WordPress from A to W E-Book

Roberto Travagliante

• Herausgeber: Roberto Travagliante
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

From the founder of "Il Bloggatore", one of the most important websites about computer in Italy, the definitive guide you need to discover the secrets of WordPress and create a successful blog.An exciting journey that will allow you to know everything about WordPress and the wonderful world of blogging.15 chapters (over 200 pages) containing detailed information to fully enter into the world of blogs!With WordPress from "A" to "W", you will be able to:- create your blog now, using a solid CMS like WordPress- discover the strengths of WordPress and configure it to get your successful blog- gain appreciation of users and improve your online presence- make money with your blogClearly written and well organized, this edition is designed to meet the needs of everyone, from novice bloggers to most experienced webmasters!For more details, visit website: www.travagliante.com

Leseprobe

Copyright notes

Copyright © 2012 - Roberto Travagliante

Email: [email protected]

Website: http://www.travagliante.com

All rights reserved according to law and international conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

The cover was created by Christian Sassano and constitutes an integral part of this book.

This work is registered at the S.I.A.E. organization.

Names and marks mentioned in the pages of this book are generally filed or registered with their respective manufacturers.

ISBN:978-88-907270-4-7

First Edition: August 2012

“Test of a program can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence.”

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra - Structured programming, 1972

This book is dedicated to my sweet little princess and to the other half of myself, my wife. She has always believed in me, even if what I was doing did not seem to respect the canons of normality and rationality.

Contents

Copyright notes

Preamble

Chapter 1 - Introduction

Blog: who is this?

Traditional Websites, Forums and Blogs

Why decide to create a blog?

Essential Concepts and Definitions

Chapter 2 - Not only WordPress

The blogging platforms

WordPress.org or WordPress.com?

Static and Dynamic websites: The importance of CMS

WordPress

The importance of DataBase

Chapter 3 - Before you start

The choice of main topic

Enhance your interests

One topic or many topics?

The choice of the name

The graphics

Chapter 4 - Installing WordPress

Choosing a hosting platform

Preparing the database

WordPress installation

First login to our blog

The administrative panel of the blog

Chapter 5 - Beginning to write

Pages and Posts

A practical example of blog: mybook.space4tutorial.com

Pages - my first page

Let's create the other two pages

Posts - my first post

Media management

Other available options for pages and posts

Chapter 6 - Improving blog structure

Quick editing for pages and posts

The feature "Trash"

Categories

Tags

Tag or Category? This is the problem!

Chapter 7 - User participation

Comments

Moderation of comments

Censorship? No, thank you!

Settings for comments

Pingbacks

Chapter 8 - Look and feel of the blog

The importance of layout

WordPress themes

Widgets

Menus

The theme options, the background and the header

PHP editor

Chapter 9 - Other elements of WordPress

WordPress: not only posts and pages

Media Library

Links and blogroll

The RSS and ATOM feeds

Feeds and Aggregators

Chapter 10 - Plugins

WordPress' flexibility

Installing and configuring plugins

Essential Plugins

Editor

Chapter 11 - Users and Security

Blog and Users

User creation

Permissions and Roles

Security and the importance of updating

Updating WordPress

Chapter 12 - The Settings

A comfortable menu to manage the blog

General

Writing

Reading

Discussion

Media

Privacy

Permalinks

Chapter 13 - The "secrets" of a successful blog

How to make your blog interesting

Choice of content

Choosing an attractive theme

Writing for web

Choosing the right font

Choosing the best title

Using social networks

Commenting on other blogs

Chapter 14 - Tools for webmasters

The presence on search engines

XML sitemaps

Google Webmasters Tools

Bing Webmasters Tools

Tools for statistics

Google Analytics

Chapter 15 - Make money with a blog

The blog as a source of income

Pay per Click, Cost per Impression and Cost per Action

Google AdSense

Heyos

Other advertising networks

Affiliate marketing

The direct sale of banners and links

Concluding remarks

Credits

Preamble

What is a blog? The first time I posed this question, I was on holiday, sitting on the beach at two meters from the sea, with the girl who would become, in a few months, the woman of my life.

The sky was clear, there was a smell of salt air that can be felt near the shoreline and the climate that I have the pleasure of living for 10, maximum 15 days a year, dreaming it for the remaining 350, during which I usually live in a very cold city.

Someone is asking: “OK, but I bought a book on blogging and WordPress. Why this woman is significant about this book?”.

Well, her presence is crucial, because she was the first person that made me think about the possibility to enter the wonderful world of blogging, by creating my own blog.

Thanks to her, at the end of August, in 2007, my first blog “Space 4 Tutorial” (http://www.space4tutorial.com/) was born.

On that day a wonderful experience began and I got great satisfaction, over the years, both personally and professionally.

I’m working in the computer industry for over ten years. I started working as a developer of web applications concerning branch banking and now I deal with both programming and administration of operating systems and networking.

But if I had not the luck to hear a sentence (probably said randomly) by the woman who is my wife today, I'm not sure things would have been the same. Maybe now I would not be here talking about blogs.

On January 1, 2008 was the time of the portal named “Il Bloggatore” (http://www.ilbloggatore.com/). It was born from the blogger experience that I gained in the previous months and from the desire to give my contribution, even if minimally, to the Italian blogosphere improvement, by providing an absolutely free service offering support and promotion of blogs related to information technology.

Thanks to “Il Bloggatore”, I was able to discover and overcome many of the challenges inherent in the creation of a blog and its subsequent growth. In fact, the development of a portal like this one, that became quickly an important reference point for much of the Italian bloggers working in this context, has enabled me to learn many aspects that a new blogger has to deal, from the earliest instants he decides to take this road.

Moreover, thanks to this website, I personally experienced all of those suggestions, apparently only theoretical. Many of them can be read on the Internet, and are related to quality of contents, indexing of a web site and presence in search engine's results, if possible on the first page.

For example, I can say with knowledge of the facts that from the appropriate use of SEO techniques depends the greater or lesser visibility of a website and, consequently, its higher success. I still remember the day when, during December of 2008, a modification to the graphical structure of the portal, seemingly small, allowed to “Il Bloggatore” nearly double the number of users who visited it daily.

Today, after more than 4 years, “Il Bloggatore” is a website that can rely on a good popularity in Italy, a PageRank of 6/10 and over a million visits per month.

If you do not know what is the PageRank, you can find more information under “Essential Concepts and Definitions” of the first chapter of this book. For the moment, however, we can consider that the Microsoft website in Italy (http://www.microsoft.it) has PageRank 7/10.

So, I guess you can understand my great satisfaction!

“Il Bloggatore” is the reference website for over 3,000 Italian blogs, originally specialized in computer, but now also projected to other topics. It tries to improve every day, providing the most effective support possible for all bloggers who need it.

In this period, almost five years since that August of 2007, I was able to discover so many things, not only about the world of blogging, but also concerning the management of websites in general.

I discovered, for example, the use of CMS (Content Management Systems), useful tools available to any webmaster, as well as optimization techniques defined as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the methods to write quality and attractive posts, the methods to publicize your own work and “make a name” on the Internet, to make money with an Internet business, and so on...

In short, I would have lost many of these things, if I had never taken the road of blogging!

This is why I decided to create this book. Because I want to share with everyone all the things that I learned during this wonderful experience allowing, even to those who do not know what is a blog, to create one by their own and, above all, to obtain the same satisfaction that I had.

Although the topic is very extensive, this book will deal in a more complete and comprehensive as possible all aspects pertaining to the realm of blogging, especially referring to WordPress, one of the platforms on development of blogs that in recent years got the most success.

For whom is this book intended? Well, I think this book is for everyone!

In fact, the main goal of this book is to support the person that comes close to this topic just today and that one who wants to challenge himself for the first time in the creation of his own blog (development of specific web space to be submitted to friends and relatives, implementation of a simple website for business, etc.).

Moreover, this book wants to become a useful reference guide for more experienced reader or for the most seasoned webmaster, who can derive useful insights, undertake new initiatives in his own personal and professional activities and obtain new inputs, necessary to enter fully and without restrictions in a market ever more rich of opportunities that are just waiting to be discovered and exploited. In any case, whether you're a novice or an experienced webmaster, I wish you a pleasant reading, with the hope that the world of blogging will conquer you as it has conquered me some years ago.