WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-Er

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.

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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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