BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

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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.

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

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!

Sometimes the quickest, easiest way to accomplish a design task is to “cheat.” Instead of editing PHP code for example, you can adjust the space above or below a WordPress widget in a couple of simple ways.

1. Go to Presentation > Widgets, and click on the text icon on the widget to open it.

Note: Some widgets won’t open and can’t be edited,
but usually the widget above or below them can be.
In that case, pick one of those, or rearrange widgets.

2. If you know the widget is a text widget, but the text icon is not visible,
even when you click on it, you may need to drag the widget out of the sidebar,
replace it in the unused widgets area below, and then drag it back. The text
icon will then reappear.

3. With the text for the widget displayed, add an empty paragraph or two
above or below the existing text. For example: < p > < / p >

Note: The example has spaces added between parts of the code
so it will show in WordPress (instead of WP reading it as actual code
and inserting a blank line in this post). When putting the code in your
widgets, do not use the spaces. (Remember that if you need to show code.)

4. Close the text box and Save Changes.

5. Click on the View Site link.

Now there should be extra space wherever you added a line < p > < / p >.
If not, go back and add a period ( . ) between the < p > and < / p >.
For example: < p > . < / p >

6. Save your changes again. Click on the View Site link again.

7. Check to see if the spacing is what you wanted.

If not, add or delete lines (by adding < p > . < / p > for each new line)
until you are happy with the vertical spacing (or it’s the best you can do).

The periods are hardly noticeable on screen. If you scroll down and look closely, you can see one above the BlogRush widget, where I added an extra line.

You can make these changes very quickly. More important, you can make them without really knowing PHP or HTML.

In the grand old tradition of alphabet lists (A is for Apple, B is for Bear, …), here are 26 blog design principles, from Audience to Zones:

Audience—Who are you writing for? What do they like? Don’t imitate the sites they frequent, but be aware of the kind of look they like.

Blog engine—The WordPress blogging engine, hosted on your own domain, is by far the only way to go for flexible design, prestige, a wide selection of free ready-made themes and plugins, and search engine optimization. There is also a wide selection of tutotials and instructional videos for WordPress these days. Many are free.

Color—Color conveys meaning. What are you saying with your blog? If your links are pale gray or pale blue or some other unreadable color, you are saying I don’t care whether you can read this or not. And most people cannot. So you will annoy and lose potential blog readers.

Design principles. Do you know the basics of good design? If not, either learn them or hire a good blog designer. Design matters. It helps convey your message to the right audience. It helps you get and keep readers.

Elegance—Strive for elegance in the mathematical sense: simplicity and directness. No matter what your audience and topic, make sure your blog is optimal for that audience and that topic, with no extra gimmicks or clutter.

Focus—What is your blog topic? Again, who are you writing for? Focus your design on communicating with that audience about that particular topic. Context is everything.

Graphics—The style of blog graphics should match the style of the blog—and each other. A ragbag collection of ads, free widgets, and fuzzy photos (not to mention crappy clip art) is worse than no graphics at all. If you plan to fully monetize your blog, it’s worth paying a pro to get the riight look if you don’t have a trained eye for graphics yourself.

Headlines—Make sure the headings are easy to read. You’ve written them to be catchy and include keywords relevant to your blog topic. (Haven’t you???) Now make sure people can easily read them.

Ingenuity—Even the best theme has limitations. Experiment. Innovate. A little ingenuity can solve design problems and make your blog stand out. For example, did you know that if you run out of text widgets, you can put two scripts into one WordPress widget? You can.

Read the rest of this entry →

Does this happen to you, too? I keep running out of text widgets. WordPress only gives you nine.

So when you have used all nine text widgets, and you just have to add one more script or ad, what do you do? If there’s a text widget immediately above or below where you want to put the new one, no problem!

1. Copy the script or code you need to add.

2. Log into your WordPress admin area.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.