Domain name choice is a critical factor for any online venture. Securing the right domain name will maximize the amount of search engine traffic that comes to your site, maintain brand consistency and make sure you’re easy to find on the web.

Those with foresight can book or ‘park’ their desired domains, so that they can own the domain without having to pay the monthly hosting costs while they are not using it. This can prove useful if you have an idea for a blog/business/ecommerce site, and want to secure a domain name ahead of time or even if you see a particular domain that will become valuable to you in the future.

Parking a domain with RSAWEB is easy and cost effective. All you pay for is the annual domain registration cost, and parking fee of R25 per annum. So for example, if you wanted to park www.thisismysupernewdomain.co.za, it would cost you R50 per annum for the registration and R25 for the parking – a total cost of R75 per annum (R6.25 per month). When you want to start using your domain, simply order a web hosting package, and you’re ready to go live.

Ready to get parking?
Check if the domain you want to purchase is available using our domain search tool.

Getting heard above all the noise on the web is becoming harder. The old mantra of, “build it and they will come” certainly does hold true on the web in many cases. There are many obvious success stories of this, ala Google, but as more of your competitors or even other websites compete for your customers eyeballs, standing out of the crowd is what you need to get right.

What is certainly true for all sites/products/services on the web is that information is king. He (or she) who holds the data and presents it in the most useful/usable format normally wins. Data can come in multiple forms: text, images, video, maps, news etc and can be presented in multiple formats: blogs, news sites, Facebook, Twitter, email, newsletter, etc.

So, how do you become successful?

1. Be interesting
Ego plays a massive part in developing a good web presence. Tell your visitors that you are good. A good way to do this with industry recognition, testimonials from customers etc.

So to stroke your ego, get connected on Twitter & Facebook and talk about yourself, your product and your site. Build up your network of followers to some decent numbers and compare yourself against your competition. Entice customers & new Twitter followers with interesting campaigns, maybe do a product discount when you increase your twitter followers to 100 (for newbies) or up it by 10% or some other strategic number.

2. KISS – Keep it simple stupid
Simplicity and usability are two of the most important factors on the web. It’s one thing having great data, but if your delivery mechanism isn’t good, it’s worth nothing. Change things slowly, introduce new concepts and see how they perform. Are you getting more visitor traffic through a new page or menu item you created since last week?

3. If you can’t measure it, how can you manage it?
Tracking is one of those vital feedback mechanisms. You need to know how people are getting to your site, what they are searching for, how long they stayed for, how many pages they viewed etc. (you need to track this via Google Analytics)

Analytics provides a FREE & amazingly powerful tool to track your users. You can also track ‘conversions’ and evaluate how these customers got to your site. Conversions can be a specific page view, like a contact form submission or a newsletter signup or even a product order.

4. Build, release. FAST (for online applications)
If your development cycle is months, by the time you have finished building it, is your product even going to suite the users? Taking a lesson from the Agile/Scrum approach to development, build something quickly and release it. Get user feedback comments and see if they like it. Customers know what they want, you can make an educated guess, but that’s exactly it, a guess. Stop guessing, release new features quickly, take a features poll from users and stop trying to understand the customers needs, get them to tell you what THEY want. Decide, build, release, get feedback, reiterate. (in 1-2 months cycles max)

5. Leverage your user base
Engage your users on Facebook, Twitter and other social media applications. Happy users are great promoters of your products. If you are selling something, create an affiliate marketing program, giving them a % of the revenue from the sale. The power of Twitter and other social media allows interesting products/services to go viral. When a new user signs up, encourage them to follow you on twitter. Possibly offer new features in advance to users that ‘retweet’ your message to their friends (this is a great way to get followers)

6. Offline Actions
The biggest debate always revolves around what offline actions one should take. Talk to as many people as possible about your product/service. Get networking, attend conferences, get invited to speak at conferences (this happens when you become the ‘expert’ in your field) and tell friends & family. Be passionate.

7. The bigger picture
Don’t expect overnight success, all these things take time to get right. Quality content & good presentation is the key, the more useful information presented in a good format, the more success you can expect to have.

Summing up
We often see companies advertising “Get listed on Google” or some other marketing tool, used to entice customers to signup for a website or web hosting, don’t be tempted, if it actually worked, everyone would be using it (even us and we don’t!). Customers also get a website built by someone else and then wonder why they don’t get any visitors.

Realistically it’s all about your content and who links to your content. Be interesting, put some effort into marketing your website and people will come, be boring and people won’t. Google Adwords is also the fastest way to get your website out there (you pay money for people clicking on adverts).

Read up on SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing) – start implementing these strategies, they do require a lot of time and energy, but they do really work.

Securing Wordpress has become a major challenge, it is certainly true that Wordpress’s success is it’s Achilles heel. As new bugs/hacks are discovered, hackers, spammers and the like are quick to pounce on these opportunities to infect blogs with rubbish content and junky backlinks. Securing your Wordpress based site is a crucial step to keeping your site online, your traffic flowing to it and protecting that all important Google ranking. (Google will penalise you for link to spam.)

Keep Wordpress updated
Simple yet extremely effective. Updating Wordpress is usually really simple. The Wordpress guys have made it as simple as possible, there is an auto upgrade function built into Wordpress, which makes it ultra simple. A word of caution, if you have hacked the Wordpress code, your task just got massively harder. So my advice –> don’t. Keep it simple.

Wordpress plugins
Definitely keep these updated. Wordpress plugins do have security flaws from time to time. Rather keep them updated, again via a simple upgrade in your plugins manager.

Secure Wordpress
There are some nifty plugins that can help you secure Wordpress that are easy to install and work like a charm. Secure Wordpress plugin

Secure your passwords
For heaven’s sake, why did you make that password for your admin user ‘password’ when you reset it? This is the easiest trick in the book, its called a brute force attack and a cracker will simply keep testing your admin or other users passwords, its just a matter of time. Make sure you use long passwords with multiple characters. Then install this: Login lockdown plugin.

Remove the Wordpress version string in your theme
This prevents hackers seeing which version of Wordpress you are running. This makes it harder for them to determine where they should start attacking your site. This and other smaller but very useful tweaks can be done easily by installing the WP-Security-Scan plugin.

Server Security – Intelligent blocking
This is harder to achieve if you don’t actually own or manage the server. Modsecurity is a great plugin for the apache web server and there are specific rules that can be added to your apache config to protect it even further. ModSecurity is a module for open source web servers, like apache, that acts like a detector & firewall. It works by providing protection from a wide range of typical attacks against web applications on a web server (like Wordpress). For RSAWEB Hosting customers, speak to us for help around this.

For top-class Wordpress Web Hosting go and check out RSAWEB. Anything from a small Wordpress site to  super-large Wordpress sites are catered for.

Wordpress plugins can add awesome functionality to your blog without writing a single line of ‘code’. In this tutorial, we discuss which plugins we find useful and which ones we think can add value to your website.

To find and install any of these plugins, login to your wordpress admin panel and go to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’, type in the plugin name below and click ‘Install’ – you may need to configure the plugin thereafter, most of the time this is done in the admin panel.

Gravatars
Gravatars are a great way to bring interactivity to the comments section of your posts. The Gravatars plugin gives your comments personalisation. The Gravatar service is one that users upload a photo once and it will be retrieved if they comment on your site or other sites and the photo will be displayed. Many of your visitors may already have a Gravatar. It’s a simple easy way to identify users and a great way for you to have a profile picture that interacts with your users when you comment.

Google XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps assist search engines by making content easier to find, by generating an XML sitemap that all major search engines can view. Sitemaps give your site additional visibility that other competing websites probably won’t have. Every time you create a new post or page, the sitemap is generated and Google is notified of your new page. This is definitely a must have.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the de facto standard now for evaluating your website’s traffic. This essential tool shows you all sorts of data. Learning to interpret it can take your website from good to great. Installing this plugin means you don’t have to go and fiddle the code manually to add Google Analytics tracking code into your theme.

Google Analytics Dashboard

This nifty dashboard plugin shows you your visitor statistics on your Wordpress admin dashboard. This gives you a quick overview to how many visitors you are receiving and other interesting stats without having to login to Google Analytics.

Wordpress Caching with Hypercache
Caching can give your users a much faster webpage load time. It allows the server that your Wordpress site is installed on to do less work. We have typically seen on busy Wordpress sites of drops of up to 80% CPU utilisation on busy servers because caching was not installed, this can make a massive difference to your end users as the page will load significantly faster and their experience will be significantly improved.

Don’t use WP-Cache, but rather WP-Super-Cache or Hyper cache, both are excellent. Hyper cache is easier to install and disrupts existing Wordpress sites less.

Akismet Antispam
This antispam plugin works wonders for spammers trying to post rubbish in your comments section. You will need to get a Wordpress API key – very simple, its free and all you need to do is  insert it into the settings of the Akismet plugin in Wordpress. Don’t worry, you can do all this via the Wordpress Admin panel.

Wordpress Database Backup
A simple plugin that backs up your valuable website. Once installed, you can backup your websites database and download it via FTP from an RSAWEB Web Hosting or get it emailed to an address (not always guaranteed to work due to the large potential size) actually a backup happens whenever you do anything major. It’s always better to be safe.

All in One SEO Pack
This enables your website to have proper ‘Title’ tags – this makes Google like your site more, its more descriptive (see the blue bar at the top of the window? That’s the ‘title bar’) and its essential to have good Search Engine Optimisation.

Subscribe to comments
Also a definite for websites/blogs that want to allow comments on articles. This allows a user to leave a comment and get notified of a reply. Eliminating the need for them to return to check the page to see if someone has replied. A definite must.

Conclusion
We regularly use these plugins and there are many different variants of some of these plugins. They will greatly improve your ability to manage your Wordpress site and make it more appealing to the end user. All the plugins above can be installed directly from the Wordpress Admin interface by going to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’ and then searching for the name as they appear above.

How is your wordpress experience going? Post a comment about it and tell us which plugins you like. What other plugins do you want to see mentioned in this list?

For Wordpress Web Hosting check us out.

Themes allow you to easily extend your Wordpress based website or blog and make it look good. The advantages of using a pre-built theme are endless, some of which being time and cost. Choose a theme, upload it, tweak it a bit and you’re ready to roll.

Theme providers like Woothemes and OboxDesign allow you download pre-built themes at a superlow cost and they even allow you to reuse them. Doing design for a traditional website can cost you thousands, but using a pre-built theme will either cost you nothing or for the more sexier themes anything from $30-$100. The three themes below are examples of wordpress templates.

Key points to consider before choosing a theme:

1. Layout – people are using fairly standard layouts to navigating the web, look at the templates, they work. Dont go for anything outlandish, your users wont wont be able to navigate your site
2. Flash – websites built exclusively in flash are a disaster. Google and Bing will never find you. What’s the point of building a site if nobody can find it? That’s like having a postal address without a post code.
3. Clutter – don’t load every wordpress widget you can find, make sure the menu structure works nicely, only use ones that are essential.

Installing your custom template:

1. Get your theme (pay or not) and download it to your computer. It usually comes as a zip file (that’s fine)
2. Login to your Wordpress Admin
3. Go to “Appearance” and “Add new themes” (red marker 1)



4. Click the ‘Upload’ button (marker 2)
5. Click ‘Browse’ and find your theme file (where you downloaded it to)
6. Click ‘Install Now’
7. If you are asked, please enter the FTP connection info and the hostname is your websites name eg. www.blognow.co.za (your FTP account details that came with your hosting account – For RSAWEB Customers –> you can get them from the webhosting section in the MyRSAWEB Control Panel)



8. It may take 2-3 minutes to complete. Then click ‘Activate’



9. Your theme is now installed! Check it out by going to your website. The www.Blognow.co.za demo looks like this:



10. Go and test out the new theme, add some content!

Look out for the next in the series of the “RSAWEB Wordpress Tutorial Series 101” – you can follow us on Twitter or signup to receive emails when a new release is announced