Currently I manage the hosting account through Web Host Manager, so here’s the steps for using WHM:

Step 1 – Setup Primary Account

1. Point the ‘A’ record of the auxiliary domain to the same IP address as the primary domain
2. Setup a standard cPanel account for the primary domain

Step 2 – Park Auxiliary Domains

1. In WHM Select ‘Park a Domain’
2. Select the primary domain from the list that you want to park the auxiliary domain on top of.
3. Enter the auxiliary domain in the ‘Domain to Park’ field.
4. Click ‘Submit’
5. Repeat these steps in this section for all auxiliary domains

Now that that is done and the change is propagated, if you go to the auxiliary domain in your browser, it will show the same website files (since both domains are now using the same filespace) but the auxiliary domain name will still be in the address bar.  Although functional, this will not work for SEO purposes.  Google will most likely eventually find that the auxiliary website is an exact duplicate of the primary website and actually penalize you for it.  So as it so often does, .htaccess to the rescue!

Step 3 – Setup .htaccess Domain 301 Redirect

In short, copy/paste the following code into your .htaccess file.  It will automatically redirect any domain that does not match the primary domain to the primary domain by way of a 301 Redirect

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.newdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Login as WordPress Admin

Go to Products–>Add New

Step 1 – Add Product Information

1. Enter name of product in ‘title’
2. Enter description of product in editor area
3. Tag product to one or more categories
4. If adding a new category, make certain that you assign it to the correct parent category.
5. Enter Price the price of the product.  You may also enter a sale price if this item is currently on sale.
6. Enter Shipping Weight and Dimensions or alternatively set a Flat Rate shipping amount for this product.  Make sure these setting are accurate to ensure a reliable shipping estimate for the customer at checkout time.
7. Optionally enter SKU under Stock Control if you want the system to track inventory for this product.
8. Taxes are typically setup in the Store Configuration and calculated automatically during the checkout process.

Step 2 – Adding Product Images

1. Under ‘Product Images’ tab, click ‘Manage Product Images’.
2. Choose the ‘From Computer’ tab
3. Click ‘Select Files’ and choose one or more files you have stored on your hard drive
4. Enter a short description of the product in the ‘Alternate Text’ field. Be sure to include a keyword or two for Search Engine Optimization purposes.
5. Click the ‘Use as Product Thumbnail’ link
6. Click ‘Save Changes’
7. Exit by clicking outside the ‘Manage Your Product Images’ box

Click ‘Publish’ to add the product to your store, or select ‘Save Draft’ if you want to save changes, to publish later. Once saved you can click ‘View Product’ to view the item in the store as a customer sees it.

1. monitors are different sizes which affects the viewable window size
2. a user can set a monitor to different resolutions which affects the viewable window size drastically
3. some users increase the font size within their browser settings, which affects the viewable window size
4. many users (unfortunately) install 1-3 toolbars on top of their browser, which eat up a significant amount of displayable ‘real estate’.

They might not like scrolling, but they will hate the alternatives!

Sometimes those reasons still aren’t enough to convince a client that this is a bad idea, so have them consider the alternatives:

1. to have VERY little content – which isn’t the case for most sites.  This would have to be the case for ALL pages if you care anything for consistency in your design.
2. having a window scroll within a window – which defeats the purpose and makes it a very unfriendly experience, particularly for mobile devices.
3. scroll horizontally, which is obviously not a natural experience for most users.

Step 1 – Edit WordPress media.php

Edit the WordPress file /wp-includes/media.php and edit starting on line 422:
$newimage = wp_imagecreatetruecolor( $dst_w, $dst_h );
if(IMAGETYPE_GIF == $orig_type){
$black=imagecolorallocate($image, 0,0,0);
imagecolortransparent($image, $black);
}
imagecopyresampled( $newimage, $image, $dst_x, $dst_y, $src_x, $src_y, $dst_w, $dst_h, $src_w, $src_h);

This doesn’t preserve the tranparency, but sets the black background in the image to transparent just before the thumbnail is created. FYI, this will most likely be overwritten next time you update WordPress.

Step 2 – Regenerate Thumbnails

Step 1 only covers thumbnails that will be created in the future, so we need to regenerate the thumbnails. Luckily, you don’t have to do all of this manually, you can install the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. Once you run that plugin, all your thumbnails should be fixed!

Sources: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/13461

This article is intended for people who use a content management system like WordPress to blog or create & maintain your website, but the overall concepts apply to all web design, regardless of what platform you use to create/manage your website.

Goals

1. Create an ideal webpage structure for easy reading
2. Maintain style consistency throughout entire site
3. Help search engines understand what the web page is about

Structure your Web Page Like a Newspaper Article

A few key points:

• The most important story a newspaper has is on the front page (think home page).  Other articles follow in order of importance.
• If you were to read only the headings and subheadings of newspaper articles, you would have a fairly decent idea of what the story is about.  If you read the paragraphs below the headings, you get more detailed information as you go.

Use Heading Tags for SEO & Readability

Search engines look at your web page in a similar way – they assume if you put something in a heading tag (h1, h2, etc) then it’s probably important, and is a good indicator on what your web page is about.

If you use a content management system like WordPress, and you just make some words a different color and bigger, that doesn’t make it a heading (as far as a web designer or search engine sees things).  You must actually declare it as a heading tag, which is usually available under the ‘Format’ menu in the editor.

To create a heading tag:

1. Highlight the words you want to make a heading
2. Go to ‘Format’
3. Select the desired heading tag

Typically you have the options for H1 (main heading) all the way through H6 (subheadings).

Why Using Heading Tags vs Manually Styling is Better

• Search engines won’t recognize it as being important text in relation to other paragraph text surrounding it.
• Far more effort involved up front
• Far more effort involved if you decide to change the color of every heading site-wide
• Sloppy HTML

But How Can I Change the Color/Font/Size of the Headings?

Typically, that is a web designer’s job.  The font, color, size, etc of headings are declared in the cascading style sheets for the website.  A style sheet is a separate file that’s included on every page of your website that says, for example: “style all H1 tags as Times New Roman, 20px and blue”.

If you wrap all your main headings and subheadings in heading tags, your web designer can quickly & easily change the color, size, etc of all the heading tags for your entire site in one place, which is certainly easier than going through every single page of your website.

Companion Video

I created a companion video for this tutorial – looking to improve it over time, but this should help out!

If you have a website design that you think should be showcased on the site, they have a submit form where you can enter your design for consideration.

To unlock your Google Apps account, go to: https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha?, fill out the Captcha, and your account should unlock.

Feel free to leave comments or possible reasons for why a Google Apps account might get locked.

Customer Service

One of the huge benefits has been their customer service.  Any time I need help with server configuration I can just call them up.  Their techs are very knowledgable, will spend as much time as it takes to help you out, and if they don’t know the answer, they find someone who does.  I know it sounds simple, but I can’t begin to tell you the amount of disinformation I’ve received from other companies when their tech wants to hide the fact that they don’t know the answer.

Pricing

Their pricing structure is totally based on usage, and since you can scale up or down at any time, nothing goes to waste.  Storm on Demand accounts are billed by the minute, which can be useful if you need a temporary bump in bandwidth or storage. Check out their plans and pricing here.

Performance

I don’t have any benchmark data, but I can tell you that the overall speed and performance of a Storm on Demand account blows away your typical shared hosting account.

The fix that is quoted on so many blogs was to delete the wp-content/uploads folder and try again, which never worked for me.  I then stumbled upon a blog which pointed me the right direction – change your server configuration to use  proFTP instead of pureFTPd.   I have a Storm on Demand account (Through Liquid Web) and was able to change this in WebHost Manager in under a minute.  Violia!  Now I’m able to do auto updates as intended!

Cudos to Darcy for figuring this one out!  View source

For example, ‘The Big Lebowski’ ought to appear in the B’s, but if you simply did this query, it will show up in the T’s.

SELECT `id`, `title` FROM `movies` ORDER BY `title`;

With a little MYSQL magic, we can sort alphabetically by title, ignoring any leading articles, while still preserving the full title.

SELECT `id`, `title` FROM `movies` ORDER BY TRIM(LEADING 'a ' FROM TRIM(LEADING 'an ' FROM TRIM(LEADING 'the ' FROM LOWER(`title`))));

Basically the ORDER portion of the query just trims off any instances of ‘a’, ‘an’ or ‘the’ (case insensitive) to get the desired order, but the column `movies` will still return the full, unaltered title.