I am a huge fan of Wordpress blogs.  They are easy to set up and can be molded to fit almost any application.  However, if you are using them “out of the box” so to speak, you aren’t getting their full benefits.  JT Pratt has a post on 20 Things WordPress Doesn’t Do Out of the Box.  Here’s a listing of the subtitles but you really need to visit his post to get the nitty gritty.

1. Page 1: Wordpress Has No Breadcrumbs
2. Page 2 – Wordpress has no Contact Form
3. Page 3 – Most Wordpress Themes have no Archive Index
4. Page 4 – Wordpress Has No Built In Stats
5. Page 5 – Wordpress Has No Sitemap
6. Page 6 – Wordpress Has no Database Tools
7. Page 7 – Wordpress Has No Voting or Polls Tools
8. Page 8 – Wordpress has no “Related Posts” Mechanism
9. Page 9 – You Can’t Reply to Comments Without Visiting Post Page
10. Page 10 – Wordpress Comments are “nofollowed” by default
11. Page 11 – Wordpress Has No Way to Append or Add Content to Your RSS Feed
12. Page 12 – Wordpress Has No Way to Enforce URL Preference
13. Page 13 – Wordpress Has No Mechanism for Adding Code to Posts
14. Page 14 – Wordpress Has No Way to Control Meta Tags or Titles for SEO
15. Page 15 – Wordpress Doesn’t Log or Notify 404 Not Found Errors
16. Page 16 – Wordpress Doesn’t Log What People Search For
17. Page 17 – Wordpress Has No Built-In Translation Capabilities
18. Page 18 – Wordpress Has no Built In Advertising Mechanism
19. Page 19 – Wordpress Has No Monetization Abilities Built-In
20. Page 20 – Wordpress Has No Cache

If some of this makes no sense to you, feel free to comment and ask questions.   Obviously, all of these areas have work arounds.  Usually you just have to add a plug-in and configure it to do what you want.  Sometimes they come in paid packages but often they are free.  Why not use this list to make sure your blog is working its hardest for you and let me know what you think.

Rather than put some ratty old picture up, I found a YouTube video that celebrates balance.  Hope you like it!

If you are so new to all of this that you are afraid to touch anything on your WP Dashboard, do yourself a favor and visit Caroline Middlebrook’s site.  She has a free ebook and video series on building Niche Sites that will help you install a blog on your own server.  In the process, the fear of using the dashboard tends to evaporate. (It helped me).  She also has The Blogger’s Bible that you can get as a free email course.  It takes you from creating a niche blog site to what to do with it to make it work.  If you can’t wait for the email version, you can purchase it but start with the free one to see if it helps you.  She is very good at explaining what she is doing and why.

Of course, you can contact me or comment on this post.  Either way, I will be glad to get back to you if there is something I can help you with.  I don’t claim to be an expert or anything but I do like sharing what I have learned.  :0)

I did find a better way to use StumbleUpon.  Like any online community, StumbleUpon wants you to be an active member.  They don’t want you to use them as a bookmark repository and nothing more.  However, they do stimulate traffic (non-targeted) and can keep you from dropping into Internet Oblivion.

In my last post I said that I was going to start blog commenting and try to find some online communities in my niche.  I want to find blogs where people are commenting and not just posting.  By using the search feature in the StumbleUpon toolbar, I set my search parameters for blogs in my niche (garden blog) and then Stumbled a few of them.  I found some great sites to work with.  Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to do some daily posting to 5 or 6 of them and see what happens.  This should be fun.

I remember the first WordPress blog I installed.  It was so wonderful to see that it actually worked and that the themes could be changed so easily.  I downloaded quite a few so that I could keep changing them and figure out what I liked.  As I kept playing around with them, I realized that if a theme wasn’t widgetized, it really limited what I could do with it.  I know just enough HTML to get into the Theme Editor and find the area that often needs changing but have to find code to cut and paste or I am lost.  I had one really nice looking theme that I dropped because of it.  It just wasn’t worth the time it was going to take for me to figure out how to make it do what I wanted.

From a marketing perspective, I like to have the blog categories and recent posts available with room for advertising as well.  I settled on a three column format which works well because it maximizes important “above the fold” space.  “The next challenge is to keep it from looking cluttered.

I found two themes that are highly customizable.  I am using Atahualpa on my Outdoor Garden Statues blog.  I turned off the left column and added another on on the right.  Rather than make it look unbalanced, it gives more importance to my blog posts and looks cleaner.  My current challenge is to get some Adsense ads where I want them.  I’m working with the Advertising Manager Plugin to see if I can get it to work.  The other theme    I really like is Amazing Grace which is on my Cheap Living Today Blog.  I am considering putting it on this one because it is very clean looking.  If you want to try either one, go into your WordPress Dashboard and search for them on the add new themes page.

On my TO DO LIST is to take the dates off my blog posts.  If you think about it, you never search a blog for dates and if you don’t post all the time, they just make your blog look neglected.

One of the things that prompted this post is that I have been routinely adding the All In One SEO plugin to every blog I make.  I recently realized that Atahualpa is already SEO Optimized.  Since the important thing is to have a title, description, keywords, etc on each page, it doesn’t matter how it gets there.  It is redundant to add a plugin to do what the theme is already doing so I don’t need it.  I might be missing something but I have decided to turn the plugin off and use the built in capabilities of the theme itself.    So far, so good.

I have some thoughts to post in my Internet Notebook about forming a marketing plan that I can stick to.  With all the stuff hitting my email, there is a lot of confusion out there.  I need to simplify it and make a daily plan so that I know what I need to do daily.  After all, I just had another grandson born this week and two of them live in my house.  I don’t have time to start from scratch each day, but that is for another time.

If you have discovered ways to work with themes that make them a little more effective for you, why not share them in a comment?  This blog is an experiment in process.  We’ll keep what works and throw out what doesn’t.  I sure welcome your input.

OK, I know I’m a little slow but I don’t remember anyone telling me what to do with the meta tags in my WordPress blogs.  I knew about the All In One SEO Plug In for posts but not what to do with the blog itself.  I would go to the settings page and enter everything I could there but was missing tags for the blog itself.

Today I finally investigated and learned that you can add the Meta Information to your blog’s header file.  Now before you go off snickering, I should tell you that I don’t know much about coding blogs.  I used to make static websites with HTML and this is similar but a little different.  Fortunately I know enough to be able to edit someone else’s page and finally solved my problem.

I know I’m not the only one facing this.  If you have uploaded a blog and think that the META data will show up when you fill in a few forms, it doesn’t.  You have to put it in.  If you aren’t sure about what you are doing, be sure to copy your header .php file before you begin.  That way if you goof, you can paste the original code back in.  You can find out more information from the WordPress Codex.

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