Widgets – lets get widgety

Here I’ve tried to simply explain what each of the standard widgets allows you to do, so read all or just those that interest you and lets get widgety…

Pages
Top of the widget list is ‘Pages’ a simple and self explanatory widget which shows the pages of your site.

Many of the themes will have the pages across the top of your blog, but using this widget you can decide which pages to be shown and which should be hidden. I personally don’t see the point of this widget with my chosen theme, but I’m sure that it has it’s uses on some themes, as a developed it’s certainly an option I’d want to offer users, but wouldn’t expect them to use it.

Calendar
A very simple widget, a calendar appears on your blog and whenever a post is posted, the date highlights on the calendar allowing readers to quickly see when posts where written and jump to the posts posted on that date. Interestingly, whilst writing this I notice that my calendar doesn’t allow the user to move from month to month, I would guess this is simple down to the fact that I have no posts more than two days old and obviously no blogs magically posted in the future (though you can set posts to be posted at a future date – cool) 

Archives
This cool little widget basically archives your posts into months, you can decide if you want a list of months or a drop down, you can also decide if you want a post count next to each month, so anybody who wants to go post crazy and show the world will opt to have this feature on.

Links
This widget confused me at first, the fancy name blogroll and the already listed links back to WordPress made me think that it was simply a list of links for WordPress – why would my readers be interested in that I wondered??  But the great news is its more than an advertisement for WordPress, it is a list of links which you can control to promote your favourite bloggers or websites.  First add it to your selected widgets and then visit the ‘Links’ section on the left within your control panel, here you can add more links, and you can decide if a link is visible on the blog or not.  You can even split your links into categories which on my theme is presented as two separate lists. �
Now links to sites and blogs are always a good thing, so if you like a blog or a site and would be willing to tell a friend, add it to your list, then they get credit from the Search Engines and more people are likely to see the site or blog you enjoyed and recommended.

Meta
To be entirely honest, right now I’m not sure what this widget offers other than a link for the administrator to get in and out of your control panel and to the RSS feeds, I personally have it turned on so that I don’t have to remember the log in url (which isn’t that hard) – If I discover more about this widget I promise to share.

Search
Well it does what it says on the tin, places a search option on your blog.

Recent Posts
Again, its on the tin, it adds a list of your most recent posts, there is a control to the number of posts to display with a maximum number set at 15. 

Tag Cloud
When you post, you’ll find that you can associate tags with the blogs, a tag is like a keyword, it’s a tool to highlight the main points/topics of the post.  The tag cloud collects the main tags used with in your blog over time and allows users to select a tag and view all posts relating to this tag – this is a widget I like and currently is a very popular gimmick used on loads of sites. I’m sure some SEO gurus will highlight the fact that it helps users to carry the main keywords through their site (or at least where the tag cloud is present)

Categories
Again I’d say this is pretty much self explanatory, it allows you to show the list of categories within which you have organised your posts, you can again display as a drop down list or a fully visible list whilst also showing the hierarchy – so categories within categories are made clear to the user and of course for the blog heavy you can show your post count

Text
Having only briefly played with this widget, I believe it simply allows the user to post some text within one of the columns – I guess you may want to announce something or write some welcome text to the users.

RSS
Rss feeds and readers are great ways of getting the latest news within your industry or area of interest straight to your blog, or you can publish your own feeds so that your readers get your latest post delivered straight to them (using an RSS reader) alerting them to your latest blog and bringing them back to your blog to read the whole post. I think RSS feeds are great and certainly worth using when your ready.

Recent Comments
This simple displays a list of the recent comments posted on your blog. Again it is possible to control the amount of comments displayed with a maximum of 15 allowed. 

Tags: standard widgets, understanding widgets, widgets, widgets explained

Widgets – an introduction

As well as the content you’ll be writing on your blog, it’s the widgets that will bring it to life.  WordPress provides you with 12 standard widgets (which will be ‘blogged’ about later) and thanks to the many people who contribute to WordPress there are many many more widgets for you to download and install.

When you view the widgets section, take a look on the right hand side of your screen and you may see a drop down menu beneath the header Current Widgets, some themes have more than one column, some allow you to place widgets across the footer (bottom) of your blog.  Take a couple of minutes to add some widgets to the various columns within the drop down menu to understand how your theme manages them, you may decide that you want some themes across your footer or in a column or you may decide that you don’t want any.

Once you’ve finished playing with the columns, and understand your theme fully, decide which widgets you want and where on your blog. You can add them with a click of a button and many of the widgets have their own little controls to allow you to edit them in some way.

A nice little extra feature WordPress have in the control panel is the ability to organise the order of your widgets, you can do this by selecting them in the desired order, or better still (and the geek in me thinks this is cool) you can drag & drop the widgets (on the right your screen – the one’s you’ve selected) and place them  in your desired order.

I’d recommend selecting the widgets, saving and then right clicking the ‘view site’ link (top left) and opening it in a new window, you can then view your site and if you want to change it, back in the original window in your admin section/control panel make the desired changes, save it, then jump back to the window with your blog and hit refresh or F5.

Now I’m sure you want to play with your appearance even more, so crazy with your widgets!

Tags: introducing widgets, widgets

Themes – looking good online

Ok – so the first thing your likely to do when you get your WordPress blog is make it look good. Now if your able to, it is possible to completely design and build your own blog, WordPress kindly provides instructions explaining how the skeleton of WordPress is structure which allows you to change the code to create your own masterpiece.  But if you don’t have these skills, worry not, there are 1000’s of themes available online so you will surely find something that matches your taste and whats better is, installing them and using them is probably easier than choosing them!

Getting your theme
This is easy, jump on over to the WordPress site (www.wordpress.org) and visit the extend section (or click here – www.wordpress.org/extend). Once there, hit the Themes link and start searching for your perfect theme.

Bringing it to Life
Found your theme? Excellent, ok lets bring it to life, this is very easy, simply download your theme, un-compress it and then you have to ftp it into the wp-content/theme folder – make sure you ftp the theme folder and its contents up not all the files loosely.

Next step to make it visual
Finally log-in to your WordPress control panel, head to the appearance section and surprise surprise there should be a preview of your chosen theme, click the image, and then in the top right of the preview screen which loads will be a Activate “theme” link, click and your new theme will be rolled out across your blog.

See it’s so easy – next of course you need your widgets 

Tags: getting a theme, installing a theme, setting a theme, themes

Starting my blog

So I’ve decided to blog (as mentioned in other parts of my blog coincidentally) and this is all about the beginnig and setting up my Wordpress blog.

So why did I choose wordpress?  Basically, little research was done on my part, I know another blogger (Business Blog Angel) whom I consider an expert in this field and even though she uses Typepad (one of the other leading Blog tools) she recommended that wordpress was really on the way up and possibly better than typepad (I hope that’s right Claire, if not apologies). But a quick visit to the Typepad website and it turns out you have to pay for the Typepad  blog (starting at $5 a month – not much admittedly $60 a year or £45 a year going on the current exchange rate – but that is the basic package) and as I own a web development company I am able to host my blog using the WordPress software for free – so two reasons to use WordPress, I think going on what my hosting company charges for php hosting the basic Typepad package is comparable to hosting WordPress so no real advantage.

But if your reading this blog and thinking about starting your own blog visit my site (IT Pie) and let us know you read this blog and we’ll be able to sort one out for you for £20 a year including domain registration – pretty good indeed! (by the way you may need to remind us of this post but we’ll honour it)

So little research was done, but a choice was made between the two leading blog packages (that I know of) and ultimately I went with a recommendation and a price influenced decision.

Setting the package up
Now WordPress boasts of its 5 minute installation and I’m sure having read the instructions that it is easy and takes 5 minutes, but my hosting company installed it for me (because I have a windows hosting package) and I think on their Linux hosting package there is a button to click and it installs so pretty straight forward. So setting up the package was very easy!

Design
Now for my own blog I was happy to use one of the many templates available on the WordPress site and chose the ‘Desk Mess’ theme, partly because it seemed apt as I am a messy person but secondly because it has the Apple iPhone on the desk and I am currently obsessed with getting an iPhone.  I have also set-up a blog for one of my clients and had hoped to style it myself to match his website, unfortunately when I looked into all the files and the work required, I recognised that though it is certainly possible to do it, a lot of work was involved and with so many templates to choose from it felt like re-inventing the wheel.  One day I think I will seriously look at developing my own design, but for now, I’d recommend choosing one of the 1000s of templates available on the site.

Basic Feature
WordPress comes with some basic features and then there are the many plug-ins available, I’m planning on getting to grip with the basic features (which I will blog about later) and then going wild with all the plugins available and blogging about them.

But all in all, first impressions and as a web developer, I am impressed with WordPress and I’m sure my appreciation will only grow.

Tags: blogging for beginners, getting a blog, my first blog, Starting a wordpress blog, wordpress or typepage

My first post

Welcome, this is my first post and to be honest I’m not sure what to write right now.  I’ve thought about outlining the purpose of my blog or maybe a little about me, but it feels as though this information should be posted in the default ‘about’ section, so hop over there I guess for this information, or stay here and read below for a brief summary…

Basically, I’ve decided to grasp social media, web 2.0, blogging and the such with both hands and see what I can achieve with it, but without going out there and promoting it to my friends, family and colleagues (at least in the beginning) so other than my girlfriend, no one knows about my blog and I want to see who reads it if anyone does and more importantly, what traffic and new business I can drive to my business IT Pie via my blog and other social media. Currently I only use Facebook for personal networking and I have a LinkedIn profile (though I don’t make the most of it) for professional networking, but in the coming weeks I’m going to investigate all the various social media tools and blog about my experience, from setting it up to using it and the results achieved.

So please, continue to read this blog, post a comment to let me know when you found the blog and visit my company site (IT Pie) – better still employ me and use some of the services we offer.

Tags: In the beginning..., purpose of blog, Social media

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!