This post is the first in a series of posts I’ll be doing to show you how to setup and run WordPress on your desktop or laptop.

You may wonder why on earth would anyone want to run WordPress on their desktop? Well there are a lot of reasons why you might need WordPress running on your desktop. One really good reason that we are going to check out here today is to create a sandbox to help you redesign a live website.

If you have a live WordPress website with a lot of visitors, there are times when you may need to improve the design or layout. But how to do you do this without impacting all of your readers and customers?

Operationally you always want to work on your site during non-peak hours. The web is open 24 hours a day and that means your website is too. To find the the best time to work on your website, fire up AWSTATS in your CPanel and look to see when you have the least amount of visitors to your website.

You lowest traffic day and hour will depend on your readers and your niche.

To make it easy to redesign our web site without worrying too much about the time of day we work on it… we are going to use an open source application called XAMPP that allows us to easily run an Apache web server, a MySQL database and PHP together on our desktop or laptop.  All three of these are the key ingredients for running WordPress.

In the following video I show you where to find XAMPP and how to get it installed.

My buddy Josh Spaulding released a new toy today.  Yup, Deep Linker Pro went live and so far it looks pretty damn cool.  As much as I would love to stay away from this shiny object, Josh has never disappointed me in the past and today is no exception.

Deep Linker Pro is one of the easiest tools for submitting your websites to directories I have  ever used.  I was really impressed how quickly I was able to add two sites for submission within just a minute or two. Most tools force you to step through one directory at a time in a very painful, manual process.  Deep Linker Pro is fully automated, simply add your website, select the category and hit submit.  It is truly that easy.  I’m at work today, submitting my sites with DLP running in the background.

Just think, SubmitEdge and others charge $15-145 bucks a site to do what DLP is doing for me for a one time cost of just the software alone.  Its pretty cool.

You have the option of automatically submitting your sites, which is what I’m doing right now, completely hands off to hundreds of directories.  There is also a manual mode too for submitting to directories that require captia.  For being a manual process, Josh has made it as easy as can be to step through each of the directories.

For Deep Linking, which is what Deep Linker Pro is all about, there are a list of  “Deep Link Directories” grouped together that allow you to automatically submit long tail deep urls within your site for even more one way back links.

Today is my first day using the tool so I don’t have any real world results as far as improved status in the SERPS.  I have heard from friends who were on the beta test that saw results with just a couple days and were very impressed.

So far, I’ve install DLP without any problem what-so-ever.  It has an extremely clean  interface that’s very intuitive.  And I have setup several websites within just a couple minutes.

If you need more backlinks, like we all do, need to get indexed, or if you use any pay directory submission services… save your money and check out Deep Linker Pro.  I’ll try to leave a comment in a few days to let you all know if I see any improvements!