CMS

Block WordPress Comment Spam

Filed Under: WordPress Plugins June 7, 2013

There is one things that most new WordPress users want to do after few days: Block WordPress Comment Spam

You will understand after your site has been running for a couple of days.

Comment spam is a black-hat tactic to getting back-links to a website. Most of those fake comments are done via spam-bots (small programs) that inject comments into the comment field of your blog articles. Others are done by outsourcing this back-linking to cheap foreign countries like India or The Philippines.

The worst kind are comments are those that send you or your visitors to mall-ware sites.

Ways to Filter WordPress Comment Spam

There are a few ways to get rid of those pesky spam comments.

Uncheck the option that people can leave comments on your blog, very effective but not really visitor friendly. Go to Settings -> Discussion -> Uncheck all first three options.

Install Anti-Spam plugins to check if its a known spam comment so that the comment is put in the Spam reaction queue.

Install a anti spam bots plugin, that will block the comment bot and prevent the comment from coming into your WordPress system.

Set some rules in the Discussion section to make sure those WordPress spam comments are moderated before they hit your visitor facing site. Is always good to moderate your comments. One tip: Trust nothing, check and double check.

Set the option that people need to register before they can comment, however this will drive off some legit visitors that want to comment as well.

An important sign of a WordPress comment spam is to check if the comment is really on topic and will have good value for you or other visitors.

If not? Delete it. No sure? Copy the comment and search it in Google between quotes. If it shows the extract term on several hits, delete it.

Anti-Spam Plugins for WordPress

The number one plugin used for fighting off comment spam is Akismet.

Akismet is installed with any new WordPress site by default. After activation you need to register for an API Key at http://akismet.com

Please make sure you read their Terms of Services so you can make a good choice on what plan you should pick.

If you only use Akismet on a personal non-business blog with under 20.000 visitors per month you can select the personal plan and slide the price slider to 0.

Note: This plugin costs $5 a month (per site) if you make any money from your site, such as through an affiliate link, ad, or paid service.

After you activate the Akismet plugin you follow the notification and put in your key.

Cookies for Comments

The cookies for comments plugin will first set a cookie on a random URL that is then checked when a comment is posted. If the cookie is missing the comment is marked as spam.

If its a spambot that tries to place a cookie, it will fail as they won't accept that cookie.

You can find the plugin here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cookies-for-comments/

Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin

This plugin is my favorite. It blocks spambots by adding a client side generated checkbox asking the comment author to confirm that they are not a spammer. (Like you see on this website)

A check is made that the checkbox has been checked before the comment is submitted so there's no chance that a comment will be lost if it's being submitted by legitimate human user.

Given your visitor the option to just tick a checkbox is much more user friendly than a Chapta (which are sometimes very hard to read) or do some calculation.

You can find the plugin here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/growmap-anti-spambot-plugin/

After you installed and activated the plugin go to Settings -> G.A.S.P to verify that the basic options are set or you want to change some text. You can configure extra checks like the number of links in a comment or the number of words in the commenters name field.

Combining Anti Spam Plugins

For me a combination of Cookies for Comments and Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin has reduced the number of spam comments to almost zero, maybe two or three manual spam comments, but that's it.

Giving me more time to build sites and write articles on my own sites.

So how about you? Does your website still gets loads of spam comments?

How To Make WordPress Look Like a Website

Filed Under: WordPress Themes August 21, 2016

WordPress has come a long way since its beginning, it was created as a blogging platform but is now way beyond that. You can easily make WordPress look like a website with just a few configuration and theme options.

With the latest versions, especially version 3.0 where the custom menu feature was introduced you can use it for any kind of website.

Using WordPress custom menu's you can really create a good navigation for your website.

So how do you get from this:

To something like this?

WordPress Theme Layout

If you have your WordPress website installed, it's now time to have it look like a regular website.

The first impression people will get when they visit your website is essential. They will either see a blog, or a website.

The way you make WordPress look like a website determined by the theme you choose and how you configured it.

Do you use a standard theme or a theme that has a special homepage layout?

Do you have a static homepage or do you show the most recent posts?

There are several options for choosing a special theme for your WordPress website.

You can search the free WordPress theme repository right from within your own WordPress installation. Go to Appearance -> Themes (aff). It opens with a search function that lets you select some search criteria. Upload your own, select one of the other options like Featured, Newest or Recently Updated.

The featured themes (aff) currently show:

There are themes like:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/responsive

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/suffusion

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/eclipse

http://demo.onedesigns.com/pinboard/

http://demo.onedesigns.com/esplanade

Or you can go for a, very affordable, premium theme from ThemeForest.net, ElegantThemes.com or my personal favorite, but more expensive, themes from StudioPress.com.

Most of these themes will start with a featured image or an image slider on the frontpage, make sure you capture your visitors and keep them on your site.

Some of these themes require an extra plugin to show a slider on your homepage. Those plugins could be wp-cycle or http://www.featuredcontentgallery.com/

There are several others, and you can find a good selection at http://speckyboy.com/2010/06/30/top-10-content-slider-plugins-for-wordpress/

Static Frontpage or Blog Posts

If you want to use a regular theme, you can still make you WordPress site look like a website.

The first thing you need to do is to create a page that will become your homepage.

Just one small warning, do NOT call this Home! If you call it Home it will create a permalink /home/ and that could become a problem.

If you ever want to switch to a theme that does work with a special homepage layout. They will use a theme file called home.php and that might cause you real problems.

And please, don't call this page Welcome or start with Welcome to my website! That is such a waste of your homepage function.

I might have searched the web and found your website, it might have been mentioned in an advertisement or was referred to my by a friend. So, unless you blocked your site for normal visitors, I know I am welcome.

Just give your visitor really good information about you, your service or your interest, tell them what your website is all about. Lead them into your site and show them where your most valuable content is.

Tell them what you want to tell them!

And don't forget to show some good images, a good picture can make a difference. Your website visitors are more attracted to images than text. If they scan your website to get a first impression an image can help to keep them on that page so they start reading.

Your theme might show the option to get comments on that page, in that situation you need to un-check the comments and trackback functions. Look for these options.

If you don't see those options active the Discussion and Comments checkbox in the screen display options (upper-right corner of your edit screen, just above the Publish option).

Once you created that page, you need to make a separate one that will be used to show your posts. You don't need to use posts, but it is a good thing to have your setup ready in case you want to start writing posts.

You can call this page anything you like. You can call it Blog or News or something that might add value to your website. Ramblings, Thoughts, Special Articles it doesn't matter what you want to call it. Just name it so you can use it if you want to start using posts.

Now here is the best thing about this page: Give it the Title you want and publish the page. Do not write anything on that page! Leave it blank.

If you get those two pages done it's time to configure WordPress so it will show your homepage and it knows where to show your posts (if any).

In your Dashboard go to Settings -> Reading and chose Front page displays option A Static page.

You can select the page you just created via a drop down menu when you click the left arrows.

Save your settings and check your website, you should see the intro page you created as the Frontpage of your website.

If you don't see the new version, try to refresh your browser via Ctrl+F5. That will get the latest version of your site instead of the cached one that your browser might show.

Getting Your Sidebar in Shape

Once you get your site's basic layout ready it's now time to look at your sidebar.

Your default sidebar is very likely to show things like Recent Posts, Archives, and Meta or it says Primary Widget Area. It all depends on the theme that is active on your site.

Now Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, Archives and Meta are a dead give away that this is a WordPress blog. You need to get rid of those widgets and replace theme with a good navigational menu.

You can read How To Use WordPress Custom Menu's and create a good menu that will show the basic navigation items for your website.

Place that Custom menu in your primary sidebar via Appearance -> Widgets and drag the Custom Menu widget into your Primary Sidebar screen.

You can see below that it will warn you if you don't have a menu yet and guide you to get one done. If you have one, you can select it.

The best part of these custom menus is that you can have several of them. I like to split my menu's in two separate ones. The first one will contain the navigation into the meat of my sites and the second one contains informational links like the About page, a Sitemap, Contact page and a Privacy Statement page.

Where I want to show these menus depends on the layout or the theme. You want your primary navigation menu in the most prominent place in your website. It should be the first thing your visitor can see if they want to browse through your website.

The second menu should not be hidden away in some obscure place, but it should be less prominent.

Once you placed this widget in your primary sidebar, the other widgets will disappear. Those widgets were there to act as placeholders to show you where your sidebar is located. There might be some widgets already in the sidebar, simply delete the ones you don't want. Search might be one to leave active.

Your theme choice will also determine if your primary sidebar is located on the left side of your screen or on the right side.

Choosing Your Website Theme

For a blog, it is most likely to show the sidebar on the right side, if your theme has that option to switch it to the left, use that. It will also make your WordPress site look more like a normal website.

If your theme does not support it via an option, your might need to change it in the index.php file or in its style sheet.

How you can change that is a completely different subject, the best option to get to know how to change that is to ask in the support forum of your theme.

For the website shown above I used the new default Twenty Twelve theme from WordPress with the plugins One Click Child Theme to make sure my customizations will stick after a Twenty Twelve theme upgrade. I also used a Custom Headers plugin because with this new theme, there is no custom header function for pages.

So now it's up to you to get the layout that makes your WordPress website look like a website instead of a blog.

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From Static HTML to WordPress Website

Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Setup May 16, 2015

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)

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:

use a plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
via the .htaccess file in which you have to write a rule per url you want to forward: redirect 301 /olde-url.html http://www.example.com/new-url.html

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.

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How to Install 21 WordPress Plugins in 5 Minutes

Filed Under: WordPress Plugins, WordPress Setup July 19, 2013

Once you have completed the basic setup of your WordPress website, it's time to add more functions by installing plugins.

Here is a basic list of plugins that I integrate into every WordPress website I build.

Update: Since I wrote this post in 2010 several plugins have changed or have been surpassed by newer better plugins. That is why I created this new list (in alphabetical order).

Basic WordPress Plugins List

BackWPup
Contact Form 7
Fancybox for WordPress
Flare
Google XML Sitemaps
Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin
Limit Login Attempts
No Self Pings
nrelate Related Content
PS Auto Sitemap
Quick Adsense
Revision Control
Simple Trackback Validation with Topsy Blocker
Subscribe To Comments
W3 Total Cache
Wordfence Security
Wordpress Popular Posts
Wordpress Seo
WP Updates Notifier
WP-Optimize

A number of the old plugins are no longer needed as a lot of their functions are now build into the core of WordPress, other ones are integrated into the Genesis (aff) Theme Framework that is used on this site.

If you need / want more details on each plugin check out 20 Basic WordPress Plugins.

Old Basic WordPress Plugins List

~~Dagon Design Sitemap Generator~~ Replaced by PS Automap Sitemap
~~FD Feedburner Plugin~~ Integrated in Genesis (aff)
~~Flexi Pages Widget~~ Build into WordPress core custom menu's and Genesis
Google XML Sitemaps
~~HeadSpace2~~ Replaced by WordPress SEO
~~My Page Order~~ Build into WordPress core custom menu's
NextGEN Gallery (Only used for Photo galleries, non standard function)
~~Related Posts~~ Replace by nrelate Relatec Content (with thumbnails)
~~Robots Meta~~ Integrated in WordPress SEO
~~Secure Files~~ Replaced by WordFence
~~SEO Slugs~~ Now done manually for more control
Subscribe To Comments
~~WordPress Automatic Upgrade~~ Now done with InfinteWP (Remote update software + WordPress client)
~~WordPress Database Backup~~ Replaced by BackWPUp for more options
~~WordPress File Monitor~~ Replaced by WordFence
~~WP-DBManager~~ Replaced by WP-Optimize a lighter version that works great
~~WP-SpamFree~~ Replaced by Growmap Anti Spam
~~Fancybox~~ Fancybox for WordPress, works better with WordPress 3.x
~~WP Security Scan~~ Replaced by WordFence
W3 Total Cache

Yes, you counted correctly, those are 20 different plugins… and if you have ever installed a plugin, you know how difficult a task it was to install these.

Search for the plugin on wordpress.org, click the install button, confirm that the installation was successful and activate the plugin.

Plugin nr 21 to the rescue, meet Plugin Central!

Plugin Central is a plugin created by Vladimir Prelovac, and it is a great time-saver.

This is always the first plugin I install using the standard process:

Plugins -> Add New -> Search -> Install -> Activate Process

Once you have done this, the magic begins. Go to the option “Plugin Central” under the Plugins menu.

The next screen gives you the option that you are going to use. Pay special attention to the field where you can paste the list shown above.
Of course, you can just type the names of other plugins you want to install.

Once you are satisfied with your list, click the “Install Plugins” button.

Depending on your host's security settings, it might ask you for your FTP data such as FTP site, username and password. Or, it will start to work directly.

The process of installing the plugins depends on your hosting (aff) environment, but with my Just Host based websites it takes under two minutes for all 20 plugins.

After the whole process has ran, you need to active all of the plugins, which takes about four clicks.

Go to the installed plugins page, click the top checkbox (Plugin), choose from the dropdown menu “Activate” and then push “Apply”.

Now all of your plugins are active. Some of them need some configuration (Google xml sitemaps, Wp Super cache and Askimet, etc) but most of them are running right off the bat.

Configuring the plugins will take some time, but you just saved a lot of time on the installation, so go ahead and set all the options that you want. I will be writing more about some of these plugins, but now it's time for you to take action!

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WordPress Agent Theme for Real Estate Agents

Filed Under: WordPress CMS, WordPress Themes May 13, 2013

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.

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.

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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CMS

Ways to Filter WordPress Comment Spam

Anti-Spam Plugins for WordPress

Cookies for Comments

Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin

Combining Anti Spam Plugins

WordPress Theme Layout

Static Frontpage or Blog Posts

Getting Your Sidebar in Shape

Choosing Your Website Theme

Convert Static HTML to WordPress

Basic WordPress Plugins List

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