photo credit: Nikolay Bachiyski

An honest opinion? Wordpress.org.

Wordpress.com has various pro’s and con’s of which will be covered in this post. Many of the negatives of wordpress.com do not exist when you choose wordpress.org as your solution.

In a nutshell, wordpress.com is a hosted solution wheras wordpress.org is a blog you own, you install and you run on your own hosting.

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photo credit: Matthew Oliphant

Its been said many times on this blog to try and at least blog once a day. Why? It drives traffic. People like new content to read, search engines like to index new content. OK - lets be realistic, if you run your blog as a hobby sometimes you cant make a post every day, then that leads to another day, then another and you end up not blogging for a month *cough* not guilty *cough*.

If you get a fantastic idea in your head you want to share - you do actually go home after work at night and blog about it. Its just getting those ideas. Here are some of the ways to get ideas to write about;

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photo credit: meneame comunicacions, sl

A largely missed concept with webmasters is how to use 301 redirects.   They are the only safe SEO redirect.

With regards to SEO and the duplicate content penalty, you should redirect all non www requests on your domain to www unless there is a special case where this is required for site functionality.   This means…

http://tdcreative.net is 301′ed to http://www.tdcreative.net
http://tdcreative.net/my-post is 301′ed to http://www.tdcreative.net/my-post

Any person involved with SEO should know this and it can be achieved with a few lines of .htaccess code placed in the public root of your FTP, sometimes public_html or httpdocs.  An example….

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^your-domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Simply add this code to the top of your .htaccess file.

Very simple, very effective.

This is a post expanding on the backend / developer site structure.

Is it perhaps the most important thing of a site. It aids the following factors;

1. User navigation
2. SEO factors
3. Search engine indexing
4. Useability
5. Conversions

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Across my sites, I try to use a common file structure. I even make sure that applications I decide to install or use use this file structure to some extent and if they dont use it, I dont use that application and write my own or find another. Simple.

photo credit: totalAldo

A common site structure is necassary in terms of the site shell and the generated content the site produces (HTML/CSS/JS etc…).

In terms of a site structure, here is one that I tend to try to find and use from a developers point of view. A site structure like the one listed below will help to maintain the site, address problems and ensure that each site component is individual from another.

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