Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category:
Premium WordPress Theme - Expression
Written by Jai on July 3, 2008 – 5:22 pm - 2,761 views
“Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.”
Breaking that silence, I present to you a refreshingly new Premium WordPress theme called “Expression“. This is a soft-colored WordPress theme with a minimalistic but feature packed approach. Here are some features of this premium theme :-
- Full Screen-width to fit all resolutions
- Tabbed menu
- Advertisement space for 125×125 & 468×60 banner ads
- A unique Ticker to display custom news & information to your users
- Social Bookmarking options under every post
- Excerpt Boxes for older posts
- Widget-ready sidebar
- CSS/XHTML validated
- Theme Options
This is the first time that I am releasing a Premium theme with “Theme Options” that let you change elements of your theme directly through the WordPress Administration panel. Read more »
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!Website Traffic Analysis - Key to Success
Written by Jai on June 25, 2008 – 11:03 am - 1,746 views
Its very important to analyze the traffic that comes to your website because it can really make or break your website. But before you can make full use of this traffic analysis, you must understand how to interpret this data.
Hosting companies will usually provide you with basic web traffic information that you will have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your hosting companies can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data - the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is mostly an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your website visitors to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!Blogging Recipe for WordPress Newbies - 100% Success Rate
Written by Jai on June 3, 2008 – 7:18 am - 6,126 views
If you are new to the blogging world and have recently thought of starting up your own WordPress blog, then let me give you a “success recipe” that every new blogger must follow to cook up some decent traffic. The following recipe might look overwhelming at the first glance but it can be essential for giving a solid foundation to your blog.
Ingredients required for this recipe :-
- A newly installed WordPress blog (Instructions here)
- A crispy theme (Free Themes - Premium Themes)
- 7 freshly written articles (How to write Articles)
- 4 spicy plugins :- All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, No Ping Wait, Related Posts
- $100 to spend on advertising (If you lack here, go with the free modes of advertising - explained below)
- Finally, a strong will to follow the recipe (I have no resource for this..you are born with it
)
I have spread this recipe through a week’s schedule, so be patient and take it easy. I can promise you that at the end of this period, you will see a good stream of visitors on your blog. So, munch on..
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Written by Jai on May 13, 2008 – 1:23 pm - 3,201 views
I know that many of you readers come here, read what you want to, take what you want to, do what you want to without me knowing that you ever came here! So, if you have been a silent reader of my blog and want to know the benefits of leaving comments on a blog’s posts, let me give you some tips on why you should be doing it.
1. Do you know me?
If you regularly leave comments on a particular blog, it will make the blog owner recognize you and also your website. When you do this on multiple blogs, you will be socially recognized in the blogging community. Also, most of the blogs nowadays use Gravatars which can help in branding and getting some popularity for your own blog. I think that leaving comments on popular blogs is the best way to be known around the Internet.
2. Building Community
A community is built around people and their views. Leaving comments is a way of showing that you care and want to share your opinion with others including the owner of the blog. The comments can be a suggestion, feedback, appreciation or even criticism. They are good as long as they are not spammy or abusive. So, even if you are just stopping by, try to make that little effort of writing a comment, even if its just a line.
3. Getting What you Want
You should leave a comment because that’s the only way the blog owner can judge what the reader/customers want without getting a written e-mail or any other form of communication.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!How to Choose your Blog Hosting Service
Written by Jai on April 24, 2008 – 10:19 am - 2,165 views
Every blogger has got two basic choices when building his own blog— Either he can sign up for a hosted solution, or he can install a serve-it-yourself solution and take care of it on your own. Signing up for a hosted solution is generally easier (especially if you don’t already have your own website and you’re not terribly interested in jumping through a hoop or two to get one), while installing a serve-it-yourself solution can be more powerful.
Popular hosted blogging CMS (Content Management Systems) include Blogger.com, Typepad.com, Vox.com, Squarespace.com, and others. With these services, you simply access the site, go through a registration process and, in some cases, enter your payment information to cover the monthly fee. (Some are free, some require payment.) These are hosted services - somebody else worries about the Internet server, setting up the Web addresses and all that sort of stuff. You’re given a URL for your site (mostly a sub-domain), some online tools for editing your blog (and, perhaps, for editing the template and making some minor changes to the functionality), and you’re ready to go. With a serve-it-yourself CMS (like WordPress) you’ll need to do a little legwork. First, you’ll need some sort of web hosting account from an Internet Service Provider. You might already have something along those lines from the Internet Service Provider that you use for Internet access, or you may need to shop for a web hosting account that will support the specifications of your blogging software.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!Why use WordPress?
Written by Jai on April 19, 2008 – 11:45 pm - 2,390 views
If you are new to WordPress and looking for reasons to use WordPress as a CMS (content management system) in your new website, let me give you some.
Open Source Software
WordPress is an Open Source software which allows it to be used free of cost. You can use it on any kind of personal or commercial website without have to pay a single dime for it. It is built on PHP/MySQL (which is again Open Source) and licensed under GPL.
User Friendly
You don’t really have to be experienced to use WordPress on your website. Nowadays most of the hosting companies provide the ability to install WordPress on your site at a single click of the mouse. The administration section is easy to navigate and its even easy to add articles/content to your website.
Themes Support
You will never run short of templates when using WordPress. If you don’t like the themes that come with the default installation of WordPress, you can hunt on the Internet and you will find thousands of free themes that you can download and use for your website. There are themes which can even make your website look like a regular site instead of a blog.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!WPdesigner.com going down the Drain?
Written by Jai on April 18, 2008 – 7:02 am - 2,439 views
If you are a WordPress enthusiast and have been following the latest news, you will know that Small Potato (Wpdesigner.com) recently sold his blog for $65,000 to some Polish guy called Pawel Ciszewski. It is really amazing that the blog was sold for that much money even when it was not earning any substantial revenue. But anyway, I feel that SP (Small Potato) has made a wrong choice by selecting someone who is not related to the WordPress field and the blog is in jeopardy now. I guess SP was in a hurry to pack his bags for his tours.
There has been no news posted since March 28, 2008 on the blog which is making the blog readers impatient and many have already unsubscribed from the blog. Pawel who is the new owner, promised the blog readers that he is hunting for theme designers and other staff who will run the blog. But its very ironical that there has been no update after that point. According to some readers’ research, Pawel Ciszewski runs some online casino sites. So, this really shows how much he will care about the reputed blog which was taken to a high level by SP. But SP, shame on you… your baby is dying out there and no one really cares.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!30 tips to Maximize your RSS Feed Subscribers
Written by Jai on April 5, 2008 – 11:32 am - 3,098 views
There are many ways in which you can maximize your RSS subscribers. I have tried to compile some of the best ones here:
1. Making the most out of your blog posts
- Write descriptive headings for your blog posts – They should purely point to the content in your post and describe optimally about what is written and it is relevant to whom and what.
- Write articles for your post with a minimum of 150-200 words because too less content will dissatisfy your readers who are trying to find information on a topic (that’s why they subscribe to the blog).
- Put internal and external links related to your articles and it would also be better if the keywords in your title match the links you have posted with the article. It adds more relevance and usefulness to what you are informing your readers about.
- Make the post user friendly and your blog easy to subscribe. The new readers of your post, who liked your article, are willing to subscribe, should be easily able to find the ‘subscribe now’ option on your site.
- When possible, try eliminating the pronouns and putting more descriptive nouns. The sparking idea behind this is that when the search engines start searching for the key words, they identify the semantics in your article and thus the searcher can approach your blog site or article. It helps your post reach its highest potential.
2. Comments should be encouraged on every post of your blog. A well written blog entry invites more readers and comments from them. Make it known to them that you value their distinct comments and they herald an improving ladder for you.
3. Give people different options on how they want to subscribe as readers like e-mail and different RSS feed readers (e.g. Google Feed Reader). Some may even prefer feed readers depending on their Internet browsers.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!Tips to Speed up your Blog
Written by Jai on February 12, 2008 – 11:22 am - 2,221 views
“People hate waiting”. If your website is not loading within 4-5 seconds, you are likely to lose a lot of visitors. Normally we assume that people are seeing our blog at the same speed as we are. It is hard to pinpoint the exact culprit that is slowing down your web page. As there are many different elements like CSS, JavaScript, Images, Flash, Frames etc. which take time in loading.
There are a number of surfers who have modems less than 56K. Everyone does not have Cable Modem, ISDN or T1 connection to the internet. Hence, it is very important for a web designer to see that his/her sites load as fast as possible.
When you view your web page, your content loads in a specific order. Images and Media are the main bandwidth hogs and take a lot of time in loading. I would suggest you to remove all forms of multimedia embedded in your front page of website except for images. You can put a background song on your web page, but normally these sound files capture a lot of bandwidth, especially if it is a .wav file. Video files should be avoided unless there is a need and keep the file sizes small. But still try and use such files in other pages of your website because as I said “People hate waiting”.
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