computer. However, in this tutorial, I’ll show you how to do everything from within your Wordpress installation: you can even find your plugins in here.

Just enter your search term (or the name of a specific plugin) into the form and your Wordpress will search the entire plugin collection. For example, write “Twitter” in the search box and hit the “search plugins” button.

Step 4

Voila! Wordpress has retrieved every Twitter-related plugin available in the collection. You can view descriptions and rating and choose the one you wish to try out.

Found something you like? Just click where it says install. For this example, I decided to try the “Twitter for Wordpress” plugin. It won’t quite install it right away though, but would just bring up a pop-up window with more details:

Don’t be intimidated by the fine print. De-activating a plugin and deleting it is fairly easy. Unless your plugin is designed to do something drastic like deleting your entire database, you should be fine with giving it a try. So, go ahead, click the red button. It won’t explode (hopefully).

Step 6 – Connection Information

Wordpress now asks you for your account FTP information. It needs it in order to upload the plugin for you. Don’t be shy about it – this is not a form of identity theft, just an online utility.

You need three bits of info here, your FTP hostname, your account username and your account password. Note: these are not your admin login details.

For these, you need your host. Most likely, this information can be found in the email you got from your host when your hosting account was set up. If you don’t have it – it’s time to drop them an note and ask for just these three bits of info.

Once you have them, just enter in the form and hit “Proceed”.

Step 7

This is pretty much it! Wordpress can do the rest now. Go do something else for a bit. Depending on the size of the plugin, this could take a few minutes and finally show you the screen above. All that you have left to do is activate the plugin.

Note: you may encounter a problem at this stage. Do not panic (and always carry a towel, of course). If you get an error message at this page informing you that Wordpress couldn’t upload the files, you are almost certainly dealing with a permissions issue. In plain English: every file and folder on your server has a set of permissions which define who can change/add anything to it. You can read more about it here. If you know nothing about this and don’t want to know anything about it then just contact your server support and ask for their help. Tell them you need to make the /wp-content/ on your domain name writable and let them take care of that for you. You would only need to do this once for all future plugin installs.

With some plugins, you may need to adjust some settings before you start using them. These should be available in one of two places -

1. The Settings menu of your Admin panel. They will show up as a new item there only after you activate the plugin.
2. The plugins management menu, right next to that plugin name.

That’s it! Everything you ever wanted to know about installing plugins in Wordpress and never knew who to ask.

I plan on writing another tutorial about widgets which should complement this one and help you manage widget-related plugins too. Please leave me comments/feedback and if you found it helpful, spread the word!

I’ve been contemplating starting my own web publishing blog for a while now. They tell us web readers like lists, right? so here’s mine:

Pros to starting a web publishing blog -

1. A place for me to jot down my thoughts about web publishing.
2. A place for my notes about stuff that I learn online.
3. A place for my impressions on various web services and products that I use as a webmaster (I’ll give you a fair warning whenever I use an affiliate link i.e. have an invested interest).
4. Hopefully, down the road, a way to brand myself as a webmaster (webmistress?) and, eventually, to leverage that into promoting my other websites.

Cons -

1. Another blog??? oh no, not another website that requires constant updating!
2. Another Wordpress blog? uh oh… add one more to the bi-weekly upgrade list…
3. Another Webmasters blog? don’t we have too many of these already?

So, you see, it’s 4 pros and only 3 cons, so I’m moving ahead with it! Thanks for stopping by and I hope you add me to your list of places to visit (and to your blogroll too!)