WPDude not only impressed me with his considerable technical prowess, but also with his integrity and commitment. He really is a pleasure to work with.
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Ben White – itsfyionline.com
Thank you for making this such an easy experience to move to WordPress from TypePad. I found it much easier for you to get me going for a small fee than spend hours trying to go through the WordPress codex.
Continue Reading »Rich Usini – imwithrich.com
A couple of weeks ago, I was at my wits end. My blog posts were not showing up in Firefox and I needed help, more than you can imagine. None of the tech people that I know good provide me real assistance so, I used my good friend Google. I found WordPress Dude, Neil Matthews. [...]
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Neil, I just wanted to say thanks for going above and beyond my expectations with our wordpress consultation the other day. You not only fixed my screw ups, but you also showed me where I was going wrong and how to properly operate the new blog template on a day-to day basis, as well as [...]
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I must say that Neil AKA WP Dude is customer service oriented and commited to building a strong and honorable relationship with his clients. I’m far from tech savy and was in need of assistance with updating my version of word press. WP Dude went above and beyond the necessary, by updating all of my [...]
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After spending 3 months setting up my new site I was stuck on the last details to get the site up and running. I was thrilled to find Neil Matthews who took care of the technical stuff to make my site work better so I did not have to spend another 3 months learning things [...]
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10 Things To Turn Your Vanilla Install Into Double Choc Chip
An out of the box install of WordPress is okay, but you can spice up your vanilla install and make it extra tasty by following these ten steps:
1 Permalinks
The default permalink structure of WordPress has a lot to be desired, change this to a custom one and you can improve your SEO and make your posts more meaningful to search engine users. Change your default permalinks to %postname% in the custom section.
I wrote an article How To Change Your Slug For SEOon this subject.
2 Jazz Up Your Admin Account
The first user created by WordPress is usually admin, make your blog a bit more personal by giving admin a nick name, give it your name, put a personal touch to your posts. This is done from users and subscribers section.
3 Add a Liberal Dash Of Plugins
Plugins rock, they extend a dull old WordPress install and make it sing, here are my “must have” plugins
4 Put On A Pretty Dress
Figuratively speaking, don’t use dull default themes, go shopping for a new theme, if you are serious about blogging, check out a premium theme, better still check out one of the cool breed of new themes like Headway which allows you to design your own look and feel without any coding skills.
5 The Key To A Good Blog is An API Key
Stop reading and go over to wordpress.com. Create a free account and get yourself and API key, this will be used to register visits for your wordpress stats and combat comment spam.
6 Get Yourself Noticed
You’ve got a fancy new blog, now you need readers, get yourself noticed on the search engines by first getting your self indexed. Step one is to add a sitemap, a text file on your site which tells Google and Co all about your blog posts and pages, read more about sitemaps in my article Getting Your WordPress Posts Into Google Using Sitemaps
7 Set A Comment Policy
The best time to set a comment policy is when your blog is new and you have no comments. Check out How To Control You WordPress Comments
8 Feed Me, Feed Me Now
Get yourself a feedbuner account and stream yoru rss feed into it. Feedburner gives you statistics on how many people are subscribing to your blog, and how people are using the content you publish. You can setup a feedbuner account at http://feedburner.google.com.
9 Backup Your Blog
Learn how to backup and recover your blog before you have too much content.
10 Get Writing
You are thinking I couldn’t think up tenth config item so I threw in get writing, you are wrong, this is the most important item, get writting your pillar content, the important stuff for your niche, have something cool to read when your first visitors begin to arrive.
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I am just getting in to WordPress, having created a b2evo blog several months ago and decided to see the difference(s) between b2 and WP. Although I consider myself to be technically capable, I must confess to being a “babe in the woods” when it comes to WP/b2evo’s use of php and related templates and style sheets.
I find your site intriguing and perhaps if I stumble a bit I’ll come here and ask for help. I have absolutely no knowledge of how to install and use some of the plugins I see, but I did get an API key and I should be ready to try several things.
I won’t go into detail now; we both have better things to do. But I thought I would introduce myself, and I will subscribe to your email. I’ll also register, and perhaps we will continue this discussion at a later time.
Thank you.
John B. Moss
Managing Editor
http://www.theonlinewriter.com
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