If your website has been setup using WordPress as your Content Management system (CMS) then you will need to get to grips with how to manage your site using WordPress. Whilst WordPress is much easier than managing a traditional website; it still can be daunting to some.

Here are our top 6 videos (from WordPress.tv) to help you on your way to managing a highly successful website.

1. General introduction to the WordPress Dashboard
2. Writing and Publishing posts introduction
3. How to embed audio and photos into your posts
4. Creating and editing pages (opposed to posts)
5. Moderating comments in your site
6. Using Quick Edit to manage your posts

Armed with these 6 videos – you can pretty much manage the day-to-day running or your WordPress powered website.

Once you have your website up and working how can you increase the number of visitors, growing your readership as well as retaining your loyal readers. Here are our top 3 tips on the subject.

1. Know your audience

Always think how your target audience would use your site, what do they want to see and gather information about? How often do they visit? What is it that makes them visit and revisit your site? Knowing your audience will allow you to keep your site relevant and fresh with information that is popular and in demand.

Make sure your website copy is in the appropriate style and blogs/articles tackle key issues of your target audience. By joining forums that your target audience are members of you can gain value insight into their views and issues. Looking at your website trends and statistics allows you to determine which areas of the site are strong and weak, what articles are most popular and even which geographical area they are from. Armed with this information you can be sure of who your visitors are and go about creating content that is most relevant and popular.

2. Use some simple SEO techniques

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is becoming increasingly important. With the majority of your potential customers reaching websites as a result of a search from Google, it really does pay off to put some effort into this area both whilst designing your site and ongoing maintenance.  There are many companies that specialise in SEO who you can outsource the SEO work to, yet this can be expensive – particularly for small businesses or community based websites.

Simply by knowing just the basics and having a Content Management System (CMS) that is SEO friendly it is possible to make your site highly visible in all the key search engines. A good CMS will allow you to individually name different pages in your site with title attribute, generate ‘friendly URLs’ and give your images alt-tags.  For some guidance, Google has PDF which explains the key concepts Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide in their Webmaster area.

3. Keep updating

Your website needs to keep visitors returning and new visitors to become attracted. The key to this is to maintain your site by continually updating it. Adding new content keeps your site fresh and interesting, it gives people a reason to keep coming back. A static, unmaintained site is not attractive and will almost certainly not reach its full potential.

Writing a blog is a fantastic way to update your site – talk about issues that are affecting your customers, what trends are you seeing etc.. Blogs are a great way of increasing your visibility and ranking in search engines. You can write blogs that are based on a particular subject or key-word, for example, if you want to improve your rank for ‘leisure facilities’  you can set write a blog entry to talk about leisure facilities, and get the phrase into the headline. Search engines’ search crawlers also become aware of how frequently your site is updated, so by not updating it Google will crawl your site less frequently, which is bad for SEO.

There is nothing worse than visiting a website only to find it not working, not finished or in a state of repair. If when you are creating your site you need to let people know that things will be back up and working soon, but also try and ensure that you do not lose visitors then there is an elegant solution. If you are creating a site with WordPress then the solution is even more elegant.

By using the Tempskin theme from www.jinsonathemes.com you can both put up an elegant temporary ‘front-door’ but also allow visitors to express their interest and register’ their details so you can keep them updated as to when your site is back up and working.

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy/support instead of being pushed.

Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

These days it is extremely important to have a website to help promote your charity or fund-raising group. It is not that difficult to

• Create and set up a website,
• Maintain and update it and
• Generate funds from it.

Creating your Charity Website

Community Hosts gives you the ability to create and host a website for FREE- so there is no need to go and spend on expensive web hosting. Once you have created a space on the Internet you need to then create a website to promote your charity or fund-raiser. This is probably the hardest part for many; however it should not be.

There are many tools available that can help you create a professional looking site. Within the Community Hosts control panel we have links to an online service that allows you to create a professional looking website in minutes. However if you are feeling more adventurous then you can try installing and using what’s called a Content Management System (CMS). Various CMS systems can be installed automatically for you via our control panel , so there is no need to stress about doing that either! Once you have a CMS system as your website, updating it and adding to it becomes incredibly easy. That is what a CMS fundamentally does for you – it takes care of the website, and where everything goes, and how it looks; leaving you to get on and worry about the content.

This is important. If it takes an hour to edit a web page manually; just to add something trivial or add some new article, then you are less likely to do do it and your site becomes in risk of falling out of date – and that is a cardinal sin! You will lose the interest of those that are looking at the site for up to date information.

The great thing about Community Hosts is that you can try all of this out, have a play and break things as much as you want – or even create something fantastic, without it costing you a penny!

If you get stuck then drop us a line, or post something in the forums and we will help you out. There is a ton of stuff available that can help and point you in the right direction. Not creating a website for your company, organisation, charity or event because you think that it is too hard is not a valid excuse any more. Try it out!

Do you run a charity, school, club or community? Do you want an easy and effective way in which you can fund raise, just buy asking the people that use your site to shop online?

If the answer is, “Yes” then take a look at Buy.At (http://users.buy.at/fundraising/), which is backed by the AOL Organisation.

An online fundraising webshop is completely FREE to set up and run. Your members and supporters get great value and exclusive discounts and can help you raise funds without any effort. Your group can receive up to 12% of the cost of each purchase made via your webshop.

Setting up your webshop is a straight forward process, and only takes a few minutes. Once set up you can download and print posters and other advertising material to hand out and you also get your own web address so you can publicise that on your site.

Anyone that enters your webshop and goes on to purchase a product from one of the 150 high-street resellers generates some cash for you. It costs them nothing, and it costs you nothing. A great way to enable some e-fundraising!

Getting started with Community Hosts is easy, and simple. Sure a little bit of technical know-how will help you out – but for the most part things should be pretty straightforward.

Step 1: Signing up for a free website

The first that you will need to do is head over to the Sign Up page and fill in the information:

• Username: This is effectively your name, or the name of your site. Whatever you put in here is the address of your site. Entering, “mywebsite” will give you a website with the address http://www.myswebsite.community-hosts.co.uk.
• Password: This is the password that will be assigned to your account. It should be 8 or less characters
• Email Address: This should be your email address. This is where we will send any email relating to your account.
• Site Category: Choose one of the options that best describes your website.
• Site Language: Choose the language of your site
• Enter Security Code: Enter the code exactly as it appears on the page.

You should then be taken through one more validation stage – before an email is sent to the email address that you gave. The email will contain a link which you need to click on to confirm your site.