Barcamp Belfast: The 7 Deadly Sins of WordPress

Lee — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:45:41 +0000

I had the pleasure of attending and talking at Barcamp Belfast on Saturday (25th April) before dashing off and getting a plane to London for the marathon.

I had a great morning and going by feedback from others the whole day was a great success with some fantastic speakers and over 350 attendees. Well done to Andy Good for putting it together, along with all those who helped out. There’s a good video montage of the day here.

The 7 Deadly Sins of WordPress

I got the ball rolling at 9.30am with my WordPress talk, looking at 7 ways to make your (WordPress) blog more effective.

I thought that rather than put up my slides (which don’t really make sense out of context) I’d give an overview of the 7 points and the solutions.

1. Backup

Assume things will go wrong and the time will come when you’ll regret you didn’t backup (server problems, site gets hacked, client/other user deletes stuff, you muck it up yourself)

Solution

Backup daily automatically with WP-DB-Plugin. Your backup will be emailed to you daily and you don’t have to lift a finger.

2. Easy Comments

Make it as easy as possible for users to leave comments. Don’t put a barrier in their way in the form of captchas or having to signup to leave a comment. These are used to stop spam, but there are better user friendly ways.

Solution

To stop spam, install and activate Akismet (which will put spam in a spam folder) and verify comments before they’re published.

3. URLS

The default URL for posts e.g. http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=1194 doesn’t mean anything to users or search engines.

http://www.leemunroe.com/tips-more-twitter-followers/ means more to users (they now know what content is on that page) and search engines can allocate keywords to that page based on the url

Solution

Under Settings > Permalinks click ‘Custom structure’ and enter /%postname%/. This will change your URL so it includes the article title.

4. Feed

Make sure your RSS feed link is easy to find. It should be clearly linked to in your sidebar and should be in the browsers address bar also (this is a common convention and there are also applications that will find your feed going by the link in your head).

By default WordPress will include this link, as will most themes, but if you’re designing your own theme it can often be overlooked.

Solution

Put this code between your tags:

5. Actions

Once someone reads through your post it’s up to you to point them in the right direction of what their next actions should be. They could add a comment, read other articles on your site, help promote the post, follow you on Twitter etc.

Solution

Use the following plugins to suggest actions at the end of your post. These will help keep users on your site reading other articles or help to promote your post via social networking sites.

6. SEO

For your posts to be found on Google they have to be well optimized. There are a few simple modifications you can make to help SEO.

Solution

Use the All In One SEO Pack and you can set titles, descriptions and keywords for your homepage, posts and pages.

7. Text

On the web, people don’t read they scan. You have roughly 3 seconds to grab the readers attention so your text should be easily read and scannable.

Solution

Break blocks of text into smaller paragraphs
Use meaningful sub headings
Use lists where appropriate (bullet and numbered)
Highlight (bold) keywords
Make sure links stand out against other text
Remove unnecessary waffle text

Photo thanks to Colin Parte

These are my 7 deadly sins of WordPress. It should take you no longer than an hour to implement these solutions and they will make a big difference to the effectiveness of your blog.

There are lots of other ways you can improve the effectiveness of your blog so feel free to share any tips below.

Also if anyone has any links to #barcampbelfast roundups or photos, please share.

Lee Munroe » talk

Barcamp Belfast: The 7 Deadly Sins of WordPress

The 7 Deadly Sins of WordPress

1. Backup

Solution

2. Easy Comments

Solution

3. URLS

Solution

4. Feed

Solution

5. Actions

Solution

6. SEO

Solution

7. Text

Solution