BritMums Live! Reporters: Advanced WordPress: Plugins & Cool Tricks

Advanced Blogging: WordPress – Plugins, cool tricks and troubleshooting when it all goes wrong

Presenter: Julie Hall

Reporter: Gillian Nove- Seren Marketing

I elected to attend this session because I thought I could pick up some interesting advice on how to design my WordPress site. I’m a relatively new blogger and had been struggling with the personalisation of my blog. However, it soon became clear early in the presentation that this really was a session for advanced and experienced bloggers! That said, the way Julie presented it meant that I understood what she was talking about, although I did not have actual experience. But when I am ready to move to the next level of blogging, I’ll be in a good position. So I did pick up and learn quite a few new things which will be useful for me in the future.

In the first instance, Julie asked the room who had a wordpress.com blog and who had .org. She explained that .com is a very basic blog with limited personalisation, hosted by WordPress. But .org is a more advanced site, with lots of personalisation options and self-hosting.

The first topic Julie covered was how to SEO your blog. She explained what SEO was and then gave us advice on how to do it. Interestingly, having attended the SEO discussion group the previous day, I did understand much of this and thought that it was a really well pitched session on SEO for both novices and those who have a decent understanding.

Julie talked for quite a while about plugins, and in particular those that are available free. The good news is that there are lots of good ones that you don’t have to pay for. For example:

• All In One SEO – use this in addition to the keywords already present in your blog.
• WP Super Cache – makes the site more like HTML pages.
• Easy No Index and No Follow – keeps people on the page and makes the page more credible.

The best pieces of advice that Julie gave around plugins (because there are so many to choose from) is to choose 4 star ones as a minimum and download from reputable sites only.

She then went on to explain about follow and no follow links and suggested that we create links internally to other posts. This creates more “stickiness” in both the posts and the blog.

Possibly my favourite piece of advice was regarding the choosing of a theme for your blog, and it was this: match your personality because your blog is your brand. It was consistent with the main piece of feedback that I’d been hearing about in the other workshops: be honest. One of the other memorable pieces of advice was to commit some time to it and sit down and just have a play with the themes that they offer. By doing that, you’ll make a much better choice in your final theme. When asked if it was worth spending money on themes, she said that she thought it might be. She invests in premium and thinks they are better quality with better support.

And finally, in terms of troubleshooting the advice was very simple: don’t panic, because it’s all fixable. Nothing is permanently broken. But if you’re unsure of anything, just google it and it should become clear. Don’t forget to do a backup of your blog. You can do this via a free Dropbox plugin or blogvault, which is another good backup site.

Julie herself was a very watchable presenter and clearly had a lot of passion for her subject. She spoke with ease and was happy to take questions from the audience throughout. She managed to engage the audience well and the buzz in the room was really lively. This was a really good session and one I could have stayed on at afterwards.

All About Gillian:

I originally come from Edinburgh, but these days live in lovely North Wales, not far from Chester. I am married to Chris, with a son of 4 and 2 step-children of 14 and 18. I spent 12 years working in retail marketing, but left at the start of this year to set up my own marketing consultancy to try and achieve more balance in my life between work and family – the Holy Grail for working mums! Things have started well and the business is growing slowly, which is really encouraging. I’m a social media addict and can lose hours weaving my way between Facebook, Twitter and my new favourite Pinterest. It was my love of social media that led me to blogging. I’m still very much a novice, but it’s something that I enjoy and am looking forward to doing much more of!

Links:
http://www.facebook.com/serenmarketing
http://twitter.com/geenove
http://twitter.com/SerenMarketing
http://pinterest.com/geenove/
https://plus.google.com/106892416753422218887/
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/gilliannove