Blog Category: Tutorials

I often have my small business website clients request images to be used in online advertising. Generally they place these ads on a website and are charged a monthly fee. When visitors click on the image, they are taken to my clients’ websites via a link.  But how do my clients really know what kind of return on their advertising investment they are getting? My favorite website traffic tool is Web-Stat. This tutorial assumes you are using Web-Stat, but it should give you enough general information to help you regardless of the tool you’re using.

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I have many clients who seem to get stuck at this point in the DreamHost set-up process, and it’s because, well, while I love DreamHost, they don’t make this easy or intuitive. So here’s my attempt at making it clear. This assumes you already have an account with DreamHost, and have registered a domain, but need to set up  hosting.

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Today one of my WordPress clients couldn’t modify any of her posts. She was using a computer with IE 9. I was on my computer using Firefox, and could modify her posts with no problem. A quick search on Google yielded others with the identical issue. For this client, all I could recommend was to switch Firefox, which she did and verified problem solved. You can view the identical issue reported here on the WordPress.com forum.

I had a client today upgrade her WordPress blog to 3.1.1 and when she clicked on any categories or posts, she got a 404 page not found error. Took a while of searching on the web but solution was found. Solution required regeneration of brand new .htaccess file and deletion of one plugin. Details are below.

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Here is information from GoDaddy on how to set up Outlook to read your GoDaddy based email:

Using Microsoft Outlook 2003 with Your Email

Using Microsoft Outlook 2007 with Your Email

Using Outlook 2010 with Your Email

Using Microsoft Outlook Express with Your Email

GoDaddy  Product and Technical Support: (480) 505-8877

If your website hosting company is GoDaddy, you can go here to read your email:

https://login.secureserver.net

This is a great article on how to disable WordPress plugins if you are unable to access the dashboard:

Quickly Disable or Enable All WordPress Plugins via the Database

DreamHost had a bad day today. Please note this is the best place to check status if your website is down, and you can’t login to your control panel:

http://status.dreamhost.com/

If things are really bad, even that URL might be down, and it’s best to check Twitter.com and search for @dhstatus, you can do this here: http://search.twitter.com/

I should note that I’ve been with DreamHost since 2006, and outages like these are not a typical experience. If you have a business that can’t tolerate its website being down for several hours, you should probably not have your website hosted with a shared hosting company (and be paying way, way more than the $10/month that DreamHost charges).

For my own business and the small businesses I work with, we can tolerate some downtime occasionally, and so for us DreamHost is a great choice for inexpensive hosting. I advise my clients to first try to notify DreamHost if they have an issue, if they can’t login, check the status.dreamhost.com website to see if there is a systemic issue.

But please don’t panic. After watching the very scary news from Japan, it really puts issues like having a website being down for a few hours into perspective.

I’ve had several clients ask me this, and it’s difficult to find this answer online, so I’m posting it here in my blog.

To clone a product in the ECT store:

1. Login to your store’s control panel

2. Click on Product Admin

3. Locate the product you’d like to clone.

4. Hold down the “CTRL” key (or “alt option” if you’re on a Mac) while clicking Modify.

5. Notice at the top of the page it says “You are cloning the product “Your Product Name Here”.

Use this feature to quickly make new products that are very similar to each other to save yourself time.

Here’s a good example of what WordPress spam looks like, disguised as a comment.

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You’ve selected DreamHost as your hosting company and now you need to configure Outlook  to read your email from your website. Here are the necessary steps to configure Outlook. If you need to configure Outlook Express, please read this article on how to set up Outlook Express. This article has been updated for Outlook 2007.

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The following video tutorial illustrates how to add a category to your WordPress blog. This tutorial assumes you know how to login to your WordPress Dashboard.

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This is a solution that I use often, and wanted to capture it here in my blog in the event that the Web Yep form is down.

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I learned of a new feature in PayPal today by complete accident. I normally login and move money from my PayPal business account to my business checking account. A few days ago, I forgot I logged in, and this morning noticed funds had moved out. When I called PayPal, they confirmed that indeed it was me (embarrassing), but they told me that PayPal has an auto-sweep feature that would do this. They enabled it on my account so it shows up under the Financial section of my Profile. I never knew PayPal had this ability, and wanted to share my belated discovery!

It seems like all my blog article ideas lately come from my clients, so here’s another one. A client got an invitation to try out DreamHost PS (Private Servers) and wanted to know whether he should sign up.

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One of my clients asked me how she could embed a PDF document into her WordPress blog today. After some searching, I found the answer and wanted to document it here so that my other clients and blog readers can learn how to do this.

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My website clients often want to be able to send out newsletters to their customers. Sending out newsletters without being labeled a spammer is tricky business. Many folks opt to use a monthly fee-based service like Constant Contact or My Emma, which send out emails using their own mail servers.  But if you have an ECT online store,  you can utilize a “mod” from ECT Modifications called Advanced News Letter that costs around $25 (one time charge). It sends out emails from your website using your ECT online store program.  This article explains how to send out email using this particular mod.

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This article is written for clients who may have just had their ECT (Ecommerce Templates) online store upgraded to a new version. One of the wonderful things about using ECT for your online store, is that they are very dedicated to continually improving their product, and come out with updates (newer versions) on a very regular basis. How do you, as an ECT store owner get the most out of your upgrade? Read on.

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I work on website redesigns, which means I often work in a temporary subdirectory. When I’m ready to launch the website, I move the files from their temporary home, into their permanent home, typically under the root of the website. But if I’ve installed WebYep on a client’s website, moving these files will break things, and since I can’t find this on WebYep’s FAQ page, I’m posting it here in the hopes of helping others.

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I’ve had a few clients ask me this question, so I’m posting the answer here – because it wasn’t super easy to find on the internet. When you get to the end of a line and hit “return” on your keyboard – what do you want to happen? Sometimes you want a new paragraph. Sometimes you might just want a line break. This short tutorial shows you how to accomplish this. It works for WebYep and WordPress…and probably for many other text editors that might use TinyMCE or FCKEditor or others.

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