I’m a strong believer in first impression. It is what determines HOW you are perceived on subconscious level even before you are interacted with. In case of blogs it is just as important, as first impression has a great chance of turning interested visitor into “fast clicking Back button” browser.

Sadly, even if the information you provide is relevant to the search!

I have seen it before and done it myself. Just think back – have you ever arrived to a site because it supposedly had info you need but was so destructed by the color combination, ads overload or awkward navigation that you simply clicked back to look for OTHER site?

FlexSqueeze WordPress theme is a new breed of WordPress themes that merges process of Marketing on Internet and blogging. Successful implementation of the idea of lead generation and service your market Niche all on a single site FlexSqueeze is guaranteed to generate interest as more and more savvy marketers will learn about it!

My goal here is to share my experience with it from playing with it for couple of days and also give you opportunity to experience it for yourself! FlexSqueeze is as close as you can get to a single site implementation of eMail Marketing and blogging, without any need to learn complex technical stuff and here is my take on it…

This post is written to address multiple questions I have received from my existing customers and readers of my blog – how to build WordPress blog with minimal number of plugins for speed and still profit from it. While the choices will greatly depend on what niche you are addressing and your goals, I’ll provide some of my personal choices that I think should be part of ANY WordPress blog, no matter how minimalistic it is.

But first, lets define minimalist:

min·i·mal·ist (mn-m-lst) n.

1. One who advocates a moderate or conservative approach, action, or policy, as in a political or governmental organization.
2. A practitioner of minimalism.

And now lets discuss how we can make our WordPress blog to follow the standart above…

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.

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.

With upcoming release of WordPress 2.5 which introduces some large changes to administrative backend I thought it was appropriate to share my personal WordPress Wish List.

I know it will be largely ignored but hey – let the guy share the dream…