Review: WordPress for Business Bloggers

 

I was sent a free review copy of WordPress for Business Bloggers as an ebook, and I must say I’m impressed.

Promote and grow your WordPress blog with advanced plug-ins, analytics, advertising, and SEO.

In 356 pages the author, Paul Thewlis, presents a great deal of very useful information, not just for business bloggers.

The book is very readable, clearly presented and usefully divided into chapters that include planning a blog, some basic CSS and HTML, how to install and set up a webserver on your own computer using XAMPP, how to handle images, video and text content, promoting a blog and even how to (maybe) make some money with it.

I expected the book to stop there, but Thewlis continued with some handy information about what to do if your blog enjoys great success and booming growth.

Each chapter includes useful, practical information that explains how to set things up, how to install and configure relevant plugins, what settings to put in place for success.

Very often I find materials that teach about web topics completely overlook the need to use valid and accessible coding and other techniques, but Thewlis was on the ball in that area too.

It was a bit disappointing that the links to useful resources weren’t clickable, but it was easy to copy them and paste into my web browser. Similarly, I was able to copy code samples from the ebook and paste into relevant places on my test blog.

Although WordPress has moved on to version 2.7.1 and the book was written for 2.6, it didn’t matter. The material he covers hasn’t been affected by changes in WordPress.

As someone who already knows and uses WordPress, I found some new and useful information — there are a few bits and pieces I’ll be adding to my own live blogs based on what I’ve learned here.

I think a business owner who is new to blogging will need to work slowly and carefully through the book. It provides good starting points, such as the introduction to CSS and HTML, but a blogger who doesn’t already understand coding will want to read and learn more about these things from other sources.

I found the information on Goole Analytics and Feedburner particularly interesting, along with the detailed handling of Search Engine Optimisation.

I think this work is a useful addition to any WordPress blogger’s library.

A note about the ebook: I was easily able to put the ebook on my iPod using Stanza, but although it was readable, it wasn’t a great experience. Headings and paragraphs all merged and the page footer, containing copyright information appeared on each page in an intrusive manner. Still, it was better then those ebooks from other publishers that prevent you from putting the work on an iPod at all.

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Tagged as: business, ebooks