Website Creation Guides

Gimp: The free and powerful image creation tool

2008-11-01T07:18:00.000-07:00

When you are creating a website or creating new content for your website a very important aspect are the graphics. The graphics used are very important since they make your website look appealing. he graphics might as well add to the overall usability of your website since since they make the content standout and the user will find more easily what he/she looks for. Overdoing it though might cause the opposite effect as the user might get confused or your website be too heavy to load fast.

You can find many ready made graphics and images on the web ut what happens if you do not find exactly what you are looking for and you want to alter it a bit or you want to create something totally unique. Image creation/manipulation applications are your friends for these situations. These kind of applications are usually very expensive. Gimp is a totally free open source image creation/manipulation application that is as powerful as most of the commercial programs out there.

Using Gimp you can create beautiful images and graphics for your website and blog without having to spend a single penny. It is supported by great community that and the application is seeing constant improvement everyday. It ha a somewhat stiff learning curve but once you get to learn the basics that it will feel very easy to use. Gimp is available for all major platforms and you will be able to use in Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Download it and start playing around with it.
Windows users download from here.
Mac OSX users download from here.
Linux users check your distros repositories.

A very good place to start is the official tutorials page that will get you going in no time. Tutorials are available for beginners, intermediate and advanced users. You can also check noupe which posted a very good list of specialized tutorials for various effects using Gimp.

Blogrush is shutting down

2008-10-30T14:10:00.001-07:00

Blogrush, the well known blog traffic generation tool, is shutting down. Today I received an email from them which holds the same message they have in their home page. They state that they are shutting down Blogrush. The odd thing is they do not give a specific reason behind their decision. They talk generally about the problems they faced troughout the one and a half year the service was online. They also thank all the users that participated in the service. They state that they had offers to sell out blogrush but they refused saying we truly feel it's the 'right' thing to do for our users. Who know what really happened..

I have mixed feelings about this. In my point of view, Blogrush never actually worked correctly. Almost all new blogs I know used it but there was very little traffic exchnage going on. It was a very good idea with a not so good implementation. It mostly helped the blogs that already had traffic to generate the credits but provided little help for those blogs that needed it the most and were not able to generate the credits to use the service. On blogs I was a regular I kept seeing the same 10 posts being advertised through it and I am sure this was not as it was supposed to be. At the same time if a service like blogrush cannot work that tells you something about the quality of the blogs out there and the how and the why they came to be.

Anyway, this is the nature of the Internet I guess... one services shuts down, ten come online. Let's see what tommorow holds.

Overlib: Use popups for your website the easy way

2008-10-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

I generally do not like popups. I especially dislike popup windows and unfortunately the internet is infested with bad-design websites crawling with all kinds of kitsch popups and intrusive popup advertisments. When done tastefully and with modesty though a popup can add to the overall usability of your website. An example of this can be info tooltips. Info tooltips can be used to explain an option, or a link, or use it on an image for a special remark. A very easy way to use tooltips and popups in general in webpages of your websites is to use Overlib

Overlib is a totally free javascript library that handles all your popup needs in an easy to use way. It has various functionalities and different ways that your tooltips are drawn. In additon you can add extra html code in a popup and provide functionlity through a popup yourself. Since it is javascript and no extra windows are created everything is fast and blends with the rest of the page without causing trouble to the user.

To use it, you do not even have to know javascript. All you have to do is to deploy the library where you host your website an make sure to include it in your html header between the <head></head> tags. For example :

After that, you need to create a javascript mousover event and instruct overlib to do something
For example :

You can have tooltips like <a href="javascript:void(0);" onmouseover="return overlib('This is a tooltip popup.');" onmouseout="return nd();">this</a>

which produces:
You can have tooltips like this

if you now replace the "javascipt:void(0);" with an actual address you have links with tooltips like this:

To go to the home page click here

With just a line of simple javascript code you can create useful tooltips to include in your pages. You can check out the overlib manual for more examples and ways that you can utilize this handy library.

Use youtube videos that start at a predefined second

2008-10-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

Adding videos to your web pages and blog posts, is a common practice if you want to show something in particular, or make you blog look more lively. Youtube is the most popular video streaming service around and provides a very efficient, easy to use, way to include videos in any type of page you want.

Adding a youtube video on a page or a post includes copying and pasting the embeded html code that can be found on the right of each video.

Including it like this will make the video to start from the beginning. In most cases this is sufficient. What happens though, if you want to show a certain part of the video and you do not want your readers to bore themselves watching it all way through until the video reaches the part you are talking about.

Accomplishing that is very easy without having to resort in any video editing and uploading the video again, or saying to your readers to forward to a particular part. All you have to do is add a little extra code to the embed code supplied by youtube. Each embed code has two URL specified in them. What you want to do is add an extra parameter to that url to instruct it to start at a second of your choice. At the end of each url you add
&start=x
where x is the second you want the video to jump start from

Thus, this code segment:
becomes:

and instead of staring from the begining

it starts from the predefined second

Google Sites in 38 languages

2008-10-25T13:12:00.000-07:00

Google Sites was first released in May 2008. The service allows Google users to create and host websites for free using a an intuitive web page editor. Since its initial release Google sites has hosted over a million web sites. A few days ago Google released the new version of the service that includes full localized versions in 38 different languages. It needs to be noted though that since day one google supported webpage content on any language. The new release now supports localization in the following languages:

Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, English (UK), Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Individual social bookmarking buttons for your posts

2008-10-25T04:20:00.000-07:00

Social bookmarking buttons help your readers share your posts with the rest of the world. Having them on your posts on your site and blog helps your readers advertise your own posts if they like what they see. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of relevant bookmarking services on the web.
Of course not all are created equal. Some are more effective than the others since they are more popular. you can either have buttons to suit the most popular of them or you can hand pick which you want to use.

I found an excellent post in 3spots blog that lists more than a hundred of those individual buttons to use on your site and blog. It also has instructions on how to use them according to the platform that you are using. Try it out.

Promote your site through social Networks.

2008-10-24T09:22:00.000-07:00

Even though, search engine optimization is a very good way to get people on your website or blog, an equally important way is to promote it to the right bunch of people. Promoting your site involves making it known to those users that would be interested in the content that you offer. It is your responsibility though to provide them with quality content so they will come again for more. If they enjoy their stay on your site, they are likely to tell their like-minded friends about it, thus earning you more visitors.

A very good way to promote your site is through social networks. Social network services tend to group the people on them according to their interests. That way it is very easy for you to find the correct people to promote your site. Promoting your site to people that are not interested in what you have to offer might turn up some visitors but finding the right ones is much more efficient.

Say you have a site about car modifications. Shouting left and right about it wont earn you much visits. Posting your site on a social network group about cars will be earn you more visitors since the people there would be interested in something like that.

Since the blogging scene has evolved into a big thing many related services have sprung around the internet that are about networking groups of readers and bloggers. you might want to try BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. You can of course use services like facebook or myspace and reach many people as well. Whatever you choose to do it is essential that you network with people and no just post your url somewhere. Earning friends in these networks, earns you visits and promotion. Do not forget though to have fun during the process.

Blogger vs. Wordpress

2008-10-19T04:17:00.000-07:00

Blogger and wordpress are the two most popular Blogging platforms on the Interent today. Both these platforms have very strong following and are loved by many bloggers for a number of reasons. When you are starting any type of website one of the initial and most important decisions is which tool or platform should I use. Read on to find out which one is better for you.

Some would argue that Wordpress is more feature-rich in comparison with Blogger. I will not disagree with that since Wordpress provides more flexibility in customization and management. I would have to say though that they are different platforms each with its strengths and weaknesses and most importantly take a different approach on Blogging.

Blogger is geared towards Blogging as it is very simple to use and gets out of they way to let you manage your posts and not your website. You can customize it though but not extensively. Wordpress is more of a mini content management system that can be used for more complex tasks. Some people would prefer simplicity over power, while others would prefer a somewhat more complex management system in order to be able to perform more customizations.

Basically it comes down to what website or blog you want to create, what your requirements for your website are. In addition Blogger provides seamless integration with other google services such as google documents so you can manage everythign with a single account. This is very important since Google sercives extend from document handling to video hosting providing a wide range of content. Blogger provides adsense advertisement out of the box which is very important if you want to generate revenue from your Blog. You can use adsense in Wordpress as well, but it requires some twiking.

Some people tend to choose Wordpress over Blogger based on the argument that later on they will make use of the extra twiking capabilities. This might be true but I suggest that if you are not clear on which this extra functionalities will be keep it simple at first. During the process you will recognise the needs and decide then. Porting everthing to wordpress is very simple. If you have been a seasoned Blogger you have probably used both of them or simply checked both of them, so you 'll know which one to use. If you are a begginer I suggest you start with Blogger for its simplicity and ease of use and then move on if you wish.

Get rid of those broken links

2008-10-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

Having broken links on the pages of your website or blog is very bad for a number of important reasons. A broken link gives always the wrong impression. You reader might think that you site is not maintained properly. This will lead him to believe that the information there is outdated and thus useless to him/her. In addition, the reader will start getting the feeling of an unprofessional work or at best that the webmaster simply does not care enough. The unsatisfied readers will most probably not come back to your site again. Another very important aspect of broken links is the search engine optimization. If a search engines crawler has a hard time navigating through your site, your site will will be penalized and you rank might drop or at best it will not increase. Having dead links that the crawler cannot follow is exactly that.

In order to minimize the dead links be very careful where you link to. Not just link to an old web page that has years to be updated, or do not link to some dodgy website that might not exist the next day. If anything looks suspicious do not link. Dead links can happen though, and it is your responsibility to fix them. In a previous article we presented the Google webmaster tools. The webmaster tools provide you with a variety of ways to maintain and administer various aspects of your website and among them how to find those broken links. Google posted on the official Google blog the very informative article Helping website owners fix broken links that shows you how to get rid of broken links, using the webmaster tools. I highly recommend that you give it a look.

Use a favicon for your blog & website

2008-10-14T16:11:00.001-07:00

Favicons are the little images that appear on the browser when you visit a webpage and dpending on the browser you use they might be on top of the url, or left of the url, or next to the name of the site on bookmarks, or on the browser tab. It is a very good way for the eye to intuitively difirentiate bettwen websites. Imagine your self when you are browsing and you have 10 tabs open. You do not remember which tab is which and you certainly do not read the site's title on the tab. What you do, is check for the symbol of the site that you want to view among the open tabs and click on it. The same applies for bookmark lists and so on. As you understand this is a way to characterise your site and give it a more unique look and feel that immediately catches the eye of your reader. This is more important to blogs that tend to have a generic look and feel. Why have the wordress logo or the blogger logo as a favicon when you can have your own.

Using your own favicon is very simple. The only restriction s that you have to create either a 16x16 image or a 32x32 image. This can be eiher an .ico a .gif or .png format. Depending on the format you us another way to use.

Lets say that you have created your favicon image. If you host your site somewhere you have file access then you just upload it on there and note down its direct url. If you use a blogging platform you can host your image on a free image host like imageshak and note down its direct url. After that you are ready to place it on your site. Edit your site's code and just after the title tag in the the head tag enter the following code depending on the image format you use:

< link href=’image url’ rel=’shortcut icon’ type=’image/x-icon‘/>

< link href=’image url’ rel=’shortcut icon’ type=’image/gif‘/>

< link href=’image url’ rel=’shortcut icon’ type=’image/png‘/>

That's it. Enjoy your new favicon.

Create website using Google Sites

2008-10-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

Google sites is a service from Google that allows you to create and host sites totally free. The service is offered via a web-based page editor with a very intuitive interface. In order to use it one must a have a Google account and from then on, he/she can login to the service's site to create or edit sites and pages.

The interface looks like a word processor and most people will feel right at home with this. You just type what would be on the page, add any images, links etc and that's it. A very cool feature is that you have various types of pages:

Webpage
Dashboard
File cabinet
List

Each of these is optimized with its own special editor to make your life easier. So for example in the dashboard you just add components on the page like, a youtube video, or a text document and so on.

As is the case with every other Google service, any Google service can be combined here. This might be a spreadsheet from Google Documents or an image from your Picasa Albums. In addition, Google offers various other small widgets that you can add on your page that range from news feeds to flash games.

Anything you create is hosted on Google so you will not have to worry about any hosting fees or finding a host service for your site. Initially your site's URL will be under google but you can easily add your own domain just like you would do with Google's blogger service.

All in all it is worth a spin. Everybody and especially beginners will find it very usefull to create anything from a wiki to a full-fledged website.

How free is the “free” website creation?

2008-08-18T05:07:00.000-07:00

Since the dawn of Internet its users wanted to have their share of making their voice heard. Internet provided and still (even more now) provides the ability for reaching a mass audience. This wish was fulfilled by a number of ways throughout the years with technologies and services for all pockets and technical abilities. As a service provider though in order to go mass it meant to go free. Many free web hosting providers mushroomed, many free “make your own page” services appeared. Some were good some were bad, most of them were kitsch.

Today we are blessed with the ability to have a variety of technologies and services that enable us to express our opinion online without having to put our hands too deep in the pocket. Blogging platforms, social networking services, free hosts all play their distinct role in the digital economy chain. Defining free though is hard in terms of money and customization ability. You may use free to tools to build a website and then pay 5 dollars per month to host it somewhere. You may use a free blogging platform and still pay 10 dollars a year for your own domain. You may even a buy cool easy to use tool to build everything and host your site on a free host. Free is what suits you to be free. You may build, host and advertise your site totally for free though...but that comes at a cost as well....the irony.

I dislike free hosting services, they usually place their own ads on your site, worst yet, they are unreliable and you may end up loosing everything. I do not really like blogs that are myblog.arandombloggingplatform.com. Domain name is long, it is not easy to remember and it just looks scrapy. Tools from the other hand are a totally different story. There are many great tools and technologies for building and managing your site that are free to use. Social networking services...well I am not a big fan, but a great deal of people like them. You cannot do a lot out there and most end up with having the most kitsch page on the web (you can call me myspace). On the other hand there are more formalized webpage social networking services like squidoo but some might not like the absence of creative freedom.

If you want to go totally free there are solutions out there, but why do that? The outcome will be far worse than with just paying 10 dollars a year for a blog domain or 3-5 dollars per month if you are hosting everything. As always you have to see what you want to build and then decide on the technology and the platform and calculate the costs. It may not be totally free but it will not be expensive either.

Create a webpage with Squidoo

2008-07-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

The Internet is a strange place. Web 2.0 is even stranger as it combines all those things that where available before but in a fancy new easy to use way. When I first stumbled on Squidoo I was puzzled as to what it was. Its first page wasn't very informative as to what this is exactly, but it all looked very exciting indeed. At first I thought it was a light-hearted collaborative encyclopedia, then I thought it was a blogging platform, later on I found out that it had social networking functionalities. When I created an account it looked like a webpage building tool. In the end I realized that it is all that together and something more.

Squidoo is totally free. You can create an account and start creating a webpage immediately. These pages are called lenses. Every lens is a single page with a coherent subject. As a lens master you build lenses about anything you like. You can have a lens about cars and another lens about gardening. in each of your lenses Squidoo will show some adds relevant to the subject of the page. The money generated from these ads can go to you, or to some charity, or to both. This is a novel idea since the platform provides you with a direct way of income without you having to do anything more than building great content and on top of that you can set the money to go directly to charities. You do not have to create an account with some online ads agency or try affiliate marketing. All is done through Squidoo. I am not suggesting that you can make a lot of money, or easily for that matter (such thing does not exist), but it is certainly a plus for the platform, especially for beginners.

In order to build your lens, Squidoo provides you with various tools and ready-made modules that you can add on your page. You can view your page and add modules wherever you like. These modules might be polls, simple text, photos, videos and more. You can later edit them or reorder them. Building a simple page is very easy as it all comes down to creating the content (writing the text, creating images, etc.) without any technicalities.

You can join special groups in Squidoo to make your lens known. These groups specialize in various areas such as computers or sports. In addition you can visit other people's lenses and write comments as well as have a guest book of your own. You build a profile that is used for your lenses where you can put anything you want; like photos, mini autobiography, etc.

The amazing thing with Squidoo is that it can be used to meet like-minded people with the same interests, write stuff that you are passionate about to inform other people, create a small income, learn stuff, do something creative and have fun along the way. Not bad for a web 2.0 platform.

Add social bookmarking buttons

2008-06-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

So you have created your Blog, you changed its template to match your unique style and you started posting. In Blogs it is very important that your readers can share posts they find interesting with their friends and the online communities they belong to. This provide you with extra traffic to your Blog. If a post brings you new readers and they like what they see, they will stay. Thus you have to provide your visitors with an easy way of sharing your post with others.

In this web 2.0 era, social bookmarking has become a standard and there are many sites and communities that provide such functionality. Having a button for each of them will fill your posts with colorful, yet easy to miss buttons and you will end up confusing your readers. Let alone, that providing a button for each one will be a very tedious task.

The answer to your problems are buttons that open up a list of communities and sites and your readers can select the one that they want to use. So you can have a bookmarking mechanism that includes digg, facebook, Reddit, yahoo and many more in one easy to use button.

Each of your posts should have one at the bottom so your readers can post that specific article and not the whole page or else their friends will be lost, trying to find the article that your reader was telling them about. Makes sense doesn't it.

There are two very good social bookmarking buttons that I use and I suggest that you give them a try: addtoany and addthis, that you can find in www.addtoany.com and www.addthis.com respectively.

Just go there and pick your button. Both come in different styles so you can choose the one that you like best and suits your website or blog.

You can add them anywhere you want. It is just a small piece of javascript that you can put anywhere on your pages. If you are using blogspot for your blog, in order to add it at the bottom of each of your posts, pick the appropriate code from the site and then go to Edit Html from the Layout menu. Click on Expand Widget Templates and near the bottom find the post-footer tag. Place the code there and voila! Social bookmarking button for each of your posts.

Website creation overview

2008-06-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

Creating a website is not just one thing that you do and you are over. In order to build you website you follow a certain path of steps. Nothing major...do not worry, but there a some things that you have to do. As a matter of fact even if you “finish” building your website and it is up and running, you still have work do. You have to promote it, renew its content etc. Do not feel overwhelmed. Sticking with the plan you will successfully create your website and enjoy the ride while at it.

Decide what kind of website you want to create

Ok, so you have decided to create a website. You are just not sure what sort of website it will be. I suggest that you think of nothing else, such as technology or name, before you clear this out. This is very important since it will be your guide into deciding the name and technology involved. Different sites are better-suited with different technologies.

Pick a technology platform to build your site

After you decide on what kind of website you will build you have to choose a website technology. Each website platform has its advantages and its disadvantages. For example if you just want to create a blog where you will post your thoughts about a certain niche, using a complex dynamic content management system is an overkill. On the other hand if you want to create a online community with forum, blogs, galleries, handle user registration and maybe add a shopping cart then creating it from scratch using a blogging platform or a WYSIWYG editor is out of the question. You would have to use something powerful like joomla.

Choose a domain name for your website

Now it is time to choose a domain name. Do not take this lightly since a domain name can make or break a website. Choose wisely. Keep it simple and catchy. Make it descriptive and make sure it contains your target keywords to be found on search engines.

Build your website

Depending on the technology that you picked it is time that you started building your site. Creating pages. Sorting out issues and most importantly creating content. If you choose a ready made platform like Blogger you life might be simpler and you just concentrate on appearance and content. Should you have opted for a tougher road do not despair because you will be handling everything in no-time after a while.

Manage your website

Ok so you have created your site. Even if everything is perfect be prepared for some changes. Every day you will see something new that you want to try. Keeping an eye on you site's statistics and usage with google analytics you are bound to change something to make your website more user-friendly.

Build traffic for your website

Everything is in place and ready but you have no readers. You have to create some traffic for your website, drive people to it. Creating traffic involves many things and may take some time but do not worry. Follow the rules of s earch engine optimization (SEO), read what not to do for SEO and you are heading to the right direction. Oh and beware of those SEO companies that promise you the world.

Change Blogger template

2008-06-07T03:39:00.000-07:00

When you first create a blog you are given the choice to select between various ready-made themes to setup your blog with. The problem with that is that most of the Internet users have got really bored of them because you see them everywhere.

Most people for some reasons, beyond me, do not change them. This ends up in half the blogs out there using the same themes. You want your blog to be unique, you do not want it to look like every other blog. In addition, ready-made blogger templates found on your control panel use only one column. What if you need two or more columns? What if you you need side panels on the left and on the right of screen? Default blogger templates cannot help you there.

Changing or editing your blog theme is fairly easy (or dead easy when using ready-made templates that you downloaded off the internet). When you are at any of your control panel's pages, click on the “Layout” tab. Then, clicking on edit HTML presents you with your current template's code.

The format followed by most templates is the same: At the top you have your CSS elements corresponding to the various components on screen(such as the posts, the lists etc) and at the bottom you have your template's structure in HTML. Inside the code you will find some blogger specifc tags, but do not be worried, because they are not too many and it is easy to understand what they do.

From the same page you can upload new templates that you find around the internet. Before any major changes though, make sure to save your template. If anything goes wrong you do not want to start all over gain. It is very important to note, though, that when you change your template you loose all the elements in your blog. For example, if you added an element holding links and you change your template this list will be gone. So, make sure you note everything dow and back up what you can.

For ready-made templates your can check at:

The template is a very important aspect of you blog. It helps your readers identify it. It makes it unique and stand out from the crowd. You want your blog to have personality and even though your posts are that count in that, the template is not to be ignored.

Transform your computer to a webserver with Apache, PHP, MySQL

2008-05-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

Apache, PHP and MySQL is probably,if not definitely, the most common setup for a webserver on the entire Internet. Many popular website and blogging platforms such as Joomla and Wordpress are based on this setup. The good news is, that you use these totally free technologies yourself in order to transform you computer into a webserver on to which you will build your website. Without any further delays let's go to meet our key players.

Apache is the most popular web server and since its first release it has served more than 50% of all the websites out there. During the last years it has seen some decline due to heavy competition, especially from the likes of Microsoft IIS, but it is still a top player. Being many years in constant development is a feature-rich, stable and fast piece of software.

PHP is a computer language that was build for creating dynamic websites. PHP is used for the server-side code, handling all the requests made by your users on your webpages. So if you have a webpage that does any calculation (do some math, bring up information found on a database, store information provided by the user etc.) it is handled by the PHP code on your page. You might say the PHP acts as the common language between your HTML page and your server.

MySQL is one of the most popular database platforms in the world. As its name suggests it is a derivative of the SQL relational database language. You can call MySQL functions from all major programming languages so you can incorporate database functionality for your programs and websites to store and retrieve information. For example, you could have a MySQL database to store your users' information, such as username and password, and using PHP you could store that information when a user registers in your site and retrieve that information when a user wants to login in your site.

Download and install

All three technologies are freely available for all three major operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX). You can setup them individually and configure them to work together, or you can download, what is known as, AMP, that incorporates all them. In AMP everything is preconfigured and ready for use from one single package. If you are unfamiliar with these technologies I suggest you use the respective AMP package for your operating system.

WAMP for Windows users
LAMP for Linux users (Look into your distribution's repositories or software manager to download the LAMP package for your distribution)
MAMP for Mac OSX users

Read the documentation of your AMP package for installation instructions. In a few minutes you will be ready to host and develop your website.

Setup your website

Most freely available platforms that are based on AMP, such as Joomla or Wordpress, do not require anything more than a single database on your MySQL setup. You need to create a database for them to use adn then you place your platform on the root directory of Apache (See the documentation from you AMP package to find out where that is) and you are ready to use it.

Lets say that you want to install Wordpress on your computer. After you have downloaded and installed your AMP package you have to create the database that wordpress will use.

commandline> mysql --user=root mysql (the default password for your root user is usually blank but check with your AMP's manual)

now that you are logged in, you have to create your database

mysql>create database wordpress;

You now need to create a database user for wordpress. Wordpress will use this user to access the database. You do not want your root user to handle this as it it is highly insecure. In addition, remember to change the default password of your root user. On the mysql promt you type

mysql>GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY
'agoodpassword' WITH GRANT OPTION;

Change the ”username” to something else like “wpuser” and a “agoodpasssword” to a difficult password and write them down. The above command creates a user and gives him permissions over the wordpress database that we created before and uses a certain password to access it. Now we are ready to use our new AMP setup to install wordpress on our computer.

Follow the installation notes of wordpress and when it says that you should state what is the database, user and password that will be used, fill in the information that you wrote down before. Congratulations! You just finished setting up your first AMP webserver with wordpress on it. Now, go make that website.

Further reading

Even though, in most case, you will not need to write anything yourself, using SQL or PHP, it is very useful to know a little programming with them. You might need to customize some ready-made plugin for your platform, or write additional functionality that cannot be found in a plugin, or you can just learn for fun.

A very good beginners tutorial for PHP programming can be found at W3Schools.
To learn the basics of SQL programming you can check the guide at databasejournal.com
A very good guide for using MySQL with PHP can be found at databasejournal.com

Create a forum with bbPress

2008-05-11T04:24:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was asked to create a discussion board that me and some friends will use to hang out. I did not have all day so I needed something that I could setup fairly easy and quickly. In addition the machine at my disposal was an old PII 400 Mhz that also served as our teamspeak, OpenVPN and quake 3 server. For that old machine that is a lot to ask from but that is what we had and I had to manage with that. I needed an extra lightweight forum platform. After a quick search I settled with bbPress and as it turned out it was the right choice.

bbPress is a free discussion board platform from the creators of wordpress. I first heard about it when I was looking into wordpress forum options. It is developed to be integrated into wordpress without much hassle so if you are thinking about a blog with a forum this is a pretty solid choice. The whole idea behind bbpress is that it is stripped out of everything, having only basic functionality, in order to be as light as possible. You can extend its functionality via its plugin system later using only the components that you need.

Setting up bbPress is very easy and quick. All you need is the usual Apache,Mysql,PHP setup and a copy of bbPress. At first you need to create a new database for the platform and then unpack bbPress on your public directory or apache root. You then point your browser on the address that bbPress is and follow the install wizard. There you need to specify things like the database info and the name of your discussion board and that's it! The whole process can take like...10 minutes.

After the setup is over you have your brand new forum ready for posts. Heading into the admin environment you notice that there is not a lot to do but you knew that already. You can create new forums, change the theme and manage the posts and plugins. In my case that was not enough so I headed back to bbPress site to look for extensions. There I found a good selection for plugins to provide extra functionality and all where very easy to setup. Plugin setup usually requires unpacking the component in the plugin/ directory where bbPress is deployed and activation through the admin environment. For the forum I was creating I needed to setup a privacy system to make some forums invisible to unregistered users and also allow the use of avatars. Installing privacy component was only a matter of unpacking and activation. Avatar component required some code inclusion in certain .php files of the template I was using, but nothing stressful. All the instructions were laid out in the component's page so I had no trouble knowing what to do.

Our beloved old server managed to run bbpress just fine without any problems. If you need an easy to install, lightweight forum platform with extension capabilities grab bbPress without hesitation. You cannot go wrong.

Beware of SEO companies bearing gifts

2008-05-09T00:37:00.000-07:00

Web development or search engine optimization sites do not often speak ill of the online companies that promise you top ranking in Google or other search engines. The reason is simple. It is not because most of these companies do their job well, it is because these companies appear in ads in the aforementioned sites' pages. Why would they want to keep those clicks from rolling? Well, I am not going to do that.

Most of the online companies that promise you top ranking are crooks. They have this impulse to separate you from your money. It is not that some of them will not affect your ranking. They will...but, most probably, in a negative way. There are many categories of traffic building cheats that have different ways of “improving” your ranking.

Some rely on pyramid schemes of link building. For example you provide some links and then you have to recommend the service to other sites. If the other sites link back you gain more link credits. This massive affiliate interlinking does not work at best and may harm your site at worse. Most of these links will be from totally irrelevant sites to yous, thus gaining you no extra ranking in Google. Also Google does not particularly love massive interlinking and on top of that some of these sites might be on Google's black list dragging you down with them.

Another cheat scheme is the promise of thousands upon thousands redirected hits from “targeted traffic”. What these people do? Well, they simply own many domains and when a user hits that domain they redirect this user to you. They promise you that the traffic is targeted and that these users were aiming at watching a subject relevant to yours. Even if that is the case, these users will not stay in your site and the reason is simple. They did not expect to see your site so they presumes (correctly) that something fishy is going on and leave. It is very bad traffic at best. Hell, I have been crooked this way and I am not ashamed to say it. During “my early days” I was promised that with 36 $ I was going to have a traffic of 10000 unique visitors in a month. I said “why not, it is not very expensive, lets give it a try”. The outcome: there goes 36 dollars I am never going to see again. The company, on the administrative software that it provided for “my campaign”, was saying that I was indeed visited by 10000 unique visitors. Google analytics said around 4000. It is not the numeric difference that is bad (which shows that the company was simply lying) but that out of these 4000 “unique visitors” all simply left the site as soon as the page was loaded(0 minutes average time on site according to Google analytics). Very,very bad traffic. Who would you have me believe? the crooks or Google? As a matter of fact I still have doubts whether these were real users and not simply generated hits from different IPs.

Another popular scheme is the “pay us your good money and we will rank get you in the top 10 results on Google for keywords of your selection.” What they do not tell you, is that they will either use all your keywords as a single keyword or some other derivatives or misspellings of your keywords. The result is that your site may come out high in results but only for an obscure, ten-irrelevant-words keyword that nobody searches for.

Here is a list of things to be careful with according to Google. Look out for “SEO” or traffic companies that:

owns shadow domains
puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
offers to sell keywords in the address bar
doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google

For more on the subject you can read Google's, very informative, take on deceitful SEOs . Who knows better about search engine ranking than the search engine company themselves?

"How to increase traffic to your website" guides

2008-05-08T09:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of guides that can be found around the internet and will help you increase the traffic of your web site or blog. I suggest that you read them in order to increase your knowledge on the subject and effectively generate traffic.

25 Tips for marketing your blog

10 effective strategies for driving traffic

The art of linkbaiting

The art of Blog

What makes a site link worthy

Social Bookmarking for traffic

Link baiting and viral search success

The 8 free things every site should do

3 ways to immediately increase search engine traffic

101 webmarketing ideas and tips

How to get traffic for your blog

Choose domain name

2008-05-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

Selecting a domain name is a very important task during the creation of your website. It is usually a task that people tend to dismiss as unimportant and get it out of the way as quickly as possible. That is a very big mistake.

The domain name should reflect your website's content. It should be descriptive and someone that hears or reads it should instantly understand what your website is about. Some might say that many successful websites or online services have irrelevant or not descriptive domain names. Yes they do, but look at them; all of them brought something exceptional and new to the internet community that was an advertisement by itself or had the backup of a major Internet company. Nevertheless they all have catchy names. Do not think that because you think a name sounds cool it is. Ask your friends what they think about it, if it makes sense to them; get ideas.

Plan ahead. Your website's main keywords should be in the domain name in some form. This is very important for search engine optimization in order to get your site in search results for that keyword. So, think what your main keywords should be and try to include them to your domain name.

The domain name should make sense and should be easy to remember. When your visitors want to come back you should make it easy for them. Do not have a domain name with 3 dashes or with numeric values because not even you will remember it. In addition try to get the .com or the .net domain for the name that you want as people tend remember these and will not find you if you have a unusual domain.

Why do I need traffic?

2008-05-07T02:02:00.000-07:00

Website traffic is the fuel that makes your website keep going. It the most essential factor of your site's success. Frankly speaking, it is your site's success. Traffic it is the amount of people that visit your website. You want to create a website for people to visit, right? Ok, if it is a website for a select group of people, like a school's website, traffic does not matter, but for everything else it should be one of your primary concerns.

If you want to create a website to generate money out of it, high traffic is the only way to do. If you want to sell a product from your site, people should visit your site in order to view and buy your product, so you need traffic. If you want to earn money out of advertisements in your website somebody has to click those advertisements, so you need traffic. Anyway, you get the idea.

Building traffic is not easy. Creating a website is very easy compared to promoting it. Traffic does not appear out of thin air, you have got to build it, and it is a long process. Anyone telling you otherwise is simply lying or he does not know what he is talking about. I am not trying to scare you, but merely make you understand that you have to put a lot of effort and energy in it in order to succeed. To build traffic you do not do just one thing. You have to deal with various issues like: find the right keywords for your site, optimize your site for search engines based on those keywords, have links pointing to your site from other sites, build your site's profile and promote it through the internet and many more.

We will deal with these issues in detail and you will know your way around in no time. When I started taking interest in how to build traffic it seamed impossible to achieve. When I found out about some simple yet effective rules to follow it seamed easy. When I tried to apply these rules it seamed impossible again. After a while I managed to see the big picture and apply these rules and found out about other things to do as well, and it did not seem so difficult anymore. One thing was clear to me though: It is a never ending process.You need hard work to do it. You will probably go through the same steps. I just want to you to know that when you think it is impossible, to follow the rules, put effort in it and you will achieve it.

Top-10 things to avoid for SEO

2008-05-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

The folowing is a list of factors that negatively affect your website's optimization for search engines ranking. Try to avoid them to rank better in search engines so that more visitors will find your website.

Text presented in graphics form in images. Search engine bots cannot read text from images so any keywords in there are lost. Be careful with your website banner for example that contains the name of your site or the description. It should NOT be in image form. The text should appear on top of the image.
Be careful with affiliate networks. Choose affiliates carefully since Google does not like massive interlinking of sites. A bad site that you link to may affect your website 's ranking.
Be careful with over Optimization. Search engines and particularly Google does not like over-optimization. If a site is TOO good in terms of optimization it is probably a fake site build to generate traffic. For example do not have a keyword appear in more than 15% of the text. These sites usually are keyword heavy trying to fool search engines and since their appearance the search engine slash them off their index or penalize them(low ranking).
Do not use link farms. The same with affiliates. The free for all link farms tend to link to “bad” penalized sites that will affect your ranking as well if you put a link of your website to them.
Do not immediately redirect the page (with onload event in javascript for example) to point somewhere else.
Do not steal images and text from other websites. If googlebot sees the same content many times it assumes that something fishy is going on and penalizes everybody.
Do not use unrelated keywords. Do not try to put many unrelated keywords in your metatags. Your website should have a consistent theme to follow.
Do not use html Frames since the search engine bots have hard time following the links.
Do not build your site using only flash. The search engine bots cannot read text through flash so they will not find any content on your site.
Do not have hidden text containing your keywords. You will get caught and penalized.

Search Engine Optimization

2008-05-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

The following is a list of factors that positively affect your website's optimization for search engines ranking. Try to follow as many as possible in order to rank better in search engines so that more visitors will find your website.

Keyword in URL. Try to have the keyword that you want your potential visitors to find you by in the URL of the page
Keyword in Domain Name. Try to have the keyword that you want your potential visitors to find you by in the domain name of your website.
Keyword in title tag. This is the title that appears on the browser window and set in the html head tag try to keep it less than 64 characters.
Keyword in the description meta tag. Try to keep it less than 200 characters. This is usually what the search engine show as a description of your website in results.
Keyword in the keywords meta tag. Use only relevant keywords and do not try to “catch everything”.
Keywords density in Body. Your keywords should appear in the main text of your pages in around 5-9% of the total words.
Keyword in headers H1 H2 H3. Use the keywords for headers on your text.
Your interlinking between your pages. From one page you should have links to other pages of your website.
All your interlinks are valid. Eliminate all dead links.
Less than 150 outgoing links.
All outgoing links are valid. Eliminate all dead links.
Have fresh pages. Search engines love new pages on a website. They rank websites better when each time they visit the website there are new pages.
Have fresh content. Search engines love new content on a page. They rank websites better when each time they visit the pages there is new content.

Analyze your website

2008-05-05T01:02:00.000-07:00

There are many aspects of a website that a webmaster should take into consideration. Most of these are small details that help him/her enhance its performance and optimize his/her website for the search engines. These details however are hard to pinpoint and beginner webmasters have a hard time finding on what to pay attention. Google has developed a set of tools that helps all webmasters beginner or seasoned with just that. Webmaster tools is a free service that any webmaster can use to improve his/her website.

How do I start?
All you need to start using webmaster tools is a free Google account. After you login you specify the url address of your site and the service generates a small piece of code that you put in your page to verify that you own the site. After the verification is done you will be able to use the provided tools.

When you start using webmaster tools the first thing you should do is provide Google with with a sitemap. The site map is a method of telling Google about the links on your site so its crawlers will be able to find all the pages on it. That way Google will be able to record your pages and show them on search results. You can find websites on the internet that will generate a sitemap for you or you can generate one yourself. If you have deployed your website using Joomla most of the SEF components such as OpenSef can generate the sitemap for you. If you own a Blog you can provide webmaster tools with your Blog's rss feed instead of a sitemap. Make sure though that you have set on your Blogging platform that each post should have its own webpage so there is at least one page link for that post.

If your site is new or if you have not submitted your site to Google for indexing you there wont be much data for it on webtools. This is normal though and after a couple of weeks time Google will index your website and it will start to generate data for it.

What can I do with Webmaster Tools?

The service's control panel is separated depending on the information you want to retrieve. Below is a list of the most important features offered by webmaster tools.

Overview. See when was the last time googlebot crawled your site to retrieve new information. See if everything is running smoothly (if the googlebot found any errors etc. ).
Diagnostics. See in detail how your site is indexed in google and any potential errors. If you want your website to be accessible from mobile phones as well you can find information here to help you optimize it for this purpose. You can view any problems that might occur with your site's meta tags and potential problems with some of the links on your site (dead links for example).
Top search queries. Find out with what queries people find your site on Google
Crawl stats. Find out the ranking of your site in Google.
Subscriber stats. Find out how many users have subscribed to your rss feed.
What googlebot sees. See how the googlebot views your site. This is very helpful for optimizing your site for search engines.
Index stats. Find out what pages Google has indexed from your site, what other pages link to your site and more.
Links. Extensive overview of all internal and external links of your website and potential problems.
SiteMaps. View and upload sitemaps for your website and view any errors associated with them.
Manage site verification. Set other owners for your site.
Manage Robot access. Set the permissions for you site's directories;which folders will be accessible to which bots.
Set geographic target. If your site is targeted to a specific country you can set that here.
Remove Urls. If you want any uls to be excluded by the search results or you do not want the googlebot to try to index them you an set that here.
Set crawl rate. Set how fast the googlebot will visit your site to try and find new content.

Why do I need a tool like this?

The information offered by webmaster tools is very important since it helps you understand how your website is perceived by Google. This will help you spot potential problems and optimize your site. Understanding how your website is indexed and improving the way it is indexed will place you better on the web. If you would ask me how this service would help you with your website I would say that it helps you examine the tree in terms of the forest.