I will document this project development from a number of different angles. This makes the development time slightly longer, but allows me to save time on future projects, by keeping all the management and technical issues recorded.

More importantly, it helps you to plan your web hosting projects better.

It also helps you deal with problems that might affect your website development. How?

By showing you how I have found answers to problems that occur as I develop and document my new website.

My first problem came as I tried to write an article describing that most important step in starting a new web business – the site concept. As a technical site manager, you may or may not be involved in developing the site concept. It is a required stage in all good websites – essentially describing why you are developing the business, it’s scope, and what you expect to achieve.

If you don’t have a formal web business plan, see your boss, client or make time for yourself, and get one. You can read more about starting a web business on my web business management site.

Bad Behavior

The specific problem I encountered was being totally locked out of managing my site. Faced with the message “Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below for more details on specific blacklists and removal procedures.” when I tried to administer any aspect of my site filled me with dread.

Fortunately, the problem was easy to fix – a simple upgrade to the Bad Behavior plug-in soon had me back on track.

This slight hiccup from Bad Behaviour was more than compensated by the benefits of controlling spam – a vital part of any well hosted web business.

Most spam is automatically generated, and you can automatically stop it with WordPress hosting anti-spam plug-ins. A small amount, typically human generated, might creep through. But if you protect yourself against the worst excesses – leaving you time to edit or filter the odd bad comment.

More importantly, it leaves you free to interact with your genuine visitors.

Most importantly, it stops new visitors from ever seeing the, often offensive spam, leaving your reputation intact.

I prefer the belt and braces approach, and activate 3 plug-ins that help in different ways.

Akismet Plug-In

Akismet spam filter is packaged with standard WordPress. It uses a central database that all users contribute to. When you flag a comment as spam, Akismet keeps a record of this, and warns users throughout the world. You need to sign-up with WordPress.com to get a key. This only takes a few seconds, and once you have the key, you can, and should, use it on all your sites. WordPress.com is also useful for another reason, and I will talk about my free WordPress.com website(s) later.

Bad Behavior Plug-In

This WordPress hosting anti-spam plug-in monitors visitors behavior and, if it recognizes typical bad robot type spamming patterns, it blocks the site. Bad Behavior is very straightforward to use, but there must be lots going on under the hood. Great way to stop spam before it starts.

Spam Karma Plug-In

The Spam Karma plug-in has loads of options, but is usually perfectly OK without changing the defaults. You need to go to the Options page after activating to initialize the plug-in. It also makes sense to run the compatibility tests at the foot of the options page, now and whenever you change theme.

aLinks Plug-In

Not a spam plug-in, but it makes managing external links so easy, that I would not have wanted to write this without it. All you do is add regularly linked URL’s to the database, linked to a key phrase, and whenever you type that phrase in a post, aLinks automatically presents it as a link. Loads of options. Loads of extra features. I’ll probably write a full review of it later.

There are more plug-ins to activate and configure, but categories need sorting out before we do any more posts, and we need a contact page.