I am going to be posting more to this blog, using it to give you some little Wordpress tips and tricks that I pick up as I do technical work for my customers.

Today’s tip has to do with a customer wanting to direct customers from a feeder blog Wordpress page, to their main site. Specifically, they wanted the blog menu “Contact Us” and “About Us” pages to go directly to their main site.

Normally, when you create a WP About or Contact page, you place the contact information, or about information directly on that page. But, the customer didn’t want to maintain separate feeder blog contact and about pages, so they want all feeder blog pages to go to their main site.

This is not a particularly difficult thing to do, but it does require manual changes to the menu in the template. I could have modified the template, but I always prefer to make changes like this within the WP framework, so that if the customer changes templates later, the functionality will still work.

Well, for nearly every WP task you want to accomplish, there is a plugin. I found a great Wordpress Redirect Plugin that does exactly what I need it to do.

The plugin presents you with the option to redirect a page, or post, to the URL of your choice, within the page/post edit/add new screen.

The plugin also allows you to open the target page in a new window, it allows you to set the nofollow tag, allows you to show the destination URL, or the blog page/post URL, and allows you to select the redirect type of temporary or permanent.

This is a handy little redirect plugin that I will add to my arsenal of Wordpress plugins.

I am periodically asked by customers if I would build them a custom WP template.  I explain to them that I could build them a custom template for the right price.  But, the better option would be to take a free template that has much of what they want, and then I can modify the template to meet their needs.  This saves my customer money and saves me time.

With all the free templates that are available, it doesn’t take much to make your blog unique from any other blog.

I wanted to show you a few of the blogs that I have worked on lately.  These blogs where created with free WP templates, but have been modified to fit my customer’s needs.  The images below don’t show you the whole picture, you really need to visit the sites to see some of the modifications made.

These are actually a series of sites related to exercising different parts of your body.

Exercises for Arms

Exercises for Arms

The blog was designed to look more like a normal HTML type of site instead of a blog.

This blog is a modified free template, with some additional features like the Relationship Q&A, plus a readable sitemap and a special widget designed just for this site.

Get Back Together Tips

Relationship Blog

This site is very similar to the above, except it includes an article on the main page, with article summaries of two different categories at the bottom of the page.

Pulsatile Tinnitus Help

Tinnitus Help

These are just a few examples of some of the things that can be done with free wp templates.

If you would like me to customize your blog to suit your needs (using a free template to save you money), contact my Helpdesk and let me know how I can serve you.

At times the technical details of doing things online can be overwhelming.

There are a lot of people online who have a lot of great strengths, but doing technical things is just not one of their strengths.

If you have problems handling technical things, that’s okay.  You probably weren’t wired to be a technical person, you were given other talents.

Maybe you are good at doing technical things with your hands, but when it comes to online technical things, well those things just don’t make sense.

Maybe it just takes too much of your time to do the technical type things, and that takes you away from things that you do better.

Perhaps you provide online services to customers and you need a tech guy to take care of some of the technical issues.

If any of the above apply to you, I can help – let me help you by being your online technical help guy.

Here are some of the things I can do for you:

Websites
Install your website
Modify your website
Search Engine Optimize (SEO) your website
Give you ideas on how you can market your website
Add newsletter lead capture forms

Wordpress Blogs
Install your blog
Modify your blog
Install different themes and plugins
Make template changes
Update your blog to the latest version
Search Engine Optimize (SEO) your blog
Give you ideas on how you can market your blog

PHP Scripts
Install scripts
Modify scripts
Create small scripts

What I don’t/won’t do
PC support
Program large scripts (Too time consuming)
Program in languages other than PHP (PHP is the small business, online marketing programming language of choice.)

My current hourly rate is $30 per hour.

If you’re looking for online technical help – I’m your The Online Tech Guy!

When you’re ready for some technical help, goto my Helpdesk, choose “Technical Work Request” and let me know how I can serve you.

Mike