We posted a video on how to upgrade WordPress a short while back.
Here is some new info – including a specific case – on why keeping WordPress up-to-date is so important.
Two new WordPress videos have been posted to the videos page at OrangeCat.com.
Is Your WordPress Installation Up-to-Date? (3:22) takes a few minutes to show you how to determine if your WordPress blog is running the latest version. If not it shows you what to do about it.
Although WordPress has been fairly bullet-proof through it’s various versions, each new version introduces new features, fixes bugs and increases security over the previous version.
The same can be said for plugins. Older versions of plugins could have security issues that have been addressed in later versions. In order to run the latest versions of a plugin, you may have to be running the latest version of WordPress as well.
Having your WordPress website hacked could be more than just as inconvenience. If you have the Google Sitemaps plugin installed (and you should), it will report any changes made by a hacker as new content. You could then lose precious ranking if Google determines your site is now less relevant. It is much easier to keep ranking than to rebuild it.
If you are an OrangeCat client, you can subscribe to our updating service that keeps WordPress, themes and plugins current as part of a website maintenance program. That way you never have to worry about your WordPress being up-to-date.
WordPress Security: Delete Your Admin User (3:38) explains how having the default admin user on your blog may be a security risk and could increase your risk of being hacked.
Far too many WordPress blogs still use the admin user that was created during installation. If a hacker can be reasonably sure that the username for your blog’s admin area is “admin” they merely have to crack the password to gain access.
Since so many passwords are pretty weak, using terms such as “joe123″ or “marysblog” or the even worse “wordpress” or “password,” using software to repeatedly try different passwords (called a “brute force attack”) could uncover your password in short order.
All recent installations of WordPress on OrangeCat servers has included the Login Lockdown plugin that stops this kind attack by limiting he number of times a password can be tried before the login is disabled for a pre-determined amount of time.
Deleting the admin user and replacing it with a more secure username is one step you can take to thwart a brute force attack on your WordPress administration. This video walks you through the process.
If you would like us to change your WordPress admin user or install the Login Lockdown plugin, use the OrangeCat.net Services Page to submit a request. Pricing is available on our Services Page.
DailyBlogTips.com recently published an article on why you should remove the default “admin” user from your WordPress installation. You are most likely using the “admin” user that was installed by default when WordPress was set up.
DBT says “The problem with this is evident: if someone wanted to gain access to your blog, all he would need to do is to keep using the “admin” user name with a bunch of passwords combinations. This is called brute force attack, and with automated tools it works quite often.”
Bestselling author Timothy Ferriss (The 4 Hour Workweek – #1 New York Times Best seller) delivers his presentation on effective blogging at WordCamp San Francisco 2009
Great information here for anyone starting a blog or wanting to improve their blogging skills.
Back in the old days (you know, the late ’90s, early 2000s), all you had to do was put up a website, register it with Yahoo! and you were in business. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that simple, but you get the idea.
Over the years maintaining an effective online marketing program has been become more and more complicated. And more and more rewarding as consumers switch their business searches online.
These days, even ordering a pizza can become an online experience. The lesson is that every year it becomes more important to have an effective online marketing strategy. And very soon, maybe as soon as the next year or so, it will be a “do-or-die” necessity for most busineses.
Can I market effectively online?
Yes, you can. The basic elements of an online marketing strategy remain fairly simple even as implementing one has gotten more complex. Let’s talk about how to create a solid online marketing plan without the sugar-coated marketing hype you hear so often.
The three-legged marketing plan.
To keep things as simple, cost-effective and as potentially successful as possible, we can compare your online marketing program to a tripod supporting a very valuable object – your business. With all three legs in place, your strategy is stable and offers a solid platform to build on. Remove one of the legs and the chances of success drop dramatically.
The first leg of this plan is set a solid foundation for the other two. One thing that hasn’t changed in all these years is that you MUST have a website. But not just ANY website.
The website is where you present your information in a way designed for visitors to find it easily. It must be simple to navigate and be easily expandable. Ideally changes can be made within minutes, not days or weeks… and this applies whether you take responsibility for your own updates or have your webmaster do it.
WordPress is the foundation to a successful online marketing plan
What makes WordPress such a powerful foundation to build your online marketing castle on? One factor is that right out of the box, with some simple changes to the default setup, WordPress is search-engine-friendly. Add a few plugins, configure them to maximize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and you leap light years ahead of the competition in the race for better ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo and others.
Another is the wide range of plugins and themes available to customize the look and function of your WordPress-powered website.
Navigation is simple, forthright and is produced automatically as content is added. Automatic archiving of older information by date and category and an effective built-in search capability keep your content readily available.
There are literally thousands of themes that you can download from the WordPress themes website or from commercial websites such as MightyTemplates.com (click on “WordPress Themes” in the left column).
Likewise, thousands of plugins downloadable from the WordPress Plugins repository make adding functionality to your site a breeze.
To make the use of WordPress even more appealing, WordPress and most of the themes and plugind developed for it are Open Source – free for you to use. But free doesn’t mean you are on your own when it comes to support. OrangeCat.com and many other companies offer support packages to suit your needs.
And you have the support of the entire world-wide WordPress community behind you.
So that’s the first of the three legs of your oline marketing plan. We’ll be discussing the other two and building on this information in the days ahead. Stay with us to learn more about how to assure your business’s future by mastering online marketing.
In fact, sign up to be notified when we post new information and you’ll never miss an important post.
The latest version of WordPress has been released and can be downloaded from WordPress.org. This version 2.8 (Baker) has many new features. To preview the features of WordPress 2.8, have a look at this video:
2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. It also fixes over 790 bugs.
WordPress 2.8 has made administrative tasks simpler and has enhanced features to allow you to customize your admin interface to organize your work the way you want.
Beginning today, all WordPress installations performed by OrangeCat will be of version 2.8. If you do your own install and/or updates, be SURE to backup your database and files before upgrading and check for updates to your plugins.
A short time ago one of my clients, ShortSaleCertified.com in Michigan, requested that we place a small video testimonial in the sidebar of his WordPress template. We built a video from two video clips and an audio file with a slide and set it in place using the WordPress Video Widget.
It worked great, but the client wanted it to autostart on opening the page and here needed to be a poster image inserted when the video wasn’t playing. After fooling around with the coding of the plugin, we got the video to autostart, but there was a problem. Because the plugin appears on every page of the site, the video would autostart every time someone went to a new page – a surefire “visitor annoyance feature”.
How did we solve it? By inserting some conditional code into the plugin, we were able to have it autostart only on the home page and not on any others. Have a look at the website and try it out.
The point of all this is that WordPress is a very customizable Content Management System (CMS). We have never had a customer request that we couldn’t fulfill with a little custom PHP coding – at least to date.
Don’t let anyone sell you on the idea that a static website is a “set it and forget it” marketing plan. Do that and you’ll be the one who is forgotten. WordPress gives you Web 2.0 interactivity and a very flexible framework to build on. Static websites are dead – or at least on life support. If you want to market online today, your visitors expect more than boring, static, unchanging content and you should, too.
How can you use WordPress and email to boost your business? Here’s an example from the new case studies section of OrangeCat.com. Check it out – we might have just the answer for your business as well.
“My most successful client has been a moderate-sized family restaurant.
“He never had a site and didn’t want one but was intrigued with the autoresponder idea for staying in contact with his customers. So we set up a simple blog and an email marketing program.
“A few months after implementing the autoresponder, his email list has been built up to over 3,000 people.
“He has a seating capacity in his restaurant of 120.
“We have built a great rapport with his list by sharing recipes, food hygiene tips, videos of new staff and chef, funny restaurant stories, etc. This is also where the blog came in handy.
“Previously, his biggest complaint was that his restaurant was extremely quiet from Monday to Wednesday.
“We send out special deals to the list – normally once a week to half the list – meaning that an offer is only sent to each person on the list twice a month and something of value or something funny twice a month, etc. – that way the list is not inundated with constant offers but the restaurant still gets an offer out every week to help fill tables.
“We have managed to make his restaurant very busy on his previously quiet nights.”
This is the power of a well-managed mailing list attached to a blog or website. Offering a special on slower days or nights allows the customer to feel there is value in coming in more often. And the restaurant turns empty tables into cash.
So what about delis and sandwich shops?
Use WordPress and an email marketing strategy to keep customers informed of daily lunch and dinner specials. Some smart operators have use a fax broadcast for this in the past, but now a well-timed email, text or Twitter update can accomplish much more for less.
Establish a birthday or anniversary club and send a special offer during the customers birth month. The big guys do it. Why not you?
A recent study revealed that $1 spent on email marketing brings in over $50 on average. It works especially well in local markets. Get your’s today.
Call us at 859-544-9005 for even more ideas on how you can grow your business with WordPress and email marketing.
OrangeCat.com went WordPress today.
Why? Because WordPress is simply the best way to get quick and sure ranking with Google and other search engines – IF your WordPress software is set up correctly. Even if it’s not, it is still head and shoulders above the competition when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So we re-launched OrangeCat.com using WordPress.
And we can enhance the SEO capabilities of WordPress to work even better.
That’s why we changed OrangeCat.com to Wordpress, which we’ve been using successfully on our many other websites, including this one, YourKentuckyHome.com, my personal blog, HowDoIDoThatVideos.com, SuperFruitsGTFiGo.com and several client sites, among them KyLandSales.com, StarHomeUSA.com and the StopMichiganForeclosure.com blog.
There are many more as well and… every time we build another one, we are pleasantly surprised by the resulting SEO results.
We’ve developed our own custom installation of WordPress that gives you everything you need to succeed. Automated Google sitemap building, custom SEO fields, custom layouts, built-in automated email marketing, and much more
WordPress can be tailored to fit your business’s needs and we know how to do it. Give Bob a call today at 859-544-9005 to get started.
We’ve all heard that posting to a WordPress blog can get your new content indexed quickly. But just HOW quickly?
Last Friday, I posted to my WordPress blog at YourKentuckyHome.com with an Easter holiday related video. YourKentuckyHome.com happens to hold the #1 position for this set of keywords, but that is irrelevant to indexing.
As you can see, within 6 hours, the new post was indexed in Google under my #1 position result. If you’ve waited days or weeks for new content to be indexed on your static website, that’s great news. But even better news is I’ve had posts appear much quicker than that – a few in under an hour.
That’s why I have been so enthused with WordPress blogging since I first tried it several years ago.
Whether you are posting information, or news and opinions, or if you are marketing your service or product, there is no quicker way to get the word out than blogging.
If you are new to blogging, or haven’t taken the plunge yet, there are videos that can take you from newbie to expert in just a few enjoyable hours. Don’t let fear hold you back.
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