Wordpress Direct - a Review

There's been some negative press about Word Press Direct because it enables you to autoblog - which means, to find content already published on the internet and use it on your site, instead of creating your own blog posts. Autoblogging has a (rightfully) bad name because the content is often illegally copied - and even if the content is legal, there are concerns about Google penalizing duplicate content.

However, there is far more to WPDirect than that. Its main aim is to make it easy to set up and manage your Wordpress sites - and considering two well-respected internet "gurus" recommend it as part of their famous 30 Day Challenge, I figured it had to be worth looking into. So what did I find?

I couldn't test this out - my websites are already set up. However, looking at the tutorial videos, I don't see how Word Press Direct adds much value.

For me, the hardest part of setting up my first Wordpress site was having to buy and set up the hosting. Originally, WPD offered hosting as part of the package, which presumably meant it was all done for you - but now, you're on your own.

They do give you tutorial videos - but you'll find plenty of Youtube videos (and Hubs) explaining how to do the same thing, in some cases better! In fact, setting up your site with WPD is slightly harder than setting it up yourself, because you have the extra steps of adding it to the WPD interface.

Once you've done the basic setup, you have an empty blog with a plain blue header. Some people will be happywith that and will just start producing content - but most of us want to make it look pretty!

The design of your blog is easy with Wordpress - you simply go to "Install Themes" on your dashboard, and search for a free theme you like. It's easy to get bogged down, spending hours Googling for Wordpress themes - and you risk downloading something with malicious code, or bugs, or that's not compatible. Or you can pay a lot of money for a theme that doesn't do what it claims.

WP Direct appears to offer a solution to this, because they have a huge range on their site for you to choose from - many of them themes you'd normally have to pay for. However, finding a theme is tedious and annoying.

First, there's no ability to refine your search. So, for instance, if I want a 3-column theme, I have to browse through 37 pages - there's no way to say I only want widget-ready, or red, or blue. There's also no information about any of the themes, apart from a few basic tags. Without information on compatibility and features, it's hard to choose.

It's much easier to go straight to the Wordpress.org site, which is full of free themes and has a search function allowing you to search by feature - so it's possible to search for a red 3-column theme, if that's what you want.

Your site now looks pretty and you can go ahead and create content - right? Wrong! Well, you can - but if you want readers, you need to do some extra things to optimize your blog so it's attractive to search engines.

WPDirect claims to help you do this. From what I can see, they do this mainly by giving you a Plugin package.

Wordpress plugins enable you to do all kinds of clever things without knowing anything about programming, so they are absolutely indispensable on your Wordpress blog. However, most of them are free, and fairly simple to understand (that's the whole point of using them!). So I'm not sure what WPDirect is giving you, apart from packaging all their recommended plugins into one upload package. And what a package it is!

Plugins are very powerful - but there's a trade-off, because most plugins slow down your load time a little (and some slow it down a lot!). Google takes speed into account when judging a website, so anything that makes your pages load slower is a bad thing.

When deciding whether to use a plugin, therefore, you need to do a kind of cost/benefit analysis: does the plugin do something really worthwhile, which offsets the loss of speed? Some plugins have an effect even when they're disabled - so the advice is to always choose your plugins carefully, review them regularly and be ruthless about deleting the ones I didn't need.

So I was taken aback when the WPD plugin package included over 20 plugins!

I deleted these straightaway:

• SEO Friendly Images - this fills in the title and alt fields on your images. That's easy to do when you upload your photos, so this is unnecessary unless you're autoblogging.
• WP-SpamFree - this blocks spam in comments. Since the package also includes Akismet, which does the same job, I'm not sure why it's needed.
• WP-Sticky - this enables you to make one post "sticky" on your front page - which is built in to Wordpress from version 2.7 onwards, no need for a plugin.
  
• WP tags to Technorati - I've been told this is outdated and no longer necessary, too.
• Wordpress.com Stats - a good, simple stat counter for those who find Google Analytics too difficult. However, since they include Analytics in another plugin, why bother?
• Pretty Links - this creates shortened URL's, but that feature is built into the latest editions of Wordpress.
  

My first reaction was to question why separate plugins for FBLikeButton, Add This Social Bookmarking and the Topsy ReTweet button were included, when there are other plugins which do the whole lot. However, I can see that having the Facebook Like and ReTweet buttons in a prominent place are useful, so maybe they're not such a silly idea.

I'm stll working through the rest - but on the whole, the plugin package left me feeling that WPD wasn't keeping up with the times! Plus I couldn't quite shake the feeling they'd overloaded the plugin package, to make it look like you're getting a lot for your money.

Once you've selected your theme, activated all your plugins and worked out all their settings, you can start adding blog posts or website pages, or both.

With WP Direct, instead of having to log in to each site individually to create posts, you can access them all from one control panel. Very handy if you have a large number of sites - but the Wordpress dashboard is so easy to use, there's no benefit for someone who has only one or two. And even for someone with a lot of sites, is a single control panel worth an ongoing monthly fee?

I can see why the 30 Day Challenge recommended WPD.  30DC Challengers have a very small window to achieve success, and don't have time to learn how to use Wordpress.

In its early days, when WPD offered hosting as part of the package, a small selection of fast themes, and a package of essential plugins, it would definitely have made setting up a Wordpress blog fast and easy.

But today, users still have to do the hardest part (setting up hosting) themselves. There are so many themes on WPD without a useful filter, so choosing a theme isn't any faster - and they have so many themes I can't believe they've vetted and approved every single one for SEO, fast loading, or compatibility.

I've already expressed my doubts about their selection of plugins.

At the end of the day, you wind up with a blog without understanding how you did it - and if you want to keep using all the features of WPD, you're stuck with paying a monthly fee that probably exceeds your earnings!

If you're brand new - I'd recommend you get your own hosting, load Wordpress, accept the Twenty Ten theme that comes with the basic install, and get started on building your content. When you need to do something fancy, Google for a plugin that does it - chances are you 'll find one. You can get more sophisticated as you go - and it's all free.

In a hurry? I think you'd get better value by spending the equivalent of a year's subscription on getting an expert to create your Wordpress site for you, complete with tailor-made theme and fully configured plugins.

WPD enables me to manage all my websites from one interface, but that alone isn't enough to justify a monthly subscription.

I was hoping I'd discover some great new themes and plugins, chosen by experts - but as I've been able to pick holes in some of their plugins, I don't have a lot of confidence in the rest. Besides, if one or two of them look good, I can always buy them separately.

So that leaves the autoblogging side of WP Direct. Autoblogging doesn't have to be unethical - I've used it in the past. For instance, my Tribal bellydance DVD Review site was created that way. I used an autoblogger to create and schedule posts with links to Amazon products, then I replaced the Amazon description with my own words.

But that's the point - I have been able to autoblog, using free plugins. If I want to get more sophisticated, there's are several autoblogging software programs on offer. So why should I pay a monthly subscription, when I could buy software to do the same job for two or three months' payments?

As I said, I'm still working through the site but I'm struggling to see what the benefit is. I'd love someone to tell me what I'm missing!