Comments are the heart and soul of your blog’s community. An understanding of how your blog’s comment system works is critical to maintaining that community! Here are five things you should know about the native WordPress comment system, followed by a discussion of other comment hosting services and plugins. 1. New comments can be automatically…
Categories and Tags might be one of the simplest yet most easily confused aspects of WordPress. Depending on your site, your approach to and use of categories and tags may be different. But here’s my five-minute explanation of the whys, the hows, and the differences. Categories: Broad categories under which your post topics would fall….
Gone are the days when you had a custom website designed and updated by a professional, and a separate blog that you knew how to post on. Thanks to easy to use content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, your blog and your website can be one entity, on the same platform, at the same address….
A “favicon” or favorite icon is the little icon that shows next to the URL in the address bar and above or beside the site name in your browser favorites or anywhere else your site is bookmarked. It also shows next to the name of each site you contribute to in your Google+ profile. Depending…
You can use WordPress without knowing any HTML if you hire a designer/coder to make all changes to your site’s appearance and widgets. However, if you’re ever going to do a giveaway with a program like Rafflecopter, or insert a button from another site to your own, you might want to take a few moments…
Your WordPress sidebar is made up of “widgets”. To add or edit your widgets, go to Appearance, Widgets in your WordPress dashboard and start dragging and dropping your widgets into the appropriate sidebar. Some themes have only one sidebar, others have multiple sidebar and footer options. Often, the secondary sidebar doesn’t show unless the theme…
The purpose of your WordPress menus—also known as the navigation or “nav” bars—is to help your website visitors around your website. By default, most WordPress themes put the pages you create into your navigation bar—in the order they are created (you can change the page order numerically by editing the page attributes). This default setting…
The theme is what controls the entire look and feel of your WordPress website. Many themes are based on frameworks (i.e. StudioPress themes are based on Genesis). Here’s a five minute guide to WordPress themes and frameworks, plus a checklist to consider as you’re looking for themes. 1. Frameworks are like a blank canvas. Theme…
Do you know how often your host backs up your files and your WordPress database? Do you know how much they charge to restore that backup? If they only back up your files once a month, what will happen to this month’s posts, comments, and images if your site is hacked or somehow deleted? If…
Google Analytics is usually considered the standard for site statistic and analytics. However, it’s just one option out of many. Here are five different ways to track your site’s stats—and details on just how easy it is to install Google Analytics in a self-hosted WordPress site. 1. From your host. Most web hosts have some…
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that brings mixed reviews depending on who you’re talking to. It’s an ever-popular download, but it’s not popular in all crowds. So what’s the deal with Jetpack? Why would you want it? And why wouldn’t you? Here’s a run-down on Jetpack, with an explanation of a few of the pros…
WordPress.org allows you to add features to and completely customize your website through the use of plugins. A plugin is something you choose and install on your WordPress.org site that adds some sort of feature or enhancement to your site. You can activate or deactivate each plugin at will. There are thousands of free plugins…
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