I’ve developed a lot of websites over the years, for a lot of people.  I’ve developed them for people who were serious about making them work, and I’ve done them for people who were just dipping their toe in the Internet pool.  What I’ve learned is, people with no goals when it comes to the on-line experience won’t last long.  I’ve done some spectacular work for people who lost interest after the fact, not because I wasn’t there to help them along the way, but because they didn’t know what they were doing there in the first place.

So, to that end, let’s discuss what it takes to write a good post or page.  Having a process will make it easier to justify doing it when the time comes and prevent you from becoming a statistic.  This goes for whatever system you adopt, but will make the most sense to WordPress users.  The process I use is simple.

1. Get an idea
2. Write the post
3. Come up with a clever title
4. Link to anything pertinent in the article
5. Pick keywords to add as tags
6. Write a compelling excerpt
7. Make a search engine friendly title and description (for your SEO plugin)
8. Publish

Thankfully, it’s not done the old fashioned way

First, you’ll need an idea.  If you’re anything like me, ideas come at the most inopportune times.  When that happens, write the idea down.  Trust me on this.  If you don’t, you’ll regret it when someone else beats you to the punch.  Where ideas come from is a matter of philosophy for some people.  I just listen to the questions my clients are asking and answer them in a post.  Pretty simple if you ask me.  It makes me look smarter than I am, and makes them happy I took the time to help.  It’s a win-win.

Next, you need to make time to actually write the text and get it ready for prime time.  I find that it’s nearly always best to just brain dump.  Don’t let your internal editor tell you that you forgot to throw in a comma, or missed an “s” in a word.  None of that matters in a first draft.  Aside from that, if you installed the plugin “After the Deadline” like I said you should, it’ll catch the silly mistakes we all make.  I’m not great at spelling, and I forget to make my verbs agree with their subjects from time to time.  That’s why we proofread (at least some of us do).

Make a clever title.  It should be something that will entice people to read.  No matter how good your work is, if no one reads it, it isn’t good to anyone.  If you have a choice between an article with a title like “Economics And The Impact Of Corn” or “CORN! It Does An Economy Good,” which one are you more likely to read (neither, I know…  bad example)?

Now, you’ve written a great article and a clever title, you’ve proofed it and you’re ready to find stuff to link.  If you installed Zemanta (or another comparable plugin), linking is a snap.  If not, do it by hand.  If you referred to a post you’ve written before, link to it.  If you’ve referred to a blog or website you respect, link to it.  If you’ve referred to a book…  You guessed it.  Taking the time to do so will increase your readership.  Not taking the time is kind of lazy.

After you’ve linked, you need to tag.  Not tagging is a common mistake.  Tags make a post more easily found, and they help search engines as well as people figure out how to place the article.  Once again, installing Zemanta (and no, they aren’t paying me to say so) helps make this process easier.  It won’t find all the words you want, but three is better than none.  You shouldn’t tag more than about seven things anyway.  Tag.  You’ll be glad you did.

The next thing to do is add an excerpt.  Why should I bother with an excerpt, you say?  Even if your theme doesn’t make use of an excerpt, neglecting to add it is a mistake.  Without going into too much technical detail, it is used in places you can’t necessarily see.  To make it easy, you can simply copy and paste the most compelling paragraph in your article into the excerpt block.  If you want to take a more productive approach, write a paragraph that would make you want to read the article if you found it on Google.  Do it, even if you don’t want to.

You should have installed Platinum SEO or All-In-One SEO (I prefer Platinum for reasons to be explained in another post).  If not, do it.  This will add a block to the end of your post / page editor which allows you to make a search engine friendly title and description for your shiny new article.  This is not the place to write all flowery and clever.  Machines don’t care about your prose.  They care about how relevant your article is to their visitors’ searches.  Make your title and description reflect this.  Also, don’t bother with putting in keywords.  No real search engines even read a keyword tag anymore so using it is a waste of time.  Put in Keywords only on the home page so that Ask.com doesn’t feel left out.

Finally, pick a good time to publish it.  Feel free to sit on the article for a day.  The best bet is to wait a day and re-read what you wrote.  You’ll find that waiting to publish lets you avoid certain mistakes you would otherwise have made (especially if you enjoyed a few alcoholic beverages while writing the previous day).

This is a long article, but it can help you generate useful content your readers will actually want to finish reading.  Go forth, write…

For some reason my clients always have weird requirements for pages.  Thankfully, WordPress has a way.  I remember reading a post on a forum recently where a user asked the question, “I created a Page and on that Page I want to list all posts in a specified category. How do I do this?”  Naturally, one user decided to tell the guy it was impossible and that he should just stick to the status quo.  This post is more for that doofus than it is for the guy who asked.

First, you need to know a few things about the way WordPress finds all the pretty things it displays.  If code makes you wince and or recoil in fear, first, grow up, and second, use the famous “cut, copy, paste” features we all know and love.

If you’re over it, we’ll move on…

The goal here is to list all the posts in a specific category on a page which you need to create.  Let’s take a useful example like a portfolio.  It could be a portfolio of images or words (or both).  The assumption here is that you won’t change the text at the top / bottom, or that there won’t be any, and that you have such a category with posts in it already.  This will make the process easier.

Either use a dev copy of your site, or backup before doing this stuff (or any stuff you read from some random stranger on the intertubes).

Open your favorite text editor (not Word) and create a file called portfolio.php (or whatever you want to call it) and make it look like this.

< ?php
/*
Template Name: Portfolio
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content">

</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Notice that we have all the elements of a good PHP page here, but the thing WordPress cares about is the “Template Name: Portfolio” bit. Change this to whatever you want to call this template.

Next, we have to add a few scripty things to it to make it pull information from the database and display it according to what we’re after.  We’ll need a call to the database here.  We want to select only posts of a specific category, in this case the portfolio category.  For me, the portfolio category is 25, but you can find yours by clicking the edit link to your desired category in the category manager and looking at the last number in the URL.  The reason you want to use the category ID number instead of the name is, on the off chance that you change the name, your new page becomes useless.  The ID won’t ever change.

The ‘showposts=10′ thing is the maximum number of posts I want to appear on the portfolio page. Change that to whatever number you like, up to and including several thousand (though I don’t recommend that).  We follow up the query with a little “while” loop so that we can cycle through the results.

<?php query_posts('showposts=10&cat=25'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

At this point, we have a few choices to make.  Do we want to display everything, or just a few things?  As a portfolio, we’d likely want to display an image, be it a thumbnail or a full sized image.  We may want to display text, but we certainly want a link.  So, the variables (stuff) we have to work with are as follows:

• the_permalink() — the permalink to the post in question
• the_title() — the unbelievably clever title you gave your post
• the_excerpt() — the excerpt that I know you’re using because it’s smart to do
• the_thumbnail() — it’s…  well… the primary thumbnail image
• the_images() — all the images in the post
• the_content() — the body of your post

Since we’re not after content we can skip that, but we may want to make use of the excerpt to entice readers to click on the pretty pictures.  It’s up to you.  let’s use the bare minimum for this tutorial and just go with images and links (and titles for XHTML compliance).  We’re going to style this with divs, and you can make them look however you want by either using existing classes or writing new ones in your style.css file.  For now, they’ll be plain and however the browser wants to drop them.

<div> /* This DIV could be a SPAN or nothing depending on how you want it to display  */
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_thumbnail(); ?></a>
</div>

<?php endwhile; ?>

Putting it all together it should look like this:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Portfolio
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content">
/* If you want to add a heading or text, do it here */
<?php query_posts('showposts=10&cat=25'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_thumbnail(); ?></a>
</div>

<?php endwhile; ?>
/* If you want text below your gallery, do it here */
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

You can play with it and add more formatting, add text, or do whatever you want.  After you have it the way you want it, upload it to your active theme’s root directory then add a new page.  In the templates box at the bottom of the right column, you should see your newly created template as an option.  You need not add any text to the content block, simply save it as a draft or view it and you should see your portfolio as a cluster of clickable thumbnails.

Hit me with questions or comments (especially if I typo’d or left something vague).