5 Steps to Building, Publishing and Maintaining a Successful Website

When I first started working online, one of the first questions that came to mind was – how do I build a website? I believe lots of other people perhaps you too was in the same predicament.

Another question was – how to build a professional looking website.

And...next question was, how to attract lots of visitors to my site?

Well, after some dabbling in the beginning, I slowly picked up all the skills required to build websites and keeping them in working order.

Yes, I understand building & establishing a professional web presence is quite a daunting task for the uninitiated. Just thinking about the HTML, CSS, Graphic Design & all of the other skills that are needed can be overwhelming.

However the good news is - it is really possible to establish a professional website without having to spend huge sums of money on web design fees, expensive software packages, programming manuals or web hosting services. Adding to that, many of the tools & resources that you will require to build your website are highly affordable, if not totally free.

In the steps below I laid out all necessary resources that you need to put in place for creating, publishing and maintaining a successful website. This only serves as an introduction so follow through the linked articles for more info and details.

Step 1 | Define Your Website's Goals & Theme

While many guides let you started with choosing a domain name first, I recommend a different strategy. I believe building a website or a blog is not all about domain name. It starts with your goals or what you want to achieve by having one to call your own.

The objectives for your website will drive the content and the design whether it's just a hobby or promoting a business.

Some of the things you need to consider are the following;

• The topic of your website - Many websites are either news/information, product, or reference sites
• Content - Content is the actual text and other media of your website's subject you'll be presenting
• Navigation - The navigation affects the information architecture of your site
• Colors - The combination of the colors throughout your website need to complement each other and will enhance the message you want to deliver across
• Graphics - Consider the design of logos & corporate branding that may be needed for your site

It is useful if you align all the points above and blend them into a unique theme to present to the visitors of your site. That could make a lasting impression to them and help in making your site more ‘stickier’.

Read more »

Step 2 | Naming Your Site - Get a Domain Name

 

It is possible to get a free domain name with a free web hosting provider. However, this type of domain would look something like this - your-site.wordpress.com or your-site.blogspot.com.

And the good thing is – your site will get indexed and ranked fast since many of these services are popular with search engines. Blogspot.com or Blogger.com is even owned by Google so it’s not surprising if it gets special treatment by the big G. Also, you save yourself from forking out money to pay for web hosting and maintaining it - which can be a great deal to some. 

While free is good, it may not help in term of integrity & branding of your web site in the long run. Having said that, there are many popular websites are also run on these free platforms. So you need to carefully matching this with all your other needs and goals.

If you have to go for the free domain route, it’s good to do it with an anticipation of going for your own domain name later in the future. This includes choosing a platform that allows you to easily transfer your website or blog contents to a new system as you may want to keep the contents and not wasting it.

 

Read more »

Step 3 | Getting A Space For Your Site on the Net - Web Hosting

 

What do you need Web Hosting for, you may ask?

Well, imagine this. The contents of your website need to reside on a machine for other people to access and interact with. That machine called web server can be your own or rented from someone else for reasons such as:

• Available to any web surfer on the world wide web for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year so it has to be connected to the internet at all times
• Downtime has to be minimal or risk losing your visitors
• Has to support a range of web technologies
• Securely protected from many different threats such as virus, worms, DOS so on

So for these factors, running your own server may not be the best choice therefore most people will just rent it out from companies that provide the service. And the most popular service is called shared hosting where many users (usually thousands) will share a web server and pay a small fraction of what they would pay for a dedicated machine.

There are free web server providers out there on the net but I have heard too much of bad experiences to recommend it to you. I even tried it myself and it may not be worthwhile going for free webhosting.

There are generally significant amounts of downtime, limited support & other restrictions on server space & bandwidth. The service can be so bad because all the provider want was to get you upgrade to their paid hosting service. So why bother trying free account while you may end up paying anyway.

Now, be it paid or free services – pay attention to the small prints in your contract. I observed the practice of these companies putting on advertisement what they think are their strengths and keeping those restriction clauses in the actual agreement. Typically what advertised as “Unlimited” this and that may not be so at the end of the day.

Getting a good web host is quite challenging. Personally, I have been changing my provider on average once a year. The biggest issues so far were downtime, slow access time, limited disk space and bad user interface. In each case, the pricing was not an issue as they were all comparable with each other.

Read on if you want to know of a few of web hosts that I used and personally recommending it.

Read more »

Blog Or Website Background Graphics | An Easy Tool To Design Site Background Stripes

You’ll be disappointed if you think I am going to recommend you to use Photoshop.

Instead there is a webtool that does this job and do it very well too. It’s called Stripe Generator and you can access it here:

Stripe Generator

There are enough options available for you to create stunning stripe patterns.

Worry not, if you’re design-challenged and want an easy way out – use stripes that have been created by others under “Your Stripes” menu.

Just browse and select a pattern you like and click button. Edit it if you’re keen and then click “download” to save the file.

On the other hand, you can also share your stripes with other users.

Enjoy!

Drupal Multisite System | An Easy Way To Install a Multisite Drupal

I have a confession to make – Drupal multisite had been quite a mystery to me!

I failed to really grasped the concept, at least until recently.

Up to now, I have been building perhaps more than 30 sites and my favorite platforms were mainly Drupal and WordPress. I also moved my webhosting four times and doing new installations on a new server has taught a lesson or two. Thankfully, by time and lots of playing around with cPanel, installing, de-installing and so on, has put my understanding of the whole thing to a new level than when I first started.

And.. I was finally able to crack that little Drupal multisite code ‘secret’

It seems that the answer to my old puzzle lies in correctly using cPanel’s “Addon Domain” feature. Some techies advised against using cPanel but I am completely happy with it as it posed no problem up until now. The best part is – it’s easy and it works and suits almost everyone!

During my struggle, I looked at every other places and most will tell you to do something with .htaccess file and symlinks. I didn’t find fiddling with those stuff amusing. If one or both of these sounds Greek to you too, then worry not as I have discovered an absolutely simpler solution which I’ll share now.

So how could cPanel help?

In short, here’s what I did in a few steps:

1. Create a folder named “drupal” under public_html e.g. “/public_html/drupal”. Basically you can name it anything and locate it in any folder you like. Just keep that in sync with step 2 and 3 below.
2. Upload all your Drupal installation codes into the “drupal” folder.
3. Create a folder under “drupal/sites/” to represent the URL of your domain. This is standard across Drupal multisite setup. If your domain for e.g. is “mydomain.com”, then create a folder that looks like “/sites/mydomain.com”. Put a fresh copy of “settings.php” from Drupal install into this folder. You may leave the configuration as it is as it will be filled by Drupal when you initiate installation later.
4. Have your mySQL database ready or create one if necessary.
5. In cPanel, create an Addon Domain and assign document root as “/public_html/drupal” or whatever you have defined earlier. All this does is that any access to the URL will end up being routed to “/public_html/drupal” folder. This is correct as Drupal codebase resides in there. (Note: Your primary or main domain i.e. the one you used to create your account with the webhost won’t be able to run Drupal in this way. That is because the main domain are not allowed to be ‘forwarded’ as it will disturb the whole setup. If your primary domain needs to run on Drupal, then all other ‘Drupal’ domains can be setup as ‘parked domain’ or ‘add-on’ ones and define sub-domain as “/public_html” only). Also if your cPanel require FTP username and password, put in anything you like as they are not related to Drupal install.
6. In your browser, enter the site URL. Drupal installation shall begin as usual.

Just repeat steps 3 to 5 above for as many sites as you have.

How It Works

As you can see, all domain URLs will end up at the same place i.e. “public_html/drupal”. However Drupal can tell the actual folder by looking at the URL entered and compare with domain name(s) defined in “drupal/sites/<domain name>” folder. So each URL will go to its’ own folder to do whatever it was supposed to do.

Setting up sub-domain as part of a multisite configuration is no different than that of the top domain. I described a similar process in this post.

You may choose to use a common database shared across all your Drupal sites or otherwise - but that is another topic altogether.

As for myself, I only maintain a single set of Drupal codes for all of my Drupal sites. This makes my life a lot easier especially when it’s time to do updates, upgrades or even moving webhost.

On a different topic, I also run my WordPress sites using a single WP codes too. I shared how I did it in another article here. So I am like having two control centers where I manage all my Drupal and WP sites no matter how many of them. Adding a few more as I go along is a breeze. Life can’t be better than that, or can it?

Hope this helps you or someone out there. Enjoy.

Related article:

Stephen On Drupal: How to Correctly Set up Drupal Multisite?

Drupal Search Not Working | It Shows No Results?

If search feature on your Drupal site refused to work, just check the following things:

• If Permission or User Control settings have been correctly done.
• Indexing of your site has completed. If not, go to “Admin-Search Settings-Re-index Site”.

If nothing seems to be wrong, just do “Re-index Site” might cure the problem.

How To Create a WordPress.com Blog Account

Using your internet browser, go to wordpress.com.

Click “Sign Up Now!” button and you’ll see this screen:

Fill up the all the required info and click “Next” button.

In this example, I just wanted to create a username for WordPress.com account. A blog that is linked to this account will be created later. You may choose to straight away create a blog the uses your userid at this step by choosing the appropriate option in the step above.

You see this next.

 

Make sure you go to your mailbox and click the activation link within the email from WordPress. If you do not do this within two days, you will have to sign up again.

So go to your email inbox and click on the activation link. You’ll see this next:

Click “Login” and you get to this:

 

Enter “username” and “password” that you used during registration and you’re DONE!

 

Creating A New Blog

As WordPress.com allows many blogs created under a single account, you may do so at your will.

So login to your account at WordPress, click “My Account” and then select “WordPress.com”.

 

You’ll then be presented with this screen:

Then click on “Register a blog”.

Enter your desired blog domain and title, tick the “privacy” and click “create blog”. In a few seconds you’ll see something similar to this:

If you click your “blog’s domain” as shown above, here’s what you’ll see:

 

 

Well, there’s nothing much to it as you just have your basic blog setup. To make it more interesting, you’ll need to do some customization including the look and feel of the blog.

Want to see how you can change your blog’s outlook?

Click the link below…

How To: Display Categories On Drupal Sidebar

If your ever wanted to show a list of categories (taxonomy in Drupal speak) in a Drupal’s Block, here’s what you should do:

• Download Sitemenu module from here and upload it to your Drupal server.
• Activate it in Drupal Admin-Modules dashboard.
• Complete the setup in “Admin-Sitemenu”.
• Position the display in “Admin-Blocks”.

This is an example with the categories displayed on the left sidebar of a Drupal webpage.

What To Do If A Plugin Broke Your WordPress Site

In a few rare occasions this can happen and when it does you can get very nervous. Things get very serious if you can’t even load the homepage!

If the site contains more than just a few skeletal info, re-install it from scratch may not be a good option, so how now?

While the solution is not difficult, you or someone helping you need to know how to run a FTP program as you will need to go into the WP file folder on your server.

Here’s an article that describe the steps in more details:

A Plugin Broke Your WordPress Blog? Here Is What To Do

Good luck.

WordPress Multisite System | How To Have One Install Many Blogs

WordPress is no doubt one of the most popular blogging platform currently in use. If you're hosting your own WP blogs and own several of them, you can understand the amount of efforts and times it takes to install, maintain, updating WP core codes, updating plugins and themes, FTP downloading, uploading etc.

Since those required times and efforts translate into ‘lost’ money or opportunity most of the time, it is wise to use a system where you can simplify and save time and efforts while doing more ‘meaningful’ chores within WordPress. That is so unless you have a lot of time to kill.

One such tool is called "Virtual Multi Blog (VMB)".

This tool will help you:

• Keep just one copy of WordPress core codes - no matter how many sites of WP you have installed and running. So how about that? To me, that's cool!
• The same simplicity applies to plugins and themes too. This makes going multisite route irresistible to a lot of WP blog owners.

Warning

Backup all your files and databases before attempting any of the procedures described below as results are not guaranteed. Do all these at your own risk ok.

Here is a step-by-step tutorial to setup VMB:

1. Setup your WP domain to point to the WP install directory using “Add-on Domain” feature in cPanel. 
2. Download VMB scripts from here.
3. Extract the files and upload the whole ‘multiblog’ folder to your “/wp-contents/” directory on your WP server or host.
4. Move the wp-config.php and wp-config-vmb.php files from "multiblog" to the directory in which you installed WordPress. Make sure you backup the original wp-config.php just in case you need to revert to it. 
5. In wp-content/multiblog/config/, rename mb-users-sample.php to mb-users.php. Open mb-users.php in a text editor. Populate $vusers[] according to the instructions there. For this example we have:
   

7. $vusers[] = 'catblog.com';
   $vusers[] = 'dogblog.com';
   $vusers[] = 'mutts.dogblog.com';
   $vusers[] = 'catblog.com/celebrities/morris';
   $vusers[] = 'dogblog.com/fido';

8. Create a mb-config file for each domain or sub-domain that you want to include. Don’t forget to change the database’s name, user & password within each file. Please note the file naming method in use here. Say your domain is “example.com” then the config filename will be “mb-config-example_com.php”. Yes, omit the quotes.
9. Next time you want to add a new site, just add a new $vuser[] in mb-users.php and create a new mb-config file. That’s it! No matter how many sites you have that’s all you need to do every time.

Yeah I know, these are quite a task but it’s surely worth it. I can’t imagine running tens of WP sites without this system!

Full version tutorial can be seen here.

Some Possible Challenges

• Things may not work first time, at least it didn’t for me. It takes a while to do the “hack” correctly.
• Since themes are shared across multiple sites, any customization done on a theme will affect every sites using it. One way out is to create a copy of the theme and use it exclusively for a site of your choice.
• Installing sites in different folders may require you to fiddle with symlink.

Want to know more? Go visit the VMB site.

 

[Video] SEO Tip For WordPress

If you are already running an Internet marketing campaign or are about to embark on an Internet marketing campaign, one concept you cannot afford to skimp on is search engine optimization (SEO).

Well known search engines such as Google rank websites according to complex algorithms which are designed to determine which websites are most relevant for particular search terms. Therefore taking the time and effort to optimize your website for relevant search terms may result in you being rewarded with high search engine rankings for these terms.

This is important because most Internet users rely heavily on these rankings. It is not uncommon for Internet users to only review the first few results when they search for a particular term. This means if your website ranks high enough to appear on the first page of the search results you will likely enjoy increased website traffic. However, if your website doesn’t make it to the first page or even the second page, it is unlikely you will receive a great deal of website traffic from visitors who use search engines.

The algorithms used by search engines can be rather complex and include a number of different factors. Some of the common factors in the equation include keyword density, META tags, titles, inbound links, website traffic and content.

Here are several videos that can help you optimize your WordPress blog from SEO standpoint.

• Setup Your Permalinks Correctly

 

• Optimize Your Post Titles And Keywords

 

• Ensuring LSI Relevancy

 

• Simplify Things By Using SEO Plugin