WordPress News | The Blog Mill

Customize WordPress Blog With 3 Simple Tips

January 11, 2012 By blogmill 2 Comments

WordPress is very popular with the majority of Internet users – from novices to advanced programmers – as it is extremely flexible and can be customized manually by editing the code. WordPress is extremely customizable and that’s one of the beauties of it. When you are able to master customizing blog themes for WordPress, you can turn the platform into almost anything. There are lots of developers today that create incredible themes so WordPress blogs, so it can be used as e-commerce sites, an affiliate site or just a simple blog. That’s why, WordPress is widely used today, not only by bloggers, but also by internet marketers. Now, it’s time to power it up, lock it down, and make your blog completely yours.

1. Theme

WordPress comes with two themes, Default (also known as Kubrick) and Classic. Installing a good theme is the primary step towards making your blog look like a professional and dynamic website.

WordPress is popular for the wide range of themes available for it. Find a theme you want to base your new theme off of. A good place to start is the default theme, but you may also want to just tweak another theme that’s closer to the look/feel you are going for. On the Themes tab you see the current theme information and you can browse the available themes. You want to find the theme that presents the blog to match your personality and the image you wish to project. If the Theme preview is blank, do not activate the new Theme without investigating further. Your site may not be displayed correctly, otherwise.

2. Plugin

Just like you can extend Firefox with feature-adding extensions, WordPress also has a pluggable architecture and a whole world of plug-ins that can soup up your blog. A plugin is a small program written by a third party that can be integrated into an application for increased functionality. In a nutshell: plugins turn your blog from something ordinary into something sophisticated and optimized for maximum traffic. Do a complete search from among thousands of plug-ins. There are chances that you may be able to find all the plug-ins your need in your WordPress dashboard itself, that too free of cost

3. Sidebars

WordPress’ sidebar and widgets feature is very powerful and customizable; in fact, you can create and customize multiple sidebars or site zones to show up on different pages. The sidebar may contain your primary navigation, text links to various pages, an email sign up form, or just about anything. You feel that you need the sidebar on homepage a little different from the sidebar on article pages. What are you going to do about it? Most of the time, we simply move on and let the sidebar be same through out the blog.

There are more useful ways to customize wordpress blog. Watch simple video guides reveal exactly how to set up wordpress 3.x websites on WordPress Genius Today!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Melody_Priscila
http://EzineArticles.com/?Customize-WordPress-Blog-With-3-Simple-Tips&id=6778998

WordPress for High Load Websites?

January 9, 2012 By blogmill Leave a Comment

By Edgar Marukyan -

Today we will talk about high load websites: especially about high load start-up planning with WordPress CMS (Content Management System). Questions that I plan to cover in this article are the following:

Can WordPress be used for high load websites or not?
What are pros and cons for choosing WordPress?
What are the potential problems that I will likely face when my traffic hit the ceiling?

Can WordPress be used for high load websites or not?

Currently WordPress is the most popular free content management system available on the Internet. As builtwith.com states there are 4,488,777 websites using WordPress. 317,253 websites are within the most visited sites on the Internet.

If you look at the statistics carefully you will find that business and entertainment websites have the biggest share. This means that there are lots of successful websites running on WordPress and for sure huge part of them have high traffic and high load.

Most amazing example for me is CNN Political Ticker. But there are more.

So the answer to the first question is pretty clear. Yes, WordPress can be used for building high load websites!

What are pros and cons for choosing WordPress?

…advantages and bottlenecks of this decision

Pros. It’s free! It’s easy customizable, and there are armies of freelance WordPress programmers that will help you in customizing or adding a new feature to your website.

It has very big community that performs bug tracking and periodically updates the core of WordPress, which is again free and you can update your website core free of charge.

There are plenty of free and non-free plug-ins written for WordPress. The most important plug-in for non-English websites I assume is a multilingual plug-in. I’ve personally faced this problem many times with other CMS systems. Currently none of the free CMS systems have good and stable multilingual support except for WordPress. Plug-in is called WPML. I personally bought this plug-in for two of my clients that asked for a multilingual website.

To say the truth, this was the only determining factor, for me to choose WordPress for these websites. Because I wanted something lite and stable. So that I can setup this kind of website in couple of days. For a small, non demanding website this is really important.

Cons: WordPress is open source CMS, which means that every one can view PHP codes of the system. From time to time people find bugs in the system and publish these bugs in public forums and bug-tracks. Later WordPress team fixes the bug and releases update that will fix it. And if for some reason you have missed a critical update your website becomes vulnerable to attacks.

So, you or your webmaster should always follow bug-track and make updates on time to keep your website up-to date and secure. As I mentioned updates are free. But! Not all updates can be installed without additional headache and pain. Some updates need to be planned thoroughly and tested in a testing environment. Some plug-ins can brake because of the update of the WordPress core. Some updates could not be applied automatically and you need a smart guy to hack the code and make manual update and big fix.

All the other cons I will list under the second section: potential problems.

What are the potential problems that I will likely face when my traffic hit the ceiling?

First: Default WordPress setup is not optimized for high load. There are several reasons for this. By default nobody knows what plug-ins you are going to have in your website. This means you should manually perform optimizations tasks like combining CSS, JavaScript files, serving zipped content with caching of static objects.

Second: Nobody knows how many different blocks of content you want to use in your website. Which means that may be you need three and sometimes four different sizes of the same photo to display in different blocks. This means that you should either have the same photo scaled and distorted for different blocks or you should upload the same photo with three, four different sizes. or… you gonna hack the core of WordPress and make this scaling process pragmatically. So in either case you have to do a lot of task to achieve this.

Third: Nobody guarantees that your WordPress will still serve pages when your traffic hits 200 or 300 visits per second, even if you have bought a dedicated server. WordPress core needs a serious optimization tasks to be performed in order to be abel to survive under high load.

Conclusion

I don’t want to scare you. You can go for WordPress, but just remember to hire a good consultant that will understand your future needs and can define the action plan or a change list that needs to be implemented on your website to ensure that at least in nearest future you will not have performance problems.

Read about optimisation in general. And if you have more specific questions, just ask me in comments. Thank you for your attention.

Article is written by website development expert Edgar Marukyan, who runs newly created blog “Smart Website Tips” about website performance, optimization and social media integration.
More articles for website owners can be found in http://smartwebsitetips.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Edgar_Marukyan
http://EzineArticles.com/?WordPress-for-High-Load-Websites?&id=6790843

Filed Under: Web Design, WordPress, WordPress News Tagged With: Installing word press, WordPress, wordpress blog, wordpress web desigh

“Social Media on AutoPilot” – Free for two days ! Really – it’s FREE

January 7, 2012 By blogmill 1 Comment

By Irene Conlan -

Social Media was (and sometimes still is) a total mystery to me. I started using it very cautiously and timidly and am just getting my feet on the ground with it so – if you have shied away from it, too - I understand. Even though I have The Self Improvement Blog it doesn’t mean I’m a computer/software guru. Trust me, I’m not.

To be honest, for a long time I thought Twitter was something for the teens who giggle and tweet. I was wrong. It’s great for businesses who want to build contacts and sales and for those who have valuable information to share. There are some other tools, as well as Twitter that you need to know about in relation to social media.

While I realized the every growing importance of social media, I have not been as fully engaged in it because I didn’t know how. There are some great tools to help you utilize social media sites and Lynn Serafinn has graciously rated and described them for those of us who need that extra boost.

Lynn Serafhinn, was our guest on Thursday’s Self Improvement Show and author of the smashing book “The 7 Graces of Marketing.” She has made an offer you should not refuse if you want to learn more about these tools.

She has just published an eBook which you can read on Kindle. Oh, don’t panic. I don’t have a Kindle either – yet. You can download the Kindle software for your PC for FREE (yes, FREE) from Amazon,com;

Then for two days you can download Lynn’s book Social Media on Autopilot: Nice, Necessary or Nightmare? 5 Product Reviews PLUS Social Media Tips for Business Owners: Ping, TweetDeck, Twaitter, HootSuite & TweetAdder for FREE. If you miss this special, pay the $2.99 and get this book – it’s worth so much more than that teeny price.

Take your time when you read it. If you aren’t familiar with the program she’s discussing, go to the software site and look it over before you go on to the next item. By the time you finish reading her book, you will have a clear idea about what will work best for you and how you can get the most from using it. Reading about software is sometimes as exciting as watching pant dry, but Lynn has kept it short and clear and the proof of its effectiveness will come in the doing.

I have been using a couple of these programs for quite some time but I certainly wasn’t utilizing their power to the fullest. With Lynn’s tips it is like switching from a horse and buggy to a Ferrari! I intend to burn up the social media road, so to speak so more people visit this blog.

Lynn is a “heavy duty user” of the social media tools and as and expert user so she knows what she’s talking about in her evaluations. She has also given some great tips on how to get the most out of the tool while you’re saving time and energy.

How can you refuse FREE? It’s only FREE today and morrow (Saturday, January 7 and Sunday, January so act now. Go to Amazon.com now and get it. FREE? Absolutely!

Filed Under: Building Traffic, WordPress News