Onsite vs. Offsite

First it’s important to understand some backup terminology. An onsite backup means that the data for the backup and the data for the production website exist in the same physical location. This might be like making a backup of your computer onto an external hard drive attached to your computer. This would protect you from a hard drive crash, but if your house burns down then both go up in flames.

Offsite means that the data for your backup and the data for your production website are in different physical locations. If one place burns up, the other will still have all the data intact.

There’s a benefit to each type of backup. An onsite backup, such as an external hard drive, can provide a much faster recovery than downloading the data from another site. Offsite backups are more resilient to acts of God (and kids).

Backup in the cloud (Amazon S3)

When it comes to your website, it turns out that the hard drive at your house qualifies as an off site backup. Even better than your hard drive is Amazon S3. There are two reasons why choosing a cloud based service is more appealing than your hard drive.

1. You can automate access to it from your website
2. They manage redundant, fault tolerant data storage for you

What to backup

I think many bloggers (those that create backups at all) use the WordPress export feature and feel confident that they have everything they need to recover their website in case of a crash.

It turns out that several things are missing. First is that even the most disciplined person can find it difficult to login regularly and take frequent backups. Since a blog is an evolving opus, constantly changing, it’s important to take frequent backups. Another problem has to do with the ‘rest’ of the information on your website.

What about all the pictures, audios and videos that you upload, along with theme and plugin files? This data needs to be included with your backups in order to restore your website. Without it, you would be able to restore little more than the text content from your site.

So, if you insist on taking manual backups then make sure you use FTP and grab the wp-content folder of your WordPress website in addition to the XML file that you export.

There’s a better way

If you don’t want to worry about all these details and risk messing them up then you’re in luck. I found a great plugin which I’ve been using on all my sites for about a half a year now. It’s called Automatic WordPress Backups. To get it up and running all I had to do was provide it with my Amazon S3 account information and it took care of the rest. It manages creating backups on a regular schedule and maintaining historical backups too.

The cost for S3 storage works out to be pennies a month, and for the peace of mind that it brings, that’s CHEAP!

How to restore

In the event that you need to restore your data, you can most likely find someone on elance.com. In fact, if you’re restoring after a hosting company crash, you could probably even give them the backup file from your S3 account and let them work through the details. It turns out to be pretty easy. Here’s the process I would follow:

1. Ensure that you have the domain configured and pointed to a directory on your host
2. Upload WordPress (you can probably use cPanel if you want to)
3. Delete the wp-content folder and upload the folder from your backup
4. Create a database and import the database file from your backup
5. Update the wp-config.php file with the connection information to your new database

Hopefully you never need to go through these steps. but if you do, you’ll be glad that you took the time to setup Automatic Wordperss Backups. Post a comment if you have any questions or need additional help.

SEO

I’ve discussed these criteria in a previous post, but it’s worth going through them again here as they apply to Thesis.  First off is SEO.  SEO is tricky for a few reasons. 1) No one really knows Google’s algorithm except for Google.  Meticulous testing has revealed many of the details, but it’s a stab in the dark or a good guess in many cases.  2) SEO and design don’t always agree with each other.  Designers want to make things look good to humans and SEO experts want to make things look good to the search engines. Both are necessary and there’s a trade off involved.  3) SEO is a moving target.  Google and other search engines are constantly making adjustments to their methods and so to maintain rankings and search engine position requires continual vigilance.

In terms of SEO, Thesis has a few advantages. The core development effort is aware of SEO best practices and has made it a focus from the beginning to balance SEO with good design. The large install base for the theme and the caliber of the blogs that use Thesis provide feedback to the developers which improve the core even further.  Finally, the proper use of css and XHTML (standards compliant) ensure that automated bots (from the search engines) can find the keyword information you include in your posts easily.

Speed

One of the most significant factors in the success of WordPress as blogging software has been the theme and plugin architecture.  You don’t have to be a programmer to understand how appealing it is to be able to modify a WordPress blog without having to do a lot of programming.  One problem that comes with this flexibility is that there are a lot of poorly written themes and plugins.  Each task that you want your theme or plugin to do requires processing, which can potentially slow down your website.

Here again, Thesis does an amazing job because it was a focus from the beginning.  The core development effort is aware of how WordPress is supposed to work and they have made very deliberate choices to make the theme as fast as possible.  This has two outcomes.  First is that visitors to the site have a better experience.  Research has shown that faster sites get more clicks.  People are more willing to explore the site when each page loads quickly. The second is that you can accommodate more visitors to your site without performance degrading.  I suppose a third would be that Google has just announced that the load time of a website is now a factor in ranking, which means that a fast theme brings SEO benefit too.

Usability

When a user comes to your site, they want to find the information that’s most relevant to what they’re looking for.  The Thesis team has found a great balance between design and SEO that gives the user a very clear path to the information that’s of greatest interest to them.  In addition to good design, they fully support the customizable widgets that are built in to WordPress.  This gives you ultimate flexibility when tweaking your site to increase conversions.

Productivity

Finally, the breadth and quality of the customization options available in Thesis means that you don’t have to fight with your blog or know how to code to get the results you want.  You’re productive from the first moment using nothing more than your web browser to configure your site.  This may be the most immediate benefit to using Thesis.  You get to stop thinking about how to do this or that and instead focus on your content.  Thesis gets out of your way and helps you do what you do best.

My sites run Thesis

I’m a big fan of Thesis and use it for my own websites.  In fact, my first blog ever runs Thesis.  Have a look at these links for a couple of examples:

• Exercise Log Blog
• Choice Software Zone

To see even more examples of how to use Thesis and see some great videos about how to use it, head over to the official site:

Atahualpa

The Atahualpa theme is a mature theme (meaning it’s been under development for a long time) and provides a lot of user configurable options.  Perhaps best of all for non-tech folks is that there are a lot of template type items so that you don’t have to provide your own information.  For example, there are a collection of favicons to choose from without having to create and upload one.  Favicons are the little icon that shows up in your browser tab and they can add some polish to a website.

My first thirty day challenge website used this theme and as I went through the motions I was easily able to take top page listing in Google for a competitive keyword in  just a few weeks, so at least there wasn’t anything glaringly wrong with the theme from Google’s perspective.  I doubt it’s as optimized as something like the Thesis theme, but it can get you down the road quite nicely if you’re on a short budget.

UPDATE: I’ve recently had some trouble with this theme in Internet Explorer.  That’s a pretty bad thing since Microsoft still holds a significant lead over the competition in user base.  If you plan to use this one make sure your finished site looks OK in IE.

Arjuna X

The Arjuna X theme has also been around for a while and has a very polished look.  In fact, it may be the most attractive of the three themes I’m featuring here and would be a great choice for a personal blog.  Customization includes headers, sidebar placement and well defined widgets.  It’s easy to use and gives your blog a clean, authoritative look.

Arthemia

The Arthemia theme is a free theme, but it’s a sibling of a more robust premium theme by the same name.  That means that in some ways you benefit from the commercial development on the premium theme, even if you don’t get all the bells and whistles.  This theme is also the only one of the three that fits in the category of a magazine theme.

Out of the box this theme offers several well defined areas for widgets that look great, but it has no user options on the backend.  That means that any customization will have to be done in the editor and so it’s not a good choice for a non-tech person.

Caution: you get what you pay for

I know that the free themes are appealing because they don’t cost a thing.  If you’re starting out with very little (or no) budget then these three themes give you options that are probably just right.  On the other hand, the SEO characteristics of these themes and customization for branding or conversion may not be as good as the premium themes.

In my experience, I found that I wasted a lot of hours trying to tweak the free themes to meet my needs.  In the end I wasn’t ever quite satisfied, since they don’t have the same polish and purpose that the premium themes do.  If I have to spend two hours getting a free theme to do what I want it to, then I’m probably better off just paying for a premium theme that does it out of the box (like Thesis).

If you have a favorite free WordPress theme, post a link to it in the comments below.

What is the point?

The people that are looking for a tutorial about FTP often don’t know the ‘basics’. When you tell them to type the ‘host’ in here, and ‘navigate’ to this folder, and ‘set permissions’ there… Well, it just doesn’t mean anything. The first video that I watched used at least a half a dozen words in the first 30 seconds that most regular users just don’t get.

So I decided to change my approach. Rather than teach you about FTP, I’d rather tell you why you shouldn’t ever use FTP again.  Huh?

Let’s start out with a simple question. At the moment you decided to learn how to FTP something up to your server, what were you trying to accomplish? I think it’s very unlikely that you were sitting down to figure out how FTP works and how to use it to get stuff up to your website.

Instead, I bet you were trying to communicate with your audience/clients/visitors. That’s a really important distinction. You don’t want to know how to FTP. You want to communicate with people. So how can you ditch the FTP and start communicating with your clients?

Use a blog

The absolute best way I can think of is to use a blog.  With most modern hosting accounts you can install a blog without FTP, without database setup and without needing to use any tool other than your web browser (I recommend Google Chrome, by the way). You literally just click a few buttons and you’re done!  Once it’s done then you use a web browser, from anywhere in the world, to communicate with people.

If you’re thinking that a blog would be great except that you still need to upload pictures and videos and so you can’t get around FTP, then you’re wrong. WordPress has little “easy buttons” that let you find the file on your computer and it puts it right in where it belongs. As far as video, you can now just paste a link to a youtube video and WordPress will take care of the rest.

Special cases

There are special cases when you need to FTP something up to your server, but those are more rare. When that moment comes along, do yourself a favor and hire your kids to figure it out for you. If you don’t have kids at home, find a neighbor that’s in high school and have them give you a hand. The $10 you pay them will be a huge prize and you can keep your hands clean of all the dirty work.

Keep your eye on the real prize

Don’t forget the real purpose of your website is to communicate with your target audience. Do yourself (and your site visitors) a favor.  Stop trying to figure out how to FTP stuff up to your server and instead figure out how to use WordPress.  Then go on to provide the content that they want. That’s the real gem!

(photo by Gabriella Fabbri)

• Logic
• Design
• Content

A theme has very little (ideally nothing) to do with the logic or programming of your blog. A theme serves to frame the content that you put on your website, but it is not the content.

Design is the sole focus of theme development and WordPress has made if very easy for non-technical designers to create a new theme quickly. That can be both good and bad. The bad comes in the form of poorly written themes that don’t perform well in SEO and website load time.

The HTML bummer

You only have to look back on the first websites ever built to begin to appreciate the power of themes for websites. Creating websites out of HTML, JavaScript and CSS was a major bummer. Why?

Imagine you have a website with hundreds or thousands of pages and you wanted to change how the header looked, but the content would remain the same.  This shouldn’t seem too far fetched. It would be like painting your house or putting a new sign up in the window of your business. Everything stays the same inside, but the ‘theme’ changed. With the original HTML approach to creating websites, you would have to hand modify every single page and try to keep them consistent with one another.

WordPress makes this type of change easy and very fast. To help it all make a little more sense I made this video for you.

Cell phone faceplates

Blogs aren’t the first place to use the idea of a theme. For example, cell phone manufacturers have been doing the same thing with their phones for years. Just like this Superman Cell Phone Faceplate. It doesn’t change which contacts are in your phone or your caller ID history. It just changes the way it looks to everyone. It’s the same story with a WordPress theme.

Other considerations

As you think about what theme to choose for your blog, you want to look deeper than just how it looks. The fact is that the theme can have a very significant impact on where the search engines place you in search results. It can also affect how visitors interact with your site.

SEO Friendly

One big factor in choosing the right theme in WordPress comes back to Search Engine Optimization. While the content may not change, the theme can make it easier or harder for the search engines to find the content on the finished page. That means the your theme can have a big impact on your search engine ranking. This tends to be a big differentiator between free and premium WordPress themes.

Easy to customize and tweak

Since most people aren’t programmers (and don’t really care to be), the best themes offer a range of customizations and tweaks that the blog owner can do without needing to write any ‘code’. These are browser based tools that you can use from your WordPress dashboard. The more control you have without needing to modify the theme code the better.

Visitor experience

The experience a visitor has when he arrives at your site is influenced by two theme related characteristics. The first is speed, or load time. The second is ease of navigation.

In the first place, if the pages take too long to load, then the user is very likely to bounce off your site. To ‘bounce’ means that they clicked through to your site and then immediately left. You want to make sure you choose a theme that will load quickly.

Ease of navigation is very relative. It’s relative to the content, your conversion goals, the visitor expectations and even the visitor state of mind. There aren’t really any general rules here, but there are some guidelines, like this post about one page, one job. As you choose a theme, think about what your visitors are expecting, where they’re coming from and what your end game goal is. This will help you choose the right theme.

Now you can see that themes make it easy to change the way your website looks. In my next few posts on WordPress themes I’ll tell you which free and premium themes I like best and why.

I searched for “wordpress 2.9 video tutorials” and to my great surprise I couldn’t find a good video tutorial. I found videos talking about new features in WordPress 2.9, and I found some that talked about plugins for WordPress 2.9, but none that just showed someone how to post to their blog.

SEO can be a funny thing, because I highly doubt that there aren’t any good video tutorials out there. For whatever reason I just couldn’t find them. So I went ahead and made a short video showing the basics of posting to a WordPress 2.9 blog. Since I love MemberWing I went to the trouble of showing how to include paid vs. premium content in a blog post.  Have a look below (it’s HD, so you can make it full screen and easily see all the details).

By the way, in WordPress 2.9, all I had to do to embed that video was paste the YouTube link (that’s amazing). In all my years developing software I haven’t many tools that meet the need like WordPress does. Hopefully this short tutorial video will get you on your way.

If you know of other tutorials or have questions, post them as comments below. I read read every comment.