Business Blog Customization: Customizing WordPress Themes

Understanding WordPress Functions

Business blogging can be difficult to the untrained marketer, but once you understand the full functionality of a blogging platform, business blog customization using a WordPress theme can be very rewarding.

WordPress is a blogging software that is free to download that must be installed into a domain’s C-Panel in order to fuction properly online. With the many thousands of themes and plugins to chose from, it can be difficult to know where to start.

I would not try to insult your intelligence by implying that I will be able to teach you everything you need to know in this one article. But, it is my hopes to help you lay the ground work in understanding where to begin to create the fundamental building blocks for business blog customization.

There are a few main functions and applications on a WordPress blog to get it to communicate properly with the rest of the web. That’s right, I said communicate. You see, a blog is not merely another website. It is an interactive communication tool that allows business owners and marketers to speak with the market place through multiple channels.

The main functions of a WordPress blog you would want to be educated on are as follows:

1. Plugins: Let’s just say that these little pieces of software allow our blogs to have many functions to increase our chances of developing a stream of traffic, as well as, it allows us to simplify certain tasks on our blogging platforms while posting.
   
2. Widgets: No, these are not just little elements of nothing. The widget is what you see in the sidebar and sometimes in the header and footer area of the blog. They appear to be little boxes with information in them, because that is exactly what they are. They allow us to separate that information so that it stays the same on every page of our site, while not conflicting with the body content of our posts.
   
3. RSS Feeds: I’ve always said, it’s not always important to know how something works, just simply know that it works. RSS feeds are like little news channels, within our blogs, that send out updates any time we decide to make a change on our blog. Imagine, every time you update or add a new post, your readers get a notification on their favorite news feed, in their internet browser and, sometimes, even right on their desktop!
4. Themes: The theme is the most important and the least functional piece of the blog. Basically, you scower the internet, or even WordPress.org for a theme that matches up with the context of your business, install it into your blogging platform and you now have what used to take ages; a fully functional website is built within seconds. The theme should always be easy on the eyes, better to have a white background in the content areas and should be neatly arranged, so not to confuse the reader of the functionality of the blog itself.

There are other more “High Tech” aspects to blogging, but this general overview should suffice for the purposes of this tutorial.

Customize Your WordPress Blog

Your WordPress blog is highly customizable. Although there are many elements such as CSS, PHP and Stylesheets to be concerned with, only skilled bloggers and web masters should really mess with these things, considering any wrong move could render your blog useless.

But, you do have the ability to customize it with custom header graaphics, the name of your business, your own email subscription form as well as, you can pick and chose which plugins you would want in there.

The plugins should be chosen carefully, as adding too many plugins could slow down the load time of your blog which would cause for a poor experience for your readers. Many plugins are available for free download and you can install the zip files that they are stored in, directly into your blog through your dashboard.

A few of my favorite and most used plugins are:

1. The All In One SEO Plugin
2. Dig-EZ
3. Zemanta

The All In One SEO Plugin allows for a blogger to add a title and description to each post, as well as a seperate set of keywords to help the search engines and pinging sites to find the description that YOU want them to list when they rank your blog in the search engines and blog directories. It’s important that these descriptions contain your keywords, in order to place properly in the search engine listings when a reader searches your keyword phrase.

The Dig-EZ plugin will display a dig social bookmarking button at the top of each of your blog posts. Your readers, who have Dig accounts, will click that button every time they read a post of yours that they like or, “Dig It”. This will add a listing about your blog in one of the most popular social bookmarking sites, where thousands of people discuss many different blog topics. Dig submissions show up very well in the search engines, which would indirectly lead more visitors back to your blog… cool stuff

The Zemanta plugin is one of the newest out there. I don’t see many bloggers using it, but it does have many advantages; such as:

1. It will show you relevant keywords to your blog posts which will tell you if you are on the right track and you can use those by adding them to your post.

2. It will display a series of images that you can chose to have one image show up at the top of your blog post.

3. It will provide you with anchor text, which supplies you with outgoing links to high ranking information sites, by opening in a new browser window, the search engines love that!

4. It also applies a “re-blog”  function to the bottom of each of your blog posts, so that your reader can pull an excerpt from your post, post it to there blog, where it will link back to yours… I do hope you can see the potential for even more targeted traffic with that!

All of the functions I have discussed above can easily be had and you can have a blog online, with content on it and showing up in the top of the search engines within a matter of hours. I have proven time and again that blogs can be set up in twenty minutes or so and I can have my posts show up in Google within a matter of twelve minutes.

This isn’t impossible and is rather easy, if you understand the full potential and functionallity of a WordPress Blog Web 2.0 site. Virtual Assistants are very important in this process as well, to continuously manage the blog, post content and social bookmark the blog to the thousands of locations around the Web.

That’s why eWeb Marketing Management has it’s very own in house, Executive Virtual Assistant CoraLyn Hughes on Staff . CoraLyn is a blog expert and along with our SEO development team headed by top SEO Specialist Paul Counts, as well as myself… our blogging and web 2.0 capabilities are virtually un matched.

Entrepreneurs will lose busiess this year. By not leveraging the proper technologies and placing all of their stock in brochure sites, they are missing the guaranteed targeted traffic they could have by leveraging web 2.0 technology. Click the green box at the top right of the site. eWeb’s main hub will open in a new window.

Read more informative and crucial articles there, but also click the “Get Free Report” button on that site. A PDF file will open in a new window and you can save it and give it to your friends and colleagues. I wrote this report showing you why traditional media is personally allowing you to lose business this year and it WILL at that.

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