I have written about some of the premium themes that are available for WordPress before but I wanted to tell you about a fairly new premium theme that is available for WordPress that I am quite impressed with. It is called Headway and it is different than many of the other premium themes that are available.

Headway is not just a premium theme, it is more a framework to build off of. There are a number of very good frameworks to start to build WordPress themes with but Headway has a unique visual editor that makes it easy to drag and drop different components into your theme. You can easily remove a sidebar on pages where you do not feel I is needed or add a sidebar to sections where you want it. Changing colours and font styles is as easy as a few clicks and changing the layout of a header is a breeze.

There is also the ability to use easy hooks to place content where you want it in the theme. Want to add some extra text to the footer, use an easy hook. Want to add an ad before or after a post, use an easy hook.

Many of the websites I have been working on lately are conversions from static HTML sites where clients are happy with the look and feel of their current website, but want the ability to edit the site themself and perhaps add a blog. Headway has become invaluable in recreating the clients website into WordPress.

Headway has also made the need to add the All in One SEO plugin no longer needed. Headway has taken many of the options of All in One SEO pack and intergrated them into the theme. You can control all the aspects of SEO including setting a custom title, meta description and keywords.

If you are looking for a fantastic theme framework to build your WordPress website with, or are a developer wanting an easy to use framework for your clients websites take a serious look at Headway. I have already created two WordPress based websites with it for clients and it has already paid for the developer license in the time I saved getting the clients sites done and out the door. Best of all my clients are happy because they can use WordPress to manage their websites and add new content.

If you use WordPress for your website or blog you might have noticed that WordPress 3.0 is now available. This is a major upgrade so I highly recommend you backup your database, and it would not hurt to make a complete backup of your current installation just in case something does not go as expected.

There are some great new features in WordPress 3.0 and it is a step forward from 2.9. The ability to host multiple websites with one WordPress installation will be excellent if your web host supports it. The addition of different types of pages will also allow people to extend WordPress into much more than just a blog.

If you want a great overview of the new WordPress take a look at the video below and don’t forget to visit the official WordPress blog about the release.

I recently bought a Motorola Milestone smartphone and I have been paying closer attention to mobile websites. I have talked about making a mobile version of your website available in the past but it has become increasingly more noticeable to me how important the mobile space is becoming.

Making applications seems to be all the rage but I am not sure who would use an app for an average website or blog. Sure sites like TechCrunch and CNET can probably create an app for the iPhone and Android phones and get a number of downloads but is it worth it for the rest of us? Probably not. Then there is the option to offer a customized mobile web version which is possible for the majority of websites.

I recently installed the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin to offer people using mobile browsers a more friendly experience. It certainly does offer a nicer version, and makes it easier for mobile web users to read the site.

The plugin uses the Carrington mobile theme. It is nicely designed and makes it easier for a mobile user to browse a website on their mobile device. I have not done any customization to the theme yet, but I plan on adjusting the colours and making the mobile version of the LGR Internet Solutions website match the full version a little more.

Making your current website more accessible to mobile users is something to consider for your website instead of making a stand alone application. It will allow you to provide a customized mobile experience for your mobile visitors while still providing your regular visitors your full website experience. It will also make it easier and cheaper to maintain since you will still only need to update only one website.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the LGR Internet Solutions website on the Android emulator.

WordPress has released 2.8.5. It is a hardening release, taking some of the latest enhancments from the upcoming 2.9 release. Highlights of the 2.8.5 release according to the WordPress blog are:

The headline changes in this release are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

More details are available on the WordPress blog. Do not forget to backup your WordPress database and files before upgrading, just in case something goes wrong with the upgrade. The easiest way to upgrade is to use the built in upgrade feature inside WordPress. If you cannot use that feature or just prefer to use FTP to upload the new files you can download the new WordPress release to upload.

Last week I open up the doors to questions and got some great ones. I thought I would start with one of the questions from Angie.

WordPress or Joomla? Which is better and why?

I have actually posted about WordPress and Joomla in the past and at the time when I wrote that post I leaned towards using WordPress for blogs and Joomla for websites. The main reason was because of an issue I ran into creating a website with WordPress and how it handled pages. That problem seems to have been fixed and I have since created WordPress powered websites with large numbers of pages and not suffered any kinds of problems. Since I wrote that initial post on WordPress or Joomla, I have to admit I have been converted to using WordPress for more than just a blog and more as a complete content management system. Some might say this is like comparing apples to oranges, that they were created for different reasons. That might be true, but to webmasters and bloggers the reasons why something was created is not necessarily the most important thing. The most important thing is that it works.

• Administration

  In my experience WordPress offers webmasters and bloggers a better administration section to use and maintain their websites. The administration pages are easier to learn, and faster to respond. The Joomla administration has a steeper learning curve and is not as easy for people to learn.

• Friendly URL’s

  WordPress permalinks feature offers an easy way to set friendly URL’s for a website or blog. Joomla has a friendly URL option, but it does not compare to the WordPress ability to make friendly URL’s. You can install other extensions to improve upon Joomla’s friendly URL’s and that works as long as the extension author keeps the extension up, and that it does not break with the next upgrade. With WordPress this is built into the core. WordPress makes it much easier to make your URL’s look nice to your visitors.

• SEO Friendly URL’s

  Having friendly URL’s is great for users, but it is also great for the search engine’s. WordPress nice permalink feature puts it ahead of the Joomla for SEO.

• Duplicate Content Issues

  Both WordPress and Joomla suffer from a problem involving duplicate content. With WordPress it happens because of archives, categories, and tag pages all having duplicate content as the posts and pages. With Joomla it occurs because of menu pages. The problems exists for both, the difference is it easier to fix using WordPress. Even with out the use of plugins in WordPress it is possible to create a robots.txt file to prevent indexing of the categories, tag and archive pages leading the search engines to the one copy of your original content. With Joomla it is not as easy. Partly because of the problem with friendly URL’s.

• Extendibility

  Both WordPress and Joomla have a plugin or extension system that allows you to add in other features that are not native to the software. This is mostly a personal preference, but I find the WordPress plugin system much easier to work with and more reliable. I seem to be regularly fixing problems and errors with Joomla extensions.

• Really Simple Synication (RSS)

  WordPress offers a much better RSS system than Joomla that makes more content available to readers.

• Speed

  I have not sat down and timed how long it takes to add new pages or posts into WordPress or Joomla, but I know that it certainly feels much faster to publish new content on WordPress. There is a post Playing with Wire that looks more at usability between WordPress and Joomla.

While there are reasons to choose Joomla over WordPress they are quickly becoming less. In the end it comes down to what you want to do with your website and what is the easiest, most user friendly system to do it with. More and more WordPress is the easiest, user friendly system to accomplish that task. WordPress is easier to use, faster to train non-geeks, and overall allows individuals and businesses of all sizes to create interesting websites that keep people coming back too. For the majority of people WordPress will easily meet their website and blog needs.

If you are looking for a way to demo both WordPress and Joomla without installing them. Take a look at OpenSourceCMS. There you can try both systems out. The here is the Joomla demo, and here is the WordPress demo.

What do you prefer WordPress or Joomla? What made you decide one over the other?

by koka_sexton

This WordPress weekend project is not for everyone, but depending on your WordPress website it might be exactly what you are looking for. WordPress by default does not include pages in the RSS feed. This makes perfect sense if you are using WordPress mainly as a blogging platform, but what if you are using WordPress for more than just blogging but as a content management system to run your website? It then makes sense that you might want to include pages in the RSS feed to let people know when you add a new page to your website.

This is where RSS Includes Pages comes in handy. Simply install the plugin and your pages will automatically be included in the RSS feed, so your subscribers will know when you add a new page to your website. There is not a lot of features or fancy options for this plugin, it does exactly what it says it does, adds your pages to the RSS feed. If you do not want some pages you can modify the publish date to a later date so it is not published in the feed. It might be nice if the plugin gave you an option on the pages editor about whether you want it included in the RSS feed or not, but sometimes keeping it simple is best.

If you are looking for an easy way to add your website pages to your RSS feed with WordPress take a look at the RSS Includes Pages plugin. It has come in handy for a few clients I work with that use WordPress as a content management system and not just for blogging.

If you are thinking of doing affiliate marketing from your WordPress blog you might have come across a plugin from MaxBlogPress called Ninja Affiliate. A couple of high profile blogs, like Daily Blog Tips and Problogger, have made posts about it and it does look like an impressive plugin. I have not personally used the Ninja Affiliate plugin but I have read about it and it does look impressive making it easy to automatically link keywords that you specify in your blog post to your affiliate links, while at the same time displaying a friendlier URL for your readers. This is a great way to help increase your affiliate sales and at the same time make it easier to manage your affiliate links. Did you know that you can get much of the same functionality of the Ninja Affilate plugin by using a couple of free GPL WordPress plugins instead of spending $97.00?

One of the great features of Ninja Affiliate is it ability to automatically turn keywords that you specify into affiliate links. For example if I type the keyword “Mozy online backup“, (you all know I like Mozy right), the keyword Mozy online backup will automatically be turned into an affiliate link leading to the Mozy website. It saves time by automatically linking keywords to affiliate links. There are a few plugins that offer similar functionality that you can try.

• Batch Links
• SEO Smart Links
• BlogMechanics KeywordLink
• KB Linker

I have not personally tried each of those plugins, but I have used SEO Smart Links and BlogMechanics KeywordLink on other WordPress blogs and both are good plugins. If you want to limit the number of affiliate links per keyword you might want to look at SEO Smart Links first. The BlogMechanics KeywordLink offers the ability to link the keyword once or all the time. This can make it harder to control how often the keyword is linked. SEO Smart Links offers a little more control over linking limits.

That takes care of part of the work. Creating nice friendly URL’s for your readers to see instead of some long affilaite link can be done with a plugin that I recommned that every WordPress blog have installed. The WordPress Redirection plugin. This plugin helps you to manage 404 error redirection, changing post permalinks, and it can be setup to manage custom affiliate links.

The WordPress Redirection plugin allows you to create groups so you can manage your affiliate links. You can create a custom group using the WordPress Redirection plugin called “Outgoing” or “Recommended”. You can then create redirection links using your affiliate links and add them to your “Outgoing” or “Recommend” group. This allows you to easily manage all of your affiliate links in one place. To create your reader friendly URL’s simply decide on a URL structure for your links. If you noticed my Mozy online backup keyword link links to http://www.lgr.ca/go/mozyonlinebackup.html, this link then redirects to my Mozy affiliate link. This is much friendlier than the Mozy affiliate link. If your affiliate link needs to be changed you now have one place to edit the link and all your keyword links that are using that URL will be redirected to the new URL. This is much faster than hunting through hundreds or thousands of posts to change your affiliate links.

It is best practise that affiliate links should be nofollowed so the search engines do not follow them. This can be done in two ways. Depending on the keyword link plugin you choose you might be able to add the nofollow attribute on the link itself using the keyword link plugin. I know that both SEO Smart Links and BlogMechanics KeywordLink allow you to do this. You can also add your custom URL’s to your robots.txt file to prevent the search engine spiders from following your affiliate links. For example I could add the following line to my robots.txt file:
Disallow: /go/

There might be other features that the Ninja Affiliate plugin can perform that I have not covered. It does appear that it has more statistics built in than is available in the Redirection plugin. The Ninja Affiliate plugin does offer all of the management in one place, while with this method you will need to go to multiple places to manage your keywords and links. Nothing a couple of opens tabs can’t do mind you. If you don’t want to spend the $97.00 to get the WordPress Ninja Affiliate plugin you might want to give this technique a try. It can help to boost your affiliate sales and provide you with an easy way to manage your affiliate links.

What do you use to manage your affiliate links on your WordPress blog?

Once upon a time I wrote two posts: Bloggers are not Webmasters and Webmasters are not Bloggers. I remember writing those two posts and recently I went back and reread them. It is always interesting to go back and reread some thing you have written almost two years ago. I know that I made a sweeping generalization in those posts, but I remember doing it to try and make a point, that we all have different talents and we should focus on doing what we do best.

When I was in University and money was tight I would do much of my own car maintenance. Mechanics were expensive and I had more time than money. I would change my oil, replace spark plugs, replace starters, alternators, fix brakes and the list goes on. At some point I ended up getting stranded on the highway in -30 Celsuis weather and needed to get my car towed back to the city. I had checked the car before the trip but I did not look very closely at the belts and sure enough a belt ended up breaking. Being a car mechanic was not something I was very good at and to be honest with you I never really liked doing. It always took me much longer to get something done than if I had just taken it into the repair shop to begin with.

Anyone can learn how to FTP, install plugins, manage widgets and learn some basic HTML, but there are times when calling a website mechanic will be faster and easier to help you accomplish your goals. Whether it is to improve your theme, install a new plugin, integrate a new feature to your website or help with your SEO. You need to know when is the right time to call someone.

With WordPress 2.8 recently being released I have been busy upgrading and updating websites and blogs for my clients. Many of them manage their own sites. They update them regularly with new posts, edit pages and add new photos. They know their business and readers, and they also know that the fastest and easiest way to make sure their installation of WordPress is up to date is to let me upgrade their software. From making regular backups of the WordPress database and files, upgrading plugins and WordPress itself I offer many service options for my clients. It allows my clients to focus on what they do best and it lets me do what I do best.

If you are in need of a website mechanic to take care of some of those regular technical tasks drop me a note I will be happy to help so you can focus on what is most important about your website.

The great team at WordPress has been busy prepping WordPress 2.8 for release. It seems like I just noticed that WordRress 2.8 Release Candidate had been released and now it is the full release. You can read more about the release at the WordPress blog: 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets. They also released a snazzy video highlighting all of the new features. Personally, I am looking forward to the new syntax highlighting.

Before you upgrade be sure to backup your current installation by backing up your database, and at least your wp-content folder. You never know what might or could go wrong. You also might want to check out the plugin compatibility list to see if your favourite plugins are compatible with the new version.

For the clients that I support I will be going through and checking your sites and backing them up before upgrading. I will let you know before I upgrade your website. If you are a WordPress user and don’t want to deal with upgrading your blog, feel free to contact me and let me take care of the messy details of upgrading your blog for you.

by koka_sexton

This website and blog has gone through a number of changes since I started it in February 2007. The blog was originally on Blogger on a sub domain, then moved into WordPress on the same sub domain. Eventually I merged the original website and blog together, and most recently I changed servers, add that up with blog being online since 2007 and there are bound to be some broken links.

I have talked about checking for broken links in the past, and it is one of the things I do quite regularly for clients. Running link checkers on a website is great, it will give you a listing of all the broken links to external sites that exist. The old way of running a link check would then mean you would have to open the page that has the broken link, find it and edit it or remove it. Wouldn’t it be great if you could run a link check, and then fix the link all at once without having to go searching for the page and the link? The WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin will let you do this and makes running a link check on your WordPress driven website and blog an easy to accomplish task.

It has been awhile since I have run a link check on my website so I thought this would be the perect time tom try the Broken Link Checker plugin a try. I have to say I am impressed. It shows that I have 1709 external links and of that there are 57 broken links. Finding the broken links is nice, but once the broken links are found you have some additional choices on how to manage that link. You can click on “Details” to find out more about the link, how many times it has failed a link check, the HTTP code the link returns and all kinds of great geeky good log information. You can choose “Unlink” which remove the link from all posts, great for those links that you know are simply gone. You can click “Exclude” the link from being checked. You can also click “Edit URL” which will allow you to edit the URL and quickly and easily fix the link if you know what it is. This is be far the nicest feature, allowing you to quickly and easily fix the broken link without having to open the post editor and search for the link. In the event that Broken Link Checker has found a link that it thinks is broken but is actually correct you can choose “Discard” to mark the link as valid.

The Broken Link Checker also can add custom CSS to broken links so your readers can see that something is not quite right with the link. The default CSS is to put a strike through on the broken link but I am sure the more creative types could make it do more. That comes in handy because there are times when you might not want to remove the link. For example on my The Really Big List of Social Bookmarking Websites post you can see which social bookmarking sites are no longer available.

The default for link check is every 72 hours. I did not run any kind of test to see what kind of load the plugin puts on the server. Blogs on shared hosting might have an issue with the plugin, so if you install it you might want to increase the number of hours between runs. Something to be aware of if you install the plugin.

Now that I have the list of broken links I guess I need to fix some of them up at least. Check out the WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin, a great weekend WordPress project to improve your WordPress powered website and blog.