Beginner Steps For Launching A Website

So you're ready to create your first website. You'll be joining quite a crowd. Royal Pingdom estimates there were 634 million websites online as of December 2012. More than 51 million of those were added throughout 2012. To make your website stand out in the crowd, you'll want to do some planning and learn how to direct people to your site.


It's All in the Name

Your domain name is how people will recognize you. It is also tied to the physical address of your website. If you already have a company name, your domain name will likely be some facsimile of it. Go to one of the hosting companies online to check if your domain is available. There can be only one of each domain, however the extension can be different. For example, there can be only one mikesplumbing.com but there can also be a mikesplumbing.net.


Pick Your Hosting Service

Research webhostingbluebook for reviews and comparisons of website hosting companies. This site also has articles on how to choose a hosting company. You want a company that is affordable for you now but offers services you can expand into as your company grows, such as shopping cart services, higher levels of security and dedicated server options.


Build or Assemble?

You can choose to create a website from scratch or put one together from existing pieces. To build from scratch requires knowledge of HTML, the language of the Internet, and a lot of time. Adam Dachis of Lifehacker has an excellent tutorial on building a website from scratch if you choose this route.

Or you can choose to put together a website from templates other people have built. WordPress is a common source. You will start with the WordPress foundation then add a theme, which is how the site will appear. Next you'll add plug-ins to do certain things such as display a calendar or a slideshow. WordPress has a number of tutorials to guide you through the process.


Getting Directions to Your Website

People will find your website through the search engines, such as Google or Bing. The list of sites returned from any search is displayed in a certain order determined by a complicated algorithm. If your site comes up on page one, that's good for you. If you're on page 110, that's not so good.

To better your page ranking, learn about SEO, or search engine optimization, to help increase the website's ranking in the search engines. MOZ has a good tutorial on SEO. It's worth learning even a little so you will know what the search engines are doing with your site.


Content is King

Content is still the reason people visit your website. Fresh content makes the search engines rank you higher and keeps your viewers coming back. If the content on your site is stale and unchanged, people will visit once and not come back. If it's interesting and they take away something each time they visit, they will become loyal followers.

There are techniques for writing content that use the SEO rules. Once you learn something about SEO, you can learn about writing SEO content. Elisa Gabbert has a good introduction to SEO content on Wordstream.


Planning Your Website

With some familiarity with these pieces, you can plan a timeline for putting together your successful website. Each step will be a fun learning opportunity for you. Don't get discouraged if you don't understand something - the Internet is full of articles on how to create your first website. There are also people who specialize in each of these areas. Don't hesitate to put out a call for help. You'll discover that there are many people out there willing to help you be successful with your website.


Did you find this article helpful? Please let me know by leaving me your valued comments in the comments section below.

Related articles:
Mobile-Friendly Site Designing: Things You Shouldn't Be Doing
Why Web Hosting Is Important To Your SEO
Five Keys To A Successful Web Design And How You Can Achieve It For Free
What Steps Should You Take To Make Sure Your Site Is SEO Friendly?

For a full list of helpful articles on SEO, use the following links:
http://www.derekjones.co/search/label/SEO
http://www.derekjones.co/search/label/SEO%20Tips


If you found this or any of my other posts helpful, don't forget to share the posts to your favourite networks using the toolbar below or by using the "+1" and "Share" buttons located at the bottom of each post.

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Until my next post on Monday on social media success: the secret to enduring the evolving SEO world, have a wonderful and relaxing weekend! See you back here on Monday!

© 2013. This article is DMCA protected. Republication is prohibited.

5 Must-Have WordPress Plugins

Guest post by Wes Burns: I try not to rely too heavily on WordPress plugins, but there are five plugins that I install by default every time I start a new website. These plugins helps me run websites effectively without having to master the technical skill of coding. If I had to pick exactly five plugins to use for the rest of my career, these would be my choices.


1. Redirection

Redirection is a plugin that allows you to easily redirect links from within the WordPress backend. This comes in handy in two different ways. First, it makes it easy to move pages to new URLs. If you need to move an existing page to a new address, you can open Redirection's settings, add the old URL and add the new URL. Hit the "ok" button and visitors to the old address will be redirected to the new URL.

Second, Redirection comes in handy for affiliate websites. It allows you to clean up those ugly affiliate links and replace them with something that looks nice. For example, let's say your affiliate programs uses links that look like this:

Commission.affiliates-product-3282.htm=affID388229

Visitors tend to be distrustful of links that look like this. With Redirection, you can create a redirection and use links that look like this:

www.website.com/visit/productname

When visitors click on your clean affiliate link, they are automatically redirected to your affiliate link. Thus, you get clean looking links and still receive credit for sending sales to your affiliate program.

You can get the plugin at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/


2. Google Analytics for WordPress

The name pretty much says it all. The Google Analytics plugin makes it easy to get site statistics on your WordPress blog. All you have to do is install the plugin, click a button to authenticate your Google analytics account and it's good to go.

After you have Analytics installed, you'll be able to see how many visitors you are getting, which pages are being visited, which search terms people use to find your site and more. I consider Google analytics a must-have for any website.

You can get the plugin at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/


3. GetSocial

GetSocial is my favorite social sharing plugin for WordPress. It adds a floating bar with social sharing options to the side of every page or post on your website. The bar includes a Twitter function, Digg button, Facebook button, Reddit button and more. The whole point of this plugin is to make it easier for visitors to share your content with other people.

GetSocial looks nice and it's easy to set up. I am not a technical person at all but I had no problems customizing the bar and getting it placed exactly where I want on my blog. This plugin is useful for you and your visitors.

You can get the plugin at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/getsocial/


4. Image Zoom

Image Zoom is a purely cosmetic WordPress plugin but I love it. It lets you place pictures in your blog that zoom nicely when visitors click. All you do is insert pictures, leave the direct link in place (found in the picture settings when you add pictures) and Image Zoom will take care of the rest.

When visitors click on your pictures, they get one of those pretty flash boxes instead of going directly to the image URL.

You can get the plugin at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/image-zoom/


5. WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is the ultimate search engine optimization tool for WordPress. It allows you to customize title tags, URLs, meta keywords and much more. It can be complicated setting it up the first time around, but there are plenty of guides online that will get you up and going.

One of the things I like most about this particular SEO plugin is that it includes a simple tool that analyzes the SEO of each page. When you add a new page (or post), it will scan the content, description and title to make sure you have your SEO keywords in place.

You can get the plugin at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

One of the greatest advantages of WordPress is the wide array of free plugins that can be used to add functionality to any website. This post lists and describes five awesome plugins that I use on every website.


About The Author: Wes Burns runs numerous websites in the tech niche. His latest project is a file storage website that provides news, reviews and tips related to cloud data management.

Do you like this article by Wes Burns? What's your favourite WordPress plugin? Please let Wes and myself know by leaving us your valued comments below.


If you found this or any of my other posts helpful, don't forget to +1 or share the posts to your favourite networks using the toolbar below or by using the "+1" and "Share" buttons located at the bottom of each post.

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Until my next post on Monday, have a fabulous weekend!

Blogger Outage: Why You Should Regularly Backup Your Blog

During scheduled maintenance on Wednesday 11th May 2011, Blogger experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger's behaviour. This resulted in all blog owners who use the blogging platform unable to publish for over 20 hours.

According to Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager on a recent post on Blogger Buzz, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (they estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts.

To resolve the problem and to get the service back to normal, Blogger returned their system to a pre-maintenance state on Thursday 12th (temporary removing all posts/comments since 7:37am PT Wednesday 11th May) and placed the service in read-only mode while they worked on restoring all content. This is the main reason why blog owners were unable to publish for over 20 hours.

Although now finally back online and bloggers being able to publish new content, Blogger are still hard at work restoring posts and comments which could take some time. Hopefully, all these posts and comments can be retrieved as the added dilemma of losing data could in fact, seriously impact users confidence in the blogging platform. There have been reports that some bloggers have already moved their blogs to WordPress due to this outage.


Why You Should Regularly Backup Your Blog

Given this recent outage with Blogger and the disappearance of some bloggers posts and comments (although temporary), backing up your blog regularly is more important than ever. Like all sites/services on the internet, Blogger (even WordPress) isn't immune to problems, so you really need to get into the habit of backing up your blog, especially after each post and when you receive comments.

Full details on backing up your blog on Blogger (and WordPress) can be found on following post: Have You Backed Up Your Blog?

Please Note: When you do a backup of your blog on Blogger, all your blog comments (along with your blog posts) are automatically saved in the XML file that you download. These comments can be found near the bottom of the document which can be viewed using a standard text editor such as WordPad etc.

Don't forget to regularly backup your template as well, especially if you make changes to your blog design or page elements. Full details on how to do this on Blogger are on the above post.

On a personal note, I was quite lucky as the outage didn't effect me apart from missing comments on my last post...I do have these backed up though just in case Blogger cannot retrieve them.

How did the outage effect you? Please let me know.

Related Articles:
Have You Backed Up Your Blog?


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Safe blogging everyone!

Have You Backed Up Your Blog?

Sometimes there are just not enough hours in the day to do everything, what with doing blog posts, administering Bloggers Network, visiting blogs and websites, answering questions, research and marketing etc. What I do have (and make) time for however, is to backup my blog on a regular basis.

What are the things that you HAVE to do when it comes to your blog? The chances are that you have these things on your list:

- write on a regular basis
- pay attention to SEO practices
- get other people to visit your blog

But is backing up on a regular basis part of your must do list? Probably not! Backing up your blog is something that should be automatic and it's a practice that you shouldn't forget, whatever happens.

Just imagine...what if your server crashes or your site gets hacked? Maybe Blogger's automatic spam detection software accidentally considers your blog as spam and blocks (or possibly deletes) your blog. What will happen to all the data that you have accumulated over the months or years?

This may not be a problem if your blog is relatively new as you might be able to reconstruct your posts, but just imagine losing all your data for 6 months, a year or maybe 2 years or more...now that would be disastrous!


Here's how you can backup your blog if you use Blogger:

1. Log into Blogger.
2. On the Blogger home page, click on the blog you want to backup.
3. On the left-side of the "Overview" page, click on "Settings" then on "Other".
4. Click on the "Export Blog" link under the "Blog Tools" heading.
5. On the popup window that appears, click on the "Download Blog" button.

Note: If you have modified your Template on Blogger, you can back this up as well by clicking on "Template" on the left-side of the Overview page then clicking on the "Backup/Restore" button on the top-right of the Template page. Simply click on "Download Full Template" to backup your blog's Template.


Here's how you can backup your blog if you use WordPress:

1. Use an FTP client (FileZilla for example) to download all the site files (the WordPress folder).
2. Log into phpMyAdmin and select your WordPress database.
3. Click on "Export" and make sure that all the WordPress tables are there.
4. On the "Structure" section tick "Add Drop Tables", "Add AUTO_INCREMENT", and "Enclose table and field names with backquotes".
5. On the "Data" section leave all the boxes unticked.
6. Tick "Save as file" and download the database (you can use compression if your database is big).

Don't leave it until it's too late, backup your blog NOW and continue to do so on a regular basis. Rule of thumb is to backup your blog every time you publish a new post.

NOTE: If you're a blogger or website owner, please consider putting a widget and/or banners on your blog or website and help support the Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami Relief Effort. Full details can be found at:
http://www.derekjones.co/2011/03/help-support-japan-earthquake-relief.html


As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

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Have a wonderful weekend!