Or is it?

Setting this blog up has given me ample opportunity to spend lots of time working with WordPress and learning many of its ins and outs.

As it turns out, building a site “while-you-wait” IS crazy talk if you don’t know anything about web design, installing scripts, or any of that. However, if you are technically savvy, the 10-hour web site is fast becoming a possiblilty. Now, of course, when i say ten hours, that’s a bit of stretch for a fully customized theme with logos and graphics etc., but the part that used to take 20, or more hours of painstaking coding can be all but eliminated now by using WordPress as the foundation of your site design.

Now all you have to do is concentrate on customizing the features, graphics and loading the content. Frankly, it’s enough to make a grown developer wriggle about a bit and even, just possibly, run naked through the streets drinking Ovaltine™ on a Saturday morning. Er sumpthin’ like that.

Anyway, the point here is that there are some really great reasons to use WordPress as a starting place for your brand new web site and here are the ones I can think of right now:

1. Major time savings in creating a consistent templating system for end users. It’s an instant foundation for a custom CMS (Content Management System)
2. Makes it a breeze for non-techy folks to add content (text, graphics, audio, video) without programming a custom interface. (Save days of programming time (or money paying a programmer) )
3. Creates a site that is automatically optimized for the search engines (with easily added, free plugins)
4. Update the look and feel easily with changes to the CSS, templates and widgets.
5. There are thousands of free and low cost, gorgeous themes available to start with
6. Easy to add new functionality at the drop of a hat with plugins
7. WordPress is free
8. Most WordPress plugins are free
9. WordPress is constantly being upgraded and bugs are fixed by the dev team almost immediately
10. Keeping spam off your site is a peace o’ cake using even the base installation and it gets even better with available, free plugins
11. A huge WordPress community is available to help you with answers should you run into trouble
12. So many marketing opportunities are aimed at WordPress blogs that a WordPress-based web site is a marketing no-brainer
13. Instant RSS feed for all your content. Now that’s a BIG deal!

OK, so that was actually 13 reasons. Just smile and nod with glee that you got 2 bonus reasons.

So how to get started? When I first thought about doing this I wondered if anyone else out there was doing it yet and if there were any easy and fast ways to do it. You need to do way more than just create a blog. You need an entire web site.

So I researched it and found that Tara over at Graphic Design Blog has already done a massive amount of work in this area and pulled together almost all the known information on creating a website with WordPress so check her post out posthaste.

If you are looking for more technical information about the nuts and bolts of editing the existing WordPress structure, check out Nick La’s post over at Web Designer Wall.

Additionally, since Tara published her CMS article, Freshout Development has published the Fresh Post – WordPress CMS Plugin that practically turns your WordPress installation into a CMS in one fell swoop. The only issue that I can see is that it may limit your design a bit and it’s a little on the technical side as far as getting it up and running and possibly managing it.

Also, you will sometimes need to limit areas of the site to members only and WP Members is another plugin not mentioned elsewhere that will help you with that.

While I was writing this I also realized that many folks are not able to pull all this stuff together and then run it and maintain it. I hadn’t originally thought of this when I started writing this post, but as it turns out, I have an answer for that too.

You want a website that’s totally optimized and perfectly designed and ready to work round the clock building traffic and I have only one answer for that.

You can go to the front of the line (yes it will cost a little, but way less than what I would charge) and get all the design and customizing and search optimization done automatically and have your new site up within about 48 hours (or less depending on the situation). I’m referring to the Blog i360 Site Management for Small Business Owners and it will pay for itself in short order if you are serious about your site.

ASC Blog i360 uses WordPress as the foundation of their system and I recommend it to all my clients now when they say they need a website immediately and they don’t know any HTML and don’t have time to learn any tech stuff and don’t know where to start. Frankly, you shouldn’t have to know all that tech stuff, unless you’re a geek like me and really dig it.

Update about ASC: they are no longer offering their original site building program and although their Authority Site Center system is still a great way to learn about building authority web sites, they don’t do the actual blog creation and maintenance for you anymore.

I’ve since found an even better resource for getting a new blog up and running extremely fast, with no technical skills needed and a HUGE amount of search engine and social marketing clout built-in. I recommend you give Blog i360 a look. They have an outstanding program and I really like the folks who created it, Deborah (@CoachDeb) and JP (@JPMicek) Micek. I’ll be writing a review of the system as well so watch for it.

OK, back to the regularly scheduled blog post…

I’ve decided to build my next site with WordPress and have started working on it already. It’s a secret for now, but as soon as it’s done I’ll post it for your review and we’ll see what you think.

If you can think of any other reasons to use WordPress (or not, for that matter) feel free to comment.

Thanks for reading and be well.

-Zack

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Here’s a quote from the page where WordPress gives examples of types of blogs they are deleting:

And here are some examples of blogs that are banned from WordPress.com (all of these fall under the general heading of “spam blogs”, or splogs, and we will be deleted as soon as we find them or they get reported to us):

Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it’s gone!

SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.

Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs. To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category. We’re only talking about blogs that are primarily designed to promote different affiliate programs.

And here’s a quote from WordPress TOS. The relevant quote is currently highlighted in purple on their site:

By making Content available, you represent and warrant that:

[ . . . ]

the Content is not spam, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);

Here is the WordPress TOS Page

This should create a pretty huge shakeup and I expect it will clear the decks and make ranking well in the search engines a whole let easier for those of us putting great, original content on the web. It will be very interesting to see how it pans out these next few weeks.

[UPDATE] Please note, I believed, based on my research that this was a new development, but right now I can’t verify whether the terms have, in fact changed recently, or have been this way for some time. I’ll let you know if I hear anything regarding timing and would appreciate any comments as well. Yup, I may have jumped the gun a bit. Thanks for understanding.

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Track Your Posts, Track Your Blogs
Need to track your own blog and other blogs you read every day? Wish you could track more easily? Want to find out how well a specific post is doing compared to your other posts? Want to quickly find the best posts ever made to your blog, or to any or all of your favorite blogs? Definitely grab an account over at aiderss.com. I just stumbled across these guys a few days ago and I’m thrilled with it so far. You can track trends, see the historical performance of your blog, or any blog you’re interested in. I could go on . . . but the best way to see why I’m so pleased with it is to just check it out. (You can also do RSS mash-ups here too.)
Check out AideRSS

Follow the Conversation
I mentioned before that marketing and blogging are all about conversations. Now I’ve found a great tool that helps you track blog conversations and will really surprise you with the alternate view it provides. It puts even older stuff you might have seen before into a different context that might trigger new ideas, or interpretations. Never mind the fact that you can watch what people are talking about in an up-to-the-minute sort of way about whatever key phrase is burning a hole in your brainpan today. This tool may be my tool-of-the-month, if I had such a thing.
Check out TalkDigger

Mash Things Up a Bit More: 2 Great Video Tutorials on Using RSS Feeds
If you were to take all the information you’re interested in and mash it up together and then sort it so the most important and relevant stuff popped to the top, wouldn’t that save you a ton of time? Wouldn’t that be cool? That’s what a feed mash-up can do for you and all you need is a good feed masher. There are a number of feed mashers out there, but I recently ran across an RSS tutorial over at John Jantsch’s blog that covers the how, but also suggests a site I hadn’t seen called mySyndicaat. I’m still having a go at mashing my favorite feeds and comparing all these tools, but so far mySyndicaat definitely seems worth checking out.

Alternatively, Jack Humphrey posted a great tutorial on another great feed manager called BlogRovr which you may find very useful. So far, this one is duking it out with AideRSS above for my favorite, but they do slightly different things and I can see using both of them.

Check out the tutorial at John Jantsch’s blog.
Check out the tutorial at Jack’s Friday Traffic Report
Check out mySyndicaat
Check out BlogRovr

Have fun finding yourself and others and have a great weekend! (Holy mackerel, I used an exclamation mark. What on earth was I thinking? . . . was that wise? Hmmm, we shall see.) [dang, WordPress won't accept my interrobang . . . argh.]

-Zack

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So how can you encourage lots of great conversations? One way is to make it easier for people to join the conversation and another is to reward the folks who do take their precious time to hang out and “chew the fat” on your blog.

I’ve chosen just a few key plugins to help you get started. This is by no means comprehensive and if you want the BEST listing of comment related plugins I’ve ever found, (it’s overwhelming and that’s why I chose just a few here) check the end of this post . . .

Make It Easier with Good Settings

1. Get your WordPress Sorted
First, before you even worry about a plugin, make sure your WordPress settings are letting people comment without too much trouble. (I’ll mention my spam fighting methods later.)

Make sure that under Options > Discussion your settings allow commenting without moderation after the first comment by that author is moderated. Here’s how I have mine setup:

2. Make Comments Easier to Read

Nested comments can be very useful for quickly seeing who’s saying what about what. Try this plugin for threaded comments by Brian Meidell. I’m experimenting with it right now. Some people like threaded comments and some don’t. Check it out and see if it suits you.

Reward Comments with REAL Link Love

3. The Do Follow / No Follow Thingamabob

Next, if you haven’t noticed lately, there are a ton of these (or similar) icons showing up in comment sections everywhere. [I borrowed that image from randaclay.com]

In 2005 Google instituted the nofollow policy for comments and basically any link that anyone other than the author places on a site is not followed and indexed by the search engines. This means that even though you might leave your site address in your comment, if the blog, or site you’re on doesn’t reverse the nofollow policy, the major search engines will not follow your link and you will get no page-rank, or back-link credit for your post. This was done to combat spam, but it seems to have mostly combated great conversations on blogs, based on my research.

So I have decided to turn off nofollow on my blog until further notice and this means that when you comment here, you’ll get search engine credit for it. I encourage you to do the same. Obviously we don’t want to reward spammy comments and interestingly enough some of the bigger bloggers in the sphere haven’t really weighed in on this. For instance at problogger.net, all comments are still nofollow encoded (as far as I can tell. Please correct me if you note otherwise!). Check the sites you comment on and see if they use nofollow or not. I have the Search Status plugin for Firefox installed and it does this and much more for you.

Right now I’m using Dofollow by Semiologic. It’s very simple and just turns off the nofollow deal in WordPress. However, if you want to make certain only real humans who like your blog are commenting, try Lucia’s Linky Love plugin. It offers a lot of flexibility in configuring nofollow as it allows you to set the number of posts required before nofollow is removed from a commenter’s comments. This encourages only real people who are interested enough to return to your blog to comment and discourages drive-by commenters. It also has quite a few other settings and is my second choice for now because, the only caveat, it does put one more barrier between the commenter and the comment. Since this is a post about making it easier for folks to comment . . . I’ll let you know how Dofollow goes though if there’s a problem.

There are quite a few plugins out there already for disabling nofollow and Andrew Beard has already gone and done us all a huge favor by posting them here: ULTIMATE LIST OF DOFOLLOW & NOFOLLOW PLUGINS – BANISH NOFOLLOW FROM COMMENTS AND TRACKBACKS Take your pick!

UPDATE: I had some trouble with the semiologic plugin not working and I’m so swamped right now I don’t have time to troubleshoot it. So, I found this excellent alternative called DoFollow 4.0 that has some great options inlcuded by Kimmo Suominen (kiitoksia paljon!) and it worked perfectly right off the bat. Definitely check it out!

4. Commenter’s Most Recent Blog Post

Here’s a great way to help your fellow bloggers and yourself. I found out about this over at Suzanne’s blog and absolutely love this idea. Use this plugin by Andy Bailey to add a commenter’s most recent blog post title and link at the bottom of the comment. I love this idea as it really encourages even more interaction among our blogs. And it’s a great way to reward loyal commenters.

BONUS Idea # 5 (wow cool, I can turn too much typing into a bonus! see how I did that? )

5. Email Responses to Comments

Finally, place the option for commenters to tick the box if they want to be emailed about any responses to their comments. This is wonderful way to invite your readers to return to the conversation again and again. Often I can’t remember where that blog was, or which post I commented on and this is handy way to deliver that link and save time and effort for all.

I use the plugin Subscribe to Comments by Scriptygoddess and now managed by Mark Jaquith.

OK, this post is never going to end. There are more things I want to suggest and more plugins you can use to enhance your blog’s conversation power, but it will have to wait. I’ll do a whole series on conversation power, in fact. Yeah, that’s it, what a great idea! Or maybe someone else can join in. Maybe you already have! Got ideas for generating and sustaining great conversations on your blog? Share ‘em! Let’s create a great resource.

I’ll also do a complete list of my plugins soon as well and maybe that will be of interest and use to you. If you have any questions at all about this stuff, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer . ..

until next time . . .

PS – Here’s that link I promised to a vast treasure trove of comment plugin goodness over at Lorelle on Wordpress.

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My favorite tutorial right now is the 7 Must Have Killer WordPress Plugins

If you can’t figure something out, check here first. Really well done, these.

Internet Marketing Videos from Tubetorial

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The solution?

Use the WordPress Compressed All-Inclusive Ping List

This is a list of the top ping services with no overlap. Just copy and paste the following list into the text area at the bottom of the page located here: Options > Writing Options > Update Services

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://bblog.com/ping.php

And now every time you post, you will automatically ping all the services you need to with no manual pinging required. (and no problems with accidental ping spamming.)

Happy pinging!

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