WordPress Resource: Your Website Engineer with Dustin Hartzler

133 – Stay Informed with Your Website Stats

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:05:09 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar
- WordPress A to Z
- July 12th, 2013
- Register at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

Stay Informed with Your Website Stats

In this episode, I talk with Dan Norris of inform.ly and he shares some great benefits about why we should be collecting stats about our websites, how we can see what people are doing on our sites and how you can send out detailed reports to your clients.

Plus we talk about how to calculate website conversions and what to do with that information.

132 – Speed Up Your Website with NginXpress

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:28:05 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar
- WordPress A to Z
- July 12th, 2013
- Register at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

Speed Up Your Website with NginXpress

Today’s guest is Branden Lawe, founder of NginXpress, has solved this problem by developing a performance-optimised server stack that runs on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) – Amazon’s VPS service.

Why is Website Speed Important?

Unless its just a hobby, the chances are ýour website exists to fulfill some sort of serious and important purpose:
- eCommerce (directly selling digital and physical products)
- Attracting customers to a bricks ‘n’ mortar business (selling products and/or services)
- PR (building brand reputation and trust)
- Recruiting support and donations for a charity or cause
- Other (e.g. affiliate marketing/review sites, etc.)

Whatever the purpose, there are 4 main factors behind a successful website:
- SEO (achieving good search rankings)
- Design (clear, logical and attractive layout that’s easy to use and no need to think)
- Content (compelling content that answers the visitors
- Speed

The 2012 Speed Awareness Month infographic http://speedawarenessmonth.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/infographic5.jpg shows that speed affects 3 things:

SEO rankings (Google gives higher pagerank scores to faster loading sites)
Conversions & revenue:
- Mozilla: 2 seconds faster = 15.4% more conversions
- Amazon: 0.1 seconds slower = 1% loss in revenue
User experience:
- 52% of online shoppers stated that quick page loading was important to site loyalty
- 40% abandon a website that takes > 3 seconds to load
- 47% expected (in 2012) < 2 second page loads – now it’s probably less!

The bottom line is that your website is often your first (and often only) chance to make a good impression. Think of it as an ambassador, out there representing your brand to the world. Don’t blow it by making your visitors wait while it loads or they’ll vote with their feet – and tell their friends about it.

Be sure to listen to episode 34 where Phil Graham outlined the 3 steps to a fast WordPress site:

Move from shared hosting to a VPS
Implement caching
Use Nginx instead of Apache

If you take these three steps, the chances are you’ll end up with a super-fast WordPress site that’s capable of handling all the traffic that gets thrown at it.

Call To Action

Sign up for next webinar
Become a NginXpress beta tester at nginxpress.com

131 – How to display Google Sitelinks in Search Results

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:10:07 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar
- WordPress A to Z
- July 12th, 2013
- Register at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar
iThemes Shopping Cart
WPMU increases prices

Listener Feedback

Ed Long asks Have you come across a feature (or plugin) that shows the internal links within a WordPress site’s pages and posts? Perhaps in a tree format? I’ve got a site that’s grown so much over the last couple of years I’m finding it impossible to keep track of internal links.

If you have a solution for Ed, leave a comment below.

Jonathan from ByMEGoogle.com asks why do I use Vimeo and not YouTube. I dig into that question in this episode.

Judi from FarmNWife.com asks What is your opinion of bloggers upgrading from wordpress.com to .org using wordpress to host their site? I believe it is $18/yr. I have friends who want to use this service but don’t know the downsides to warn them about. What do you think?

I share my thoughts on this question and also recommend listening to Episode 110 for a more detailed look at wordpress.com hosting.

How to display Google Sitelinks in Search Results

Brandy writes in and wants to know how to make the links underneath your website appear in Google Searches.

This is information straight from Google:
/#sitelinks

Q: How can I get those links displayed under my site’s listing in Google’s search results like some other sites have?

A: Those are called sitelinks. Our process for generating sitelinks is completely automated and cannot be purchased or requested. We show them when we think they’ll be most useful to searchers, so one site may show different sitelinks for different queries. If you think the sitelinks displayed for your site are inappropriate or incorrect, you can manage them in your Webmaster Tools account.

Call To Action

Sign up for next webinar
West Coast Suggestions

130 – Your Questions Answered

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 29 May 2013 09:44:11 +0000

Announcements

Google Analytics
May 31st, 10am EST
Register Today!

Tools / Plugins

– Desktop Server – Susie

Listener Feedback

Robey – beardedfriend.com.au
How do I remove the smiley face from the Jetpack plugin?

Gary – thebibleinhd.com
Where can I upload my powerpoint documents so they can be used with e-junkie?

Robert
How should I use subdomains for a mobile site?

James – jamesyardley.com
How can I automatically bill my clients for hosting?

Call To Action

129 – 10 Most Overlooked WordPress Features

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:23:51 +0000

Announcements

Google Analytics
May 31st, 10am EST
Register Today!

Yahoo buys Tumblr

Tools / Plugins

Joel Z. from Value of Simple
- Way Back Machine
WPQueryGenerator

Listener Feedback

Randi

What if a theme developer never updates a theme? I dig into that question on this show.

Most Overlooked Features in WordPress

Full-screen writing mode
Help Menus
Show Options Menu
Advanced Menu Options
Sticky Posts
Filters within Posts / Pages
oEmbeds. Learn more about oEmbeds.
Media Galleries
WordPress Dashboard Reorganization
Your Profile Settings

Thank You!

iTunes review by MoneyPlanSOS
Listen to this show while on your computer. I listen to podcasts while driving, but that doesn’t work well when you want to pull out your computer and follow along with Dustin

- Thank you for the reviews!
- 89 Customer Reviews
- 123 Ratings

Call To Action

128 – Keep Your Sites in Sync with DB Manage Pro

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 15 May 2013 09:55:43 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar
- Google Analytics
- May 31st, 10am EST
- Register Today!
WordPress 3.6 Beta 3
- wordpress.org/news

Tools / Plugins

Marshall

Spice up your generic latin text with Hipster text

Chris

Want to see what WordPress theme as site is running? Then WhatWPThemeIsThat.com is for you!

Keep Your Site in Sync with Migrate DB Pro

Coupon Code: YWE13 (until May 29th, 2013)

Notes from our discussion:

Migrate DB Pro
Can you explain how it works
How did you come up with the idea?
Does it work if your dev site is local?
Free Version in WordPress repository
Pro Version can be found at deliciousbrains.com

Call To Action

127 – Software Tools for Developers Part 3

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:16:55 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar

Google Analytics
Register at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

Fast website
- If you are interested in learning how to become a beta tester of a website hosted with Amazon, please send me an email at Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com

Listener Feedback

Raffi

How do I create a landing page inside my theme?

There are two different ways to do this. First you can install a plugin like Premise or you can hire a developer to go in and create a custom page template.

Main Topic

Today’s episode is another one that highlights several guests sharing with me the different tools that they use to keep their WordPress websites up and running.

If you’d like, you can listen to Part 1 and Part 2.

Robey Lawrence

Website: beardedfriend.com.au/ | Twitter: @robeylawrence
Computer OS: Windows
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: NotePad++
FTP Clients: Filezilla, Cyber Duck
Photo Editor: GIMP, Pixlr
Web Browser: IE10, Chrome, Firefox, Torch
Productivity Tools: Google Drive, Dropbox, KeePass

Chris Kindred

Website: KindredWebConsulting.com | Twitter: @KindredWeb
Computer OS: Mac
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: Sublime Text 2
FTP Clients: Transmit
Photo Editor: Adobe Creative Cloud, Pixelmator
Web Browser: Chrome / Safari
Productivity Tools: 1Password, Text Expander, Freshbooks, Paparazzi, Skitch

Justin Shreve

Website: justin.gs | Twitter: @JustinShreve
Computer OS:Mac OS
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: Sublime Text 2
FTP Clients: Sublime Text 2, Transmit
Photo Editor: None
Web Browser: Chrome

Beau Lebens

DentedReality.com.au | Twitter: @beaulebens
Computer OS:Mac OS
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: Sublime Text 2
FTP Clients: Something custom: Do NOT try at home!
Web Browser: Chrome

Call To Action

Sign up for next webinar
Backpack Ministry Details
- Go to BlessinginaBackpack.org
- Donate as little as $1
- In the notes section specify “Summit Academy – Xenia”
- Read more details at DustinAndMelody.com

126 – Take Your Website Mobile with WPtouch

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 01 May 2013 09:07:48 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar
- Add eCommerce to WordPress site
- May 3rd 10am EST
- Register Today!
WordPress 3.6 Beta 2 is now available. Download today

Tools / Plugins

Coffitivity.com is a great solution to break the silence in your office. It delivers white noise that sounds like a coffeeshop.

Main Topic

Thanks to Dale for coming on to the show. For more information about WPtouch, check out BraveNewCode.com.

Here are a few of the things that Dale and I talked about:

What percentage of websites are being viewed on mobile?
As a website owner, what options do they have for making their site mobile friendly?
How does WPtouch work?
Will it work with any theme?
How much can you control do you have when it comes to what your site will look like while using WPtouch
What about plugins? Will it work with other plugins?

Win a copy of WPtouch Pro 3.0!

Congrats to Scott M and Alicia Oriol for winning the free license to WPtouch Pro!

Call To Action

Sign up for next webinar on eCommerce websites.
I’m speaking at WordCamp North Canton on Saturday. Feel free to say hi to the tall blonde wearing orange.
WordPress Developer Training starts on Monday May 6th. For details and to register go to [http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/academy] (http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/academy)

125 – Make Your Site Compatible with Pinterest

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:49:08 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar
- Add eCommerce to WordPress site
- May 3rd 10am EST
- Register Today!
- We are going to talk about onsite vs. offsite credit card payments
- Different plugins
- Different third party solutions
- Easy Digital Downloads, e-Junkie and more!
Android Version Updated
- http://androidcommunity.com/wordpress-2-3-for-android-gets-updates-bloggers-will-appreciate-20130418/

Tools / Plugins

http://easywpguide.com/

Listener Feedback

Phee McD

How do you present prebuilt WP theme ideas to your client? Do you send them direct links to the demo site? Or do you mock something up to present?

Make Your Site Compatible with Pinterest

Here are some of the things that Cynthia Sanchez from OhSoPinteresting.com talked about on this episode:

Definition of terms: Pin, Repin, Like, Boards
How does Pinterest stack up against other social media platforms? Should we spend more time there than on Facebook?
Can Pinterest help every business?
What makes a great shareable image?
How can we make sure our images are easy to spread on Pinterest?
Do you recommend any WordPress plugins?
- Pinterest “Pin it” Button
As website creators, how can we make sure we are building themes that are Pinterest friendly?
Is there an easy way for us to find images that have been pinned from our websites?
Call To Action
- Sign up for next webinar
- Here my interview with Matt Medeiros from MattReport.com

124 – Guard Your WordPress Site Against Attacks

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:57:20 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar – Add eCommerce to WordPress websites

May 3rd, 10am EST
We are going to talk about onsite vs. offsite credit card payments
Different plugins that are available
Different third party solutions that can be used

WordPress Developer Course

Next 4 week course starts on May 6th
Find out More!

Tools / Plugins

http://dribbble.com is a website where designers can show off what they’ve been working on. It’s a great site to get inspiration for your own design work.

Listener Feedback

Dave writes in and want to know how to transfer a website from a development location to a live server.

Guard Your WordPress Site Against Attacks

This past week there were major attacks to thousands of WordPress websites. Luckily most (99%) of the sites that were compromised where ones that had the username admin

Here’s the best way to protect your WordPress installations from being taken over from botnets:

Remove admin as a username (see below)
Create a strong password with special characters
Update you wp-config.php keys
Install Lock Down Plugin

Don’t give others your administrator username/password. Create an editor account for additional users

Call To Action

123 – How to Interpret What a Client Wants

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:32:00 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar
- Add eCommerce to WordPress site
- May 3rd 10am EST
- Register Today!
WordPress 3.6 Beta is out
- http://wordpress.org/news/2013/04/wordpress-3-6-beta-1/

Tools / Plugins

Remove Social Media Widget
any.do to do list app

How to Interpret What a Client Wants

Charlie from South Africa

What is the best procedure of getting to know what a client wants?
Do you have a set procedure?
Do you give the client a list of sites to visit and let them choose which format they prefer?
Do you give them a questionnaire?
Maybe the Steve Jobs method is best. Don’t ask them what they want, tell them what they want.

My Steps to Determining What a Client Wants

First my work with us page http://hartzlerdm.com/work-with-us/
Follow up the email request with either a phone call or an email
- The purpose is to try to get to know what your client is looking for
Find some themes that do approximately what they are looking for and share with client
Tools to help clients communicate with you:
- http://patterntap.com/
- Skitch

Support Pressgram!

Pledge Now!

Call To Action

122 – Help Someone Start an Inexpensive Website

Dustin Hartzler — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:08:49 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar – April 5th at 10am EST

Mailchimp webinar
Topic: Add an email sign up form to your website

Continuity Summit 4

Ten video lessons on how to build a monthly membership site
Choose your own price $59, $99, $129
Register by April 9th
Be in my Accountability Group!

Tools / Plugins

WebPlatformTools

Listener Feedback

Kristian (image feedback)

LoremPixel

Help Someone Start an Inexpensive Website

Set up an affiliate relationship with a hosting company
Create a set of instructions on how people can set up their new account
Send set up sheet to your friend
Find a theme that they like
Use the built in 1-click installation to set up WordPress
Install WordPress theme
Install handy WordPress plugins
- BackWPup
- All in One SEO
- WordFence / BetterWP Security
Set up with some free images
Create a mailchimp account and add a subscribe button to their site
Call To Action
- Sign up for next webinar

121 – More Great Places for WordPress Images

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:47:54 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar – April 5th at 10am EST
– http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar
– Topic: Add an email sign up form to your website

Tools / Plugins

Topsy is a great tool to measure and analyze conversations that are happening in real-time on the web.

Listener Feedback

Joey left a comment

He gives some suggestions of finding less expensive images at iStockPhoto.

Question from Keith

I’m new to WordPress and I’m wondering what the difference is between a category and a tag.

Follow Up From Amy

Amy had a follow up question from last week’s show. She wondered how to instruct her clients on how to upload smaller images on her website.

A few suggestions:

Show them how to resize images in Photoshop, GIMP, etc.
Only allow upload size to WordPress to 2MB
Change media sizes in WordPress settings to make default sizes smaller
Install a plugin to optimize to a smaller image

More places to find images

Call To Action

120 – How and Where to Find Images for Your WordPress Site

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:59:48 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar – April 5th at 10am EST
– http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar
– Topic: Add an email sign up form to your website

Tools / Plugins

PartnerTap is a resource tohelp trigger creative design ideas. You can browse by area of the site (like footer, social media, etc).

Listener Feedback

Question from Amy

How should I resize my images for the web? My client has given me images that are 4000x3000px and I want to make sure that I am covered in the future if I need larger images.

How and Where to Find Images for Your WordPress Site

Image Rights
- Need a quick picture for a blog post, web page or anything else? If you’re like most people, you jump into Google Images and grab a great shot from there.
- Unfortunately, that puts you at huge risk of lawsuit, because, unless someone specifically grants rights to you to use a given image, every picture taken in the United States (and in most other countries) is considered to be copyrighted, and the property of the person who took that picture.
So where can get images?
- Negotiate payment for rights with the photographer
- Go to sites that sell rights for pictures and pay for images you use (like stock photography sites)
- Use creative commons-licensed content and follow their guidelines.
- Hire a photographer to take every picture for your website or blog
- Snap the pictures yourself
Free
- Flickr
  - Be sure to do an advanced search and select images only available for creative commons
- MorgueFile.com
- sxc.hu
Premium
- iStockPhoto.com
- 500px.com
- shutterstock.com

Call To Action

Sign up for next webinar
Explore PartnerTap to find inspirational ideas for your website.

119 – The Easiest Way to Add a Shopping Cart

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:17:21 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar

March 15th at 10am EST
Register Today!
Webinar replays are available online

WordPress Developer’s Training Course
Are you interested in becoming a better WordPress developer? Here’s your chance! In this four week course you will learn everything you need to know about WordPress, even if you’ve never written a line of code in your life. Learn More!

More Courses
I’m currently working on two new courses. If you have a few seconds, can you take the survey to let me know which one I need to start working on first? http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/build

WordPress.com for Business

Techcrunch Story
Episode 110 for more information

Listener Feedback

Nick

I love your show! Your episode with database maintainance ideas brought back to my mind the question that I have not managed to resolve yet. I have several websites with post types and each one has a post thumbnail in a different size.

However I am not aware of specifing the image size when the user is uploading images on this post type only so I am forced to crop the image in several sizes that I know I am never going to need. Do you know a way to specify the image size on a custom post type level in order to avoid creating image sizes that I am not going to use?

How do you approach this issue? I think that many of the people from your audience will benefit from such info.

Frank

I noticed that in a podcast you recommend meeting burner, but it seems you are using go to meeting for your upcoming webinar. I am looking for the best way to host a webinar from my website. Which of these do you recommend? Currently I have been doing screencast recordings and just posting those, but I want to jump to the live audience, and a webinar would be the next logical step.

Brian

How is the best way to create a mobile website? Do you use CSS? Is there a plugin that I can use to make my site look good on a mobile website?

The Easiest Way to Add a Shopping Cart

WooCommerce 2.0
– http://www.woothemes.com/2013/03/hello-woocommerce-2-0/

Call To Action

Sign up for MarkDown Webinar
Are you interested in becoming a better WordPress developer? Spots are still available in my March WordPress developer’s course. Sign Up Today!

118 – A Practical Guide to Picking Out Plugins

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:34:43 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar – Register Today
WordPress Developer Course registration is now open. If you are interested improving your WordPress skills, this is the class for you! Learn More

Listener Feedback

Joey (nomady.net)

Question about the nofollow meta tag

Chad Warner (optimwise.com)

Feeback on WordPress books and standup desks

118 – A Practical Guide to Picking Out Plugins

Techniques for picking the right plugin.

Google what you are looking for ( function + WordPress plugin )
Most links will open up in the WordPress repository
Does the plugin meet the following criteria:
- Does the plugin have a large banner graphic. This is a relatively new feature within the plugin directory. It helps me know whether the plugin developers took the time to design something creative
- Next I look at the LAST UPDATED field. I has to have had a revision in the last 6 months for me to consider it
- Then I look at the number of downloads. If it has a lot, 10,000 or more, it’s probably legit
- Lastly, I always look to see if it contains screenshots. Lots of plugins don’t so it’s hard to know which ones are good by seeing what the plugin looks like installed.
Then I will highlight the plugin name and go back into WordPress and search within WordPress. This makes it much easier to install (you don’t have to download, etc.)
Test it out
If it works, configure
If it doesn’t work, delete the plugin then rinse and repeat

Backup

Security

Spam

SEO

Cache

Stats

Related Posts

Redirection

Comments

Livefyre
Disqus
I also like the standard commenting system built in by WordPress. It makes it easy to style this area like the rest of your website

Forms

Misc.

What would Seth Godin Do

Call To Action

117 – 6 Reasons to Learn How to Code

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:17:44 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar

March 15th at 10am EST
Register Today!
Webinar replays are available online

WordPress 2013

Late Night Internet Marketing

Episode 47 & 48

Tools / Plugins

I’m in love with stand up desks. I’m currently looking at building my own. Do you use a stand up desk? If so, what are the benefits? I’d love to hear from you!

Listener Feedback

Joe C. (Incoming Link Sites)

What are incoming links?

Kristi M. (best WP books)

6 Reasons You Should Learn How to Code

It’s useful even outside of computer geek circles
– You can save time and money by creating a simple program when you combine the knowledge of business with the knowledge of programming

It helps you talk to programmers
– Some knowledge of code may not make you a coder, but you’ll be able to easily communicate with someone who will be creating the program / application

It’s fun hobby
– Coding is addictive.
– There are struggles that you will face, but it is so worth it
– Time flys by

Computers are everywhere.

It teaches us other skills
– Science has shown that kids who learn piano makes them better at math, much the same with coding
– It helps problem solving / critical thinking
– Helps you notice things you might not have noticed before

Programmers are in high demand
– average starting salary for a good programmer is $100k
– no manual labor

Call To Action

Sign up for Mark Down Webinar
Do you use a stand up desk? I’d love to hear more!
Are you interested in becoming a better WordPress developer? Spots are still available in my March WordPress developer’s course. Sign Up Today!

Create a Custom Category Page

Dustin Hartzler — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 15:02:27 +0000

WordPress is a powerful tool to build a website. It makes it very easy for website owners to create the perfect page template for different sections of our site.

We can easily create a landing page that looks completely different than the rest of our site and manage it within WordPress. In today’s post I’m going to show you how to create a custom page template for a certain category of posts.

Tools Needed:

FTP Client with your account credentials
An idea of what you want your custom page to look like
HTML knowledge
(Optional) PHP Programming

While you don’t necessarily need to know extensive amounts HTML / PHP, knowing a little bit of PHP will make this much easier.

Make sure you make a backup of your site before you start making modifications.

In this example, we are going to create a custom page to display all of my podcast episodes.

Now by default, WordPress has the ability to show all of your posts in certain categories by going to:

yourwebsite.com/category/CATEGORY_NAME

And you can control this by modifying your archive page template.

But, what if you are looking to have your podcast (or other category) archive look different than the rest of your archive section.

For example, my podcast archive can be found at: http://yourwebsiteengineer.com/podcast-archive/ and I have specific items that show up on this page.

I have a header that let’s people know they can subscribe to my podcast through different methods. Each episode includes the name, the featured image, a player and when the podcast was published. Plus I’m displaying my most recent 20 posts insead of the standard 10.

Let’s take a look at how I did this.

#1 Make a copy of archive.php

Step one is to make a copy of archive.php. Take the copy of this file and rename it to archive-CATEGORY_NAME.php So for my example, it’s archive-podcast.php.

#2 Tell WordPress this is a template

Open up this new file in your favorite code editor and add this line of code to the very top:

This will tell WordPress that this is a new template file and you will be able to select this page template for a WordPress page. You can substitute ‘Podcast’ for the name of your category.

Save this page and upload it to your server. It will go in the wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME folder

#3 Create a new WordPress page

Next go into your WordPress dashboard and create a new page. You can name it whatever you like. Mine is called Podcast Archive.

Under the publish button, look for “Podcast Archive” template. Select that template and save the page. Now open up this page in a new browser window and take a look. You probably won’t see any differences because we haven’t made any yet.

#4 Modify Our New Template

Now come the time when you can become creative. You can dream up exactly what you want your archive page to look like.

a. Add Content Above the Posts

Sometimes you want to create static content on a page that never changes. In your template file, look for code that looks like:

if (have_posts()) : 
while (have_posts()) : the_post();

Anything you want to display at the top needs to go before this code. Without getting into too many details, this is the WordPress loop and that’s how your posts and pages display properly.

b. Query the Correct Category

Next we want to make sure that we are only going to pull the correct category of posts from the database. This can be done by adding this code right above the WordPress loop.

   'post',                        
               'category_name' =>    'podcast',                    
               'posts_per_page' =>  20, 
               'paged' =>  $paged   );
query_posts( $args );
?>

The category_name will pull only the podcast tagged posts and the posts_per_page will display 20 posts per page.

Tweak the Current Code

This part is the hardest part to explain as everyone’s original archive.php page is different.

After the start of the loop and before the endwhile; statement, you can tweak / change / add whatever you like and that content will be displayed for each of the posts within WordPress.

Here are some key WordPress php commands that will help you display different items for each post:

the_titel();                =>  Displays the title of the post
the_permalink();            =>  The link to the specific post
the_excerpt();              =>  Displays the excerpt of the post
the_content();              =>  Displays the full text of the post
the_category();             =>  Displays the category
comments_number();          =>  Displays the number of comments
the_powerpress_content();   =>  Displays the player for my audio files

Here’s the code that I’m currently using on Podcast Archive

 'post', 'cat' => '29', 'posts_per_page' =>  20, 'paged' =>  $paged   );
    query_posts( $args );
    if (have_posts()) : 
    while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

    
    






    Published on: '. get_the_time('d') .' 
    '. get_the_time('M') .'';

Save Your Code

Every time you make a change to your code, make sure you save it and upload it back to your server. Then you should be able to refresh your site and see the changes you have made.

Keep modifying and saving until you are happy with the way it looks.

Show off Your Page

Now that the hardwork’s done, you need to show off this page to the world. Create a new menu item or link to this page on twitter and direct people to your new page.

Call To Action

Do you have a custom page for a category archive? If so, post it below in the chat.

116 – Keep Your WordPress Database Lean & Mean

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:57:47 +0000

Announcements

– WordPress Webinar – March 15th, 10am EST about Markdown
(http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar)
– WordPress Developer’s Course is Now Open
(http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/awdt)
– Find me on the Late Night Internet Marketing Show
(Episode 047)

Keep your database lean and mean

Reasons to remove unwanted data
WordPress needs to go to the database after every page load (unless you are using a caching plugin). And the more information you have in the database the longer it will take for your site to load

The longer it takes your site to load:
– visitors will leave
– search engines will ding you for being sluggish
– it takes longer to backup

What to Remove
– Unnecessary WordPress Plugins
– Delete Spam Comments
– Delete Old Posts
– Optimize Database
– Delete Unwanted Files in Media Library
– Clutter from Plugins

You can also turn off / delete post revisions

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', no_of_revision)

Call To Action

– Sign up for webinar at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

What else do you do to clean up your WordPress database?

115 – Become a More Efficient WordPress Developer

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:45:12 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar – March 15th, 10am EST about Markdown. Register today!
WordPress for iOS gets an update: iOS 4.3.1
Another WordPress Developer Training Course will start on March 18th

Become a More Efficient WordPress Developer

There are 100 million things that we can do with our time, okay, well, probably more, but everything you do will take away from other things you could be doing

This past week, I took a good look at my life and the things that I wanted to become an expert at by the end of the year

And I want to be more efficient when developing. I’m always trying to ‘hack’ my life so that I can squeeze ourt the most productivity I can

1. Plan Your Day in Advance

This is one of the most beneficial things I do. At the end of each day, I try to summarize what I need to accomplish for the next day. This helps me hit the ground running when I get into my studio in the morning.

2. Check Your To Do List Every Few Hours

One of the worst feelings in the world is to check your to do list at the end of the day, and see that you’ve accomplished nothing that was on your must-do list. Check your daily tasks throughout the day to make sure you are staying on track.

3. Simplify Your Tools

Try to use as few of tools as possible. This includes pieces of software and gadgets and widgets. Learn to get by with the simpliest set of tools and learn how to use them efficiently.

4. Do Your Most Important Task First, before checking email

I find that when I do my most important task first, it gives me an emotional high to take me through the day, plus gives me momentum to attack my next task.

If I check my email first and see a note from a client, I might get upset or it could shift my focus for the rest of the day.

I like to accomplish some big items first before I get distracted by the outside world.

5. Screen Your Calls

During the day, I rarely answer my phone. If someone calls and it’s extra urgent, they will call multiple times in a short period of time. If that happens, then I’ll pick up the phone, otherwise, it goes to voicemail and I keep working

6. Organize Your Workspace

For some reason, I feel more productive when my desk is clean. When things aren’t cluttering my work surface, I can focus on the task at hand. Try to keep your desk clean a priority

7. Work During Your Prime Time

As developers, we can work virtually anywhere, any time. Personally, I’m a morning person and usually get my best work done before 10am. That’s just me. If you are someone who codes better at night, then schedule your day in a way that you do most of your work then.

8. Do Small Items Immediately

If you can finish a task in less than 5 minutes, just go ahead and do it now. It will keep your to do list less cluttered and it will give you satisfaction of completing projects for the day.

9. Centralize All of Your Information

This is another hard one, but it helps tremendously. If all of your information is in the same spot, it saves you a lot of time when you don’t have to go and look for it in several places.

Plus, you can feel more relaxed knowing you have all your tasks written down in one place and you won’t accidentally take on a new project if you have too many other projects on your plate.

10. Stop Multi Tasking

Our brains were not made for multitasking, so we need to stop pretending like we are more efficient when we are doing multiple things at the same time.

Stay focused on the task at hand and remove all other distractions (shut down programs, close web browsers, etc.) until the task is over.

11. Use a WordPress Framework

By using a WordPress Framework, you will become familiar with the code inside and out which will make it much easier for you to add features / styling / updates to every website you build.

Also, you won’t have to worry about learning how someone programmed a theme before you actually start using it.

In this episode, I briefly describe the differences between:

Builder
Genesis
Headway
Standard
Thesis

What do you do to make yourself more productive?

Call To Action

114 – Is Your WordPress Site Accessible?

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:03:44 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar
March’s webinar is about Markdown. You can register today at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

Live Session
How to package website development services: Date: February 19th. YourWebsiteEngineer.com/live

Is Your WordPress Site Accessible?

The four main ways that people might be interacting with your site are:

Screen Readers / Braille Keyboards
Voice Navigation
Eye Control
Morse Code

Standards:
http://www.w3c.org/wai
https://www.section508.gov/

Tool:
http://wave.webaim.org/

Before/after improved accessibility example:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/demos/bad/

Community:
http://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/
http://a11yproject.com/

If you want to check out what Wade’s up to, you can do so here:
Easter Seals Tech
Fathers over Forty

What do you plan to do to make your website more accessible?

113 – The Power of Adding a CDN to Your Website

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:56:33 +0000

Announcements

– WordPress Webinar – This Friday, Feb 1st about Version Control
– Looking for a framework developer comfortable with Builder, Standard and Thesis

Tools / Plugins

Use Load Impact to see how fast your site loads under pressure.

Content Delivery Networks with Justin Dorfman

Here are some of the things that we talked about in the interview.
– What is a Content Delivery Network?
– Is it easy to add to WordPress sites?
– Do you have to remove your images from Media Library?
– Will it work with dynamically generated images like ones created by timthumb script?
– What type of site owner would benefit from this service?
– How much does using MaxCDN cost?
– What size of site will the starter plan be perfect for?

14 Golden Rules
How to Improve Amazon S3 Download Performance with a CDN

What do you think about the 14 Golden Rules? How many have you implemented?

Call To Action

– If you are interested in checking out more, go to http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/maxcdn
– Sign up for webinar at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

112 – How to Work Through Theme or Plugin Conflicts

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:14:44 +0000

Announcements

- WordPress Webinar about Version Control (February 1st)
Sign Up at: http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

- Still time to sign up for the Advanced WordPress Developer Training

What is it?

- A four week training series that I walk you through some of advanced development techniques that I use to run my business.
- Videos are recorded complete with me writing code, zoom in, so you feel like you are sitting right next to me
- Short assignments each week to ensure you have mastered the concepts

How is this different from the other courses out there?

- 100% Access to me during the four week session via email – an email that comes from you will be answered as quickly as I can
- Weekly Calls – each week I will spend time with the group to answer any questions they may have. I doesn’t even have to be over that week’s course material
- Group Forums – You will have access to get other participants feedback on ideas that you are working on
- Did I mention that it’s lifetime access?

This will be the last time I offer this course as this price, so don’t delay. You can sign up thru January 29th at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/awdt

Listener Feedback

Joey from Singapore (nomady.net)
Hope you are well! You may remember that I previously asked a question on a tweak I want for my website. As suggested by you, I contacted Randy and Sean from beautomated.com, but my budget was not met, so they directed me to their affiliate partner, Tweaky.com. I remember you mentioning this service on your podcast, too.

Anyways, things turned out very well, and everything was completed real quick with very affordable price of USD 117 (USD 39 per tweak x3). They made 3 tweaks in WP loops, one each for index.php, category.php and tag.php to achieve what I wanted. Actually, the tweak they made in each php file is all same, so I could have paid USD 39 only for 1 tweak, and copied the codes for the 2 other php files by myself, but I was happy to pay all and get everything done by them. Now my requested feature on the website (http://nomady.net/) works like a charm…!

This is a great service that I can recommend to anyone.

Andrew Blane (Gravity Forms Question)
- Tool Tips – I don’t think there is an solution for this, but they do a great job of handling this themselves
- Gravity Forms – Placeholders Add-On (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gravity-forms-placeholders/)

Brian Wallace (http://www.physicianassistantexamreview.com/)
- I don’t think it’s going to slow down your site, but it could mess up the formatting of your posts and pages
- There are a couple of ways to handle this.
- When I paste content in, I always past into the HTML (or now called text) box and not the visual. This will only paste in the text with no formatting
- Or you can use the “Paste as Plain Text” option in the visual editor. It’s on the second row and it looks like a little clipboard with a T on it.
- One word of caution, it will remove all text formatting, bullets, etc.

How to Work Through Theme or Plugin Conflicts

Thanks to Matt (mskdigitalmedia.com) for the topic suggestion

Step by Step Approach to Work Through Conflicts
- Install a Maintenance Mode Plugin
- Change your theme to a default theme (twentyten / twentyeleven / twentytwelve)
- Deactivate all plugins (yes this will be messy!)
- Reactivate plugins one – by – one
- If that doesn’t fix the problem, it might be a hosting issue – contact your host
- If you are still having problems, feel free to contact the developer

Call To Action

- Sign up for Advanced WordPress Developer Training at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/awdt

Do you like my new introduction? Answer in the comments

My goal is to help inspire you to make amazing things online, whether that be creating websites for clients or developing plugins for users or even if just tinkering with your personal blog, there is so much we can do with WordPress, I’m going to show you how.

111 – The Importance of Conferences

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:41:34 +0000

Announcements

- Advanced WordPress Developer Training is now available, check out http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/awdt for more information
- Your Website Engineer Live is scheduled for Jan 22nd from 3-5pm EST. Register!
Topic: How did you get started with WordPress or how/when did you start your own company?

Tools / Plugins

Twitter is a conference must
By following the #NMX hashtag, I knew what was going on, who lost their luggage, what bloggers are paleo and who met who for the first time

The Importance of Conferences

Network with like people
Hang out with digital friends
Be Inspired!
Become recognized

Call To Action

- Sign up for Advanced Course at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/awdt

110 – Is WordPress.com the Solution for Hosting?

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:51:35 +0000

Announcements

- Check out new Plus+ Membership
- Learn about Advanced WordPress Developer Training Course

110 – Is WordPress.com the Solution for Hosting?

Why WordPress.com

It’s a super fast performing, highly available grid that processes only the content.
It’s quite affordable, only $13/yr for domain mapping plus $30/yr for no ads. The money spent supports the WordPress community.
It’s highly social, powered by JetPack following, sharing.
It’s completely secure! Other than having a good password on the accounts and periodically exporting the XML of your pages, posts and media, they handle all the security and backups for you!
Rather than a more traditional top-down structure, WordPress.com treats all contributors as individuals with their own set of sites, subscriptions, and authorities.

What was involved going from .ORG powered to .COM powered

Setting up a demo account, reserving the subdomain.wordpress.com address.
Choosing a Theme. We selected the ever popular Twenty Eleven theme designed by the WordPress team.
Exporting the posts, pages, and media using Tools-Export.
Importing into WordPress.com using Tools-Import, and mapping usernames accordingly.
Launching the domain involved purchasing the Domain Mapping product for a small fee.

When to consider the WordPress.com hosted platform

When custom themes aren’t needed
For customers who have small budgets
If customers do not need large amounts of customizations

Would you consider hosting your website on WordPress.com

109 – Important Things to Focus on in 2013

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:22:22 +0000

Announcements

– Register for WordPress Webinar – Custom Post Types
– NMX Meet Up – Monday Jan 7th at 7:15am: Details.
– Advanced Developer Course will begin on January 28th

Important Things to Focus on in 2013

For Website Owners
– Responsive Design
    - Your customers are probably spending time on your website on their phone
    - Do you have too much information on your site?
– Speed
    - Removing extra themes / plugins
    - Trimming Database to get ride of junk
    - Choosing the right hosting provider
    - Are your images too large?
– Security
    - Prevent your site and server from being hacked
– Attend Local Meet Up (meetup.com) or WordCamps (wordcamp.org)

Developers
– How to write better / more efficient code: HMTL, CSS, PHP, mySQL
– Developing functionality plugins
- Custom Post Types
- Theme Options
– How to build / manipulate child themes
– Learn to use SASS to help you write CSS more quickly / efficiently
– Learn how to use a popular framework, like thesis, genesis, builder, etc.
– Share your knowledge at Local Meet Up (meetup.com) or WordCamps (wordcamp.org)
– Contribute to WordPress core
– Answer questions on WordPress forums
– Build a plugin or theme and release on the repository
– Become a terminal / command line ninja

Call To Action

– Sign up for webinar at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar
- If you are interested in the Advanced WordPress Developers Course, please email me: Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com

What are your WordPress goals for 2013?

108 – The Dangers of the functions.php File

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:02:25 +0000

Announcements

– WordPress Webinar on Custom Post Types on January 4th at 10am EST (http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar)

Advanced WordPress Developers Course
– Last week in January
– Take your developer skills to a whole new level
– Sign up below to be notified

Become an insider and get exclusive deals + free eBook!

No Spam. Not Ever. We Hate it Too!

Weekly Newsletters
– Premium Content will begin in January! Join the mailing list to find out more!

Tools / Plugins

oEmbeds http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds
One of the great features in WordPress that is rarely mentioned is oEmbeds. This give the ability for WordPress users to simply paste a link (the main URL) to their YouTube video (and other services) directly into their visual editor. This saves a blog / website owner from learning how to find the embed code, format the application to be the correct size, then switch to the HTML editor to paste in the code.

Main Topic

Dave Clements (http://doitwithwp.com/)
Some of the questions that were covered on today’s episode:
– Tell me a little about yourself. Who is Dave Clements?
– How long have you been using WordPress?
– Why do you cringe when I mention adding code to your functions.php file?
– Where should I be putting this code?
– Is it hard to create my own plugins?
– Can I put several snippets of code in one plugin?
– How can I make sure that some the website owner doesn’t accidentally turn off my plugin or remove it

Call To Action

– Sign up for webinar at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

New Features WordPress 3.5

Dustin Hartzler — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:12:14 +0000

In my last video about WordPress 3.5 I missed some of the key features and took some time to explain them in this video.

The main items are:
- Plugin Favorites
- Easily create a gallery
- oEmbeds

107 – Five Reasons Your Site Loads Slowly

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 10:39:09 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar about Custom Post Types is on January 4th at 10am EST

New Media Expo
– If you are going to be in Vegas, please let me know, I’d love to meet you!

Tools / Plugins

– 5 Second Snow (http://codecanyon.net/item/5sec-snow/851002)
– tools.pingdom.com

Listener Feedback

Chad Warner (optimwise.com)
Left his method of teaching people how to use WordPress

Matt Shane(mskdigitalmedia.com)
Also called in and shared how he is creating videos to help his clients learn WordPress.

Andrew H (impact-images.com.au/)
His website is taking up a lot of room on his server. He wonders how he can make it smaller.
– Are you storing full size images on your site?
– Are you backing up your site to your host?
– My site is 309MB and that includes all plugins and theme files as well.

Jacob (inticemedia.com)
Jacob provides a great resource to find people to do work for us. It’s a site called http://odesk.com. You can find people who work locally or overseas. One benefit of hiring someone overseas is that they are working while you sleep.

Main Topic

Too Many HTTP Requests
– Combine multiple scripts and css files into one
– Combine images with spriteds
– Use few images

Minimal Client Side Processing
– Validate forms on the client’s site
– Use AJAX to only require small parts of the page to change in response to user actions, you make your site or web application much more responsive and efficient.

Failure to Use Browser Cache / Local Storage
– Adding an Expires header to your components with a date in the future makes them cacheable, reducing the load time of your pages.
– Caching items that do not change regularly on your site, images, scripts etc

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days"

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

Too Many Bytes
- Use compression to make code smaller (http://diyws.ath.cx/how-to-enable-gzip-compression-for-your-wordpress-site/)
- Using less code in templates
- Image optimiazation (http://smushit.com)
- CSS minification
- Pagination
- Ajax

Not using a Global Network
- One very common mistake is to ignore geography. If your site is hosted in a NYC data center, there is a huge difference in latency for users in Boston versus users in California (let alone Asia). Serving content from the edge is the role of the traditional CDN. Using a cloud provider to distribute your content to even more locations so users always pull from a server near them is even better.

Call To Action

- Sign up for webinar at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

What other things would make a website load slowly?

106 – How to Teach Someone WordPress

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:04:24 +0000

Announcements

WordPress Webinar
– January 4th: Custom Post Types
– Benefits of Using Them / How to Use them
– Register Today: http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar
NMX (New Media Expo) is less than three weeks away
– I’m on a panel talking about the benefits of growing your brand with a podcast
– I’ll be doing a live podcast session
– http://nmxlive.com
WordPress 3.5 is out!
- http://wordpress.org/news/2012/12/elvin/

Tools / Plugins

– WordPress 3.5 New Tools
– Register your favorite plugins with a username with WordPress.org
– You can only add to your favorites from the WordPress repository
– Check out my profile: http://profiles.wordpress.org/dustinhartzler

Listener Feedback

Chad Warner (http://optimwise.com)
I offer my clients a WordPress update maintenance service, which includes updates to WordPress core, plugins, and themes. I offer this to clients who have their own hosting and those whose sites are hosted in my hosting account. I tell clients that it’s critical to keep their sites updated for the sake of security, and that I remove the hassle by handling the updates.

In 2012 I charged $10/mo for this service, but in 2013 I’m raising it to $20/mo because of the work involved. I’m usually handling backups and sometimes troubleshooting plugins and themes that break, which can be time-consuming. Almost all my clients pay for each year upfront.

Main Topic

Amy London (http://www.amylondon.com)
How do you teach someone how to use WordPress?
– Here’s how I do it
– Sign up for a free meetingburner.com account or use similar screen sharing application like Skype
– Run ScreenFlow in the background so I can give the clients a copy at the end
– Take them to the WordPress dashboard page and login with their credentials
– I talk about the Dashboard first
– Then highlight the other areas (Posts – Comments) & (Appearance – Settings) just a high level overview
– Then I show them how to add a post / page.
– How to save / schedule a post
– http://www.videousermanuals.com/

Call To Action

– Back up your site and install WordPress 3.5

First Look at WordPress 3.5

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 19:28:31 +0000

Much of the time, I’m too busy to check out the latest version of WordPress until it’s been released for a few days. Well, that’s not the case for version 3.5.

In less than 8 minutes, you can watch and learn about some of the new changes that you will see with the next major release, which is due out any day now.

105 – How to Charge for Maintenance of a WordPress Website

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:51:55 +0000

Announcements

– WordPress Webinar on Friday: How to Install Google Apps. Register: http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar
– WordPress 3.5 is releasing soon! For more details: http://make.wordpress.org/core/2012/12/04/all-hands-on-deck-within-the-next-few/

Tools / Plugins

– Find excellent free icons: http://www.iconfinder.com/
– Great WordPress website: http://aliciakeys.com/

Listener Feedback

- Scott (www.ComputerTutorFlorida.com)
- Andrea (http://couponblessingsnow.com)
When people get themes from – even if its from a reputable company, they gotta have the TAC plugin and make sure there isn’t encrypted code in the theme
- Joe
– I was considering signing up with green geeks, but now I’m a bit worried, read the full article: http://drupal.org/node/810476

How to charge for Maintenance of a WordPress Website

– If I’m hosting the site
– I will update WordPress
– When I find out new things about security, I update them as well
– I have a BackupBuddy running on their sites and depending on the hosting plan, determines how often their site gets backed up. Plus I also back up to a third party site.
– If they are paying for their own hosting
– I give them instructions on how to update WordPress and plugins
– I set them up with BackupBuddy and configure to save to their server as well as give them instructions to back up to a third party
– If they have maintenance issues, that is normally a new project

Call To Action

– Sign up for webinar at http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar

How do you charge for maintenance of WordPress? Leave a comment below.

104 – Become a Full-Time Freelance Developer

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 10:26:01 +0000

Chad Warner

Website: OptimWise.com | Twitter: @warnerchad

In today’s episode we hear the inspiring journey of Chad Warner, who has successfully transitioned out of his full-time job into a full-time freelance developer.

Some of the questions Chad answers in the interview:
- Tell us what you do at your current job.
- How did you become interested in web design?
- When did you decide you wanted to go full-time working for yourself?
- How did you tell your current boss?
- How have you managed doing two jobs at one time?
- What are you going to do about benefits?
- What advice would you give someone who’s listening who wants to become a full-time developer?

What’s Holding You Back?

103 – A Website Developer’s Nightmare: Passwords

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:32:42 +0000

Announcements

– WordPress Webinar
– Here’s what’s coming in WordPress 3.5
– http://www.wpbeginner.com/news/whats-coming-in-wordpress-3-5-features-screenshots/
– Thank you for the 5 star reviews in iTunes I appreciate it! My goal is to get 11 more by the end of 2012 in the US iTunes store.

Tools / Plugins

– https://www.tweaky.com/
– http://launcheffectapp.com/

A Website Developer’s Nightmare: Passwords

(Jeff @readtree)
I have a question about building WordPress sites for other people. I find it very difficult to manage all of the user names and passwords they need to provide me to set up a site. For example let’s say my client is very new to the online world and does not have any accounts (hostgator, twitter, WordPress, mailchimp, etc.). What is the best way to coordinate this with the client. Should I set up everything for them and then turn over the user names and passwords when the job is complete? Should I have them set up the accounts and provide me the info? Or is there a service I am missing to accomplish this task?

If they are using Gmail / Google Apps

– Ask if you can have their password for setting up their accounts
– Sign up for twitter, Google+, Facebook, MailChimp, wordpress.com, analytics / any other account that doesn’t need credit card information
– Write down all of the passwords you create in one area
– When you get the confirmation emails, verify your clients email address and delete the email messages promptly (to not confuse the client)
– If you plan on billing your clients monthly, then you can create a new account for Hostgator / Bluehost with your credit card and charge them monthly

If they are not using email with a web interface

– You could:
– Sign up for their accounts with their email address and let them know they will be getting notifications to confirm their new accounts
– Sign up for their accounts with a generic email address you own (WebsiteName@YourWebsiteEngineer.com) then once all of the profiles are set up and running, you can change the email address. This will probably generate another notification email message.
– Or you can create a short how to document to highlight the different methods of signing up
– If they create the accounts themselves, then you have to get all of the usernames / passwords before you can start working

Create a new Gmail account

– Choose Gmail because it easily connects with analytics
– Web interface that out of the box can forward to multiple email accounts
– Thanks Dustin, you do a great job keeping us informed. Can you let me know when this is addressed on the show (if you decide to cover it )

How do you do it?

Call To Action

– Sign up for webinar at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar
– Leave a 5 star rating and review in iTunes YourWebsiteEngineer.com/itunes

102 – WordPress Custom Post Types

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 10:52:43 +0000

Announcements

WordPress iPhone / iPad app is updated to 3.2.1
– No need to login with username / password
– Clean interface for editing posts and pages
– Full access to the dashboard from within the app

Listener Feedback

Jason’s Question about Google Libraries

Decreased Latency

– A Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributies your static files across servers from different diverse physical locations, so the download will take place from the closest location

Increased Parallelism

– Browsers limit the number of connections of simultaneous downloads

Better Caching

– If a visitor to your site already has downloaded a version of jQuery from Google, then they won’t have to download it again

Gerald (http://memphisdigitalmedia.com)
I use Backup Buddy too and backup to several different places. One way I backup my clients is to create a Gmail account for their backups. Then I set BackupBuddy to email the database to that Gmail account. Gmail has a lot storage space if you just use it for you database.

Understand WordPress Custom Post Types

– A custom post type is your own post type; testimonials, portfolios, blogs etc
– If you think of WordPress as a site-building framework, custom post types are the different kinds of content blocks that make up your website. For example, you can have a unique post type for portfolio items, houses for sale, podcasts, journal entries, or anything that might warrant its own formatting. If a site is set up specifically for a client who is not so familiar with WordPress, a custom post type can be easier to understand than sorting out posts and pages, which have more of a generic meaning. Adding custom post types is a helpful way to tailor a WordPress site specifically for the content that it will be delivering.
– It allows you to present your data the way you want to. You can hide data and choose to present to the audience only when required. This is especially useful when you wish to segregate your default queries from specialized queries thus organizing your information and choosing what information will be public and what information will be specialized.
– Improved usability: simply it is quite complex to tell a client, “To post a podcast, you must do A, B, C, and D. To post a blog post, you must do A, B, and C.” Custom post types allow you to create one singular process that makes sense to the non-programmer and non-power user.
– Hide content from default queries: It’s not that you are hiding content per se; however, out of the box, custom post types are not included in the query further customizing the ability to organize and present the content the way you want. Without additional coding, custom post types are not included in the default queries. Furthermore, the customization options allowed in registering custom post types further increases the beauty and power of custom post types by making them non-public and non-queryable.

Links
– http://wpmu.org/explore-the-power-of-custom-post-types-to-maximize-wordpress-as-a-cms/
– http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/plugins/a-guide-to-wordpress-custom-post-types-creation-display-and-meta-boxes/
– Custom Post Type UI

101 – What is Your WordPress Backup Strategy

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:09:16 +0000

Announcements

Vote for the Podcast Awards
– Takes a community effort, that’s why you can vote once a day for 15 days!
– Help me shake Leo LaPorte’s hand!

Looking for developers! Contact me at Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com if you are interested in become a recommended developer.

Tools / Plugins

Jacob from Intice Media – signature tool online at sigwich.com

Rick Perkins – Corel’s Paintshop Pro. It has 80% of the Photoshop functionality but only costs $70 (and it often goes on sale for less). So, if you are a Windows person and you need to keep your costs down, I would highly recommend you check it out.

Listener Feedback

Joe Cannon previous question – I thought you would be the perfect person to ask this of. I sometimes update my posts as new information becomes available. As I add new information, I’d like to change the time stamp so my blog post reflects that it’s more recent. My question is would I lose any SEO juice by doing this? I often rank #1 in google for the products I review so I was curious.

Randi’s Response: Changing the time stamp is OK (and actually could be very good) because Google loves fresh content. However, when he mentions “update post with new information” it is important that he is adding more than just a few sentences. Another words, he is adding substantial good content. Good content can never hurt your website. This would prevent Google from suspecting that the time stamp change is a method used to try to manipulate their algorithm.

What is your WordPress backup strategy?

What type of service?

Free
– BackWPUp
– WordPress Backup to Dropbox
Paid Plugins
– BackupBuddy
Services
– VaultPress

Automatic or Manual?

– Automatic never forget
– I manually back up before any upgrades or adding a new plugin
– It’s as easy as clicking a button

What should I back up?

For Clients
– the database
– the uploads folder
For Yourself
– the database
– the wp-content folder

How do I backup my backups?

– There is no point of having a backup if you lose it or can’t find it
– You can use a paid cloud service like Amazon S3 or Rackspace
– You can use Dropbox
– You can burn to CD

100 – Your Can’t Live Without WordPress Plugins

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:27:07 +0000

Today’s episode marks the almost two year mark of Your Website Engineer podcast. Every week for the last 100 weeks, I have share information about WordPress or I’ve interviewed a guest about a WordPress topic.

This week, I shake things up a bit as I’ve asked people to send me an audio recording of a plugin that they have to install on every site. Plus, we had a hangout online and some of the episode comes from the live chat formula. Enjoy!

Cliff Ravenscraft – Pretty Link Lite

Dave Stachowiak – Backup Buddy

Brian Wallace – W3 Total Cache

Samuel Lewis – Shareaholic

Matt Shane – Backup WordPress

Brian Retterer – Cimy Swift SMTP, infinite WP

Adam Silver – JF3 Maintenance Mode

Jeff Long – Word Fence

Chad Warner – Dupicator

Marianne Hegedus – Advanced Access Manager

Peder Aadahl – nRelate

Patricio Parada – File Monitor Plus

Joe Cannon – WP Insert

Andrew Blane – W3 Total Cache

Lynn Dye – Backup Buddy

Jim Krenz – Bulletproof Security

Andy Lehman – Limit Login Attempts

Others’ mentioned:
Google Analyticator
BackWPup
WP-Remote
Login Logo
Simple Menu Delete
Better WP Security

Here’s a snapshot of those who were on video:

Listen to the full 2+ Hour Hangout
Download Now

099 – Keys to Enjoy Web Programming

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 09:47:29 +0000

In this week’s episode, Sean and Randy from beAutomated.com and I chat about the keys to enjoy web programming.

In order to be a successful programmer, you will have to enjoy your work, break it down into manageable pieces and write it so others can read it. Listen to the show to learn more!

Here is the outline we discussed:
The way to enjoy programming is to work in “bite sized chunks” of code, code that provides a single service.
– The inspiration for this came about from working on a large non WordPress project, where we were tasked with making patches to an unfamiliar system with half a million lines of code.
– Working with large programs means working with many developers. Each developer has their own style. The lack of standards creates bloat, confusion, and eventually bad security, performance, interoperability, and UX.
– Think of architecture as an analogy. Building a custom home is fun. Building a skyscraper makes even the tiniest of decisions highly complex.

WP Plugins allow us to concentrate a single service tied to the core API.
– All you need to know is the data model of the website, how to talk to the core, and the feature you are building.
– You do not need to know the inner workings of the WordPress infrastructure, nor the inner workings of any other Plugin or Theme, when you build this way.
- Developers often ﬁnd themselves dealing with a spaghetti mess of code.
– How do you remember thousands of lines of code that produces a result, especially among dozens of projects?

Earlier on, the key to keeping code scalable was the use of objects, and object oriented programming techniques.
– For example, you would create classes of functions and variables and store them in appropriately named ﬁles. For example: ʻclass.students.phpʼ or ʻclass.teachers.phpʼ.

Object oriented programming led into standardized frameworks and model-viewcontroller frameworks.
– Frameworks provide a stock set of objects, for example: ʻusersʼ. Frameworks separate the code that produces data, design, and structure.• Web publishing platforms such as WordPress, take this concept even further by providing an inherent set of documented, supported objects, user interfaces, and community contributed bundles of design and functional packages.

WordPress provides what you might call “master objects”.
– For example, entities that log in; instead of thinking about many objects like ʻstudentsʼ and ʻteachersʼ, you think about ʻusersʼ, user role/capability assignments, and ʻusermetaʼ.
– Another example, entities that produce content; instead of thinking about ʻschoolsʼ, ʻdepartmentsʼ, ʻprogramsʼ, and ʻclassesʼ, you think about ʻpostsʼ, post types, and ʻpostmetaʼ.
– Final example; instead of thinking about conﬁgurations, session variables, and caching, think ʻoptionsʼ particularly with the settings API, and ʻtransientsʼ.
– All of these are documented and heavily used WordPress Plugin APIs.

We always preach about the need to keep design/layout/style code within themes or child themes, and any functional/logical code within Plugins.
– A new concept we like to put out there is keeping Plugins sized to these “bite sized chunks” because each Plugin becomes a unit test to work on, something that can be enabled/disabled, plugged-in and plugged-out, packaged and distributed among sites accordingly.

Often times marketing trumps the practice of keeping themes and Plugins simple, because packaging software features exposes more to the market.
– Itʼs preferable to help users manage their limited resources within their websites.
– A future concept of parent/child Plugins (think JetPack or EditFlow) may standardize this architecture further.

Developers prefer managing modules that they can easily comprehend the purpose and structure of, especially as multiple developers get involved.
– We always have best practices to follow to make everyoneʼs job more enjoyable.
– We have WordPress and Plugins to thank for this new way of thinking, and enjoying development projects.

098 – Software to Run Your Website Development Business

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 10:08:17 +0000

In today’s episode, I follow the eight other people that I interviewed in the past fews and share what tools I use daily to run my company. Quite simply, this is about software to run your website development business

Computer OS: Mac
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: Espresso, Coda 2
FTP Clients: Flow, Forklift
Photo Editor: Acorn, Adobe Creative Cloud
Web Browser: Chrome / Safari, Web Developer,
Productivity Tools: WorkFlowy Things
Podcasting Tools: Adobe Audition ID3 Tag Editor, Libsyn Soundboard
Misc. Tools: Freshbooks, ScreenFlow

What do you use? Is it something that hasn’t been mentioned? Let us know in the comments below.

Install a Premium WordPress Theme

Dustin Hartzler — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 19:06:52 +0000

I get a lot of questions on how to install a premium WordPress theme that isn’t in the WordPress repository. They themes can be found many place but today, I want to show you how to add a theme that’s purchased at ThemeForest.net.

Even if you’ve never purchased a theme from ThemeForest, this process is the exact same. I’ll show you how to use WordPress to upload your theme and how to use an FTP client.

Take 5 minutes to check out the video below:

097 – Software for Everyday WordPress Users Part 2

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 09:09:33 +0000

Today’s episode is another one that has several guests sharing with me the different tools that they use to keep their WordPress websites up and running.

Joshua Rivers

Website: JoshuaRivers.net | Twitter: @JoshuaWRivers
Computer OS: Windows
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: NotePad++
FTP Clients: FileZilla
Photo Editor: Infraview, Gimp
Web Browser: Chrome / Firefox, Web Developer, Webpage Screenshot
Productivity Tools: Pen and Paper, Evernote

Albert Hathazi

Website: TheLocalMethod.com | Twitter: @AlbertHathazi
Computer OS: Mac
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: Kompozer, Sea Monkey, Markdown Syntax, Byword
FTP Clients: FireFTP, Forklift
Photo Editor: Pixelmator, Snag-It, Skitch
Web Browser: Chrome, LassPass
Productivity Tools: Siri, Things

Sean Conklin and Randy Sandberg

Website: beAutomated.com | Twitter: @beAutomated
Computer OS:Mac OS
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: Text Wrangler
FTP Clients: Text Wrangler, Transmit
Photo Editor: Photoshop
Web Browser: Safari
Productivity Tools: RepositoryHosting.com, redmine.org

096 – How to Migrate Data within WordPress

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 09:57:32 +0000

Announcements

- WordPress Webinar – Facebook (yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar)

- PodcastAwards.com
If you are interested in nominating this show as for a Podcast Award, please fill out the form so it looks identical to this one:

- I will be speaking at New Media Expo (#NMX) this upcoming January. More details to come!

- WPEngine Free 3 months of hosting
use coupon code hostober

WordPress Twenty Twelve Theme is now out! You can download from: wordpress.org/extend/themes/twentytwelve

Tools / Plugins

Jacob (inticemedia.com)
Here’s a free tool to generate estimates and invoices. aynax.com/freeEstimateTemplate.php

Listener Feedback

- Joe Cannon – I thought you would be the perfect person to ask this of. I sometimes update my posts as new information becomes available. As I add new information, I’d like to change the time stamp so my blog post reflects that it’s more recent. My question is would I lose any SEO juice by doing this? I often rank #1 in google for the products I review so I was curious

Jason
Jason asked about the “Enhanced Distribution” section of the JetPack Plugin. I let him know my thoughts on that.

How to Migrate Data within WordPress

- One thing that I would be interested in hearing you address is how to handle changes to the database. Do you ever migrate the data you use for developing new features or would you recreate them on the new site once those new features have been deployed? Or do you use WordPress’s import and export functionality?
- Widget Settings ImportExport

Thank You!
- Thank you to the following people for using my affiliate links. As you know I make a small commission when someone uses my link and I want to say thank you to the following people. For all my recommended resources, go to my Resources Page
Hover
- Peter I.
- Christopher H.
- Chad W.
- Josh W.
- CheVon B.
GreenGeeks
- 1 Person have used my Green Geeks Affiliate link since last week. Thank you!
Backup Buddy
- Three people have used my Backup Buddy Affiliate link since last week. Thank you!

Call To Action

- Sign up for webinar at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar
- Contact me if you are interested in sharing your tools for next week’s episode

Run WordPress Locally on Your Mac

Dustin Hartzler — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:43:11 +0000

As I’m building a website for a customer, I want to develop their site as quickly and efficiently as I can, because the faster I complete it, the faster I can get to the next paying project.

I have found that if I develop a website locally on my mac, it saves me a ton of time, because I never have to wait for a file to be uploaded to a server. As soon as I save the file, I can refresh on my computer and I can see the modifications. There are many more benefits to run WordPress locally.

Today I have a video that shows you exactly how to set up MAMP on your computer to run your development sites on your computer.

This is also great if you want to work on a website when you know you’ll be offline, like flying or at the beach. You can be set up in less than 10 minutes and I think you will enjoy the flexibility you have for developing locally.

095 – Software for Everyday WordPress Users

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 09:55:35 +0000

Today’s episode is a little different than most. Today I had multiple guests on the show to share with us what software they use everyday to create WordPress websites.

I asked everyone the same questions and you can find their answers and links to the things that they use below. Enjoy learning the software for everyday WordPress users.

Chad Warner

Website: OptimWise.com | Twitter: @warnerchad
Computer OS: Windows
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: NotePad++, Aptana Studio
FTP Clients: FireFTP
Photo Editor: Paint.net, Inkscape
Web Browser: Firefox
Productivity Tools: GTD, http://pomodorotechnique.com/, GTasks

Ann Marie Gill

Website: CascadeValleyDesigns.com | Twitter: @CascadeVDesign
Computer OS: Windows
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: Dreamweaver, Stylizer
FTP Clients: Dreamweaver
Photo Editor: Photoshop
Web Browser: Chrome
Productivity Tools: WorkFlowy, Basecamp

Register for my free webinar on “Easy Ways to Make your Website Mobile Friendly” 9/28 at 12pm PST http://bit.ly/O7P7K2 #B2BBsummit

Adam Silver

Website: silverliningphotography.net | Twitter: @SLP_AdamSilver
Computer OS:Mac OS
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: Headway, Text Wrangler
FTP Clients: Cyber Duck
Photo Editor: Aperture, Photoshop,Fusion (for Windows)
Productivity Tools: OmniFocus, iCal, Evernote

Stephen Cross

StephenCross.com, ParallxInfoTech.com | Twitter: @stephencross
Computer OS:Mac OS
HTML, CSS, PHP Editor: BBEdit
FTP Clients: Transmit
Photo Editor: Photoshop
Web Browser: Chrome
Productivity Tools: Basecamp, OmniFocus

What do you use?

Create an HTML Email Signature (with images and colors)

Dustin Hartzler — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 15:22:56 +0000

Probably the most frequent question I get via emails is “How do you create a signature like yours?” Or put another way, “How can I create an HTML email signature for my emails?”

I never really know how to respond to those messages as it’s significantly tricky to describe, because there are so many different email clients out there.

But today, I’m going to show you two different ways to add a great looking signature to the end of each email you send. The first way is to generate the HTML that you can paste into your mail client of choice and the second is how to add a HTML signature to gmail.

Plus, the cool thing is, you can use your current WordPress website to help you

Create Your Signature

First things first, let’s decide what should be in your signature. Here’s what mine has looked like for the past year:

I like to only include the essential information here. As you can see, I don’t have my email address in my signature. Most likely if someone wants to email me, they will simply reply to my message. I do include my business phone number in case someone would rather contact me via phone.

Of course promote my websites, but I’m not shouting, “Come check me out, NOW!” My websites are there in case someone is interested in finding out more information about me or my company.

All of those things can be done with a basic signature. It’s the next thing that trips up most people; adding the images.

I’ve included different networks of where people can find me, for their convenience, in a compact matter by using images.

Now some email clients like Outlook have the ability to add an image to your signature. But this isn’t the way to do this. This is the incorrect way because then every email you send will have that many attachments and we don’t want that.

We want to host your file on a web server somewhere. And we will get to this in the next step.

Okay, so take a few minutes and create your signature on paper, before moving on to the next step.

Add a New WordPress Page

Now that you have your signature designed, open up WordPress and create a new page and name it Signature. (Don’t worry, about people finding this page. If you don’t want people to find it, you can delete the page after you’ve created your signature).

Now using the visual editor, start creating the signature digitally.

Start by adding your text and your hyperlinks, just like you would for a blog post. Once that’s completed, it’s time to add your images.

Adding images is just like adding an image to a blog post. Find the icon or image you want to use, add it via the media library.

For my signature, I used a space between each social media icon, so the edges don’t touch each other.

Once you are happy with the way your signature looks, save the page.

Use HTML Signature

With some email clients you can simply paste in HTML code. If this is the way your email client works, then this is the step for you. If you are using Gmail, skip this step and go on to the next one.

From the page editor, select the HTML editor and you will see the HTML that was generated while you built your signature with the visual editor.

Copy this generated code and paste into the custom signature area in your email client.

Save it and check it out. You should have a great looking signature that pulls the images from your server so you aren’t adding unnecessary attachments to every message.

Gmail Signature

If you are using Gmail, here’s what you need to do.

First go into your Gmail Settings. Currently, this is under the gear in the upper righthand corner.

Under General settings, scroll down until you see “Signature.”

Now go back to WordPress and view your Signature page you just created. You should be able to see exactly what your signature is going to look like. You will also see all the rest of your website.

While viewing this page in your browser, highlight and copy your signature only. Now paste this into the Signature window inside of Gmail and save the settings.

With my testing, this works most of the time. If it doesn’t work for you, try one more thing.

Paste HTML into signature.html

I found out in my own testing, that certain CSS properties, may not allow the images to show up in your new signature.

From your Signature page editor, switch to HTML mode and copy all of the code and paste it in a new document called signature.html. After saving, open the file in your web browser (you should be able to double-click).

If the formatting is off, you might have to use some simple inline css to do the trick. Here’s the code I am using for my newly created signature:

Dustin R. Hartzler

YourWebsiteEngineer.com
P: 937.881.4865

Let’s Connect!

Dustin R. Hartzler

YourWebsiteEngineer.com
P: 937.881.4865

Let's Connect!

Now, highlight your signature and paste into Gmail.

Compose a new message and see your fancy new signature.

I just created a great looking email signature (with images) by following these simple steps: yourwebsiteengineer.com/create-an-html…

— Dustin Hartzler (@DustinHartzler) September 24, 2012

Share Your New Signature

Did the above steps work for you? I’d love to see your new signature. Post in the comments section below with the link to your Signature Page. I’ll start off and my new signature is below.

094 – Sell Digital Products on your WordPress Site

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:49:58 +0000

Announcements

Read about GoDaddy Security Breech in a blog post I wrote last week.

Tools / Plugins

infinitewp.com

Listener Feedback

Kristi Mallet – How to hide a page from search engines. Will not linking to the page work?
– First, do not post a link anywhere
– Use Yoast SEO (or other SEO plugins) and select no-follow from the advanced section on that particular post or page.

Sell Digital Products on Your WordPress Site

- Create the content (audio, video, written)
- Upload your content to your web server
- Link / Embed / Attach your content to a WordPress page – IMPORTANT – this page should not be easily found
- Password Protect this page
- Create a summary sheet that give people access to your page that’s password protected
- Upload this to the media library
- Create a short link to this document (using Pretty Link Lite)
- Sign up for an account with e-junkie
- Add a new product to e-junkie
- Name the product and select redirection and give your item a price. Nothing else should be checked. It will automatically generate an item number
- Paste in the redirection URL (from previous step)
- Set download link validity and item expiration (if necessary)
- Next screen gives you the ability to cross promote your products
- Finally, you will get “Add to Cart” and “View Cart” code
- Paste this information into WordPress on your Products / Shop page

Thank You!

Thank you to the following people for using my affiliate links. As you know I make a small commission when someone uses my link and I want to say thank you to the following people. For all my recommended resources, go to my Resources Page.

Hover
– Christopher H.
– Peter I.
– Adam. K
GreenGeeks
– 2 People have used my Green Geeks Affiliate this month. Thank you!

Do you have a preferred method to selling digital products online?

Are you still using GoDaddy?

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:36:53 +0000

Earlier this week, we saw a huge melt down of domain registrar GoDaddy. If you are using GoDaddy for hosting, email or DNS services, basically everything stopped working.

Now it’s no secret that I’m not a fan of GoDaddy. In several past podcasts, I’ve talked about my dislike, especially 011 – Why I Can’t Stand Using GoDaddy and I even tweeted this on Monday:

GoDaddy Outage Takes Down Millions Of Sites hartzler.tv/NkY8gZ //Glad I strongly dislike their service and don’t use them for anything

— Dustin Hartzler (@DustinHartzler) September 10, 2012

I guess I should back up a second and tell you what happened.

Basically, any service that was being hosted at GoDaddy, vanished. A hacker named Anonymousown3r tweeted out that he took down the giant company. Whether this is true or not, remains to be seen, but the fact is, GoDaddy went down hard.

I had a different issue to talk to them about on Monday and even their hold message was all messed up.

Monday’s meltdown should be the last straw if you are still using them (in my opinion). They are still okay for domain registration, as that’s what they are good with, but anything else, you should stay far away.

I’m a fan of smaller companies because:
- I normally get better customer service
- Small companies are not usually prone to huge global attacks
- You normally get more for your money

In case you are interested in leaving GoDaddy, here are my personal recommendations.

Domain Registration

My personal favorite place to register domains is hover.com. Not only is the interface extremely clean and simplistic, but there are no crazy upsells. You purchase exactly what you want.

Now, some people may claim that at $15 their domains are more expensive; however, when you really look at it, you are actually saving money because Hover’s services includes WHOIS privacy, which means people cannot see your private account information. This is an upsell for GoDaddy Customers.

Plus, once you reach someone during business hours, you will never be put on hold. And usually the problem is resolved in less than 5 minutes (well, that’s been my experience)!

Email Hosting

I have people who I work with that couldn’t get to their email on Monday.

Wow, think about that.

If you are a small business and you rely on email communication to run your business, this puts a damper on your day. You can’t respond to message, you can complete tasks that were email, etc. Yeah, that’s bad news.

I recommend all of my clients to use Google Apps for email. I personally use their service and completely love it.

The only time in the 2.5 years I’ve had my Google Apps account I can remember not having access to my email is when I didn’t have an internet connection.

Seriously, I can’t remember a time my mail went down.

Plus with Google Apps, you get Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sites and all the other features of Google. With the Apps account, you can also manage internal company communications using these platforms. You can even upload your own company image and remove the Gmail branding.

If you need 10 email accounts or less, it’s completely free. If you need more, it’s simply $5 per month, per user. That’s about double GoDaddy’s price, but you get so many more resources, I can’t recommend them enough!

Website Hosting

Of the several reasons that I don’t like GoDaddy, the deal breaker is that they have no live chat. You have to get on the phone and wait to talk to someone.

That doesn’t work for me. I like to be able to send someone via live chat my error codes, screenshots etc.

The company that I highly recommend is GreenGeeks.com. They are a smaller company but they have incredible customer service.

When starting a live chat, you are talking to a live person within a minute.

Also, GreenGeeks has very little upselling and you can get a great deal on hosting packages. In fact, if you sign up with the link above and use the coupon code “TODAYOFFER” you will save an additional $30.

WordPress can be installed instantly on your server with their one-click installation scripts and it’s available for you to start editing immediately. Unlike GoDaddy, where you have to submit a request and it will be installed sometime in the next 24 hours.

It’s not Hard

I know that some people continue to pay GoDaddy and are frustrated with their services, but think it will be too difficult to transfer to a new provider.

It’s not difficult at all. Hover and GreenGeeks will help you every step of the way and there are great resources online to setup and configure your Google Apps account.

What’s it worth to you to be confident that you will receive every email or your shopping cart will always be online?

093 – How to Update a Live Site

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 10:34:30 +0000

Announcements

Lock Down Your Website Webinar Replay is now available.
WordPress Security Update 3.4.2 has been released

Tools / Plugins

WordPress VIP LiveBlog
- Post updates right from the front-end of your site (no need to use the /wp-admin dashboard)
- Viewers of your Liveblog get new entries served to them instantly and automatically, without needing to refresh their browser.
- Your authors can drag-and-drop photos right into the Liveblog area, without needing to navigate to separate browser tabs or windows.
- There’s no need for a separate site dedicated to liveblogging: every post can be a liveblog, even existing ones.

Listener Feedback

- Mystery Caller – Jetpack Plugin. Try Jetpack Lite. To see if Jetpack is slowing your site down, use P3 Profiler.
- Andy Lehmen – Video Intro – watch my new intro
- Dustin – GIT is awesome. If you are interested in learning more, check out this YouTube video: youtube.com/watch?v=vaNGbk6HN9Y

How to Update a Live Site

Steve from http://FrugalLancaster.com is interested in finding out the best way to update a live WordPress website.
– Update the live site
– Put up a maintenance plugin
– Create a sub domain for the development site
– Develop locally on your computer

Call To Action

Email me if you’d like to be part of the show that I’m putting together. I’d love to hear about what tools you use to create websites. FTP Clients, HTML Editors, Wire Frame Diagrams, you name it, I want to hear about it!

New Video Intro

Dustin Hartzler — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 18:11:40 +0000

When building your business, I feel that branding is a huge piece thing to keep everything consistent.

Recently, I’ve been trying to create more videos, but I’ve had a hard time actually doing so because I wanted a really cool intro clip that would set up my video.

I’ve looked around a premium templates that I could slap in my logo and be done and I’ve looked on Fiverr.com for someone to do this for me for little cost.

Finally, I’ve have an opening video, so technically, I can’t drag my feet any more when it comes to producing video.

Before I show it to you though, I want to let you know that connected with one of the listeners of my podcast and he created this amazing video. Andy Lehman from Lehman Creations did a great job of putting this video together for me.

Of course, even though the video was awesome as Andy sent it, I had to make some tweaks

I sped it up and added the background music and here’s the final product that you will see at the beginning of my videos.

092 – Version Control your WordPress site

Dustin Hartzler — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:16:04 +0000

In today’s show, I interview my friend Aaron Holbrook (@AaronJHolbrook) from a7web.com and aaronjholbrook.com so we can learn about version control.

This is a topic that I need a lesson on, so I’m excited to bring you this interview. I hope you learn as much as I did.

Here are some of the questions that we covered:
- What is version control?
- Who should be using version control?
- Do I have to use something like GitHub?
- What are the major benefits?
- Doesn’t it take longer / take up more room for more files?
- How do I use Git Hub
- Does it cost money for Git Hub?

Learn about Version Control for your WordPress site with @aaronjholbrook hartzler.tv/NcjCN7

— Dustin Hartzler (@DustinHartzler) September 5, 2012

Call To Action
– Sign up for webinar at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar