This post brought to you by the letter “D” and the number “7″. D is for Dan who’s an almost thirty web developer and blogger hailing from the Great North and 7 for the number of paragraphs you will be subjected you to.

Let’s face it… all the stuff you heard about setting up your own website being difficult was not true. Most blog owners are not tech-savvy people and everyone including your grandmother has a website now. My websites have evolved over time and transitioned through various blogging platforms giving me a taste of what options everyone has when they choose to put up a site. One of the things I’ve learned is that while it’s nice to have all the newest and coolest widgets, plugins and advertisements on your website you have to keep in mind that the more fancy things you add the more that has to load for every viewer who comes to visit. The key thing to having a website is to keep it running smoothly and provide readers with a pleasant experience.

For every widget that you add to your website you are adding one more call to an external website every time your page loads. You must also remember that if one of these external websites is experiencing problems it will directly affect the loading time of your own website. A perfect example of this would be any blogger who uses a twitter plugin to display their tweets or whatever they’re called (I do not use twitter). I do know however that the twitter website experiences above average downtime.

Read the rest or post a comment »

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.

Read the rest or post a comment »

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?

Read the rest or post a comment »

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.