Recently we designed a new site, Maternity Underwear and this was ready really quickly, probably our quickest site design to date. So it was rather frustrating when Google just wasn’t indexing it. Initially we thought it might be the fact that the robots.txt file had incorrectly disallowed access to everything but this was changed and still almost 1 month later the site was being indexed despite it being complete, good content and starting to be linked. Then Gary found that in the new Wordpress and option had changed. Under the Privacy settings the default now appears to be to block search engines and allow normal visitors only. We changed this and about a week later it is starting to be indexed. Hopefully given a bit more time the site will be fully indexed and start to climb and the hard work will pay off. Has anyone else noticed this  option change?

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We researched about how to create our blog and the best package to use. We came up with Wordpress. I had been following other people’s personal blogs which were written using Wordpress and I liked the feel of them. Looking into Wordpress further it seemed that its ease of use suited web design beginners like us to create a blog fairly easily using a good standard of tools.

So we then looked at using and installing Wordpress. The installation was straight forward with a good step by step guide on the Wordpress website which can be found here

Wordpress comes with a nice dashboard which really makes designing and managing the website straight forward.

We had a look at some themes and decided on the layout we wanted. We wanted a 3 column layout. We had a look at lots of themes that we could customize to suit our blog. We came across the Revolution website which has lots of great themes to use at a great price.

As well as the main blog theme two components of Wordpress have increased the speed at which were able to get our blog up and running and to have the look we wanted. Firstly plugins have been very useful to add functionality to our website with ease. They can be used to do almost anything you can imagine with Wordpress. Many people have designed and written plugins for Wordpress. Some plugins we have used are the Popular Posts plugin and the SEO plugin both of which aid the website development to do what we want it to easier and to make is better content wise. To have a look at some plugins available to Wordpress click here

Secondly we have used widgets. Widgets are standard sets of code to create items you can put in your WordPress blog’s sidebar without needing the knowledge on how to edit a web page. Initially we were trying to modify php code to do things like add Categories and other sections to the sidebar but with widgets they give you the code to do this and through the widgets dashboard option you can modify them to appear how you want without having to modify code. Again for a beginner this is a very useful tool.

In time we hope to create some “How to …” guides such as “How to install”, “How to use plugins” so please keep coming back for updates.

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