The latest version of WordPress Version 3.0 has been released and you are looking at it. I just upgraded and it all went smoothly and all appears to be working just fine.  The dashboard looks very similar to 2.9.2  but there is a lot more under the hood to be discovered.

The first thing I noticed which is a very welcome improvement is the simple update of multiple plugins which will be a bit of a timesaver for those who have lots of blogs to update when you discover several plugins have been updated since you last looked, which seems to happen to me quite often. It's telling me I have eleven to update here right now!

One welcome improvement is a change to the default worldpress theme. The new one, called Twenty Ten, is a very smart looking theme that looks great yet remains simple and clean.

Watch the video below to learn more about the new WordPress 3.0

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Just about everyone online tells us that we should all be using wordpress because it is quick and easy to use and also because Google loves it. I am a big fan of WordPress myself and I use it for many different blogs. This site is a wordpress blog and I have no plans to change that anytime soon. But... my experience recently makes me wonder if wordpress is always the right choice.

I have a website in a pretty competitive market. I purchased the site a couple of years ago and it has been sitting around the number 5 position for searches for it's main keyword pretty much ever since. I never did anything to promote or develop that website. Maybe I added a couple of backlinks but literally just a dozen or two. It was a plain and fairly ugly html website and all I ever did was to change a couple of the affiliate links. I am not even sure if I changed all of them, that's how little work I did to the site.

Earlier this year I decided I should spend some time and completely revamp the site and I decided to put it on a wordpress blog. I spent several days setting up the blog and transferring all the articles over to the new blog. This was a month or so ago and I recently checked my Google results. What did I find? The website that has been consistently in the top ten search results for the last two years has all but disappeared from the first page. Before the change there were a few dozen keywords showing up on the first page for searches there now appears to be only one and that is at position number ten!

So what are we to make of this? I am disappointed. As far as I am concerned I have improved the site. The articles are almost identical to the original html versions but the site looks better and I have added more pages, information and offers. WordPress blogs have more code to make up the page than a simple html website with various links and menus and I wonder if this has reduced the value G sees in the site which, if true, would suggest that a simple site with less code is more effective in the eyes of the big G searchbot.

This is something I need to investigate further but right now I am regretting transferring the site over to WordPress. I had planned to work through many of my sites and change them over to WP but now I think that might be unwise. Maybe I should have tried it out first with a less successful site as this is obviously costing me money in lost revenues now but I do like WordPress with it's ease of use and appearance so I will persevere for now and hope that this is a temporary setback but the lesson must surely be this. Just because lots of people tell you WP is the best thing since sliced bread don't assume that is always the case. As always, test and test again to establish what works best for you and your websites.

I have this theory, as yet unproven. The easier it is to do something the less it is rated by Google. So, easy to get backlinks would be of less value than hard to get backlinks. Easy to build website, i.e. wordpress blog, less value than html sites. You would think that what is basically the same site would be rated basically the same by the search engines but apparently not so something has been downgraded and it would appear to be the platform used to produce the site.

You will have noticed I have been raving about the commission automator plugin that I am super impressed with. I think you should buy i if you have any blogs that sell stuff. Anyway, the plugin has several options for how often you add offers to your blog.

Since I wanted to see it in full action I had it posting a lot of offers to this blog over 24 hours. Trouble with that was that it made the real articles get buried way down under all those offers. Now the sensible thing would be to switch to just publishing an offer every couple of days or maybe once a week but I started thinking about another possibility. What if I could add a second blog to this one that only published the offers and let you switch between the two!

I started to experiment and installed a second blog in another directory and set it all up and whilst it appeared to work just fine there was a problem with the fact that if you clicked on the header of a post on the Offers blog it took you back to the main blog,

I did a quick search online but the only thing I found were questions from people who had suffered a similar problem and hadn't apparently solved it. So, I put my thinking cap on and had a lightbulb moment. You know? One of those moments when if life was a cartoon a big speech ballooon with a picture of a lightbulb would have appeared over the top of my head.
The solution lay in the htaccess file.

If you use permalinks to change the name of your post as it appears in the address bar the server relies on the information in the htaccess file to tell it where to find the files and mine was reverting to the domain htaccess file which told it to look at the main blog installation.

So, to solve the problem all I had to do was to edit a copy of the htaccess file and save it to the new blog folder. I did this and bingo! Everything started working properly as intended.

So, now if you want to find the offers you can click on a link on the side menu and it opens a new window to the second blog on this domain with just the juicy offers there and I can keep all my, hopefully, interesting articles here and easier to find.

So, can you add a second blog on a domain, yes you can. In fact you could us the same database but I don't really see the need. I have always believed you should KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I still recommend the commissions automator plugin for your blogs but it might be best if you only add offers every couple of days which is easy to set up which just one click. If you do want to publish more you can simply add another blog and do as I have done which keeps things tidy and uncluttered. I hope this has helped. Feel free to comment below.