BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

Graffiti art has tremendous vitality and a feeling of authenticity. Sometimes ugly, it can also be beautiful and outrageously creative. It can lend freshness and creativity to a building, a neighborhood, or your blog.

I had created a page, where I intended to add a widget that allows you to easily make your own graffiti graphic signature. It’s free. It’s fun. And you just might find a use for the graphics you make.

However, WordPress will not execute the flash code required to implement the widget on a page. Instead you will need to go to the NY Graffiti Creator site and use the widget there.

They do offer the widget code to embed in your own site. (Presumably it works on HTML sites?) It does work if you paste the code in a WordPress Text widget and put that in a sidebar. I have done that, and it worked.

So for now you can see (and use) the widget in the lower right corner of this site. But I will not leave it there for long, so play with it now and remember to go to NYGraffitiCreator.com if you want it later.

By the way, the text entry box is that gray bar right above the control sliders under the Preview area.

Enjoy!

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No matter whether you are going to build a blog dedicated to affiliate marketing, drop shipping, or your own product, it is very important to choose  a platform that will enable you to add content easily.

Today, WordPress and Blogspot are the industry leaders when it comes to the blogging arena. When you answer the following questions, it will help ensure that you are using the best platform for your new blog. Read the rest of this entry →

Image via Wikipedia

by Kathleen Gresham

When you say WordPress, people automatically think of blogging. WordPress is the blog engine supreme. It is free, easy to install and easy to customize.

Thinking of WordPress as just a blog engine, though, seriously limits your options. That would be a shame, because WordPress offers so many options.

WordPress is a full-featured content management system (CMS). It can keep track of multiple authors and their privileges, provide a place to store documents and allow users to download them, keep track of document revisions and allow you to compare them and reinstate earlier versions—and so much more.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with WordPress. And most options are freely downloadable somewhere on line at no charge.

1. Web Sites

WordPress allows you to build a static web site much faster than any website builder software. Especially if you are not a wizard with that particular sitebuilder. That is, unless you are a super whiz with, say, DreamWeaver, you probably cannot match the speed—and certainly not the ease—with which you can set up a web site with WordPress.

Nowadays there are some great themes with dropdown menus that look like high-quality web site templates and can be easily customized.

Not only that, the search engine optimization benefits of a WordPress site versus a conventional HTML web site are tremendous. There are so many blog networks and SEO plugins and other tools that you can use to promote a WordPress site that are simply not available for HTML web sites.

2. Forums

There are several free plugins that allow you to easily set up a discussion forum, using WordPress. You can use that forum to make money from advertising, offer support for the products or services sold by your company (on line or off line), meet like-minded people, and so much more.

3. Membership Sites

Membership sites are a great way to make residual income. You can charge a fee for joining, for example for a niche membership site, and/or charge a monthly membership fee. Internet marketers often use a membership site to post their products for purchasers to download, to offer affiliate marketing tools and status reports to their affiliates, and to offer support for their products.

Others simply charge a membership fee for members to get access to a host of free downloadable ebooks, software, or other original content in a particular niche.

4. Article Directories and Link Directories

Article marketing is a staple of online marketing, and articles sites have many purposes. If your article site becomes popular, you can make good advertising revenue. If not, you still have a good place to post original or PLR articles with links to your main blog or web site.

You can download free themes and plugins to build an article directory with WordPress. Or  you can build yourself a link directory with other free WordPress themes and/or plugins. You could, for example, add a links page from your main blog to all your other sites.

5. Blogs

Yes, of course, WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible blog engine for self-hosted blogs. The very popularity of WordPress means there are thousands of theme designers and plugin makers constantly providing excellent new free or paid products to add value to WordPress blogs.

6. Combination Sites

Lately I have been making combination website-blogs for offline and online businesses. That is easy to do with WordPress.

For example, see the site designed for Temples Gate, a charming metaphysical gift shop in Houston, Texas. The old site was unfindable on Google for any related keyword or phrase.

The new WordPress-based site rose to Google PR2 in just a few months. It gets traffic via Google searches from all over world.

The site continues to grow as we add more pages, posts, and photos. Google loves sites that steadily grow. And site visitors like to see new and different photos and text whenever they visit the site.

The embedded blog fits seamlessly into the web site, and the site is linked to a Google Calendar so that the store owner can easily add and update the classes, workshops, and other events held at the store.

We will soon add a shopping cart to encourage online purchases. WordPress makes it easy to do that, and several of shopping cart plugins are free. We are still comparing features and usability on a separate test site.

Flexibility and Free Tutorials

Some of the same features can be found on Joomla and Drupal, but nothing beats WordPress for design flexibility and the huge array of plugins, widgets and other accessories available to easily customize it. Also, there is so much free training available for WordPress. WordPress video courses abound, and many of them are free.

So think outside the box when deciding how to build your next site, whether for personal use, to enhance your offline business or for ecommerce. Consider using WordPress even if you are not building a blog. Your imagination is just about the only limit to what you can do with it.

Adding Extra Value to Your Blog

And consider all the options that the WordPress community offers for adding value to your blog. Even if a blog is your main goal, WordPress allows you to add a forum for your reader community or a paid membership area.

If you want to do business on line, WordPress is a great tool for that, too. The sky is just about the limit when it comes to WordPress.

Select Your Hosting Service Carefully

If you intend to build a business in online retail sales, however, make sure you have a good ecommerce web hosting service. Make sure  you use a service that fully supports whatever it is that you are trying to do.

My first hosting was horrible. We could not even get a simple WordPress blog to work properly on their service, and it was a nightmare. So look for quality, not just price, in selecting a hosting service, even if you are not currently planning to get into ecommerce.

What cool things do you do with WordPress? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Kathleen Gresham designs, writes, and promotes blogs and websites and consults on search engine optimization (SEO) and directory listings for online and off line businesses in Houston, TX. For more information, see Houston Blog Web and Web Fresh Leads.

With the neon-text-generation widget, you can generate neon text for your blog or web site, if the style is appropriate for your design and contents.

And you can get this widget and put it on a blog about, say, graphics, for the use of site visitors. Putting a text generator on your site may bring visitors back for repeat visits.

At WidgetBox.com you can generate the widget for a wide variety of platforms (including WordPress, Blogger, HTML, and lots more). And you have the choice of javascript or flash.

To get the neon-text-generation widget, just click on the tab at the bottom of the widget in the sidebar on the right on this page. (You may need to scroll down or up to find the widget.)

I love neon! I hope you do, too.

WordPress themes are free by the hundreds, or cheap by the dozens. Or expensive, if custom designed. Usually.

But now there’s a website where you can design your own WordPress themes—for free.

Yep. Your colors. Your design. Chosen from menus. Easy.

Want the sidebar on the left? On the right? Want two sidebars? No problem.

There is a bit of a learning curve. But have you even tried going through free WordPress theme sites, looking for something that works for you? Yep, that takes time, too.

I haven’t quite mastered it yet. I haven’t quite figured out the trick to adding background images. But I did create a plain, clean theme. Want to see? You can view it here.

So why not give this a try? If nothing else, it’s fun. And you might create the perfect theme for you!

I just discovered this site where you can make a widget of your own blog posts. They call it a “blidget.”

This widget, or blidget, automatically picks up and displays your last few blog posts. It is your very own private BlogRush-type widget, featuring only your own blog!

Others can then get your blidget and put it on their blogs if they want to keep up with your posts (sort of like putting the Digg widget on your blog). Or you can put your blidget on other blogs and/or websites that you own.

Not only that, but when you create a blidget, you can then easily add it to your Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, or other site by clicking a button. It’s all very automated and easy.

Here is an example that I made for this blog:

You can customize your widget, and others who get your widget to put on their blog can customize it to suit their site.

Register, and you can store your widgets and have them listed in a blog directory for others to see (and maybe post on their blogs).

Also, by registering your blog, you get a free link back to your site from what is sure to be a highly Google-ranked site as it catches on. (That’s great for getting traffic and helping raise your blog’s ranking).

This is really fun stuff! Go see for yourself at Widgetbox.com.

Do you want 2000 links to your blog for free? Yeah, I thought so.

In case you are new to blogging and/or search engine optimization, let me explain. A big part of how Google determines the Page Rank (PR) of your site is by how many backlinks (one-way links to your site from other sites) you have. The higher PR the sites that link to you have have, the more they help raise the ranking of your site. (That is search engine optimization (SEO) in a nutshell.)

Brad Callen offers a program called Directory Submitter that you can download from his site at no charge. It allows you to select which directories to submit to (for example, only PR 4 or above). Then it automates directory submission, saving you hours and hours—or days and days—or time.

All you do is provide your email address and register the program. It’s that simple. You can download Directory Submitter here.

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Go, now! Sorry I didn’t mention it before.

By the way, Brad’s other programs are excellent, too. Not all of them are free, but they are great.