This guest post was written by Hayes Potter, the 13 year old web developer and programmer that gives webmasters tips on protecting their website from common hacking techniques. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Today I want to tell you some very simple tips to keep your WordPress site running smoothly and easy ways to keep readers coming back.

First you should always keep your site running well.

• Try to avoid things like “Under Construction” and “Coming Soon!” for pages or new site features.
• Keep everything organized.
• Set categories to divide your posts, don’t cram everything in one page and create multiple pages for more organization.
• Make everything obvious, don’t keep your visitors guessing where the Contact page is.
• Always make sure your site is actually fast and not keeping your visitors waiting at a white page, 6 seconds waiting is fine in life but online it’s like an eternity.

For more in depth help on speeding up your site take a look at my tutorial by clicking here (see there’s another hint, “by clicking here”, easy and simple).

Next keep your readers interested and intrigued about your content.

• Always post top quality content.
• Don’t post about your cat, new boyfriend/girlfriend, or that awesome YouTube video you saw recently.
• Short isn’t bad, sometimes short stories that are to the point are better than long lengthy stories full of unneeded details and side stories.
• Make your articles into a series, keep your readers guessing on what your next article is about, but don’t write enough information in one article or the post is basically obsolete.
• Stick to one niche in your blog. If your blog is about blogging tips, why are you posting about that new computer that just came out?
• If you have a lot to say, say it. Don’t just write the bare minimum as long as the content is relevant.
• Most readers simply scan anything you write, so adding pointless information (even if it somewhat pertains to the article) doesn’t help much.

For some more simple ways to keep your readers visit my tutorial by clicking here.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day! Also a big thanks to Kyle Eslick for having this awesome site.

If you ever visit our actual website, you’ve probably noticed the “Print This” button that we display below each post.  Depending on the type of website or blog you are running, having a button like this may be a good fit for your blog.  I’ve found it to be good to have this button available to readers for any type of website that offers tutorials, recipes, guides, or pretty much anything that might require a visitor to print something you’ve written.

If you think you’d like to offer your readers the option to print something on your blog, here is the code I use on my blogs (uses Javascript):

<a href="javascript:window.print()" rel="nofollow">Print This!</a></span>

It prints the page you are on, so it is probably best to use it mostly on post and pages.  If you place it on the blog’s homepage, it will print the entire homepage, not just that post. 

Do you find you switch WordPress themes a lot?  If you do, Chris Pearson has taken the time to write a great post about using WordPress functions to ease the transition between themes.   The idea is to put all your design elements in one file and then move the file over to your new theme every time you switch, saving you the time of re-coding the specific elements you like to see in your blog’s theme.  

In his post, Chris provides the functions file to get you started, teaches you how to write your own functions, and then explains how to activate and use your new functions. 

I personally have used a functions file on some of my themes, but for me it hasn’t really saved much time.  That is probably because I’ve always prefered to hack my existing theme when I want to see changes, rather than to switch to a completely new theme.   For people that switch themes a lot, a user functions file is definitely something you should consider doing.

If you consider yourself a WordPress freelancer or at least have good enough hacking skills to do some paid work with WordPress, you may be wondering what the best ways are to find work?  

Over at the Planet Ozh blog, Ozh recently gave some great tips on how to find WordPress work.   The first tip?  Subscribe to the WP-Pro mailing list, where job offers are regularly available.   These jobs can range from theme design, coding help, or even basics like installing WordPress. 

Other places he mentions to look:

• Official WordPress jobs board - These boards look pretty busy
• WordPress Job - Aggregates job offers from several freelancers

Your other option is of course to do some work up front and then charge for it, which is how premium theme authors and premium plugin authors make their money.   This way people come to you and they know what they are getting ahead of time. 

Any other good places to find WordPress work?

This guest post was written by Hayes Potter, a 13 year old programmer and web developer that gives webmasters tips on protecting their website from common hacking techniques. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I absolutely love the i3 WordPress theme. I used it for my site for about a month, and I had no problems for what I needed. It features a “mac” look, has the Mac OS X classic background that fades into the mac’s “spotlight blue”. The sidebars are on the left and right side not attached to the middle content. The separate widgets are each in their own little bubble with a mac like toolbar as the header. The theme displays the pages in the middle content column, and this is one of the very rare themes that display the sub-pages very nicely under the page parent. Also you can move around the columns to your liking, so instead of the content being in the middle you can have it off to the right and the sidebars on the left, and vice versa.

If you are on the photos section it would display a small little bar under the pages bar displaying the sub pages, but if you are on the home page it will not display these sub pages. It has a built-in search bar in the top right hand corner, and it looks like the spotlight application in Mac OS X 10.4 and higher, except its black. The only problem I’ve ever had with it is displaying javascript in sidebar, ad- sense would fine, but a simple javascript code would make the sidebar screw up and shift to the bottom of the page. I switched themes because of that and because it is a very popular theme, and I like to switch up my theme every once in a while.

I highly recommend using this theme if you can’t find a better theme for yourself. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!

If your blog has over 100 subscribers on it, it is pretty likely that your blog is probably getting scraped, as they seem to be everywhere anymore.   Hack WordPress currently has 3 blogs scraping its content every time we publish a post, so we’ve become pretty familiar with them.   But that is not actually what I’m referring to when I came up with the title of this post.

What I’m talking about are people that manually reprint an entire post on their “legitimate” blogs.  One blog that has been doing this to me (and I assume others) is a blog called WordPress Collection dot com.  The link was intentionally left out.

The two most recent posts (as of publishing this post) are identical copies of two posts in our archives.  Here are our posts:

• How To: Display the Recent Posts of Specific Categories
• How To: Prevent Google from Indexing Your Images

Now, to be fair, I fully understand when dealing with code that it really doesn’t change, so I have no problem with someone taking one of our code hacks, or someone else’s posts, and publishing it on their blog.  We have done this on occasion, but we always have a fresh post where only the code is the same, and we link to the source.   Unfortunately with this site, it uses the exact same title and exact same content as our posts, word for word.   The only thing I could find changed is the permalink in the code, which was switched to the permalink of their blog.

So, when does content theft go to far?  I’ve never liked scrapers but I have learned to live with them.  They usually only reprint a excerpt of the post and link to the source.  This, however, is going to far in my opinion.   At least change the wording around the code and link to the source.  As a result, this website has been added to my blacklist of sites I don’t visit or link to, etc.

I’ve seen people mention contacting their web hosting as a good method to deal with content theft when something like this gets out of hand.   What methods have you used to deal with content theft?