Authors, artists of all kinds, are always looking to save a buck. I understand the feeling; I’ve been there myself far to often.
Your author or artist website is a place where I’d hate to see you skimp. I’ve been a professional web developer for over 15 years, so as you read this you should assume I have some skin in this game.
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You may feel overwhelmed with the idea of blogging and are unsure where to begin. To help you get started, Sue has created a Special Report, Tips for Your Business Blog: How to Get Started, What to Write, How to Promote and much more!
The topics covered include:
You can download this free report now at Sue’s other website. Please let us know if you have any questions.
A chap on Linked In asked for my advice on how to install WordPress. I wrote out a quick email and thought I’d include
it here. This is our process, but it’s off the top of my head, so if you run across any discrepancies or errors, I’d so appreciate hearing about it.
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Our good friend Mat Fitzgerald of Split Strategy recently offered a full review of the Spinhead Web Design website and we took him up on it.
Mat provided a thorough assessment of the website including page by page design and copy suggestions.
We have already begun implementing his suggestions and look forward to completing them all.
You can read his full assessment at Split Strategy.
Split Strategy offers detailed, free assessments of your website. Visit Split Strategy and get your free assessment.
We are working on transcribing all the audio from our video tutorials. Following is the transcription for the Managing Links and Link Categories video tutorial.
On the web you’ve seen on various blogs the list of links to other sites. The default that comes installed with WordPress is links to other WordPress sites. The category they are all put in is called Blogroll. You might want different links and a different category or categories. So let’s go do that.
First let’s come into the dashboard and we’ll go to links and link categories. It’s easier to understand if we just create a category and then put links into it. So let’s put in Joel’s Sites and down here in Slug it’s just the same text. You use dashes for spaces. In fact you can put anything you want there; but web friendly so it doesn’t have punctuation.
We’ll add that category and now we have a new category. Let’s add a new category: other sites. We’ll add that category and then we’ll add a new link. Type in the name and the web address and a description. We can now add it to the correct category. Then click Add Link. Add a link to another category.
Then go to Links on the dashboard and you’ll see all those originally in the Blogroll plus those in our categories. To use links we’ll go in the dashboard to Appearance; then Widgets. Drag the Links widget over to the Main Sidebar on the right. We have options to show all links or just a category. There are other settings as well. Now click Save.
We can also add another set of Links and show those from another category if we like. Now we’ve gotten written of the default Blogroll category and created two categories of our own links with links in them. You can play around with links and categories and use them in various places.
Joel D Canfield, Spinhead.com with another WordPress tutorial.
To see the full video, visit the WordPress Tutorial page and click on “Managing Links and Link Categories”.
Want Personalized Help?
What if you could ask me as many questions as you want, all month long? Yes, for $100, you can email me as many questions as you want about WordPress all month long, and I’ll answer in enough detail to allow you to get the work done. For a complete list of all video tutorials available and to sign up for the Monthly Concierge Q&A for $100, visit the WordPress Tutorial page.
We are working on transcribing all the audio from our video tutorials. Following is the transcription for the Changing Basic Widget Settings video tutorial.
Today we’re going to modify widget settings such as Pages, Categories, Recent Comments, Recent Posts, Top Posts & Pages. Widgets usually have options we can configure. Categories for instance. We can give that a title so let’s call it Blog Categories. We can check all the options, Save, and see what they do.
Now at the website it says Blog Categories and instead of a list it’s a drop down and it’s got the number of posts in that category.
Recent Comments – again we can title it to whatever we want and save it. We go back over to the website and now the Comments are titled something different. Every widget has configurable options, usually at least the title.
Play around with widgets. Learn how to configure their options. Remember, if you want to remove a widget temporarily but keep the settings, drag it down to Inactive Widgets. If you want to remove a widget and get rid of it completely, drag it back to the Widgets section on the left. Go back to your website and you’ll see the widget is gone.
Joel D Canfield, Spinhead.com with another WordPress Tutorial.
To see the full video, visit the WordPress Tutorial page and click on “Changing basic widget settings”.
Want Personalized Help?
What if you could ask me as many questions as you want, all month long? Yes, for $100, you can email me as many questions as you want about WordPress all month long, and I’ll answer in enough detail to allow you to get the work done. For a complete list of all video tutorials available and to sign up for the Monthly Concierge Q&A for $100, visit the WordPress Tutorial page.
We are working on transcribing all the audio from our video tutorials. Following is the transcription for the Updating WordPress video tutorial.
If you’ve been using WordPress for any length of time, you’ve seen the message “WordPress 3.5 (or other version) is available! Please update now.” But before you update be sure you backup your database and your theme. I’ve never had a problem updating WordPress. That doesn’t mean I never will. That doesn’t mean you won’t. Whether you use plugins or do it the geeky way through FTP and database tools, back up your database and your theme before you do this update.
Once you’ve backed everything up, click the link to update on your dashboard, then click Update Now. Wait patiently while it is downloaded, unzipped, and applied. Then read all the fascinating information about the new version. In a day or two you can delete that backup if you like. Enjoy your new updated, upgraded version of WordPress.
Joel D Canfield with another WordPress tutorial from Spinhead.com.
To see the full video, visit the WordPress Tutorial page and click on “Updating WordPress (back up your database and theme folder first!)”.
Want Personalized Help?
What if you could ask me as many questions as you want, all month long? Yes, for $100, you can email me as many questions as you want about WordPress all month long, and I’ll answer in enough detail to allow you to get the work done. For a complete list of all video tutorials available and to sign up for the Monthly Concierge Q&A for $100, visit the WordPress Tutorial page.
Though I pay the bills as a WordPress web developer I can’t stop myself writing like mad. My 10th book, You Don’t Want a Job: Why Self-Employment Reduces Your Risks & Increases Your Rewards, supports that claim with reasoning based on the work of Maslow, Csikzentmihalyi, and other experts in the study of what makes us happy. Give it a look, and join my hosts and me on a virtual book tour beginning Friday.
It’s not a sale, it’s an experiment.
How would you like to have a ready-to-use no-brainer zero-hassle blog and website?
What if it included hosting for a year including babysitting all the WordPress security updates, your own domain name, and WordPress professionally installed, including all the plugins and setup I normally do for myself? It’s our Basic Package but without content (which you can add at any time) at a savings of $200. Like this:
Ready Set Go
Instant Blogging
$300
And even better: we’ll hand you the keys in 2 business days. (It’ll probably be even sooner, but we won’t make a promise we can’t keep, and once in a great while, some of the bits take 24 hours to happen.)
That’s it: everything you need to get blogging and build your own website, right now, for $300.
Questions? You know what to do.
13 years ago Joel registered the domain name spinhead.com on February 8, 1999. It’s the one domain name we hang on to no matter what. If you ever want to find us, just Google ‘spinhead’. We can also be found on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Also, March 1st was the 11th anniversary of the web design company’s first website. Despite the years and a lotta changes in between, it still feels a bit like this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010301084836/http://www.spinhead.com/
Looks like we’ll be celebrating 12 years in business this coming March 2013 right here in Rice Lake, Wisconsin.