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Free Hosting vs Paid Hosting

By on December 7, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Free Hosting vs. Paid Hosting

If you’re just starting out in the webmaster arena then you’ll probably either already be debating between a free host or paid host or you will be soon. A lot of new webmasters aren’t too confident with what there doing and feel that they may not know how to do anything which is one of the reasons why people choose using a free host. There are tons of free blog hosts out there which allow you too create your very own blog on their servers for no charge at all. This means you could potentially make money without ever spending a dime of your own money, but there are downsides to using a free host.

Sure most people talk about how new webmasters should use a free host because it will allow them to test out how to run a blog and will give them valuable experience. Now this is correct in the fact that the person would learn what it takes too run a blog, but then once they do feel confident with blogging they’ll want too move on to their own domain. Now the problem with this is that you won’t be able too take your blog with you and therefore you’ll need to start from scratch from again which isn’t always fun. This is why I recommend starting out with your own paid hosting right from the beginning. For the price that it costs for a domain and a small blog hosting package nowadays there is no reason too be using free hosts.

It will cost you no more then $20 too get your first domain and first months of hosting paid for and from there you can begin making your blog and you actually will own it. On a free blog host you don’t really ever own your blog, but with your own domain and hosting you’re the complete owner to your blog and nobody will be able too take that from you. Free blog hosts have the possibilities of closing down in the future and then all of your hard work would also be lost.

I tend to not enjoy leaving my blogs in the hands of someone else and I personally have never used a free blog host and never will. When you have a successful blog on a free host not many people really care and your monetization methods are slimmer for private advertisements. Private ads are a huge part of blogging monetization and without the option you’re cutting yourself short. When you have a blog on its own domain then you’ll easily be able too sell links, banners and more once you get traffic.

The benefits of coughing up $20 to own your blog is well worth it and can save you from lots of headaches down the road. You never want too leave your web properties in the hand of someone else and by using a free blog host you’re doing exactly this. Now for children and teenagers I understand using a free blog host, but if you’re an adult and serious about giving the online world a chance then you shouldn’t be scared about paying $20 for a domain and hosting as this will be the least of your investments.

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How to Create a WordPress Theme1

By on November 4, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Create a WordPress Theme

As most bloggers know, WordPress is an amazing platform for blogs, personal sites, businesses and portfolios to publish content, news, pictures and anything it comes to your mind. It’s very powerful and nowadays, it’s not just for blogs, most people are using it as a CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is for free & incredibly secure! It’s open source and one of the best thing about it, is that you can integrate plugins very easily from your WordPress admin panel. You can search for plugins all over the web, in the WordPress official website (WordPress.org) or anywhere else.

Designing a theme can be a hard task, specially because you can get a bit lost if you know nothing about html or php, but it’s definitely not impossible. With patience and perseverance anything is possible.

Looking around the web you can find several interesting tutorials, very useful and easy to understand, they guide you step by step on how to use the codes and tags, but very few of them are precise about what it takes to build a WordPress theme from scratch and what you need to know beforehand. They usually assume you already know about html and CSS.

First of all, you need to understand how HTML works. HTML is essential to learn how to create a WordPress theme. You need to find a way to learn and get familiar with the basic html tags and commands. Use Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage to play around a bit and get used to the html structure. Without HTML, you are completely lost, because you are going to deal with a lot of coding! Simply Google and key something like this “”learn html from scratch””, “”html for begginers””, “”html for newbies””, “”html step by step””.

After learning the basic html tags and functions, you need to learn how to style a webpage, that is to say, in other words, you need to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets ). Learning how to Style an html page will allow you to style a WordPress theme, with pics, colors, font sizes, etc.

Why is this so important? HTML + CSS = CSS TEMPLATE. In order to build a WordPress theme, we need to create an HTML CSS layout first. It is the easiest way to build a WordPress Theme. That would be an html page styled using CSS. As we already mentioned before, with CSS you can control the different font sizes, font styles, colors, layer positions, margins, etc.

Once you’ve created a CSS template, THEN you will be able to easily convert it to a WordPress Theme.

So, to sum up the first phase:

1- Learn html. 2- Learn CSS. 3- Create a CSS Layout. 4- Convert the CSS Layout to a fully functional WordPress Theme.

Remember it’s a process that takes time but it’s definitely worth it if you aim to work freelance to make some extra money! don’t be afraid, use Google and search for tutorials, play around with Dreamweaver, and you’ll be able to create a WordPress theme!

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Free 90 Minute WordPress Training Course | WordPress For Beginners

By on October 27, 2011 in Randy Roedl

wordpresstrainingvideocourse.com Download this free 90 minute wordpress training video course that will show you how to build a website from scratch. I will let you watch over my shoulder as I build a wordpress website from the ground up. Please contact me if you have any questions and make sure to subscribe for more great videos.

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Having a Great WordPress Theme in Time For Warcraft Cataclysm

By on October 15, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Having a Great WordPress Theme in Time For Warcraft Cataclysm

Updating Your WordPress Theme In Time For Warcraft Cataclysm

The web is full of sites promoting or talking about Warcraft, but many look and feel quite dated and in need of an overhaul.

Perhaps like many people looking forward to the Cataclysm expansion, you are often looking through the web for sites updated with the latest news. Only to find that the sites you find look very dated and have graphics that pre-date The Burning Crusade.

Of course content is king, but if the look and feel of a site seems out of place, then many people will assume the worst and “”bounce”” straight back out again without so much as a glance at your content.

That’s not something you want.

Like visiting a distant relative or changing your tyres, updating your web page to look and feel new and fresh is not something many look forward to. But just like those things, it is something you really should do now and again.

Technically it can seem a little daunting. Changing the theme and look of a site might mean tinkering under the hood at all the HTML and CSS. But it really shouldn’t have to. There is really nothing that technical about changing your WordPress theme, or even starting a new blog from scratch for that matter.

There are perhaps three thousand sites on the web at the moment that could do with an update. Guild site, information, support, or just general Warcraft chit-chat. So installing WordPress from a host that offers a one click solution – then installing a theme which probably takes no more than seven clicks really is a piece of cake.

Why WordPress? Well search engines love it. It’s rock solid stable, and even a complete first timer can have a pleasing looking, and very functional site up in a matter of minutes. It’s hard to find any downside.

If the web-host offers one click installation, and the theme provider gives you a good “”over the shoulder”” tutorial on how to install one in less than sixty seconds – then there really is nothing to lose. No tech skills required.

So if you have a well run site promoting or discussing Warcraft, get yourself up to date. It’s vital to have lots of information, but if it isn’t displayed in a way that looks modern and reflective of the way the game is played now, then many visitors to your site will never spend enough time there to find out just how good you are.

Search the internet for WordPress themes, preferably ones that come with video tutorials. Soon you’ll be bang up to date.

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How to Make a WordPress Theme – Use the Incredible Artisteer Theme Creator Software

By on September 21, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Make a WordPress Theme – Use the Incredible Artisteer Theme Creator Software

How to make a WordPress theme – no this isn’t a tutorial on php programming, or a crash course on HTML or any other technical instruction.

If you are using WordPress, whether it is actually for blogging, a general CMS, an article directory or one of the other type uses that this incredible platform lends itself to, you will inevitably get in the situation that we all arrive in, where to get the ideal theme for your site.

Most people probably have no real desire to learn the tedious scripting necessary to build a WordPress theme from scratch, although most of us have probably cut and copied/pasted blocks of code to try and get a theme to our liking, or at least as far as our skills would permit.

After finding Artisteer a good while back, I now know how to make a WordPress theme. I simply start the program and use the menu-driven interface to setup a theme to look exactly as I want it to. There’s no more paying for custom or premium themes, no more searching for hours on end looking for a decent looking WordPress theme that thousands of other sites aren’t also using. Artisteer is both easy to use, but also very powerful in that it allows the user to change nearly everything in the theme aesthetics that you could possibly want.

If you are not familiar with Artisteer, a detailed look at the company site will give the details of the power of this nifty piece of software, which by the way, won the Software Product of the Year (2008) (
The Red Ferrett Journal). It not only works well with WordPress, but will also export themes/templates in HTML, to Blogger, and also to other CMS-type programs.

For less than what you would pay for a single WordPress premium theme, you will actually own Artisteer and have the capability to create as many themes/templates as you need.

The software is a very good value for the reasonable cost (offered in two versions), is very stable, and the company behind this quality product regularly offers updates.

If you have WordPress working just as you want it to, and the only thing left is to make it look just right, Artisteer WordPress theme generator is just what you need.

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lynda.com Tutorial | WordPress 3.0: Creating and Editing Custom Themes—Building the sidebar

By on April 23, 2011 in Randy Roedl

Watch the entire course at www.lynda.com In WordPress 3.0: Creating and Editing Custom Themes, author Chris Coyier shows how to build a custom WordPress theme from scratch and satisfy common client requests. The course covers steps necessary to build a theme using a complete workflow with Photoshop, HTML, CSS, and WordPress 3.0. Also included are tutorials on enhancing a WordPress site with JavaScript, using plugins, and ensuring site security.

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Blogging has become a phenomenal trend

By on March 18, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Blogging has become a phenomenal trend of the century with the birth of free web hosting such as WordPress, Blogger, Xanga and LiveJournal. One of the most prominent webs hosting in blogosphere, WordPress is most preferable for its versatility in tutorial posting and editing. Layouts in WordPress blog are designed by Kubrick, which is also known as Default Theme. Kubrick has been around for years as the main template of WordPress. However, custom theme has soared as the next big thing in WordPress.
Custom theme in WordPress is slowly replacing Kubrick theme as blog layout. Users prefer to customize their blogs to make them outstanding among millions of blogs in the Internet. This especially true for famous and influential bloggers who hired professional IT individuals to encode new CSS and HTML required for new layout design.
Although changing codes might be difficult for beginners, there are various tutorials that can be learned via World Wide Web. With advanced technology, there are even websites that offer to customize blog theme for free. WordPress users take this advantage to revamp the whole layout look. Beautiful and extraordinary layout or theme displayed in the blog is believed to attract more readers and create heavier traffic into the blog. People do this to increase online income through advertising in their blog. Hence, custom theme is preferred as the first step to better layouts for their blogs.
Some people also love to create layouts from scratch. They believed that their layouts need personal touch to make their blog really special and one-of-a-kind. Tutorials in YouTube are big help in such matter. Professional IT individuals sometimes created blogs of their own to spread knowledge about customizing blog layouts. In their blogs, some innovative suggestions are given that makes Kubrick theme seemed so outdated and old- fashioned.
Fresh layouts and themes are also available in design-oriented sites. All WordPress users need to do is downloading the theme that caught their attention. Later on, they just need to upload the custom theme onto their WordPress sites. Such convenience made Kubrick theme less popular because rigid theme is no longer applicable to cyber world that requires constant makeovers.
The smart ones designed more themes to be sold to big companies and famous bloggers as side income. People see this coming as the next revolutionary change in WordPress which created job opportunity for graphic designers. This is why Kubrick theme is much forgotten by users especially to experienced bloggers. In the Internet, you might find plenty of sources to provide new design themes to WordPress blogs.
WordPress documentation and application tabs also makes layout changing less frustrating to many. Instructions are stated for people to follow which makes more users opt for major layout makeover. Some users alter Kubrick theme instead of the old Kubrick theme to make their layouts less boring. However, the downside to Kubrick re-adaptation is sometimes the CSS files are in header files, not in style sheet that might be confusing for beginners. It is not recommended if users want totally different design since altering Kubrick theme means you will still stuck with Kubrick look with minor changes.
Although Kubrick theme has served people as the main theme in WordPress all these years, it is time that people move on to world of creativity and changes. Custom theme is here to stay to dominate WordPress sites unless Kubrick theme changes into a better and more eye-catching theme.

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