It’s never any fun to follow a link just to find out the page you were looking for can’t be found. Chances are, the user may spend a few seconds trying to find the correct page or just bail on the site. To ensure that visitors stay on your site, site owners should ensure that the 404 error page is friendly and helpful.

I did some research in the WordPress plug-in directory and came up with many plug-ins to enhance the default WordPress error page. However there were only two plug-ins that I could get to work and liked. The fist is Dunstan-style Error Page.

Dunstan-style Error Page

The Dunstan-style Error Page has a really nice layout that includes recent posts, a quick error report button, and a feedback form. It’s all built into the plug-in and there is nothing that needs to be configured.

The downside here is that the Dunstan-style Error Page tries to make integration simple but actually makes it complicated. The code did not work right with my design and I had to spend a few minutes modifying the plug-in so the layout was visually correct. This may not be an issue with all themes, but I could see it being a big deterrent; especially if you don’t know code.

WordPress, like any software, has the ability to break and that then can cause a blog owner quite a bit of anxiety. This can be caused by plugins not working properly, file corruption, database problems, or many other things. Even though your data is usually just fine, having a blog down is not what a blog owner wants.

Here are 5 things you can do to try and fix a broken WordPress Install.

Before trying to fix any issues, make sure to back up your blog! The fixes below should not cause any harm, but it’s always better to have a backup you don’t need than not to have a backup when you need it.

Items to backup:

• Your /wp-content/ folder
• Your blog’s database.
  • Use the wp-backup plugin to make backups easy.

1. Disable Plugins

Plugins add a lot of additional features and functionality to a blog but can cause also cause unexpected issues such as admin pages that show nothing but a white screen, slow loading pages, or PHP error messages on public facing pages.

It seems that that there could be a lot more done with WordPress’ internal search. More results, better options, filters, or something to make the user experience better. So I started looking for options.

One option I found was Lijit. Lijit offers the ability to allow your users to search your blog, bookmarks, photos, videos, social networks such as Twitter, and other sites from one search box on your site. It seemed like what I was looking for, so I installed it.

The downside to Lijit is that it can give other sites more visibility via advertising or the web searches tab. And taking traffic off your site isn’t always a good idea. The upsides though are that you can include many blogs, social networks and all sorts of different things into your search results. Lijit makes it all about your network of sites, not just about one blog.

So far I’m not overly impressed with Lijit as I don’t see any Twitter results and I see sites like TechCruch which I don’t have listed in my settings. I’m hoping the bugs get worked out in the next day or two.

Did you know that you can post to a WordPress blog in a number of different ways? Here are 3 alternatives to create content in WordPress other than logging into the blog admin using the built in editor.

Post via Email

Built into WordPress is the ability for the software to check an email account and post each message it finds to a blog. This serves as a quick and easy way to send an email message and publish new content.

To set this feature up, the fist thing you’ll need is a custom, secret, email account. Since WordPress posts everything that goes to this account, it can’t be one that serves more than one purpose, or that gets spam.

Once you have that, go into WordPress and go to the Settings > Writing page. There you’ll be asked for your email server, email login, and password.

Post via eMail Settings

After that’s setup, you’re almost ready to go. The other thing you’ll need is a line of code in your blog template that tells WordPress to check the email account. If embedded in your blog template, every time the page loads, WordPress will check the email for new content. The code you’ll need can be found here.

There are a lot of people that will tell you that you need a blog because it’ll perform better in search engines and gain more traffic. This is not completely false, but it’s not exactly true either.

Blogs tend to perform better because of the abundance of content. Blogs empower users to create content in a way that is easy and fun. By doing so, users are creating content on a daily, or weekly, basis.

More content means more traffic and links. This is more for search engines to index, more for users to link to, and more to share with their friends and co-workers.

More visitors can then lead to more sales and conversions. The more eyeballs that are in front of your content, the better the opportunity to turn them into your customer.

The same could be done on a website, but that doesn’t happen. People view blogs as something different than a website. This is probably because most website were built back in the day when you pushed a page live and then had to add a link in the navigation and it was all very technical. With blogs, those technical items get removed as blogs automatically do all the work of updating navigation, categories, feeds, and even pinging the search engines of new content.

A while back we covered a plug-in called Subscribe To Comments.  It’s a great way to ensure that when visitors comment on your blog posts, they receive follow-up comments and stay a part of the conversation.

After using Subscribe To Comments for over a year, there was one major issue, fake email addresses.  Whether they are from people who didn’t want to leave their real email address, or from spammers, the number of bounce backs can become overwhelming.

The good news is there are developers out there that have taken the Subscribe To Comments plug-in to the next level.  They require a user to validate their email address before subscribing to the comments.  This ensures that they wanted to subscribe and that their email address is valid.

The two plug-ins that I’ve seen are Gurken Subscribe to Comments and Subscribe to Double-Opt-In Comments.  I’ve started to use Gurken Subscribe to Comments and like the added functionality.

One thing that I did notice however is that you need to make sure to customize the subscription confirmation emails that go out.  The default one went into Gmail’s spam folder, as it was very light on content.  Take the time and write out a nice email to help keep it out of peoples spam boxes and inform the user as to why they are getting the verification email.

When thinking about a blog, one big thing that a lot of companies are concerned with is control. They are worried about what may get posted on their blog, and are concerned with people saying negative things about them in their comments. Companies get scared that it’s going to be mass chaos.  The good news is content can be easily controlled by properly setting up user rolls and comment moderation.

When a WordPress blog is stet up properly, some users can be free to create content, but not able to push it live. Other users can be given the power to publish, but only after they approve the post.  When it comes to comments, turning on the moderation feature will ensure that no comment makes it on the site without internal approval.  This allows a company to weed out comments that are not appropriate, or formulate responses to negative comments so the comment and company response both go live at the same time.

So how do you set this up?  Lets start with users.

Users

Within WordPress, there are five different user rolls and each roll has different capabilities.

Starting a business blog is no easy task. There are lots of things to think about and lots of things to consider. Sometimes companies think to big to fast, which could be setting the blog up for failure before it even launches.

The key thing to remember when creating a new business blog is to start simple and then expand. Going from 0-60 in two seconds sounds like fun, but there are a lot of risks involved. It’s better to ease into it by focusing on creating good content, measuring growth, and learning how users interact with the blog.

Here are five things to think about when before creating your business blog.

Time Crunch:
Launching a blog takes time. There has to be hosting, software installed, a design created, a template created from the design, testing, content creation and approval from management. This is not a process that can be done in a week or two. Rushing it only leads to mistakes and stress.

The best thing to do is create a plan and make sure to give enough time to each step of the process.

The grass is growing, the flowers are blooming and that means it’s spring! As people start the spring cleaning on their garages, it’s also a great time to do some spring cleaning on your blog and give it a tune-up.

A lot of things can happen to a blog over time and blog maintenance is a task that probably doesn’t get done as often as it should. When is the last time you tested your comments? Or filled out your own forms? Maybe looked at the site in Internet Explorer?!

It’s a good idea to take a step back and look at your site, as others do, from time to time to ensure everything is working, and displaying, as it should.

Here are a few things to help with your blog tune up and spring cleaning.

1. Upgrade your software.  If you aren’t running the latest version of your blog software, you may be missing out on features, security patches or bug fixes.  Upgrading could make for an improvement in performance for both blog authors and visitors.
2. Upgrade your plug-ins.  Just like with blog software, the plug-ins you run get updated from time to time to fix, update and improve.  Check those plug-ins to see if anything needs to be updated.

Moderator is an Adobe Air application that allows you to peek into your WordPress blog and manage any comments that are awaiting moderation.

You can see who wrote the comment, their email, Gravatar icon, what they said, when they said it, and then you can decide to accept, spam or delete the comment.  The settings also allow you to set the refresh interval and hide Gravatars if you’d like.

Another nice feature is that there are dock and system tray notifications of the number of unmoderated comments.

At this time, Moderator does not allow you to do a whole lot, but they plan on adding the ability to see all comments, reply to comments, manage multiple blogs comments, and get desktop pop-up notifications of new comments.

Moderator is a combination Adobe Air application and WordPress plug-in.  It’s pretty easy to install and works on Windows, Mac and Linux.  The next version is rumored to just be an Adobe Air application with no WordPress plug-in needed.

I’m eager to see how Moderator advances. It’s already a handy little tool and has potential to become even better.