BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

The title of this WordPress plugin may stimulate many people’s appetite, especially those who love Chinese food.  But Tan Tan Noodles WordPress Reports is a delicacy of another kind.  Rather than providing a wonderful gastronomic experience, it will allow blog owners to view and study the statistics that matter so that they can make adjustments and improvements to their blogs, and in so doing, increase their blogs’ profitability.

Tan Tan Noodles WordPress Reports is one of the Top 10 plugins in lists published all over the internet.  Does this make it a “must download” however?  Is Tan Tan Noodles the “end all and be all” of statistics-gathering add-ons for WordPress Blogs?

The Good

Tan Tan Noodles WordPress Reports is the perfect plugin for people who want their statistics delivered fast and clean.  This plugin displays relevant statistics pertinent to your blog, i.e. how many people visited your blog, which pages garnered the most views, the URL where they came from, the URL where they exited your blog, among others.  One of the majot problems of WordPress blogs is the lack of such a reporting tool, making it nightmarish for most tweak freaks who want to monitor the smallest details about the performance of their blogs so that they can make adjustments towards its eventual perfection.

Tan Tan Noodles WordPress Reports fills in this void by basically gathering data from free third party statistics tools Google Analytics and Feedburner.  Thereafter, Tan Tan Noodles WordPress Reports conveniently displays the relevant portions of these statistics on the WordPress Dashboard.

Tan Tan Noodles WordPress Reports is a great way to monitor your blog’s performance in real time.

The Bad

However, Tan Tan Noodles WordPress Reports does not provide comprehensive details about the statistics it reveals.  You will get the main numbers but not the breakdown of those numbers.  You will not get information about how much time your visitors spent on each blog page, the countries where they came from , among other pertinent informative bits.

To view these missing statistics, the blog owner has to go to Google Analytics or Feedburner himself.

This is a fair compromise, though.  If the plugin was to display a thorough reporting of all the statistics gathered from Google Analytics and Feedburner, then that area of the blog will be a chaotic mess, what with the sheer number of details that will be exhibited.

The Ugly

What is the absolute worst thing about Tan Tan Noodles WordPress Reports?

It’s name, most definitely.  Somehow, encountering the name of the plugin at midnight while finishing up some work would be enough to make anyone hungry.

Conclusion

There are more comprehensive statistics reporting plugins for WordPress blogs, but Tan Tan Noodles provides a cleaner and more straightforward experience for people who just want to receive the basic numbers and don’t want to be weighed down by the details behind the same.

This makes Tan Tan Noodles WordPress Reports a worthwhile plugin that deserves an installation in every WordPress blog.

We recommend that you download this Plugin and place it straight on your Blog in order to get the best results. Visit http://www.myeasyonlinepay.com/blogging-tools for a comprehensive selection of Plugins on the internet today.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/a-review-of-tan-tan-noodles-wordpress-reports-simplified-statistics-reporting-for-your-blog-1053808.html

Most bloggers who host their own domains use cheap web hosting, especially when we first start out. As we learn more, those who want to make money from blogging start to learn about search engine optimization (SEO). 

You can optimize your blog, and you can write and place articles, post on forums (with your blog address in your signature), send out press releases, get links from blog directories, and so on.

But one often overlooked way to make your blog more appealing to search engines is to have a dedicated IP address, especially if you hope to improve your Google page rank by linking from one of your blog or web sites to another.

Read the rest of this entry →

If you do a lot of blog design (or web design), you know what a pain it is when your PC seems to get slower and slower. That is not your imagination—or too much caffeine.

PCs really do get slower and slower after you have used them for awhile. The more you use them, the sooner that happens.

While there are software programs that claim to clean up (and speed up) your PC for you, they only do a partial job. But a young guy named Kris Maineri has a better way. For $10 he’ll sell you an ebook with videos to walk you step-by-step through cleaning up your PC to make it faster.

It’s called PC Secret Formula. It really is only ten bucks, including the videos. It’s easy and effective, and it works.

Even better, he will show you how to keep your PC from slowing to a crawl again. It takes just a little more time than installing and running one of those pricey programs, and it does a lot more good.

Your PC will run faster than it has in a long time. And at $10, it’s way cheaper than buying a new one.

How does this relate to blog design? When you are sick and tired of working on your blog design because you are tired of fighting a slow PC, you tend to skip things, cut corners, and sacrifice quality. (Ask me how I know?)

We never have as much time to spend on design as we would like anyway. That is, there is never time to really perfect the design as much as you could. Why waste time needlessly waiting on a slow PC?

Instead, try the PC Secret Formula. Speeding up your PC will leave you more time for designing blogs.

Are you a serial blogger? Do you have more than one blog?

Do you create blogs and often find that there are not enough people interested in your topic to make it worthwhile to post? Traffic is light? Few people comment? Do you gradually lose enthusiasm for posting, and move on to create yet another blog?

If so, maybe your blogs are not well enough targeted to a niche, a group of readers who are intensely interested in your topic. If you are blogging just for personal expression, that may be OK with you, but it can also be discouraging. You feel you are alone in the wilderness, talking to the trees.

Thousands of blogs are abandoned every day, because bloggers become discouraged when they have no audience. Sadly many people start a blog in hopes of making a little income from it and then are bitterly disappointed. There seems on reason to carry on if no one is reading.

If you hope to make an income from your blog, the best design in the world (see, there is a tie-in with the topic of this blog, sort of) will not make up for not having an audience.

The best blog design begins before you ever build your blog, before you ever select a design, before you even buy a domain name. The first step is research. Yes, that dirty word: research.

You may be writing a great blog that is focused on the wrong group of people. Maybe a slightly different target niche would reward you with lots of readers.

Read the rest of this entry →

Blog design is my priority, but let’s face it. We all have to be constantly on the lookout for good ways to promote our blogs. Especially quick, easy and free ways.

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.

Blog design can be complex and daunting if you want to go beyond merely making an on-line journal to share your thoughts. Designing a blog on your own web site that is well optimized for search engines, for example, takes skill and know-how.

Designing a blog with WordPress that is optimized to make money is an even bigger undertaking. I wouldn’t even have the courage to start this project right now if it were not for my business-blogging mentor, Alex Sysoef, who has just released an amazing product called Web 2.0 Wealth. Without Web 2.0 Wealth, this blog would not exist, and my Talk Like a Texan blog would still be a mess.

Web 2.0 Wealth (or as I call it, W2W) is a huge package of ebooks, step-by-step videos, and too many extras to describe here. It leads you step by step from how to choose a profitable niche for your blog through how to build it, optimize and monetize it (set up a bunch of ways to make money with it) and then publicize it to bring in lots of readers.

I learned so much about so many aspects of WordPress blog construction, php scripting, plug-ins, and related topics with W2W! And I had already bought and studied a few other [tag-tec]blog-design[/tag-tec]-and-monetization packages—some of which I liked and will write about in future posts.

Every time I turn around, Alex has added more features. And his support is fast, accurate, and truly helpful. What a refreshing change from some other vendors I could mention! Well, OK, most other vendors I could mention.

If you buy only one package on how to build blogs and make money, buy Web 2.0 Wealth. Then please come back and comment on how you used it. I’d love to see your blogs.