We here at Unlimited use the very solid WordPress platform. Why?
+ It has a vibrant open source community
+ It’s free
+ It’s extremely customizable
+ It comes with heaps of plug-ins that extend the functionality of your site
+ It’s very search engine friendly
+ It’s free
If you ever start a blog I would recommend Wordpress. I’ve set up four Wordpress installations in the past two years and the process is fairly pain-free, no coder or crazy-techie skills needed.
One piece of advice for a prospective Wordpress blogger is to change the default permalink structure before you write a single post. Permalinks are the permanent URLs to individual blog posts (e.g. unlimitedmagazine.com/blog). If you click on an article on Unlimited and look in the address bar, that’s the permalink. Here is a handy article from the Wordpress Codex explaining permalinks in more detail and how to change them.
Right now, we use the default “ugly” style, as Wordpress aptly puts it. This default renders a URL with a bunch of numbers of punctuation marks, like so: http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com/blog/?p=1279. Not exactly the prettiest URL. Over the next couple of weeks, Unlimited will be change our current ugly style to pretty permalinks. A gussied up permalink would look like this: http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com/DailyBlog/Interview-with-Terry-OReilly.
Why change to permalinks?
+ No one likes to be ugly
+ Permalinks make it easier to see what articles are doing well when you check your Google Analytics
+ It enables certain plug-ins, like this one that enables category specific RSS feeds
+ A concise well-done permalink is just as useful for search engine optimization as a well-written headline
+ They’re totally awesome
On to the somewhat skeevy world of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the art and business of making a website appear high in Google search results. Somewhat skeevy because I’ve been spammed more times than I can count with people offering to get my sites on the front page of a Google search for specific keywords. I’ve even been cold-called on my cell phone by people offering SEO services. Think about that, these are people for a site that advertises the fact that it can get my own site noticed on the Internet and they are spamming me on my phone. A good rule of thumb is to never, ever do business with an SEO company that contacts you first.
All in all, permalinks play a small part in how your site does with Google. The best SEO is having quality content that is linked to by many sites. Google looks at the quality of those backlinks and gives your site a PageRank.
Whatever decision you make, be sure to stick with it. If you change your mind (like we did), it means an awful lot of work. Internal links, of which there are many, will break. Using permalinks when you start blogging will spare you a lot of tedious, copy and paste, data entry work as you go back and fix all of the links, especially if you have an archive that goes back years.
Tags: permalinks, technology, websites, Wordpress
There’s no question that custom permalinks have their advantages, not the least of which is that default permalinks do not allow category RSS feeds.
If you are changing from default, here are your (technical) red flags:
- all links, images, flash files, etc., will require absolute path names (“http://sitename.com/” prior to the page or image). If you have access to your database, the fastest way is to query wp_posts for ‘href=”?’ ‘and src=”‘ (relative links and image references), then replacing them with ‘href=”http://sitename.com/?’ and src=”http://sitename.com/src=”‘ … if you don’t have access to your database, you’re stuck with trolling through your CMS for relative references. This includes Flash references to AC_RunActiveContent.js.
- if you’re calling the post id via a GET function, you’ll have to change that to “$postid=$wp_query->post->ID;”