Want To Start a Website – Choose Wordpress Hosting

Starting a website is for the inexperienced person an almost impossible task. Understanding coding in html, ASP or PHP can seem like climbing the Chinese wall, even for the accustomed Internet user. And as a natural result of a high demand with little know-how, web hosting companies have stepped in to assist beginner website builders in creating professional and good looking websites. But even so, there are far too many terms and available options for the inexperienced not to feel confused. However, with wordpress hosting all you need to do is choose a web host, register a domain and the host will take care of the rest.

The Misconception of Blogs

We are talking about the prospect and benefits of starting a blog. A general misconception is however that a blog isn’t a real website, only fit for people like Perez Hilton to use as a daily online dairy. This is of course not an accurate observation. A blog is a simplified CMS, content management system used by most dynamic websites today, allowing the webmaster to login and easily administer the website from a user-friendly control panel. Getting a blog is the best way to get started if you do not know so much about developing websites. It will give you a proper website and a platform from which you can control web design, content, settings and additional features.

What does a Wordpress Host do?

A Wordpress host is simply a web host that offers free tools to help you install a blog. Wordpress is, if you don’t know already, the most popular and used blog developer with a unique control panel and management system, adapted to the beginner user. The 5-minute installation that is advertised by Wordpress can however be quite tricky, seeing as you have to create a MySQL database and edit the config.php-file, and letting someone else handling this is advised. That’s hence where your Wordpress web host enters the picture. With one click and a few steps the host will install the Wordpress blog for you – in less than 5 minutes.

Don’t even think about it anymore. Trust us – if you want to start a website but lack knowledge, time and money to set one up yourself – choose this hosting type. If you want a website to easily manage, with the aspect of choosing between hundreds of design templates, adding video and image slideshow content, banners, your own header/logo, pages, posts and so on. Choose this type website hosting.

When it comes to online publishing, most of us are firm believers of the same old rule – Content is king. We’d like to argue a point that, even with the greatest blog that constantly pumps great contents, it’s not to overlook the importance of interface design. This includes overall color matching, the typography, attractive logo, proper text and paragraph alignment, clear navigation, etc. Another way to look at things is when you put an image and a row of text side by side, image is where the eyeballs are while the text plays a supporting role.

HongKiat has spent weeks going through hundreds and hundreds of blogs in the blogosphere, looking for blogs with nice and interesting design. They marked down those with great interface, graphically beautiful, unique personalities and styles. Here they bring you – 100 Nice and Beautiful Blog Design. You might learn something or perhaps inspired by these designs. Full list after jump and get prepared to scroll.

Source: 100 Nice and Beautiful Blog Design

Your company has decided to launch a blog, and you’re the lucky blogger. Maybe you’ve even asked for this pleasure, suggested it to the boss yourself. Only now, you have to deliver, and you have to stay consistent. It’s not always easy to keep up a steady blogging pace, and there are days when you might run into a roadblock or two that might keep you from delivering on your schedule. I am sure a sample blogging workflow will definitely help you.

Here are some ideas on how to build and maintain a steady blogging rhythm, be it for your personal blog or your business blog. Chris Brogan has covered goals, tasks, tools, and some bonus secrets for blogging

Source: A Sample Blogging Workflow

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In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial we’ll be learning how to create a unique, and professional-styled bookmark/promote box for your personal Blog, or maybe even your website. Having a promote or a bookmark section at the bottom of your articles can be a great boost in traffic for your Blog, especially if your Blog is new and you’re looking for more ways to get traffic.

There’s nothing like seeing a huge peak in traffic then an influx of new subscribers to your Blog!

Final Image Preview

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OrderedList has conducted a Content Management Survey recently. You can see the result that WordPress is by far the most broadly used system. In general, people seem relatively satisfied with the CMS they have, though there is definitely room for improvement.

Overall, only 12% of respondants indicated any dissatisfaction with their current CMS, while 38% said they were very satisfied. Expression Engine was notable because the low level of dissatisfaction, and the high rate of ‘Very Satisfied’, even though the software costs money.

Source: Content Management Survey Results

One of the things you run into when your blog becomes bigger, is that you need to cram more info into less space, to make it possible to display all the information you want to show. One of the things Chris did to do that is add an icon for the date, and then a bubble over that with the number of comments in it. As you can see, the “shield” shows the day, the month, and the number of comments. “Date Badges and Comment Bubbles for Your Blog” shows you exactly how to get that effect.

Source: Date Badges and Comment Bubbles for Your Blog

Subversion is a version control system that makes it easy to get the latest version of files, or go back to previous versions. It is used by many different pieces of open source software and has been around since 2000. Subversion is considered the successor to the Concurrent Versions System.

Say you were running a Subversion server and your resume was checked into it when you first created it. Years later, if you have maintained your Subversion repository, you could go back and look at all of the changes you have ever made to your resume.

Subversion made upgrading a quick and simple event rather than a multi-day chore. Once set up correctly, there is very little you can do that will cause a mistake to be made. GeeksareSexy has written a nice article about ‘How To Upgrade WordPress Using Subversion‘.

First, upgrade your current blog using FTP, or whatever other method you choose to the latest stable version of WordPress.

Then, log in using SSH, and browse to your current blog. Go up one folder using the command cd .. in the terminal window.

Next, create a directory using mkdir. I usually make a directory called public_html_new.

mkdir public_html_new

Now browse into that directory, and using the instructions above, install the version latest stable version of WordPress using Subversion.

Once that is complete, copy your wp-config.php file from your old blog in the regular public_html folder to the public_html_new folder. This will allow your Subversion controlled blog to access your current blog’s database.

Next copy your wp-content folder from the old public_html folder to the public_html_new folder. This will give your new Subversion controlled blog all of your plugins, images, and themes.

Lastly, rename your public_html folder to public_html_old and then rename your public_html_new folder to just public_html. Check to see if your blog is working, and if so, you are most likely seeing your blog, now being version managed by Subversion.

Source: How To Upgrade WordPress Using Subversion

WordPress is first and foremost a blogging platform, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used for other things as well. In fact, the development of WordPress have been such that I wouldn’t be surprised to see a non-blog focused fork soon, because the necessary functionality for most web sites on the admin side of things are already there. In general, using WordPress as the CMS just means that you’ll design a theme as you would for a WordPress powered blog. Most of the things you need to keep in mind is what should be powering what on the site.

Thord has shared us the Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS. These are the things we need to think about before choosing and designing a website where WordPress will be used as the CMS.

• Is there even a need for a CMS for the client?
• Is WordPress the correct CMS? Will it fit the needs? Is the translations available for the WordPress backend good enough? How will it be upgraded?
• Will I need to extend WordPress using plugins? Are any hacks to the core necessary, because if they are, how will I make sure that these won’t break when the core is upgraded?
• What types of content will there be, and what should be deemed static (i.e. use Pages), and what is flowing updates (i.e. Posts)? How will I present this, and what is the main type of content?
• How will the permalink structure be? Should it really say “category”, why not “view” or “updates” or something else?
• Will the menu be static (i.e. coded into the theme) or controlled by WordPress (i.e. listing using WordPress tags for Pages and categories)? How could this go wrong in the future?
• What hierarchy will the Pages have? This is important for the URL, since it should be coherent with the menu hierarchy after all.
• How will I present sub-pages (i.e. Pages having a mother Page)? Should there be any at all?
• Do I need Page templates for various sections? How will these work with sub-pages?
• What categories will I use? Should the client be allowed to create new categories?
• How will I present Posts content?
• Do I need category templates for the various categories?

Source: Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS

DBS Interactive has created a Template Tags Quick Reference Guide to expedite their WordPress theme development, and they found it so useful that they would like to share it with us. The content was reformatted for quick reference from the Template Tag section of the WordPress.org Codex, a relative encyclopedia to WordPress theming, and great reference for your WordPress questions.

Source: WordPress Template Tags Quick Reference Guide

A fun part of customizing Wordpress themes is designing a comments format which complements the rest of the site. Darrenhoyt has shared with us his three examples from recent projects, including code samples and downloads to the original .PSDs on ‘Styling Your Wordpress Comments‘. All of them looks stunning, are you ready to customize your comments template now?

Source: Styling Your Wordpress Comments