There are two primary styles of mainstream bloggers: conduits, and originators. Conduits help digest, funnel and channel helpful information. Originators come up with new thoughts, observations, perspectives and points of view. It’s far less risky to be a conduit. Sure, it takes work seeking out and filtering information. But sharing information that’s been created by others doesn’t require you to put your ego, your self, your opinions and thought processes on the line like being an originator does.

Conduits find interesting and relevant content and pass it along in the form of blog posts, how-tos, links, lists, reviews and tweets. Conduits can be incredibly helpful in helping us find and filter out important nuggets of information. Necessary even. There’s so much info out there in any given field, especially for those of us in the internet/social media business, that no one can possibly keep up with it all.

Conduits at their best create lively and important forums that may themselves become buzzwords for new trends--”meta-conduits,” we might say. Huffingtonpost.com in news and commentary, mashable.com for web and social media info, lifehacker.com for DIY tips—all of these lively and informative sources of information perform an enormous service. Many of us come to rely on them. And meta-conduit sites can create considerable wealth and attention for their owners.

Originators, on the other hand, help us think and see differently by sharing their experiences, thoughts, reflections and perspectives. Help clarify the blur of daily life.

At their best, originators can become not just trend-setters, but thought-shapers. People like Mark Silver at heartofbusiness.com, Nancy Humphreys at brucenomics.com or Steve Pavlina at stevepavlina.com are people who think and feel deeply about business development and spiritual growth, or what’s really happening in the global economy and why, or how to live a rewarding life. They may have huge personal followings and write on a regular basis for other blogs than their own. Or they may not (yet).

But they’re more than mere conduits. They see and digest the same information as the rest of us do. But before sending it back out, they think. Cogitate. Feel. Process. And when they write, they often share something of striking intelligence or wisdom. It might just change your thinking, or your life.

Are you a conduit or an originator?

Most of us are somewhere on a continuum. We’re a bit of both. On my “on” days, and when I have time, I try to share an original thought. On my “off” or super-busy days, it’s all I can do to find something interesting on the net and share a link. But I always think about it. Because for me, being a conduit is the easy way out. It’s second-best. It’s not challenging me to do my best work, or to be my best self, or to contribute all that I can.

But maybe I’m prejudiced. Making this all harder than it needs to be. What do you think? Which are you and which do you want to be? How do you want your blog to contribute to the world we all share?

These days, a good many of the new sites I create use the Thesis theme for WordPress. It’s so easy to install and use that even WordPress newbies swiftly learn to manage their own sites. But there are a few simple, free, essential plugins that make Thesis (affiliate link) work even better. Here they are.

Help Google Crawl Your Site

Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin automatically creates a continuously updated XML sitemap that helps searchbots crawl your site and gives you better search results. Every time you add a page to your blog or site, it’s automatically added to the XML sitemap. If you want, you can also register the sitemap’s URL with Google at Google’s Webmaster Central and with Yahoo to get tons of helpful information about how your site is crawled.

Keep the Hits from Your Old URLs

Redirection. Unless you’re starting a brand-new site totally from scratch, you had an old site before your WordPress Thesis site. That old site was probably around for awhile and garnered at least a little bit of SEO mojo. But now all your URLs are different because you’ve deleted all your old pages in favor of your brand-new spiffy Thesis pages. Ever wonder what happens to all the old links—including search engine links—that went to those old pages? Without some kind of redirection, they’re all lost. And anyone who finds a link and clicks through gets nothing but a “page not found” error. Which is not exactly the ideal welcome.

With Redirection, you don’t have to lose all the clicks and search results that your old pages may still be generating. Just paste all your old URLs into the windows the plugin provides. Then, for each URL, paste in the new URL that you want to send your visitor to instead. Now, visitors are seamlessly and invisibly directed from your old URLs to your new ones, without your losing any rankings. It’s quick, simple, easy, and solves a real problem without any hassle.

Choose What Pages Sidebar Content Shows Up On

Widget Logic. My fave. With old html sites, it could be a challenge to get every page to look uniformly the same. Some table or div tag would always act up just when you least wanted it to. With WordPress and other CMS sites, the challenge is the opposite: how to get pages to look different from each other; how to relieve the terrible monotony of a site-wide template and put relevant content just where it needs to be, rather than all over.

Here’s the answer. With Widget Logic, you can control which pages any given widget will appear on. Want your article list on your blog post pages, but not on your “Services” page? Simple. Want an ad to appear on certain posts or pages, and not on others? Simple. In the interests of full disclosure, I do have to say that you need to look up, and paste in, the appropriate WordPress conditional tag. But the intimidation factor is way bigger than the reality of doing it. In about 20 seconds you can impress yourself by using PHP tags… and you don’t have to actually know any PHP. Awesome! (There’s also a YouTube video tutorial.)

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress Database Backup. Would you like a daily or weekly backup of your WordPress database (that’s where all your content is stored) delivered automatically to your email inbox? Trust me, you would. Well, you should. This plugin does it.

Best of luck, and happy Thesis-ing!

Do you want an up-to-date web site with the latest super-cool techie bell or whistle? Don’t we all?  And WordPress: it’s so contemporary, versatile and inexpensive. So, pick a theme already, and get to it! (A WordPress “theme” is the design template that determines layout, type, color, etc. for your content.)

But wait a sec. I’ve found that there are huge differences among themes, differences that are invisible until you start working with them. Choosing a sloppily constructed one, or one that isn’t updated, can be an expensive mistake. Here’s how to pick the right one.

Premium (Paid), or Free Theme?

There are thousands of free WordPress themes. For a long time, all themes were free. And some of the free ones have problems. Issues I’ve encountered include:

• Themes that “broke” when I upgraded WordPress
• Coding so sloppy that basic customization was a humongous job
• Standard features that didn’t work

This being said, if you have simply a plain-vanilla blog, or simple blog plus a few static pages, and you don’t need a custom look, many free themes will work just fine. A good place to start looking for good free themes is the WordPress site:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

But if you’re planning a more complex site—for example, you need a content management system (CMS), a magazine- or newspaper-style front page featuring many items, an e-store, a digital portfolio, a real estate site, or a photoblog, selecting a theme is much tougher. You need a specialty theme which has the appropriate features already built into it from the start. For these more specialized and complex sites, as well as for any site that will require extensive customization, I would tend to look at a premium theme first.

Premium Themes

It took me a long time to warm up to the idea of paid premium themes. Now I’m a convert. Most premium themes are cleanly coded, work well, and are regularly updated. Prices generally run from $20 to $80 or so for single-site use. Some wonderful themes I’ve worked with come from:

Ithemes: specialized premium themes including magazine, real estate, ecommerce and online gallery/portfolio (I have used several of these themes and am an iThemes affiliate)

Themeforest: many well-designed specialty themes, updated at the discretion of their authors.

Woothemes: many magazine- and news-style themes, with support. (I have worked with several of these am an affiliate.)

The Market Theme: one of the top paid premium theme specially designed for ecommerce (I am an affiliate). (For more on ecommerce and WordPress, see my article “Ecommerce: How to Choose the Best Shopping Cart for Your Site.”)

Theme Frameworks

Recently, “theme frameworks” have come on the scene. These are basic themes which offer the ability to customize the design using more mouseclicks than actual code. (Here’s a somewhat technical intro with a discussion of the pros and cons of each major framework:  including some that are not mentioned here.) So, they’re highly adaptable to your particular purpose, and suffer few update problems. Three of the most popular theme frameworks are

Carrington (free)
Thematic (free)
Thesis (paid premium)
ThemeHybrid (free)

Thesis, for example, allows you to have either a magazine-style home page, a conventional blog page with either 2 or 3 columns, or a simple static home page, with a few mouse clicks and no programming at all.

End Theme Overwhelm!

There are thousands of gorgeous themes out there, and it’s easy to fall into overwhelm unless you have a plan. Here’s how.

• First, know what features you need in your theme and cannot compromise on.
• Then, troll for templates that already have all or most of those features, designed by reputable sources with a good track record in providing working themes.

You’ll end up with a handful—or maybe just one or two—themes which offer the features you’re looking for. At this point, cost might be a deciding factor. Or you may want to experiment among the themes on your short list to find the one that works best for you. Don’t sweat the final decision. If you’ve done your homework, any of the themes on your list will make you happy and serve you well for a long time.

Have you ever chosen a theme that broke? That you love? I’d love to hear your experiences.

There’s just been some big news for bloggers and other Internet writers this month. The FTC has decided that “bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service,” or face a fine of up to $11,000. That’s a sizeable incentive to come clean about paid product endorsements, paid reviews, free products, and affiliate marketing. (For those who don’t know, an “affiliate” receives a percentage of the sale price when someone buys a product or service online using one of their special tracking links. For example, as an Amazon affiliate, I receive a small percentage if you go directly to Amazon from one of my links and purchase something. )

I think it’s wonderful. Affiliate and other paid relationships have long been a gray area on the Internet. As a reader, I want to know someone’s relationship with a product they’re touting. As a writer, I feel scuzzy and sleazy if I don’t disclose my own relationships.

This has always felt a little weird for me, since most of my colleagues and peers have never disclosed. For years, I ducked whole the issue by refusing to affiliate at all. Particularly since the amount of money that an affiliate gains from any one sale is often minuscule.

But then two things happened. First, I noticed that I was recommending the same products over and over to my clients. They were products I had rigorously researched, tested, compared, and used. So I wasn’t being fully dispassionate, anyway. Some products are simply better than others.

Second, a couple of clients actually asked me to send them my affiliate link before they purchased products I’d recommended—because they out-and-out wanted me to get my “cut.” It was a revelation to me that, far from diminishing my credibility, being an affiliate sometimes enhanced it.

Now, I’ve got a special page on my site on which I list all of my affiliate relationships. They also happen to be all of my favorite, most used and trusted Internet tools and services. Full disclosure… it feels so good.

What do you think about this issue, whether as a blogger, consumer, or product rep? I’d love to hear from you.

If you’re a sole proprietor just starting a new venture, you may not want to pay a designer for a custom web site—especially when you can test your market, concept, and business model with little or no investment of time and money. Here are some web site options that can get your site up and running fast, with no stress about time or cost.

Some require that you already have a domain name ($10) and a web hosting account ($4 to $5 per month); some are self-hosted and totally free.

Free Downloadable Web Site Templates

Do a quick search on any major search engine and you’ll find thousands of free site templates, many of them quite good looking and well constructed. Caveats? Read the terms of service—some require a link back to the site or template author. You’ll need some basic html knowledge in order to input your content and upload the finished files to your web host.

Use Your Web Host’s Free Site Templates

Many web hosts, including Godaddy.com and Yahoo, offer free web templates. You purchase a low-cost hosting plan, then pick a pre-designed template that most closely matches your business. Customize it using built-in or downloadable tools, and voila, there’s your web site. You don’t need to know anything about coding or html. True, you don’t have total and absolute control over the appearance of your site. But it’s quick, and it’s cheap.

Free Google Sites & Blogs

Google offers a totally free online site-building tool and hosting service. You don’t need any expertise whatsoever, you don’t need to pay one dime, and you can use these sites for business and commercial purposes. You can have your own site up in half an hour, no technical knowledge required. Check them out at sites.google.com. Remember to read the terms of service, privacy, and policies pages.

Planning a blog? Google also offers a free blogging service, blogger.com. Your own very attractively customized blog can be online in five minutes.

More Totally Free Site Services

Check out the free services out there, like GoGoPin, or blogging guru Seth Godin’s Squidoo (single-page sites called “lenses,” that gather information on a particular topic, product, project, or business), or the free start-your-own-social-network site, Ning. (Again, always read the terms of service and privacy policies. Be aware that a free, hosted site service offered by a brand-new company may or may not be a long-lived endeavor.)

WordPress for Web Sites, Blogs, Ecommerce and Membership Sites

WordPress was originally developed as a free, open-source blogging platform. It has evolved into a powerful site tool that’s used by major newspapers, universities and businesses—and it’s still free.

WordPress is not the simplest option out there, but it is the most scalable. Starting with a simple one-click template, you can later evolve your site into an extremely sophisticated and powerful system. WordPress allows you to start small and end up big, without ever having to change platforms or portage your content from one interface to another.

WordPress.org offers free downloads to install on your own domain. Many web hosts (including my favorite, Westhost) also offer free, one-click installation.

WordPress.com offers free, hosted blog sites on their domain.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect

The web is not a permanent medium. It encourages flexibility and experimentation. Yes, you can get started now, on a shoestring! A very short shoestring. Or even no string at all. Your site isn’t perfect? That really doesn’t matter, because it will continue to change as you learn and grow. Sometimes it just makes sense to begin simply, even when you’re aiming high.

Do you have your own free site source, comment, or experience to share? Please join the discussion.