I’ve removed the footer ads from this blog for now. The Close button kept creeping down the window. Today when I got here, the Close button was completely gone, and there was no way to close the ad window.

Yikes! These things are like weeds. I keep deleting the code, and the ads keep reappearing. Very Twilight Zone. So you may still see them, and I don’t know why. Yet. But I will find and zap them.

When I have time, I’ll contact the publisher/vendor and see if there’s a fix. Meanwhile, I can’t recommend using the Footer Ads. If you find out what the problem is, please post a comment and let me know. Especially if you find that there’s a way to fix it.

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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.

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Today I ran across a site that offers free traffic to your blog or website in a very nice way. (You do not get bombarded with emails.) Instead, here’s how it works:

You paste some code, supplied by the company, Footer Ads, into the footer of your blog or website. That displays to visitors a strip of text ads at the bottom of your page, which they can close after reading.

In return, you earn credits to use to display your own text ads on other sites. Your visitors do not have to click on the ads or buy anything for you to get credit. They just have to visit your site.

The ads look like Adsense, Yahoo or MSN ads, but they are not embedded. The user can click and close the ad window like the one that appeared at the bottom of this page after the page loaded. (To close the ad window, click the X button in the lower right corner.)

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Somehow or other, Technorati found my Talk Like a Texan blog, so now I’m “claiming” all my blogs so I can track them there.

Technorati Profile“>

It may not seem like a free, online PowerPoint-style presentation program would have anything to do with blog design. But it does.

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 blog design tool.

Blog design directly affects profitability. Choosing the right widgets when designing your blog can help you make money. A new widget from PayPerPost.com makes it easier to make deal directly with advertisers.

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Roger Black, the legendary designer of the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other world-famous publications, said that black on white, with touches of red, was the best color combination if you want the largest readership. He could cite extensive (and expensive) research to prove that. When he moved to the Web, he found that the same thing was true.

But graphic designers and web designers are creatures of fashion. They can’t resist following the latest design trends order to look cool—even when those trends seriously impair readability. And those who imitate them blindly follow whatever they do.

Lately it seems that most new web sites and blogs are using gray type. Don’t they want people to read their content? Don’t they know that content is king? Apparently not.

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