When you first log on to the WordPress Direct site, the message that greets you is loud and clear:
“Let us do the heavy lifting for you!
No more wasting your precious time with setup, Search Engine Optimization, or maintaining your site . . . WordPressDirect has been designed to handle all the setup, SEO and maintenance functions for you. With over 15,000 users, we are the leader in Search-Optimized Blog Publishing.”
Now that’s some powerful statement and if true it is the best kept secret in the internet marketing world.
I was first introduced to WordPress Direct (WPD) in the summer of 2009, August to be exact. I was participating in Ed Dale’s annual 30 Day Challenge. The instructions were to use WordPress Direct which was available for free for 30 day challengers for the 30 days. After that pay or return to the regular WordPress.
Of course I paid – moreover there was a special for members of the 30 Day Challenge (and my guess is that there will be one again this year). I am so glad I did. In October I transferred Blog Income from Blogger to WordPress Direct.
Increasingly the internet marketing crowd is beating a path to the door of WordPress, but WordPress has a steep learning curve and for us non-techie types the upward curve is nosebleed high.
How does WPD differ from WordPress? Well as their intro says, they do all the heavy lifting for you. Lets take a look at their claims and see just how much lifting they do do.
#1. Handle All The Setup
This is a biggie for me. To give you a bit of a background:
In January 2009 I signed up for a course on niche marketing. Included in the course were instructions on how to set up your own WordPress site. While the majority of the course was easy to understand, the WordPress setup had it’s challenges. I needed to install an FTP file and learn how to upload and download, c.panel navigation and php. This may be simple once mastered but the exercise gave me nothing but grief and no results to boot. The site languished.
I even downloaded several other tutorials on WordPress. Then it dawned on me that simple though it may be, it wasn’t simple enough as there were plenty of courses being offered at varying prices on how to set up your WordPress. WPD showed up at just the right time.
When you log into your WordPress Direct Account the first thing you want to do is watch the video tutorials. There are two sets: the first three are on Internet Basics and the second are a set of five on How it Works. These are very easy to follow. Each step is clearly illustrated. There are no assumptions that the new member knows anything about internet marketing – they even take you through the initial stages of selecting a domain name, hosting and installing your first site.
I just reviewed these videos again to make sure that they are as newbie friendly as I remember. They are. For the veterans you can skip the Internet Basics videos (although you never know what new nugget you might pick up). I just went through the second lot on How it Works and just realized that I am not taking full advantage of all that is available to me.
Installation once again is as easy as ABC. It’s a series of point, click, select and fill in the blanks and voila! You have a site up. You are then taken through configuration and setup where needed and then you publish your first post. You are also shown how to get into the WordPress Admin area and how to navigate from there if you want. So now you have all the bells and whistles of direct access to your site’s WordPress administration area where you can choose to do most of your backend office type of stuff, or get most of that done through the simple WordPress Direct dashboard options.
So do they do the set it up for you? My conclusion is that yes they do. This gets a big “A+” from me.
#2. Search Engine Optimization
When you are completing the setup of your site, you will be asked to include your keywords both long tail and short, a brief description and other bits that help to make your site search engine friendly.
What I really like about WPD is that all the themes come loaded with a pack of important plugins. All you need to do is to activate them. When I was setting up my site for that course I mentioned at the beginning of this post, there were only two plugins that were given. Now plugins are important as they play a key role in the appearance of your site, ease of navigation, ad display, spam filtering, enabling comments and so much more.
As you cut your chops and become more experienced in the ways of WordPress and internet marketing, you will want to add more plugins. Plugins are like an aftermarket product – think of all the toys and goodies that you can buy for your car. A word of caution as I recently found out, make sure that you backup everything before installing a new plugin, not all of them play nicely with each other and you might end up with a blank page! Trust me that is one experience you do not want.
So does WordPress Direct deliver on Search Engine Optimization? This is a toughie. SEO is always a work in progress, but I give WPD two thumbs up for getting you started with a bagful of goodies that the average newbie knows nothing about and saves a ton of time for the advanced and professional internet marketers. I can tell you that once I switched this Blog Income from Blogger the SEO bots were a lot happier with what they saw and within a short period of time the search engine traffic increased.
#3 Maintenance Functions
What I like is that not only can you automatically update your plugins, but you can also update to the latest WordPress edition as it comes available without having to backup, uninstall, reinstall the newest edition and marry your site with the new WordPress edition. I notice though that WPD does not jump through hoops to support the latest edition as it comes out and that is probably a good thing as not everything when it’s first updated is free of bugs and with open source products such as WordPress that may be a bigger issue than not. For the tech proficient probably not a problem, for the rest of us update when WPD says so!
The deal breaker for me though is the support. I was exchanging comments with another blogger who is a whiz on WordPress and she wanted to know why I was using WPD, when I told her that they had real support, she was both surprised and impressed. In my brief experience with WordPress Direct (7 months) I cannot count the number of times I have had to submit a ticket because of zigging when I should have zagged. Every issue was resolved – either I was advised on how to fix it, or, it was fixed for me. Usually within two days. There is a hierarchy if you will as to what and how much of your site they will support if the theme is “foreign” and this is clearly spelled out in the FAQ section.
So, Does WordPress Direct deliver on maintenance and functionality? Woohoo! Do they ever! High Fives all around.
Some Shortcomings:
I think they can do a better job of themes. They offer over 1500 themes and you would think that surely there is something there that will fit just about anyone. But I find that the selection offered leaves something to be desired.
1. The majority of the themes seem to be overly ornate. Now I know that newbies tend to go for the flashy looking stuff, with lots of art, but once the first blush of blogging/internet marketing is off, we soon realize that simple is more.
2. We want themes with shallow, that is short headers. Some of the headers hog most of the space above the fold and we want to have that space not for the pretty pictures, but for our content to grab the visitor’s attention.
Having said that, I have manually installed themes directly from WordPress to my roster of available themes that I can work with through my WPD account. I also think that they miss the boat somewhat by not playing up that you can import your existing WordPress accounts, theme and all and that there is all sorts of customization available for the advanced internet marketers. I know that this is a perception held by many professional internet marketers, that WPD limits your selection of themes and restricts access to and functionality within the admin area of WordPress.
It would also be great to have some of the more popular themes included without having to manually import them, Atahualpa and Frugal come to mind. I like these in their simplicity and flexibility when it comes to customization. DarkZen is another one I like.
Conclusion.
In my opinion WordPress Direct is a must have for the newbie and professional alike. It saves time for all. With WordPress Direct you have the advantage of a “done for you” setup without restricting you only to that which is included as part of the package. Your site is powered by WordPress and you have the added benefit of being able to work on your site via the WordPress back office admin area simply by logging on as http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin and a responsive support team.
Would I recommend WordPress Direct to everyone? You bet!
P.S. Disclaimer: I have become an affiliate of WordPress Direct . Should you open your account through my links and decide to become a paid customer, I will make a little bit of coin.
