But PageRank (PR) is still used by many advertisers to select blogs to advertise on. That makes PR important for monetizing your blog.

A free service called PRChecker lets you quickly check PageRank for a web site and then generate code that you can paste into a widget (or any html code) to display a button that shows the current (updated) PR of each page of your site, on your site.

The PageRank button comes in three sizes. Here is the size I normally use:

There is also a free PageRank Checker Tool that you can add to your site. I’ve put one in the right-hand sidebar of this page for you to use to check PR of your sites right here at BlogDesignJournal.

So you can come back here anytime to check PR of a blog and read about what’s going on in the blog design world.

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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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.

1) Is the Interface Easy to Understand and Work With?

If you know how to compose and send emails, you will most likely have few problems using the Blogspot platform.  On the other hand, if you aren’t accustomed to posting in groups, or on social networks, you may find the WordPress platform a bit more complicated.

Nevertheless, once you get accustomed to the functions on one blogger platform, you can transfer the concepts to other platforms.  Therefore, even if you feel more comfortable with the Blogspot platform, you should not automatically eliminate WordPress from your list of possible platforms.

2) Are There Advanced Features Available?

Ideally, you should choose a platform that will allow you to take advantage of new marketing tools, as well as other technologies.  This includes incorporating social networking information, as well as many other things that will give your blog a constant source of live content.

In general, you will find that WordPress outstrips Blogspot when it comes to advanced features.  For example, if you select the Atahualpa theme, you will gain access to a page menu with listing features.

When it comes to advanced features, you should also give some thought to functions that may not be seen by users.  In particular, if you are going to have more than one writer work on the blog, it will be of some help to provide each person with an account.

Even though both Blogspot and WordPress offer account setup functionality, WordPress tends to give you more options.  On the other hand, the Blogspot platform tends to be more secure.

At the very least, you won’t have to worry about continually upgrading to a new version because hackers have found yet another hole to exploit in the platform’s overall security.

3) Can the Blog Script Be Modified Easily?

Even though WordPress has an endless number of advantages, it can be very difficult to modify the basic template.

Consider a situation where the theme you select does not come with controls for changing the header image or background color. If you look at the WordPress dashboard, you may find well over a dozen files that may have coding related to these parts of the blog.

Without a question, if you do not have experience with CSS, HTML, and PHP, you may find that making even simple changes represents a daunting challenge.

By contrast, making changes to a Blogspot template is much easier. At the very least, you can edit everything in one file.

At the same time, if you need to make changes to a widget, you can easily select an option in the editor that will give you access to the appropriate code. Therefore, even if you are not familiar with web design, you can still tweak a Blogspot template with a minimal amount of difficulty. Worst comes to worst, you can also reset the blog with ease.

During the process of choosing a blogging platform, it is very important to make sure that you will be able to manage each aspect of the blog with a minimal amount of difficulty.  This includes being able to make changes to the following basic areas:

Header and Footer
Fonts, colors, and format for posts
Background colors and designs
Number of Columns and Column Size
Login and account areas for writing teams

Once you begin comparing the general characteristics of the Blogspot and WordPress platforms, it will be much easier for you to determine which one will give you the most flexibility in each category of interest.

As may be expected, you may come across situations where one platform will suit your needs better than others.  Therefore, even though you may have chosen one platform for your first blog, there is no reason to conclude that you will never want to use a different platform at some point in the future.

About the Author:

Learn how to make money blogging today. Visit Brian’s website, http://www.HomebasedBlogging.com and learn how you can make money online from blogging using social media, affiliate marketing, podcasting, article marketing, and many other money-making topics from blogging professionals.

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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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

.

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.

So I was thrilled with the idea of BlogRush.com, and I told you about it a week or so ago in a post called Promote Your Blog Instantly With BlogRush. No Charge!

At the time, the service had no track record. But I was betting on the brilliance of the concept—and of the founder, John Reese, who has made many millions on the Web. The results are in. It works! It is especially good for younger, less-well-known blogs, like this one.

The only thing I didn’t like was the widget itself, which was ugly. It really clashed with some of my blogs, but I used it anyway.

Early on, John promised colors, or “flavors” of widgets, and I could hardly stand the wait. Now they’re here! And they are beautiful, well-chosen colors.

I’ve chosen a conservative dark blue to blend with this blog, and various other colors for my other blogs. (Feel free to go look, please.) Talk Like a Texan got Ice (pale gray) to go with the colors of oaks, bayou and spanish moss.

New Health Ideas got a Plum widget. Art Fun Cheap got a Watermelon (emerald green) widget to match the accent color of the WordPress theme. And so on. It was so much fun.

And here’s (almost) the best part. You do not have to cut and paste any code/scripting/whatever to change the widget Flavors. Let me say that again: No cutting and pasting. No wp-admin.

Once you’ve registered and added your blogs, you can just go to the BlogRush site, log in, and apply whatever flavors you want to. Anytime. It all happens remotely.

Sheer blog design bliss! It’s my favorite new toy!

And the widget works with other blog engines. I have put one on a Blogger blog, Tengsha.com, and it works great there, too, including changing widget colors.

As far as the service itself goes, I’m delighted. There have been problems with cheaters lowering the overall click-through rates, but I’m confident that those will soon be sorted out.

BlogRush is truly a fantastic service! And it is free, quick and easy—three of my favorite things.

Preezo is an Ajax web application that lets you create and share professional-looking, PowerPoint-style presentations over the web without software or plugins. And there is no charge to join the site or to create presentations.

The best part from our point of view as bloggers is that the presentations are then stored there at http://preezo.com, and you can embed them in your blog. That means you can create video presentations that add great appeal to your blog, easily and cheaply.

The only cost is your time to create the presentation, and the interface makes that easy. No, I haven’t made one yet (but watch for one soon!). I wanted to let you know ASAP.

Please come back and tell us what you did with this great new free [tag-tec]blog design[/tag-tec] tool.