Check Out the Lifestyle Theme for WordPress

Whether you’re a one-person shop at a kitchen table, or the next Rupert Murdoch (or both), you need to start thinking like a media business.

Say you want to run an online magazine. Or maybe you’re a personal publisher executing on myriad ideas that need more options than a simple blog post can provide.

You’re covering multiple topics, in multiple formats.

You’ve got video, you’ve got text, you’ve got photos … You’ve got the idea.

How do you organize and layout all that content in a meaningful and attractive way for your readers?

Let’s take a look at the Lifestyle theme for WordPress from Copyblogger Media’s StudioPress division.

Lifestyle, simply put, is an elegant frame for everything you’re publishing. Particularly if you’re publishing everything.

Effortless design and layout

Organization and layout of various forms of content is easily the biggest headache facing the magazine publisher.

It’s true that you could drop everything into a traditional blog theme and run with it. But what if you could comfortably create and maintain a magazine-style site that was comparable to the biggest players around?

And what if that site was built on one of the most secure and stable foundations available?

The Lifestyle child theme powered by the Genesis framework delivers just that with your content.

In Lifestyle you’ll find, with a few clicks, just what you need to organize your growing new media presence:

• Simple widgets to control and support your video, photography, and in-depth articles
• Quick-change between five different color schemes without touching a line of code
• Evolve with your site’s growth using six different page layout options
• Powerfully simple navigation control allows you to highlight your most important work
• Logical category layout that lets your readers get to what they want

Best part is, we’ve only been talking about the skin of your site here.

Let’s move on to the breakthrough that’ll put you into an elite class of hackers and SEOs, without spending a single minute sweating inside a computer science class…

Simplicity and stability

If you’re building a website these days, you’re in luck. The idea of a “framework” has revolutionized the ease and power of what a website (or blog) can do and be.

Genesis is much more than a mere WordPress theme. It’s an underlying framework of immaculate code that’s been built to achieve two general objectives:

1. Spoon-feed Google your content. If you know anything about how SEO works (don’t worry if you don’t, Genesis will take care of a lot of it for you), you know that Google hands out brownie points for clean code. As amazing as search engine are, they’re not as smart or grown-up as you might think. Present them with an orderly, squeaky clean page of code, and you’re well on your way to a solid ranking for your chosen words.

2. Erase the headaches of constant, stressful updates. Everything changes. Nowhere more quickly than on the web. Unless you’re a rockstar developer, being up-to-date on the latest SEO, WordPress, and security developments can be a full-time gig. The Genesis framework responds and adapts to these constant advancements.

So, the power of a framework lies in its simplicity, spotlessness and stability.

With one click of that update button, Genesis handles the fickle problems of SEO and security for you.

And it does all of this without going near the design of your site, which is taken care of entirely through the use of “child themes”.

Uh, what’s a child theme and why should I care?

Think of Genesis (the framework) as your car, including the engine, the transmission and the thousands of parts that make it run.

Lifestyle (and the 30 other child themes from Studiopress) are the paint job that make your car so damn hot. You pick the color, the stripes, and an airbrushed coyote howling at the desert moon (if that’s your thing).

Here’s where the car analogy breaks down (as if it hadn’t already): the really cool thing about using child themes is the ability to change the “paint job” of your site in minutes, without trashing the underlying engine that powers your site.

• Want to focus on your photography this year? Drop in Landscape and start snapping away.
• Bootstrapping a new startup? Easily skin your site in Venture, and then get on with generating revenue.
• Prefer point-and-click design control over your theme elements? Pick up Prose and unleash your creativity without code.

Whether you’re building a new site, or revamping a classic, child themes allow you the freedom to re-invent yourself without ever touching the critical code underneath.

Website security ain’t easy, until now …

There’s no way around the fact that some very talented, very bad folks are out there hacking away at blogs and websites every day.

Question: when was the last time you updated your WordPress software, or your particular theme’s software?

If you’re anything like me, it’s been a while. You think, “Eh, I can let it go for a bit, can’t be that important…”

Maybe you’re worried that all the work you’ve put into the design and customization of your site will disappear into the digital ether as soon as you punch that ominous “upgrade” button.

The bad news is that not upgrading software is one of the most common reasons websites and blogs get hacked.

The good news is that Brian Gardner has worked like a dog on your behalf, to make the Genesis framework upgrade process a piece of cake.

Painless. Future-proof. Easy.

If you’re more worried about upgrades breaking your site than you are hackers breaking in, you’ve got the wrong theme.

Keep your site (and your readers) safe…

Get Lifestyle + Genesis today

• Lifestyle’s color and widget design controls to layout your content the way you want
• A great-looking magazine-style theme that puts a laser focus on your content
• The considerable SEO and security benefits of the rock-solid Genesis Framework
• Unlimited updates and support (you’re not alone)
• The go ahead to use Lifestyle on as many sites as you want (no developer surcharge)

Pick up Lifestyle powered by Genesis today.

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Three Ways to Take Advantage of Being a Blogging “No One”

This guest post is by Chris, “The Traffic Blogger”.

My name is “no one.” Well frankly, to you, being that you have no idea who I am, my name might as well be “no one.” However, just because I am a “no one” does not mean I have nothing to say! Many of you may actually know exactly what it is I want to say because you also are a “no one” like me.

I am a “no one” and I have dreams. I have aspirations, a good work ethic and although there are others with the same name as me, there is only one person who can be me. So just because my name and situation are not unique, does not make my personality, good humor and helpful nature a common commodity. Nobody else can be me—even other “no one”s!

I am “no one,” and I have something to say! I exist! I want to help people and I need to reach out to them! I write helpful content several days a week but I cannot find other people besides my mother to read my work. I exist whether I have a comment, a follower, or not!

Are you a “no one” as well? I know that I sure was when I first started writing a gaming blog two years ago. It took many months of hard work before 1000 people called my site home and two years later a staggering 9,000 individuals read my content daily. What I did as a “no one” was the difference between building a site that worked and one that would lead to me wasting my time.

There are two drastically different ways to look at being a “no one:”

You can realize this is hard work and eventually give up.
You can take advantage of being a “no one.”

If you chose option ‘B’, good for you! But how can you possibly take advantage of being a “no one?”

1. Be a new presence with fresh ideas.

If you are a new person to any niche you have an opportunity to jump off the band wagon and stand all by yourself on an island build out of your own ideas. Many people find fresh ideas exciting and inspiring, so play off this notion as much as you can by making your site seem very new and inviting.

Write content that is challenging of old concepts and revolutionary at the same time. In other words, don’t be just another site in your niche. If you manage to pull this off then you will be the person everyone wants a guest post from or the one person they all talk about on forums (which you should also be participating in).

2. Experiment and don’t be afraid to mess up.

Making mistakes and learning is what it’s all about. Although you will never stop screwing up and learning, it pays to get the bulk of your speed bumps out of the way earlier on. Write outrageous articles, experiment with cheesy headlines and do all the big mistakes we all learn from early on. You’re a “no one” so nobody will mind your early mistakes. Take advantage of the situation and do some learning.

3. Build a relationship with the few readers you do manage to get, while you have time to do so.

As your site grows you will find it impossible to build relationships with your readers the way you could when you were a “no one.” If you skip this crucial stage of intimately connecting with those who like you from the outset, then you will be building a structure whose foundation is made of Swiss cheese.

Be intimate with your readers and pick their brains on what their problems are, what they think so far of your site, and more. You’ll need these fans later when you want to promote site growth, especially with regards to social media.

Are you a “no one”? If you are, what are you going to do about it? If you aren’t, what did you do to go from a “no one” to a “someone?”

Chris “The Traffic Blogger” writes on the subject of generating traffic for both new and advanced site owners for the purpose of making money online. He is a self-proclaimed expert on building communities and marketing solutions for those communities.

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Niche Marketing Breakdown

Before jumping into your next ad campaign, or even starting a new web site or blog, take a step back and look at exactly who you are tying to target. We often come up with great ideas for new ad campaigns and site, then start getting excited with our ideas, without looking at the big picture and room for improvement. It’s not enough to target a niche, but it’s now more important than ever to focus on niches within niches.

An excellent example of a huge site in it’s own niche, is IGN.com, which is one of the largest video game sites on the internet. They don’t just cover computer games, they cover all games! Everything from XBox, Playstation, Wii, Computer Games and more. IGN has the massive exposure, staff and funding to take on this massive and competitive niche like many others can’t. Pushing out quality content and video on a daily basis isn’t a problem for them. With all of that said, do you think you would be able to compete with a player like IGN.com if you wanted to get into the video game space? Probably not.

You want to focus on video games, but how can you compete at the same time? Simple… break down your efforts and focus on a niche group. Instead of trying to create an ad campaign, web site or blog that focuses on all games, you need to be selective on your targets and ad copy. An excellent way to do this, would be to focus on one of the big three (Wii, PS3, XBox). To break down your efforts and increase your return on efforts, you can go a level deeper and select specific games which are only available on one of these system.

Using Google’s Keyword Tool, we can pull up quick reports on how many time the big three gaming systems are searched in a given month. Among the three systems, you have over 300 million searches every month. Even if you were to grab just one tenth of a percent (.001%) of this traffic, you would have 300,000 visitors to your blog… but the competition for these keywords is phenomenally high, as you can see from the “competition” bar below.

Break down each of the gaming systems to another level, such as the most popular games from each system. You can see we still have millions of monthly searches, and they vary heavily based on the game search. Competition is still extremely high, which usually means there is good money to be spent and made in this area… but the majority of these advertisers are probably big and well funded sites in the video game space.

One last time… let’s take one of the search results from above and break it down by itself. You are now given a selection of top keywords searched just on this one search term. Now you have a massive amount of search results and topics all on this one tight niche group. Had you created a blog on call of duty when it first came out, you would have reaped the benefits every time a new version of the game came out.

This breakdown is a perfect example of how you can take one niche and continually break it down til you have a super tight and high traffic topic. Instead of spreading you and your ad campaign or web site thin, why not focus on a single topic with a large following and search traffic? You will find that not only will you provide exactly what your customers and site readers are looking for, but they are also more likely to be in a buying / action mode, which increases overall revenue.

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Will Your Site Survive the Google Shrink Ray?

Google likes to play a little game with those of us who do business online.

The game is called “change all the rules and see who survives.” It’s often a fun and rewarding game for Google users, but it can be painful for business owners.

In the latest version, Google has rolled out a feature called Instant Previews.

When enabled, users see a cute little magnifying glass sitting next to their search results. The user can view a quick snapshot of sites simply by hovering over links.

Remember the three-second rule for websites? The one that said that your visitor will decide within the first three seconds whether or not they’ll stay on your site?

Forget that: it’s now the 0.3 second rule. Does your site have what it takes to make the cut?

Let’s find out. (And if not, let’s get it fixed.)

Snap judgments served here

With Instant Preview, potential visitors are going to make a judgment about whether or not to visit your site without even reading the content. It’s too small to see in the pop up window. They’re going to decide based purely on — (drumroll, please) — design.

Potential site visitors don’t have to leave Google to get a peek at your pages. What will they find when they see your site reduced so that it’s just large enough to read the name, the headlines, and maybe the subheads?

Don’t despair if you don’t like what you see. You can polish up your site so it holds up when viewed under Google’s magnifying glass. Just follow these few simple steps.

Clear the clutter

Some pages are cluttered with so many ads, sidebar entries, social media icons and sign up boxes the visitor won’t want to see them full size. Why magnify clutter?

To remedy this, decide what one action you want users to take on your page. You may have more than one possible path to send visitors down, but which one takes priority?

Once you know what you’d most like them to do, set up your page so that this action stands out. Put it toward the top, make it larger, use brighter colors to emphasize it.

Then don’t be afraid to strip off the ads, sidebar items and icons that are distracting from that one action. Push them down the page, and display them in colors that are subtle and low-key.

Customize, simplify, implement consistently

Here are a few ways to know if your site looks bargain basement:

• Does your header feature cheap clip art?
• Are you using lots of different colors with no discernible visual branding?
• How about typefaces? If you need more than two or three fingers to count the different typefaces used on your site, you’re in trouble.

You can create a custom header image for your site using a nice, clear typeface and a textured background you download from free or inexpensive photo sharing sites. Combine them using free image editing software, and you have a no-cost, unique header image you can use on your site and in your email marketing. You’ll stand out, even if you can’t afford to hire a designer right now.

When it comes to colors, pick two main colors, and make sure all your headlines, subheads and site graphics reinforce these choices. Black or grey text don’t count toward this total.

This doesn’t mean you can only use two colors: just give your two main colors priority, because that will reinforce your visual brand.

Stick to two typefaces as well. Your graphic style will be clearer and easier to capture in a glance if you’ve used two typefaces consistently throughout your site.

And of course, you can always take a “shortcut” by getting a turn-key premium WordPress theme that incorporates these professional design elements without having to pay for a designer.

Headlines always matter

In a “snap judgment” environment, a great headline is one of the most valuable tools that can stack the deck in your favor.

If headlines aren’t your strong suit, be sure to check out the great resources here on Copyblogger for creating more compelling headlines.

While you’re at it, make sure your subheads also tell a compelling story. Since your readers can often read them from the preview, they’ll help entice and attract the reader to click through and learn more.

And while we’re talking subheads …

Make your content scannable

Readers can’t see individual sentences from Instant Preview.

But they can see if your content has been broken up into short paragraphs, with plenty of white space.

Long stretches of unbroken text can intimidate your searcher. They make your content look difficult and painful to digest.

Just about any piece of writing can be made more reader-friendly by breaking it into short sentences, short paragraphs, and using strong subheads to keep the reader oriented.

Time to clean up your act

I’ve said it in this space before. Sure, content is king. But if your handsome king looks like an ugly toad, who’s going to pay attention?

It’s more important now than ever to spend time polishing up the visual presentation of your site. Not only will it help you with Instant Preview, but all of these enhancements will make your site look better on small mobile device screens as well.

And — added bonus — they even improve reader experience on a full-sized screen. Come take a look at the brand new Copyblogger design for ideas you can implement on your own site.

What will you do to survive the Google shrink ray? Tell us about it in the comments.

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Awesome WordPress Plugins to Empower Your Visitors

This guest post is by Jeff Starr, co-author of the book Digging into WordPress.

Helping your visitors get the most out of your site benefits everyone. Visitors get more relevant and useful content, and you enjoy better statistics and more exposure. Unfortunately the game is set up to keep people away from your site. Think about it:

• Search engines are used to find your content
• Feed readers are used to read your content
• Social media is used to share, tag, and organize your content

These are major obstacles, certainly, but they don’t have to work against you. People use search engines, feed readers, and social media because they provide functionality missing from most websites. By integrating some of that same functionality into your site, you empower your visitors to maximize its usefulness. This may sound like a tall order, but if you’re using WordPress, improving your site couldn’t be easier. Let’s look at some awesome WordPress plugins to make it happen.

Google-power your search results

People will always use external search engines like Google to find content on your site. That’s a good thing, but you also want to empower your users with the best possible search results. WordPress’ default search is limited in several ways:

• does not do “exact-match” searching
• only searches posts and post titles
• only searches your current WordPress installation
• can be painfully slow, gobbles resources

Fortunately, we can harness the power of Google and empower your users with the most accurate, comprehensive, and speedy search possible. Integrating Google Search into your site provides the following benefits:

• exact-match searching (i.e., using quotes to match specific phrases)
• searches your entire site plus any other desired sites or directories
• usually works pretty quickly – much faster than WordPress default search
• optional additional revenue through Google’s AdSense program

Sound good? Here are some of the best plugins to make it happen:

Google Search for WordPress

This beautiful plugin works silently behind the scenes to replace WordPress’ search results with Google’s search results. You simply install the plugin and enter your Google API Key in the Google Search Settings. If you don’t have an API Key, it’s free and easy to get one. The only other requirement is to include “Powered by Google” next to your search form and on the search-results page. Once it’s installed, all search results will be replaced by those from Google. No code-wrangling required.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Google Custom Search Plugin

The Google Custom Search Plugin is another excellent way to integrate Google Search into your WordPress blog. Instead of signing up for an API Key, visit Google Search and create your own custom search engine by walking through the steps. After setting up your own form, grab the generated code and paste it into the plugin’s Settings page.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

More from Google

The More from Google plugin works a little differently by adding to your default search results instead of completely replacing them. After installing and configuring the plugin, your search results will include matches from both WordPress and Google. If Google has yet to index your entire site, this may be the perfect way to ensure that visitors are getting the best search results.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Other Ways to Improve WordPress Default Search

If Google Search isn’t for you, don’t fret. Here are two additional plugins that will vastly improve WordPress’ default search:

• Search Everything – literally searches everything in your database, based on your preferences
• Better Search – highly customizable solution for improving WordPress’ default search

Regardless of how you do it, improving your site’s default search functionality is a great way to help your visitors use your site and find the content they crave.

Socialize and communitize your WordPress site

Bring the excitement of social-media to your WordPress-powered site! There are so many reasons to empower your readers to favorite, share, and rate your content directly on your website, and just as many awesome plugins to make it super-easy to do. Here are some of the best plugins for making your site fun, social, and more interactive.

WP Favorite Posts

WP Favorite Posts is a popular, five-star plugin that enables your visitors to add favorite posts to their own list of favorites. Installation is easy, and the plugin is straightforward and easy to modify and customize to fit any design. I use the plugin on my Angry-Birds fan site. You can see the “Add to Favorites” link in the upper-right corner of any post. There is also a link to “View Favorites”, where each user can view (and delete) their favorite links. And even cooler than all that, you can display a list of everyone’s most-popular favorites, very similar to how Delicious works.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Star ratings and reviews

Post ratings are a fun and informative way to engage visitors and promote content. And there are many post-rating plugins to choose from.

In terms of functionality and customization, the GD Star Rating plugin can do just about anything, but the endless configuration options may be overkill. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the elegant simplicity of the Vote-the-Post plugin, which is lightweight, flexible, and easy to customize code-side for tight design integration. I use this plugin to enable voting at Angry-Birds.net (see any post for example).

These plugins also enable you to display lists of top-rated posts anywhere on your site, so you can uninstall that most-popular-post plugin you no longer need.

Chat forum

Chat forums aren’t for every site, but when done right they’re great ways to build community and facilitate conversation. As with post-ratings, there are many chat plugins available in the Directory, but there are two that stand above the rest:

• WordSpew
• Pierre’s Wordspew

Both of these plugins are popular, highly rated plugins that provide flexible, customizable chat functionality. WordSpew is great because it uses Ajax to refresh everything automatically, keeping the chat window flowing in real time. Pierre’s Wordspew works without AJax, but it also uses a Flash .flv file that prevents it from working on devices like the iPad and iPhone. You can see a highly customized example of the WordSpew plugin at Dead Letter Art.

Show online users

Just like showing off counts for feed subscribers, Twitter followers, and Facebook fans, you can also show off the number of users currently online. An excellent plugin for this is WP-UserOnline, which provides several templates for easy configuration of how and where the user-online count is displayed. You can also set up a “Who’s online?” page that shows detailed statistics of where your visitors are on the site, who they are, and where they came from. This awesome plugin takes only minutes to implement using template tags and/or widgets.

Social media

Even after socializing your site, you want to make sure that visitors can easily share and bookmark your content on their favorite social-media sites. I tell you the truth, there are a gazillion plugins and widgets for adding every social-media site under the sun, but you really only need one plugin to do the job. Just install and configure WP Socializer and done. Any combination of social-media buttons, icons, links displayed virtually anywhere on your site. Tons of options yes, but they are all well-organized and easy to configure from the comfort of your WordPress Admin.

Wrapping up

No matter how awesome your website, there’s always room for improvement. With the techniques and tools described in this article, empowering your visitors to get the most from your WordPress site is as easy as installing and configuring a few choice plugins. As you go, keep an eye on site performance. Loading up with too many plugins can burden your server and slow things down for visitors. All the functionality in the world means nothing on a slow-loading website. A good strategy is to cherry-pick a few choice plugins and watch the results. Remember the goal is to help visitors get into your site and really use it for all it’s worth.

Jeff Starr is a web developer, graphic designer and content producer with over 10 years of experience and a passion for quality and detail. Jeff is co-author of the book Digging into WordPress and strives to help people be the best they can be on the Web. Read more from Jeff at Perishable Press or hire him at Monzilla Media.

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