SteemPress answers to common questions and update to design

Since last week's announcement post that @steempress-io has received a 1,000,000 SP delegation, we've seen an explosive growth in interest. Whether it be from steemians wondering how they can use SteemPress or be eligible for a @steempress-io upvote, to communities and others looking to make partnerships with us. We are thrilled to see all the people joining our new Discord server and are grateful for all the ways our users take part in reporting their experience with using SteemPress. A huge thanks also to everyone who have made some of the now many tutorial videos and posts and contributed to sharing information about our service and are excited to see how we can continue to grow SteemPress!

In this post, we will try answering some of the most common questions we have received over the last week, as well as presenting and briefly explaining updates we've made to our design.

Update to the SteemPress Logo and Design

As the most enthusiastic of our followers may have noticed, we recently updated our banner as well as making a subtle change to our logo. Again we would like to thank @foundation who's been of tremendous help both in helping us develop the right branding strategy as well as doing all of the visual artwork!

For the banner, we wanted a cleaner version that still communicates the core of our value proposition to new users not familiar with Steem: The ability to reach new audiences through a decentralized blockchain with many active communities and front-ends to gain engagement around one's content.

The new SteemPress banner as it is found in the wordpress.org plug-in store

The design is picked specifically with the purpose of sending the right message, and installing the right ideas, in new users. Since we see our natural first adopters as people simply looking for new ways to gain traction and grow a more engaging website, we hope this can give people that idea.

To adopt this new visual identity more fully and also look more professional, we also now have a banner with the same design elements custom made for the steemit blog page.

New SteemPress banner made for steemit.com

For the logo, while the feedback we got from the community in our first steempress-io post was very positive, we realized when presenting it to people outside the Steem ecosystem that a common response was that it looked a lot like a messaging application. To take the focus back to content, we decided to make the small change of removing the arrow on the bottom corner to make it look less like a chat bubble.

Old SteemPress logo on the left, new version on the right

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a wordpress.com business account?

No, you can use SteemPres with any web hosting providers out there. While Wordpress.com provides a free hosting service, it comes without the option to use plugins. For this, you will have to upgrade to the highest plan which is very expensive compared to other plans.

For price-sensitive users, we've recommended the web hosting plan from ovh. You are, of course, free to use any other host of your liking. We also recommend you to pick the "one click WordPress install" option which will directly install WordPress on your server to make things easier.

What kind of server do I need

It all depends on your blog and how much it'll be visited. For most new users, you really shouldn't need a lot of data. In which case, the "personal" plan from ovh with 100gb of disk space is more than enough.

Do I need a domain name

No. Although having one is way better for your search engine optimization (SEO) and obviously more pretty. Ask yourself, have you ever enjoyed reading content from a website named 173.245.234.11?

Can I use a free domain or a subdomain?

Yes.

What are the beneficiaries?

15%

How can I ensure that the SEO of my blog is not affected?

SteemPress offers a feature to delay when an article is posted to the Steem blockchain. This means that you can choose to first publish your article on your blog before it is scheduled to be posted to the Steem blockchain at a time selected by the user. This means that Google and other search engines will index your blog first and tag steemit.com as a duplicate, meaning that your blog's SEO ranking won't be hurt.

I did not get a vote on my article, is something wrong?

You will not automatically get a vote as soon as you start using SteemPress. There are two reasons for this: First, we make it our first priority to avoid upvoting spam and/or plagiarized content. To ensure this, all new users are briefly screened before a curator or our voting bot will cast any votes on a post made by a newly registered account. With 50-100 new users signing up every day, it takes some time to review everyone. We invite new users to give a link to their post in our #post-promotion tab on Discord which may help us notice you sooner. Be aware that if the post is found to be spam and/or plagiarized, you will end up on our blacklist and will not receive further upvotes. Second, please consider a vote from @steempress-io as a tip for producing good content with us rather than as an expected reward. You don't expect a tip, but you are happy when you get one. The same mentality should apply here.

As mentioned in the previous post, steempress-io votes based on a mix of trailing trusted curators, manual upvotes by us to welcome new users and automated upvotes based on our internal whitelist and ranking system.

What can I do to get a higher @steempress-io vote?

When deciding on a user's rank, we use a few simple rules to guide our decision:

• Do the user make content that is original and of high quality?
• Do their posts obtain engagement from users either on steemit.com or on their blog?
• Does their website look serious with links back to their Steem account with options for content to be shared?

As time goes by and we obtain more users, we will prioritize users whose posts help achieve the mission statement of SteemPress: To see the best WordPress content on the Steem blockchain, and the Steem blockchain made visible to WordPress consumers all over the web.

Who do I talk to about business and partnerships?

If you have any questions about how your community can cooperate with steempress-io, or that you would like to do business with us, then please contact @fredrikaa on our Discord channel or send an email to [email protected]

Who do I talk to about technical details, bugs etc?

For any challenges or experienced difficulties with using SteemPress please resort to making a post in the #help or #suggestion channels on Discord. For more urgent matters, you can send a direct message to @Howo, still on the SteemPress Discord.

I published my post on WordPress but it was not published on steem what's up?

Check the plugin settings to make sure that you have set everything correctly. you should see

"Connectivity to the steem server: Ok
Username/posting key: Ok
"

If that's ok, look at the delay, did you put any delay? And is that delay over?

If all of that checks, then something went wrong, come in the #help channel and we'll figure it out.

Can I use this on my phone

We got that question a lot so I feel like we need to answer it.

No. You need a WordPress blog which needs to be hosted. So you can buy hosting with your phone and manage it
still from your phone but you'll have to go by the "hosting" section and get a blog there.

For all the questions related to Steem please see:
https://steemit.com/faq.html

We hope this post can help answer some of the more common questions asked and can be used by our growing community of users as a reference to questions they might get from people they encourage to try SteemPress.

We would like to thank you all again for the very positive feedback, support and suggestions you've provided us so far and are more excited than ever to continue developing and growing SteemPress and the Steem blockchain together with you!

As always, SteemPress on!
@fredrikaa and @howo