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Keeping WordPress Up To Date and Secure

Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Plugins

After you installed your new WordPress website you need to make sure you keep it up-to-date and optimized. An up-to-date WordPress website is better protected against hacking attempts and runs better with fewer errors.

Optimizing your WordPress website goes beyond keeping it up-to-date with the most recent version of the core files and plugins. You need to optimize your database as well and make sure your site loads fast.

Keeping WordPress Up to Date

– updates for core files: WordPress will inform you if there is a new version update once you log in to your dashboard. This can be an upgrade or, very important, a security update. Note: some minor security upgrades are now installed automatically.

– updates for plugins: WordPress plugin updates can add new functionality or bug fixes and sometimes also have security updates.

– update themes (aff): WordPress theme update is mostly focused on new layout options, getting responsive or extra layout functionality. Sometimes bug fixes and security patching.

– remove no longer used plugins and themes (aff): Don't leave possible security problems and clean up all plugins and themes you tried once and decided not to use any longer. WordPress will check these plugins and themes as well so save yourself some time and clean up!

Keeping WordPress Secure

Lock Your Site to Block WordPress Spam Comments

Keeping your WordPress site up-to-date is the first step.

Next step is to use a plugin that will shield your site from people who want to hack your site or fill it with spam comments.

One of the fastest ways to block those people is with the Shield security plugin.

Shield has an easy to use Dashboard that will show you which option you have configured for use.

Shield Security Dashboard - Build a Website with WordPress

Just follow the icons in Orange once you have installed and activated the plugin.

One of the most important options if the Firewall. The firewall will block a lot of hacking attempts.

In the configuration, I have the Firewall Blocking options all set to active except for the last two.

Firewall Options in Shield WordPress Plugin

And to be able to work in your Dashboard without any problems, you should use these options in the Whitelist part.

Firewall Whitelist in Shield for WordPress

The rest of the options in Shield are pretty easy to configure, so go ahead and run through them.

Have a special look at the Login protection where you can easily rename your login option to redirect wp-login.php! This one is a no-brainer as Shield makes it very easy without you needing to create special rules in your .htaccess file.

There are so many other nice options in this plugin that I will create a separate post for it to go through the complete plugin settings. But for now, make sure you block out the basics and see what other options you might want to use.

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How To Set Up and Use WordPress Menus

Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Setup

The recent versions of WordPress offer you the new Custom WordPress Menus function to set up a navigation menu. The Menus can be created with pages and categories, and include hyperlinks. You can also sort them any way you want.

These new WordPress menus are very flexible and are especially useful if you want to create a static website. You can have different custom menus to show different navigational elements.

For example, you can create a menu to all the main pages and a separate one for pages like Contact, Privacy Policy, Legal Pages etc.

How To Create WordPress Menus

To create such a menu go to Appearance -> Menu and first put in the name of the menu you want to create. Then push Save! this is important because you cannot place any links until you save the menu first.

Best practice for Menu naming is to give it the name where you want to use it, or what content you want to put into it. I use Top Menu, Page Menu, and Category menus for example.

Create WordPress menus to improve navigation

After you saved your menu, you could get extra fields on the left-hand side of the screen. If your theme supports it, you will see Theme Location Menu options like Primary navigation. You can have that new menu replace the theme default menu if you use that option.

WordPress Menu Created

Now you can add you pages or categories to the menu, select them on the left side and choose Add to Menu option. Hint: Under pages select View All first so you can select Home as well.

 

Once you added the page to the menu, you can sort them by dragging them to the right place and even drag them to a child page position. Click save when you are done and your first menu is ready.

Now create another menu for your categories and add the topics you like to show.

WordPress Category Menu

Showing Your WordPress Menus

You need to get your WordPress menus into your layout and bring the navigation structure to the front of your website.

The menu's you just created are shown via Widgets, so go to the Widgets page first via Appearance -> Widgets. Look for the widget that is called Custom Menu and drag that to your primary sidebar (or the widgets position you want to use).

WordPress Custom Menu Widget

If you open that widget you can give it a title and select the menu you created from a drop-down menu.

You can use more than one Custom Menu widget on your site, just make sure you create a good navigation for your users.

If you want to make a WordPress website instead of a Blog, these custom menu's are the way to go!

Special Custom Menu Options

In the custom menu creation screen, you also saw another option called Custom Links. With custom links, you can have a link in your menu that points directly to another website. Just give it a name, put in the hyperlink you want it to point to and add it to the menu of you choice.

You can also use this option to create a NonLinked menu item. A possible use could be that you want a section divider in your menu. To do this you use the custom menu option. Label it by using the Name you want to use and for the hyperlink you use http://# add it to your menu in the position you want to show it. Save the menu.

Open that menu item and remove the URL option and save the menu again. Now you have a menu item that is not linked.

No Links Menu Item

Editing Custom Menu Links

Title Attributes and Custom Menu Fields

With any Menu item, you can edit some extra options, with the most prominent one being the Title Attribute. The Navigation label is the name that is shown in the menu, the title attribute is shown if you hover over that menu item.

If you create a page menu, you could have very long titles in you menu items. By reducing / renaming the Navigation Label you can improve the menu option and if you put the longer page title in the Title Attribute your have the best navigation for your visitors.

There are a few extra special options which are not shown by default. If you want to see and use them, use the Screen Options on the right-hand top corner and select the extra options you want to see.

Custom Menu Screen Options

This will show you the extra options.

Custom Menu Special Options

Most of us will not use these options, but its good to know they are there.

If you can think of other cool things you can do with Custom WordPress Menus that please share it in the comments below.

From Static HTML to WordPress Website

Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Setup

This is a question I get on a regular base: How can I convert my Static HTML to WordPress based website?

Let me give you a warning in advance, a WordPress website needs to be kept updated!
A static HTML site can run for years without you ever touching it for things like security updates or new versions. Just to make you aware of the need for updates!

Another thing that needs really close attention is to make sure that your rankings in Google and other search engines stay intact.
That means you need to make sure that the URLs of your old site will stay the same with your new WordPress based website.

Luckily this can be done and for those few links you want to change you can redirect them via your .htaccess file.

Convert Static HTML to WordPress

But first things first, the conversion of your website.

First, what do you need:

  • good hosting (aff) that support php
  • a mysql database: databasename, username for that database and the password for that useraccount
  • the possibility to use a .htaccess file

If you are not sure about the above mentioned items, ask your website hosting (aff) provider!

Installing WordPress in a Subfolder

The first thing you will do is to install WordPress into a Subfolder like /cms .

After you finished the installation you have to set the Privacy setting so that Search Engines are not allowed to visit and index your site (Settings -> Reading) so your new URLs are not getting into the search engine indexes until you are ready with your conversion.

Now you can start building your WordPress website next to your current site, that site will stay active while you build a new one.

Keeping Old URLs

Like a mentioned before, it is very important that you keep the URLs for the new site the same as the old one!

That is why you need to set the Permalinks to custom with the value /%postname%.html this will result in Posts links with the extension .html.

During the development of your new site the urls will be like /cms/page-url.html , but after the final steps this will become /page-url.html , that same as the old site.
Make sure that the “slugs” are the same as the old site, and there is a plugin that you will need which is “.html on pages” . I take it you will have some pages that use the extension .html

You can now start to convert your old pages to WordPress by copying the text or the HTML code of the content from the old website into the HTML code screen of WordPress.

Your page URL is created by the Title of your page, but you can change them by editing the Slug permalink.

There is a plugin that could help you convert old pages: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/import-html-pages/ Attention! For this plugin to work you really need  PHP5! Ask your hosting provider if you are not sure.

Website Layout

The conversion from your old static HTML to WordPress based site with the same layout is a completely different exercise than what I am describing here, to do that your will have to get a complete custom Theme / Layout.

But why not take this opportunity and change the look of your site together with the conversion? Choose a nice premium or free theme  that will fit you company / website topic and customize it to your needs.

If you are happy with the look and feel and the content of your site you can follow these step to get it “live”:

1. delete or rename the index.html file in the root of your old site.
2. copy the index.php and .htaccess file from the /cms folder to the root of your site
3. change one rule in the index.php file into require(‘./cms/wp-blog-header.php’); (only with the index.php file in the root, not in the folder  /cms!!)
4. change only the Site address (URL) in the general setting (Setting -> General) into the domain (aff) name. (remove the /cms part)

Change Site Address Only!
Change Site Address Only!

5. remove or rename the old  .html files.
6. change the privacy settings so the Search Engines can access and index the site again.

If you handle the change over it this manner, than your old site is not reachable during the 5 minutes you need to rename the index.html so the index.php takes over and if you kept your URLs you are not loosing any visitors from the search engines like Google.

And of course you have taken a complete Back-Up of your old static website so you can restore your old side if you should encounter any unexpected error(s).

If you want new URLs for your pages than you can redirect the old URLs to the news ones in two ways:

However if you change your URLs, even with a 301 redirect you could loose some credit and backlinks that are pointing to your site.

Good luck and if you still have some questions, please use the contact form.

If you have other tips and additions that might help others, please write them in the comments section below.

One last question: Is there a need to have this information in an even more detailed form like a pdf manual with screen shots and tips? if so, please leave a comment.

Update: You asked for it and now it's finally here… From Static HTML To WordPress version 1.0

You can share the PDF with friends, post it on you website but you cannot sell it or change anything in it! If you find any language or grammatical errors please let me know so I can correct them.

From Static HTML to WordPress Website

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WordPress Agent Theme for Real Estate Agents

Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Themes

WP Agent Theme Colors

Brain Gardner, WordPress theme designer extraordinaire, just announced the release of a new theme specifically targeted to Real Estate Agents.

This theme comes with great features like automatic thumbnail creation and special pages for your real estate listing.

There are separate writing panels for your listings with fields for price and other items pertaining to the property. You write the data, and the theme will handle the layout so that every listing has the same format.

For Google maps code, there is a special field where you only need the location code.

WordPress Real Estate Agent Theme

It comes with four different color schemes that give you the ability to use the one that best fits your company. You also get the PSD files, so you can make your own changes or hire AgentPress to do further customization for you.

WordPress Theme for Realestate Agent in Tan

Different ideas for usage

Although this theme was developed by Brian Gardner together with Nicole Nicolay (of My Tech Opinion) for real estate agents, it looks to me like you can adapt this theme. With a few simple changes, you can make it work for different agents like car dealers, motorcycle companies, and even custom car builders.

In fact, every company that chooses to showcase their products with several photos can benefit by using this theme.

If you want to build a professional website for marketing products in the high end consumer market, the SEO-ready Agent Theme from StudioPress (aff) may be just what you need.

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Moving a WordPress Site to a New Host and Domain – WpSiteBuilding.com

Filed Under: Weblog News, WordPress Blog, WordPress CMS

Moving a WordPress Website

I decided to move this WordPress website from the “old” subdomain (www.hummerbie.com) to a new domain (aff) and hosting (aff) company.

The main reason I moved is because I was unhappy with the hosting (aff) provider of the main site. Recently they moved to faster servers and a better internet backbone, but after moving there are still ongoing issues with some of the other sites that run there.

The second reason is, I wanted to see how well Google and other search engines will pick up the 301 redirects (permanently moved pages) and hold my current rankings in the search results. Another part of this SEO exercise is to see how the rankings and number of visitors to this site are influenced by the move of a Dutch hosting provider with servers in Amsterdam to a USA-based hosting company JustHost.com (Geo Targeting in Search Engine Optimization).

After the dust settles, I will write a page/post about the process of moving a WordPress site. I've already found one major problem that is now fixed, but I need to do some more testing and tweaking to be sure. After that, I will give you a complete overview of all the pitfalls to avoid in a process like this and how to handle it the right way. Subscribe to the e-mail or RSS updates on the right side of the menu to get those updates.

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