When considering a web site, definitely give WordPress a try. There is tons to be gained from it. But there are pitfalls you should know about it too.

Let’s just take a moment to analyze what you should watch out for before looking at what makes WordPress a great choice.

First, WordPress is a complex system to run a web site upon. This sophistication comes at a price. WordPress is much more hackable then a static web site. Fortunately, protecting your administration directories in WordPress can protect you against about 95% of all hacks.

Next, there is a lot of ways to setup WordPress. What plugins should you use? What theme is the right theme? What’s a theme? Oh boy. But these are things you need to consider before using WordPress.

Personally, it took me about two years of use to really get a hang of successful WordPress installs. This included well over 300 site installs and fixing dozens of other people’s installs in the process.

Think of WordPress as the Mustang of web sites. Press the pedal too hard and you will find over 300 hp of raw power crashing you into another car.

What’s the good of WordPress. If you know how to properly drive this powerful web site engine, it can be a very potent ally to your quest to get ranked by the search engines.

Personally, I find that I can dominate a niche over time for many keyword phrases with very little outside backlinking.

If you are incline to learn WordPress and you are willing to establish many web sites with WordPress, then you can definitely do very well with WordPress, generating a secondary income.

In my opinion this can be accomplished very quickly with very little expense on your behalf. This investment into your future, learning how to flex WordPress, can pay you back very well indeed.

Learning WordPress doesn’t have to be too hard. It is a complex system, but stick to it and over time, you’ll find that you too can become a WordPress expert!

This is something that I’ve resisted for some time, simply because I felt that it didn’t work well. As a proof in point, I recently had to fix a customer’s website that had caching issues.

But going through the fix made me think, should I be relooking at this option within WordPress? I do have some sites that are seeing some serious traffic and I’d like to make sure that I’m ahead of the curve instead of behind!

Let me first explain caching 101.

WordPress Caching 101

 WordPress is actually a very complex framework of calls and procedures that composes a fixed web page to the web surfer when it is requested.

Before the web surfer arrives on the scene to see your page, the web page is composed as some web programming code, a bit of html code and finally data settings that are sitting in a database.

You can aliken it to a baker who has all the ingredients to make a cake ready for the soon to arrive customer. Once the customer arrives and places his or her order, the baker quickly whips together the cake mix, bakes it lightning fast and serves it to the customer ready to go.

Now, you and I both know that preparing a cake takes time. So the smart baker wakes up extra early to bake all the goods he believes he’ll need for the day beforehand.

Truly that only makes sense. Now the baker can satisfy the customer order, literally in seconds.

When you use WordPress Caching, it’s much the same idea. The caching plugin will premake the web pages for the prospective web server and when they arrive to your site, the page is already prepared, thus just needs to be presented to the surfer.

Sounds pretty logical so far, right?

WordPress Cache – Fly In The Ointment

There always has to be a fly in the ointment, of course. WordPress caching is no exception.

Let’s think on the baker example for a moment. Let’s say the baker wants to have the cake 100% ready for the customer. But in reality the baker gets stuck at some point.

Is the cake going to be a birthday cake for some name Sam, Sue or Jim? He just doesn’t know?

So, the baker will still have the customer waiting for the final preparations, like filling out the writing on the to be purchased cake. He just cannot guess what the cake must say.

The same occurs with WordPress. For example, if someone wants to leave a comment, then the caching program must then tear down the ‘cached page’ and replace it with new content.

Now, this isn’t a biggie, but for some other features and functions, caching can cause ruin to the website.

So, where do I sit on caching?

I’m still not sure, just yet. WordPress has matured significantly since I last looked at caching and this site is currently working with caching in place, so we will see. I don’t know if I’d roll it out to an e-store operated by WordPress just yet.

If you to are not sure, the better option, in my opinion, is to get better hosting. Caching has it’s place but it cannot fix slow or poor web server hosting. Making sure that you have enough time on the server you are renting time on is probably the #1 fix you should investigate first.

What do you think about Wordpress caching? Please tell me with your comments below.

After tons of work (and still a bit more to do), WordPress Bootcamp 101 is open to the public!

It currently consists of almost 5 hours of video instruction and close to 70 lessons. It’s a course that is designed not to only show you how to set up a blog, but to fully understand all the functionality available to you within WordPress.

Aren’t There 50 Other Wordpress Courses Out There Already?

Yes there are. But I wanted this one to be different. I wanted the information to be ‘complete’. I’ve done probably 40 of those other 50 courses and was always still looking for more information.

I can’t say that WordPress Bootcamp 101 is the definitive guide to WordPress, but it does cover 95% of what is important to the average user.

I Don’t Want Know How To Or Want To Learn How To Program!

Great! I hear that. This course has minimum code shown. Only in important, want learn areas, do I delve a little bit into the code. But all unnecessary, if you wish.

Can I Make Money With This Course?

Yes and Yes! The first yes is  because I start the course showing different ideas and sites that I’ve created with WordPress. I’m currently gleaning an easy income from these sites and as time marches on it only gets better and better!

On the second yes, I will be soon permitting affiliate sales to this course. Again, I believe that it’s a great course and an affiliate has the ability to make up to 40% of the cost of the course.

Will It Be Kept Up To Date?

Absolutely. I want it to reflect changes that could occur to WordPress. It is currently written to version 2.9.x, but I also know that version 3.x is just around the corner.

What Will I know Once I’m Done WordPress Bootcamp 101?

You will have a firm grounding of the essentials to WordPress. Plus I’ve encluded special sections showing techniques that WordPress owners could encounter.

For example, how to install a site. How to move a site. What are the best plugins? What if I’m hacked?

Plus, you’ll know the difference between differen things in WordPress. For example, how to make WordPress come across more as a corporate or static site with a blog section is covered.

Click Here for more information on WordPress Bootcamp 101

I’m pretty good at keeping my web real estate safe from criminals but every once in a while someone finds a way to get in still.

Yesterday, I discovered about 20 of my WordPress web sites were compromised by an aspiring hacker. He or she may think it’s great fun and think that they have a right to hack web sites, but to me they are criminals.

They are no different to someone who skulks into your house at night to steal your jewelry. They hid behind the covers of the Internet, looking for someone to deface.

But in the end, the joke is on them. If you want to protect yourself from this sort of criminal intent, I have a few great suggestions for you.

First, take the time to get to know your hosting company’s plan of backup for your web sites. Make sure they are running a good backup plan and also ensure you know how to use it to recover your sites quickly.

My recommendation is to align yourself who offers Cpanel hosting as well as a backup product within their Cpanel called R1Soft Restore Backups. This backup system is very good and very simple to use.

You will normally find that a hacker will compromise all of the web sites that you host on a single Cpanel install, so you can perform a full cpanel recovery of the site using R1Soft. Again, consult with your local web hosting provider.

If you are looking for a good hosting provider, here’s one that I recommend, Scala Hosting. I’ve been with these folks now for about a year and I’ve had stellar service from them. And their backup system is very good and as I describe here.

Next, to stop hackers from hacking your site, make sure you have updated all of your WordPress plugins and your core WordPress install to the latest version.

I have my set to the latest, but was still cracked. It looked like the hacker either used a brute force admin password guessing and/or a password reset hack to cause my admin password to be compromised.

So, the second thing I recommend you do is create a new admin user, giving them full admin access with a complex password, then delete the admin user.

This form of attack is immediately nullified.

Finally, one final thing you can do is use the power of .htaccess files to limit access to your wp-admin folder on your WordPress install to your local IP address. This is getting a little complex for the average web master or internet marketer, but if you want as much protection as possible, you need to perform this step to.

If you are interested in form of protect and be forewarned you can lock yourself out of your sites, you can look to many great web sites, like Blog Security. The author’s posting is two years old, but still very relevant.

Keep your WordPress sites safe from hacker, crackers and script kiddies. No matter what their name, they are criminals. They want to rob you of your web sites and the earnings that you could be making with them.

Take the time to take security seriously. Fixing 200 web sites or even just one can be painful if you don’t plan for this problem in advanced.

Taking the time to learn Wordpress can benefit you substantually. Let me tell you my journey with its trials on learning wordpress.

I started with this open source software back in April 2008. So, not too long ago. I’m not a software developer but I do have a keen interest in computers, so many you could call that an advantage.

Anyhow, I looked at content management systems, as I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel from scratch each and every time I wanted to setup a website. And I intended to light up many of them.

I wanted something that ran the basics pretty much for me. Things like site framework, menuing and easy content insersion. That’s about it. It was at a time when I knew very little about search engine optimization, and the such.

So, I started with other blog and content management systems and eventually settled upon the task to learn wordpress. Why? It was probably one of the most popular at the time. The other package I did look at was Joomla. But at that time, there was a split between coders with Joomla and the future was just a tad uncertain.

So, that was another factor that drove me to Wordpress. Soon, I found that Wordpress was very liked by Google, so that was kind of the nail in the coffin, so to speak, for me to settle upon Wordpress.

Now, to learn wordpress, it is going to be a bit of a time effort. Yes, you can hire others to do the whole setup, but only you will do the very best job. My recommendation is to take the time to learn wordpress as you build wordpress sites, and eventually farm out these jobs to your exact specifications.

Nice thing too, is that there is a lot of automation tools to do automated installs and final settings. I only use automated tools now.

I’m going to be reflecting back on courses that I took when I started to learn wordpress and see if I can get the rights to them and find a way to get them to you, the reader. Reason why is if you go to wordpress.org, you will be confused.

I was very confused about wordpress.org. Unfortunately, they’ve been using Wordpress way too long and there is very little in the way of hand holding for the newbie.

Next, it’s worth your while to look into getting an older license of Photoshop. Yes, yes, you can use other graphics packages, but you’ll find ten times more free tutorials on photoshop then you ever will on any other graphics package.

Photoshop is a bit of a leap in the beginning, but you can learn it too.

So have I made you nervous yet? Don’t be. It really is all possible. If graphics work is not your passion at all, getting this hired out to others is relatively easy. And in the beginning, your sites don’t have to look extremely polished. 

I’ve looked back on my original sites and wow, are they ugly! But they do bring in a bit of cash each and every month. I’ve actually taken some of my original sites that were not very good looking and given them a facelift. With Wordpress, it’s easy.

Also, keep your daytime job while you learn these new skills. Your skill set could take a year or two to develop to the point where you will be doing well on the Internet. I’m currently recommending several great products in my review section and soon I’ll be releasing my own video product that ties up a lot of the loose ends.

This way, a newbie can really excel very quickly!

So, don’t let Wordpress get you down. All journeys start with the first step, then the next step and the next. But you do get there. Be patient with yourself and make sure you enjoy your time when you decide to learn wordpress!