Resources
Tools for WordPress Webmasters
Welcome! If you arrived at this page from reading my ‘WordPress To Go’ ebook then thank you for buying the book and I hope you found it useful. Before we we go on, may I please ask you to post a review of the book at Amazon.com
As I mentioned in the book, there are many tools and techniques that can help to improve a website, some paid and some free. I have listed here the resources that I personally use and can recommend. I have provided a brief introduction to each one, but for full details of what the product or service can provide I urge you to visit the website and find out for yourself.
WordPress Hosting
Hosting is the one resource that a WordPress webmaster cannot do without and it is vital for the performance of your website that you choose the best. I host this website (and many others) at BlueHost and I have never had the slightest problem with them. They are one of the premier hosting companies that WordPress themselves recommends – and who am I to argue?
Other hosting companies that I have used are Hostgator and West Host. Both of these have a great reputation and come well-endorsed by the professionals.
WordPress Themes
In addition to the default theme of Twenty Eleven, WordPress users can choose from hundreds and hundreds of free themes in a wide variety of colors and formats. But if you want a more exclusive look to your website you can use a premium theme from one of the many companies specializing in WordPress designs.
One of the best-known companies is Elegant Themes. For a small annual fee you get access to their whole portfolio of premium themes, including new ones which are released during the year. They have many happy customers and an awesome reputation for high quality designs.
Woo Themes is another premium themes service, this time with a range of theme packages and pricing options. They have some truly exciting designs to suit a wide range of applications and they offer a good range of options and plugins to maximise their themes’ functionality.
The powerful Thesis Theme by DIYThemes is the mother and daddy of all premium themes. It is actually a framework designed to enable you to customise each element of your theme and make your WordPress website unique. It requires no coding knowledge and delivers precision results via its revolutionary layout generator.
And, if you want to design your WordPress theme yourself, you can use Artisteer, a point and click theme generator that lets you design totally unique themes that look and behave like professionally designed themes. You don’t need any particular technical or artistic skills to use it. I actually used Artisteer to design this the theme for this website!
Header Graphics
If you want to design your own website header to upload to a theme I can recommend XHeader, a service which provides an easy-to-use graphical interface which combines text and graphics. There is a good free service where you can use your own graphics or there is a paid service which gives you access to a huge library of images to suit your website.
Autoresponder Service
If you have an email list of customers and/or prospects then you need an autoresponder service to send out emails to them automatically. There are two market leaders: AWeber and GetResponse. I have used both and they each provide an excellent service. Check out the pricing packages on their websites to decide which of them would be suitable for you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is all about presenting your website to the search engines (Google in particular) so that your indexed site will attract your target audience. There is no point in having a whizz-bang website with every latest dingle-dangle if no-one every visits it. And, even if you do have thousands of visitors a day, it is a waste of everyone’s time and resources if they are not the right sort of visitors.
SEO begins with keyword research. You need to know what phrase or question your ideal visitor would type into Google Search when they are looking for a website like yours. And you need to know what your competition is. How many websites are there already in existence that Google will list in preference to your website and what keywords are they optimized for?
The first place to go is the free keyword tool provided by Google. This will give you a general idea of the words and phrases that people use when looking for a site like yours. And it will provide evidence of the level of competition that your keywords will encounter.
Google’s keyword tool is useful but it is limited in scope if you want to drill down and find those keywords that have reasonable amount of traffic but lower than average competition. For this you need a tool like Market Samurai which has many options to filter the keyword results and look in detail at the websites that occupy the front page of the search results, which is where you want your website to be. I highly recommend Market Samurai.
And one tool that I have heard good reports about is SEOpressor, a WordPress plugin that takes care of analysing on-page SEO in your site. This plugin looks intelligently at your content and either tweaks your site itself or makes suggestions about how you can improve your internal SEO. SEOpressor has a large customer base and an impressive reputation for effective SEO.