Website Managers

Archive for July, 2008

There are literally thousands of WordPress themes available. Most are free, while others have a price for the premium templates. No matter which one you get, there is always some form of customizing to be done so it looks and feels unique.

Having a blog that is identical to others makes yours blend in. With some time, patience and good guidance though, your WordPress blog can stand out from the rest. One of the better tutorial sites I have seen is at Balkhis. Each section devotes itself to one task.

The article, How to Make a Magazine Style Theme for WordPress, is a step-by-step guide to creating your own them. By the time you get through it, your blog truly can stand out from the rest.

Syed Balkhis took all of the online tutorials from his blog and put them into an Ebook that you can download free from his website. Syed included both advanced and online techniques for creating the new theme. This makes the Ebook valuable to WordPress users of all levels.

Whether you are new to WordPress or more experienced, I highly recommend you spend some time on Balkhis.com. When you design WordPress themes, you need a place to host your blog and show it off. Website Managers has blog hosting plans to suit most budgets.

Jim Hutchinson

Of all the domain registrars where you can register a domain, the one with the loudest voice is Go Daddy. Ironically, they are also a service that people love to hate. They may have lower rates than many other services, but while reading through the list below, ask yourself if that low cost, high profile service is worth the discounted rates.

1. Too many ads, especially when registering or renewing a domain (2 pages worth before getting to checkout)
2. They try to be everything to everyone, offering more services than necessary, which over-complicates all of their offers.
3. Menus are over-crowded, making navigation tough.
4. Tech support reads answers to your questions from a web page you could have read yourself.
5. Changing name servers requires looking in multiple places, with some links buried out of sight.

Yes there are other low-cost services, but I have come to know and like DirectNIC. While their prices are a little higher, their website interface is easy to navigate, support is helpful and fast to respond and managing large lists of domains is far easier than I have seen elsewhere.

So when comparing domain registration services, you have to look at the entire picture, not just the up-front costs. Choose wisely.

Jim Hutchinson

Getting flash-based websites indexed by the search engines has always been a challenge. It meant making sure you added plain text to the page so the crawlers had something to read, while trying to incorporate the text so it blended in with the design.

That all changed recently when Google announced it now uses the Adobe Flash Player technology to read Flash. You are now free to design your websites in Flash and still get indexed in Google. This is a major jump in Search Engine Optimization strategies.

All those who have previously put off using Flash to build their websites now have the freedom to let their imaginations loose. While this is just on Google and Yahoo! so far, other search engines are sure to follow soon.

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