By now, if you’ve been following my posts, you would have noticed that wordpress is a bit clunky and hard to customize when you have a blog hosted on wordpress.com. The free install-it-yourself version is available at wordpress.org, for you to download and install on your server, control of which is enabled by a hosting provider.It’s a bit hard to install it yourself if you have relatively no experience working with a file manager on your host’s server. If this is the case, I reccomend switching hosts to someone like godaddy.com. Large hosting providers like godaddy provide applications like wordpress, among others, which are simple to install, and are free. If you want to do it yourself/ have a learning experience, wordpress provides you with an installation manual.
Click here for more on the differences between wordpress.org and wordpress.com.
Once you have wordpress installed on your server, you are ready to go to town. Now you can start installing plugins to expand the usablilty and features of your blog. You can add a whole new theme (template) to your site, changing it’s entire appearance and functionality. There are tons of free templates out there to choose from. Plugins are mostly free as well, and allow you to do things like display RSS feeds from other blogs, display a Flikr photostream, display your blogs recent comments, your twitter or facebook posts, and countless other things. These add value and functionality to your blog and attracts traffic, which converts to new clients for your business.
I also reccommend adding a snippet of code to your blog that allows users to bookmark it on various social networking websites. By far the easiest and best way to do this is to utilize the free service at socialmarker.com and simply add the following code to a “widget” you have dragged to a sidebar on your site, called “arbitrary text/html”. In the drop down box for this widget, insert the following code by copy and paste:
<a href=”javascript:window.location = ‘http://www.socialmarker.com/?link=’+encodeURIComponent (location.href)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent( document.title);”><img src= “http://www.socialmarker.com/bookmark.gif” border=”0″ alt=”share” /></a><noscript><a href=”http://www.socialmarker.com”>Social Bookmarking</a></noscript>
There is a plugin for this, but I currently have found it impossible to access. Let me know if the above solution doesn’t work for you. It should generate a button like this:
What this will allow users of your website to do is to bookmark your site on as many social networks as you would like. Why? Increased traffic and free inbound links.
Stay tuned by subscribing to my RSS feed, the orange button at the top of the blog! By the way, this feature comes for free with many of the open-source wordpress themes. Nice!
Tags: acupuncture website, holistic medicine, holistic website design, how to blog, wordpress
