ToS A Load of Toss

It looks like this might be YAAP. Yet Another Abandoned Project.

I wanted to compare free WordPress.com accounts with systems that are prohibitively expensive for the poor startup web business newbie with zero budget.

Nothing in the Terms of Service that I could see to prevent this. The only paragraph relating to commercial use is highlighted:

the Content is not spam, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);

I wasn’t surprised that I couldn’t put AdSense on this site. After all, you open one javascript hole, and before long you’ve got an avalanche of spotty coders trying to break the system.

What did surprise me was this note tucked away in the FAQ:

We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for … commercial purposes … and will continue to nuke them, so if that’s what you’re interested in WordPress.com is not for you.

Now, I honestly believe this blog is for educational purposes. It has a commercial aspect because I believe underprivileged people should have a chance to improve their lives through Internet web businesses. It could become a fantastic business model for governments, charities etc to provide a few hours access each week. People with no hope might find a few dollars a week from their own efforts to free themselves from grinding poverty.

Not here it seems.

I quite understand the WordPress.com stance. But why could they not make it clear in the ToS?

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Free WordPress.com: How To Make Contact

Naughty me.
A few days away on another project, and I’ve been caught with my pants down.
I thought I would have a couple of weeks to get the basics in place, but now I’ve already been found by the search engines.
Visitors, with no place for them to leave a private message for me!
Oh the shame, the shame.

I know from experience, that people like to comment publicly, but many more like to send a private message. That will teach me. In future, the first page will always be the Contact Page.

Now how do I make one in free wordpress.com?

How To Make A Contact Form on Free WordPress.com

1. Click on the FAQ at the bottom of the post editing page
2. Type form in the FAQ Search box
3. Click the first offereing – How do I make a Contact Form?
4. Copy and paste the simple command for adding a contact form

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Text only. No markup allowed.

Easy.

Seriously simple and seriously useful.

I’ll be back soon with a Contact Page. If you get back before me, just use the form above to tell me what you think of the site so far.

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Free WordPress.com: Will It Ever Look And Feel Good?

One of the advantages of WordPress is the wide range of free themes. They help you stand out from the crowd with your own look and feel.

One of the drawbacks of WordPress is the wide range of free themes. You have to wade through many to find a suitable look and feel.

Never easy is it, but you have the choice of going with the first theme you like the look of, finding the best that suits you, and customizing what you find to make it even better. The final option of writing, or commissioning, your own theme doesn’t apply to free WordPress.com – you need your own, or a shared, server.

There are some good themes on free WordPress.com – a choice of 60 as I write. Many have the ability to change color scheme, header image, or change layouts by adding widgets, so the choice is wide. You can also customize by changing settings in your style sheet (CSS), so the possibilities are endless.

Now I have a few posts, there is some content to see what the finished site will look like, but first I have to address 3 issues that you must deal with before you choose your theme.

Categories

Themes display categories in different ways. Categories are crucial to helping your visitors find information on your site. They help you group articles that a particular type of visitor will look for. Visitors to this site will include:

• Current free WordPress.com users looking for some help, or inspiration
• Non WordPress users trying to find out what you can do with WordPress and the differences between types
• Web business builders looking for tips

Within those categories, I might include sub categories, or I might expand the number of categories, but leave them all at the top level. I like sub-categories, but if I can’t find one that suits, I know that the subject matter for this site can easily fit in 10 to 15 main categories. Anything more than 15 starts to make finding the right category hard for users. A clear idea of where you want to go with your website (your site blueprint) is crucial here.

Pages

The second part of reviewing your blueprint is to think about static content. A contact page and privacy policy might be all you need, but beware if you are expecting a lot of static content. Some themes look awful with too many static pages, and many do not support sub-pages very well. I’m not actually all that keen on sub-pages, but some projects demand it, so it is best to set up some before you choose your theme.

Headings

How will headings look in your free wordpress.com theme.

H1 Heading Example: How Does It Look?

H2 Heading Example: How Does It Look?

H3 Heading Example: How Does It Look?

H4 Heading Example: How Does It Look?

H5 Heading Example: How Does It Look?

H6 Heading Example: How Does It Look?

Other factors

Changing the header image is important to me.

Changing color options is attractive, but I’m more than happy to set colors via the style sheet

I want my sidebar on the left, and I want to be able to amend it easily using widgets.

It’s a good idea to include some quoted text and lists to see what they will look like (although this can usually be changed through your CSS.

Summary

Set some categories and sub-categories, and make sure they have at least one post in them

Set some pages and sub-pages.

These can be temporary – you can keep them private, but they must not be private, or drafts. Just add some random copied text, then delete them when you are done.

Time to play around and decide how it looks.

Remember – you can always tweak your theme later, but changing to a new theme might make your site unreadable.

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Free WordPress.com: Getting Down To Business

I like to take a new look at old issues. Trying to set up a web business on free WordPress.com, means a reassessment of the way I look at Search Engine Optimization.

SEO for WordPress is a popular bloggers theme. Since very few people, including myself, are in a position to test all aspects of SEO and real advantages of different techniques, I end up looking for consensus and relying upon available tools.

The best form of SEO is always excellent, information rich, interesting to humans, content. Is it worth tweaking beyond this?

The first SEO adjustment I always make to standard WordPress is to change the Permalinks to show the postname. I get rid of the date, for simplicity. WordPress.com does not allow a change, but is set to include the postname anyway, so I’m happy with that, and can live with the extra date information.

Then I setup my plugins to handle meta keywords, meta description and sitemaps. Most SEO commentators claim meta tags are dead, or at least dying. I like to keep them as it prompts me to focus on them, and check my writing for relevance. I also believe that they might generate a small amount of traffic through the lesser search engines that do use them, and even Google still uses the description for many of its listings.

Free WordPress.com does not set meta keywords and descriptions (at least not in this theme), so it is time for a rethink.

Free WordPress.com Meta Descriptions

I normally use Tags In The Head to set the Optional Excerpt field as the description. This does not apply in free WordPress.com – the excerpt appears as only on category views and searches as an introduction to the page (in some themes?). Theme dependency aside, it’s time to focus on making that all important first paragraph do it’s job. For this project, from now on, I’m going to drop excerpts and triple check my first paragraphs.

Free WordPress.com Meta Keywords

Keywords play 2 important roles – a search engine role, with focus on what people are searching for, and a content role, which highlights a topic that people might look for related information on. Both these functions can be found in a wonderful free tool on No Title. That article links back to one of the best WordPress sites ever – lorelle.wordpress.com. I will write more about this tool and Lorelle’s site in my step by step guide to a free web business in a week.

So how important is the lack of meta tagging the head of the page? To be honest, I don’t know yet. I am going to proceed without it, and document it later as one of the benefits you get when you host your own WordPress site rather than rely on the WordPress.com site.

If anyone wants to test this further by setting up similar sites on free WordPress.com, compared with hosted WordPress, I am quite happy to donate some server space.

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Free Web Business: First Impressions

Yesterday was my first look at wordpress.com. It is too early to truly assess it’s suitability as a free web business platform, but first impressions are good.

I have been using WordPress on my own server since October 2006. My reasons for investigating it’s potential will become clear later. I was extremely impressed with the standard features, ease of use and potential for expansion. It soon became clear to me that this was a brilliant platform for building a web business on, with sufficient flexibility to take on virtually any form.

So how does the free version stack up?

My first thought is that there is much more in it than I thought there would be.

My second thought is that I wonder how long it will be before I miss the ability to add plugins – or is that just a distraction I am best without?

My third thought is that the only way to prove if it is any use is to actually use it.

My web business in a week model relies heavily on having a step by step system that you can work through to define and reach your goals. This is the ideal opportunity to adapt my system for a free web business at wordpress.com

The fact that you can have as many free web businesses as you like, leads me to my plan for the next few weeks.

I will use the private posting part of this website to develop my notes for a new project. You can use this method, or your own word-processor, or something like Google docs. I will explain your options in more detail as I go through the day by day processes.

I have to do it this way, as explaining how to apply my step by step model takes longer than actually doing it. I will spend one hour per day on my new project, and as long as it takes to document the process. When I launch my project, you will see exactly what to expect with one hour per day.