If you are using self-hosted WordPress, there is a field called “nickname” that I want to draw to your attention. Usually, when one hears nickname, one thinks of Bill as short for William or Kathy as short for Katherine. With the WordPress user profile field “nickname”, however, one can put whatever one likes in the field. You can be Hiawatha or Screeching Eagle or Mata Hari.

So, for example, the name section of my user profile looks like this:

By editing the nickname field, it now displays as Purple Headed Monster:

In order for my name to display as Purple Headed Monster, I would need to pull down the menu on Display Name Publicly As and select Purple Headed Monster.

How is this useful, you ask? Recently I found two uses for the nickname field.

Use Nickname for Multiple Authors of One Article

Let’s say you have a number of people who collaborated to write one article on your blog. WordPress only allows one author at a time for each article (there are plugins, however, for multiple authors). An easy solution to this problem might be to use Display Name Publicly As, so if you set the nickname to George Eliot and Jane Austen and then choose display as George Eliot and Jane Austen, you can show both these British authors as having written one article.

Use Nickname to Change User Name on RSS Feed

Let’s say you want to get rid of the by Author Name that displays by default on many WordPress themes. You can edit your WordPress theme pages so the author name no longer appears (a simple way might be just to edit style.css so the author section is set to display: none; or you could just delete the author section from your theme pages). However, you then decide you want to edit your RSS feed as well. You could possibly use the functions code on this page of the Codex to edit your RSS feed. If you are happy with having a new nickname show up instead of the name (for example, you could name the nickname after your blog’s name), editing the nickname might be a simpler solution.

Your Turn, Please

Can you think of any uses for the WordPress nickname field? On a past post, we explored how WordPress User Profiles can be edited to include Google+ profile link. Other fields can possibly be added to a user profile. What kind of user information (this information for authors of posts) might you want included?

Detail from Portrait of Bartolomé de Las Casas

1. Technical: What platform will you use to blog? WordPress.com? Blogger? Tumblr? Self-hosted WordPress? Or perhaps some other platform.
2. Content and Readership: What will you blog about? How will you find readers? How will you get responses (i.e., comments) from readers?

If you are blogging to promote your own business or to sell affiliate products, then that is a third aspect for thought. This post will mostly talk about developing your content and readership.

• • •

I asked some of my favorite bloggers on Google+ the following question:

What is one piece of advice that you would give a beginning blogger?

I organized their comments into categories, and I added a few of my own comments.

Why are You Blogging?

Jack Steiner:

Sustain your effort and understand why you are blogging. That is critical for personal and business bloggers. It takes time to build your platform and to find your voice. Give yourself the time to do so and understand that it is ok.

It is all about realistic expectations.

Haim Cohen:
Blog for a purpose, even if that purpose is to journal privately.

Get Your Content on Your Blog

Bennett Ruda: be prepared to invest the time to post on a regular basis.

Praveen Rajarao: As a beginner myself, it was very tempting to achieve overnight success by signing up for all sorts of affiliate programs and try to make money fast.

I later realized that to be a successful blogger, I will need to write content which has NOT been seen or read elsewhere and try to get other bloggers to notice you and your blog.

Jacob Alonzo: 1. Focus on 1 piece of qualitative or quantitative piece of information. A blog entry should not be generic. A blog entry on a recipe on American apple pie can be identical to all others except maybe in how you make or decorate the top crust. But, the reader is left with a singular or valuable piece of information that will stay with them.
2. A beginner blogger needs to blog for themselves alone. Forgo any thought of a follow-ship/readership initially!

Haim Cohen: People like content, so if it is relevant to them, consistent, as well as informative, you should get an audience.

Respond to Comments

Responding to comments on your blog is not only good etiquette, it can also expand your readership.

Emily Seuss: Respond to comments so that you can meaningfully engage with your readers.

Bennett Ruda: Following up on what Emily wrote, it is also important to engage with bloggers of similar interests:

• Leave comments on other blogs of similar interest.
• Link to posts of other bloggers and quote them by name.

Haim Cohen: If you want comments, make it as easy as you can for readers to comment on it, but obviously stay clear of just allowing anyone to post.

Choosing a Platform for your Blog

Note: choosing a platform for your blog (Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, etc.) is a topic for another post, but I want to leave you with one insightful comment on Google+:

Haim Cohen: Google+ at this point is about to take over for ease of use. Links are public, share able, and have great SEO, and engagement value.

In response to Haim’s comment, I would add that I find some intelligent, educational and inspirational conversations (and lovely imagery, too – many photographers have taken to Google+) occur on Google+. Also, as he notes, the search engine Google picks up the information on Google+ and it receives priority in search engine rankings. A downside would be it is not your own platform with your own name or brand, as self-hosted WordPress would be (or WordPress.com with your own domain name).

As an experiment, I decided to link to each of these people’s Google+ profiles instead of their blogs. I’m wondering if they will attract some new followers on Google+ as a result. If you would like to circle me on Google+, I’m Leora Wenger.

Your Turn, Please

If you are an experienced blogger, how would you respond to my question? Also, if you have any responses to the bloggers’ comments, I would love to hear those, too. What else might you tell beginning bloggers? Thanks!

More posts like this one:

Blog Highlights

Twitter Profile

Blog Improvements

Link Picks is a selection of posts by bloggers to help grow your small business, blog or non-profit organization. Note on choices: I tend to pick recent links from bloggers with whom I’ve interacted, whether on their blog, this Websites for Small Biz blog, on Twitter, on Google+ or elsewhere in social media. I then might include important news, such as on WordPress permalinks. Enjoy, and please give feedback on what you find useful.

Suggested Posts by Knowledgeable, Friendly Bloggers

Unfollow Twitter Users – The Easy Way
Too many followers on Twitter? Not sure who is following you and who isn’t? Want more followers? Jens Berget teaches us about various tools useful for managing followers on your Twitter account. In particular, he talks about a tool called Tweepi, and he demonstrates in a video how to use Tweepi.

4 SEO Tips to Optimize your WordPress Blog
Much has been written on SEO, search engine optimization. The difference on Sherryl Perry‘s blog is she lays out a few basic tips for you to follow and explains carefully as a teacher would (she has a teaching background) how to set up your post for search engine optimization. For example, she shows how you can put important headers (h1, h2, h3, h4) tags in your post.

Social Media and Your Small Business Website
I was pleased when Don Campbell of Expand2web asked me to write a guest post for his blog. The result is a post on ways to integrate social media with your small business website. What sorts of plugins can you use? Where can you place the social media icons – you may decide to place them in multiple locations on your website or blog. How can you track the success of your social media integration?

Links to help your Small Business Grow – WordPress Permalinks

It used to be that if you use /%postname%/ for WordPress permalinks, there was an issue of a performance problem with sites that have large numbers of pages. This Postname Permalinks issue was solved with WordPress 3.3, and Yoast explains in his post How to change your WordPress Permalinks. He has a button on that page to a tool to Generate Redirects – it will produce a line you can put in your .htaccess file. If you use the Redirect tool, you can put the first part of the redirect in Source URL and the second half in Target URL (and click Regular Expression box). I just tried it for this site, and it worked just fine.

The red arrow points to the Source URL and the green arrow points to the Target URL.

The redirection tool set up for this redirection of old URLs with dates to new URLs with postname only looks like this:

Your Turn, Please

Did you find any posts in the past week that were particularly helpful to your small business? Feel free to leave a link in the comments. Also, please let me know which topics reviewed in this post were helpful.

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO by Yoast can be useful to anyone interesting in maximizing the search engine optimization of a site. You can fine tune each post with a focus keyword, helping you to tailor your post as you write it. It comes with XML sitemaps, RSS enhancements, and more goodies for working on search engine optimization. For more on WordPress SEO, read http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/.

Here’s one example of how it works. The screenshot below is how the plugin box looks on this post.

We are going to fill in those three empty boxes: Focus Keyword, SEO Title, and Meta Description. But first, what’s that in red? Whenever you see something in red, pay attention. It seems our default title for this post is too long, by a whopping 18 characters. Using the handy SEO Title tool, I click on Generate SEO title, and now I can create a new title. The tool gives me the same title that I have now, but now I can edit it. And do so, creating a new title that is not too long this time:

Now I write up a meta-description in the box provided. This is a paragraph with keywords of 140 characters or less. I also try out focus keywords – they can be adjacent words that show up in your content.

I save my draft, and the next screen has two pieces of valuable information:

It seems my meta-description is too long, and I don’t have the focus keyword in the meta-description. I fix those, and I am ready with my post. Two notes: I did take out the words ‘two’ and ‘and’ from the URL to make it shorter and more to the point by clicking the Edit button on the Permalink line, right below the title. Also, you can probably come up with a better keyword than plugins – I would suggest aiming for what’s known as a long-tail keyword, which is usually is at least three words together. Maybe I could have gone with ‘WordPress SEO’ as my focus keyword.

If any of this is confusing, my suggestion is to try the plugin. It will become more apparent as you experiment with the WordPress SEO plugin.

NextGen Gallery

Do you have an image rich site? Do you want to be able to display your images in a variety of ways? Would you like to be able to upload images in bulk or one by one, manage your photos in galleries and albums, sort them as needed and tag them as well? NextGen Gallery has all these features. Here’s an example that I did on my photo blog:

You can learn more about the NextGen Gallery on the NextGen Gallery website.

Have you used either of these plugins?

A friend decided to widen her sidebar on her self-hosted WordPress site last week. Oops, the sidebar floated down under the main content. What to do?

This is a basic post on how the layout of your WordPress site is constructed. Even if you never touch the code yourself, you may want to understand what needs to be done when you ask your web designer/developer to widen the sidebar on your site. Not all CSS layouts are constructed in this manner, but many have these three basic elements:

1. Wrapper or container
2. Content
3. Sidebar

In some layouts, the wrapper may be one big div that is about 850px to 1000px wide. In other layouts, especially responsive layouts like lessframework.css, a class called container takes over from what the wrapper used to do, and then the header, main area and footer are all given the class of container to keep them the same width. The content and sidebar are added together to make the size of the container or wrapper; for example, if the sidebar is 300px inside a container of 900px, the content is 600px. The numbers you see in your CSS may be smaller due to padding on either side of the content or sidebar.

Here is a chart that illustrates how this might look with a wrapper of 900px:

So what happens if you make your sidebar 320px? It will float down under the content, because it can no longer fit inside the wrapper. If you want make your sidebar larger, you either need to make your content smaller or make your wrapper/container larger. Here I did a similar illustration with a larger wrapper:

Some pointers on fixing a layout:

1. Take out all padding and margins on sidebar and content and see if that helps. Make sure the sidebar + content adds up to the wrapper (or less).
2. Use background-colors on the sidebar and content temporarily to see where the code is being applied. For example, make the sidebar yellow and the content green. This often helps in figuring out the layout problems. Don’t forget to the take the weird colors out on the production (real) site.

Want to learn more CSS?

• All About Floats
• Simple 2 column CSS layout
• Sidebar pushed down (in the WordPress codex, someone had a similar problem with the sidebar floating down under the content – read the pointers by hellomatt)
• Float that Image

Whenever you make a change to a permalink, you risk losing the search engine listings you have for a post. Also, if anyone has linked to that particular page or post, the link now goes to a missing page. The solution is: redirection.

What is a Permalink?

First, what is a permalink? See the WordPress Codex:

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.

This is an ugly permalink: http://example.com?p=1234

When do you need to do redirection?

1 – Let’s say you decide to change your permalink structure. (Why would I change the permalink structure?) You might want to move to pretty urls, for example, or to a structure with numbers instead of postname. Again, you don’t want to lose the incoming links from search engines or other pages.

2 – You decide to emphasize keywords in your permalinks. Let’s say you wrote a post called: Have Fun in the Sun. But you realized after publishing the post, you really want to sell sunscreen. So you changed the links from have-fun-in-the-sun to sunscreen-sun. You now need redirection to tell search engines to connect their listings to the new permalink.

3 – You change platforms (from plain HTML to WordPress; from Drupal to WordPress; from WordPress to Drupal) or you change the domain url. Your urls change, but you can salvage old incoming links with redirection.

How Does One Redirect a Permalink?

It used to be one had to use .htaccess for redirection.
If you use WordPress, you can use Redirection Plugin.
Drupal has various redirection modules.
Joomla has several redirection plugins.

Have you had experience with redirecting links?

Here’s why you should use a Google Analytics plugin on your WordPress site:

Last month I spent a fair amount of time revising my arts and photos blog so it would respond well on platforms such as mobile and tablets. I then got busy with various work projects.

A few weeks later I looked into Google Analytics, and I was surprised to see that my stats for my site had dropped significantly. At first, I thought my readership really *had* dropped. But then I realized that only the links to my Arts and Photos blog weren’t appearing in the analytics. I decided to add the analytics back into that blog as a plugin. Sure enough, my readership is back on the upswing. When I change the theme in the future, I now won’t have to remember to add the analytics back into the code, because the plugin is separate from the theme.

The plugin I use is Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast.

On the other hand, if you think you will never change your theme or you are very organized, maybe you will want to put the Google Analytics code directly into your theme. Paul Underwood writes how to display Google Analytics without a Plugin.

Do you have a strong preference – with or without the plugin for Google Analytics?

Fireworks in Asbury Park 2010, photo by Leora Wenger

1. So really, don’t use just /%postname%/ as your permalink structure.

“I used /%postname%/ as my permalink structure on CSS-Tricks for a long time. I have lots of Pages. My site went down. I changed my permalink structure to begin with a number. Now it’s fine.“

– Please note this was someone who had many *pages.* The article’s commentators seem to recommend in general using a numeric part in your url, such as post_id or year. This post called WordPress Permalinks for SEO and Speed explains even more on the permalinks issue.

2. 5 Best Practices for SEO

Praveen, who writes the blog Daily Morning Coffee, will be a guest on this blog later this week. I hope you will come back and read about search engine submission; Google isn’t the only fish in the sea.

3. GoDaddy got bought. Will life get better for those who own domains via GoDaddy? Stay tuned. Your guess is as good as mine.

Happy 4th of July to all those who celebrate.

How can a few changes to your website help you gain new customers? I am working with Sheila S. of NJ Playgrounds to make some technical changes on her site. We decided it would be beneficial to do a before and after post – here’s how many visitors certain pages received before and after the changes are made.

What technical changes are we making?

1. NJ Playgrounds was set up with numbered permalinks, the default in WordPress. We will be changing the permalinks from numbers to postname, as the postname will have keywords that are meaningful to the search engines. When we do this, each post will have to be redirected to the new permalink, as the search engines have indexed the posts under the old permalink. The redirection plugin will aid in this process. This change still needs to be done – estimated early June.
2. NJ Playgrounds did not have a meta description tag appearing in the code. We added one to each page. This change was made on May 22, 2011.
3. NJ Playgrounds had a code error – a banner was appearing before the DOC Type in the code. This was fixed and put in a proper place within the body of the page. This change was made on May 22, 2011.

What is the data we are comparing on the site?

unique visits to NJPlaygrounds in May 2011

NJPlaygrounds unique visits via search engine in May 2010

Let’s look at the data for two specific park pages, one in Northern New Jersey and one in Central New Jersey:
2011:
Van Saun Park, Paramus, NJ – 448 unique page views
Johnson Park, Piscataway, NJ – 57 unique page views

2010:
Van Saun Park, Paramus, NJ – 1,001 unique page views
Johnson Park, Piscataway – 161 unique page views

Stay tuned as we gather the data for June 2011.

Why might statistics have gone down from last year to this year?

If you look at the numbers, you will notice that NJPlaygrounds got more hits last year in the spring than this year. So let’s come up with some theories about why this might be:

1. Perhaps the site was penalized for the code problem – when the banner was added at the top of the code, no DOC TYPE was appearing on the page.
2. Competition with other sites – other sites might be better optimized for SEO. It could be other sites have better descriptions or titles, or it could be they have more incoming links. Or both.

So now we have added the meta description tags, and we will be adding the permalinks with keywords instead of numbers. There may also be improvements to titles, such as adding Paramus, New Jersey to the Van Saun Park title tag. Come back in June or July, and there will be a post with new data. Will the changes help? Let’s find out.

Colonial Park, Somerset, New Jersey (photo by Leora Wenger)

Beata Szweryn

The design of the website for translator Beata Szweryn is simply white with a bit of color and stunningly beautiful.

Aperio International

Developed by Red8 Interactive, this site for Aperio follows a simple formula of slideshow on top and slider with three columns underneath. It’s white, crisp nature allows one to concentrate on the content.

Life Coach Tracey

Nadine Gilden of Curious Light uses lots of white along with a pale blue background and blue highlights to bring out the best in Life Coach Tracey.

BioNJ

BioNJ features a big slideshow to attract the reader. What I really liked were the simple lists in three white columns under the slideshow.

Brunswick Media

Even from a distance, I can Mike Conaty’s message on the home page of Brunswick Media Services.

Geri Rosman Public Relations

Geri Rosman’s site developed by Leora Wenger is white with touches of bright red. Sometimes simple with style is the best way to earn visibility.

Which of these are your favorites? Do you have an impressive WordPress site that you would like to share (possibly highlighted in an upcoming post)? Thanks for reading! And thank you to the members of the WordPress Designers group on LinkedIn who shared some fabulous WordPress sites.

See also:

• Ten Impressive WordPress Websites
• 10 Noteworthy WordPress Sites