Why a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

Setting Up Your WordPress Blog – Themes, Plugins, SEO & More

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If you have bought a domain, purchased a hosting package and Installed WordPress, it is time to setup your WordPress blog to make it blogging ready.

Topics covered in this lesson:

Setting up a www. version for your blog
Setting up the permalink URL structure

Why a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog?

A self-hosted WordPress blog is the best way to learn and practice digital marketing. You can use some other platform as well, but with WordPress many things are easy. For example, if you want to install your analytics code on all the pages of your website, it is just a few clicks with WordPress.
All the future lessons and tutorials will be based on implementing things with a WordPress blog. That’s why I recommend having a self-hosted WordPress blog for everything that we are going to learn from this point.

Buy Webhosting for Just $0.01:

Click the following link and use the coupon code: “JURY” on the last page of the checkout form to get hosting for $0.01 for the first month! Make sure to select Hostgator.com (and not Hostgator.in).

Note: The coupon code only works for Hostgator.com and not Hostgator.in. Select the .com version (US) when you are signing up!

Which version of the website to offer (www?)

If you have browsed around the web, you would have seen two types of websites. Some will have www. in the beginning and other websites will be served directly from the root domain. A domain name without any subdomains is called a root domain. There are no rules or standards here. My blog Lovettegibson.blogspot.com loads without the www. but many other blogs load with www. in the beginning.

In the options above you can choose the www. version or the non-www one. If you choose the www. version as shown in the figure about, your naked domain will automatically redirect to the www. version if someone types it on the browser’s address bar.
When it comes to SEO, there is no effect on what type you use here. But you have to make sure that you make this decision once and stick to it. If you are linking to the root domain, always link to the root domain. If you are linking to the www version of the domain, it is considered as a different website in the eyes of the search engines.

The Importance of Permalinks:

Permalinks are very important for SEO. By default the permalink structure in WordPress is not optimized for SEO. Inside WordPress settings, you will find an option for Permalinks.

This is important for SEO because if someone is searching for WordPress blog setup tutorial and your site has a page on it, then when someone searches for it on Google, these words will be highlighted.
For example, if you search for Facebook Lead Ads, my blog post shows up in the search results. You can observe that the words that match the search term are bolded in the search results. This gives signals to the user that this link is relevant – and the user is more likely to click on it, improving the CTR of your links.

So permalinks are one of the most important things for WordPress. You can also choose to include the date in the URL. But once you set this up, you should never change it for the life of your blog. It needs to maintain its URL structure for good user experience and SEO.

Thank you for taking out time to visit my blog, please do drop by again for fresh post. To make it easier, sign up for my update. It is quick and simple!

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Get Acquainted With Tools In Microsoft Power Point - Advance Digital Marketing

Technology

Get Acquainted With Tools In Microsoft Power Point

by Lady Lovette Gibson 5.2.17

Resource For Writers - Microsoft Power Point Tools

PowerPoint is a highly innovative and versatile program that can ensure you a successful communication whether you’re presenting in front of potential investors, a lecture theatre or simply in front of your colleagues. Below are five features you should be using – if you aren't already. Learn everything about these tips: they will improve your presentation skills and allow you to communicate your message successfully.

1) Adding Smart Art

Don’t confuse SmartArt with the similarly named WordArt. Where WordArt just allows you to display text using a wide variety of different formats and effects, SmartArt is a comprehensive and flexible business diagram tool that greatly improves upon the ‘Diagram Gallery’ feature found in previous versions of Office.
Click the insert SmartChart Graphic to choose from a selection of options.

SmartArt can be used to create professional diagrams that include pictures and text or combinations of the two. An obvious use of SmartArt would be to create an organisation chart but it can be used for many different kinds of diagrams and even to provide some variety to slides using text bullet points.

2) Inserting Shapes

If you need to include some sort of diagram in your presentation, then the quickest and easiest way is probably to use SmartArt. However, it is important to be able to include shapes independently of SmartArt and worth being familiar with the various Drawing Tool format options.
Not only will they be useful if you do need to manually draw a diagram (and SmartArt doesn’t suit all diagrams), but they can also be applied to objects on a slide that you might not immediately think of as shapes. For example the box that contains your slide title or your content. This can be anything from text to a video, or even the individual shapes in a SmartArt diagram.
As you can see, the gallery of available shapes is very extensive. Once you have selected your chosen shape, you can just click in your slide to insert a default version of the shape or, to set a particular size and position, click and drag with the mouse to create the shape and size you want.

3) Inserting an Image

Here are two content type icons which appear in new content Placeholders for inserting pictures. You can Insert Picture from File or Insert Clip Art. Alternatively, the Illustrations group of the Insert ribbon tab includes the same two tools. In addition, PowerPoint 2010 has a new ‘Screenshot’ option that allows you to capture an entire window or part of a window for inclusion on a slide. You can also copy any image and just paste it directly to a slide.
Insert Picture from File allows you to browse to an image file saved somewhere on your system whereas Clip Art is held in an indexed gallery of different media types. Clip Art is not limited to pictures: ‘The Results should be:’ box lets you choose between: ‘All media file types’ and one or more of the following different types:

Illustrations, Photographs, Video, Audio
Once you have found the image you want to use, click on it to insert it into the current slide. You can now re-size and move the image accordingly with further editing options available when you right click the desired image.

4) Slide Transitions

Properly used, slide transitions can be make your presentations clearer and more interesting and, where appropriate, more fun. Badly used, the effect of slide transitions can be closer to irritating or even nauseating. Simple animation effects are often used to add interest to bullet point text. Much more extreme animation effects are available but, in most cases, should be used sparingly if at all.
Two main kinds of animation are available in a PowerPoint presentation: the transition from one slide to the next and the animation of images/text on a specific slide.
In PowerPoint 2010 & 2013 there is also a separate Transitions ribbon tab that includes a gallery of different transition effects. These can be applied to selected slides or all slides. If you want to apply different transition effects to different groups of slides, then you might want to choose ‘Slide Sorter’ view from the Presentation Views group of the View ribbon.

5) Adding Animations

Whereas the transition effects are limited to a single event per slide, animations can be applied to every object on a slide – including titles and other text boxes. Many objects can even have animation applied to different components, for example each shape in a SmartArt graphic, each paragraph in a text box and each column in a chart. Animations can be applied to three separate ‘events’ for each object:

Entrance – how the object arrives on the slide
Emphasis – an effect to focus attention on an object while it is visible
Exit – how the object disappears from the slide

To apply an animation effect, choose the object or objects to be animated, then choose Animation Styles or Add Animation from the Animations toolbar.

Where an animation is applied to an object with different components (for instance a SmartArt graphic made up of several boxes), the Effect Options tool becomes available to control how each component will be animated. So for example, your animation can be used to introduce elements of an organization chart to your slide one by one.

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A Resource For Writers-Tools In MicroSoft Word

by Lady Lovette Gibson 4.2.17

You Will Find This Article Very Useful

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Microsoft Word offers many additional tricks for writers to speed and facilitate our craft. In this series of articles, I'll present a few of these features, and perhaps take you beyond your normal usage of this premier writer's aid, including crafting manuscript submission templates and easy tools for collaboration and tracking changes. But before we get there, we have to start with the basics.

The following five tools are some of the most basic in Word, and you may already use them. But they offer much to the writer, so be sure to check out my "bonus points" section for each item. These notes offer further tips and tricks, and you might be surprised at the additional depth these simple tools offer! Knowing these tricks will enable you to improve your writing, your editing, and eventually, your bottom line!

1. Auto Correct

Obviously, Spell Checker is a key feature of Word, and everyone knows how to use it, right? But a subsidiary of Spellchecker is Auto Correct, and it can speed your writing by correcting your “usual” misspellings without forcing you to run Spellchecker. More importantly, you can program it to overcome your standard mistakes, and others can be switched on by checking the appropriate rule boxes on the Auto Correct tab! These "built in" rules include automatically correcting any word that starts with two capital letters, capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, and automatically changing any accidental use of the caps lock key.

More importantly, though, if you have some standard misspellings that you frequently trip over, you can also add these words to the Auto Correct function, and you'll never have to correct them by hand again – or even see them. Auto Correct will fix them as you type!

Here's How:

Click the Tools Menu. Choose Auto Correct. Choose the Auto Correct tab (if not already selected.) Check any boxes for rules you want to automatically include. To add your commonly misspelled words, be certain the "Replace Text as you Type" rule is checked, and then type the misspelled word in the open record under "Replace." Add the correct spelling in the open record under "with." Then click "Add." Be certain the box for "automatically use suggestions from spell checker" is checked. Repeat as many times as you need to get all your frequently misspelled words into the Auto Correct dictionary.

Bonus points:

Some writing requires the use of certain words that might be long, or technical in nature, but requires repeating them. With autocorrect, you can give these words a two or three letter code word, and then each time you enter it, Auto Correct change it to the full word! That's a real time saver!

Additional bonus points: Fine tuning Word.

Many publishers often ask writers to make certain they are using "straight quotes," since these are often translated as an unrecognized letter online or via a Mac. Simply click the tab marked "auto formatting as you type" and uncheck the appropriate boxes! The same is true if you want to stop unwanted auto formatting changes, like lines beginning with numbers triggering an indentation and a numbered list. When you are finished, simply click "OK" and you're set!

2. Undo

Again, this is another common feature of Word that everyone knows – but be aware there are a few different ways to use it, with some powerful traits! It is found under the Edit menu, though most people I know use the toolbar button (a bent left arrow). This will undo a single action – though the shortcut "CTRL+Z" achieves the same thing, without pausing your typing. But many people do not realize that you use "Undo" to reverse multiple actions at once, or choose a specific previous action to undo!

Here's How:

On the toolbar, there is a "look in" arrow to the right of the Undo button. (A black triangle pointing down.) Click it to open, and then slide your mouse down the list. This list will highlight, and clicking the bar at the bottom of the list (which reads "undo x actions" depending how many you've highlighted) will undo the listed number of actions, at once! Right now, I could undo 216 actions – which would take me back to the title of this article!

This is a powerful feature that can save lots of time, since in editing an article, you can often backtrack to a place you chose the wrong path! You can also use it to find a specific action you performed earlier, and undo that single item. Or, for example, you can wipe out a group of edits you made that you decided you really didn't like, while keeping all the more recent changes you did like!

Bonus Points:

The sister button "Redo" becomes a lifesaver as well, allowing you to put a change back when you realize you liked the previous change after all!

3. Fast Highlighting

In Word, we select the text we want to move or format or delete by "hightlighting" it. Better yet, in Word, as everyone knows, we can drag and drop this highlighted text by clicking on it and holding the mouse button while we move the mouse pointer to a new position. This feature allows us to rearrange paragraphs in an article quickly, and is a real boon to writers. But many people seem to have great difficulty highlighting just the right amount of text! Problems generally arise with a speedy zip through the entire article when you reach the edge of the page.

There are many easy "workarounds" for this common problem.

The 1-2-3 click:

In Word, a click on a word highlights that single word. A second click on the same word highlights the line, and a third click will highlight the entire paragraph! With this, dragging and dropping a paragraph is a snap! (or should I say a click?)

The Shift Method:

Another easy way is to select exactly the right amount of text: single click your mouse at the start of the text you want to highlight, placing your insertion point there. Then use the scroll bar, (or the page down feature, or the cursor arrows,) to reach the end of the piece of text you want highlighted. If you hold down your SHIFT key as you single click the mouse at the end of the text in question, the entire text between the two points will be highlighted.

Additional Bonus Points:

You likely already know you can select an entire line by moving your mouse into the margin, and clicking in front of the line you want to highlight. If you hold the mouse button down, and drag the mouse down, you'll continue to highlight additional lines.

4. Find and Replace

This is another simple feature that everyone knows, but realize it can do more than you might think!

Word allows you to search for non-printing characters as well as letters and words! Found you put in a tabs when you shouldn't have? Looking to get rid of fields, or page breaks, or other non-standard items? Find and Replace has you covered!

Here's How:

Under the Edit menu, click Replace. When the new window opens, click the "More" button if it is showing. This opens more options, and one of them is a "Special" button. Opening this gives us all the non-printing characters we can use. Then decide what you'd like to replace them with – which again, could be another "special" feature, a space – or even nothing! (The special button also offers options to find a range of letters or numbers, and many other special search qualities as well. Check it out!)

Also:

If you are looking to replace a Word or a Character, it is always good to "test drive" the change with a "find next" rather than the "replace" or the "replace all" button. Also remember that unless you use leading or trailing blank spaces, it will find your text anywhere, including inside another word!

Still, this is a wonderful feature for any author that has over used a noun or verb, or more importantly, someone who has changed the name of a character when they were pages into a story. Find and Replace will find every previous use of the name, and replace it with the new name. Very fast, and greatly appreciated!

Special Bonus Points:

Ever find you spelled your character's name a variety of ways in your story? Find and Replace can fix that in a flash! Clicking on the Use Wildcards option allow you to spell the name with placeholders in certain spaces, in case you sometimes used an 'o' and sometimes an 'e' for example. The question mark and the asterisk are the two common wildcards. Thus, using Anders?n in Find or Replace would bring back Anderson or Andersen. (It would also find Andersin, or any other word that matched all the other letters.) This is very handy, but what if you changed the name drastically halfway through the draft story, perhaps from "Anderson" to Andropolous? Worst yet, you frequently spelled the new name a number of different ways? "And*" would find every word that began with "And" in your story (but it would not find "and" since it is looking for an uppercase A, unless your "match case" box has been cleared.)

5. The Thesaurus

This is the last of the basic features in Word for this article, and I'll only mention it briefly, since I suspect many people here are well versed in its use. The program allows users to find substitute words, which can be a godsend for some of us! (Nothing worse than coming to a screeching halt because you can't think of the right word!)

Here's How:

The process is very simple: place your insertion point in the word in question, and do a Shift+F7 (that's the function key F7, not the F key and the 7 key!) The Thesaurus window will open, and you can chose your replacement word – and that's all there is to it!

I used the shortcut keys since opening the Thesaurus is a three step process otherwise: Click on the Tools Menu, go to Language, then on the additional menu, and choose Thesaurus. Then make your word choices. (Again, make certain your insertion point is in the word you want to replace – or have it highlighted. Otherwise, you won't get the right option!)

Additional Method:

You can find additional replacement words even faster if you 'right-click' on the word you want to change. This will give you a menu list, and one option near the bottom is synonyms. When you place your mouse on it, it will give a list of similar words. To replace your current word, simply click on the new one you'd rather use. If you don't like the choices, the bottom choice on the synonym menu will offer to open the Thesaurus as well.

Bonus Points:

Since some words can be nouns or verbs, the choices may not always match. If that happens to you, in the Thesaurus choose one of the words that more closely matches your meaning in the left hand box, and click the "look up" button instead of "replace." You'll then get a list of new options based on this choice.

These five tools are all very simple, but they offer writers a fast option to overcome potential time wasters. These quick fixes allow the writer to stay in the flow of the article, which is very important, since any distraction that takes your mind out of the process can result in a big delay – or perhaps even threaten the completion of a particularly tough article!

Now that we've covered the basics, my next article will draw attention to some of the wonderful higher end features of Word, including how to make your own submission template, complete with special formatting, headers and page numbers.

Thank you for taking your time to read this tutorial. Please visit this blog again for future updates and helpful tips. Your visits will surely be worth it. I sincerely appreciate your visits and presence here. If you are finding these tutorials and tips informative and helpful, please kindly recommend this blog to your friends. If, on the other hand, there is any area you feel improvement is needed, please kindly forward a piece of advice. These will be highly welcomed and appreciated. Feel free to drop comments or ask questions using the comment box below. Your comments will be promptly reviewed and published and your questions speedily looked into and answered in the best possible manner. Thanks.