The all new marbleblue.co.uk is created using Wordpress and a customised version of the Studiopress Lifestyle theme.

This is the second version of the site for which the original was a ASP.Net 3.5 and C# based site, with a seperate Wordpress blog.

Firstly, id like to say a big thank you to James Reeve, a respected network guru, work colleague, and webmaster of singleandflirty.com, for drawing my attension to Brian Gardners Studiopress Wordpress themes. Some of these themes have been SEO optimised by Joost de Valk, a well known Wordpress ninja! After looking into these, I decided to create the all new marbleblue website directly from Wordpress – saved me a bunch of coding and optimising too! This is the first time I have really played with Wordpress, and I have to admit, it has been great fun! It has also inspired to me look deeper into the massive subject that is SEO.

If you are starting off with Wordpress, I recommend having a look at the video by Matt Cutt’s at this years Wordcamp as a starter for ten.

You may also find it worthwhile looking at John Chow’s website, and downloading and flicking through his free ebook. John Chow is a very successful and well known blogger, in terms of generating traffic and money if that is what you are interested in.

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Contribution: Everything, from start to finish!

URL: www.marbleblue.co.uk

Technologies: Wordpress 2.8+, Wordpress plugins, php, mysql, customised (by me) Studiopress Lifestyle Theme.

By the way, for hosting, I am using and I can highly recommend, Rick Stevens’ Soft Sys Hosting.

Related posts:

1. Getting started with Wordpress and SEO, Video by Matt Cutts and Wordcamp 2009 Video and summary of the great presentation by Matt Cutts at Wordcamp 2009 about getting started with Wordpress and SEO. Click on the title to read more and see the Video......

- Install the Video Quicktags plugin by the legend that is Viper (viper007) – dont forget to make a donation

Without using this plugin, and by adding the embeding code directly, I had nothing but a ton of script errors in IE, but as always Firefox was perfect!

- Create a Featured Video category.

- Set the area on your homepage where you want your videos to be displayed, to hit posts from this category.

- Add a post.

- Within the post, create a Custom Field. Call it for example, Video_Link, and for the value, add a quicktag to the video you want to display, e.g.


[ viddler id=bc656bb0&w=280&h=166 ]


where w is the width and h is the height.

- Open home.php in the wordpress editor, and locate the area which you have set to display your featured videos.

- Comment out the following:

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<? php the_content_limit(80, ""); ?>

- Add replace with:

// If post contains a vid_link custom field
<?php $vid_link = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'Video_Link', $single = true);
if($vid_link !== '') {
// first display the title
?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php
       // Get the contents of the value of the custom field and apply Quicktag filter
$vid_link = apply_filters('the_content', $vid_link);
      // display video
echo $vid_link;
}
?>

You might notice that if you have other plugins installed, such as TweetMe or Share/Save buttons, unless you have unchecked the ‘display on home page’ checkbox on the plugin settings, this will also be displayed with the video (from the apply_filters command), so I would recommend checking this option to hide them in the home page.

Related posts:

1. Getting started with Wordpress and SEO, Video by Matt Cutts and Wordcamp 2009 Video and summary of the great presentation by Matt Cutts at Wordcamp 2009 about getting started with Wordpress and SEO. Click on the title to read more and see the Video......
2. Wordpress on IIS Cannot Handle 404 File Not Found A solution to the problem where Wordpress sites hosted on IIS cannot handle 404 File Not Found errors using the standard 404.php page, even though it exists. Click on the title above to read more......

- How to do well in Google. ‘Wordpress solves a ton of SEO issues, 80% to 90% of the mechanics of Search Engine Optimisation’, i.e. the crawability of a site.

- Useful Plugins to improve your site, for example, Cookies for Comments (spam prevention). On a side note, I have been looking at Plugins for a couple of weeks now, look out for my Post on this, coming shortly!

- Pagerank, the higher your Pagerank, the faster your pages will be found, the deeper your site gets crawled, and the more often your site gets crawled. It is not just about how many people link to you, but the ‘QUALITY’ of those links.

- Keywords and how they can be used to structure titles and URL’s. The Google Keyword Tool can be used to find top ranking keywords for your subject, hence aid you in picking up traffic via Word Targetting.

- Wordpress Permalinks and how to structure your URL’s to give ‘meaning’ for better ranking.

- Finding your niche and gaining reputation!

Finally, I would just like to say, thank you Matt! – and I hope you like my site!

Related posts:

1. Adding a Featured Video Section to a Wordpress Homepage Instructions on how I created the Featured Video section on my homepage. Click the title above to read more......
2. marbleblue. website Welcome to my website! I hope Matt Cutts likes it! This site is created using Wordpress with a Studiopress theme. Click on the title above to read more......
3. Wordpress on IIS Cannot Handle 404 File Not Found A solution to the problem where Wordpress sites hosted on IIS cannot handle 404 File Not Found errors using the standard 404.php page, even though it exists. Click on the title above to read more......

I found a simple solution for this by setting up a Custom Error to push a 404 error towards the 404.php page that comes with Wordpress, via the Index.php. You may have direct access to IIS, or for example, you are using a hosted service (in my case, dotNetPanel), but the gist of it is to:

1. Access you custom error setup
2. Add a custom error for status code 404
3. Select ‘Execute a URL on this site’
4. Enter /index.php?error=404

The index.php file will contain the code to send the 404 error to the 404.php file.

Related posts:

1. Domain Blacklist – Online tools for testing your IP Address and Email Tools for testing whether your IP Address and your email has been blacklisted. Click on the title to read more......
2. Adding a Featured Video Section to a Wordpress Homepage Instructions on how I created the Featured Video section on my homepage. Click the title above to read more......
3. Getting started with Wordpress and SEO, Video by Matt Cutts and Wordcamp 2009 Video and summary of the great presentation by Matt Cutts at Wordcamp 2009 about getting started with Wordpress and SEO. Click on the title to read more and see the Video......