This post was guest blogged by Simon Koldyk of ScribbleWiki

If your running any sort of website you most likely have some sort of stats (if you don’t have one check out Google Analytics, its free!).  On a blog you have a RSS feed; but, you don’t know who is looking at that or who has that in their feed reader.

Enter Feedburner, which was bought by Google last year.  You can go to Feedburner.com put in your feed, it spits out a new feed for you and then you just take a Wordpress plugin (or whatever your blog software is) and plug that in.  Done.

Feedburner will give you a couple of things, in the first 24 hours it will just give you some live stats it is keeping.

Then after the 24 hours it will start giving you a feed count which is the amount of users that checked your feed in the last 24 hours whether you posted anything or not (RSS Readers check several times a day; but, will only count as one person).

You can then log-in to FeedBurner.com and click on the publicize tab and put a Feed Counter on your website.

This is good for showing off your readers and is really good for selling to advertisers.

Also, Feedburner since its owned by Google is already plugged in with Google Adsense so you can just put your Adsense publisher ID in and have it show Google Ads in your feed.

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The internet, a magical place, where bloggers roam free, techies abound and newbies frolic about. The internet really is the ultimate form of communication with the rest of the world. Places like Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress and other social networks or blogging networks have made it an easy 3 step process to sharing yourself with anyone else of your liking.

You don’t have to know how to code or have hardly any interweb skills Well, for some of us, that just isn’t enough. If you’re like me, you want your own domain, your own website or blog, on your own hosting server!

Now, I have spent the time learning the coding and all the techie stuff but you would be surprised at how easy it is to get yourself or your business on the web. I have outlined a 5 step guide to the DIY website that just about anyone can follow.

1. Brainstorm & Establish - Most people want to just jump right in and get something, anything on the internet. Don’t do that, it will look like crap, function like crap and ultimately you’ll loose interest and it will just become another piece of crap in the internet junkyard. Here are a few things you should establish:

• Content subject
• Objective and goals for the site/blog
• How you want the page layout
• What colors you would like it to be

Go old school and write all this stuff down. Sketch out some ideas or layouts. I always loose anything I write down so I prefer to type everything up in notepad or similar but people seem to loose that just as easy. Whatever works for you!

2. Find Web Hosting - The most common hosting uses PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), MySQL for your database needs and Apache (Apache HTTP Server). If those sound like foreign words to you, don’t worry, you don’t need to know anything about them.

I did mention those however because you will want to make sure you find a host that supports those (easy). You might want to read “5 Steps to Finding a Quality Web Host“. If you want to keep reading to a minimum, be sure the one thing you DON’T DO is use a “Top 10 Web Host” list. You’ll end up using a web host not worthy of your hard earned cash. Here is a list of web hosting companies I would recommend:

Shared & Reseller Hosting Services

• Steadfast.net
• Liquidweb.com
• Godaddy.com (cheap, quick, dirty )
• InnoHosting.com

VPS Hosting Services

• ServInt.com (who I host with, VPS & higher)

• Steadfast.net
• Liquidweb.com

Confused on which service to go with? No problem!

• Running a small personal site/blog? - Shared Hosting
• Running multiple small scale websites for yourself or others - Reseller Hosting
• Running medium/large scale website(s) for yourself or others - VPS Hosting

NOTE: Some web hosts offer a domain name when you sign up, before choosing a domain name/web address please refer to step #3 below.

I recommend using Cpanel for the web host control panel software. It’s easy, common and flexible. Control panels like VDeck, Plesk or others might be available and will likely work just fine.

A good resource to find more information on web hosting is WebHostingTalk.com The members are friendly and you’ll be able to find a solid, quality web host given you spend the time to research the companies.

3. Web Address / Domain Name - Once you have chosen and signed up with a web hosting company, it’s time to find a domain name. This is going to be the address people use to navigate to your website. If your web host offers a free domain name with your sign-up, you can do this step at the same time as step #2.

Tips for picking a domain name:

• Pick a domain name related to your content subject or objective.
• Try to keep it short so that it will be easy for people to remember.
• Feel free to get clever (ex. del.icio.us, ma.tt, website.name) but don’t make it too complicated.
• Type out your chosen domain name a few times to get a feel for how difficult/easy it is to type.
• “I suggest not buying your domain from the same place as you get your web hosting, sometimes trying to change it doesn’t always work out.” - Simon Koldyk

Places to register your domain name (Domain Registrars):

• www.namecheap.com
• www.domaincentral.com
• www.enom.com
• www.name.com
• www.godaddy.com

Once you figure out what domain name you want to use and you begin the process to register it, you might be given the option to change your nameservers. It’s easier to do this now, rather than later (later isn’t hard just takes a few more minutes ). What are nameservers? Thats a good question, I wondered the same thing when I started out. You can read about DNS (Domain Name Servers) at HowStuffWorks.com or Wikipedia.org

Basically, your domain name points to your nameservers, which point to the IP address for your server (like your server’s phone number). When you sign-up with a web host they will tell you what nameservers to use, if they didn’t you can find them in your control panel or by calling your web host. Usually they are something like NS1.EXAMPLE.COM & NS2.EXAMPLE.COM - it doesn’t matter what order you put these in for your domain name.

Once you register your domain name it will take awhile to activate/process (usually anywhere from a few minutes to 24 hours).

4. Setup Your Website / Blog: You’re almost there! - You have a couple options at this step. You could go get a website template and update the content yourself (which would require HTML editing) or you can setup your website using a Content Management System (CMS). By using a CMS you will only have to get things setup and from there you can use an easy control panel to update your content. This is the recommended way to go and what I will cover here.

Here are some CMS’s to consider:

• WordPress (Ok, not really a CMS but used as one by many)
• Joomla
• Drupal

If you’re just starting out, I would highly recommend using WordPress. It has probably the easiest install process of any blog software or CMS available. You can find an install guide for WordPress here. To make things even easier, you can have it installed FOR YOU, FOR FREE! (install4free.wordpress.net) It doesn’t get much better than that.

5. Load Your Content! Yay! You made it! - This is the easiest step and the most fun. All you need to do now is load your site/blog with content. There are a few things you might want to read if you installed WordPress to customize and optimize it for search engines and your visitors. “Ok WordPress is installed. Now What?“

Don’t worry, they are very easy steps and will help you get one step closer to a website you’ll really be happy with.

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I decided to take the jump and upgrade to WordPress 2.5! Everything went pretty smoothly (for the most part) and everything appears to be in good working order. If you notice anything odd or broken please let me know! Thanks!

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One thing that drives me crazy is the way so many of the blogs I come across on a daily basis are designed. I’m not a design or usability expert but I am an internet user, who happens to use A LOT (sounds like I have an internet addiction problem ).

Do your research people, find out what makes a good website actually good! That brings me to….

10 Principals of Effective Web Design

Smashing Magazine had a really nice post on effective web design (link above) that bloggers should really thoroughly check out before designing a website/blog to make sure they’re doing things right. I disagree with a few things there but I won’t argue with them.

Here are a few things that I try to keep in mind while doing my work:

1. Visitors scan pages, they don’t really read them through. That would just be a giant waste of time since they are usually there for something specific. How do visitors scan pages? By anchor points throughout the page. Anchor points either draw their eyes there or is relevant to what they are searching for.

That means blogs/websites need to guide visitors’ eyes through the page. It drives me crazy when I see pages that have no flow or direction.

2. Presentable eye flow (from the anchor points) gives websites or blogs a comfortable and easy feel to the page as well as making navigation and browsing easier. Good eye flow goes along with the way we read. From left to right, then down a little farther in the page, left to right again and so on. What that results in is “Z” eye flow.

It’s a good idea to setup your site to use a “Z” eye flow but if you don’t, at least guide your visitor’s eyes to where you want them to go. The easier it is for your visitors to browse your page, the longer the will likely stay.

3. Give your visitors a reason to stay, and do it fast. If you don’t give your visitor’s a reason to stay at your site pretty much right off the bat, they will leave pretty much right off the bat. I can’t even begin to count the number of websites I have seen that the article or permanent information was just spewn on the page. I only stayed long enough to see the site wasn’t going to help me accomplish my goal (maybe 5 seconds).

4. Make what you have to offer easy to use. If the majority of your site isn’t easy to use, visitors aren’t going to stay. They are going to go find a website that is easy. Blogs don’t have to work about that too much but if it’s hard for people (in any way) to subscribe to your rss, you’re loosing out on readers.

5. Make your posts easy to read. So many blogs just have a title and text….lots of text. That makes me feel like my eyes are going to explode.

Why would I read that? Break up the monotony by using bold or italics, images, smilies, etc. Bolding and italicizing important words, phrases or sentences will help visitors find what they’re looking for faster.

Keep your paragraphs shorter. Even the one above is a little long but because it’s broken up a little with different styling, it’s acceptable. Big blocks of text will be skipped right over. If the important information was there, then you just failed your visitors.

There is a lot of information on the internet on design and usability for websites, so don’t just throw something up and hope everyone is going to flock to your website to read it. I would really love to see some of the blogs I stumble across revamp their sites. I bet they would gain and retain more visitors.

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Well, WordPress 2.5 has finally been released. I’m pretty excited to get my blog upgraded but I think I will hold off for awhile until I’m sure everything will go smoothly.

If anything goes wrong it will probably be related to plugins. If you need to find out whether or not your plugins will be compatible head over here for the list of compatible plugins and plugins that have issues.

If you’re curious about what 2.5 looks like in case you haven’t already looked, Matt posted a video with a quick overview of the dashboard and about posting multiple images. It looks pretty sharp and will be nice to use soon.

There are tons of new features in addition to a new look for the dashboard. If you want to check them out head over here. Some of the features I’m excited to use are:

• The new dashboard of course
• The multi-file upload with status bar
• Few-click plugin updates
• Improved visual editor - this one will be great since it fixes Safari issues and doesn’t mess with your code.
• Built in galleries

If you want a nice comparison laid out between 2.5 and 2.3 check out Optiniche

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If you’re new to WordPress and you’ve just setup a fresh WordPress install, you might be wondering if you should do anything else. The answer is yes. WordPress is an amazing piece of software but without plugins and other changes in settings, it’s not quite all there.

So, first thing’s first. Here are 5 things I would do right after getting WordPress installed.

1. Change the default theme (you can find tons at themes.wordpress.net and how to use/install them here)
2. Change the default permalink structure to something like “Date and name based”
3. Setup WordPress with a statistics tracker like Google Analytics - Use a plugin or install the code yourself by putting the block of code provided by Google Analytics into your footer.php file.
   
4. Make sure you have a good setup for your feeds (I use FeedBurner - Plugin provided below)
5. Make sure your ping settings are setup right (I use PingShot with FeedBurner)

Ok, so you have WordPress installed and the basics configured. You might want to add a few plugins to WordPress for added functionality. Here are the plugins I use and would recommend:

• Akismet Comment Spam Blocker - Pre-installed, just activate. (Some prefer other plugins instead of Akismet but it works for me and newbies)
• Install FeedBurner FeedSmith to redirect/manage all your feeds at FeedBurner
  
• Setup Google XML Sitemaps
• I use the All in One SEO Pack but it’s probably not a really important one if you aren’t concerned about traffic.
• Setup a way for people to share your blog posts with others. I use AddThis.com but will probably be switching to ShareThis.com which includes an option in the button to email as a way of sharing.

These are additional plugins I use but aren’t necessary unless you need them or want them on your blog.

• CformsII - Makes it easy to add a way for people to contact you through your blog.
• Commentluv - I especially like this one because I like it when other people have it on blogs I comment on. It adds a link to the last blog post the commenter had in their comment.
• Subscribe to comments - keeps you informed of comments posted after yours.
  
• WP AJAX Edit Comments - makes it quick and easy to edit comments should that ever be necessary.
• WP Grins - Now this one I love! It adds the little smiley faces to your blog which I think are great.
• WP Super Cache - this one will save you lots of bandwidth and help pages load faster.
• XHTML Video Embed - this makes it easy to embed videos into your blog.

Thats all the plugins i’m using right now but I have a few other in mind that I might be adding soon. If you’re new to WordPress these plugins can really help bring some added functionality to your blog but beware, they can also slow things down a bit if you are using far too many!

It’s a good idea to get all the little bits of your blog setup and configured before you start posting away. It could save you from having to do much more work in the future and you’ll have a better functioning website/blog.

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