There are two domains that have been sitting in my registrar account for quite a while now, but I haven’t done anything with them.  The finished sites are BassOutfitter.com and FanChair.com – they are build using the same process, so don’t expect much difference (it’s just a splash page, rememter).

So why should you take the time to set something like this up?  Several reasons:

• Domain age – the age of a domain is considered to be a small factor for SEO.  All things equal, take two domains targeted for the same keyword, and the older domain will rank higher.  Of course all things are never equal, but every little bit you can do helps when your are trying to rank well in the SERPS.
• Content – I can provide a small amount of targeted content on the site.  It’s just the domain name in an H1 tag, META info, and a couple of paragraphs, but that’s all I need right now to put three good, targeted keywords on the page several times.
• I am collecting email addresses.  Opt-in email lists are a great way to increase revenue for your site.  By building a targeted email list, you can greatly increase your profit per visitor by gathering long-term, repeat customers.
• I’m too busy right now.  Yep, but one site is an extension of work I’m already doing… the next evolution, if you will.  The other is a business idea that I’ve been thinking about for years, and am very excited about once I can get to it.

The Rundown:

Here’s a quick step-by-step to tell you exactly what I did.  Hopefully you can put this to good use on some of your dormant domains.

1. Install Wordpress & do the standard config stuff (permalinks, blog name, analytics & other basic stuff)
2. Install a Theme I like – I chose one that would have a good, strong content page with a wigitized sidebar and footer.
3. Build my “Action Page” – Create a new page and put a little content telling users that visit the site what is is about, when it’s coming, and a call to action.  Mine was sign up for an email when the site launches.
4. Set Static Page – Go to Settings > Reading and set the front page to your Action page.
5. Remove Navigation – You don’t want any other pages on the site – only the one with the call to action.
6. Install Opt-In Plugin – Set up one widget that can collect email addresses.  MailChimp has a good Wordpress plugin.  Then set this as the only widget in the sidebar.

That’s it. Now you have a great looking placement page that will work for you collecting email addresses while you build your site.  Check mine out here:

BassOutfitter.com - Bass Outfitter will carry the stuff that we use personally and recommend. Great fishing gear, killer lures, awesome accessories, and all the stuff you need to catch a lunker.

FanChair.com – Fan Chair will bring you the best stadium seat available.

1. Changed jobs
2. Built & launched 3 WordPress blogs and 2 Magento stores.
3. Working on a rebuild of 2 ecommerce sites I own & building a brand new ecommerce store for a great domain I picked up.
4. Incorporated my business and built a corporate site for that.
5. Managed a ton of advertising spend for my clients
6. And a spent a ton of time with my family – both happy and sad situations.

But MattMauldin.com has been neglected.  The first nine months of 2009 went pretty well, and I like writing because it keeps me on the lookout for interesting topics when I would otherwise be playing Brickbreaker on the Blackberry.  Even my twitter account was quiet.

Here are a few New Year’s Resolutions I have for MattMauldin.com:

• On good post per month – “good” is subjective and the only point of view that counts is mine.
• 5 tweets per week minimum – because a list of tweets are posted here weekly, as you can tell for the previous several pages.
• Finish the Wheel of Time posts by Spring – This post topic was leading up to A Memory of Light (see here), but I didn’t complete all the posts. I did, however, read all the books (yay for me).
• Updates on MattMauldin.com – Find a replacement plugin for Simple Tags unless it is updated in the next week or so because it doesn’t work with WP 2.9; and find a replacement plugin for Twitter Tools because it skips weeks or double posts for a single week.  Any suggestions?
• Begin sharing a little more about items 1 through 5 above.  Sorry, #6 is all mine.

OK, now the goals are specific, written, and measurable.  We’ll see how they go.

The Old GuideBrooksRogers.com:

New and Improved GuideBrooksRogers.com:

The site is built on WordPress to give Brooks great control over the content.  Brooks regularly writes new fishing reports and WordPress is excellent for this because each new fishing report will be written as a blog post.  Most of the new site is an improvement over the old site, without a lot of new features.  But focus was given to usability of the site, effective navigation and internal linking, and especially the SEO-ability to get better rankings in the search engines.  Here’s the top features or improvements of the site:

• Fishing Reports on the home page – it’s currently set to show the most recent three posts.  If Brooks posts two or three fishing reports a month, then each post will move off the home page about the time the fishing patterns change.
• Date stamped posts – fishing is very seasonal, so archiving by date is perfect way to save fishing information from past years.
• Archived posts – on Brooks’ previous site only one fishing report was on the site at a time.  This limited amount of content really didn’t do so well for SEO.  So having the additional content of past fishing reports on the site should help Brooks out in the rankings.
• Comments – Brooks takes hundreds of people out on Lake Fork each year.  The Comment system will allow these people to comment on Brooks’ work and on their experience.  His old site didn’t have a comment feature, so I think this will be an excellent improvement.
• Videos in Posts – Brooks reguarly does interviews with other guides about Lake Fork, so it was important that he had the ability to post videos of these fishing reports on his site also.
• New Photo Gallery – The new photo gallery uses the highslide method of displaying images.  It’s much better than the old version because some of these pics are really big.  It’s easy to go from one to the next and quickly view each big bass picture.
• Book a Fishing Trip – Now you can book your guided bass fishing trip through GuideBrooksRogers.com.  It’s often hard to firm up plans for a trip like this, so payment and scheduling is still done offline for the customers convenience.  Once a trip is booked online, Brooks will personally contact each of his customers to work out the detalis (like I said, he’s a great bass guide).
• Lake Fork Info – The site also has a tie to Weather.com to show the next few days of weather on the lake, and an interactive map of the lake that customers can easily zoom in and move around on to see lake details.

Overall I’m very happy with this site.  More importantly, Brooks is happy with the site.  This site will be easier to read and use for Brooks’ customers, easier for him to maintain using the WordPress admin, and should provide better rankings in the search engines.

More Screenshots:

Book a Trip on GuideBrooksRogers.com

Example of a Video Report (Brooks is on the left)

See the new site at GuideBrooksRogers.com.

I was playing around with some demo software on a subdirectory and there were a couple of times I typed in the wrong subdomain.  My default 404 error page popped up instead of what I expected.  After this happened a couple of times, it struck me how bland and absolutly useless my error page was. So I found the AskApache Google 404 plugin and just got it configured.

It works great!  See an example of my new 404 error page here,  or here’s a screenshot:

Installation

Easy!

I was able to download, install, and configure the whole plugin in less than 5 minutes.  It does require a Google AJAX Search API, but that’s easy enough to get with your Google account. (If you don’t have a Google account by now, you are seriously behind.)

Here are the install steps:

1. Download and activate the plugin
2. Add your Google API key in the given blank in the settings page and save.
3. Insert a line of PHP code to your 404.php file in your WordPress template, and a couple of lines of code to your .htaccess file.

Be careful, though.  There was an error in the PHP that is given to place into your 404.php file.  It was missing a “?” just before the final “>”.  I’m going to message the plugin author to mention it and to thank him for the great plugin.

Customization

The default width of the search results are 750 px wide with no margin.  I need 600 px wide with a 17px margin on the left.  Thankfully this plugin allows you to easily edit the HTML, CSS and JS that controls the search listing display from within the admin settings page.

I changed this line in the HTML:

<div style="width:750px;overflow:hidden;margin-left:0;">

to this:

<div style="width:600px;overflow:hidden;margin-left:17px;">

That fixed the width of the search results container to fit in my left column, but it also squeesed the text results on top of the video/image listings on the right.  That was easily changed in the CSS.  I found this:

#rDiv {width:500px; min-height:400px;}

and changed it to:

#rDiv {width:450px; min-height:400px;}

And that was it.  Now I’ve got a functional 404 error page that will help visitors reach relevant pages, search engines to find my content easier, and keep me from getting annoyed as much when I type a wrong URL.

Breadcrumb NavXT – Good navigation is incredibly important for a good user experience on any website, especially a blog, and breadcrumbs are one way to improve navigation.  It helps show your visitors see where they are, where they can go, and helps them understand the heirarcht and organization of your site.  This plugin is great for automatically showing a breadcrumb trail on your blog.

All you need to do is install the plugin and copy a simple piece of code into one of the files on your template. It got a great admin to control how the breadcrumb is displayed on your category pages, tag pags, and archive pages.

For this blog design, my index page has a large block above the posts that pushes the content further down the page, so I though it was important that the breadcrumbs NOT show on the home page.  All I did was add an if statement in my main page like this:

<?php if (!( is_home() )) {
breadcrumb code here
} ?>

So my breadcrumbs to be loaded on any page except my home page.  Yep, this little code is more useful than a pocket on a shirt.

Really Simple CAPTCHA – This plugin creates CAPTCHA fields for some added spam protection on your forms.  The contact form I use automatically looks for this plugin and uses it to create the CAPTCHA field.  You can see it in action on my contact page.

ZD YouTube FLV Player -  This is a really simple plugin to use if you want to embedd .flv files or YouTube videos in your posts.  To post any of those, it gives you simple instructions to insert your video:

'ZD YouTube FLV Player' requires either a youtube video URL or FLV URL.

Usage: [zdvideo]url[/zdvideo]

By using this plugin, your video is wrapped in a simple media player.  But the real kicker here is that YouTube videos don’t show the stupid ads or follow-up videos at the end, so only the video you want to show is displayed to your readers.

The ZD Player is great for a rickroll, not that I’d ever do that to you.

Check ya later.

As of the time I write this post, there were 4,245 plugins available for download in the Wordpress Plugin Directory.  So the question is this: How do you decide which Wordpress plugins to use?

MattMauldin.com runs on WordPress 2.7.1 with quite a bit of custom work, but the main functionality on this site comes from my use of 15 Wordpress plugins (at the moment).

15 Best WordPress Plugins (because I use them)

Akismet – Keep your comments spam free (or damn near) with this plugin.  It will automatically remove comments marked as spam from your comment queue.  This plugin has saved me a ton of time weeding through jibberish, stupid “great post, admin” comments and sale notices at oversea pharmacies.  I mean, come on; I don’t want a stupid Viagra ad running on my website (unless it’s from my own affiliate link).

No Self Pings – This plugin keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.  It’s incredibly helpful if you record pingbacks as comments, or if you are trying to manage your internal link juice.

All-in-One SEO Pack – This is the #1 most popular plugin on WordPress.org.  And there’s a reason why: you can manage most of the lacking SEO items for your blog from a single settings page.  Set how your Title and META tags are displayed for each page and post, tag, archive, and category page.  Set the same tags for your home page individually.  Beyond that, you can customize the Title and META tags for each page or post if you choose to.

Google Analytics for WordPress – There are a few other plugins that integrate Google Analytics into your WordPress install, but none are as easy or as configured out-of-the-box as this one.  There’s also a great resource available from Joost de Valk here to help you with some of the more powerful (or complicated) tracking options Google Analytics offers.

Google XML Sitemaps – Keep your XML feed to Google Sitemaps up to date with this easy plugin.  Take some time to set your settings correctly, and then you can forget it – it runs itself.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – Manage your RSS feed with Feedburner.  Then use this plugin to ensure all of the subscribers subscribe through your Feedburner feed so your tracking is accurate.

PS Auto Sitemap – Use this plugin to quickly create a Site Map for your WordPress blog.  It comes installed with several CSS skins you can choose through the admin settings page.  In fact, there are quite a few powerful settings you can choose through the settings page to create a helpful sitemap.

Page Link Manager – Add additional navigation and pagination to your blog.  Although I’ve got an archive, categories, and a tag cloud, I thought it was important to provide the pagination at the bottom of this blog for usability.  The last thing you want is a blog that is difficult to navigate.

WP-PageNavi – This plugin allows you to choose which pages appear in your blog menu if you use the wp_list_pages hook.  It works will with the next plugin.

My Page Order – This plugin provides a drag-and-drop interface for changing the order of your pages.  It’s great to easily manage the menus on your blog.  Use it in combination with the previous plugin and you have almost total control over your blog’s menu.

Simple Tags – Simple Tags offers three powerful new options to manage your tags.

1. Manage your tags: search tags, rename tags, delete, add or edit a tag, change the sort order of your tags, and even see how many times each of your tags are used.
2. Mass Edit your tags: changes tags on multiple posts at once instead of going post by pont – a huge timesaver. and
3. Auto tag: this is by far the most powerful function of this plugin. Choose the tags you expect to repat among your posts and enter them here, then Auto tag will automatically apply them to new posts if they match the headling or content.

Popularity Contest – This plugin scores your posts by calculating the number of comments, links, and a number of other attributes.  You can then show the result in a number of ways.  My footer contains a “Popular Posts” that uses this plugin.  I also use this plugin to help rank my page importance in my XML sitemap.

Twitter Tools – The Twitter Tools plugin is just what I was looking for to integrate my twitter account.  I’ve scheduled a post once per week, early on Monday mornings, that pulls all of my tweets over the past week.  I also use it to post a notification tweet each time I publish a new post.

Contact Form 7 – Create multiple forms with a ton of options for input fields.  You can create forms with text fields, comment boxes, and even CAPTCHA support.  I use it on my contact form, and have used it on other WordPress installs for much more complicated forms with ease.

Note: You will notice that I do not use Sociable.  Instead, I’ve custom coded five social icons that show up inside The Loop beneath each post that allow readers to share my posts on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Facebook.  The only reason I bypassed Sociable is for style.  In many other instances, I’ve used it and it will work just fine.

If you have a suggested plugin, please comment.

Thanks to Fontspace for the free Hard Rock font.

The original blog theme was from Dezzain.  You can find the BoxTube Wordpress Theme here.

UPDATE!

So after just a couple of days with the blog design, I decided that my graphic design skills were easily eclipsed by a pre-made Wordpress template from Web2Feel.com.  So here it is.

I still did some custom work to keep the same social icons beneath each post (on the single post page), and I added the RSS feed and chicklets on the right column.

I also did a new type treatment on my name.  I used the  font Perspective Sans and some colors that matched this theme.  The font has a 115% vertical scale, a 110% horizontal scale, and tracking set at 32.  I also put a white stroke and a subtle drop shadow on the type.

Overall, I’m much happier and expect this theme to remain on MattMauldin.com for quite a while.