Blogging Course Notes 2011

8/4/2019 Blogging Course Notes 2011

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Blogging for Business

Course Notes

By @philoakley (www.twitter.com/philoakley)

From @outserveweb (www.twitter.com/outserveweb)

Website – www.outserveweb.com

Facebook – www.facebook.com/OutserveWeb

There is a companion blog to along with these notes available at

http://OutTraining.wordpress.com/

Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

January 2011 Outserve Ltd

© Outserve Ltd 2011 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Page1



ContentsIntroduction ............................................................................................................................4

Sign Up for a WordPress.com Account...................................................................................5

Posts......................................................................................................................................9

Write you first post................................................................................................................10

Permalinks........................................................................................................................11

Entering your post.............................................................................................................12

Embedding Media into a post............................................................................................14

Categories and Tags.........................................................................................................15

Save, Preview and Publish...............................................................................................16

Twitter and WordPress.com..................................................................................................17

WordPress .com to Twitter................................................................................................17

Twitter to WordPress.com.................................................................................................18

WordPress Settings..............................................................................................................20

General Settings...............................................................................................................21

General Settings – Blog icon.............................................................................................22

Writing

Settings....................................................................................................................23

Reading Settings...............................................................................................................24

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)......................................................................................25

Discussion Settings...........................................................................................................27

Media Settings..................................................................................................................28

Privacy Settings................................................................................................................29

Users....................................................................................................................................30

Upgrades -Premium services..............................................................................................32

Appearance..........................................................................................................................33

Themes.............................................................................................................................34

Widgets.............................................................................................................................35

Change your Header Image..............................................................................................39

Pages................................................................................................................................41




Badges and Widgets............................................................................................................42

Legal Disclaimer...................................................................................................................43

Copyright notice...................................................................................................................43




Introduction

These course notes are designed to get you started blogging. If you completethe steps in the course you should have the start of a fully featured blog, but of

course this is just the start if you want a successful and productive blog then itwill normally take consistent effort over a period of time. This course shouldgive you enough knowledge to get that great blog started.

The course is based on using WordPress.com a very well known and respectedhosted blogging platform. This means that the blog is hosted for you at no cost(there can be some adverts placed on your blog to cover hosting).WordPress.com does offer a premium ad-free service with other additionalextras, details at http://en.WordPress.com/products/ .

Although the course is based on WordPress.com most of the training is

transferable to other blogging platforms which offer similar functionality. Also if you were to find WordPress.com restrictive then you have the full open sourceWordPress software hosted by a third party or even host it yourself whichoffers the opportunity to customise further.


Definition of a Blog from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)

A blog (a contraction of the term "web log") is a type of website, usually maintained

by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other

material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-

chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.





Sign Up for a WordPress.com Account continued

You can change you domain name during the sign up process tohttp://somethingunique.WordPress.com. and you should consider SEO friendlyURL e .g i f you se l l So lar Pane ls in the UK then maybeuksolarpanels.wordpress.com although again your business name may be a

popular choice. At this stage you can also set the title of you blog (don’t worrythis can be changed later if you don’t like what you first choose).

Once you have completed the registration you should be taken to the

dashboard screen. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) and theDashboard screen is the back end ‘control panel’ for your blog so you cancontrol you ‘content’ (the information you put on your website).




Navigation of WordPress is controlled be the main toolbar on the left. Below isbrief summary of the main areas of the menu and what they are for




After you have completed the signup go and have a look at your website eitherby clicking the ‘visit site’ link form the top left or by typing you web addressinto another browser screen. With none of the configuration changed and alldefault settings the website should look very similar to the screen below:






Write you first post

Click ‘Add New’ from the posts screen and you will be presented with the

main post screen below.

First you will need a title. Titles of posts are key for being found on Google asthey create the permalink (see below). A few tips on blog titles:

Keep them short and interesting

Make them a good description of the post

Try to make the title something that would make people want to readmore

If possible, include your keywords into your title




Permalinks

A Permalink is short for permanent link. For every post you publish to yourblog, WordPress automatically creates a permalink that looks contains the dateof the post and the title

http://WordPress.com/2006/04/20/blog-post-title/

This link will always point to a specific post, even if you’ve blogged all kinds of new things and your old posts have moved off your blog’s homepage and intoyour archives. Other bloggers and sites can use your permalinks to link to aspecific post of yours. Search engines also use permalinks to separately indexeach post on your blog.




Entering your post

WordPress.com has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor soyou can enter direct text into the main box with the ‘Visual Tab’

After you have completed the title you need to 'craft' a post. If you prefer youcan use a word processor or software of choice to create the main body of thetext and then copy and paste it into the main window (below) although wewould using either a basic text editor or saving files in RTF format because youcan copy across the formatting from word processing format which canconfuse the WordPress editor.




When entering a new post for WordPress.com on the website you will be usingtheir WYSIWYG editor with a main row of icons. Some of the icons will befamiliar to you is you are used to using word processors. The main buttons areexplained in order below

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

1. Bold

2. Italics

3. Strike through e.g. Strike through

4. Bulleted

5. Numbered

6. Block quote - normally used for text quoted from a person or website

7.Formatted Left

8. Centred

9. Formatted Right

10. Link to another site or page e.g. bbc.co.uk

11. Break the link - bbc.co.uk

12. Inserting more tag will complete the visible part of the post and offer a'more' link

13. Spell check

14. Full Screen mode - enters into a full screen edit mode

15. Shows even more options:




Embedding Media into a post

Long lists of text posts are not attractive and are thought not to entice areader so it is recommended to embed media into a post even if it is just arelated (however loosely) picture. From the upload/insert bar (above the maintoolbar) you can upload:

An image

Video

Audio

Media

Poll (via PollDaddy form)

Form (e.g. contact form)

More details of embedding media in a blog post are on the example blog at:

http://outtraining.WordPress.com/2010/02/20/embed-audio-images-and-video-

media-in-a-WordPress-com/

and

http://outtraining.WordPress.com/2009/12/08/embedding-content-in-posts/

and forms

http://outtraining.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/adding-forms-to-wordpress-com-posts/

and polls

http://outtraining.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/create-polls-on-wordpress-com/






Save, Preview and Publish

At any time you can, and should at regular intervals, save your post by clicking

‘Save Draft’ this will not post the article to the blog but will ensure no

information is lost. Before publishing to your blog you can preview how the

post will look. This is especially important if you have any embedded mediasuch as pictures to ensure that layout looks right.

You can save and edit a post as often

as you like before you are happy to

publish it. Once you are happy to post

your website clicking the ‘Publish’

button will send it to the site for all to

see (depending on your privacy

settings).

Although you can edit a post after is has been published to your site once theoriginal post has been published it may have been searched by Google andpublished in RSS feeds.




Twitter and WordPress.com

A blog can be a great way to integrate multiple social media activity and also

get the most out of the time and effort put into them. If you have a Twitter

account then you can use it to broadcast information from your blog and also

bring your tweets onto you blog. There are a two main ways that you canint egr ate Twit ter (the well known micro blogg ing ser vic e at

http://twitter.com).

WordPress .com to Twitter

The first is to send a title and link of

your new post once you have

published it. To do this visit the ‘MyBlogs’ link from the main menu under

‘Dashboard’.

Here you can tick the Publicize Twitter and it will take you to the Twitter

authorisation page to link your accounts

You can also update a Facebook profile automatically. Understandably you will

need an account with Twitter or Facebook if you want to use these services.




Twitter to WordPress.com

The second way you can integrate your WordPress.com blog to Twitter is to

bring all of your Twitter updates on you blog using the Twitter widget (more on

widgets later).

From the ma in menu se lec t

Appearance> Widgets

You should be presented with a list of widgets on the right and should find theTwitter Widget towards the bottom. Click and drag the widget to the left had

sidebar (you may have 1 or 2 sidebars depending on your theme).

Once in one of the right hand sidebars click the right hand down arrow next

to the twitter widget:

This will display the twitter widgetoptions:

Twitter Widget Options:






WordPress Settings

By now if you have made your first post and added some tags and categoriesthe blog will be starting to take shape but there are many settings that can becontrol and customise your blog.




General Settings

Blog title

Can be changed butgood to get your

preferred title rightfirst time. (nothingwrong with ‘BusinessNames’ blog also addsto Google juice)

Tag line

Not essential but anice not have (many

businesses have taglines already). Canalso be changed later.Also think aboutkeywords and Google Juice

Times/Dates

Preference for display

of dates and times.Most default settingsshould be fine.




General Settings – Blog icon

General Settings also allow you to

upload a picture/logo. As well as

being used around WordPress.com

(their directory etc) it is also usedas the sites favicon which will show

in the browsers tab (where

supported)

e.g.




Writing Settings

Size of post box

This is the box that you type your post into on the post new and edit screen, itcan be made longer (this often depends on the size of your screen whether is

it helpful). The input box can also be made wider by using the on

the postings screen and setting the columns to 2:

Post by email

You can write an email post by email and send it directly to you blog. There are

full instructions on how this works on following web page:

http://en.support.WordPress.com/post-by-email/




Reading Settings

Front page

Set to latest postsor a static page

that you havesetup.

B l o g p a g e s

show at most

Set how many blogposts show oneach page.

Feed setting referto RSS (see below)




RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

Nearly all blogs are setup to use RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This justmeans that people can subscribe to your posts in an RSS reader such asGoogle Reader.

Continued


Definition of RSS from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss)

RSS (most commonly expanded as "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web

feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news

headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is

called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus

metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by

letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to

subscribe to timely updates from favoured websites or to aggregate feeds from many

sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader",

"feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-

device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published

once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering

into the reader the feed's URI or by clicking an RSS icon in a web browser that initiates

the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly

for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to

monitor and read the feeds





Discussion Settings

One of the big benefits of a blog is that people can leave comments (if youdecide this is appropriate) and then if you want you can respond to thecomments by commenting back yourself, in doing so engaging with yourreaders and creating conversation.

Some popular blogs have closed comments deliberately as they do not want toallow people to comment other blogs can have a 100 comments on a post. Themore comments a blog has then the more popular it will look to readers andto Google.

The ‘Discussion Settings’ control whether comments are allowed or not andwhether a user has to be logged in (i.e. has a WordPress.com account).

WordPress has comment spam control built in. Spam messages left in

comments are very common and are not always easy to spot. The commentmay look genuine but there may be a link on the user name that is a promotingcontent that you would not want your blog to be linked to. Most commentspam is left by bots which are automated systems not requiring a human to soanything.

Depending on your settings once youhave a comment it will be incomments section from the left handmenu bar from here you can decide if you want to approve it, delete it ormark it as spam (see screenshotbe l ow) . Th e sa me appl ie s toTrackbacks and Pingbacks which are,put simply, just references to your blogon other blogs.




Media Settings

The sizes listed above determine the maximum dimensions in pixels to use

when inserting an image into the body of a post.

All of the defaults should be fine unless you looking at getting advanced with

your images.




Privacy Settings

In these notes there is a presumption that you are setting up a blog to be

found and gain more visitors but there are can be many reasons when you

might not not want to be found for a period of time or even indefinitely.

Also you could also keep you blog to a private community that you control.




Users

As previously mentioned a WordPress blog can have multiple users and the

Administrator (usually the person who set the blog up) can control the users

rights.

Users can be controlled from theusers section of the main menu

If you’d like your blog to feature posts from multiple authors, you can add as

many administrative accounts to your blog as you like. There are two ways to

add new users:

If they are

already have a

WordPress.com

then add them

on

Users>Authors

& Users

See below for an explanation of the different roles

If they are not a

WordPress.com user then

invite them from

Users>Invites




Users can be set to four different levels (roles):

Administrator

An administrator has full and complete ownership of a blog and can do

absolutely everything possible. Complete power over posts/pages, comments,

settings, theme choice, import, users only one administrator per blog isrecommended.

Editor

An editor can publish, edit, and delete any posts/pages, moderate comments,

manage categories, manage tags, manage links and upload files/images.

Author

An author can edit, publish and delete their posts, as well as upload files/images

Contributor

A contributor can edit their posts but cannot publish them. When a contributor

creates a post, it will need to be submitted to an administrator for review.

Once a contributor’s post is approved by an administrator and published,

however, it may no longer be edited by the contributor.

A contributor does not have the ability to upload files/images.




Upgrades -Premium services

All of the notes are based on the free version of WordPress.com but there canbe many reasons to add paid for services or even to host your blog with thirdparty or on one of your own servers.

The current services offered by WordPress.com and the prices are below:




Appearance

The appearance of your blog can be very important to attracting and keeping

readers. It can also be important to the impression you want to leave with thereader especially when looking at consistent branding for your business or

product.

Leaving all of the settings as default can make the blog look quite plain but

probably more importantly will make it look very similar to 1000’s of blogs that

have also kept the default settings.

This said there are many very popular blogs that keep it very simple and plain

after all “Content Is King”. Also if you reader sees your post in an RSS reader(see RSS section) or is subscribed by email they will not see your website

design. You could have the most attractive blog in the world but if there is no

quality content then there will be few readers.

WordPress.com offer many features to change and control the look and feel of

your blog. Below are just some of the main options.




Themes

A WordPress.com site’s overall look and layout is controlled by theme.

Currently all WordPress.com blogs come with a default theme called Kubrick

which while it is quite flexible is quite plain when first setup.

WordPress .com of fers

many themes and they can

be changed in an instance.

There is also a preview

window if a new theme so

you can see what your site

might look like before

selecting.

You can search through all

the themes and try different

ones until you are happy.

When looking for an

appropriate theme you can

use feature filters to search

by:

Colour

Columns – A theme can have a different number of columns on either the

right or left to add additional content.

Custom header – Selecting a theme with a custom header makes it possible

to change the main image at the top of the blog to your own image or logo.

Widgets – as many of the additional content can be added easily with widgets

(see separate widgets section) is recommended that you search for a theme

which supports widgets (not all do).




Widgets

A widget is a tool that allows you to add, arrange, and remove content from

the sidebars of your blog. Widgets make it easy to customise the content of

your blog sidebar(s).

You can access the widgets from the

Appearance menu in your Dashboard:

Widgets can be activated by dragging and dropping over to your sidebars on

the right. Here they can be re-ordered to your preference again by drag and

drop.

Some of the most useful widgets have been used on the OutTraining blog and

are listed below with descriptions:




Widgets

EXAMPLE DESCRIPTION

Recent Posts Widget

The recent posts widget gives the titles of your recently written content, so that your

readers can quickly see what’s new and click

through to read your latest posts. Set a title

and how many posts to show.

Blog Subscriptions via email

The blog subscription widget allows you todisplay a subscription form so that you

readers can signup for blog subscriptions via

email.

Text Widget

The text widget allows you to enter text

directly into a box. It also allows you to

enter HTML. In the example on the left it is

being used to display a Twitter Badge image

with a link to the OutserveWeb twitter

page. Text boxes are very versatile but do

not support javascript which is used by

some badges inc lud ing Facebook .

WordPress.com does not allow users to

embed JavaScript.

Categories Widget

The categories widget alphabetically lists the

categories used on your blog




Archives

The archives widget shows a monthly

archive of your blog posts

Twitter Widget

The Twitter widget allows you to display

updates from a Twitter account in the

sidebar of your blog. It can be used multiple

times if you want to bring in more than one

Twitter account. You can decide how many

tweets you include and how whether you

include @ replies (public messages you have

sent to other twitter users).

Delicious Widget

Share the bookmarks you save to

Delicious.com. Good way to share links.

Requires an account at delicious.

Search Widget

The search widget adds a search form for

your blog.




Vodpod Widget

The Vodpod videos widget lets you display

image-links to your favourite videos from

around the web in your sidebar. Requires

account from http://vodpod.com/.

Calendar Widget

The calendar widget will create a calendar

in your sidebar with clickable links to your

blogs posts for a particular date. The

calendar widget does not let you setup acalendar of events or anything similar. It’s

only use is to display links to your posts by

date.

Tag Cloud Widget

The tag cloud widget will display a cloud-like

selection of your tags, with the tags most

used appearing larger than the ones leastused – this gives an at a glance view of your

favourite subjects, and lets your readers

know the things you write most commonly

about.




Change your Header Image

Changing the Theme and adding widgets can make your site more attractive

but it still is not original in design many people can be using that design and

those widgets. One significant item that you can change to make your blog

design unique is change the header image for one of your own. The image could

be personal favourites, relevant to your blog or include you logo.

To change your header images you need to have a theme which supports

customised headers (you can use the theme search filters to find these).

Navigate to Appearance>Custom

header. From here you can often

change colours and styles of the image

but it is far more effective to change

the image completely.

The header image screen will show the exact dimensions of the header image(in the case of Kubrick above this is 740 x192). If the image you have is largerthan this WordPress will help you crop the image although it is better to haveprepared image with right dimensions (if you do not have any image editingsoftware you could download Gimp from http://www.gimp.org/)




In the example blog http://outtraining.wordpress.com the theme was changedto Coraline which included by default the image below.

For the purpose of this blog animage was found on Flickr with acreative commons license andpermission was requested to cropit and use it for the blog. The imagewas cropped to the exactdimensions (990 × 180 pixels)anduploaded from the customerheader page.




Pages

As well as the main blog page where all posts are shown in reverse

chronological order you can add other pages to your blog making it look and

act more like a traditional website. If required any of these pages can be set to

be your home page.

The default home page can be set in Settings>Reading Settings

A page can be created and edited from the main editing tool bar on the left




Badges and Widgets

Badges are a quick and easy way to link people to your Twitter or Facebook pages. Often these badges are put on an organisations website or blog. The

simplest badge, which has become very popular, is a ‘Find us on Facebook®’Badge normally a simple Facebook® logo promoting a link to your Facebook®page. As below:

T h i s b a d g e i s a v a i l a b l e f r o m F a c e b o o k ®(http://www.Facebook.com/note.php?note_id=12259414821)

The HTML below is used for the Text Widget. Of course you will want tochange the link, in bold below, to be your Facebook® Page (the image link refers to my Flickr page but this should work for everybody)

HTML

< a h r e f = "http://www.Facebook.com/LottyBox">< img s rc=" /http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2768/4332871421_e7b6348a22_o.jpg"></a>




Legal Disclaimer

These notes contain general information only. Nothing in these pages

constitutes legal advice. You should consult a suitably qualified lawyer on any

specific legal problem or matter.

Outserve Ltd makes no warranties, representations or undertakings about: any

of the content on these notes (including, without limitation, any as to the

quality, accuracy, completeness or fitness for any particular purpose of such

content); or any content of any other web site referred to or accessed by

hypertext link through these ("3rd party site").

Outserve Ltd does not endorse or approve the content of any 3rd party site,

nor will Outserve Ltd have any liability in connection with any of them

(including, but not limited to, liability arising out of any allegation that thecontent of any 3rd party site infringes any law or the rights of any person or

entity).

Any enquiries should be directed to the [email protected]

Copyright notice

The content of these pages is protected by copyright © Outserve Ltd 2009 –

2011. You may download this document and you can provide content to others

– but you must not sell our content or republish it except as permitted underthe Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

UK: England & Wales license which this document is released .

You are welcome to link or use this document and or text online, but do not

do so in a way that is likely to give your users the mistaken impression that our

content is yours or that our site endorses or is affiliated with yours.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike3.0 UK: England & Wales by Outserve Limited. To view a copy of this license,visit:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 2nd Street, Suite 300, SanFrancisco, California, 94105, USA.

© Outserve Ltd 2011

Documents

Blogging Course Notes 2011