Below are my top 9 social media WordPress plugins:

1. Add To Any – Compatible 2.0 – 2.7.1

Allows readers to share, save, bookmark, and email your posts using 122 different social sites. Very easy to use and compact, also allows you to customize the look.

2. WP Digg This – Compatible 2.2 – 2.7

Adds the Digg button to your posts with the added option of choosing which posts you want to add it too.

3. Social Bookmarks – Compatible 2.5.1 – 2.7

Adds the social media buttons to the end of your posts. You can also select which media site to show and use.

4. HB Social Bookmarks – Compatible 2.3.3 – 2.7

If you’d like to add the feature to a sidebar this plugin will do just that. You can choose which site to show and use.

5. Share This – Compatible 1.5 – 2.7?

This is possibly the most popular social media plugin. It’s very simple, compact, and clean looking.

6. Sociable – Compatible 2.2 – 2.7

You can’t go wrong with a plugin by Joost de Valk aka Yoast. It adds the social sites to the end of your posts and again you can choose which to use.

7. Twitter For WordPress – Compatible 2.1 – 2.7

This will display your Tweets on your sidebar.

8. WP To Twitter – Compatible 2.5 – 2.7.1

This works in the opposite direction of the above. It send a Twitter Update when you post something new on your blog.

9. Meet Your Commenters – Compatible 2.5 – 2.7

This is a very unique and smart plugin. When someone leaves a comment it will show the profiles of the sites they are a member of in the dashboard so that you may add them.

For those unfamiliar with it, Google Adsense is an advertisement application run by Google.

As a website owner, you can signup for this program to allow Google to place ads on your website according to your site’s content and audience.

Basically when your site visitors click on these ads, you receive a percentage of the ad revenue generated by Google.

While it is free to signup, easy to use and provides a supplemental income, there are also negatives associated with using Google Adsense.

Three examples are the lack of control over the ads shown on your website or blog, the small earnings for someone just starting out and the somewhat ambiguous rules.

Need alternatives?

Here are a few great alternatives to Google Adsense that I recommend to my clients:

1. PayPal

PayPal is not just for buying and selling online. You can also create PayPal buttons for your website to accept subscription/membership fees and donations via credit card, debit cards and/or PayPal. Note, you will need a PayPal Premier or Business account.

2. Affiliate Programs

Place links and banners on your website and get a percentage of their spending. You can sign up with services like Commission Junction, LinkConnector and/or ShareASale to access thousands of available affiliate programs.

With affiliate marketing, you decide which merchants to promote and how to promote them. For example, if your website is a blog and gallery of your travel stories, you can display banners or links from major online merchants such as:

• Expedia
• Travelocity
• Budget Rent A Car

You can place the links in your blog sidebar or you can use text links within your site body content.

Another way is to visit your favorite merchants and see if they offer any affiliate programs.

3. Ad Spots

For websites, blogs or forums that are established and big enough, you can consider selling ad spots on your own website.

Here is an article by ProBlogger you can read for more information on selling ad spots on your website and blog.

Happy blogging and good luck with earning money on your blog or website.

When a 404 page is encountered, many people will not make an effort to find the missing page.

While some people might hit the Back button and try again, some might just leave and move on to another website.

In other words, every 404 error is a potentially lost visitor and loss of opportunity.

But there is no reason to allow visitors to leave disappointed, so why not create a custom “404 page” that can help visitors find what they thought they’d find on your website and keep their stay on your website longer?

When creating a custom 404 page, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Your 404 Message

• Don’t blame the visitor for typing in the wrong URL. 404 errors very rarely come from URL-typo. They are usually broken links from external sites or the site itself.
• Don’t imply your site is unfinished. It is not professional. And don’t expect customers to try again later.
• Keep it short.

2. Think like a visitor

• If you said “contact us for assistance”, make sure you include your contact information or link to your Contact page. Don’t redirect visitors automatically to the homepage and have them search for it themselves.

3. Show a friendly error message

• Use a more informal tone, such as “Oops! We couldn’t find this page for you”. It sounds much better than “Error! Missing Page!”
• But be consistent with your visitor’s expectations of you and your website.

4. Offer links

• Offer a link to the site map, or better yet, create a site map on the error page. This will help visitors find the particular section they need.

5. Allow site search

• Offer a link to the site search, or better yet, put a search form on the error page. It’s always good to minimize the number of clicks for a visitor (again, think like a visitor).

6. Facilitate contact

• Include a contact form on the error page so that the visitor can contact you directly if they need assistance looking for something specific

To check out some more examples on 404 pages, check out: 404Lab.com, Royal Pingdom, SmashingMagazine.com

Here is an example of an interesting 404 page: BlueDaniel.com

And, examples of not-so-good 404 pages: Youtube.com, Blogger.com, match.com

Remember, the last thing you want is confused visitors not knowing if your site is down or what is happening.

1. Reinstall iTunes. Launch the app and sign in to your itunes music Store account. Don’t plug in your iPod yet.

2. Install and launch a free trial of Music Rescue or PodUtil from KennettNet software. The app will sit there idling, displaying a Waiting-for-iPods message.

3. Plug in your iPod. Music Rescue will detect it and display a window that shows the files and playlists on your ipod. Click the “Choose” button at the bottom of Music Rescue and select your iTunes music folder.

Next, click the “Copy Settings” button. In the dialog box that appears, select both “Add Tracks to iTunes” and “Rebuild Playlists.” Click “OK.”

4. Read the Don’t-Steal-Music warning in the lower right corner of Music Rescue. Think carefully. Click the “Copy” button below it.

5. Watch as Music Rescue copies your songs, videos, playlists, and podcasts back to your computer and then loads them into iTunes. Reauthorize your iTunes music store tracks. Done!

6. Happy? Hit the “Register now” button and send the site 10 British Pounds (about $18 USD).

For another method, you can do this with a third party application called “iPod to PC transfer“.

When your computer crashed, just recover your iPod video music to your computer or itunes directly. It’s really easy to use!

With iPod to PC transfer, you can transfer iPod/iPhone music, videos to your Windows PC and iTunes. This option has made ipod and iphone deals more attractive than other bargains in the gadget market.

iPod to iTunes transfer can also transfer between iPod and iPhone, or among several iPods are also supported.

For Mac users there is also a similar one iPod to Mac Transfer which can helps you transfer iPod video, iPod music, podcast and TV shows from your iPod or iPhone to Mac.

Apart from that, it can add all these files from your iPod or iPhone to iTunes library. On the other hand, it is also Mac to iPod transfer, Mac to iPhone transfer software.

Amazon has since removed tabs from their site, but it’s still a useful metaphor when done right. So what’s right and wrong? The Usability Post shares 5 tips for tabbed navigation:

1. Connect the active tab to the content
2. Make other tabs a different color
3. Change the font color on the active tab
4. Have the link area span the whole size of the tab
5. Make sure the landing page has its own active tab

Each step is illustrated with the right and wrong way, and explained. That’s helpful. Now you can include tabs on your website without the wrath of the entire design community (you’ll never avoid all the wrath, no matter what you do). Just don’t look like Amazon in 2000:

If you’d like to implement tabs and don’t know how to do them, you can’t miss with this classic A List Apart tutorial.

Originally posted on PlanetSean.com

While the temptation is great to use Flash to deliver an impressive and flawless presentation to your clients, such usage may also bring about other problematic issues.

Perhaps the most pressing one of them all is the fact that search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, are not able to crawl through the dynamic contents in a flash set up.

This makes it impossible for search engines to rank these web pages and link users to them.

However, times have changed and technology is starting to catch up.

Adobe System Inc. has just announced that they are releasing a customized version of its Flash Player software, which enables search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, to “see” the elements of the web pages embedded in the Flash files.

While they have been indexing static texts and links on Flash sites for some time now, a lot of the newer ones are generated on demand. By improving what search engines’ crawlers can recognize, it will enhance the user’s search results.

It is exciting to see that search engines are starting to look beyond indexing static HTML and move into dynamic data.

What this means for web developers is that they don’t have to avoid Flash like the black plague anymore and use it to establish aesthetically pleasing websites.

With Flash, there’s a higher degree of freedom than sticking with HTML as it allows designers to place objects anywhere on the page without limitations. This also eliminates the need for contents to be rendered correctly in each separate browser.

Flash can also provide site visitors better interactivity. A myriad of multimedia can be added to the website, such as videos and sounds, to enrich the experience. This is especially helpful in the application of a demo video for your products or even a spruced up home video to show friends and family!

While this is quite innovative, it is still in the early stages of development and one concern that has been circulating amongst receivers of the news is that this technology would still not be able to bring users directly to a specific page within the Flash site.

Only time can tell if this launch will be successful for the future of search engines. Nonetheless, this provides web designers additional options and makes the searching process a whole lot more efficient!

If you’ve never considered building a Flash website due to the lack of ability to be searched, here’s your chance to try it out.

[total size of website] x [number of visitors/month] = monthly bandwidth consumption

So, based on this formula, there are only two ways to reduce bandwidth consumption, either by the total size of website or by the number of visitors.

Since the purpose of having a website is to be seen by more people, reducing the number of visitors will not be a good measure for minimizing bandwidth consumption. That leaves reducing total website size.

So what can you do to reduce the size of your website?

1. Keep pages simple, limit rich web content

Rich web content (ie. images, flash, audio, video) is a good way to make your website more attractive, but these files burn out bandwidth fast. If you need to include all those rich content on your website, consider offloading onto different servers (ie. third-party storage sites).

2. Limit downloadable files

Music files, .PDF files, flash or video files will consume most of your bandwidth allowance by just a handful of visitors.

3. Cleanup Your Code

Many HTML pages contain unnecessary stuff: unneeded spaces, meta tags, tags, default values and elements. All these will make your web pages bigger without serving any real purpose.

Classic examples:

1. Image border – by default, images do not have borders. So adding the extra border="0" code is unnecessary.
2. Comments – many designers like to insert comments in their codes. It does make the file easy to manage later on, but try to keep comments short.
3. <–! Footer –> instead of <–! This is the Footer and it contains links, banners… –>

Also, use a code validator to make sure your codes are as clean as possible.

Try these ones:

• W3C Markup Validation Service
• HTML Tidy
• Or if you use FireFox, consider installing the following validator add-ons: HTML CSS, or the Total Validator

4. External CSS and Javascript

Make CSS and Javascript external whenever possible. This will reduce HTML file sizes as well make your website easier to manage.

5. Optimize images

Stick with GIFs and JPEGs. JPEG is best for images with gradients or glows. GIF is best for flat or simple images with one-color areas, such as logos. PNG is another format you can use.

Most people use monitors that have a resolution of 72 dpi so there really is no need to use images with resolution higher than that.

Resize large images and/or use thumbnails. While the majority of the web uses a 1024 x 768 resolution, there is still a percentage of visitors using older, smaller monitors which have a maximum display resolution of 640 x 480. To make sure images do not run off the edges of any browser, I like to keep my images at 600 px or less.

Use an image editor to crop unnecessary parts, create smaller versions or create thumbnails.

6. Keeps scripts efficient

Some scripts are known to consume a lot of resources. Try to use scripts that are more effective and efficient. Also, keep in mind that static pages are better than dynamic ones because static pages can be cached.

For example, if you are running WordPress, consider the WP Super Cache plugin.

Always make sure to deactivate any plugins or extensions you are not using.

7. Host news feeds externally

Consider services such as FeedBurner. This can save a large amount of bandwidth if RSS feeds are a popular feature on your website.

In general, most of the SEO guides will include a “good SEO” checklist:

• Links
• Content is King
• Sitemaps
• Keywords in your URL
• H1 instead of H2

And you’re probably wondering what about META tags.

Background Information:

The META tag was a way to insert text into an HTML page that is only visible to search engines crawlers. Four of the seven major crawlers in the mid-1990s supported the META tag.

Unfortunately, the tag was widely abused and many of the early crawlers dropped the tag from their ranking equation.

Many people also believe that newer search engines never even considered meta keyword tags in their ranking logarithm.

So, is META tags really not worth the trouble or time anymore?

What Google has to say:

As Google is the dominant search engine, we want to see what Google has to say about META tags.

Here are some articles found on the official Google Blog:

• Answer more popular picks: meta tags and web search
• Webmaster tips for creating accessible, crawlable sites
• The anatomy of a search result

So, now we know Google does consider the Title and META description tags.

<meta name=”description” content=”A description of the page”>

This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations the META description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results.

For more reading:

• Improve snippets with a meta description makeover
• Meta Descriptions still very important for SEO
• SEO those meta descriptions for more Google Visitors

<title>The title of the page</title>

Although the <title> tag is not technically a meta tag, it is often used with the description tag. The contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results and in the user’s browser when visiting the page or viewing bookmarks.

For more reading:

• Target visitors or search engines?

What about ALT attributes?

ALT tags are “alternative information” source for images on your website. Not all intended audience see the images on your website: people who have chosen to disable images in their browsers, people using text-to-speech browsers, and search engine crawlers.

The Google crawler, or Googlebot, does not see your images but rather it looks at the ALT attribute for a text equivalent of the image to determine what it is about. Thus having an ALT attribute is useful especially for Google Images ranking.

For more reading:

• Use ALT attributes smartly
• Optimizing Image Tag Alt Attributes: Good Use and Abuse

Even though META tags and ALT attributes do not play a big part in your search engine ranking, it’s always better to have proper tags than no tags at all.

Well, here are some website statistics applications and tools you can try:

1. Crazy Egg – http://crazyegg.com

Crazy Egg is a web traffic visualization tool. By pasting a line of JavaScript on your web page, you can learn what visitors are doing on your website. Crazy Egg gives you reports on where visitor click on your website. This helps you figure out your visitors usage pattern and the hotspots on your website.

2. Compete – http://www.compete.com

Want to see how your website measures up to the competition? Compare competitors’ websites on Compete.com.

3. Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics

Learn about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your website. All you have to do is copy and paste the Google Analytics tracking code into each of your website pages and tracking begins immediately.

4. SiteCounter – http://www.statcounter.com

Similar to Google Analytics, all you need to do is copy and paste a simple code on your web page to get reports on visits, page views, and referring source to your website.

5. Clicky Web Analytics – http://getclicky.com

You are given two lines of HTML code to place on your website. The code then lets Clicky monitor all your site traffic, including each individual visitor’s usage and action. You can get your stats via the account dashboard or have Clicky send them to you via RSS feeds.

These are just a few of the website statistic tools and programs out there that I have personally tried. If you have tried other ones, let me know in the comments.

• BrowserShots – You can test your website in different browsers. It generates screenshots of how websites appear at 800×600 and 1024×768 resolution in six commonly used web browsers.
• RoundedCornr – This online tool generates HTML/CSS code and images to decorate your Web site with rounded corners and gradient.
• ColorSchemer – This is an online color scheme generator; it helps you generate matching color schemes.
• Color Mixers Another easy-to-use color mixer.
• ColorBlender – An online color matching toolbox for color palette design and matching.
• Vecteezy – An index of Free Vector Graphics available for download.
• BlogFlux Button Maker – This tool allows you to make 80×15 and 88×13 buttons without a graphics editor.
• Button Browser – Button gallery and button maker
• Background Image Maker
• Iconfinder – An icon search engine, over 30,000 icons in PNG-format.
• IconBuffet – Collection of free icons.
• The Icon Factory – Offers free icons and royalty-free stock icons.
• Web 2.0 Badges
• TypeTester – It allows you to try out different web fonts to see how they’ll look side-by-side.

And if you’re ever stuck in a designer’s block, check out these sites for inspiration:

• DesignSnack
• Web Creme
• CSS Collection
• Cool Home Pages

Have something to add? Let me know in the comments. Enjoy!