Pingable :: Everything Wordpress » Blogging Tips

Review of WordPress Theme Designer Birdtone

Dusty — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 13:09:59 +0000

If you have ever come across BloggingTips.com, you’ll have noticed they have an incredible design. It is use-friendly, professional and there’s just something about it that makes you want to subscribe to their content. That feeling is due in part to the high quality content found on that site. It is also due in part because of the design. I contacted Birdtone to see what makes them tick and how they conceive designs. This is an unpaid review of Birdtone Designs, the shop responsible for this cutting edge design.

Using Bloggtips as an example of their design strategies, you can see the content is priority one. There are no flashy, distracting features. If you notice two things on the page, they are either the content or the conversion tools (subscribe form and social media links). That’s it.

They specialize in blogging designs with a focus on user experience and content. Their designs are simple and so very easy to use, even a two year old could find what they need. That’s a compliment.

They do two things really well. Simplicity and a nifty “ripped paper” effect. When each are used in the proper form, they create exceptional packages. I don’t want to speak out of turn, but the cost of their designs are less than you might think. Although it sounds otherwise, this was an unpaid review of Birdtone. Here are a few designs from their portfolio.

Must Have WordPress Plugins for 2011

Dusty — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:29:05 +0000

I build a lot of WordPress sites and these are, in my opinion, the must-have WordPress plugins for 2011. I start almost every new WordPress install with these plugins, even if I don’t have a specific intention for them all at the time of development. If for no other reason, these WordPress plugins will make your websites function at a top-notch level in 2011.

Jetpack WordPress plugin for 2011

Jetpack is a compilation of handy features for any WordPress installation. It includes Gravatar Hovercards, WordPress stats (available as a standalone plugin), Twitter Widget, wp.me shortlinks, Sharedaddy social sharing plugin, and Shortcode Embeds.

Usernoise Contact Form WordPress plugin for 2011

Usernoise is an absolute must. It is the easiest, smallest and best-looking contact form plugin available for WordPress. It is super-simple to setup, but that means there’s not a lot of customization options. Usernoise Plugin ads a floating “feedback” image on the side of your site, that when clicked, created a slick AJAX powered overlay contact form.

Donation Can WordPress plugin for 2011

Donation Can creates a widget that accepts both set and custom donations via Paypal. It works magically, letting you choose fundraising goals like “Pay for our server costs” or whatever you’d like. Set weekly, monthly goals, anything really. Perfect for kickstarting your WordPress website development.

Password Protect WordPress Plugin for 2011

Password Protect plugin is essential for development, especially if you’ve got a great idea that you don’t want stolen. Make sure your WordPress install is not indexable by search engines, then install this plugin. It will only show the front end to logged in users, ie: you. You can even set a custom message to users who try and view your site.

Facebook Traffic Pop WordPress Plugin

This plugin creates a floating Facebook like box that utilizes jQuery overlay to catch visitors for a set period of time. They can either “like” you or wait for it to fade away. This is a great, albeit pushy technique to increase your social networking presence.

Foobar Announcement Bar WordPress Plugin for 2011

This plugin expertly mimics the HelloBar which is a free but branded dropdown bar at the top of your page. HelloBar limits what you can place in their bar, and asks for $25/monthly to unlock the best features. That’s pretty steep, especially when this plugin only costs $9 once at CodeCanyon.

Google +1 WordPress Plugin for 2011

Despite how you feel about Google’s foray into social networking, savvy webmasters will need to adopt Google +1 as the next wave of content sharing. This plugin is free, in the WordPress plugin directory and gives you tons of flexibility to choose how the button is displayed next to your content.

How to customize WordPress

Dusty — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 16:14:55 +0000

WordPress comes feature-rich and smooth right out of the box, but have you ever wondered how to customize WordPress? As in, really making it your own? Want a blog? Done. Want a static website? Done. But are are lots of other ways you can use WordPress to meet your web needs. Here is a list of helpful tools and tips for how to customize WordPress.

If you’re interested in how to customize WordPress, consider reading our past article on making your blog stand out, as well as this one about WordPress tutorials.

How to customize WordPress

If you’re skilled, you can create a theme from scratch. This is by far the hardest way, even premium theme creators often use some of their previous themes as frameworks. To start creating a custom WordPress theme, check out some of these resources.

Artisteer

Artisteer is a finicky option. It will not create a premium quality theme in terms of design. But it will be valid XHTML and clean CSS. The good news is you can use Artisteer to create lots of different kinds of themes. I use it to create a framework for custom themes, then go back and customize them further. Check out Artisteer here, or read this full review we wrote back .

Hybrid custom theme

Search for a theme with a strong foundation, valid XHTML and clean CSS. It should have many of the features you want but not all. You can then take that theme and completely hack it up to meet your needs. Think about adding new widget positions, changing the column structure or adding a new menu.

When choosing a foundation theme, go premium. You’ll be glad you did. They’re just better made, cleaner, with a solid code foundation. Here are three of the best providers:

How to Customize WordPress’ Look and Feel

Custom Default Gravatars

The Gravatar is an often underlooked (not a real word) feature of WordPress. The Gravater was incidentally created by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. WordPress comes with a default Gravatar when commenters do not have one. This is a nice, simple way to give your website a customized feel.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Gravatars

Custom Comment Styling

Comments are the second easy way to add a custom feel to your design. Nesting comments is a great way to encourage discussion on your blog. Quality comments and good discussion are great ways to explode traffic.

http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-style-author-comments-in-wordpress-27

Creating an effective “about” page

Your “about” page is the first step when a reader really likes what they see. When you make the effort to write superb content, a reader will find it and seek more info about your site. Next stop… conversion! If they like what they read on your about page, they will sign up for updates and you’ve nailed it.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/01/best-practices-for-effective-design-of-about-us-pages/

Revamping your footer space

Footer spaces are now being used to show lots of information or tools. It’s no longer just a silly copyright section. The link below has some great examples of usable footers. Customizing this section of your site really gives that extra customized feel.

http://www.reencoded.com/2009/07/07/20-great-wordpress-footer-designs-for-inspiration/

Customize your WordPress 404 page

Hopefully users aren’t encountering your 404 page often because your links are all current. However, it does happen, sometimes out of your control because outside sites will link to your site incorrectly. Customizing your 404 page says to your readers: “we went the extra mile to offer you a unique experience.”

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/404

Customizing the login page

If your site employs the user function of WordPress, creating a customized login page can be a nice touch. Somehow branding the login to match your site but also be creative is a great touch.

Revolutionary thinking (put content before ads)

The instinct to make a few bucks for all the time you’ve spent on the content is sometimes overwhelming. But if you listen to one piece of advice on this page, prioritize content over revenue. You will reap the benefits.

Think of this as a design choice as well as a chronological choice. When starting a new website, forego the advertising until you feel it is absolutely necessary and you have the traffic to make it worth it. You choose which is better: little traffic with many ads to make a few dollars or few ads, making lots of money with lots of traffic.

http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2010/06/09/blogging-pitfalls-advertising-overload/

Custom content archives

Users need to be able to access your content. If they come back to find some older content, the search form may not work. Also, complete archives will help search engines know about all of your content. You spend time writing it, should people be able to find it?

http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_an_Archive_Index

Custom Admin theme

The admin theme will only be for your benefit or that of your writers and editors. However, it can be nice to change things up, and some custom themes can add a whole new experience for the admin. It can also save you time if you spend a lot of time in the dashboard.

http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/how-to-customize-the-wordpress-admin-area/

Additional Resources

Check out these other resources and articles on customizing WordPress.

If you have your own tip for how to customize WordPress please share it below.

Hand coding

8 Helpful WordPress Tutorials

Dusty — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 21:04:21 +0000

Tutorials are all the rage right now, especially WordPress Tutorials. I understand why. There used to be a plethora of posts like this one for a while. Many people still write posts like this: “100 amazing themes” and “50 creative logos”. They’re nice to look at, helpful and inspiring.

However the trend is definitely towards tutorials. Look at Envato’s newest marketplace as an example. And we at Pingable understand the trend. Tutorial posts are more helpful in a tangible way. Users can read a post and walk away with a real, measurable, helpful new skill set.

In light of this trend, we thought it would be nice to combine the two types of content. Here is a list of 25 extremely Helpful WordPress Tutorials.

Free WordPress Tutorials

16 Vital Checks Before Releasing a WordPress Theme Tutorial

WordPress Tutorial by Ludovico Fischer

This tutorial will help you check off those must-do steps before making your new theme public. You spent countless hours developing the theme, don't forget these steps. From protecting comments on posts to correctly paginating posts, don't forget any of these steps.

Designing the Post Meta Data Section

WordPress Tutorial by the Codex Team

Using post meta data is one of the most versatile and helpful features of WordPress. You can essentially generate all of your post excerpt information on the fly which can make for a rich user experience. This official codex tutorial walks you through creating this section of your design.

Creating Custom Fields for Attachments in WordPress Tutorial

WordPress Tutorial by Andy Blackwell

WordPress custom fields are incredibly useful and versatile. They can turn a regular theme into a dynamic and user-powered design. However when displaying attachments the code needs some tweaking. This tutorial walks you through the necessary tweaking to make it work.

Fun Character Entities WordPress Tutorial

WordPress Tutorial by the Codex Team

Using various character entities in your designs can make the user experience smoother. This can be navigation arrows, ampersands, etc. This tutorial by the official codex crew will help you incorporate those characters into your next design.

How to Integrate an Options Page into your WordPress Theme Tutorial

WordPress Tutorial by By Dan Walker

All of the latest quality WordPress Themes include backend (administrative) options themes to help the user utilize all of the incredible, complicated features coming standard with the latest themes. This tutorial will guide you in creating this feature for your next theme.

Premium WordPress Tutorials

WordPress, Beginner to Master Tutorial

WordPress Tutorial by By Dan Harper, $5

This tutorial walks you through creating a complete WordPress site including a blog and portfolio. Written after the many new features in WordPress 2.7, this tutorials brings you up to speed before looking closely at WordPress 3.0.

Securing and Hardening WordPress Tutorial

WordPress Tutorial by By JT Pratt, $5

WordPress is inherently secure as a blogging platform. However as it is converted into a CMS, more user data is being transfered and more opportunities to access core files are created. This makes it less secure. This tutorial will help you secure WordPress against data theft but also make it less prone to malicious attack and forceful entry. A must-read for any serious WordPress user.

Creating a Custom WordPress Portfolio Page Tutorial

WordPress Tutorial by By nuResponse, $5

This tutorial will help you leverage the WordPress custom template functionality to create powerful design functionalities within your site. You will be walked through creating a portfolio page to display information in a unique way which can be applied in unlimited ways.

We hope you enjoyed these Helpful WordPress Tutorials. These are some of the best free and premium tutorials we could find. If you have your own must-read WordPress Tutorials, please leave a comment below!

10 Obscure But Handy WordPress Plugins

Dusty — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 01:04:17 +0000

Where do you go to find helpful plugins? I click “Plugins > Add New” from the dashboard. That’s great for ease-of-use. However, that database is limited to GNU/GPL licensed plugins accepted into the WordPress database.

These plugins are all not in the WordPress Plugin database and therefore, are not easily found. Despite their obscurity, they offer some great services to the WordPress admin.

White Label WordPress Branding Plugin

Replace the WP logo from the login screen and dashboard to rebrand WordPress for your clients.

Like/Unlike Posts

Font Replacement

Substitutes standard fonts with one of over 30 Cufon and Google Fonts. Cufon is all the rage, take advantage of it with this killer plugin.

WP Geo Tagger

Integrate Google Maps by adding location information to posts. This is an excellent option for community or event blogs.

Paypal File Download

Allows you to easily set up pay-per-download files. I’ve tried to set this up before and this plugin would have been really nice to have back then.

Sliding Contact Form

Creates a slick, sliding contact form on any WordPress page.

Word and Phrase Spinner

Generates new content from existing stuff to prevent duplicate content issues with search engines.

Font Uploader

For those without HTML or CSS knowledge, this plugin allows you to upload your own fonts and apply them to any section of your site.

Social Pop

Allows for the easy insertion of 26 social bookmarking and sharing links below the content area of WordPress.

Search and Replace

This handy plugin lets you search for text and automatically replace with something else. Can be used for text or links (read: automatic affiliate link conversion)

Click the image to check out any of these plugins.

5 Excellent WordPress Articles

Dusty — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:30:29 +0000

Commanding 2% of the websites globally, WordPress produces a lot to write about. Subtract the junk, ad-bait and plagiarism and you’re left with only a few quality articles each day. I sorted through the latest WordPress articles and identified the quality, helpful posts. I hope you enjoy.

18 WordPress Plugins for RSS Management and Tweaks

What’s Coming in WordPress 3.1

A New Home for the WordPress Trademark

Tips for Your WordPress Comment Page

All Killer WordPress Websites are Built Around These Concepts

What's Your Backup Strategy?

Simon Ward — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:58:36 +0000

How much do you stand to lose if your site goes down and you’re left without a backup? Even if you only have a smaller personal site, losing months or even years worth of work will hurt.

If your site is vital to your business it can get you in the pocketbook, too. You’ll not only have to worry about lost content, but links that now return 404 errors, any customizations you did to your theme and plugins, lost comments and all of the other tweaks and modifications you’ve made to your site.

You can rebuild but why go through all of that hassle when it can be avoided by having a good backup strategy.

A good backup strategy requires a balance between being as up to date as possible with the effort you can reasonably put into it with the resources at your disposal. Remember, you can’t rely on your web host to do it for you. Even if they offer the service, if you are locked out of your hosting account their backup will do you no good. Ask yourself these questions before formulating your backup plan:

How often do I really need to make a backup?

This will vary based on how often content is updated and how often changes are made to the structure of the site itself. A busy site that’s updated several times a day and receives a substantial number of comments might be backed up hourly while other sites can get away with just once a week.

For most sites a daily backup of the database is sufficient; an hourly backup could potentially strain the server, particularly at busy times of the day.

The WordPress files such as content, themes and plugins will also need to be backed up on a regular basis. If you rarely make changes to your theme or plugins and don’t upload amount of media, this can be done less often, perhaps once a week or even less often if you aren’t making changes and uploading images or other media.

No matter how often you choose to backup your database and files, you’ll want to be sure to do a backup right before making any changes to your site as insurance in case something goes wrong and once again after all changes have been made.

Where will I store my backup?

The simplest solution is to store your backup to your local machine, though this isn’t without its own set of problems. If you’re away from your computer and your site goes down, how will you get it back up and running without access to the backup?

Although it doesn’t seem likely that something will happen to your computer at the same time your site goes down, it is possible.

You can also store backups on your server. However, if you can’t access your sever, you’re still screwed. I’ve heard of more than one person who had their site shut down by their web host and were then unable to get the files and databases needed to migrate to another site.

It’s always best to store copies of your backups in more than one location, for example your personal computer and an online storage service such as dropbox. You can also look into paying a service to make and store backups for you as an added convenience and for peace of mind.

So I have these backups, now what?

Having backups scheduled every ten minutes won’t do you any good if you’ve no idea what to do with them in the event that your site goes POOF!

If you don’t have a plan in place to restore your site, you can lose hours and even days trying to figure out how to get your site back up and running. For most people, this will be stress they don’t need and time they can’t afford to spend. Take the time now to prepare for the worst case scenario.

If you have the time and inclination, teach yourself how to restore your site from the backups. There is a bit of technical know-how needed, but it’s something most people can be taught to do. Since restoring your site isn’t something you’ll do on a regular basis, make sure to write down step-by-step instructions and keep them and all relevant log ins and passwords in a safe place that will be easy for you to access if you need to fix your site yourself.

You don’t want to waste time having to Google and remembering FTP details while under pressure.

Another possibility is to develop a relationship with somebody who is experienced with WordPress and can fix your site more efficiently than you could. Again, it’s best to contract with this person in advance and find out how much the service will cost and what information they’ll need from you to do it. You don’t want to find out at the last minute that you can’t afford to have somebody fix your site.

Some freelancers will allow you to pay a retainer to have their services for a fixed amount of time per month or year. Even if you never need their services, think of it as insurance!

Finally, you can contract with a service that will make and store backups for you and will restore your site should the need ever arise. These services vary in price depending on size of the site and the services offered but can be very affordable, especially if you have a number of sites that need to be maintained.

If you schedule backup with a professional service, be sure to ask them how often backups are made, where the backups will be stored and if you’ll get a copy and how long will you have to wait to get somebody to restore your site if needed.

As the saying goes, stuff does happen. But even though we can’t always control hardware failure or malicious attacks, we can be proactive and make a plan to ensure that even in the worst case scenario we have a backup of our sites and can get them up and running again in the least amount of time possible.

Keeping your online assets safe with a regularly scheduled backup routine, is the best insurance a site owner can have.

Sean Platt is a content marketing specialist who offers regularly scheduled WordPress backups at TheWPMechanic.Com. Follow him on Twitter.

Ways to Boost Productivity

Dusty — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 01:55:55 +0000

Our friends over at DzinePress have put together a guide on how to boost your productivity. When you spend hours, sometimes days on a single quality blog post, it can feel like you’re moving slower than a snail. These tips will hopefully help when it feels like you’re moving backwards. Check it out.

Collection of reader submitted resources

Dusty — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:37:45 +0000

Want to see what our readers are interested in? We ask readers to submit their favorite, new content and resources so we can share them with you. Without further delay, here are some of the best recent submissions for your enjoyment.

50 Striking Typography Tutorials Using Photoshop

In the broadest sense, typography is the design and use of typefaces as a means of visual communication from calligraphy to the ever-developing use of digital type. we creating list of striking techniques of typography tutorials using Photoshop. Typography is sometimes seen as encompassing many separate fields from the type designer who creates letterforms to the graphic designer who selects typefaces and arranges them on the page. We hope you all like these stunning typography graphics and also can share your own typefaces.

50 Stunning Poster Advertisement Ideas

Poster designing is one of the most creative part of graphic designing and helping for brand advertisements, now web designers also like to draw advertisement posters for web promotions and we have some awesome collection of Poster designs in this creative post. Creative Posters always attract users whether they graphical posters accumulate to the side of roads, in the paper flayers, wall posters, telephone cabin and even when distribute on the way, they always grab the viewers attention and invite them to take some immediate action. This is my favorite alternatives for inspiration is poster design, by looking at great posters, you can learn a lot about composition, typography, and use of colors…

40 Stunning Tutorials about 3D Text

Adobe Photoshop is powerful tool for create any kind of professional designs and effects for both categories like Print Media and Web Designs, we’re proudly present beautiful listing 3D Text Effect Tutorials Using Photoshop, We have collected 40 best ever cool 3D typography text effect trainings. you’ll find all these beautiful, high-quality Adobe Photoshop tutorials from top tutorial sites and designers, they did excellent work in all trainings and sharing helping techniques about Photoshop.

50 Ultimate Useful Free MAC Applications

Apple always produces most powerful products, one of those are Mac Machines and we presenting “50 Ultimate Useful Free MAC Applications” we dug up from famous resources all over the web and arrange on our platform for you Mac lovers. Each of listed are free to download and use as you required in your field, one of the greatest things about Mac Computers are wealth of extremely talented developers that are willing to share their amazing creations without asking for a single cent, because everyone loves to get free Applications.The following list may come in handy too. In this weekend, we’d like to showcase you a list of really useful yet free Mac Software’s you can install for your Mac, we create our list in 3 category: Free MAC Applications for Freelancers, Music and Video MAC Applications, Free MAC Productivity Applications, File Sharing and Transfer Applications and MAC Apps for Web Designers.

30+ Useful Jquery Tutorials Using Advance Techniques

Although there are many great techniques already but hopefully these listed jquery tutorials will help you too and it will also give you a more professional feel and you will get latest techniques for modern design requirements of Web Developers.In this our first jQuery Tutorials article, we will presenting some really useful trainings about how to learn jquery techniques step by step and also will productive in your websites developments.Hope you will like these listed tutorials and leave your comments.

20 Articles and Tutorials About Using Negative Space

Negative space, also referred to as ‘whitespace’ in design, can dramatically improve your designs and help them breathe more and have a much better flow. Today we have collected 20 articles and tutorials to get you started understanding negative space and effectively applying those principles in your designs.Whether you’re a graphic designer or you design solely for the web, I am certain you will learn quite a lot from those articles. Some of them are geared more towards web-design but some also refer to drawing and painting or simply talk about how to effective use whitespace to craft more interesting designs.

6 tips for making your blog stand out

Dusty — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:39:49 +0000

With hundreds of thousands of blogs being created every day, yours will take a lot to stand out in the crowd. These tips have been assembled from years of experience navigating the blogosphere. Stick to these 6 principles and you’ve got a pretty decent chance of making it.

1. Use a custom design

This is less difficult or expensive as you may think. There are tons of beautiful themes and templates available for blogs. Find the one that best suits your needs (see #6) and customize it by adding a unique background, menu, icons, etc.

Using some of the online marketplaces like Graphic River, you can find new images to spice up your design that is both unique and aesthetically pleasing.

2. Give away something (quality) for free

One of my first blogs found success in giving away a premium quality CMS template for free. This helped in almost every component of my blog. It encouraged link building, increased credibility, and encouraged repeat visits.

The investment is well worth the return. Give away a quality asset like a theme, icons, or something else related to your blog topic. You will find an increase in traffic, backlinks and favorable mentions on other sites.

3. Post frequently (reference other article)

This article discusses this topic further, but you should respond to your readers and post often. Don’t flood your blog with content so that readers can’t filter through it all and quality suffers. However, posting on a regular and frequent schedule will build credibility and show readers you can be depended on for quality content.

4. Develop relationships

There’s no subsitute for pounding the internet pavement and building relationships. All relationships matter, but focus on connecting with others who share your passions and topics. I regularly reach out to other blogs that I follow.

Reaching out can be guest blogging, exchanging links or collaborating on a freebie release. (See #2)

5. Be unique

The web is full of duplicative, useless content. There is a special place in hell reserved for those who saturate the web with boring content meant only to encourage ad clicks.

Have you noticed the increase in “list” sites? Mashable.com and Tutorial9 are just some examples of websites that create helpful posts of lists like “100 of the best free WordPress themes”. Your content should be unique, informative and easy to read. If you can do this, the links and traffic will follow.

6. Leave out the excess (focus on the content)

The big content management systems (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) offer countless addons and plugins. These can be both helpful and harmful to your blog. Don’t think that the coolest features are necessary. Focus on quality, informative content and leave the fancy sliders and effects out.

7. Be patient

The top blogs were not made in a day. Popularity, traffic, links and credibility are earned over time. If you’re passionate about a topic, you will continue to be motivated by changes and innovations. Be patient, offer consistent quality and useful content that people can expect every time they come back.