If your blog already has a small image (maybe it came with one in your theme), you just create a new header in something like Photoshop, and put the new image in the appropriate image folder in your hosting. Deleting or rename the old image file, and call your new image the same name as the old one. You can also upload your image, but change just the filename in the style.css file.

Often a theme comes with just a text title, that you want to replace with a header. This is more often the case, so here’s an easy way to do it.

1) create a header as close to the right size as you can, and save it as a .gif, .jpg, or .png.

2) open up any post in your blog.

3) insert your header image into the post. don’t worry, we’re not saving the post, so it can go anywhere. sometimes i make a ‘draft’ post just for situations like this. by uploading it, we are putting that image in your hosting.

4) grab a corner and slightly resize the image, bigger or smaller. This adds an image size line of code to the image, which can be useful later.

5) click on the image, and make it a link, back to your home page. get it to open in the same window. at this stage i usually center the image on the page, also.

6) ok, switch to HTML view. Copy ALL the code that has to do with that image – link, image title, image location, and image size.

7) open up the header.php file and look for the line of code that controls the printing of the name of the blog in the header. I just do a search for “name”. There is usually a similar line after that for “description”.

8 ) you can delete that line if you’re feeling confident, however it’s better if you “comment out” the line. do a simple google search if you don’t know how to comment out lines of code (it’s easy).

9) just before or after this commented out code, paste in your image file code from your post. Hit save.

10) open up a NEW tab or window, and see the results (opening up a new window lets you easily change windows and correct things if you’ve made a mistake).

Look ok?

If it’s too big or small, remember that you should have some numbers in the code controlling its size. Play with these numbers until you get the look you are after. Adding spaces around it, and line breaks before or after, should be enough to get the exact look you need.

If it looks good in Firefox, don’t forget to check in browsers others might be using too – like Safari, Opera, Chrome, Internet Explorer (yuck!), etc.

This same basic technique can be used for putting images (such as ads) in your widgets, or just about anywhere you want an ad or graphic to appear.

Any questions?

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People often ask me where they can find a particular plugin I’ve used on a site, or how to do something like install a free script to insert an Ebay listing into their site. Here’s 100+ free (or very cheap) resources to get you started. Ok, so if you count closely ‘s really 91 – but with some suggestions from you we’ll soon get over the 100 mark. More great tools coming soon from me, too.

Quick Site Building

• WordPress
• Blogger
• Joomla
• Google Pages
• Squidoo
• BANS
• Develop Quick
• PPC-sites.com
• Associate-O-Matic
• WhyPark
• Homestead

Recommended Hosting

• Hostgator
• DimeReseller
• BlueHost
• The Legion Host
• Fused Hosting
• iiPanel.NET
• HostQuack
• Nixism

Handy Plugins and Add-Ons

• Free WordPress Themes for Developers and Tips for Modifying Them
  
• WordPress theme viewer, wpthemesfree, siteground, mambo, theme-time, web2feel
• Joomla Themesbase, Joomla Themes
• WordPress Plugins – Sitemaps
• All In One SEO Pack
• Fonts and Tables, or Tables
• Changing Headers
• Color Picker
• Statcounter, Google Analytics
• Social Bookmarking
• Adsense Delux and Mighty Adsense
• Static Front Page
• Mini Forms
• Contact Form
• RSS feeds
• Shopping Cart (mixed reviews)
• Bravenet.net, Lists.topica.com email lists, logins
• HTML quick guide
• Other Plugins

Free Content

• GoArticles Free Content
• List of Free Stock Photos and Icons
• Free Fonts

Advertising

• Google Adsense
• RevenuePilot
• End User Advertising Rates

Affiliates

• One Stop Affiliate – Big List
• Ebay Partner Network Amazon Asssociates
• Abestweb Affiliate Forum
• A free Ebay storefront- see an example here

SEO

• Zero to Hero, Slaydragon, Seo For Everybody, Search Engine Watch
• All In One SEO Pack
• Website SEO Reports
• Marketleap SEO tools
• Check Your Search Engine Position here or here
• 136 Different SEO tools

Promoting Your Site

• Link Building Tips
• Press Releases, PRWeb
• CommentHunt
• EZineArticles
• iSnare
• Feedburner
• Big Directory List

Miscellaneous Other Resources

Logging In

The first thing to know is that you don’t need to download anything to your computer to start using WordPress. If you’ve chosen a good host for WordPress, it should install on your hosting with ‘one click’ (actually a few clicks, but that’s what they call it). If you are using WordPress.com, you only need to sign up and get an account.

So – to start posting – the first thing to do is find your login page. If your domain is – say – DoubleSidedCoin.com (a name I just registered), then your login name will have “/wp-admin” added to the end of it. So if you had that domain you’d go ahead and type into your browser http://DoubleSidedCoin.com/wp-admin, and press enter.

You should be met with your login page. The exact look has changed with recent upgrades, it can be on a white background on some older ones too – but it should look something vaguely like this – a logo and some fields.

Go ahead and type in your username and password. This should be provided by your designer (if you have one), otherwise you would have set these up when you added your blog to your hosting provider. If you have forgotten your password then there is now a link you can click under the password form.

Ok, you’re in. Now, do you want to make a new Page, or a Post?

Pages Versus Posts

Pages and posts are really the same thing, with slightly different options tacked on to them. All of these can change, but the most common characteristics are:

Posts

• Usually get added to the front page automatically
• Most commonly have comment boxes, and the ability to create tags and categories
• If you have a fancy magazine style theme, posts most often show up in slideshows and previews
• Posts are usually where you write every day, week, or month.

Pages

• Usually appear in the top navigation bar menu. Think: lots of posts, but only a few pages.
• Pages tend to be used for pretty static things like “About me”, “Contact”, “Advertise”, and other static pages.
• You might write a new page much less frequently – or even not at all.

So, if in doubt you probably want to write a new post.

Starting a new post

To write a new post:

Click on Write, then Post.

This screenshot is from an older version of WordPress, before the options moved to the side. But it’s a similar process there with the side navigation – just hit Posts and Add New.

Putting In the Content – SEO Preparation

Ok, you’re all ready to start writing. At this point you could put in a Title, add some Text in the big box. hit “Publish” – and you’re away. Skip to the next section if you don’t care about the search engines, and just want to know about adding images, tags, categories and the like.

I want to set you up properly for getting the maximum traffic from the get-go. And that means thinking about the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of what you’re about to write.

If you write a thousand posts on novels and write “Novles” every time, chances are the thousands of people searching for “Novels” won’t ever see your site. (You have the smaller “Novles” market sewn up, though!). A more subtle version of this is if you’re writing about “Skiing Holidays” but people are searching for “Ski Vacations”.

You can take a punt and use words you think people would search for. I often do that when I’m on the run. As you do the following process, though, your idea of what people actually are looking for becomes a lot more precise.

Ok, go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This is the actual tool buyers of google ads go to see what are the most popular searches. It’s a great tool. You need to be told how to set it up to work for you though, so here goes.

Find the following options and make sure they’re set:

• “Results are tailored to English, United States Edit“. Set this to “All Countries And Territories” (unless you want your site to ONLY focus on one particular country audience, which might be the case for some niche topics or businesses. If so – select your country and language).
• In the box, type in some brief terms you think people might be searching for relating to your article. Eg. for this article I typed in “WordPress Post”, “WordPress Posting”, etc.
• Click “Use Synonyms” (it should be set already)
  
• Add in the Security Code, and then “Get Keyword Ideas“.

You should see something like the following:

(Note – these screens’ designs change all the time, ever so slightly. Again, it should be something similar.)

Notice I have varied the responses somewhat to make it more useful.

• Under “Match Type:” to the right, select “Exact“.
  
• (There are different uses and schools of thought for all of these functions. But I find this gives the most accuracy).
• Sort by “Approx Avg Search Volume” by clicking on this at the top of the results.

Another variation of this technique doesn’t look at what is searched for the most – but what gives the highest paying ads. But we’ll leave that for another tutorial.

Ok, scan and see which results seem the most appropriate for your content.

I usually take the top 4, 5 or 6 terms and copy them directly into my open blog draft. This reminds me to use them. I even sometimes copy this list three times there – to remind me to use them about three times (the maximum you’d want to be doing, to avoid appearing as “keyword stuffing”. Usually I don’t use them all, though.)

Ok, that’s more SEO than you need for one day – this is only a basic How to Post on WordPress article after all. But you might as well be taught that sooner rather than later. Just keep that list in mind for when you write your titles, label your images, links, and write your content later.

Writing Your Title

Add a title that is catchy, quirky, intriguing, yet useful and descriptive. And if it has some of those magic keywords, all the better for advanced WordPress posting!

Write Your Content

This is up to you. I have plenty of tutorials on how to write good content – that people will return to, bookmark, and share – with sites like Stumble and Digg. Check out the category about professional blogging for more details.

One thing about content – remember that WordPress only lets you do one line break at a time. Ask me if you want a tutorial about adding any more than that on WordPress. How to post bullet points, lists, tables etc. is also something you can find online, or drop me a line.

Adding Images (Music, Video, etc)

There are fancy ways to add content that give you total control as to how added things like images, files, and videos appear. Here is the unfancy, super basic guide.

• Go to where you want the content to appear and make sure the cursor is ready to write at that point (click there with your mouse).
• Click on Add media: (Now called Upload/Insert:). (Images are the first option of two squares. Video, files and music are later options).
• Click on the image option to add an image.
• My browser always has trouble with the Flash option, if yours does, choose the Browser Uploader option instead.
• Hit Browse, and find the image on your computer (you have to have one there first – see my tutorial on finding good images to use for your blog. These should also be labled well for SEO, using the keywords already found). Select it by pressing Open.
• Hit Upload.
• Add a description (remember SEO!).
• I usually leave images full size. You can always reduce and adjust them later, and full sized images make for a nice looking blog.
• Hit “insert into post“

You should see your image where you wanted it in your post.

There are some fancy tricks for adding YouTube videos – again, request a tutorial if you are interested.

Adding Links

Of course you’ll want to add as many links as you can be bothered doing – both to things outside your site, and within your site. Both give a better user experience, and both will help, rather than hurt, your search engine results – even if they are to your competitors.

• Select the text you want to make a link
• Hit the little chain logo.
• Paste in the URL into Link URL (don’t forget the http://)
• Under Target – I always set external links to Open in link in a new window, partly to not lose visitors, but also because I think links are often an optional “extra”. Others don’t. For internal links, I always set this to Open link in the same window. What you do is a matter of personal choice.
• Title – Whatever you want it to say when the mouse hovers over it, but again remember SEO.
• Hit Insert.
• If you make a mistake you can always select the link and remove it with the “Unlink” icon – or select it with the Link icon again and modify the details.

Tags and Categories

These might be used for the way your page sets out your content. For instance, a “News” category might make your post appear in the “News” section, or “Op-ed” into an Opinion column. If you have this set up in your blog, select the appropriate Tag, or Category from the options given.

If not, they are still useful – again – for SEO purposes. I’ve heard it said that one category, and three tags are ideal – it reduces duplicate content when these are sorted via the search engines, and forces you to use accurate tagging for your visitors. If they don’t already exist, set up new tags and categories to whatever you think is more appropriate.

Magazine Themes – Custom fields, Excerpts, and Preview Images

More and more WordPress themes are becoming fancy, and allow you to put thumbnail images and text excerpts with your posts. This is a little outside the scope of this basic intro, so refer to your theme’s homepage for instructions as to how to do this.

Publishing

Ok, you should have a great post, with great images, and well linked to other sources. Now it’s time to hit Save (if you want to think about it and publish later), or hit Publish to print your content for the world to see straight away.

Both of these are pretty self explanitory. I want to show you a neat alternative – which is controlling when your post is published.

This is a great WordPress function. Basically it means you can set your WordPress post to publish at 6am tomorrow, next monday morning, in a fortnight’s time – perhaps even 7000 years in the future if WordPress is still going strong.

What this does is really lets your WordPress blogging become efficient. For instance, rather than having a punishing schedule you always have to keep up with – put one day or week aside to really get ahead of yourself. Set posts to publish every three days, week, or whatever you think is your ideal posting schedule (future tutorial).

To do it – above Save and Publish hit the “Publish immediately Edit” option and fill in the details.

(Note – If you do want to write a new Page, instead of a WordPress post – the process is much the same, only you press Page instead of Post at the beginning.)

Editing What you Have Done

Ok, once you go to your site and see the post, there will no doubt be things you wish to change. No problem, it’s all part of WordPress posting – easy changes.

Simply:

• Go back into your WordPress Administration (Dashboard)
• Select Manage > Posts (or Posts > Edit on later versions).
• Select the title of the post you want to change, make your changes, and hit Publish again.

You might see one default post called “Hello, World“, and one default page called “About“. Delete these – they are another page that there is a million of on the web, and although not a killer (for SEO with duplicate content), they are at least ugly. Select and hit Delete.

There you are, how to post on WordPress. How to post is something you just need to be shown how to do and you’re away. With the SEO skills built in here it should make you one of the meanest WordPress posting pros around.

Just let me know if you have any questions, tips, improvements or stories on how to post to WordPress.

A portal for golf news, information and scores.

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Our sister site, offering low cost, high quality websites to artists. The challenge here was to mirror the minimalist product design, whilst drawing visitors in to the content they needed – in an inviting, easy manner.

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For the owner of this short name, we created a simple website to seem like an industry leader from the very beginning. With a few key articles, able to be indefinitely expanded, our site gave Vego.org a perfect placement in the huge vegetarian and health recipe market.

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An information site for and by cat lovers.

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A personal finances site the owner is establishing to later promote his own accountancy business.

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expireDN is an expired domain name service that uses Freshdrop and Godaddy Auctions to find valuable domain names. We designed a site that gave a nod back to the colors and feel of Freshdrop.net, that was fun to use, and that was optimized to encourage the maximum visitors to sign-up to their automatic email alert – which was an optional extra the customer wanted added to their site.

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Mermaid.net takes a great name and sets it up quickly as the premier site for anyone looking for anything related to mermaids. Visitors are quickly enticed into CD, Video and Costume shops, while younger visitors are enticed to return with a large number of cartoons, audiovisual material, games and chat.

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A community-written magazine on the theme of contemporary Buddhism.

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Or, why not go completely custom? Pay by the hour to get the site components you want at the lowest possible price. Use it to add extra features to our low plans, including personalized favicons (small website URI icons, pictured above), hosting help, advertising banners, personalized search engine assistance, design changes, content writing and copy, shopping carts, classifieds, forums, and more. We work fast and charge little – speak with us to achieve a solution normally way outside of your budget.

1. Launchpad

If you want a “site under construction” page – this is a great alternative. Instead of a static message (you can just have that with a bit of commenting out and deleting of image files) this has even more.

Launchpad has a sign up box for readers to get a RSS or email alert, telling them when the new website will be ready. And there’s no need to change the design much – as it will disappear when the new one is online. How handy is that?

Demo • Download • Designer’s Website

2. WP CODA

WP CODA is one of the most stunning – and truth be told frustrating – WordPress themes ever. Check out the demo, if even just to see how far WordPress theme design has got in recent years. The whole content slides across in a beautiful fluid motion quite unlike most sites out there.

The frustrating part comes when you try to download and use it – downloading takes an inordinately long time as you sign up, wait for email confirmation, get passwords, and the like. I’m all for people protecting and making some money from what they do, but this is seems like an awkward solution to the problem. The customization is also really difficult – changing the image files or trying to add posts (no page option). But – well worth it for some people who want to leave it as it is, and wow people with their expensive looking website.

Demo • Download • Designer’s Website

3. Cubist 1.0

I haven’t found a use for this theme yet – but I know there’s one waiting. It’d be a nice one to modify and to try out different colors with. The nice theme with this one is as you hover over each different text area, the whole square lights up – making for a unique, flash like theme.

Demo • Download

4. Ubian Nation

Ok, this is not a download, but I mention it because it is a pretty amazing example of a unique WordPress theme. Someone is going to take this idea and run with it pretty soon – if they haven’t already. I only knew about it and the fact that it’s WP as the owner posted a question on a forum.

Basically this site reads like a book or magazine – with one single page intro, then whole pages that open up in a double format way. The whole thing could be toned down an inch for my taste, but the result blows me away.

I’m not sure I read the content or just oggle at how it works – which is one drawback!

Check it out here

5. Takimata

A real gem, but not for everybody or every project, that’s for sure. One of the most experimental and unique designed free WordPress themes I have come across, this theme opens up like a graphic design convention’s lunch menu. Beautiful work, and here’s hoping it inspires more experimentation in this and many other directions.

Test Drive • Download

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6. Facebook Theme

I can’ think of a situation where you’d want to make a site that looks like Facebook, but it’s nice to think you could if you needed to. Here’s a pretty good Facebook clone, if you find yourself ever down that particular road!

Designer’s Website

7. Revolution-X Transparent Background

Ok, the screenshot and dramatic design isn’t for my type of projects, it might be for yours. But this is a great and rare example of a transparent wordpress theme, and I’ve ended up using this for the bare bones for many of my sites.

If you replace the background image for any image of your choice, and strip away every other image in the download folder, you’ll have a great, transparent theme, useful for almost any project. What you’ll have is your image, with floating text all over the top of it. Change the fonts, colors and remove the borders for best results.

If anyone wants any more information, let me know, and I’ll post some examples and a tutorial for you. But do try it out for yourself, it makes for a great, professional looking theme!

Test Run • Download • Designer’s Website

8. Open Air

Another transparent theme with a unique ‘action’ – as you scroll the posts go up to heaven, leaving the image at the background – your horizon, if you will – stay in the same place.

If you don’t like the artwork you could strip this back to basics and have some fun with this one!

Demo • Download

9. Strange Little Town

A third ‘transparent’ theme – ok, I’m not getting obsessed – this time with a pretty/ folksy pink starlit background. I’m wondering if and when someone is going to come up with a nice, minimal transparent theme? Anyway, no one is forcing you to use the background, and it might just suit a project – you know – for kids.

Preview of “Strange Little Town” Download “Strange Little Town”

Demo • Download

10. Compact

The closest we’ve found to a minimal transparent theme but – just to torment us some more – it’s still pink!

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Demo • Download

11. BlackBox

Another one I know there’s a person just waiting for – this is a really bold design with a black half for navigation, and a white half for content. Or you might swap them around with a bit of swapping of numbers in the style sheet. I can see a band information or any other slightly edgy project taking to it like a duck to water…

Test Drive • Download • Designer’s Website

12. Motion

A nice alternative – this theme has little bars that open up to reveal content – sort of like a toast coming out of a toaster.

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Demo • Download at the Designer’s Website

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13. Natural Power

Ok, not your usual theme. You might have your own idea what it’s useful for. For my money, I find the rounded curves, flip out sidebar, and groovy logo-like text area great for making video featuring sites. There’s something about the interface which is great for saying “watch me”! The grey background is quite lovely, but I think it works better with a plain background you can set up just by changing the numbers in the stylesheet.css (and renaming the background file that comes with it). Let us know if you use this theme for any of your sites

Test Drive • Download

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14. Stripped

A stripped down WordPress theme with a unique, typography focused theme that wins my eternal admiration for experimentation and creativity. One of the best designed themes out there, it has a completely unique navigation that I enjoy (although sometimes I forward my domains so that viewers land on a single post page, rather than the home page, to save time).

If you have a project that you want the look of stripped, but with a more conventional sidebar, WordPressTheme.me has made a hack that gives you this option. Basically, download a very Stripped-like theme (Estranged), and then add in our Stripped-like fonts, colors and sizes. You can get the hack here.

Test Run • Download • Designer’s Website

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15. Plain Box Theme

One of the most interesting and unique themes out there, this theme wouldn’t download last time I tried it – but it probably has been fixed since. It has great potential for a very unique site, and hopefully the file will be repaired by the author soon.

The theme has some very unique visual thumbnails on the front page, and then opens into a very visual-dominated, delux opening spread. Personally I would remove some of the extra elements on the front page, but you may have uses for them. Tell us how you go.

Test Run • Download • Designer’s Website

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16. Make Your Very Own Theme Generator

If you still can’t find something unique – why not make your own, with this theme generator online wizard. Type in the variables you want (one sidebar, two sidebars, etc.), fonts, colors and images, and the WordPress Theme Generator will convert it all into a downloadable, zipped file you can use like any other free theme. Let us know of your experiences trying this software.

Try out the WordPress Theme Generator for yourself here.

17. StudioPress

Ok, so this isn’t super unique, but I didn’t know where else to put it, so it’s in the “miscellaneous” category here. It’s an elegant theme well worth keeping a tabs on for its extended header – great for highlighting a photo that really sets the scene for your site’s content.

There is another version out there with the (white here) content box black, so the content seems to ‘float’. It’s something you can easily change yourself in the style.css, otherwise Google “StudioPress Black” and the theme’s designer, Danny Archer.

If you want to make your own header, simply fade the bottom of the image to black in Photoshop using the gradient tool and replace the file. If you want to use the same font that the “StudioPress” uses, it’s called Scriptina.

Download

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This section is growing by the week, make sure to come back soon.

Coming soon: Leopress for mac lovers.

Broken link? Do you know of more unique themes? Comments? Leave them here

The problem came when I thought about all of that past content, inbound links, and the dreaded specter of “duplicate content”.

I was amazed to find nothing online about this. In the way that you are forced to do, I sorted out a solution for myself from 5 or 6 different articles, comments and snippets. This is my best shot-in-the-dark approach, posted online in case you, too, are trawling for this answer. And if anyone else has anything to ask, add or change, drop us a comment.

Duplicate Content?

Fortunately, it seems this is not as big an ogre as I had been led to believe. Dane Morgan does a pretty good job of putting that fear to rest. It seems your new site won’t be penalized (i.e. brought down in the search engine results) as a whole for having duplicate content. The post with it in it will just rank really bad for that particular page. I can live with that. And the reason is sensible – Google, Yahoo et al don’t want to get clogged up with 100 copies of the same article, every time you search for something.

You can always delete your original version to bring your new version up the top. But first – check if there are any other copies of your article already on the internet. Try searching for snippets of text in quotation marks to see if there are any exact matches. Someone might have pirated your content for their own site – the lazy sods.

If there are copies, then I’d leave my old content where it is. Better that you get the traffic on an old site than someone else get the credit for it. Simply add a link to your new location, saying where it has ‘moved’ to. If you’re lucky, the pirated copy might one day hit the dust. google has said it likes this sort of behavior – pointing to the most authoritative location. Just be sure not to also point back to the first content location – the search engines don’t have time to read everything and work out which is which!

If there are no other copies you can see, I’d still leave the old article there until you are sure it has indexed on your new blog. Remember this can take a few weeks, and different search engines can take different times. A few months minimum is what I’d be thinking.

There is one caveat here – if you don’t have your own hosting and are using a free WordPress.com blog. Having duplicate content is against WordPress.com’s TOS (terms of service). Personally, I would use this opportunity to take the plunge and get your own blog hosting. It will let you make money out of you hard work through advertising and affiliate sales, let you change the design to whatever you like, allow you to add SEO and other plugins – and generally take your blog to the next level.

So, the plan so far is to leave the old content where it is – at least for a while – and to ‘duplicate’ it on your new site – seeing that there is no penalty for doing so. What’s the most efficient way of doing this?

Moving Posts Over

If you have less than 4 or 5 posts to move, per blog, you’re probably like me and will just cut and paste your old material over. Just click to HTML view, select All, Copy, Paste again into HTML view, and you’re done. Just remember to put that link to your new location in whilst you’re there – save yourself the trip later.

If you have more posts to move than that, this could be a pain to do repetitively. If you’re moving a whole blog for instance, you can save an export file and re-import it as a whole. Just make sure you change the author name if you want to keep track of the posts in its new location.

If it’s just some of your old posts you want to move – but more than a cut/paste job – here’s a good tip. Change the author names for just the posts you want to transfer across to the new site. Don’t forget to add that new location link at this point, again!. Then – hit “Export”, and just select the ‘new’ author’s name (it’s one of the options). Voila – WordPress will create an archive of that author’s work for you in its own little bundle, ready for you to slot into your new site (your current posts there should remain intact).

All the images should be there still too – just remember that these will have to be transferred if you ever delete your old domain name and site.

Saving External Links

Ok, so now you have your new content all moved across. If you’ve found you have some old external links to your site (perhaps providing valuable traffic), what do you do?

One answer is to leave them there. With the link to your new location, some visitors will find their way across.

If you can hold on to your domain name, simple domain forwarding (through your domain registrar’s account page) is another option. It will at least move your traffic to your new site – in a clumsy way.

Much better is to use the special WordPress plugin, designed especially to get every old link perfectly to its new location.

Voila!

Have you moved posts over and lived to tell the tale? Do you have questions or suggestions to add to this guide?