What Specification does WordPress Require?

You will be surprised to hear that WordPress is a very light-weight script and it is compatible with almost all web hosts. The simple requirements that WordPress put forth are:

• PHP 4.3 or greater
• MySQL 4.0 or greater
• The mod_rewrite Apache module

As a matter of fact most linux web hosts come pre-installed with WordPress, so you won’t have to worry about what WordPress requires.

Things to Consider when Choosing a Web Hosting Service

Your Needs

As we stated above, WordPress is a very light-weight script for a normal blog account, you won’t be needing a dedicated server. So don’t get that. Majority of top shared hosting sites are now offering unlimited resource, so take advantage of that. That is all what you really need. But if for some reason, you end up going with a service that doesn’t offer unlimited specs what will you do?

You need to evaluate. How much space you do need on the web. A WordPress site can run well under 100 MB space. If you are offering downloads, and hosting your own images then you will need more space.

Evaluate the bandwidth your site will be using? As a goal of every blogger, you want to hit the Front Page of Digg and other social media networks. When you hit that, you receive a lot of traffic. So how much bandwidth should you get? Start low and upgrade when necessary. There is no point of paying extra for something you won’t use in the early months. Once your blog starts to get influence in the industry then you can upgrade.

WebHost’s Reputation

Every host that we mention in this post has earned its reputation in the industry. They are top-notch services. If you decide to go with a service other than the ones that we list in this post, make sure you do an extensive research on their reputation, uptime history, and support reviews.

WPBeginner Web Host Recommendation

Below is the list of what we consider to be the Best Web Hosts for WordPress. All of these hosts have an unlimited specs for you.

Host Gator – Hosts over 2 million domains and is known as one of the well-reputed web host in the industry. They have plans that will suit all your needs. Use coupon “wpbeginner” to receive $9.94 off the first month.

Quick Hosting - A very nice service that is not only WordPress friendly, but it is environment friendly. They have quality customer service and have a good reputation in the industry.

Blue Host – Another reliable web hosting company that has been around for a long time. Blue Host has proven it’s worth to the users, and it is a legit competitor of Host Gator.

Choose from any of the web hosts above, and we guarantee you that you will not be disappointed.

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Actually, people say that Facebook was an overnight success but its not. Facebook was not an overnight success and it was not a stroke of luck which made that guy the youngest billionaire of his times. Since 2004, if you analyze how Mark Zuckerberg has worked, you’ll know what makes Facebook.  See the timeline of Facebook evolution below.

2003

• October 28, 2003: Mark Zuckerberg releases Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook. It was described as a Harvard University version of Hot or Not.

2004

• January 2004: Zuckerberg begins writing Facebook.
• January 11, 2004: Zuckerberg registers thefacebook.com domain.
• February 4, 2004: Zuckerberg launches Facebook.
• March 2004: Facebook expands to Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, and Yale University.
• April 13, 2004: Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin form Thefacebook.com LLC, a partnership.
• June 2004: Facebook receives its first investment from Peter Thiel for US$500,000.

2005

• May 26, 2005: Accel Partners invests $13 million into Facebook.
• August 23, 2005: Facebook acquires Facebook.com domain for $200,000.

2006

• September 2006: Facebook discusses with Yahoo! about the latter possibly acquiring the former, for $1 billion.
• September 2006: Facebook launches a high school version of the website.
• September 26, 2006: Facebook is open to everyone aged 13 and over, and with a valid email address.

2008

• August 2008: Employees reportedly privately sell their shares to venture capital firms, at a company valuation of between $3.75 billion to $5 billion.

2009

• August 2009: Facebook acquires FriendFeed.

2010

• February 2010: Facebook acquires Malaysian contact-importing startup Octazen Solutions.
• April 2, 2010: Facebook announces the acquisition of photo-sharing service called Divvyshot for an undisclosed amount.
• April 19, 2010: Facebook introduces Community Pages, which are Pages that are populated with articles from Wikipedia.

2011

• January 2011: $500 million is invested into Facebook for 1% of the company, placing its worth at $50 billion.
• June 2011: Facebook partners with Skype to add video chat.
• September 2011: Facebook partners with Heroku for Facebook application development using the Facebook Platform.
• December 22, 2011: Facebook launches its new profile user interface, Facebook Timeline.

2012

• On January 24, Facebook announced its new profile design, “Timeline”, will become mandatory and permanent for all users.
• On February 1, Facebook announced plans for a stock market flotation in a effort to raise around $5bn.

This was about their financial growth and now let’s see how their users have grown over these years :

Looking at the graph, you see a constant growth and not a sudden growth as you expect. It has a great story of growth and probably one of the best example of determination, leadership and all and every quality you require to grow in such a way that makes you be on top of the world.

Many people hate Facebook and I’m somehow one of them but I still have a little love for Facebook inside all those hatred because without Facebook, so many things couldn’t have been possible. On this day, I would just like to add : Happy Birthday, Facebook. Keep growing .

Credits : Wikipedia, TechCrunch, skotgat

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What to Consider While Picking a Domain Name?

Picking a domain might sound hard at first, but it is not when you use the simple metric that we created for you which assist you in the evaluating process and make the decision much easier. Below are things you need to consider when registering a domain name.

Keywords

Keywords play an important role in a domain. Good keywords in the domain also assist in ranking higher in the search engine. But to get a good keyword name like webhosting.com is very hard to get these days without spending a hefty sum. But as new niche markets are coming out, the possibilities of keywords are increasing as well, so use your creativity and get a keyword in the domain.

Branding

In the quest for keywords sometimes we forget about our users and audience. Make sure your domain is catchy and easy to memorize so the user can come back to your website and not forget about it. Sometimes the most unrelated and catchy domains do best. Take Google for example. The word has nothing to do with a search engine, but now it dominates the web. So keep in mind about branding while registering the domain name.

Length, Hyphens, and More

The shorter the domain, the better it is because it is easy to memorize, but don’t just buy because of length. It wouldn’t be any use if you qvwmt.com because that does not relate to your niche. You may use hyphens in your domain, but try to stay away from those as much as possible because as the domain gets bigger, the value of it goes down. You need to avoid double letters domain because you it increases your chances of losing traffic to typos. So domains such as WordPresssetup.com you may want to avoid because it confuses the user.

Domain Extension

While we know that .com is the most popular extension for domains, don’t limit yourself to just that. Get the extension that suits your site the most. So if your blog is about an organization then get .org. If it is an informational site, getting a .info won’t hurt you either. But .com is a plus and mostly preferred because most of the users type .com without thinking about it.

Domain Registrars

There are hundreds of domain registrars on the web that are offering you domain registration and more. But like many other scams on the web, there are scam domain registrars that disappear every three months, and you get left hanging. Therefore we suggest you get a domain from one of these popular registrars that has been around and have earned a good reputation in the industry.

Dotster – One of the most reputable domain registrar in the industry. (Buy One Domain and Get one Free – Coupon: GetOneFree)

Go Daddy – One of the domain giants on the web. You can register your domains with them with full trust because we know they are not going anywhere.

Quick Hosting - My one of the favorite. One of the younger domain registrars but has a good support and the same options.

Any suggestions for Domain Registration Companies??

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An overview of the interface of WordPress 2.7 from the acclaimed WordPress. (latest version is WordPress 3.3)

Hope you loved it..

Share your views.

Why Use WordPress To Create A Website?
In my several years of working with business owners to create websites, I’ve encountered two very typical scenarios.

The first scenario is the do-it-yourself business owner who learns just enough HTML to cobble together a website either from scratch or from some template or theme-based site. Typically, the website is just adequate, and maybe not quite as professional looking as expected. “But it’s just temporary until I get the time to really do it right,” says the owner. More often than not, the site is quickly neglected because additions and modifications are just too cumbersome for the busy owner.

The second scenario is the business owner who is willing to spend some money on a web developer to create a site. In this case, the website often ends up costing more than expected. Additionally, the business owner often becomes dependent on the web developer for any future additions or modifications, driving costs even higher.

Both of these scenarios are far from ideal.

If you find yourself in, or contemplating, either of these scenarios, then consider these top-5 reasons to build a website with WordPress:

The WordPress interface is intuitive and easy to learn. Chances are, if you’ve used a word-processor and have browsed the web, you’ll find the interface familiar. Even if you haven’t, spending a half hour in the Posts and Pages areas (which is where you will live most of the time) will be sufficient.

The areas of WordPress’ interface are neatly organized in drop-down tabs along a right sidebar (See A in above illustration.) Text formatting and media placement in WordPress is similar to most modern-day word-processing applications (See B in illustration.)

After creating one or two posts or pages, you’ll wonder why you ever considered any other tool.

2. Large Selection of Themes

The selection of themes is almost too large. As of this post, the WordPress Theme Directoryboasts over 1,300 free themes! Now, to be fair, not every one of them is a gem. But there are plenty of great free themes from which you can build a smart, functional business website.

There are also hundreds of commercial themes to choose from. Again, some are much better than others. My experience is that most of the well-designed commercial themes cost $50-$90 for a single license. If you are a website developer and plan to use the theme on multiple sites, the cost $120-$200. This cost will seem trivial when you realize what these themes can do, and how much time they will save.

My advice is to first browse through the free themes at the WordPress Theme Directory, pick 4 or 5, and play with them.

3. Extended Functionality from Plugins

The number of plugins for WordPress is also impressive. While WordPress has built-in CMS (Content Management System) capabilities, it’s the plugins that truly extend this functionality to another level. Like with themes, not all plugins are created equal. It’s especially important to know your plugins well, as sometimes they can conflict with each other and cause unexpected problems.

For most business websites built on WordPress, there are between 10 and 15 plugins that I would consider essential.

Like themes, most plugins are free (though donations are encouraged, and it’s good karma). There are also a number of commercial plugins that address specific needs on a high level.

The WordPress Plugin Directory is a great place to spend some time learning about which plugins do what. Here you can also see how users have rated each plugin.

4. Large Developer & Support Community

WordPress has been around since 2003 and has become the most popular blogging platform in the world. As a business owner, it should be comforting to know that WordPress is likely to be around for a very long time.

Since WordPress is opensource, it has literally hundreds of developers from around the world working on improving performance, features, and security. This is far more developers than are typically devoted to any one commercial software.

WordPress also has a very large and active support community. There have been many times in the past that I’ve gone to the WordPress Forums to ask a question and either discovered the answer already listed, or posted and received an answer within an hour. That’s impressive customer support, especially when you consider the price!

5. It’s FREE!

Any top 5 list about WordPress must include the fact that it’s opensource and therefore free.

Of course, “free” can be a bit deceiving. While it cost no money to download and install the software on your server or a host, it will cost you some of your time. And presumably, your time is not free.

If you’re a true do-it-yourself business owner, then WordPress is definitely the right choice. Even if you’re a dabbler, you may find that you can get quite far in building and managing your own website with WordPress.

A Hybrid Approach
A very common and successful approach to building a business website with WordPress is what I call a “Hybrid” approach. That is, the business owner hires a WordPress expert to come in and install and setup WordPress. Then, the expert spends an hour or two tutoring the owner on the basics. Then, the expert goes away and the owner spends some time playing and experimenting with themes, designs, posts and pages.

]]> http://protonwebs.com/wordpress-tutorials/top-5-reasons-wordpress/feed/ 0 http://protonwebs.com/wordpress-tutorials/what-is-wordpress-and-its-features/ http://protonwebs.com/wordpress-tutorials/what-is-wordpress-and-its-features/#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:30:16 +0000 nrmodh http://protonwebs.com/?p=279 WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and content management system (CMS) powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular CMS in use on the Internet.

It was first released on May 27, 2003, by Matt Mullenweg. As of December 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times.

Features

WordPress template hierarchy
WordPress has a web template system using a template processor.

Themes

WordPress users may install and switch between themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website or installation without altering the informational content. Themes may be installed by using the WordPress “Dashboard” administration tool, or by uploading theme folders via FTP.The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations…

Plugins

One very popular feature of WordPress is its rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install; WordPress has a database of over 17,000 plugins with purposes ranging from SEO to adding widgets.

Widgets

Widgets offer users drag-and-drop sidebar content placement and implementation of many plugins’ extended capabilities. Users can rearrange widgets without editing PHP or HTML code.

Multi-user and multi-blogging

Prior to WordPress 3.0, WordPress supported one blog per installation, although multiple concurrent copies may be run from different directories if configured to use separate database tables. WordPress Multi-User (WordPress MU, or just WPMU) was a fork of WordPress created to allow multiple blogs to exist within one installation that is able to be administered by a centralized maintainer. WordPress MU makes it possible for those with a website to host their own blogging community, as well as control and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. WordPress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.

Mobile

Native applications exist for Android, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad,Windows Phone 7, and BlackBerry which provide access to some of the features in the WordPress Admin panel and work with WordPress.com and many WordPress.org blogs.

Other features of note

WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters are also included, providing standardized formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes). WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article.

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