iPage – Setting up a wordpress blog/website

Question:

Hi,

I’m totally stuck.

I have an account with ipage. Through them I have installed wordpress.

I want to create a website using wordpress with a couple of static pages and a blog.

How do I create a static page?

How do I insert button lings (like facebook/twitter buttons) on my pages?

How do I set up advertising on the site and how does this work?

Maybe some of you can answer these questions of point me in the direction of some good tutorials.

Thanks.

Answer:

Do you want to create a regular website, but also have a blog link from the site? If you do it that way, you’ll build your site in the root of your domain, but you’ll need to install WordPress in a different folder so the two index files don’t interfere with each other. Install WordPress in a folder called “blog” and then link to it from your main site. But, it’s a pain in the ass to maintain two sites. I don’t suggest doing it that way unless you already have an established website and now want to add a blog.

Instead…

Here’s what I do. I install WordPress and then use a plugin called WP-Sticky. It will create a widget on the post editor page with 3 radio buttons. Click the Announcement button and it will keep the post on your blog’s home page. All other posts will display below it. You can also go into Settings: Reading and set Blog pages show at most 1 post. That way only the Announcement post will display on the home page, making it look more like a website instead of a blog.

Also play around with the new 3.x WordPress native menuing system. It’s soooooo powerful. Appearance: Menus. You can create your own custom menu bar if your theme supports it. You can also create menus that can be assigned to widgets in the sidebar. It’s like the old school Links widget on steroids.

Facebook Buttons

For the Facebook buttons, search the WordPress plugin directory for social networking buttons. There’s one called Add To Any that has tons of buttons, including Facebook.

Set Up Advertising

What kind of advertising? Google ads? Products/Services? To set up advertising you first have to build a site/blog with decent content and then get your site approved by the advertising network. It’s getting harder and harder to do that because the networks are sick of crap and scraped content. Google Adwords can be a tough nut to crack. Networks like Commission Junction and Linkshare are a little easier. I recommend CJ over LS because the LS interface SUCKS and is hella slow. However, just because you get approved into a network doesn’t mean the individual advertisers will approve you for their program. Some do automatic approval and some manually check your site. Always write good content.