 Hola, bueno, buenas tardes. Voy a dar la charla en inglés porque puedo explicarme mejor, así. Pero si después tenéis algunas preguntas, estoy aquí. Bueno, my name is Jean Gallia. I come from Malta, which is the silent here. For those of you who don't know where it is, it's the small point right here below Italy. I'm a WordPress developer and also a blogger. Where do I blog? Basically on WPMare.com, which is the site I'll be speaking about today. So it's the site here. For those of you who haven't been on it yet. So basically what I blog about here is about plugins, themes. And also we have a section about WordPress news. And also some jobs, which we post under the jobs menu item. I'm going to talk today about, I'm going to divide the talk into two parts. The first part will be about the blogging aspect of WPMare. And the second part will be more about the technical aspect. So hopefully all of you who are here will take something out of it, either from the blogging aspect or from more developers or technical side. So starting from how I started off WPMare. So I've been working with WordPress for the last couple of years. But in 2010-10, I was really concentrating all my efforts on WordPress as in developing client sites. So I needed a place to post all the ideas and research which I was gaining by doing these projects. I was obviously seeing other websites such as WPcandy, WPrecipes and WPMu, which were posting very good articles. And I decided to build something similar. Of course, at the start it was just a place for me to store information that I could come across later. Since I wanted to focus on the content, I built a team using a ready-made team, which was the prototype team, which I got from Justin Tedlock's team hybrid club, which is an excellent place for anyone who wants to join a team club. You can also find a forum there which you can learn a lot from because you can also ask questions about WordPress in general. So as the months passed by, the site started growing, started getting more visitors. So I decided to get a bit more into it and put more effort. So I started learning about SEO techniques, like putting descriptions for each post, using tags, things like that. I also started to involve guest writers, as I wanted to make it more of a community blog. And also to gain more visibility, I started commenting on other blogs, some of the blogs I mentioned earlier and even others. Something that I enjoyed and I still enjoy is interviewing other WordPress developers. And having a blog such as this one really helps you to get to know other developers in the industry much more easily than if you had only your small site which doesn't deal with WordPress. So I recommend all of you to participate more in the community. Where do we get our visitors from? Well, the main source of visitors was Twitter. Obviously the social networks are essential when you have a blog. But Twitter was the one which got us the most visitors. Then came also Facebook and LinkedIn. Also something which is important I feel is RSS, the feeds via FeedBurner. A lot of people sign up using the email subscription button so they can receive our posts directly when they are published. Another thing which I use to get more visitors involved is competitions. Sometimes, especially when we do interviews, the developer usually offers us a few giveaways. So I'm using Graphilcopter which is a service which I like because we can attach actions for people to participate in a competition. For example, at the moment, if you go on wpmair.com, we have an article, an interview with Andrew Powers of PageLines and we're giving away one PageLines developer license. To enter the competition, the visitors must either tell us why they want to win it or also follow wpmair on Facebook or other similar actions. So Graphilcopter is a free service which lets you do this. Now, as all of you who are developers know, we're always looking for a way to make our site better, right? So for me, it's the same thing. With wpmair, I'm always thinking about how to improve it. What I would like to improve is branding. As you've seen, I've just used the normal default template. I haven't been doing any branding itself, like logos or a team, a custom team. So we're thinking about doing a responsive custom team and we also have a new logo which has been finished last week, actually. It's this one here. So we're also introducing more article styles, which means I will be writing more opinion-style posts which tend to get people more involved rather than just a plug-in or a team review. Also, I feel that the navigation needs to be improved. So there are so many articles now that sometimes it's difficult for people to find what they are looking for unless they are coming from Google directly onto one particular page. So that's something which I want to improve. Now another thing which you'll definitely find mentioned whenever you read about blogs is the importance of a mailing list, growing your mailing list and using the power of newsletters. As my friend Ben has mentioned earlier, there's excellent plug-in called Residia, which I plan to use for newsletters. And before you can send newsletters, you obviously have to have the mailing list. For growing your mailing list, you can have a subscribe form in your sidebar, for example, but I also plan to use a pop-up plug-in, such as Pippity, which I'll talk about a bit later. So what have I learned about blogging? Basically, the most important thing when you start a blog is to focus on content. As you've seen, I've just used a default template, very plain template. Why were the people coming to the blog? Because they were finding content which was helping them. They were researching about a plug-in or a team, and they found the content there. So they came. Social networks are essential, wherever. Even if you have your company websites, be sure to post on social networks. I have been using plugins that auto-post all the posts from my site on to the social networks. Think about ways of engaging your visitors. Like we've done competitions. There are many more ways of engaging your visitors. Try to think of something original. Branding, something which I haven't done yet, but I'm sure it's very important for blogging. Once you visit a website which has a particular design, particular color, particular logo, for example, again, I mentioned with Siege, which have a very nice logo, and the logo remains in your mind after visiting the site. It's easier to remember where you found that particular piece of information. Good navigation and, of course, innovate constantly. New content. Keep everything updated. Now, I'd like to talk about the technical aspect of WPMARE. So first of all, I'll be talking about teams. So the ideal team, if you want to start a blog like this. As someone already spoke earlier on this morning, the ideal team must have an appropriate design for your content. Not any generic team will do. If you have a photography blog, you need a certain type of team. If you have an informational blog, it's another team. The team should be well supported, which means that whoever developed the team, if it's not yourself, will keep on updating the team as WordPress itself decor updates and also can support you if you need to make any modifications, for example, or if you got stuck somewhere. Another important thing, even in terms of SEO, is that the code is clean and is in line with the WordPress best practices. For example, if you have a badly coded team, it's very difficult for us to modify. You cannot make sense of the code. If it's well-coded and clean, it's easy to jump in right there into the code and start modifying stuff. Now, the big question is whether you have to get a free or premium team. In my experience, unfortunately, the free teams tend to be a bit limited. Yes, there are some good free teams, but premium teams are usually better in general always. Another trend is responsive, responsive teams. This means that your team will look great on whether you're on a laptop, on a big screen, or on a mobile phone. So it's a big thing. I recommend that if you start a new site, you always go for responsive teams. Some recommendations of teams I've used or tried out, there's page lines, which is a team builder. So it's actually more not a team in itself, but a drag and drop or it has a very good options interface where you can design your own team. It's probably the most advanced team builder at the moment. Then there's Genesis team, which is used by many big blocks, such as Yoast. And it's very good if you're a developer and want starting base to base your site on. As regards to team shops, there is new teams, which has been established for a couple of years now. They're selling very good quality teams. Elegant teams are also well known. And the team hybrid, which is where I got my current team from. And finally, team forests. Now, as you might know, team forests, there are like hundreds of teams, but the quality can vary quite a lot. You have to be careful of the quality when you're going on team forest. When it comes to hosting, usually all sites start with shared hosting, which is the cheapest and most accessible for us who are starting blocks. I've started WP mayor on a shared host. And then I moved over to managed hosting. In between those two, there's the VPS. Basically, if you're confident in setting up a server, it might be worthwhile to move to a VPS, which is a virtual private server. And you have more power than shared hosting. The most expensive is WordPress managed hosting. With managed hosting, basically what you get is sort of a VPS, but is managed by the company itself. You don't have to manage everything yourself. For example, I've just moved last month my site from host nine, which was my previous shared host, to WP Engine. You might have come across WP Engine as they're doing a big marketing effort at the moment. What do I gain from moving to WP Engine? Well, it's mostly about speed and the peace of mind that somebody is taking care of my blog in terms of security and backups mainly. What WP Engine offers, as well as other managed hosting services, they offer free backups, things like also content caching, for example. So your site is always very fast. And they also have a very cool staging area. What is the staging area? Basically, I have the live server, the live website, but I also have a staging area, which is a direct clone of my site. And when I want to install a new plugin or make any modifications, I can do that on the staging area. So if something breaks, it's not the live website that breaks, but the one hosted on the staging area. It's very good if you're doing constant changes and improving your blog. So I've listed here some recommended hosts for you who are maybe just starting out and would like some tips. These are all hosts which I've used along the years. When it comes to shared hosting, these three hosts, nine host gates and blue hosts have very good support and good uptime, which is what you should look for in a shared host. When it comes to VPSes, there's VPS.net, Linode and Slice host, which are the three leaders in this industry. And WordPress managed hosting, there's WP Engine, which I've just been mentioning and PageD. So now the final piece of the puzzle is plugins. Now plugins, there are thousands of plugins. How to choose the best plugins for your blog? That depends again on the type of blog you have. When it comes to plugins, some plugins can be badly coded again, similar to Teams, but they can sometimes really break your site if they are, for example, processing intensive. How do you make sure that a plugin is good? If you are code savvy, you can take a look at the code itself and see how it's made. Or else, another idea is to look into the plugins forum. You will find the feedback of other users. So if the feedback is generally negative, if there are a lot of negative comments, then it's something to keep in mind before installing that plugin. Another thing when it comes to speed, what you can do is measure the load time of your site before and after installing the plugin. If there's a big difference after installing the plugin, probably there's something wrong with the plugin or something you have to take care of. So these are, I'm going to go through some of the plugins, the main plugins I'm using on WPMayer and explaining a bit about each why I'm using it. So the first one is for SEO. It's WordPress SEO, which is coded by Joost Davalk, which is a Dutch WordPress SEO guru, and it's one of the best plugins when it comes to SEO, and it's also free. There's no reason not to have this installed on any WordPress site, really. When it comes to speed and caching, there's W3 Total Cache, which is also free. It's coded by another good company. And basically what this does is it implements caching on your website, which, if you're on a shared host, can drastically improve the loading time of your site. Sometimes it's even cut by a couple of seconds. When it comes to forms, most websites have some kind of form. Maybe it's a contact form, maybe it's a more complicated form, especially if you're using more complicated forms like if you want input from the user and then put that input into a custom post type, for example, you probably need something like gravity forms, which is a premium plugin. There's no free version, but it's all drag and drop, and very easy to use. Related content, related content, basically after each post I have a few links to related posts on my site, on WPMare, and I use this plugin called and relate. Before, I used to use YARP, yet another related post plugin. Maybe some of you use that one, which is also very popular. The issue with YARP is that it does all the processing for finding the linkages between posts on your server, whereas and relate takes all that load away from your server and does that on and relate servers. So basically this one is better for performance on your server. As I mentioned earlier, I want to implement pop-ups for capturing email addresses, and Pippity is one such plugin which helps to create forms. Again, it's drag and drop. You can create your own team for your plugin. And what you can do is decide when and where the pop-up will appear. For example, I can say through the plugins interface, I can decide that the pop-up should only show after a person reads the whole post. As soon as he scrolls down, the pop-up comes up. Or I can decide that the pop-up only comes up once a month for each user. There's email, for email newsletters, I'm using Visigia, which is a freemium plugin. I won't be going much into that, except saying that I've been really impressed by this plugin. It's a young plugin, only nine months old, but it really has a very good interface. I think it will be going places. As I said, there's a news page on our website where I get feeds from other websites, other WordPress-related websites. And to take care of all that, I'm using WP-RSS Aggregator. This is a plugin which I developed myself. Again, as I need to make this news page. What I want to say here about this plugin is that developing my own plugin really helped me learn a lot about WordPress. So for all of the developers here who have not yet made their own plugin available in the repository, I really encourage you to do so because the feedback you gain is really invaluable, as you're learning more about WordPress itself. Backups, a blog without backups is basically, I think it's destined for failure because losing everything is very easy nowadays. It can be hacking, it can be a problem with your hosts, it can be so many things. Please keep a backup of your blog. There are also some free plugins, but I've been using BackupBuddy for like two or three years now, and I'm finding it really easy to use. It does backups to other FTP servers, to Dropbox, and even to Amazon S3, so it's very convenient. For those of you who are publishing code on your website, you can use something like Syntax Highlighter Evolved. It's a free plugin. What it does is format your code. So you have the color coding, it's easy for users to copy and paste the code. It's a very handy tool to have. Analytics, I use Google Analytics, like probably most of you, so Google Analytics is a plugin that inserts the code into your site and also presents a graph directly into your dashboard. So you don't have to log in into Google Analytics. Now this is very handy for those of you who are developing client sites. WPTouch is used for presenting a mobile version of the site. At the moment, my team is not responsive, so I'm using WPTouch to automatically serve a mobile version. So WPTouch, when you download it, it has a team built in, so it's just plug and play. You install the plugin and it serves up a mobile team. For management, this is for those of you who are managing more than one website. Basically, manage work persists in service. It comes along with a plugin as well. What it does is say I have actually more than 10 client websites which I manage, apart from my own. So imagine having to go into each one of them, do the plugin updates, monitor the comments, maybe some spam comments, update the team, check SEO, everything. This is really inconvenient if you have more than two other websites. What manage WordPress does, it combines all those dashboards into one. So you go to manage WordPress, you sign up, you start linking up your websites and you have one dashboard through which you can access all the data in your other blogs. So it's really handy. Now finally I'm going to speak about WPML which I don't use on WPML but since we're at a multi-language conference, I thought I should mention it. Basically WPML is a multi-language plugin. It's really the leading multi-language plugin out there. It helps you keep separate versions of your content, one in each language. You can use any language you want and the plugin has also an built translation service by the company which is publishing this plugin. So you can get your content translated obviously at a fee but all through this plugin's interface. So that's all for my site. If you have any questions, now's the time. Thank you.