I’m opening the door of my WordPress training and support environment to new students again over the next week or so. Full details can be seen here

wpdude.com/wp-owners-club

My program called the WP Owners Club will start again on the 9th June.

I would like to invite you to a webinar to tell you more about the club, the training modules and the ongoing support available to members.

I will give you full details of the syllabus in the webinar, but in brief, the six course modules are:

1. WordPress Overview
2. Content; Post, Pages and Comments
3. Theme Masterclass
4. Understanding Plugins
5. Users and Roles
6. WordPress Maintenance

The webinar is on Thursday 2nd June at 11am-12pm Pacific, 2pm-3pm Eastern and 7pm-8pm UK Time.

Seats are limited so book your slot now by clicking on the link below.

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/847311041

I look forward to seeing you on the webinar.

 

This is the last part of my WordPress socail Media Hub series, in the first part I laid the ground works, in the  second I gave you the nuts and bolts to build a social media hub.

In this final part of the series I would like to give you a video demonstration to show you how all of the integrations work together.

Video Demonstration

[flowplayer src=’https://s3.amazonaws.com/WP_Owners_Club/sales_videos/socmediahub.mp4′ width=630 height=480 ]

WordPress Social Media Hub WorkShop

I would like to invite you to join me in a live workshop where I will teach you how to build your very own social media hub.

The Agenda

The agenda for the Workshop looks like this:

• Why create a social media hub
• Plugins and applications to automate the process
• Pushing Posts to the social media sites
• Pulling social media activity to your blog
• Creating social media friends from your site
• Setting up your sidebar for success
• Marketing your content on social media

The Format

The workshop will be an online webinar,l part presentation, part live demonstration by me on my development site where I can take you through the process of setting up your social media hub.

There is no travel of accommodation costs and time away from your day job is limited to the hour of the workshop, it’s a great way to get training without the headaches and interruptions of a normal course.

Recorded For Future Review

The session will be recorded and made available to you in a members only part of my site.

You can review the workshop at any time in the future to jog your memory and review what you learned in the live event.  So note takin gis not required it will all be made available for you.

I’ll also transcribe the workshop as a pdf document to review and and audio only so you can choose what format you review the session in.

On-Going Support

I’ll also give you on-going support for your social media hub building activities through a members only support forum.  If you have any queries or questions about social media integration just ask me in the forums.

Cost

The workshop costs $77, for that you get the live event, access to the recordings in the members only area and on-going support from me in the members only forum.

Guarantee

If you are not completely happy with the workshop for whatever reason just let me know for a full no quibble refund of your money

Book Your Seat Now

To join the workshop click on the add to cart button below, seats are limited by my webinar software so join now to avoid disappointment.

IMPORTANT after checkout you will be redirected to the webianr registration page where you need to leave your name and email so you can join the live event.  I look forward to working with you on Thursday.

 

A few words from REAL clients I have worked with . . .

 

A few words from REAL clients I have worked with . . .

Image byuselessid

 

Here is post two in my series on building a social media hub centred around your WordPress site.

In the first post in this series I outlined what the social media hub is, if you missed that post check out Building A Social Media Hub.

In this post I want to give you a practical guide to building your social media hub so you can created your content once in WordPress then automatically syndicate it out to the three main platforms FAcebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Here’s The Plan

We are going to integrate WordPress with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and set it so that whenever you create a new blog post it automatically adds a new update to all three networks.

Being able to automatically update your social media platforms without having to visit multiple sites takes a lot of the “time suck” out of social media marketing.

It All Begins With Twitter

The easiest way I have found to push your content out is to integrate WordPress with twitter and the integrate the other services with your twitter feed.

I recommend this route over an initial integration with Facebook because of the always changing rules in FB.  Let’s face is shall we, Facebook wants you to spend all of your time in your Facebook account and they do not make it easy to push data out of FB. they want your eyes on their ads, so the easiest way to do this integration is to push information into Facebook rather than take it out.  I’m not being anti FB here I’m just saying that the massive heads in FB towers want you on their site not twitter or LinkedIn.

So we are going to push our updates out to twitter, push those updates out again, we are also going to aggregate our social media activity back to WordPress.

This means you can concentrate your unique content on WordPress and your social media activity on one platform

The benefit of this is you are sharing your message easily across all four platforms and your followers can choose where they consume you updates from, everyone’s happy. Twitter fans using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, Facebook fans can sift your message out of the Zombie attack garbage and LinkedIners can be very serious and professional in their business only area.

Twitter Tools

My preferred tool to integrate WordPress and twitter is Twitter tools, this excellent plugin allows you to create an automatic link between your WordPress site and twitter.

You can get a copy of Twitter Tools from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/

Twitter tools has a number of functions you can

• Push a tweet to twitter when you add a new post
• Create a post from an aggregation of your tweets, for example you could pull all of your tweets in a week into one post digest
• You can push your twitter updates into a sidebar widget

Creating the link between the two is a little tricky, you need to add your twitter authentication keys into twitter tools and essentially setup your site as a twitter application that has access to your twitter.  I will be offering a training session to take you through this in the next post in this series.

Once you have installed Twitter tools, and as you create a new blog post it will automatically push a tweet into twitter looking something like this

New blog post: How to make widgets http://shorturllink.com

Step one is complete you have integrated Titter and WordPress.

LinkedIn Twitter Integration

Integration number two is between Twitter and LinkedIn.

Login to your LinkedIn account and go to the edit profile option.  At the bottom of your profile you will see a Twitter option.

You need to add your Twitter account details, then set your update options.

That’s integration number two complete, when you add a post it is pushed to Twitter which pushes an update to LinkedIn.  If you add an update to LinkedIn, it pushes an update to twitter. BI-directional fun for all the family ensues.

Facebook Twitter Application.

The last link in the chain is Facebook.  To make this integration we are going to install a Facebook application which will link our Fb and Twitter accounts in a two way stream of fun and frollicks.

What’s Next

Next in the series will be a video post where I show you the social media hub in action, and an invitation to a live event to help build your social media hub.

See you then.

If you would like to be notified when the next post in this series is available, why not sign up for my mailing list and I will send you an email when the post is ready.

Image by dhdesign

 

I’m a firm believer that your WordPress site should serve as the hub of you social media activities.  Over the course of three blog posts I will be telling why I think you should have WordPress as the hub, and social media as spokes on a wheel.  I will tell you how to configure your site and push updates to your social media presences

In this post lets set the groundwork for building your social media hub on WordPress.

Homebase and Outposts

I’ve written about the idea of homebases and outposts in the past, but I think it is worthwhile rehashing this concept as it is at the core of my social media hub concept.

Darren Rowse of Problogger fame first brought this idea to my attention, and it goes like this; your homebase is a property that you own, it’s somewhere that you crate your unique content and publish whatever you like.  No-one but you has control over that site but you.

An outpost is someone elses property that you go to and market your unique content.  This could be a social media site, guest posting on another blog, videos your create hosted on YouTube or one of many other outpost marketing strategies.

Create Your Content In WordPress and Syndicate To Outposts

Taking the homebase and outpost idea, let’s pad this out and explain what this means for WordPress site owners.

Your homebase is a self hosted WordPress site.  Sorry wordpress.com site owners, you are still publishing your content on an outpost, you are creating content on someone elses property.

On your self hosted WordPress site you have total control over what you can create, when it is published any editorial control over that content.  You control the comments, and feedback to your content.

You don’t have that on an outpost, with my social media hub concept you have complete control over your message. something you do not have if you are trusting your unique content to be hoisted on an outpost.

Social Media Sites  Should Never Be Your HomePage

You should NEVER make your homebase on someone elses property.

You do not have control over your content on an outpost, you have no say over the editorial policy, you don;t have control over whether or not you are kicked off an outpost. You have no control over what shoddy ads are being displayed next to your content (and you are not earning any money from ad clicks, I’m lo0king at your Facebook).

I hear people say that they are making their Facebook presence their homebase, because that is where  the people are – WRONG, syndicate your content to your Facebook page but make your permanent homebase your WP site.  Why? Because if for whatever reason you piss Facebook off and go against their T & Cs they can ban you from the site and with one fell swoop remove your content, your audience and your influence.  With a homebase this cannot happen.

The Big Three

I’m going to focus on the big three networks throughout this series, they are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  In the rest of this series I will show you how to create a social media hub with WordPress at the centre syndicating your content

Sorry YouTube, I’m not talking about you in this series, I’ll focus  on you with a multi media series soon.

Create A Social Media Hub

When you create a social media hub it very easily allows you to market the content and drive traffic to your homebase.

Create your content once on the hub, and push it out to multiple social media sites and enjoy the benefits of viral sharing and distribution,  this in turn creates more traffic to your site and hopefully exposure to your products or services you sell via your site (or ad clicks if you are a problogger).

The Outpost Time Suck

Spending a lot of time marketing your content on social media is a huge time suck, if you stick with me throughout this series I will show you how to configure your site to automatically update all three social media sites very quickly. I will also show you how to aggregate all your social media updates back to your site so all of your audience be they site visitors or social media friends

Next Up

In the next post in this series I will tell you how to link you WordPress to automatically integrate with your social media presences.  This is a much more practical post where I will show you what plugins, configurations and Facebook applications to use.

If you would like to be notified when the next post in this series is available, why not sign up for my mailing list and I will send you an email when the post is ready.

 

I’ve added a new video to my WP Owners Club page so you can get a sneak peak inside of the club house.

What is the WP Owners Club

The WP Owners Club is my training and support community where I teach sites owners how to get the best from our favourite open source blogging and website building platform.

It’s a members only part of this site where you can really get a good understanding of how WordPress works.

Training and Support Community

The site has three main components

Live training events – I host regular live training workshops using a webinar format to teach people about a particular WordPress topic, and example is my recent WordPress performance tuning workshop.

An ever growing repository of training videos – I’m building an ever growing library of training videos so you can review live events in your own time.

Support – members can get unlimited support on all aspects of WordPress via my members only forum.

Check Out The Video

You can learn more about the WP Owners club including details of how to join from this page.

If you were not able to join my live performance tuning workshop of Thursday, all it not lost, I have a recording of the workshop available to download and watch in your own time.

The live session was great and the feedback from the people who attended was that the workshop was really helpful with lots of information to help speed up people’s sites. Many of the attendees have already gained speed improvements using my methodology.

In the live session we reduced site load time from 12 seconds down to 2.5 seconds.

Why Performance Is Important

If your WordPress site is running slowly you could be impacting your business in a number of ways. Performance is important for two key reasons:

User Satisfaction – if you site loads slowly, your site visitors will become frustrated and click away before you can present your call to action to them.

Search Engine Rankings – site load speed is one of the factors which helps to rank your site, a slow running site will not rank as well as a speedy site regardless of your content.

What’s In The Workshop?

You will learn my methodology for performance tuning your site, this is what I do when I’m speeding up my clients sites, it’s tested in the field and really works.

My Methodology

I will be teaching the performance tuning methodology I use to fix my clients slow loading site, this includes:

Baselining performance

You need to know how fast your site is running so you can monitor your improvements as you performance tune your site, I will show you the tools I use to see how long a site takes to load and where the bottlenecks are.

Minimising overhead of plugins & Themes

A bloated site with slow running themes and many plugins is a slow running site, this is the first stop on performance tuning your site.  I will show you how to rule out theme  and plugins as bottlenecks, and how to audit and tidy up plugin database debris.

Checking Memory Allocation

Does you site have enough memory available to it? I will show you how to diagnose memory bottlenecks and how to increase available memory.

Installing and configuring Caching

I will take you through the process if installing and configuring caching on your site to minimise the number of times a page needs to be build from scratch.  This will include

• Page caching
• Object caching
• Database caching
• Parallelising with a CDN (translation server up your content from multiple locations so it is streamed in parallel not serially)
• Browser caching & compression with gzip
• Minifying javascript and css files (translation make your javascript and css smaller and more streamlined)

Hosting Considerations

Some hosting packages are just not up to the job, I will take you through identifying your hosting package as the bottleneck to site performance

Format

The workshop was part presentation, part screen cast of me fixing the performance of a slow test site.

Support

As this is a complex topic I am also offering support to anyone who buys the workshop via a members only forum.

Cost

The workshop costs $77, for that you get over an hours worth of performance tuning training, support from me in the members only forum, and access to downloads.

Guarantee

The workshop comes with a no quibble guarantee, if you are not happy let me know and you can have your money back.

Get Instant Access Now

Click on the link below, make your payment and you will be redirect to a members only part of my site where you can watch the video and get the downloads.

Image byuselessid

Yesterday I wrote about Why Google places so much importance on site speed, in my post Why Does Google Place Importance On Load Speed For Ranking.

In this post I want to talk about the more important reason why you should speed up your site and that is user or customer experience.

Google has done a lot of research into site load speeds and how that affects the number of funnel completions made.

To translate that from Google Geek into normal speak that means that Google has analysed the correlation between site load speed and people actually buying something, or completing some other call to action on a site.  Slow loading sites consistently fail to achieve their call to action.

In the case of Google it is clicks on their ads  see this post http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/speed-matters.html.

Here Comes the Sales Pitch

Just in case it is not 100% clear I am running a Workshop on performance tuning on Thursday 12th May to teach people how to improve the speed of their site. For full details of the workshop, check out this post.

Here is why I think load speed is so important to your customer’s visit.

User Experience

Offline business knows that the user experience is very important.  If you walk into a shop, the assistants are attentive (usually 🙂  ) they have been trained to give you a good user experience when using the store.  They will efficiently point you in the direction of the widgets you want, take time to explain how the Widget Meister 3000 works.

Having a slow loading site is like having surly teenagers server you in a fast food restaurant, all they want to do is slam the plastic tray over the counter and take your money.  A slow loading site says you don’t care about the user experience of your site visitor, just get to my sales page so we can move onto the real service or product delivery.

If you work online you will probably never meet your clients, you need to give a great impression, that is not just excellent site design, beautifully crafted copy, but also a positive user experience.

Unprofessional

A slow site comes across as an unprofessional, poorly put together site.   Is you site visitor thinking “What is their service or product like if their front of house website is so slow?”

Don’t let an excellent service or product be mired by a slow site.

Frustrating

Your potential customer does not need to be frustrated before they have even requested a quote, what kind of impression are you giving that person?

Make it easy and painless to get to that call to action on your site, don’t leave them sitting whilst your browser churns away loading up pages.

First Impressions Count

It’s a cliché because it is true, people aren’t coming back to you site a second time if they are turned off my site load speed.

Can You Speed Up A WordPress Site?

In a word yes, there are a number of techniques you can use to speed up your WordPress site. They involve tweaking your site, optimising plugins and theme files. removing unnecessary code and caching your system with plugins.

I’m running a workhop on Thursday 12th May to teach people how to improve the speed of their site. For full details of the workshop, check out this post.

Google uses site load speed as one of the factors when ranking your site, check out this post from the official google webmasters site for confirmation

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

This post looks into the reasons why Google would take site load speed so seriously and penalise slow loading sites.

User Experience

Google’s mission is to give the best search results for any given query,slow sites give a poor user browsing experience.

If you site loads slowly people will click away without reading your results (it’s true google have tested it in depth. more about that in tomorrow’s post) this means the search result google served up is not providing the best result to the query as no content was consumed. This is not in Google’s best interest.

Efficiency of the Google indexing

I’ve got no evidence on this one, it’s just my gut feel, but if Google is slowed down when trying to index your site, they are missing other sites, and their whole process is imapcted, they want slick sites which load quickly so they can index teh content and move on.

Slapping a penatly on slows sites will make you imrpce the speed and make their proicesses more efficient.

Slow Site = Less Visitors

Google make the rules I’m afraid, so a slow site will mean lower rankings which means less visitors to your site from the search engines.

Less visitors means less people reading your site, clicking on ads, visiting your sales page, joining your newsletter, promoting your art in social media, or whatever your reason is for keeping a site online.

How Does This Effect me As A WordPress Site Owner?

The majoroty of poeple I work with are small business owners or solo bloggers, you don’t have huge deep pockets to host your site on high speed servers.

You don’t have the cash to employ a staff of perforance tuning specialist like big business do.  I’ve worked on projects for multinationsl corporation before and they throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at high spec servers, parallel processing, and code optimised to the nth degree.  That is not something my average client can do, technically or financially.

If you use standard hosting, can you spped your site to avoid a hit from Google …

Can You Speed Up A WordPress Site?

In a word yes, there are a number of techniques you can use to speed up your WordPress site. They involve tweaking your site, optimising plugins and theme files. removing unnecessary code and caching your system with plugins.

I’m running a workhop on Thursday 12th May to teach people how to improve the speed of their site. For full details of the workshop, check out this post.

Image by photomonkey

I’m running a WordPress performance tuning workshop next Thursday 12th May and I would like to invite you to attend.

WorkShop Details

The workshop will be run as an online webinar on Thursday 12th May at the following times and will last 60-70 minutes

• Pacific:11:00am-12:-00pm
• Eastern: 14:00pm-15:00pm
• UK Time: 19:00pm-20:00pm

The session will be recorded for review if you cannot attend at these times.

Why Performance Is Important

If your WordPress site is running slowly you could be impacting your business in a number of ways. Performance is important for two key reasons:

User Satisfaction – if you site loads slowly, your site visitors will become frustrated and click away before you can present your call to action to them.

Search Engine Rankings – site load speed is one of the factors which helps to rank your site, a slow running site will not rank as well as a speedy site regardless of your content.

My Methodology

I will be teaching the performance tuning methodology I use to fix my clients slow loading site, this includes:

Baselining performance

You need to know how fast your site is running so you can monitor your improvements as you performance tune your site, I will show you the tools I use to see how long a site takes to load and where the bottlenecks are.

Minimising overhead of plugins & Themes

A bloated site with slow running themes and many plugins is a slow running site, this is the first stop on performance tuning your site.  I will show you how to rule out theme  and plugins as bottlenecks, and how to audit and tidy up plugin database debris.

Checking Memory Allocation

Does you site have enough memory available to it? I will show you how to diagnose memory bottlenecks and how to increase available memory.

Installing and configuring Caching

I will take you through the process if installing and configuring caching on your site to minimise the number of times a page needs to be build from scratch.  This will include

• Page caching
• Object caching
• Database caching
• Parallelising with a CDN (translation server up your content from multiple locations so it is streamed in parallel not serially)
• Browser caching & compression with gzip
• Minifying javascript and css files (translation make your javascript and css smaller and more streamlined)

Hosting Considerations

Some hosting packages are just not up to the job, I will take you through identifying your hosting package as teh bottlneck to site performance

Format

The course will be a live webinar, which will be part presentation, part live demonstration to take you through my methodology.

This is an intermediate level workshop you should have an understanding of WordPress, what is javascript and CSS files to gain full benefit of this workshop.

Cost

The cost of the workshop is $77.

For that price you get the live training, support from me during the session, a recording of the session to keep along with all associated downloads and follow up email support when you apply my methodology on your own sites.

Limited Slots

Seats are limited due to the webinar software I use, book your seat now to avoid disappointment.

Book Your Place

To book your place click on the buy now button, and make your payment, IMPORTANT you will then be redorected to gotowebinar to book your seat on the training course.

 

I’m often asked by clients to perform security reviews and security hardening procedures on their WordPress sites.  In this post I want to tell you what I think the key areas are that need to be addressed when securing your site.

WordPress security is an issue, I have fixed dozens of hacked sites, by following this guide (and the videos that acompany this post) you can make your site much less attractive to the would-be hacker.

Video Coaching

I have a free video coaching guide to show you how to make all of these changes I mention below, simply join my mailing list in the sidebar to the right for details of the coaching videos.

The processes are quite long and drawn out, so a video explains it in much more detail.

Before You Start

You are going to make fundamental changes to your site if you follow this guide, please take a backup and know how to restore before you start, you have been warned 🙂

Keep Your Site Up To Date

The first and most important step if to keep your core wordPress file and all plugins up to date.  Many updates to WordPress are security patches, so whenever the banner pops up at the top of your dashboard, take action and update your site.

The only caveat I would add is to check that any critical plugins (e-commerce etc) are compatible with the latest update before you do that.

Change Default Table Prefix

By default the WordPress tables are called wp_, so a hacker knows that the users are held in wp_users table, they already have part of the puzzle if they try an SQL injection.

Change the default table prefix to wp_{somethinghardtoguess}_

Change Default Admin Name

On earlier versions of WordPress you were forced to accept admin as the default super user name, this had thankfully changed with newer installs, you can choose your admin user name.

If you are using admin as your super user, consider changing it for something more difficult to guess, the hacker already has half the puzzle if he know your admin login name, a brute force attempt to send thousands of passwords to yoru site is made much easier.

Security Keys

WordPress has the facility to encrpy a lot of the security information it holds in browser cookies to stop people gaining access to those credentials, but you need to add some encryption keys to wp-config to make this work.

Look for teh following section

define(‘AUTH_KEY’,        ‘LONG STRING’);

define(‘SECURE_AUTH_KEY’, ‘LONG STRING);

define(‘LOGGED_IN_KEY’,   ‘LONG STRING’);

define(‘NONCE_KEY’,       ‘LONG STRING`’);

define( ‘AUTH_SALT’, ‘LONG STRINGl’ );

etc etc

Use the following tool to set random encrypted keys https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/

Use Strong Passwords Throughout

Make sure you are using strong passwords over all of the important layers of your site.  WordPress users have a password strength guide, but you may want to use this tool for the other layers http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

The passwords you need to check are

• WordPress admin logins
• The WordPress database password (held in wp-config)
• FTP users
• The login to your hosting panel

Don’t use the same password on all layers, and consider changing hte password on a regular basis

Hide WordPress versions

If a hacker knows what version you are running, it makes it easier to find vulnerabilities.  Hide the version of WordPress you are running.  It can be found in two key areas

The file yourdomain.com/readme.html, delete this file.  Note this will be re-isntalled with each new version installed, I like to set the file permissions to 000 on this file.

If you view source of your wordpress page you will see the version written into the source code, this is a good plugin to remove that loop hole http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/replace-wp-version/

Access Backend via HTTPS

To ensure all access to your backend dashboard is encrypted, I like to do the following

Ensure I can access my site via https, check with your hosting company, you may need to buy an SSL certificate.

Enable the force ssl options,you can either force all logins to be encrypted or all backend activity to be encrypted by adding one of the following commands to yoru wp-config file.

• define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);
• define(‘FORCE_SSL_LOGIN’, true);

For more details on SSL admin see http://codex.wordpress.org/Administration_Over_SSL

Only FTP To Your Site Using SFTP

Not really a WordPress security fucntion, but only upload and download files to yoru site using SFTp not FTP, your ftp password will be sent in the clear over the net if you use FTP.Check with your hosting company on how to configure SFTP.

For more details on using SFTP see this post https://dev.neilmatthews.com/sftp-flip-sake

Security Plugins

There are a couple of additional security plugins I like to install

wp-malwatch, kind of an anti virus plugin for your site to spot malware

Login lockdown – stops incorrect logins after three attempts and locks the user ID

Want A Secure WordPress Install

If you want me to secure your site, get a quote for a security review from my WordPress technical support page

Thanks to everyone who joiined the live session last night I hope you learned something about WordPress multisite.

If you were unable to join my webinar Yesterday on WordPress Multisite, here is a recording of the session for you.

Video

Click on the play button to watch the video

 

[flowplayer src=’https://s3.amazonaws.com/wpdudewebinar/multisitewebinarreplay.mp4′ width=640 height=480]

To Join the WP Owners Club

To join the WP Owners Club to take advantage of the training, click on the following link

wpdude.com/signup

I would like to invite you to a free webinar to learn about the WordPress training course I am running on WordPress multisite.

Webinar Details

Thursday 28th April, duration 40-50 minutes.

• Pacific 1am-12pm
• Eastern 2pm-3pm
• UK 7pm-8pm

What Is WordPress Multisite?

Multisite is a way to run multiple wordpress sites from one installation of WordPress reducing maintenance overhead by managing and maintaining only one set of WordPress files.

In the webinar I will tell you:

• What is multisite in more details
• What it can be used for
• Details of my multi-site training course
• How to sign up for the live training

Book Your Seat Now

Seats are limited so please click on the link below now to reserve your place.

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/542699065