Tag Archives | Popularity

What Are The Top WordPress Widgets In Use For Blogging

By Randy R on April 14, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

What Are The Top WordPress Widgets In Use For Blogging?

WordPress as a content management system is very popular. In my opinion one of the main reasons for it’s popularity is the WordPress widgets. If you are new to this blogging platform you may be asking yourself “”What are widgets?””. Well, in an nutshell they give you full control of the content in the side bar of your blog. Widgets allow you to insert HTML code for banners of various shapes and sizes, they also allow you to insert contact forms otherwise known as autoresponders.

I would like to discuss the top WordPress widgets, that I use on a daily basis.

1. Wp Spamfree. This widget removes spam from your website. It finds unnecessary content and gets rid of it.

2. Wp Polls. This allows interaction between your visitors and your blog. This widget helps you create new polls and display them on your blog.

3. All In One Seo. This will take care of your search engine optimisation. This widget takes care of optimising keywords, tags and HTML. This widget helps in getting your site ranked higher in the search engines.

4. Featured Content Gallery. This widget gives your site an nice look and give your visitors an nicer experience while on your site.

5. Font Resizer. Font resizer give your site visitors the opportunity to change font size with just a click.

6. Secure WordPress. This widget secures your website content.

7. Follow Me. Twitter has become very popular and there is a widget called follow me, which allows site visitors to follow you on twitter, thereby increasing you twitter following. You can in turn market your site or blog to your increased twitter following.

8. Sexy Bookmark. With this widget you can give your visitors the choice of bookmarking any useful content on the various social bookmarking site. This is an excellent tool for website promotion.

9. Recent Comment This one is self explanatory, it displays recent comment.

10.Related Posts. This one encourages your blog visitors to stay longer on your site by reading related posts. They may even bookmark your site and read more content at a later stage.

These are just a few of the top WordPress widgets I use. WordPress widgets are crucial for your website or blogs design, functionality and promotion, so enjoy and take action.

How To Build A WordPress Theme – 5 of the Most Popular WordPress Blogging Themes1

By Randy R on February 16, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How To Build A WordPress Theme – 5 of the Most Popular WordPress Blogging Themes

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms in the internet today. Over 25 million site owners have chosen WordPress as their blog software of choice.Â WordPress is easy to install, maintain and modify. It has a huge list of powerful features that can make your website very functional. Best of all, WordPress is free. Site owners can easily change the visual look and layout of their WordPress site simply by changing the themes.Â There are a lot of themes available for free online. One of the best sites to get your WordPress blogging themes is the official WordPress site of WordPress.org. WordPress.org maintains a theme database where people can download WordPress themes for free. Themes are ranked based on popularity, date of first upload, as well as the date of the latest update. Currently WordPress.org ranks Twenty Ten, Mystique, Atahualpa, Constructor and LightWord as the five most popular themes based on the amount of downloads.

LightWord is the fifth most poplar theme in WordPress.org. It is a basic, intelligent black text on white theme that can have two or three columns. The theme is set to display at fixed width regardless of the browser size and screen resolution of a site visitor. It supports widgets as well as Google AdSense and covers all the basic WordPress functionalities.

Contsructor is the fourth most popular theme. A lot of people like this theme because it can have multiple layout settings. The theme can display six different sidebar positions and three layouts right out of the box and creating a new layout on this theme is fairly easy. This is a great theme to work with if you want to easily come up with a distinct original theme.

The third most popular WordPress theme is Atahualpa. They are highly customizable WordPress blogging themes. It boasts of 268 options for site owners to use to come up with their own original themes with the resulting design compatible with most web browsers. Designs can be up to 4 sidebars, fixed or flexible width as well as other customizable functionalities. The theme also has an active support forum where users can find help in fixing any theme related issues.

Mystique is the second-most popular them in WordPress.org. It currently has over 340,000 downloads since October 2009. It is a feature rich theme built over solid and stable design. There are a lot of useful widgets built-in to the theme as well. The best part with Mystique is that the theme settings interface is intuitively designed so users can easily make changes to the theme even while having only a little knowledge in PHP and CSS.

Currently, the most popular WordPress blogging theme is Twenty Ten. Designed to be stylish, simple and readable while still highly customizable, site owners can easily make a distinctive theme by just changing the header image, the background and designing a custom menu. This them is great to use when you need to come up with a theme that you can easily set up, modify to be distinctive and efficiently present your information without making any modifications to the actual theme files. This theme is great for website owners with minimal knowledge in PHP, HTML and CSS and just wants to have a theme that they can easily modify to look different and original.

must-have-tools-for-webmasters

By Randy R on December 31, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Must have tools for a webmaster

There are some must have tools for webmasters. And these are the tools that you will see in the computers of each and every experienced webmaster. If you are new to these things, then you might not be having these tools installed in your system.

Let’s start with the web browser. One of the best web browsers at the moment is Mozilla Firefox. It can be downloaded for free. The tools that we are going to mention here are actually plug ins of Firefox browser. When you install these plugins, your browser will become a much more intelligent browser than it was earler when it was with no plugins at all.

Page Rank Checking Plugin

A page rank checker can be integrated into your firefox browser by installing any page rank checking plugin. You will see a lot of such plugins and you may choose any one of them to install in your browser. The primary aim of installing a page rank checker is to view the page rank of sites that we open in the browser. So, you can download and install any plugin that does the above job.

Alexa Rank checking Plugin

How would you be knowing by seeing the design of the site whether its a reputed website or not? It can’t be founded that way. But if you are with the traffic details of the site- then you’ll be getting an idea about the popularity of the site. This is an extremely useful tool since you will come across a lot of sites as a webmaster and finding good ones from them won’t be easy without this cool tool. So, like we said above, you can download and install any plugin that does the above job – ie, displaying the alexa rank of sites that we’ll be opening in our firefox browser.

If you are having the above two tools, then you will able to filter out the good ones that are with decent traffic and page rank from the rest of the sites. This way, before ordering something from a site, you’ll be able to make out whether it is a good one to use your credit card or not.

WordPress Plugins – What Are Their Security Risks

By Randy R on December 16, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Plugins – What Are Their Security Risks?

The WordPress platform owes a lot of its popularity to the availability of thousands of plugins that perform any function a site owner may need. Simply put if you need to do something there is probably an existing plugin to do it. But what are the security risks that come with installing WordPress plugins? I will tie these threats to the central principles of information security which include Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.

Confidentiality – Goal is to prevent the disclosure of information to unauthorized individuals or systems

Integrity – Goal is to ensure that data cannot be modified without detection

Availability – Goal is to ensure your site is available when someone tries to access it.

Plugins vary in code size from very simple to very complex. 99.9% of plugin users do not have the time or expertise to do a security review of the code prior to installing a plugin. That means you are at the mercy of the developer that nothing malicious has been programmed into the plugin that could affect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your site. For this reason it is best to stick with WordPress plugins that have a large user base and come from more trusted sources.

Plugins are primarily developed by individual developers or very small teams with limited budget for testing. That means if you are an early adopter of a plugin you are the equivalent of a beta tester so it is wise to avoid being on the bleeding edge of adopting a new plugin version unless there is a security vulnerability in the old version that is actively being exploited in the wild. Otherwise you risk something going wrong with the plugin that could negatively impact the availability of your site. For this reason it is important to have a viable backup of your site prior to installing a new plugin or upgraded a currently installed one.

When you install a WordPress Plugin you are installing an application. That means you should careful consider whether you need and intend to use the plugin regularly. Each plugin installed required additional site administrative overhead in the form of applying upgrades to ensure you are running the latest version. For this reason it is important to only install plugins that will be activated on your site and plugins not active should be removed to eliminate a potential source of vulnerability.

WordPress Company Sites

By Randy R on December 4, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

A decade ago, it is not surprising and embarrassing if large corporation did not have their own websites. Now, a company without its own website loses its credibility and respect due to vast demand in online business. WordPress websites are made for companies and individuals to compete in this competitive cyber world. Whether it is for commercial or personal purpose, websites are staples in the Internet as a form of communication approach. The success of a website depends on how appealing it is to search engines. To make websites easily accessible, WordPress are created to be SEO friendly.
WordPress can be customized easily to optimize search. The term ‘SEO’ which stands for search engine optimization, is used as a tool to gauge traffic and volume of a website. It is not difficult to change WordPress URL into a more SEO friendly one with a few simple steps. Users just need to change and update their permalink structures. The reason behind this is to create a new SEO keyword-friendly URL structure. Bloggers need not worry about their old URL because all incoming links which are associated with the old URL will be directed to the latest optimized URL.
Being a platform of blogs and commercial websites, WordPress is user- friendly in terms of site administration and configuration. Users do not have to be highly- skilled in IT knowledge but to learn a few advanced technical optimization to prevent duplicate contents and make their blogs SEO friendly. Some useless archives in the blog need to be disabled to avoid duplicates which will adversely affect blog ranking in search result. It is also wise to exclude unnecessary links and pagination.
Using suitable WordPress themes can shoot your blog to stardom with better SEO. Users can download SEO friendly templates to revamp their blogs to increase popularity and readership. The secret to choose the best template that fits your blog is the matching the theme with blog contents and blog name. Search engines will easily recognize the keywords and WordPress theme used when the blog fulfills certain SEO metrics such as highlighting its contents, onsite optimization and appropriate look and feel.
On top of that, WordPress is blog- publishing software that is compatible to many useful and SEO friendly plug- ins. Killer plug –ins like Comment Luv, Feed Footer and Who Sees Ads give your blog more functionality. WordPress is already great software by itself. With enhanced features by plug –ins, your blog will be more manageable and SEO friendly. Plug – in like Google XML Sitemaps helps to make your blog more visible for search spiders. Marking the online presence of your blog through sitemaps makes you a more successful blogger.
Also, WordPress blog is made to host a more well- structured layout. It is a design stage for corporation and individuals that need no fancy design features. Moreover, design features such as Flash and Javascript might hamper search effort as they are not SEO friendly. Search engines prefer simple but loud layouts that clearly reflect the identity of the website. WordPress websites are not heavily designed so that the websites can appear easily and quickly in the search result.
You can also optimize your WordPress front page with texts. Texts, preferably permanent ones, are personalized to make blogs more visible in search engines. More tags on the front page also optimize search especially the unique ones. You can even replace the “Read More” link with something more meaningful to your every post. This little thing makes a huge difference in your WordPress SEO.
To conclude, many people underestimated the power of SEO in elevating their WordPress websites to greater height. Through intelligent comprehension and understanding of SEO, blogging is not a mere entertainment anymore, but a sign of success in blogosphere.

The Thesis WordPress Theme – Perfect For Beginners and Experts Alike

By Randy R on November 6, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

The Thesis WordPress Theme – Perfect For Beginners and Experts Alike

Almost anyone who has ever set up a blog or tried to design a website will probably have used WordPress at some time or other. It’s one of the most powerful, and popular, pieces of software to be found on the internet today.

Most people think that it’s just useful for blogs and they do little more than install a copy and add some content. However, if you search around the internet you will soon discover that WordPress can do much more than just act as a blogging platform. Its great popularity comes from its customizability thanks to the huge number of plug-ins and widgets that you can download for free. These add-ons enable you to configure WordPress for almost any kind of website from simple sales pages to complete e-commerce stores complete with payment gateways and so on.

Its other great feature is the ability to change the look of your website at the touch of a button using templates, or as they are referred to in WordPress circles, themes. Some themes offer little more than a change of colour or some extra graphics, but the better ones enable complete customisation of your website, right down to individual page level. Using such a template can really make your website seem individual and make it stick out from the crowd.

One of the best themes in terms of the level of customisation it offers is the Thesis WordPress Theme by DIYThemes.com. This amazing template enables people with little or no web coding skills to completely customise the look and feel of their WordPress installation. Non-techies can adjust a whole range of parameters from right inside the WordPress control panel itself without ever changing a line of code.

There are 3 different ways to alter the look and feel of the Thesis them. These are listed under 3 menu options named Thesis Options, Design options and Custom File Editor from inside the control panel. The Thesis Options menu allow you to change things such as the layout of your navigation menus, add analytics and stats tracking code and gives you a fine degree of control over the display by tuning the headers, the posts, comments, sidebars and even tags that are used. The next menu option covers the design aspects of the Thesis theme. Here you have a bewildering range of choices that allow you to change the colours and fonts of every part of the site individually. You can have a feature box, a multimedia box for displaying video and even drop in a custom stylesheet if you have one.

Finally, you have the custom file editor. This utility allows even the most hardcore technical wizard full control over every aspect of the themes design. There is literally nothing that you cannot customise as long as you are familiar with WordPress and PHP.

The Thesis Theme is amazingly versatile, as can be seen by some of the showcase blogs that are demonstrated on its homepage. If you are en expert you can play about with it to your hearts desire but if, like most of us, you never want to see a line of code, then you can still change almost every aspect of the design. You can really allow your creative juices to flow without your getting your hands dirty, making the Thesis WordPress Theme one of the best available on the market.

How To Build A WordPress Theme – 5 of the Most Popular WordPress Blogging Themes

By Randy R on October 27, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How To Build A WordPress Theme – 5 of the Most Popular WordPress Blogging Themes

How To Get A WordPress API Key For The Akismet WordPress Plugin

By Randy R on July 13, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How To Get A WordPress API Key For The Akismet WordPress Plugin

With the growing popularity of blogs and the ease to obtain links through comments on blogs, it didn’t take long for programmers to come up with automated tools to blast link packed spam comments to unsuspecting blogs.

Some just turn comments off for their blog but to me that eliminates one of the great features of making your blog interactive for your visitors. Comments can open discussion between the reader and the blogger. Your blog’s visitors can even subscribe to a post’s comments, getting notified of any new comments, keeping your readers coming back.

The WordPress plugin, Akismet checks comments posted on your blog posts against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

To activate Akismet from your WordPress blog dashboard, click Plugins, scroll down and click Activate next to the WordPress Akismet plugin. After you do that you will see a box near the top of the dashboard that reads:

Akismet is not active. You must enter your WordPress.com API key for it to work.

Click the link in the message, and then the Akismet Configuration panel will open. You should then see this in the middle of the screen:

Please enter an API key. (Get your key.)

On the top of that page click the Sign Up tab, fill in your information and if you have a self-hosted blog choose the Just a username, please option.

Be sure to use a good email address in here to get your login information and WordPress API key, click the box to agree to legal junk and click next.

Check your email and click the confirmation link from WordPress to activate your account. You should then see a page that reads, “”Your account is now active!”” Click the login link within the text of that page and login.

You should now be at the WordPress.com site, if so click the dropdown box on the very top right of the page and choose “”Edit Profile””, now you are in the Global Dashboard.

Within the WordPress Global Dashboard you can now see your WordPress API key on the right side of the page. Oh, and by now you should have also got the API key in an email from WordPress also! But you should still edit your profile while you are in the Global Dashboard.

Now its time to place the API key in the Akismet WordPress plugin; go back into your WordPress blog dashboard, click the link on the Akismet WordPress plugin warning box near the top of the dashboard. Paste the WordPress API key in the box and click update options.

If the warning box is not visible check to see if Akismet is activated, click Plugins and look for the status of the plugin on the right. You will notice that all activated plugins are highlighted green. When Akismet is activated you can configure it by clicking Plugins, and look for the Akismet subpanel (white text in the dark blue bar) directly below and to the right of then main panel menu.

Keeping comment spam out while allowing your blog visitors to comment, will not only keep your blog clean but more interactive and help generate more traffic.

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