Archive for January, 2011
by Franky Branckaute on January 30th, 2011
WordPress.com is a hosted service, which allows you to set up multiple blogs for free, however there are optional paid options which add functionality to your blog. WordPress.com is perfect for a beginner blogger, however many bloggers find that it is to restrictive and looks unprofessional. In this Conor P. explains how to move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, with the help of some video tutorials.
Visit the tutorial here.
Categories: Linking, WordPress Tips, WordPress Tutorials
Tags: Conor Pendergrast, Moving Domains, Screencasts, Tutorials, wordpress.com, WordPress.org
by Franky Branckaute on January 30th, 2011
Brandon Jones over at Envato’s Tutsplus posted the video of SXSWi 2010′s panel, discussing whether WordPress kills the creative design scene. Read More
Categories: Interesting, Linking, WordPress News
Tags: Bradley Potter, Brandon Jones, Envato, Opinion, SXSWi, Videos
by Franky Branckaute on January 30th, 2011
Justin Tadlock, of Theme Hybrid fame, has published a new entry describing how to display links to all images sizes within WordPress (or on your attachment pages). The attachment page often is a forgotten area in many a WordPress design.
At Splashpress Media we also made sure to pay extra attention to the attachment page in our redesigns and all our newly designed pages also include an ‘Attachment gallery’ as can be seen in this ForeverGeek post. Click any image in that post or just visit an attachment page:
Justin’s entry explains how to include links to every image size in your designs.
Read Justin’s tutorial here
Categories: Linking, WordPress Tips, WordPress Tutorials
Tags: Attachment, justin Tadlock, Media, WordPress development
by Franky Branckaute on January 28th, 2011
WordPress Post Formats have been the rage among designers and developers since first announced and with WP 3.1 reaching its release a set of standardised, non-extensible, post formats have found their way in the WordPress core. As so often, a decision made by the Core team has lead to questions, sometimes even disapproval. Read More
Categories: Linking, WordPress News
Tags: Andrew Nacin, Post Formats, Thord D. Hedengren, WordPress 3.1
by James Dunaway on January 28th, 2011
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, 3 new blogs will have come into existence. There can be no doubt that the world wide web in general, and social media sites in particular, are becoming more crowded and more competitive every second. The result? Standing out from the crowd is getting harder and harder.
Social media marketing is both necessary and extremely challenging. Blogs are an integral part of SEM, but simply building one isn’t enough. You need to get people to read what you write!
That being said, there are myriad resources that have become available which can help you promote and measure the success of your blog. Below you will find a definitive guide to some of the best resources online.
Overview of Blog Promotion
Promoting Your Blog
Some sweet, simple and easily actionable tips for blog promotion from Google itself, although we also love their disclaimer: “This is in no way a science or guarantee; it’s simply a few suggestions with which many bloggers have found success”. If you know little to nothing about blog promotion, it’s a good place to get an idea of the basics without getting overwhelmed.
21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic
SEOmoz offers some great, detailed advice for bloggers who want not just more traffic but better, more targeted traffic. There’s a lot here to help diagnose why your blog might be fledgling, and what to do to remedy the situation. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips, Blogging: How To
Tags: blog promotion, Social media marketing
by Franky Branckaute on January 27th, 2011
Many of us tend to install blog after blog and every time have to upload a series of WordPress plugins every time or browse through the plugin installer. A tedious and long task, especially for those of you who love running 60 plugins on every single blog.
Vladimir Prelovac, serial plugin developer, has created WP Quick Deploy, a plugin which will soon become your favourite WordPress install assistant.
The plugin lets you browse a well curated selection of WordPress plugins which then can be installed all at once. Check the plugin page for more information.
Categories: Linking, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tools
Tags: Install, plugins, Vladimir Prelovac
by Jonathan Bailey on January 26th, 2011
If you take a look at your traffic stats, you’ll likely find that a very large percentage, if not a vast majority, of your new traffic comes from Google.
While this can be a great thing as search traffic is some of the best that you can get in terms of targeting, it is also highly risky. The reason is that it makes all of us subject to the whims of Google, a company that our sites have no direct relationship with and is prone to being fickle with both its algorithms and its index.
Imagine, for a moment, if half of that traffic went away suddenly or, even worse, if it disappeared altogether. This is the reality many sites have faced, and it has proved disastrous for many sites, including established ones that suddenly find the lion’s share of their daily traffic to be gone.
Perhaps worst of all though is that it is a pitfall that can not be completely avoided. Considering that Google makes “over 400″ changes per year, it’s almost impossible to be sure your site won’t get eaten in one of them.
Still, there is plenty that you can and should do and most of them are actually quite simple. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips, General
Tags: blogging, crawler, google, index, pagerank, seo, webmasters
by Franky Branckaute on January 26th, 2011
Paul Stamatiou has switched his site from WordPress to Jekyll. In this extensive review he features a step-by-step how to switch from WordPress to Jekyll, a new static generator. Paul mentions also some interesting details and reasons why his traffic dwindled and how this had a massive impact on his earnings.
What is Jekyll
Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server.
Find out more about Jekyll at Github and read Paul’s excellent write-up here.
Categories: Blogging Tools, Linking, WordPress Tutorials
Tags: Conversion, File Management, Jekyll, Paul Stamatiou, wordpress
by Darnell Clayton on January 25th, 2011
When it comes to installing WordPress premium plugins, there are a few extra questions users should ask beyond the “Is this plugin secure?” or “Can I trust this developer/company?”
While there is are greater expectations regarding premium plugins (mainly due to the fact that you’re paying them), not every premium WordPress plugin is worth their weight in code (regardless of which features they promise to deliver).
Regardless of whether you discovered the premium plugin upon the WordPress plugin directory or via a quick Google search, here are several questions you should ask before hitting the buy button. Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins
Tags: Premium, wordpress, WordPress Plugins
by Cassie Emelia on January 25th, 2011
Why You should Err on the Side of Being Too Formal when Making Contact
Dear Jodee,
When I’m responding to freelance writing job ads, I don’t always have a contact name for the client. How do I handle the salutation?
E-mail is a little different from sending a letter by regular mail. People tend to be a little less formal when communicating in this manner. While that may be acceptable when you are sending a note to a friend or a family member, you will want to be more formal when you are communicating with a potential client. Read More
Categories: General
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