Blog
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I have several people say they have left comments on my log page, but they do not show up…help?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi Kristi. I looked at your blog and your settings and it looks like everything is set up properly to allow comments. I just left two test comments, one logged into my own wordpress.com account, and another as a not-logged-in visitor on this post: http://kristifosterphotography.com/2013/10/01/commision-work/ *
You can see that they both comments went through just fine, weren’t held for moderation or anything. I’m wondering what exactly the people who say they can’t comment are seeing. Are they trying to leave a comment without providing an email address? Are they filling in the whole form and their browser is eating it? Without knowing what they are seeing/experiencing I’m not really able to troubleshoot further, since everything seems to work just fine. If you could ask them to send you detailed descriptions of what happened when they tried to comment we could use that information to take another look.
*Side Note: Looks like you misspelled “commission” when you first created the post but fixed it in the title. It’s still misspelled in the permalink (the URL), because that gets saved right away, before you publish the post. If you ever need to edit the permalink in a case like this, it’s easy to do. Directions and screenshot walkthrough here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/new-post-screen/#post-title-and-permalink-url
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(P.S. Go ahead and delete those comments I made. Just left them there so you can see for yourself.)
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awesome, thank you for your imput. Not sure what is happening, I just had two people tell me they commented and I couldn’t see them. It’s possible they meant they commented on FB because I share it there too. This social media stuff is all new…so I”m learning. Thanks, I will check with them to clarify.
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Ah, yeah, if it was Facebook it wouldn’t show up on the blog, just on the facebook page. If you get any new info from them and it is on the actual blog, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
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thank you will do. I’ll check with them. If I get people to actually make comments on my blog I may faint :)
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while you are here….I am taking a marketing class and they suggest I switch my website to wordpress.org instead of having it wordpress.com….for better SEO and plug ins. for me I read SEO blah blah blah :). Would it be better for me to have a wordpress.com site?
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It depends on what you want to do with your site. I will say that most marketing/SEO gurus give advice that I personally disagree with. I’ve been working with WordPress for years (I ran the .org core development team for almost 5 years and currently oversee the contributor community — I’m not biased against .org) and I have seen over and over people getting disappointed after trying to boost SEO with plugins and tricks. SEO comes down to some pretty basic things:
– Write good content. Include images and/or video when appropriate.
– Write good, descriptive headlines. Skip the clever in favor of the informative.
– Post regularly. Google likes knowing that a site is maintained.
– Use WordPress. .com or .org doesn’t matter, as both use the same engine for semantic markup.
– Use a fast-loading theme. Google likes sites that load quickly. In this, .com does well, we have very fast stuff and whole teams continually optimizing things.WordPress.com, as one of the biggest sites in the world, gives you an automatic SEO boost. I do recommend using your own domain and mapping it (you’re already doing this). Otherwise the only reason I would suggest going self-hosted would be if you wanted to run a store (.com doesn’t support that, which requires a plugin), or if there’s something else very specific to a plugin that you want that we don’t have. .com runs a lot of plugins already, they’re just in the dashboard as if they’re regular features.
If there are specific features you’re thinking about, if you tell me what they are, I’d be happy to tell you if you can do it on .com or if you should think about switching over to self-hosted WordPress. It’s not hard to do, and it does give you more freedom to tinker if you enjoy the technical side. If you just want your site to work without your attention so you can focus on your content, staying on .com might be a better fit.
(For the record, I have sites both on .com and self-hosted.)
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thank you, that is all VERY helpful. Honestly this social media stuff is overwhelming. The woman teaching the class says we need yoast for SEO and gravity forms to get people to sign up for a newsletter, hence why I needed .org for those capabilities. But to tell you the truth I get a lot of referrals from word of mouth. If someone searches for st. Louis bar mitzvah photographer I come up first on the web. weddings would be really hard not matter what because there are so many. so I think I will stick with the way I’m using it now. I may at some point buy a template so I can customize a little more for say a nicer slide show on my gallery pages and a page that the home is a photo underlay with the text on top of the photo instead of the way I have it now. I do think my home page is lacking but I don’t think it’s that bad…I hope it’s not. My main goal is to have people want to hire me after they see my website, of course and I’m not sure I’m there yet with the theme but I haven’t found anything I like any better yet. so hard :)
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Since I know the people behind both of those plugins and am intimate with how they work, I feel pretty confident in answering. :)
Yoast SEO (made by a man named Joost, pronounced yoast) is one of those plugins all the SEO people tell you that you need (that or All-in-One SEO by Michael Torbert and Semper Fi). If you follow the rules I outlined before, and don’t overdo it on tags (no more than 5-7 per post, generally, and keep it specific), those plugins won’t necessarily do much to your ranking. They don’t hurt, but good content and structure trumps all.
Re gravity forms and newsletters… it depends on what you want exactly. Gravity Forms is a commercial plugin that is hugely customizable for all sorts of things, though then you’d run a newsletter through a third-party service like mailchimp. Those are both great services, if you need that level of customization and control. If you don’t, here’s what you can do in that vein on wordpress.com:
- Blog subscriptions: Enable this feature and people can sign up to get your blog posts by email or in the wordpress.com Reader. This feature is so popular that self-hosted blogs use the Jetpack plugin to get it from wordpress.com. It’s not a separate newsletter, it’s your actual blog posts.
- Contact Forms: These are built in as well, and offer a handful of question types (there are more types in Gravity Forms). For submissions are sent to you by email and are also readable in your wordpress.com dashboard in the Feedbacks section.
If you are interested in either of those features, here are the tutorials:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact-form/You can use a background image on a lot of our free themes (Appearance -> Background), so you probably don’t need to buy one to get that look. Many of the newer themes also use a really nice gallery layout with different sizes and such, which I personally like better than having the slideshow embedded. When you click on an image it can launch a bigger slideshow then anyway. But getting your content settled and getting more comfortable with that is the best first step.
You might consider joining the St Louis WordPress meetup group… you could meet some people there that would probably be happy to help you learn as you go. http://www.meetup.com/stlwordpress/
Good luck!
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thank you so much, you have been extremely helpful! I will look into all this tomorrow when I have more time. I feel much better now.
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