A website’s “visual appeal” is one of the most important factors when it comes to first impressions. Visitors make nearly instantaneous judgments that influence their decision on whether to stay and the site or bounce out of it right away.

When it comes to creating aesthetically appealing websites, you might be interested in taking a look at Wix. If you haven’t heard of Wix.com yet, let me introduce you: it’s a powerful Flash website builder that enables you to create and publish your own stunning custom Flash websites, mini-sites and other Flash content for free. More and more bloggers have also come to understand the importance of a well designed site. Many are now using Wix to add more dynamic designs into their blogs and also, to create their own custom standalone websites into which they add their RSS feeds. The connection between Wix and Bloggers couldn’t be more natural.

Similar to the Wordpress platform, Wix offers a powerful free web design solution. Read more

I was recently playing around with few online tools that let you measure your Link Popularity. These tools let you compare your website with 2-3 different other websites and show you a chart based on incoming links from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. I was amazed to find out that Blog Oh! Blog is far ahead than many popular & established blogs (and we are just one year old). Take a look at the following pictures and you will get an idea :-

These shots were generated using this tool :- Check Link Popularity

All these incoming links are a contribution from people who use the free themes available on Blog Oh! Blog. I thank you all for making Blog Oh! Blog a success

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.

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I present to you a very colorful and feature packed WordPress theme that has all the right ingredients to replace your current blog theme. Please welcome “Firebug“! A new WordPress theme from Blog Oh! Blog.

Firebug is a dark (but colorful) theme with two widget-ready sidebars, space for 125×125 banner ads, social tagging options at the end of each post, Gravatar ready comments, feed subscription options, WordPress 2.5+ Gallery feature, and much more. I have also included the logo.psd file in the images folder of the theme so that you can replace the logo.gif file with your own modified version. The WordPress theme is CSS/XHTML validated and has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer 6/7 and Safari.

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If you are a blogger and have been thinking of writing an ebook for a long time, here are some tips to help you in your endeavor.

When you look at the whole project, it seems like an impossible task. That’s why you have to break it down into manageable tasks. Think of climbing a mountain. You are standing at the foot of it and looking up at its summit vanishing into the clouds. How can you possibly scale such an immense and dangerous mountain?

There is only one way to climb a mountain ? Step by step.

Now think of writing your ebook in the same light. You must create it step by step, and one day, you will take that last step and find yourself standing on the summit with your head in the clouds.

The first thing you have to do, as if you actually were a mountain climber, is to get organized. Instead of climbing gear, however, you must organize your thoughts. There are some steps you should take before you begin. Once you’ve gone through the following list, you will be ready to actually begin writing your ebook.
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The time has come to declare the winners for the Premium Wordpress themes contest. There were a total of 40 contestants who participated in this contest. Out of the participating bloggers, five have won the rights to Premium WordPress themes and out of those lucky five, one has been chosen to get his blog reviewed on Blog Oh! Blog. The winning entries have been selected through a lucky draw and here are the winners :-

5 Premium Theme Winners

http://bridex.wordpress.com
http://www.stuff.web.id (Prize Given Out)
http://geniushackers.com/blog (Prize Given Out)
http://www.blogbucks.net (Prize Given Out)
http://pinoyteens.net (Prize Given Out)

Blog Oh! Blog Review Winner

http://geniushackers.com

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A couple was holidaying in Florida to celebrate their first anniversary of marriage. One morning the wife saw the husband wake up and go to the toilet. To the wife’s amusement, he stayed there for a very long time. As time passed, the wife became suspicious, as there was no sound of running water or the husband singing a bathroom hit. As she knocked the door and opened it, she found him sitting on the pot with the laptop stuck on his lap. He was blogging over a wireless link.

Blogging has become the new way of livelihood for many and fun for the idle ones. But there are also people for whom blogging has turned into an obsession instead of being a harmless hobby.

Given below are some real facts that can help you see the real picture and also to justify if you are actually a blogging addict. Read more

For the past few weeks, I have been experimenting with different grid-based CSS frameworks available on the Internet. YAML and Blueprint are two of the CSS frameworks that I might be using for my future theme development work. These nifty frameworks can be used for rapid development of clean CSS/XHTML layouts. I am not sure if any theme designers are already using these, but I like them a lot because they can save you a lot of time.

Based on the Blueprint framework, I am releasing a minimalistic WordPress theme called the “Gridblog“. This is a fast loading theme (only 36Kb in size) that has very little design elements but compensates with its functionality. It lets you display your front page blog entries uniquely by dividing them into two columns. The theme has different layout for pages, single entries and the archives section. Gridblog is fully CSS & XHTML compliant and has been tested with both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Test Run | Download

Please leave comments and let me know if you like it!

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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WordPress is commonly used as a blogging platform but if you dig deeper, you will find that there are many different ways in which this CMS (Content Management System) can be used. You might need to modify your theme differently to reach your target but it is entirely possible. You can also take the help of some already available plugins that will help you do the task.

Given below are some ideas for the enthusiasts and modders. I am also thinking of developing some free themes which will help you to use WordPress in the following ways :-

Giving your Blog a Website look

If you change the front page of your blog to a static one, you can configure WordPress to easily behave like a normal site instead of a blog. In WordPress 2.5.1, there is an option under settings -> Reading of your wp-admin section where you can set the front page of your blog to a static page. After doing this, you can just design your static page to look like a standard website.

Here are some additional tutorials to accomplish this :-

Creating a Static Front Page
Creative a Static Front Page (with many options)
Static Front Page Combined with Dynamic Content

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