You know that searching for family fun often returns rubbish, and all the best fun and games sites seem to be hidden away. Perhaps it is because the best games players are not always the best marketeers.
I don’t claim to be the best marketeer, but I do know a bit about playing the search game - and I don’t mean hide ‘n’ seek :-). There are lots of plugins to help with search engine optimization, and my choices are:
- Tags in the Head
- Though not as important to the SEO game as they were, keyword and description tags are still useful.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior
- The best way for managing keywords. It isn’t just about adding keywords for search engines - it’s more about tagging related content so that you can find everything that interests you. I like playing tag.
- Google (XML) Sitemaps
- Lets Google, Yahoo and Ask know about our fun and games
- Google Sitemaps - UTW Tag Addon
- Lets the 2 above play together
And yes, I know that the best way to optimize my family fun website, is not to start with several posts about building a website, but I just wanted a bit of fun. Sometimes I hate playing by the rules.
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You probably know that you can share your family fun ideas and experiences simply by adding a comment below for the whole world to see. Sometimes you want to maintain privacy.
To avoid the spamming game, I don’t publish my email address. You can still share your family fun and games by sending me a message on my Contact Page. I always play fair, and never send your email address to anybody else. You can see more details about this in my Privacy Policy.
My contact form was made much easier when I installed the Dagon Design Form Mailer plugin. So now you’ve no excuse for not sharing all your family fun ideas.
To make it easier for me to share my fun and games, I also installed FeedBurner FeedSmith.
So I can easily tell you about all related family fun news and stuff to play with, I installed aLinks, which makes linking to favorite sites a piece of cake.
Finally, no article about sharing family fun would be complete without Share This, which provides that lovely green button that you can play with now. Go on - press it. You know you want to.
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There are hundreds of plugins for WordPress. Ones that keep spam out are top of my list - there’s no fun in a polluted blog.
It’s easy to forget about spam comments until they start playing around on your blog. Best to get some anti-spam protection plugged in as soon as you can, and stop spam games before they start.
Anti-Spam Plugins
Several tried and tested extra goodies for various reasons. Listed in no particular order.
- Spam Karma
- This add-on is very good at stopping most spam. It uses a variety of filters to keep out most of the bad guys. For belt and braces, I add a couple more.
- Akismet
- This is the most common anti-spam - it ships with WordPress, though not everybody activates it. You should.
- Bad Behavior
- Good one, this. It watches for any strange, spam-like activity, and won’t let them play. Only keeps out the bad guys - good ones like you can still come and play.
I’ll be playing around with more plug-ins soon.
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No big fanfare, just a gentle start, mainly off topic, to get the Friendly Family Fun blog rolling with some acknowledgments.
About Page next (when categories started) to test entire look and feel before introducing plugins.
Start with Theme introduction - reference back to authors, and possibly announce in their blog.
Acknowledgements
First load your WordPress. See foot of every page for references.
After setting a few simple options, it’s time for a little polish in the Look ‘N’ Feel department…
Theme
I find the K2 theme very easy to work with and pleasing on the eye. It has styles that are quite easy to change. I called my style for this freedly and again it links at the bottom of each page (until I get round to replacing the standard footer)
To top the theme off with a decent logo, I took a public domain image from http://www.ready.gov/kids/step1/index.html. At least I assume it’s public domain (I’ve emailed them to confirm it).
Edit: They’ve asked me not to use it, so there is a temporary pic until I can find / draw something better. If you have one, please can I have it?
Time for the pub now. Plugins to plug in tomorrow, starting with Spam Karma.
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