What is a WordPress theme?

September 17, 2012 / Basic Web Concepts, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

WordPress basicsSometimes those of us who are immersed everyday in WordPress, SEO and Online Marketing topics forget there is a whole world out there that has barely heard of WordPress. Or if they have heard of it, they think it is only used for blogs. So today I’m going to talk about WordPress themes and what they are.

Anatomy of WordPress

To understand WordPress themes, it helps to have a basic understanding of WordPress itself. I like to think about WordPress as different components working together that not only brings you an awesome website, but one that comes with an administrative interface you can use to create new pages on your site without needing any technical know-how. If you can do Word documents, you can write pages on a WordPress web site.

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How I Enhanced My WordPress 404 Page To Be More Useful

August 20, 2012 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Frak! 404 Error Page
Flickr CC License - The Shifted Librarian
This week I wanted to enhance my blog’s 404 page to be more useful to my visitor. But I didn’t want to spend a lot of time and I didn’t necessarily want to use a plugin. Why not a plugin? I get worried about the overhead plugins add to my site and it’s not always easy to find one that does exactly what I want. Sometimes it is easier to just edit the code.

While Google Webmaster Tools does show I am getting 404 errors on my site, they are all due to the the lower quality guest author posts that I recently deleted. A spot check of the errors didn’t turn up any external links to these pages. So because a 404 is not a frequent occurrence for my site, it’s not a top priority (hence my upfront criteria that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on this task). Nevertheless I wanted to make my 404 page more useful to my visitor and not a dead end.

Here’s how I added a search box and a list of categories to my 404 page. Now keep in mind that to follow along, I’m assuming you know how to copy and update files on your server and that you are comfortable editing php code.

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Pitfalls of WordPress tags and how to avoid them

July 16, 2012 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Just because you have a tool in front of you, it doesn’t mean you have to use it. This is particularly applicable to WordPress tags. A lot of bloggers tag each post they write with 4 or 5 multi word tags that they will never use again — thinking they are adding keywords to the post and helping their site’s SEO. Nothing could be further from the truth.

How WordPress tags work

tags: wordpressLet’s say you are a foodie blogger and just posted a recipe on tomato soup. So you wrack your brains – gee what are all the keywords that describe this post? And you come up with “tomato soup”, “healthy eating”, “warm foods”, “easy recipes”. The way WordPress works is (as long as your theme shows tags), those tags will appear as clickable links that will take you to an archive page that show a list of posts that have the same tag. The problem is that unless you have written several posts on “tomato soups” – the tag archive page will just show your one post. Not only is that not useful to your site visitor, but could be diluting your content in the search engine index.

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Backups and upgrades may be boring, but losing your data is not.

November 23, 2011 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Website Under Construction

Have you backed up your WordPress lately? Maintenance activities such as upgrading WordPress or backing up my site rank at the top of my list of my least favorite things to do. I’d much rather write a blog post or check out a new plug-in. But this week I bit the bullet and spent some time on site maintenance.

Do I really need you to tell why backups and upgrades are important? Here’s one reason, WordPress’s popularity has not gone unnoticed by hackers and they are hard at work exploiting security vulnerabilities in the software. By upgrading to the latest version of WordPress you are at least installing the latest security fixes. That goes for your plugins as well.

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Help, My WordPress Site is Hacked – What do I do?

March 26, 2011 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Attack Site Image
Courtesy of stwn - Flickr Creative Commons License
Early on March 10th, webenso.com was infected by malware. It started out as parts of the site not working however by the end of the day, it had been blacklisted by Google with any access to the site getting the dreaded red “reported attack site” image.

If your WordPress site is hacked – what do you do?. First things first, are you (or your web designer) up for the challenge? Security is a specialized field that can require a different perspective and skill set. If you are not comfortable with browsing through code and don’t know your way around .htaccess, other configuration files and phpadmin, consider using a service that will clean up your site for you. Whether you get help or not, it helps to be familiar with the issues and remediation steps. Here’s my take on what you need do.

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Preventing Image Theft & Copyright Violation

January 21, 2011 / Digital Marketing, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Stop Image TheftCopyright law exists to protect the creators of a original work, whether than be an article, a photo or a drawing. As soon as you create it you have copyright to it, which stays in place 70 years after the author’s death; at that point it belongs to the public domain. Unless you grant license for someone else to use your image, it is considered a copyright violation if they use without your permission.

Image theft is an important issue on the web, especially to people who make their living creating visual art.  Just this week there was a furor over the site http://lxixixl.com/ which was copying and hosting entire collections of images from people’s websites. Complaints shut it down but there are others that are doing the same thing.

Theft of content and image happens every day on the web, so what can you do?

  • Inform:   Show that it is your original work by placing a copyright notice on your website.   For example “Copyright 2011 Pablo Picasso”
  • Make it less desirable: Many artists will only put low resolution copies of their images online.   So if they are stolen they are not of full quality.
  • Make it difficult: Implement functionality that makes it harder to steal the images.   For example, disable the right click functionality with javascript.  Note this will annoy some visitors who expect the right click to work for legitimate uses.  Another approach is to place a transparent image over the real image, so when it is saved the thief gets a blank image.   WordPress users might want to check out the iProtect plugin.   Keep in mind that that neither one of these are complete solutions.   Disabling right click doesn’t help when the thief finds the image in Google Image Search and gets the image there.  Which brings me to ….
  • Hide them from Google and Bing: Keep all your images in one directory and tell Google and Bing not to index that directory by placing a directive in the robots.txt file.   Note that this action is useless if Google has already indexed your images.
  • Watermark them: Perhaps the most effective solution, this alters the image so that it is “marked” in an identifying way.   It’s the same idea as branding cattle back in the cattle rustling days.  There are also WordPress plugins that watermark the image “on the fly”.

Ultimately it is up to you how much effort you want to put into preventing image theft and violation of your copyright, but don’t just ignore the issue, decide on an approach and take action.

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