I have had so much interest in a Web Hosting For Dummies book (that does not exist), I’ve introduced a new section looking at appropriate books in the field of web hosting.

Also, a couple of other updates:

• WordPress.com has clarified that it does allow some site monetization as log as it is ethical and incidental (my interpretation). I’ll review this in more detail just as soon as somebody asks me to.
• My installation wizard is on-hold. Now that Pods is here, there is a better way to manage it, but I have other Pods projects to complete first.

These people are Shrewdies.

They want to gain the benefits of web hosting without years of learning technology secrets.

How can Shrewdies get good quality web hosting at reasonable prices? Or free?

There is a good example at WordPress.com, but it is not for commercial gain. It’s necessary restrictions also limit it’s use for optimized not-for-profit projects.

My solution is to set-up my own WordPress.com equivalent, but with fewer restrictions and a closer community. Obviously smaller scale than WordPress.com. Small is beautiful.

I’ll continue to develop the WordPress Wizard for single user WordPress installations, but first a short diversion as I document and develop a WordPress Multi User installation.

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.

The AdSense for Content scheme dominates my thoughts, perhaps because, for many sites, it is the main earner. But AdSense Referrals can also bring significant income, and the product list has grown tremendously from the original Google product line.

Not that there is anything wrong with the Google products. Firefox, and most of the applications in the Google Pack have been my firm favorites since the day they were launched.

There used to be an issue with WordPress, adding line breaks in the AdSense Referral code, which made it unusable, without a plug-in (Script Enabler). The latest WordPress version certainly has no problem now. I have tested this with 2.2.3, though slightly earlier versions will probably work.

AdSense Referral can be used on pages with AdSense for Content and AdSense Search boxes, though you need to be careful of overloading the page and making it look spammy. However you monetize your site, if you put revenue before value for your visitors, then they, quite rightly, will look elsewhere in future.

Google includes limits for the number advertising units you may place. You should not see these as goals. One well placed unit is usually better than slapping in the maximum allowed. By there nature, Google for Content adverts rotate depending on how many advertisers are bidding for the type of content you provide.

Blog platforms like WordPress can occasionally present a problem here, because several pages are often presented together on the blog page, category, author, tag and search results pages. Though you have written individual articles, when several are presented as a list, they are regarded as a single page for advertising purposes.

There are several ways round this, and none is better than another. Your visitor profile is unique, and the way they respond to adverts depends not only on their demographic, but your content and design. You should try different options, and monitor your results to see what options and combinations work best for you.

Your options include:

• Use a “legal” number of adverts in fixed positions by amending the header, footer, sidebar or page layout templates in your theme.
• Use a “legal” number of adverts in fixed positions by adding text widgets in your theme configuration.
• Use an add-on, such as Adsense-Deluxe, to control the number of adverts as the page is rendered
• Only include adverts in the body of posts below the <!--more--> command.

A recent addition to AdSense Referrals, means you can now set up a basket of keywords to select from the ever-expanding range of products. Google will automatically rotate the adverts for your chosen keywords or categories, and will even serve the best performing ones if you ask it.

If you want to know more about a particular web business opportunity – AdSense Referrals, AdSense for Content, or any other form of monetization in the context of your website or business plan, I am happy to give you advice. Just add comments below, or email me via my Contact Page.

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 need my WordPress Tags, and I want them right. I started writing about them in my last post, and I have plenty more to say – mainly from a site management point of view, but also many technical tips.

If you are browsing this site, or more importantly seeing all my wise words about UTW in a search engine, I want you to see http://www.shrewdies.net/tag/UTW, not http://www.shrewdies.net/index.php?tag=UTW. To be honest, the latter isn’t the end of the world, but when something that ought to be straightforward doesn’t work, I get frustrated.

Frustration mounted as I searched the UTW site, trying what felt like 100 .htaccess variations. Why won’t it work?

All it needs is a simple change of the UTW options to invoke URL rewriting and that should be it. Then the more you try to understand, the worse it gets. Is it a server configuration problem? Is it a WordPress core coding problem? Have I screwed up my .htaccess with all these changes?

I just want URL rewriting.

OK, try Googling for url rewriting UTW.

Top of the list sits Using Permalinks « WordPress Codex

WordPress URL Rewrite Plugin for blogs running on IIS …. WordPress are being overly greedy and getting invoked before UTW’s rewrite rules have a chance. …

Hmm… Looks like a WordPress problem then – better check it out. Long page, but quite interesting. How can we stop being WordPress being greedy?

This usually occurs only when using a custom permalink structure (like /%postname%/). To fix it, either switch your Permalink structure to “Date and name based” or hack the UTW plugin to place the UTW rewrites at the top of the internal rewrites array. More Info on this.

And More Info (from www.naturalsearchblog.com) gives the answer. The unbelievably simple answer.

From Stefan Freimark:

rebuilding the permalink structure solves problem

All you need to do, after activating UTW and setting the options, is to go to Options – Permalinks and click Update Permalink Structure. Thank You, Stefan.