Sonoma Wire Works - Support Forums

by **EvanBerard** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 11:32 pm

http://evanberard.com/

Here's my website, evanberard.com. There's nothing much on it yet, but I'm working on adding some stuff to it! Hope you like it so far. Be sure to leave a comment!

by **ShredRex** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 12:01 am

Looking cool so far Evan...going with Word Press huh? Who did you pick for hosting?

by **EvanBerard** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 12:05 am

ShredRex wrote:Looking cool so far Evan...going with Word Press huh? Who did you pick for hosting?

Thanks! I went with wordpress just because it's simple and elegant. I tried a lot of other content management systems but I just found wordpress very user friendly. I went with justhost because they're cheap. Obviously not the best host out there, but the best bang for the buck.

by **ShredRex** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 12:30 am

Wordpress is good, and easy to use......as far as hosting goes I agree cheaper is better.....lol

I will keep an eye on it and watch it develop for sure!

by **scott** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 6:13 am

Well done Evan! Keep the pages coming!

by **beauzeau** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 4:15 pm

Evan,

I've hosted with Bluehost, Hostgator, LunarPages, Powweb, and most recently, Justhost. Out of the above, Justhost has the fastest machines, or at least the fastest connection. When I go to a new host, the first thing I do is upload about 50,000 images. This can sometimes take a day and a half to do! Justhost allowed me to connect ftp with 10 simultaneous users and it ended up taking a mere six hours or so to upload my files.

One thing to consider though. Keep your eye on the host. For years, the cheaper webhosts have been notorious for NOT upgrading accounts. In other words, you could still be paying for the account you signed up for in a year, while NEW members are getting more features and faster machines. If you don't say anything, they WILL keep you on the slower machines as they add more users. Also, many of these hosting companies are only in the game to sell out later. They start a company, offer the moon with their service for next to nothing, then a year later, your account is being sold to someone else, who will likely put your account on a box that's three years old and has half the resources of the box on your original account.

The best way to protect your site from this kind of thing is to learn to do your own backing up and restoring from within cpanel. NEVER rely on them to backup for you, as there's almost ALWAYS a blanketed hold-harmless clause in the user agreement that basically says "no matter what we said we'd do, you can't sue us if we don't do it". I found out the hard way with bluehost that they stop backing up when you hit 50,000 inodes (files, emails, pics, etc) on your machine.

I don't know if wordpress is mySQL based or not, but if it is, learn to backup your databases to your local machine (look for this in the mysql section of cpanel). If you're confident in your backing up skills, then a year from now when justhost says "sorry, we can't move your account to a faster machine", you can simply start another account and ditch the old one.

Also, when logging in to cpanel at justhost. DO NOT fall for the "Our CEO has selected YOU to receive a free upgrade to premium hosting". It's not free. Besides, they put you on a plenty fast machine when you signed up. These little "extras" they offer are mostly sucker-bets designed in an attempt to get an extra dollar or three out of you each month. And remember, before you joined, they were quick to tell you that you'd be on the fastest servers in the world, so how can the premium hosting account be faster?

And last but not least, but maybe a little too late. Justhost had a coupon code that I used which was "50off" I think. The code was given to me when I added a hosting account to my cart, then tried to use the back button to back out of it. So I then added the annual plan to my cart, deleted the monthly plan, and got the annual plan at 50% off!

Is this your first time with a hosting account? If so, you'll be glad to know that cpanel is one of the most intuitive control panels out there. Has been for ten years or so at this point. Fantastico is indeed fantastic (oh), as it does away with the need to learn how to configure php files for use on your own hosting environment. I used to set up mambo cms and oscommerce and agoura cart scripts, and it was a total drag to do manually. It's much easier with Fantastico.

Now for the fun part! Learning how to optimize your site to get crawled by google!

by **EvanBerard** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 7:46 pm

Hey beau! Thanks for all this really useful info.

beauzeau wrote:I've hosted with Bluehost, Hostgator, LunarPages, Powweb, and most recently, Justhost. Out of the above, Justhost has the fastest machines, or at least the fastest connection. When I go to a new host, the first thing I do is upload about 50,000 images. This can sometimes take a day and a half to do! Justhost allowed me to connect ftp with 10 simultaneous users and it ended up taking a mere six hours or so to upload my files.

This is nice to know! I love justhost. Thanks.

One thing to consider though. Keep your eye on the host. For years, the cheaper webhosts have been notorious for NOT upgrading accounts. In other words, you could still be paying for the account you signed up for in a year, while NEW members are getting more features and faster machines. If you don't say anything, they WILL keep you on the slower machines as they add more users. Also, many of these hosting companies are only in the game to sell out later. They start a company, offer the moon with their service for next to nothing, then a year later, your account is being sold to someone else, who will likely put your account on a box that's three years old and has half the resources of the box on your original account.

I'm glad you told me that because I didn't know about that. I'll make sure to keep this in mind and I'll watch carefully for upgrades.

The best way to protect your site from this kind of thing is to learn to do your own backing up and restoring from within cpanel. NEVER rely on them to backup for you, as there's almost ALWAYS a blanketed hold-harmless clause in the user agreement that basically says "no matter what we said we'd do, you can't sue us if we don't do it". I found out the hard way with bluehost that they stop backing up when you hit 50,000 inodes (files, emails, pics, etc) on your machine.

I don't know if wordpress is mySQL based or not, but if it is, learn to backup your databases to your local machine (look for this in the mysql section of cpanel). If you're confident in your backing up skills, then a year from now when justhost says "sorry, we can't move your account to a faster machine", you can simply start another account and ditch the old one.

Will Do! I just checked if wordpress is mySQL based and is is! That will be useful. Again, thanks.

Also, when logging in to cpanel at justhost. DO NOT fall for the "Our CEO has selected YOU to receive a free upgrade to premium hosting". It's not free. Besides, they put you on a plenty fast machine when you signed up. These little "extras" they offer are mostly sucker-bets designed in an attempt to get an extra dollar or three out of you each month. And remember, before you joined, they were quick to tell you that you'd be on the fastest servers in the world, so how can the premium hosting account be faster?

Yeah seriously... after checkout they tried to sell me pages of upgrades which I ignored and immediately scrambled to find the No thanks button without reading much else. However, I do like their referral program, but the only reason they offer so much is because they know they are going to sell all these extra things to the suckers! :O

And last but not least, but maybe a little too late. Justhost had a coupon code that I used which was "50off" I think. The code was given to me when I added a hosting account to my cart, then tried to use the back button to back out of it. So I then added the annual plan to my cart, deleted the monthly plan, and got the annual plan at 50% off!

The 50OFF was awesome! I used it so I only had to pay a mere $40 dollars for one full year... in canadian cash! I noticed that the number $3.95 a month stays the same but the currency changes depending on the location of your IP address. (ie. People in the US pay 3.95 US, people in europe pay $3.95 EU, and canadians get the best price because our dollar is so low lol.)

Is this your first time with a hosting account? If so, you'll be glad to know that cpanel is one of the most intuitive control panels out there. Has been for ten years or so at this point. Fantastico is indeed fantastic (oh), as it does away with the need to learn how to configure php files for use on your own hosting environment. I used to set up mambo cms and oscommerce and agoura cart scripts, and it was a total drag to do manually. It's much easier with Fantastico.

This is my first time with a hosting account. Cpanel is the first thing I check for when I look at different hosting companies. I've heard how great it is. Fantastico is great too, it came pre installed with cpanel and it made trying out different CMSs a lot faster and easier.

Now for the fun part! Learning how to optimize your site to get crawled by google!

Done! I did some SEO so a google search for my name will bring my page up on the top of the list. Google doesn't use meta tags much anymore so I think it liked the words "Official Website"

. It's kinda annoying how they keep on trying to make you pay $50 a year to get your site submitted to search engines just when you can get it done yourself.

Again, thanks beau for all this great info,

Evan

PS Now it's time to drive traffic into my site! Anyone have any suggestions?

Pootertunes · by **pooterpatty** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:13 pm

Another thing you can do with wordpress to make your site more SE-friendly is to change the permalink structure. In your Wordpress admin, go to Settings > Permalinks, tick the radio button next to "custom structure", and put this in there:

/%postname%/

By default, Wordpress uses page ID's for permalinks, giving you URLs like this:

http://www.domain.com/?page_id=4

not very search engine friendly. Using the custom permalink structure as I pasted it above will give you URLs like this:

http://www.domain.com/page-name/

much better. So if you wrote a page in Wordpress and titled it, "Rad Music", the URL would be

http://www.domain.com/rad-music/

...and who says Google doesn't use meta tags anymore? They certainly do look at your meta information.

Website · by **Stymie** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:27 pm

I tried to register and got an error.

It's a really nice looking site and I was going to leave a shout, but figured I'd have to register to do it.

Ron

by **EvanBerard** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:42 pm

Stymie wrote:I tried to register and got an error.

It's a really nice looking site and I was going to leave a shout, but figured I'd have to register to do it.

Ron

Okay I'll look into that. I'm glad you pointed that out. It's not necessary to register to leave a comment though

EDIT: It works now.I looked at the error and saw that there was a problem with one of the plugins I had, more specifically an unused plugin that connects wordpress to SMF forum, hence the error code "smf_getmemberidbyname()". You should be able to register and login now

by **beauzeau** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 3:42 pm

Evan, Poot is right. Metatag info still makes up a big part of the google algorithm (and no, algorithm is not a setting in instant drummer). You've got one thing weighing in your favor. Google tends to crawl blog sites more often than non-blog sites. In fact, many non-blog sites have resorted to creating blog sites in order to test google's results more quickly.

I'm afraid I won't be of much help with SEO. I've never been one to get into technology that changes TOO rapidly, and SEO techniques are towards the top of that list. But I will share a little of what I do know. Much of which has been around since 96, and the days of excite.com!

Because you're not particularly trying to "compete" with anyone, you shouldn't have too much of a problem getting to the top of the google list in many cases. Searching your name, for instance, should be an easy shoe-in for number one spot, because there aren't 2,000 other people out there trying to get that traffic. But showing up when someone searches for "rock music", well, that's gonna be tricky!

Another thing I can tell you is, it's not nice to fool with mother google. If you resort to trying to trick google into sending you traffic with non-relevant keywords or keyword spamming, it will likely backfire on you. At least that's what I've read over the last few years.

For your blog, you're already on the right track as far as promotion. You're putting the word out there yourself! Post on forums, and make sure your URL is in your signature at all times. Why not post some guitar lesson vids on youtube? That would probably bring you some traffic. No need for perfection in the vids, if you simply show the chords to a song, that's all some people are looking for. And, of course, writing unique content on issues that are current, and relevant to the blog subject matter is paramount. Just don't resort to stealing content off other sites. It's ok to re-write an article than someone already wrote. Journalists do that daily. Just don't plagiarize and you should be fine.

Good luck with it, and keep us posted, literally! We will now expect to see TWICE the number of posts from you in the sonoma forums, all containing the URL to your site.

Oh, and I didn't mention this the other day, and I'm pretty sure that Justhost does this automatically, but it's always a good idea to make certain that any directories you have off the main directory (public_html directory) have index.htm files in them. If all you're using is wordpress, then this was likely taken care of for you. But if YOU manually add any folders, you should always make sure they have an index.htm or index.html file in them. If they don't, then when someone types in that directory as a URL without a page name they will be able to see all the files in that directory. For example www.evanberard.com/mynewimages would allow them to see all the files in the /mynewimages directory IF there is no index.htm file there. It doesn't matter if the index.htm file has content or is blank, just as long as it's there.

by **EvanBerard** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 8:06 pm

Added a new entry to my blog - Check it out!

http://evanberard.com/

Pootertunes · by **pooterpatty** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 9:44 pm

beauzeau wrote:And, of course, writing unique content on issues that are current, and relevant to the blog subject matter is paramount. Just don't resort to stealing content off other sites.

Jeez I wish more people understood that. It's amazing how a single piece of bad information written by one turniphead can be plagiarized by so many people and eventually become accepted truth.

And Evan, you should be thanking beauzeau here. He's imparting knowledge that it takes years of trial and error to learn (some folks never figure it out). I remember spamming the engines back in the day. We made a crapload of money in a short time, but once the engines got wise to us, that was all she wrote. I've since taken a much more honest path concerning web development and promotion

These days, content is king. You've got to have a lot of it, and it better be original and unique. Beauzeau's suggestions about YouTube videos is a good one. Writing informative articles about music-related topics and submitting them to different places is a good idea. Being active on the various social networking sites is a good way to get noticed as well. You never know, you could meet some people on myspace which might give you impetus to go outside and interface with other human beings. People tell me it's nice.

by **Muddhole** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 10:49 pm

Cool site Evan, but if this is your home address;

1**5 K******y Ave. Apt #*
******, Quebec H** ***
BR

Get ahold of your registrar or webhost and have yourself anonymised to replace your contact info with theirs or anyone can see your home address by doing a "whois" lookup.

Again, your site looks great!

by **Muddhole** » Fri Sep 25, 2009 10:49 pm

Cool site Evan, but if this is your home address;

***5 K******y Ave. Apt #*
******, Quebec H** ***
BR

Get ahold of your registrar or webhost and have yourself anonymised to replace your contact info with theirs or anyone can see your home address by doing a "whois" lookup.

Again, your site looks great!

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