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Website backups are a vital part of maintaining your own website. Lose your data, and it’s not always so easy to retrieve it again. Many hosts do keep backups, on your server, as well as elsewhere, but not all do, and it’s best to have your own copy, just in case something goes terribly wrong.

There are a number of free backup plugins that are pretty good, but I have recently been implementing a new premium plugin called Backup Buddy.

Most free plugins will back up only your database, leaving you to do the rest (export your data via ‘Tools -> Export’, download all your files via FTP). Backup Buddy does it all: backups up your database, a copy of all your files, and all your website copy.

And, in addition to having a copy stored on your website server, you can choose to have a copy emailed to you (size-dependent), or sent automatically to an online storage facility, such as DropBox (free for up to 2GB). You can perform backups whenever you like, and also schedule regular backups to make sure you always have a copy to fall back on.

What’s more – should anything go wrong with your server, you can restore your entire setup in one go.

This plugin comes highly recommended and should, I believe, be considered a vital component to any WordPress website.

If you would like to find out more, please visit the Backup Buddy website, or contact me for specific information regarding implementation on your own website.

Blog Meistress has splashed out on a developer’s licence for the fabulous Gravity Forms premium plugin.

This is no ordinary contact form – this baby can do all kinds of fantastic things:

• Conditional Form Fields – This means you can show or hide a field or entire sections of the form based on a value selected in another field.
• Email Notification Routing – Now you can set up notifications to route to different email addresses based on rules that you define. Use one form to route form submissions to sales, marketing, customer service department.
• Enhanced Post Custom Fields – Custom fields can now be email, website, multiple choice, drop down lists, hidden fields and more.
• Dynamic Field Population - Populate form fields dynamically by passing data to the field using querystring, shortcode, function or hooks. This makes pre-populating data fast and easy!
• Bulk Add and Predefined Choices - Quickly and easily populate drop downs, checkboxes and radio button fields with predefined lists of values such as Countries, States, Months, etc. You can also bulk add your own options.
• Form Scheduling.  Have a form that you only want made available during a certain time period? Form Scheduling allows you to define a start date and end date for your form (great for competitions!).  You can also limit the number of entries per form.
• Easily Embed a Form into Posts & Pages. The easy to use Embed Form tool will help you in creating the correct shortcode to be added to your post or page content.
• Create Autoresponder Emails to Users. Send automatic emails to users in response to a submission. Add any form field content to your message to create professional and personalized messages.
• Prevent Spam with Built-In reCAPTCHA Protection. The reCAPTCHA field will shield you from spam by preventing from submissions from automated scripts. You will also be helping in digitizing books for online use.
• Allow Users to Automatically Create a Post. Let your users help with data entry. When added to a form, our Post Fields create a post when the form is submitted. Great for user submitted stories, job postings, directories, etc.

The list of features goes on…

Additionally, the form keeps a copy of all form entries which you can export at any time.

Very cool indeed.

A single user licence for this nifty plugin costs $49, but I’m throwing it in for all new websites and website makeovers from now on.

If you’re new to WordPress, and looking for handy hints on how to use the admin side of things (where you create and modify the content that’s on your site), it’s not always easy to know where to begin.

A handy tutorial I found, to which I direct all new clients, is Carolyn Cooper’s “Beginner’s Guide to WordPress 2.7“.  The tutorial is available for download in three different formats – PDF, Powerpoint and Flash – and covers not only the practical basics of creating and modifying content (pages, posts, links, image uploads etc), but offers invaluable, applicable tips for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as well.

WordPress has since reached version 2.9, but the tutorial isn’t outdated, and is well worth downloading and working through from one end to the other.

You can download the tutorial at the link below:

http://carolynecooper.com/news/beginners-guide-to-wordpress-27

Have fun!

Blog Meistress has invested in a series of flexible premium themes from Woo Themes.  These theme gurus create beautiful feature-rich templates that cater for everything from professional business websites, to colourful ‘blog-style’ websites, magazine/news-focused websites, media-rich showcases and much more.

The best news?  You won’t pay any more for your website – prices stay as they are, but your choice of templates has been vastly improved!

Templates can be used, as is (each has a number of colour schemes), or if the budget allows, can be further customised to your own preferred look-and-feel (colours, fonts, logos, banners etc).