Archive for the ‘March Newsletter’ Category

WordPress: Frequently Asked Question

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Q: I have a WordPress website, but it’s old and needs a new look, do I have to start over?

A: This is the beauty of WordPress sites, we can give your site a facelift at any time and you won’t lose any content. Here’s how it works: Your site has a theme with style sheets that dictates how the site looks, we can create and apply a new theme and new style sheets so your site is brand new to your audience, but has the same content and works the same for you. We can also turn a regular html site into a WordPress site. With WordPress, getting a new look is much like redecorating your house. We can recover the furniture and hang new curtains, or we can totally refurbish with new floors, baseboards, a fresh coat of paint and new furniture—but, we never have to rebuild the house.

 

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Three Cool & Useful WordPress Plug-ins

Monday, March 21st, 2011
  • WP-DB-Backup: This plug-in is a must have for all WordPress users! It gives you the ability to backup your database content (meaning your blog posts and page content). You can automate this backup to occur as frequently as you think is necessary. We typically recommend setting it to backup weekly. You can also choose to download this file to your computer.

FYI: This does not backup your images or your theme, for this reason, it’s a good idea to have a full site backup, which does include your theme, images and all other content that gets stored on your server (we recommend that you backup your physical site at least monthly, unless you have not made any changes in that time period), this is done from your C-Panel or through an FTP client.

  • Revision Control: This little plug-in allows you to control how many revisions get stored to your database. I for one tend to noodle with a post over and over until I finally feel it’s ready to go live and then I still end up making edits—this means that I can often have up to 20 different versions of one post. This is cool because you can revert to an older version at any time. But what is not cool is that all these versions take up valuable space and can slow down your site’s load time. Revision Control allows you to set the number of stored revisions for both posts and pages, so for example: you could set it to save only the last 5 post versions, and 10 page versions.
  • WP Super Cache: Speaking of load time. This plug-in can help speed up your site’s load time. It basically caches your site’s content and then pulls up each page as html so your server doesn’t have to work so hard to load php code and images every time someone views a page in your site.

FYI: If you are making changes to your site and yet you keep seeing the old version. Don’t panic—it could be that your page has been cached and is pulling up the old data. To make sure those changes were really made, you might need to clear the cache. You can access Super Cache from your Dashboard, under Settings, from there, click “Delete Cache,” about half way down the page.

 

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It’s Time to Update to WordPress 3.1

Friday, March 18th, 2011

I like WordPress Version 3.1, not because it works so much better (most things you won’t even notice because they run under the hood, if you will), but because I can now access my Dashboard from the front-end of my site (as long as I am logged in). So, let’s say for example you are viewing your website’s home page (what your readers see), you will have edit capabilities to this page, and the ability to add a new post or page, and manage comments from tabs now located in the upper left side of your screen. Cool. Not to mention the fact that keeping your WordPress site updated will protect you from potential hackers. And that’s really cool!

The coolest new feature is the internal linking capability. Let’s say you are writing a post in your blog and you would like to link to an older post where you reference the same subject; before 3.1 you would have had to remember when you posted it, what it was called, and find that link (time consuming and maybe not worth your effort).

With WordPress 3.1 you can now highlight the keywords you want to use as your link and click the (more…)

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Protect Your WordPress Website from Hackers + Get Results from Your Online Marketing Efforts!

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

In the last six months we have experienced a wave of hackers getting into our custom WordPress author websites.  The problem is that hackers have realized how popular WordPress sites are (internationally); as a result, many of them focus on finding weaknesses and hacking into thousands (gosh maybe millions) of sites. Less work—more payout. The good news is that we are more diligent in our efforts to make you aware of the importance of keeping your site updated. Why? Because while the bad programmers are working to get in, the good WordPress programmers are working to keep them out. The bad news is that updating your site can cause errors due to conflicts with custom php code and plug-ins. Stay with me.

You can very easily click the Please Update Now link from your WordPress Dashboard. And it will update, but what can also happen is that your blog can quit working, your theme can get wiped out, your plug-ins could stop working, and your blog could be rendered useless. It could also work seamlessly. So, how do you know what yours will do? Well, you don’t. Each site is unique to this equation. That is why it is so important to back up your website and your database content.

At Monkey C Media we do a complete backup of your site so we are ready for any hiccups, and after each update we do a physical check to ensure that everything works properly.

At the risk of boring you to pieces, here’s an example: (more…)

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