Over the last few months I have been guest posting like a maniac, but it is time to offer it up again, so if you would like some free content, check this out now!

Yoav and I want to write free articles about Excel for your website or blog.

All we ask is that we can link back to our site(s) in the “about the author” attribution box. Seem like a good deal?

If so, simply fill out this short form and we will be in touch via email if we have something for you. (If you have multiple sites, please fill out the form for each one).

Click here to add your details and be on your way to getting some free, expert content for your site!

We have already written guest posts for several happy site owners. In the past we have written about all kinds of topics but now we really want to focus on Cogniview’s core expertise which is making your Microsoft Excel experience happier, easier, more efficient.

Cogniview’s expert developers have already supplied me with some absolutely awesome Excel solutions and code to share with you, I just need somewhere to write it up!

While we can’t guarantee that we will write something for everyone, we will think very hard to see if we can come up with something brilliant for you, so don’t delay, fill the form out now!

The project is for me to create a course on setting up WordPress based websites, and it got me thinking about how WordPress is not just a blog package for many of us any longer. I have written about this a little before but I think the idea has gone from being a geeky curiosity to an established fact. Course members added lots of ideas to my already growing list of ways this application can be used.

In the last year I have set up dozens of customer’s corporate websites using the software. This is not unusual, even the Number 10 Downing Street (home to our country “leadership”) runs on WordPress.

Here is a list of types of WordPress site I managed to come up with. I am sure you will agree, it can do more than just blog …

1) Blog (text, podcast, video) - OK, this one is obvious and goes without saying, but I think it is important to note how WordPress has given content creators an easy platform that does not require being tied into gated communities and paying through the nose for the privelage.

2) Static site / company website - As mentioned above, this is so common place now that I can’t imagine using anything else.

3) Lead capture site / Squeeze page - Lately I have been using WordPress for gathering contact details through free offers (send someone to a site where they can get something cool in return for putting in their contact details). Where before I would have used a static HTML site, using WordPress allows me to rapidly test, tweak and optimize the conversion rate. Plus there are other pages like privacy page and so on that need to be set up using a similar look and feel.

4) Single product sales site – Where before I might have used a download service, one of those download protector software packages, or some other system to deliver my digitial products like ebooks and videos, now I can use WordPress plus Wishlist member plugin to protect my download products. Not only does it provide a convenient and secure download area, but it reduces customer support through having built in password recovery, and also allows me to “drip out” bonuses.

5) Multi-product ecommerce site – Once you start selling from your WordPress site, it doesn’t take a leap of imagination to start thinking about selling multiple products from the same site.

6) Reviews site – Think back to when you last booked a hotel or vacation. You probably visited at least one review site. Affiliate marketers often like to set up a site where you review products in return for a sale commission on anything that is purchased. WordPress makes building one of these sites so much easier.

7) Photo gallery – It’s not just Facebook, Flickr and Picassa that can be used to display your photography, and WordPress is ideal if you don’t just want to show off but to sell your work.

Twitter-style site – Automattic released a special theme just for creating an internal or group Twitter type site where you can interact with short “tweet” type posts. This is great for project management, group notifications and discussion.

9) Membership site – If you want to create a password protected client area, online course, or monthly “continuity”, as mentioned earlier, WordPress is now ideal when used with Wishlist, but also much easier and cheaper to work with than the alternatives.

10) Resume – The resume is dead. Long live the resume blog! Much like company sites, if you are not filling Google with positive references then you don’t exist when it comes to certain jobs, and it is only going to increase in liklihood that your HR rep looks first to Google before checking any of your paper credentials.

I have a couple of hours to finish this WordPress based online course. Wish me luck!

Any more ideas for how WordPress is being used over and above blogging? Please share in the comments …

This service is called Posterous and while it appears to be a stripped down blogging service (and it can be used for that) in fact I have been using it as a media and cross posting service.

You see what it has that none of the others can do is really intelligent multimedia handling and posting via email.

• Email Posterous and your text appears as a blog post
• Blog posts can be automatically cross posted to your real blog
• New posts get tweeted and added to your FaceBook updates
• Send a photograph as an attachment and it is uploaded to Flickr and posted into an article
• Send multiple photographs and you get a gallery widget
• Attach a video and it posts to your blog and YouTube
• Want a podcast? Record an audio note and send it over and you get a media player widget for your mp3

So unlike FriendFeed that aggregates your lifestream, Posterous allows you to post to it. For smartphone owning social media fans it is the ultimate mobile blogging tool – you can keep your friends up to date with everything you are up to in complete multimedia.

Pretty cool, huh?

Yes WordPress and some blogging tools have had post by email before, only Posterous has this level of ease and functionality. There are more features to come, including themes.

Here is a video shot by Steve Rubel interviewing the founders.

Another neat feature is you can point your own domains at it, rather than use the lame *.posterous.com domain. My own Posterous account is at http://www.chrisg.co.uk for example.

This means should anything happen to the service at least you have not lost all your link equity. Take regular backups and you might be able to salvage the whole thing, or move over to WordPress when they inevitably steal all these great ideas.

Once you are a member you can comment and subscribe to other folks Posterous, and comments can also be posted as status updates to keep the conversation crossing over into social media.

I got so into this I think it could be the rebirth of the personal blog after Twitter has had the spotlight for so long. What do you think?

Yes we are opening  up this offer again, so if you would like some free content, check this out now!

My colleagues and I want to write free articles for your website or blog.

All we ask is that we can link back to our site(s) in the “about the author” attribution box. Seem like a good deal?

If so, simply fill out this short form and we will be in touch via email if we have something for you. (If you have multiple sites, please fill out the form for each one).

Click here to add your details and be on your way to getting some free, expert content for your site!

We have already written guest posts for several happy bloggers. Obviously there are only so many topics that we can write about that will be relevant to the work Cogniview does, but we have so far written about software tools, PDFs and ebooks, business and productivity. So while we can’t guarantee that we will write something for everyone, we will think very hard to see if we can come up with something brilliant for you, so don’t delay, fill the form out now

All we ask is that we can link back to our site(s) in the “about the author” attribution box. Seem like a good deal?

If so, simply fill out this short form and we will be in touch via email if we have something for you. (If you have multiple sites, please fill out the form for each one).

Click here to add your details and be on your way to getting some free, expert content for your site!

Obviously we can’t guarantee that we will write something for everyone, but if you don’t ask you don’t get, so don’t delay, fill the form out now

A much overlooked feature of WordPress that can add a lot of nice touches to a site is the “Custom Field” option along with custom templates.

Say you wanted to show a thumbnail photograph to go along with a blog post, but not in the article itself but alongside the headline?

Or maybe you have a site where you want to link content to a certain product, but pull in details about the product from a database or feed rather than manually type the information in over and over as product details change?

Another option might be to change the look and feel of a page away from the default, for example change the color of just that one page, or different header graphics. Sometimes people will color code so people know which section of a site they are looking at for example.

All of these can be achieved with custom fields. Custom fields are just a way that you can add a “meta” value to a page or post, that is information “about” a piece of content rather than as “part of” the content. Yes we have the option of using tags or categories, but these tend to be visible, and not as specific as we would like. Custom fields can be used to link to a product ID, ISBN number, affiliate code, or image Src without cluttering up our tag database.

In your blog post/page editing screen there is a box containing the custom field information. There is first a dropdown containing the custom fields you have used before. This might well be populated if you use any SEO based plugins. That is how the custom title, keywords and description are added to a page.

Next you have boxes where you can provide a key and a value. So your key might be “ISBN” and your value might be a particular books ISBN code.

In your template you can pull out the value belonging to a particular custom field using the following PHP code:

<?php

 $custom_field = get_post_meta($post->ID, "key", $single = true);

?>

You can see this in action over at my credit card site where we pull in a single card details into a page by specifying the cards ID, in this case the Blue American Express card. All the other details are pulled from a separate database, and are refreshed from the source daily.

WordPress is much more powerful than people give it credit for. Really, I would choose it over software costing tens of thousands of dollars. You just need a little lateral thinking to make it really rock.

If you know of any innovative uses of WordPress, do share in the comments …

One of the best sessions was about WordPress and SEO by Joost De Valk. Check out the slides here:

Another fantastic resource for anyone using WordPress to create their sites and want to rank in search engines is the free guide about SEO for bloggers by Aaron and Giovanna Wall.

Between those to sites you should be well set up to rank your blog or WordPress based website

It often surprises me just how well WordPress sites perform in search engines. Even out of the box, with none of the recommended tweaks, you can find yourself appearing under searches within a few weeks of launching.

The most important factors are:

1. Great content - Write about what people want to know
2. Search phrases – Use the phrases that your audience is looking for, and also use keyword tools for research
3. Interlinking – Link out, link to your own content, network to get links from other sites

All of these things happen very naturally with a blog, and can be easily implemented on a WordPress-based sites.

Add the recommended tweaks and plugins and you will have an even more search friendly site!

In the past I have had a straightforward solution, a combination of Amember and WordPress can work ok, and it is the basis for existing membership sites that I have built such as Performancing Hive, and so on.

Recently though I heard about a new WordPress plugin that aims to build out a WordPress blog as a member site directly.

Appropriately it is called “Your Member WordPress Membership Plugin“.

This I had to investigate!

Features include:

• PayPal recurring or one-off payments
• Membership roles
• Free and paid content
• and crucially allows Aweber integration, which is a must for serious bloggers (see why here)

Obviously if you add this to an existing blog or site then you need to make sure a significant portion of it stays free to keep that search engine juice!

A word of warning to anyone who thinks of using this, take a look at what you see when you log in to their own site:

Yup, the bog standard WordPress dashboard. Do customise the user experience otherwise you will lose the trust of your customer. This could set in some serious buyers remorse.

That aside, things look well with this plugin and at only $50 I will be trying it out for myself.

When I set up a WordPress-based blog or website I usually install the Backup plugin. This emails the user a copy of the database once a week. That coupled with a good FTP download of the files means that at least it is possible to recover to a week old version, and with some swift copy and paste from the most recent RSS download maybe more.

There are other database aspects you might need though and that is where WP-DBManager supposedly comes in to play, but I have issues with it. First a description of what it does …

This plugin gives you a whole bunch of features that otherwise would be off limits, hidden away from the user in scary places like PHPMyAdmin, or the command line.

Just like the other backup plugins, this will allow you to take a backup and email it. It also allows you to optimize and repair, and more dangerously empty or drop tables. While it does have a facility for running SQL queries, you can not run anything that returns a resultset which seems pretty daft.

Now my criticisms:

1. It should allow routine scheduled backups and maybe optimizations - right now need two plugins when one could do both jobs
2. As it is you would not hand it over, it is too dangerous – integrate with Role Manager to remove dangerous features
3. SQL Queries is useless for end users – Make it so you can run queries and show results?

The repair feature could be a life saver, but as for the rest, while an excellent plugin, I think it could be a lot better.

Do you know an alternative database plugin for WordPress?

For many end users the standard WordPress Admin is both over featured and scarily complicated.

The experience of an overly permissioned user destroying a site will be one that is only too familiar, as is the experience of sites going unmaintained out of intimidation even after training.

What is needed is a tailored approach, to give users what they need and no more.

Enter a bunch of WordPress plugins that aim to do just that.

Cloak allows you to remove elements from the write screens that your writers do not need.

Flutter allows you to create custom write screens, optionally forcing the new content into a certain category.

This is not just useful for limiting the user, you might also have created a site with content areas such as sidebar, featured posts, etc. Using category logic and a specific write form you could allow the site maintainer to enter content for these featured spots in the theme without having to remember which category does what. For example, below shows a form I built to allow the user to input reviews.

Finally Role Manager allows you to completely remove options for certain users so they can only do what you want them to.

Added: JonnyA from WP-CMS tells me you might already know Flutter as “Fresh Post”

Do you know of any other plugins that make customizing WordPress admin easy?