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.

It’s no use putting on a friendly face, and hoping that your visitors will be happy – you have to work to keep them happy.

Visitor satisfaction must run through all aspects of your website. Much is commonsense:

• Encourage customer feedback
• Prompt response to feedback
• Clear site policies
• Consistent navigation

Most of all, you have to overdeliver in every department. There are a couple of essential tools which I have added to my WordPress Installation pack.

Getting Visitors

I’ve mentioned TailHitter before. With a few server moves and reconfigurations coming up, I’ve gone ahead and installed it today. Very simple, and the HitTail code works fine. One thing to watch – WP-Cache will still be holding pages without the HitTail code. Normally this will not matter, but if you want to test the search results on HitTail, disable the cache first – or at least view the source before you test to make sure the HitTail code is at the bottom of the page.

Obviously the TailHitter plugin is not absolutely vital, as you can easily paste the code into your footer.php. But then you run the risk of losing HitTail when you change themes. And HitTail certainly is essential, especially as part of my marketing tool trio.

Keeping Visitors

When you’ve gone to all that trouble to attract visitors, what is the point of being rude to them? One bad feature of WordPress is the way it adds the nofollow tag to links in comments. I won’t bore you by discussing the pros and cons of no follow, chiefly because their are no pros.

Suffice to say, that DoFollow is an essential part of your visitor management system. Let the good guys have their say and recognize their contribution with a fair link that search engines will follow. You can easily blacklist the bad guys with Akismet, and help us all in the process.

Blog style websites have long been the easiest to promote, and blog promotion just got easier. And better.

John Reese is a long-standing source of top quality management information. In his latest venture, BlogRush, he has launched an incredible blog promotion tool.

I will add an extra element to my small business web site installation wizard to include post-launch promotion features.

Top of the list has to be inclusion in the BlogRush network. If you want terrific free traffic generating power, you need this small business web site promotion tool.

Sign-up for BlogRush is very quick, but note that you need to be able to add javascript to your blog, so free WordPress.com sites will not be eligible.

Installation is a breeze. For widget enabled themes, simply add a text widget and paste in the code. Other themes will need to paste the code into their sidebar template.

You should be able to install this extremely valuable free small business web site promotion tool in seconds. If you have any problems, let me know, and I will do all I can to help you – this is too important for you to miss .

I have called the first part Essential Plug-ins. These are ones that any self-respecting WordPress web business needs. Some may have alternatives. I have selected ones that I know work. If you know of alternatives that you think are better, please let me know.

I noticed one or two that I rely on, but haven’t mentioned in this blog, so I will mention them now.

cforms II is a very useful form manager that I found when I had difficulty trying to get Dagon Design Form Mailer to display a group of checkboxes on a form. The Dagon Design Form Mailer is very good, but I find cforms II even better. The first form takes a little getting used to, as the method of setting up the fields is slightly unusual. However, it is quite easy to learn, and very powerful. It has many components and styling options. Though not enabled by default, it also has data tracking capabilities. This is a boon for survey and customer satisfaction forms – essential for all business websites.

WP-Cache is essential for busy web business sites. WordPress normally builds and serves each page whenever it is requested. WP-Cache simply stores these pages when they are first requested, and serves them from it’s store. You can specify how often they are refreshed.

No automated business website builder would be complete without a few non-essential add-ons. In the final wizard, there will be some optional plug-ins, with recommendations about when they are useful. Blogrolls are often a personal choice, but they are essential for serious web business site builders. No business can thrive in isolation, and blogrolls are the ideal way to show your key business associations. Often, these breakdown into separate categories. Single Bookmark Category List is a great plug-in for showing selected categories (up to 9) in separate lists.

So that is my business website builder wizard started, with a long way to go. If you know of any WordPress plug-ins that you feel are vital to a successful web business site, please let me know.

Today I found a better forms handler, reminded myself about the importance of backups, and found a potential method for making plug-in management much easier.

Contact Pages are important for any web site, but crucial for a credible web business site. My current method works fine on standard contact forms, but to build a business web site, you also need surveys, polls, and all manner of related feedback mechanisms.

I ran into some problems with the plug-in I described in my post about implementing my email policy. Try as I might, I could not configure a check-box group that looked right, or even readable. I had used an extremely good survey tool on another site, so I tried that. SurveyGizmo describes itself as More than “Just” a Survey Tool, and I can certainly endorse that.

SurveyGizmo offers a very powerful free survey tool, with plenty of features that allow polls, quizzes and landing pages amongst many other things. There are a whole host of extra options in the paid-for versions. For some reason, I could not get the survey form to display on my website, so I moved on. In hindsight, this could have been a mistake, as I think the problem might have been a temporary overload on this server. However, I had moved on by that time, but I will come back to SurveyGizmo later to see if the problem is repeatable.

I’m actually pleased to have had this problem, as I found another really good forms plugin. cforms II has loads of features, which I will explore and report on later. For now, I have used it for my First Time Visitor Survey. This type of page is crucial for any web business. I have recently developed a range of standard pages that should be a part of any business web site. Some are not really useful until the site gets busy, but it is best to get them built early on, to save time when you are busy with visitors, and the pages become essential. I describe my standard opening pages in my web business management website, and I include customizable versions of all these pages in my WordPress installation wizard.

Other Business Web Site Essentials

When you build a business web site, as well as visitor optimization, you need to construct a technical toolkit of plug-ins that add security and help efficiency.

Managing these plugins can become arduous, but I found a plug-in that helps you manage plug-ins – PlugInstaller.

Installation is very straightforward – a standard plug-in install, because the tool is obviously unavailable before it is installed. I’m hoping that future plug-in installs will be much easier. The first signs are hopeful – a simple click of the Check for updated plugins button and after a couple of minutes, PlugInstaller’s list shows 4 updates, 2 of which I knew about, but had forgotten. A slight problem, due to my server setup I think is an inability to run programs, so it means I have to activate plugins manually after updating – I can live with that for now.

One reason why I wanted to start using PlugInstaller now, is to install more plug-ins, especially a backup plug-in. Recent problems with the hosting provider of another of my sites, and one of my clients, have reminded me of the need for regular backups. WordPress Database Backup is recognized as being the best.

Hoping for a simple install, I realized that the activation warning I got from PlugInstaller is more serious than I thought. The plug-in is still excellent for checking for updates, but will not install them on my server. I will spend some time on server configuration later, but for now, I have a workround in the form of another plug-in manager – OneClick.

OneClick handles the transfer to your plug-in folder in a different way, and even has a Firefox extension to install direct from a website. Works well with PlugInstaller, so I will probably keep them both. OneClick adds a tab on the WordPress Dashboard, and all you need to do is put the url for that page in your Firefox extension (through Tools – Add-ons).

Installation of WordPress Database Backup was a cinch. Right-click on the file link, send it direct to the plug-ins folder, then activate it in PlugInstaller. All that remains is to goto Manage tab and select Database. With a daily backup automated to my admin email address, I am hoping that I have achieved set and forget security in less than a minute.

Whilst covering plug-ins, I must finally mention one that is indispensable whenever I build a business web site. aLinks is an easy way to establish a database of common links. It can also be used to help manage internal links, but I use it mainly to manage external ones. All I have to do, is type the name, e.g. aLinks, and it automatically converts that into an external link, with optional open in new window and graphic. It has a lot more, including statistics tracking which links are clicked. I am sure I will be mentioning this again – I use it everyday.

I discuss the merits, or otherwise, of SEO on my web business site. Keywords for SEO are generally recognized as being unimportant, to the extent that free WordPress.com sites do not have them. However, there is an alternative, as I describe in my free WordPress.com tag feed page. I think tagging is still important.

Tagging serves a number of purposes, definitely in order of importance:

1. Helps visitors find related content.
2. Makes me focus on what is important in the post or page.
3. Tells search engines what the article is about.

example upgrade-wordpress
All aspects of WordPress can be upgraded by tweaking the code. This is not a significant part of this site about business web hosting, but it is an important one. I try to find ready made extras for my WordPress Hosting setup, but if they do not quite do what I want, I am happy to apply one or two code tweaks to upgrade them.

WordPress upgrades are not important enough to warrant a category, but they are quite closely related to business web hosting. They will crop up across categories, and I might even do a post that is focused just on upgrading WordPress. My answer is to tag them.

The secret to choosing good tags is to focus on what visitors are looking for. They should complement and not duplicate categories. I’ll write more on technical tools to help choosing tags later, to link in to the advice on my web business management site.

My chosen WordPress plug-in for managing tags is UTW. I use it in conjunction with some other plug-ins to help focus every article on being accessible to visitors – a process I’ve heard referred to as Visitor Optimization. I call it looking after your customers – a maxim that’s served many a shrewd business owner for centuries.

The related plug-ins are:

Google Sitemap Generator

Not directly related to WordPress tags, but very important for building sitemaps (and not just for Google). I use the extra features of version 3 with no problems, despite it being beta software. Included here as it links with…

Tag Warrior – Sitemap link

… this plug-in which adds tags index pages to your sitemap.

All in One SEO Pack

A new one for me, recommended by many. It should link titles and UTW, but that means, it aint all in one.

SEO Title Tag

Now this takes me back to a pre-WordPress life. Good page titles to get attention separate from good article headlines to maintain interest. I often tried to get round this with a headline starting the post, but this is better. My only beef is the confusion with the tag word. I keep tags for in-article keywords, usually duplicated in meta-keywords. Meta-titles and meta-descriptions adequately describe the header parts of an html page.

I’ll write more in-depth articles on each of these in future. The technical part of this is quite simple, but I think it warrants further explanation.

One final point that relates strongly to tags, and is vital to every website. You need HitTail. The HitTail code can go anywhere in the body – I put it in footer.php just before </body>. There is also a plugin on the HitTail site and one called TailHitter – I’ll try this soon to avoid problems when changing themes.Hittail is no longer available as a free service, and the paid service is not worth the money – there are much better ways of discovering new keywords, and I cover these in my installation guide.

My installation wizard will package all the starting content, customized for the intended site concept. Doing this manually takes a few hours – the wizard will do it in minutes.

After this step, you can simply continue building content, but the Internet would be a boring place if all WordPress sites used the default theme. I will discuss themes later, along with some more plug-ins that are crucial (or at least helpful) in hosting your web business.

Before that, a few short notes about links.

Links are not compulsory, you can leave the default links to WordPress developers, or delete them all. Most new web businesses will have no sites to link to at first, so do not waste time on this now, if you have no immediate links.

I include this step here, as it completes all the different content types on WordPress, and this helps me choose and tweak a suitable theme. I have linked to my web business management sites and other related project.

In WordPress, links can be categorized in a similar way to posts. Once a category is used for links, it cannot be used for posts, and similarly, a posting category is unavailable for links. If you want to create linking categories and posting categories with the same name, you can do – WordPress will automatically add a number to the second slug, unless you overwrite it with something different.