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Now What?

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Picture 111 Now What?

Complete any other site content, designs, or calls to action that you want

By now you should have a cusomized site with content, widgets, and know your way around fairly well. But before you close your laptop and head to the beach, let’s make sure we tie up all of the common loose ends:

  1. Permalinks
    Make sure you click into Settings > Permalinks and configure your links from the standard WordPress ?post=number to something more search friendly and less visually awkward. (Note, if you’re a LoadedWordPress user, these should be configured for you by default, but doesn’t hurt to check).
  2. Search Engines
    If ‘Search Engines Blocked’ is showing at the top of your admin dashboard, do yourself a favor and click it, then select the radio button that says ‘I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers.’ You may also find this setting in Settings > Privacy.
  3. Calls to Action
    If you’re in the business of being in business, make sure you let people know how to find you. This may be accomplished in a number of ways, including a nice big glowing button that says ‘Contact Me’ with a link to your contact page, newsletter, or similar.
  4. Design
    Don’t forget that LoadedWordPress is highly customizable. With that said, make sure your site matches your personality, or the feel of your business.

    If you need a hand, we can help with any of the hard stuff. Just give us a shout and we’ll help figure it out.

Share posts on your social outlets and build your following

Sure we have the built in Social Push and pull, but nothing helps your presence more than getting your hands dirty and being your own advocate. Get into your social networks and let them know how to find your new site.

Get leads, sales, traffic, or whatever your goals are

Whatever your goals, LoadedWordPress will help you accomplish them. From easy to use contact forms, customizable analytics, and sales tools, you’re off and running in an exciting new direction; and we’re happy to be a partner in the journey.

Keeping your new and old customers informed and excited about you, your product, or your offerings isn’t easy, but we feel that with LoadedWordPress, spreading the word just got a whole lot easier, more manageable, and – dare we say – fun.

Thanks for creating with us.

Step 5 – Choose Your Widgets

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

lwp widget screen Step 5   Choose Your Widgets
Widget areas are reserved content sections for everything that is not a Post or a Page. You can use them for pretty much anything, but the most common uses are Advertisements, Meta data, Tag Clouds, RSS Feeds, Recent Comments, and.. well the list goes on.

Within the default LoadedWordPress theme, there are nine reserved widget areas. This doesn’t mean you can only add 9 widgets, but rather the way your widgets display will depend on the areas you assign them.

To assign widgets go to Appearance > Widgets, and you will see the reserved widget areas on right (pictured here). Simply expand the widget area you wish to utilize, then from the available widgets on left, drag and drop you widget where you wish it to display. Mnany widgets have extra options available for further customization.

Also by default, LoadedWordPress features a Widget Logic plugin, which allows you to specify which pages should or shouldn’t show specific widgets. You can use this feature to have specific content, side blocks, or other information selectively displayed only on certain pages, such as your home page, landing page, etc. This makes your site that much more customizable, and that’s the whole point.

There are many other widgets and plugins available for use on your site, and the best way to decide what to use is publish what you are interested in and see how it works. It is as easy as drag-and-drop to try them out, so as you are setting up your site feel free to test any widgets you may want to use.

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