Book Image

WordPress for Business Bloggers

By : Paul Thewlis
Book Image

WordPress for Business Bloggers

By: Paul Thewlis

Overview of this book

<p>Blogging has been part of the web landscape for over a decade and has matured into a ubiquitous mode of live communication. The power of blogging has been recognized by the business community, and canny marketers view it as a powerful weapon in their digital arsenal. Done well, blogging can bring myriad benefits to businesses of any size. Done badly, it can cause more harm than good. Central to the success of any business blog is a thorough understanding of the technology. This book will give you a competitive advantage by helping you to create an engaging, effective, and well polished business blog.<br /><br />WordPress allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with many outstanding features. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users, who have created a large and diverse collection of plug-ins. It has various features that can help business bloggers to boost their business strategy.<br /><br />This book will take you beyond the basics of WordPress, helping you take full advantage of its rich and powerful features to transform your basic blog into a more advanced and professional blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. You will learn everything you need to know to extend and grow your business blog. You will learn to mange the content including images and videos, which will make your blog more appealing. You'll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools. So, if want to transform your business blog to give a kick start to your business this book is for you.<br /><br />This book deals with using WordPress and third-party tools to manage and optimize your blog, focusing on the business aspects of blogging. It is not an introduction to WordPress and does not cover the basics such as installation or how to post. Most readers will already have an established WordPress blog or will at least be in the advanced stages of planning one.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
WordPress for Bussiness Bloggers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Setting Up a Local Development Environment


If you are considering making big changes to your blog, particularly ones that require editing the WordPress source files, it's worth considering setting up a development environment on your local computer. This has a number of benefits. First, if you mess up and cause irreparable damage to the WordPress files, you haven't broken your live blog. Second, you don't have to take your blog offline while you're playing around 'under the hood'. Third, you don't have to keep FTPing files to your remote server to view the changes.

Admittedly, most of the editing we'll be doing in the rest of this chapter could be done using the Theme Editor in the WordPress administration area. If you follow through the case study example at the end of this chapter, it will probably only take half an hour or so. However, if you do decide to design your own theme the chances are it could take several hours or even days. Much of the work will involve trial and error—saving...