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WordPress Security Service for free!

18 Jan, 2010 | mayank

(Image Credit – ClickonF5)

Since few months, I’ve been hearing lot of horror stories regarding the security compromises that bloggers have to deal with. It’s open source nature, what has been the boon for WordPress, is now standing against it (For Hardcore Open-source lovers – I am in favor of Open-source all the way and that statement of mine should not be taken as personal attack). There have been many blogs that weren’t using the latest version of WordPress are now infected with some sort of worm or some hacker gets access to the web server and misuses your precious resources. There are cases where they even harm the website by effecting its search engine rankings.

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Why I ditched WordPress for Blogger!

15 Jan, 2010 | mayank

Topics: Blogging Resources

Image Credit - AyudaWordPress

I’m completely sane and I haven’t ditched WordPress for Blogger at the moment. I’m talking about the time when WordPress was pretty young and like the infamous “browser wars”, blogging world was buzzing about “Clash of Blogging platforms!” It was nearly 4 yrs. ago when I started jumping in Blogging and at that moment, WordPress was already giving good fight to Google’s Blogger. Questions can be asked that why am I writing about this after so many years, the answer is that Keith has asked this question from everyone. Don’t forget to post your response too!

So, coming back to the question – during that time, I was super excited about every product from Google and Blogger was no exception. My technical knowledge was limited to fixing up Windows and I was just trying to take dip in the world of being a true webmaster.

So Why Did I Ditch WordPress?

Ease of Use – Blogger has always been a wonderful platform for those who are technically challenged. At that time, WordPress was considered to be choice of techies and surely wasn’t as easy as Blogger.
Not extensible – WordPress at that time didn’t have as many powerful plugins as we have now. However, there were already lots of hacks, tutorials available for Blogger. I’ve learned almost everything with the help of mighty Google. It didn’t take me any time to play around with Blogger that much.
Fear of screwing up things – Even though techie by nature, the initial hitch of trying something more techie gave me chills. I always had the question “what if” haunting me. However, there was hardly anything in Blogger that scared me. There were times, when I wanted to put Flash widgets in my blog and found it super difficult in WordPress where as Blogger made me feel as if I’m home!
Google’s branding – When you know that such big name is behind a service then you feel comfortable. You know that nothing will happen to your blog if you don’t do dirty things. However, WordPress was only developing at that moment. So, my inclination was more towards Blogger.
Not many beautiful designs – Blogger’s template engine has always been pretty similar to the normal HTML, so it was very easy for designers to create templates for it. For this very reason, there were ample amount of beautiful templates for blogger as compared to WordPress.

Keeping those points in mind, I decided to ditch WordPress against Blogger, however after few months of Blogging, I realized that if I have to become professional blogger, I would have to shift my Blog to WordPress and face my fears. The moment, I got the feeling of having no other option, I decided to take the step and since then I’ve been using WordPress. I was actually surprised to see that, things were tremendously easy in WordPress and with in no time, I was playing around with it pretty comfortably.

Now I can’t imagine my life without WordPress, not only it helps me keep our blog running smoothly, it helps me in earning my bread and butter too. Moreover, there are far too many resources available that ensure that you are never stuck even if you have any problem.

What was your reaction when you first used WordPress? Were you scared like me or was your reaction like that of Keith’s? Do share your experience with us or write a blog post as I did.

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Widgetizing Your Non-Widget WordPress Theme

8 Jan, 2010 | Igor

Topics: Wordpress Customization

(Image credit - Clockless)

Many of the WordPress themes promoted are described as being widget-ready. Widget-ready WordPress theme is a theme that has widgetized areas which allows you to dynamically manipulate these areas in a simple drag-and-drop fashion. Widgetized sidebar is another way to describe the same thing because most of the widgets are used in the sidebars of the themes. However, sometimes you find a WordPress theme that you really like, but discover that it’s not widgets ready. Don’t give up just yet, making themes widget-ready really isn’t as difficult as you might think. Follow the steps in this article and we will teach you how to Widgetize a WordPress theme making it a drag-drop widget theme.

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Installing WordPress Locally on Your Computer

5 Jan, 2010 | Igor

Topics: Wordpress Tutorials

In a previous post I wrote about a simple and easy way to convert your html into WordPress theme. Starting from today I will post a small series of articles that will explain the sweet little details when building a new WP theme. So first things first, we will start by explaining how to install WordPress on a local computer (Learn how to install wordpress locally on mac). By doing so, it will save you time from updating and previewing files, also we will mention some problems that you may encounter during the installation and after it.
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Don’t Let WordPress Scare Your Clients

21 Dec, 2009 | Igor

Topics: web design

Image Credit – Twimg.com

WordPress is an excellent CMS and one of the most popular blogging platforms available. WordPress is free, open-source, extremely extendable and it gives the clients control over the content of their own website. It is quite user-friendly, it provides flexibility, you can use hundreds of plugins and last but not least it has a huge support community. With all those positive attributes how can you not simply like it. However it can be a little bit different for your clients. While you are probably fully comfortable in managing, editing, and adding content, most of your clients probably will be regular people not technically savvy and may find Wordpress hard to use. So part of our job would be to make things easier for these people for their better overall user experience with WordPress.

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A few mistakes that beginning bloggers should be aware of

7 Dec, 2009 | Igor

Topics: Blog Traffic, Blogging Tips

Blogs are everywhere. Blogs are about literally everything. People write a blog for a variety of reasons, as an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, to promote a business, as a way to reflect on life or for a plenty of other reasons. Blogs are a great to express your opinions and attitudes, but when writing a blog you have millions of competitors. In order to build an audience, you have to avoid few things that can seriously hamper your progress toward your goal.

1. Uninteresting Posts

Before you start your blog, think about your goals you want to accomplish. Define your target readership and don’t forget that your future readers are common, real people and that you need to write posts that people enjoy reading and they will reward you by returning to your blog regularly. Getting the visitors is easy, making them your regular visitors is hard. Write in a conversational style and on one particular topic. Don’t worry about blog traffic but focus on quality contents.

2. Ignoring Search Engines Optimization

You should follow a basic but important search engines optimization tips that will make your page perfectly optimized like:
-Your blog URL should contain the primary keyword you want to optimize for.
-You should use your primary keywords in the title of your post and your secondary keywords in the body of your post.
-You should use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts.

3. Off to a Vacation Every Week!

Write often and write regularly so readers and search engines will visit your blog more often, post on weekdays, because there are more readers and than post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts. Even if you keep a low pace of posts, say 5 posts per week still be available for your readers most of the time.

4. Terrible Design

There are two things that your blog design should not be: complicated and visually unappealing. If your blog design is complicated it will make readers distracted from reading your content. It also can slow down loading and will drive impatient visitors away. But if your blog design is simple and visually appealing it will be more attractive to your regular readers and also you can submit it to some CSS gallery site that feature great designs and get some extra traffic from there too.

5. Not Spreading the Word About Your Blog

Don’t just post on your blog and leave it like that. Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums, submit articles and post a reviews to newsgroups. You must work a little bit harder and be active to generate traffic, read lots of other blogs, leave trackbacks, simply you should become part of the community.

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Wordpress Blog Design Services

10 Nov, 2009 | Oliver

Topics: web design

Why is a unique custom blog design important?

It is always genuine quality content that really keeps the readers coming back to the blog, but a unique blog design makes the blog to easily stand out amongst tons of others out there in the blogosphere and thus helps to make the first impression to a new visitor. And for a regular visitor, the blog’s appearance creates an image in the mind of the reader which plays a big role in branding.

Why should you hire us?

Any good designer can claim that they design with emphasis, contrast, balance, alignment, repetition, flow, etc, but a good blog design also understands what the reader wants and what you want your readers to do. Target clientele as in what’s their age, how much time they spend online, etc along with what’s the goal of the blog as in branding your services, making money through ads, making money through affiliate links, etc all play an important role as to deciding how the design and structure should be. We had web design experience and also were bloggers (personal and then making money through ads) and then got into wordpress blog designing in Dec ’07 – and along the way have had the chance to work along with top pro bloggers like Yaro Starak, Daniel Scocco, Kevin Muldoon, Kyle Eslick and many more which has taught us a lot and now we put all this experience behind designing your blog.

What do you get?

Brainstorming on all the ideas you have in regards to features you have seen on other blogs, plus feedback from us in regards to what all features will best suit the needs of the blog.

A unique custom made design that complements the goal of your blog, suits your unique content and provides ease of use to your readers.

Coding which is/has:

Table-less
Rollover and Dynamic Menu
Javascript Framework – jQuery (best option)
SEO Semantic, Complete Presentational Separation
Optimized for Load Speed
W3C Valid Shorthand and Optimized CSS
W3C Transitional XHTML 1.0
Cross Browser Compatible (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE7 & IE8)

Installation on the server (if you already have a blog, then creating a test location first and porting over all your content there and going through rigorous testing together before it goes live).

Clear Instructions including screenshots on how to easily manage your blog on wordpress.

3 months of free support on any issues in relation to the coding done by us and future paid support (discounted price for existing customers) for wordpress upgrade, addition/changes in features, etc.

How much does it cost?

The exact cost depends on the project requirements as in tabbed content in the sidebar, magazine style layout, featured content in javascript, embed videos/audio, etc – basically how much custom work we have to do on top of the default features available through wordpress admin and its plugins. We work transparently with all our clients and charges are based on the efforts we put, as in number of hours and not what kind of blog we are designing or who you are or where you are from.

To start with!

Whether you have an existing blog or you want to start a new one, use the form below to let us know anything you have in mind for the blog i.e. your ideas, your budget (if you have one) or anything else you want. If you aren’t sure about what you want on the blog, then don’t worry as we know what questions to ask. So just get in touch and we will take it on from there.

Get in touch

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So Why Did I Ditch WordPress?

1. Uninteresting Posts

2. Ignoring Search Engines Optimization

3. Off to a Vacation Every Week!

4. Terrible Design

5. Not Spreading the Word About Your Blog

Why is a unique custom blog design important?

Why should you hire us?

What do you get?

How much does it cost?

To start with!

Get in touch

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