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Theme Update for TechCo Support Site

Those of you who visit TechCo Support regularly will notice that we have now updated our theme to Atahualpa 3.5.1. Atahualpa is a highly configurable WordPress theme which allows you to change hundreds of parameters and features to suit your needs

There are a huge number of configurable items, (268 according to BytesForAll, the theme creators) with five separate categories for changing the header area alone. The theme will support five columns, with one or two sidebars on either side, each of which can have a number of combination such as display on Pages, or Categories, or not. The sidebar combinations alone would fill a substantial article, so let it suffice to say that you can configure them to meet most requirements, no matter what they are.

Atahualpa features a distinctive rotating header image, which changes every time you load a page. This can be further rotated selecting from the WordPress dashboard, Appearance, then Atahualpa Theme Options, Header Images, Rotate header images with Javascript, and setting a value in seconds in the dropdown.

For this to work, you will need a selection of images of the correct header size: 1300 pixels width, by 160 pixels high by default. You can also select to have the images transition by fading out then in, in the same place.

To install the Atahualpa theme, there are two methods:
Automatic Install From the WordPress Dashboard

  • Click on Themes, Under Appearance
  • Select the Install Themes tab
  • Type Atahualpa in the textbox under Search for themes by keyword, author, or tag.
  • Ensure Term is selected in the Dropdown, and click Search
  • When the Atahualpa theme appears below, click Install
  • After the transparant overlay appears, click the Install Now button
  • You should then see messages including the following:
    • Unpacking the package…
    • Installing the theme…
    • Successfully installed the theme Atahualpa 3.4.9.
  • Activate the theme by clicking the Activate link next to Actions, and you are in business!

Manual Install
Alternatively, for those used to manually installing WordPress themes, you can download the package, unpack it and then upload it to the Themes directory on your site. You should end up with a directory called atahualpa351, or whatever is the version number. Atahualpa versions will happily coexist with earlier releases, so if there is something you do not like you can always revert to the earlier version.

This versatile theme from BytesForAll is available currently as version 3.5.3, which we are actively evaluating at the moment. The latest version of Atahualpa also includes support for the new WP 3+ menu system integrated with 2 Menu Locations (called Menu 1 and Menu 2). The original Page Menu Bar and Category Menu Bar will work if you don’t setup a menu with the new system. We will let you know as soon as we apply this update to our live sites

If you are interested in using Atahualpa on your own WordPress blog, then see

  • Bytes For All
  • Atahualpa Support Forum
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    Katie Freiling featured WordPress blog

    The featured WordPress blog this week is the personal, coaching and marketing site of Katie Freiling, a social media, blogging, and personal development coach in the online home business industry. This one takes the headline position because of its balance between the personal blog style, and the content and panache of a marketing guru. It uses the Fresh News theme by WooThemes from WooThemes

    The site is a must see for anybody who is considering setting up a blog for marketing purposes, including nonprofit organizations, associations or coalitions, or even just to promote a worthy cause. It contains tips on Video marketing, getting top rankings in search engines, list building and numerous desirable achievements. The included YouTube videos are textbook examples of the way to build your brand online, in small chunks.

    Among her plugins, Katie is using the WP-FacebookConnect, WP-Polls and the ubiquitous Contact Form 7. WP-FacebookConnect adds Facebook functionality to WordPress using the Facebook Connect APIs. It provides single sign-on, avatars, and News Feed publication of comments. WP-Polls adds an AJAX based poll system to your WordPress blog so that you can easily include a poll into a page or post.

    You can find the plugins to add to your own WordPress site by following the links below:

    Click here to visit Katie Freiling’s blog

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    Changing Pages To Posts

    Sometimes in the life of a WordPress Blog there comes a moment when you realize that a static page you created (say for an upcoming event or campaign) has time expired, but still contains useful information. You might like your users to find the detail, in a search, but you do not want it clogging up your page structure, so it is time to make it a historic post. What you really need is an easy way to change a Page into a Post!

    You can create a new post, copy all the detail into it from your old page, and then delete the page, setting the Publish date to the original date. However, the easy way to change a WordPress Page into a Post is to use a widget!

    Changing Pages To Posts
    The widget we are currently using is called Post Type Switcher, by John James Jacoby. After installing this plugin and activating it, you will see a new option under Publish when editing a page or a post, Post Type. Clicking on the Edit link next to it will allow you to select Posts, Pages, or if you have any custom types defined Custom. Click OK, and the Page entry you are editing will turn into a Post. Simple!

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    Featured WordPress blog is Twingly

    The featured WordPress blog this week is Twingly Blog, and more specificly a post by Martin Weiger called Europe’s 50 most popular startups according to the blogosphere.. Using data from their Twingly Blog Search they rank blogs in the global blogosphere from May 1 to July 31. This gives you a useful list of web and tech startups to check out for inspiration.

    The blog has posts going back to September 2006, and provides lots of interesting comment and links to resources. It also contains the observation that A blog is a timeline; The fact that every blog is an ordered record of thoughts and opinions makes the aggregated data of many blogs very valuable.

    This is a useful tip to remember when you are structuring your own WordPress posts, as you should consider that you are also writing for history, as well as promoting your latest product or venting your spleen. Surf back through the Twingly timeline and see how the writing style has progressed, and the rated Social Media sites and tools have emerged. Consider the way your own posts might be viewed in three months, or after a year, or in five year’s time.

    The Twingly Blog uses the Neutra Theme, by Artmov which is a simple and elegant free theme. The site is hosted at WordPress.com.

    Resources to check out:

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    3 Top Tips For Marketing Via Your Blog

    In response to a number of inquiries about How to boost your Search position on Google, here are the three
    Top Tips For Marketing Via Your Blog which we cover on our Low Cost Marketing Using WordPress one day seminar.

    • Chose a Compelling Title
    • Keep It Simple and To The Point
    • Tell Your Readers What They Want To Know

    In order to boost your search engine rating on Google, Yahoo! and Bing, and make the most of your marketing effort, make sure that your blog posts take account of the advice they give about SEO. SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”, and describes the techniques of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the natural or un-paid search results.

    In the context of marketing your business, using your WordPress Blog to tell people about your goods and services is a great idea, so you want the most people to see it. This is the way to make Blogging help your business for very little cost, and so get the word out to as many people as possible. A good Blogger grabs the attention of their readers, and holds it long enough to establish an emotional connection, so that they will want to return.

    Compelling Title
    First of all chose a Compelling Title to grab the reader’s interest and attract them to visit your site. This may be repeated in the content, which will help the search engine spiders correctly rank your site. On Google, the PageRank will determine how close to the top of the search results your site or page appears in the list returned to the user. Make sure your title is relevant to your content and brings visitors who want to know more about your subject.

    Keep Content Simple
    Once your visitor has arrived, you have only a few seconds to give them enough information so that they can chose that they want to read on. Keep your content simple and to the point to hold their attention, and if possible provide a bullet pointed list near the start to aid comprehension. This will allow them to confirm that they are on the right site for their needs without wasting time reading the detail. It is better to have someone decide that they do not want your content and leave quickly, than have them read to the bottom and leave disappointed.

    Give Them What They Want
    Finally, tell your readers what they want to know, rather than what you want them to know. That means you have to write to satisfy your readers’ need for information, rather than for your need to tell people about your new Widget making process! Tell them what they will find immediately useful, so that they will feel grateful and want to visit you another time. A happy reader is more likely to buy from you than a resentful one who has had to wade through all your marketing copy to find the nuggets.

    A word of caution about taking the optimization too far: some SEO experts will claim to get you to the top of Google using secret techniques known only to a few, for which you will pay a premium. As Google will tell you, deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site.

    So in summary

    • Chose a Compelling Title to grab the reader’s interest
    • Keep your content simple and to the point to hold their attention
    • Tell your readers what they want to know, so they will visit you another time

    To maximize the potential of your visitors, without spending a lot of money on marketing, apply the three tips listed above and you will satisfy your readers’ needs, help them to feel good enough to want to come again, while aiding the search engines put you it the correct place in the rankings. That has got to be a good deal,and a win for everybody.

    Other Resources:

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    More on Internet Explorer 6

    As most people who visit this site will be aware, TechCo Support have been patient voices calling for the scrapping of Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), and a move to newer standards based applications which support tabbed browsing. With a large number of web developers in our stables, the persistence of IE6 and its numerous bugs, odd interpretation of standards and peculiarities is a consistent drain on resources and a barrier to progress.

    We came across this resource for dealing with the persistent bugs in IE6 which contains lots of usefull information and further links to IE6 nuggets:

    Other Usefull Links and our earlier rants about IE6 may be found below:

    Finally, if you missed our posting on IE6 and SEO, see:

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    The Spending Challenge Featured Blog

    The featured WordPress blog this week is actually a UK government site called The Spending Challenge.

    It uses a Theme in a directory called Coalitiondocdg, which may be a custom solution, with Contact Form 7 plugin by Takayuki Miyoshi to capture your feedback. It also uses Recent Posts with Excerpts plugin by Stephanie Leary, which lists your most recent posts with excerpts, optionally limited to a category.

    According to the home page, The Spending Challenge is your chance to shape the way the UK government works, and help us get more for less as we try to bring down the deficit. It seems to be open initially to people who work in the public sector, but after 8th July the process will be opened up to the wider public. It is easy to make a suggestion via the site, and the email address is optional, so there is a level of anonymity.

    For what it is worth, my suggestion was to allow (or even ecourage) organisations to save money by using open source web applications like Apache, MySQL and WordPress on the national infrastructure to provide a low-cost generic platform for non-critical applications.

    To visit the site and see an example of WordPress in action in government click here to visit The Spending Challenge.

    If you are interested in adding either of the plugins to your WordPress site, see the links below:

    You can download the plugins from the links above, or alternatively, if you are in the Install Plugins section of your site Dashboard, search for Recent Posts with Excerpts or Contact Form 7, and the when you have found the right one, click on Install Now.

    If you are interested in those plugins, you may also be interested in the Contact Form 7 Widget by Stephanie Wells which allows you to use Contact Form 7 Forms in your sidebars.

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    IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice and SEO

    There has been a few comments back on our post, from back in March, containing the quote from Ed Bott, who stated that “Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice“. One person, who we will not name, offered the comment that IE6 is the basis for a whole developer community, so recommending it’s discontinuance was irresponsible and unprofessional. Besides, the commentator sneeringly pointed out that “hundreds of people had used that expression in web commentary.

    Ignoring the obvious response to the “whole developer community” thing, of course we immediately did a quick Google search on the expression, and sure enough there are good number of matches (408 exact matches at time of writing). Does this mean that a large number of people had come to the same conclusion and used the same expression spontaneously, or was there some blatant manipulation of the search ranking by unscrupulous Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts.

    This also poses an interesting observation about the way the search engines, like Google, rank pages. If you search for the phrase Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice, the original page from Ed Bott appears fourth, and then does not appear again until page two; that is eighteenth in the results set.

    At time of testing, the top three results, beating the original post, are as follows:

    1. LessThanDot (a phpBB powered Bulletin board)
    2. Integrity Technology Group (a Joomla powered site)
    3. A Twitter link (with the exact quote verbatim)

    This is interesting, and shows just how important your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be. The Bulletin board beat the Joomla entry by having repetition of the phrase “Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice” twice in the body, plus a partial reference in the title.

    The Tweet came an honorable third by repeating the exact quote, and due to the limited number of characters available had the highest match to “noise” ratio.

    Could it be that “IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice” proposition, repeated often enough, could get you a top position regardless of the content of the surrounding article?

    By the way to avoid this post jumping immediately to the top of Google simply by repeating the full phrase ad nauseum, we have deliberately shortened it to IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice. However human readers will be able to substitute the full expression unconsciously, and so allow us to sleep at night! The expression we have distilled down to is concise, accurate and meets the requirement for this exercise.

    If you want to see for yourself, try the links below to search for the full expression:

    As an intellectual exercise, we have dutifully entitled this posting IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice, and at the time of posting Google returns no results for the exact phrase “IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice”. Over the next few weeks we will keep searching for the expression and see how many web sites pick it up. Any that do repeat it in their content will become the subject of extra scrutiny to see if they are brilliant SEO expert who we need to model, or cheap rip-off sites to be added to our SEO blacklist.

    IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice
    If you are interested in playing the game, and contributing in some small way to the sum of human knowledge, click here to search Google for the exact expression IE6 in a Corporate Setting is Malpractice. Let us know what you think.

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    Maximizing WordPress Through Social Networking

    Our featured blog this week is the WordPress hosted Smoke-Free Texas if for no other reason that it has a good message!

    However, check out the sensible inclusion of Latest Flickr photos, Twitter feed and Smoke-Free Texas on Facebook links, maximizing their targeted inbound traffic potential. There are useful WordPress plug-ins for these Social Networking sites available from WordPress.Org Social Network

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    Australian WordPress Blogger Featured

    The featured blog this week is littlelioness.net, a personal blog by Fiona, a 27 year old Australian woman currently residing in Canberra. The littlelioness.net domain was registered on 11 September 2002, and is powered by WordPress, and there are archives which go back to November 2007, so Fiona has been blogging a comparatively long time. The theme is WhitePlus, which is available from the WordPress.org Free Themes Directory WhitePlus

    The site has some great food pics on the pages which makes them attractive and interesting. Newbie bloggers should take note, and make sure to include photos in your posts to hold your readers’ attention.

    As a Speech Pathologist, and an Atheist who sometimes works in Catholic schools, Fiona has some interesting personal challenges, and a chatty style when talking about them. For a view on her world, click here to visit littlelioness.net