WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-Er

Web design for WordPress always comes down to evaluating which Blog Templates (or what is commonly knows WordPress Themes) fit your needs the most! This review of available options for choosing best blog template for your WordPress will concentrate not only on their visual appeal (web design factor) but also functionality!

WordPress is a dynamic by nature and any web designer failing to also properly integrate functionality - falling short of the target and minimizes benefits of the platform. Web design for WordPress blog is quite a bit different from creating template for static site and how well designers understand it will impact the overall performance of your blog.

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This article was written by Monika Mundell

If you blog for fun and don’t want anything to do with an online business, you might not need to read this post. If however you do run a business online, regardless of creed listen up as the tips below can present your blog in a more powerful way.

Blogging is fun, I’m sure you agree with this, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. In general bloggers start out because of two reasons:

1. They heard it is cool to start blogging and did so
2. They purposely started a blog to get more exposure for their business

Do you fall into one of those two categories, or did I miss an obvious reason here?

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This is a very short post (been a bit sick last few days) and the main reason behind it is to give you a free tool I have just created - WordPress Web 2.0 Guide Toolbar. It designed to solve one BIG problem - convenient access to all relevant information to help you build, maintain, promote and earn from your blog.

I have realized that my collection of Personal Bookmarks, tutorials and howto guides can be a great resource for many other bloggers and created toolbar to share it. While it is still in process of been built - it will contain a one click access to what I personally use on daily bases and something that helps me in daily blogging.

With abundant choice of freely available themes for WordPress every blogger gets tempted to test a new look every once in while. I know I get the urge often enough so I decided to discuss the subject of how you can safely test new look and see if the theme you liked will fit your blog vision.

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This weekend I had to answer some questions for an interview by Carlo Selorio and one of them made me think. Not that it was unusual but it was operating outside of the realm of conscious decisions and logical choices…

“What inspires you?”

… or something to that effect. As a blogger sometimes I find inspirations in most unusual locations and today I want to run a parallel inspired by my family’s dining out experience this weekend. One question got stuck in my mind …

Is My Blog Ready For “Fine Dining” Or Will It Become “Fast Food Joint”

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I have just signed up this morning for a QuickWebCreations service and was amazed at the service is provides at an extremely low price. Being a fairly decent with Photoshop I still spend considerable amount of time when I need to work with images, especially anything related to Web 2.0.

Time it takes to figure out latest trends and how to get image to correspond to it is one of the most consuming tasks for me and if you are like me I suggest you look at what I was able to create in a spam of 2 minutes using this tool:

Like what you see? Then watch the video where I show exactly how I did it …

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Blogs by its nature are INFORMAL online information medium and way too often don’t pay appropriate level of attention to credibility and trustworthiness and yet – we should! Being a webmaster I always used to put establishing trustworthiness at the top of my list of key tasks to be completed on launch. What happened you might ask?

While I have followed some of the basics even with my blog – the core fact that blog is less formal always managed to interfere and perhaps even made me ignore what I know has to be done. This post is designed to be as much of a guideline to myself as a form of benchmark you can use to determine just how trustworthy your blog is.

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This is more of an internal note then anything else and my quick apologies to anyone who has a different experience while accessing my blog. This morning I started and now just about completed move of this blog to my hostgator account.

I got to so fed up with increasingly poor support and stability from Site5 hosting aver the period of last 2-3 month that I’m moving everything off of their servers. I have also removed this hosting from the list of my recommendations. Don’t take me wrong - they USED TO have one of the best options available and what you get for your money is probably still the best but their support is gone to sh*t.

So there you have it - an explanation on why you might have seen a few glitches this morning …

Every once in a while I run into a cool tool that attracts my attention and draws me into further investigation. Quite distracting but stats and performance analysis is one of  my minus and always have been  as long as I’ve been building websites. My justification always been simple - If I know what effort contributes more to success, I can spend more time on it and disregard tasks that give me less return.

A little while ago I have posted an article “Webmaster Tools Every Blogger Need To Know About” , where I listed some of the most useful tools in my opinion to perform tracking and get general overview. We are not talking detailed analytics here but an Great Overview of results. And Website Grader is another tool that should have made the list but I simply didn’t know about it until quite recently.

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