Wordpress Recommendations and Best Practices?

Brandi Pierce built out my entire website in Wordpress. Her site is another great example of her work. If you need help getting your site built, give her a call!

Wordpress is a great platform. I say just start plugging away at it and become more familiar yourself.

It's all scary, the PHP, CSS, etc. But if you follow the instructions for each piece you are trying to set up, you may be surprised ... it just takes some time to take away the fear of f***ing something up ... and to start the building process with wordpress.

Remember - "Pages" stay on your site as static. What you put on a "page" will be there for the long haul (i.e. about me, contact info, etc.) ... it's the categories that you'll want to consider before you writing posts are put up work. How can you categorize your photos (people, architectural, etc - and can photo's hit other categories like "additional lighting used", "HDR", "natural lighting", "commerical", "experimental", etc. So prethink what categories would be appropriate for your posts, and make those categories ... so when you do post, you just check all the boxes that apply to that specific post.

For example on bayareavr.net, I may hit "virtual tour", "commercial", "san francisco" .... or "photography", "experimental", "thoughts". etc.

Absolute plug-ins - Spam blocks (Akismet), NextGEN Gallery - awesome for photos, and some kind of stat tracking program like wordpress stats or google analytics ... there are many more, but having a spam filter, a nice photo gallery, and tracking stats seem to be the strongest for me.

Best practices: keep your topics focused on your niche. Try to blog 2 times a week - although it's been over a month since I have ;( I think tutorials are a great way to go. If you can educate someone, there's a good chance that people may point to that tutorial - share some of that knowledge! Take an extra minute to link to the references you are talking about - make the blog entries more dynamic. Pay close attention to your stats plug in ... what are people viewing? What are they coming back for?

For example, I create virtual tours. When I capture a great scene, I can take that stiched photo - and crop my favorite part of the spherical image to make a wallpaper. I have found that people come to my blog by looking for wallpapers more than looking for virtual tours or panoramic photography. So once I noticed the trend - I started to create more wallpapers - giving the readers more of what they were looking for. Am I big on wallpapers - not really. Do I hope people will see m virtual tours - absolutely ... and do I hope that people look for wallpaper, find a virtual tour, and then go to about me, or bayareavr.com my commercial site to find out more about my business - OF COURSE - that's the end goal!!!

Good luck - you will find TONS of info ... and will be joining a very large community.

You can configure your site so that the front page is something other than the blog component, which is a swell option.

With your work, be sure to include specifics about your stance on copyright/licensing ... Creative Commons or?

Hello Matt,

I recently met Stephan at an event and I think that you should check out his case study on tags and using a wordpress blog as a website, very interesting stuff. This guy is an SEO expert but he is VERY expensive.

http://www.netconcepts.com/netconcepts-case-study/

I realize that this question was originally posted around a year ago, but I figure I could still add on to Eli's & Leila's input so far.

Configurations:

• Update your permalink structure for SEO purposes.
• Update your page title tags
• Make sure you have some security measures in place as Wordpress sites are vulnerable to attacks due to its popularity.

Plugins

• Wordpress Database Backup This plugin can be set to automatically email you a backup of your Wordpress database on a daily or weekly basis.

• All in One SEO pack This plugin allows you to adjust your page titles, control your URL structure and just about everything else you can think of to help optimize your site for the search engines.

• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade This plugin allows a user to automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation to the latest one provided by Wordpress.org

Resources

1. Smashing Magazine Wordpress Toolbox: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/15/wordpress-developers-toolbox/

2. Step by step guide on how to setup and manage a Wordpress site for your small business, with Top 10 plugins to install, SEO for Wordpress, etc (Disclaimer, I wrote this guide)

http://postscapes.com/wordpress-for-small-businesses

1. Go to www.delicious.com and search for Wordpress, this will give you a ton of good resources to try.

Wordpress has a very large community, their forums are active so you should be able to find a solution to your problem no matter what kind of site you are developing with it.

-T