About ElegantThemes.com

ElegantThemes is one of the best wordpress theme provider. Nick Roach a talented and professional web designer/WordPress developer who is manage the site.

Each premium WordPress theme comes expertly coded in valid XHTML and CSS, and all are made compatible with the latest version of WordPress. ElegantThemes make sure that each template performs flawlessly in each of the most widely used browsers to ensure maximum functionality. Furthermore, all sidebars are made widget ready for your convenience.

With their core features:

• Cross-browser compatibility guaranteed
• Stellar design
• A focus on support and community
• Advanced features
• Frequent theme additions and upgrades

The Prize

3 lucky readers will get ElegantThemes membership developer account for a year (worth $89 each!). To date, ElegantThemes has 83 great looking premium themes in their gallery. And as a winner, not only you’ll gain access to all of them, but you’ll also get to enjoy all the new premium themes and plugins these folks are going to release in the next one year.

How to Win

It’s easy to get a chance win this giveaway contest:

• Just leave a comment below
• And tweet this contest, like this: Giveaway – 3 Developer Accounts on @elegantthemes worth $89 each! http://bit.ly/11QCMka via @dynamicwp
• That’s all

We’ll pick 3 lucky readers and announce the results on Monday May 27, 2013. Also, make sure that your e-mail address is valid so we can contact you if you win.

Good luck to everyone!

Companies are now conquering the online world to stay ahead in the game and many businesses depend on social networking sites to increase the search rankings of their website, drive up website traffic, promote their business online and increase sales of products/services.

Why Are Businesses Using Social Media For Online Marketing?

Social Media offers business owners an effective online platform to promote and market their company and their products and services.

Let us take a look at an example to understand how social media is a powerful tool in your hands to increase website traffic and promote your business.

Imagine you have entered a party and you are working your way around the room. You are meeting as many interesting people as you can, getting to know about them and letting them know more about you. Word goes around that you are a popular figure. Friends tell their friends about you, who then approach you to get to know more about you.

Suddenly you are the centre of everybody’s attention, talking to everybody and answering their questions and everybody wants to know what this “popular figure” has to offer. Now that you are liked by all, you are probably going to be invited to every other party.

This is how it works when you use social media. Your social networking profile is the popular figure at the party. Your followers are the people at your party who tell your friends about you, thus, giving you more followers. When these followers want to know more about you, they become a part of your social networking profile and visit your website to see what you have to offer. If your followers like what you offer, they are likely to purchase your product / service and recommend more people to you, thus building a chain of followers for you. This greatly benefits your social networking profile, your website and your business.

The practical applications of social media for business owners and their websites include:

1. Implementing an effective SEO strategy with the use of social media.
2. Creating an online presence.
3. Providing a platform for the company to interact with customers and for customers to interact with one another.
4. Providing links to your website which your followers can click and share with others, thus, increasing website traffic.
5. Improving your search rankings on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
6. Creating an exposure for your business and promoting your company.
7. Driving up product / service sales.

5 Easy Tips to Increase Website Traffic and Promote Your Business through Social Media

1. Declare yourself to the online community. Let people know who you are so that they can relate to you. You cannot expect people to connect with you on your social network unless they know who you are, what you do and what you offer.
2. Link your social networking profiles to your website and link your website to your social networking profiles. In this way, those visiting your website will learn of your social media presence and those visiting your social profile will click your website link for more information and increase traffic to your website.
3. Encourage interaction on your social networking profile by asking your followers for their opinions about your products and services. Encourage them to ask questions and make sure you answer them. Allow your followers to review and rate your products / services.
4. Whenever you update your website, notify your followers about it on your social profile. This could mean a new article or a new picture on your website or the launch of a new product. The curious ones will visit your website to find out more about it and if they like what they see, they will recommend your website to their friends.
5. Use specific keywords in your username, page name, vanity URL, informative content and your posts. This way, when someone runs a search with similar keywords, your website and / or your social networking page will show up in the search results.

If you think social media is just a passing fad, it’s high time you change your beliefs. There is enough and more proof out there that business are doing really well with the aid of social media. Why else would so many organizations ensure that they have a team in place to take care of all their social connections?

So are you going to adopt these techniques to drive up website traffic and promote your business through social media?

Written by Yasir Khan, is a leading SEO consultant in Canada and the founder of Quantum Labs. Read more for further tips on how to increase website traffic through SEO.

One of the main reasons this happens is that it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that drag-and-drop equals great design. And that’s just not the case.

Template-based designs do have many advantages: they’re usually created by professional designers who have a deep understanding of the principles of page design (alignment, color, repetition, proximity), including the effective use of typography. And they’re undeniably easy to use. However, simply substituting your company name and other information for the generic template text does not constitute good design, nor will it make your blog or website stand out from anyone else who starts with the same template.

So what can you do to make your online presence stand out from the crowd?

Think about it this way: if you were opening, say, a physical retail clothing store, you wouldn’t let someone else decide for you what color to paint the walls, the style of furniture and lighting, or display fixtures, would you? Even if you were planning to hire an interior designer to handle these tasks, you’d still have to give that designer at least some idea of the general look and feel you were going for: modern, baroque, youthful, bohemian, fun, family-friendly, luxurious. The same should be true for any design project, whether you want to create an e-book cover, personalize a sign (or social-media profile picture or header), build a whole website, or start a new blog.

First, start by considering your content. Will your blog be about technology, fashion, music, politics, cooking, homeschooling, or travel? To narrow your design choices in a general way, take a minute to visualize what blogs on each of these topics might look like, then compare them: do you think a fashion blog should have a similar look and feel to a political one? Why or why not?

Next, get more specific, by considering how you will impose your own taste and style on your blog’s design. Are you conservative, witty, stylish, eccentric, or serious? If you can come up with one word (okay, maybe two or three words) that captures your personality, that can be the springboard to a unique design point of view. And from here, you can think about type styles and color palettes that will reflect that point of view.

Finally, look around for templates that could fit into the look and feel of both your blog topic and your personality (note how this is not the same as making your content fit a template you happen to like). Dynamic WordPress is a great place to get started, with many free customizable WordPress templates, along with helpful advice and tutorials that will help you create an outstanding blog design.

From a sketch on a napkin to launching your masterpiece into the blogosphere, your blog is ultimately a reflection of you. Design accordingly.

UPDATE: We just got the winner for this contest, please see below this article.

What is IM Creator?

IM Creator is an online website builder that allows you to create great websites with its drag n’ drop editor – WYSIWYG, no monkey business.
Check out some of the beautiful sites built with IM Creator.

How Do I Build a Site?

1. Choose one of the templates or start from blank
2. Make changes and add your content
3. Click PUBLISH… and your site is live

IM Creator Features

• Dozens of gorgeous high-end templates
• Hassle-free customization of templates
• Reliable, fast and globally-distributed free hosting
• Connect your domain or buy a new one
• Free customized email accounts
• Free and fast support
• Integrate social widgets: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more
• Add pictures, videos, music, Google maps, forms, gallery, slideshow, HTML and more
• Built-in SEO
• Add online store
• Total mobile/tablet compatibility

How to Win

To enter the giveaway:

1. Leave a comment below telling us what your favorite template from IM Creator is (view their collection HERE and come back with a link).
2. “Like” IM Creator page on facebook.com/imcreator.

The contest will run for a week and we’ll announce the winners on Wednesday May 8, 2013. Also, make sure that your e-mail address is valid so we can contact you if you win.

Good luck to everyone!

The Winners

Congratulations to :

• Zachary Weber
• Yuri
• Alia

You are selected as the winner of this contest. As the winner you’ll get a lifetime subscriptions from IM Creator (each!). IM Creator staff will contact you with the information how to get the prize.

We also wish a big thank you, to everyone who participated. Stay tune with our cool giveaway next!

Here are 22 Brown WordPress Websites for your inspiration, if you have another good and creative brown wordpress websites, please don’t hesitate to write a comment below. Enjoy!

One of the brightest reasons behind the success of WordPress is the Content Management System (CMS) it provides. These days people are developing customize WordPress CMS for their websites just because it’s user-friendly and provide ease in terms of content management. Like other websites you don’t have to download entire page to perform changes, in WordPress you can add/edit and remove content without downloading the page and the best thing is that you can view your changes instantly. In addition to that it offers media support as well, you can include images and video clips from the same panel.

Another promising feature of WordPress is that is offers countless themes regarding different categories so that people can easily choose the most suitable one, also there are several paid themes available over the web. If you are interested in developing professional business website on the basis of WordPress, you can create customize WP-Theme and install it. The best thing about WordPress is its plug-in features, if offers countless plug-ins for several different reasons, all you have to do is to install and configure it according to your requirement. The most popular WordPress plugins includes AlliInOneSEO, social media sharing, NextGen gallery and more.

The most important concern while setting up WordPress blog or website is to choose an appropriate hosting service, there are several web hosting companies that claims to provide WordPress hosting but later on people have to suffer low quality hosting service as they lack in terms of WordPress support. One of the easiest ways to figure reliable hosting company is to read web hosting reviews and for that purpose I always prefer top10webhosting.com reviews as they provide clear picture regarding quality of service, features, cost and customer support. If you are looking to publish blog make sure your selected web host is good enough to provide support for plugins and customize themes.

What is it exactly?

Just to give you a quick summary of the whole service, here’s a short elevator pitch: It allows you to pick a theme from ThemeFuse’s gallery and have it installed by their team, on an optimized hosting platform, and under a new domain (of your choosing). From a client’s point of view, this is great because the only thing you have to do is choose a theme and your work is done. Then after a while, you end up with a fully functional WordPress site. Cool, isn’t it?

Who is this for?

The official press release says that it’s for beginners in the WordPress world who don’t want to deal with all the hassle that’s usually involved when building a site. That is true. However, I’d say that it’s also for anyone who simply can’t be bothered to set everything up on their own and would rather have it done by someone else. Hence it’s also a good deal for pro developers and designers.

Does it work?

Here’s the thing, creating a product for beginners is actually really really really hard due to something called the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is, for example, what prevents you from explaining a basic concept of an area that you are an expert in to a complete beginner. In other words, it’s when the scope of your knowledge makes it impossible for you to switch to a beginner state of mind and be able to deliver value in an easy to grasp way. This is ultimately the reason why no one understands university professors when they try to explain things… And sometimes, it’s also a problem with many “beginner” products in various niches. So today, I want to check if this new service has similar issues or not. This is how I’m going to do this – my original testing method:

• The service gets a credit of 10 points to start with.
• I’m going to go through the entire setup process and try acting like I’m completely new.
• If something isn’t clear, that’s -1 point.
• At the end of the test, we’ll have the final score.

The test begins

To take advantage of this new offer, all you have to do is go to ThemeFuse.com and click the promotional banner/bar that’s right at the top of the homepage. When you do so, you’ll be redirected to the official signup page.

Quite a long page, but it explains the main idea behind the service pretty clearly, so it’s surely worth a read. There’s a signup button at the bottom.

After clicking it, you’ll end up straight in the theme gallery, where you can choose whatever theme you like (every theme is included in this new service). After browsing around for a while I’ve decided to go with Conexus.

The sales page for every theme itself is very clear with a visible buy button. But the next step – after clicking this buy button – can cause some problems. It’s an order customization page, and unfortunately, I’m going to have to call “-1″ on that (yeah, let’s keep this review honest). Here’s the problem, this is what this order customization page looks like:

Since I’m interested in the “theme-domain-hosting” package, I clicked the big blue box at the bottom of the screen, which led straight back to the page where I started this whole journey. Not a serious issue, but still a little misleading. Anyway, the thing you should click here is either the BUY STANDARD version button or the BUY DEVELOPER version button (in most cases it’s the former). Okay, let’s do that and see what happens.

Everything is back on track in this step. There’s a very clear confirmation page where you can click the orange button and get started with the new service. The next screen:

This is where you have the possibility to get a new domain along with your package (the domain is optional; you can skip it if you already have one). By the way, if you decide to get a domain, it’s free for the first year. You get to choose from domains under .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info. After clicking the Review Order button you’ll see the final confirmation page.

This is where you can check if everything is alright, pick a payment method, input a discount code if you have one, and finally proceed to checkout. One more step you have to take care of before the checkout itself is the signup page for a client account at ThemeFuse.

What follows next is a standard PayPal payment procedure (if you’ve selected PayPal as your payment method). I don’t think any screenshots are necessary here… It’s a pretty standard PayPal transaction. Lastly, after successfully completing the transaction you can go back to ThemeFuse (through the link provided inside PayPal). Well, apparently, that’s it for the whole purchase process. All that follows now is an email from ThemeFuse informing you that the site is up and running. Now here’s the best part. Literally 15 minutes after completing my purchase, my new domain was live, and I could access the site’s Dashboard via the client panel at ThemeFuse.com. Again, that’s 15 minutes. (Note. This is a fully functional WordPress site. So you get unlimited access to the Dashboard, where you can publish posts, pages, create new user accounts, install plugins and so on.)

The good

To be honest, I love everything about this service. It’s clear, the signup form is impressively simple, and the whole idea itself is superb. The main element where this service stands out is its ease of use. You really don’t need any experience in order to handle the signup process. Everyone can do it.

The bad

If you’ve read this closely then you’ve noticed there’s only one “-1″ moment. And to be honest, it wasn’t even that serious. Just a single, little misleading message for people landing on the order page. The signup process itself is so simple that it’s really hard for me to find anything else wrong with it. And believe me, I tried. I even waited for the session to invalidate and did other similarly strange things, but nothing bad happened. More than that, I made my test on Saturday, and even despite this the site was live within 15 minutes.

Plans and pricing

ThemeFuse sells their themes for a variety of price points. The standard range is $49 to $99 for a standard license (there’s also one free theme). The hosting package is $69 a year. In the end, to get started, you need $128 in total, and that’s exactly what I paid during the test.

The bottom line

Let’s compare this service to the traditional way of launching a WordPress site. Usually, you have to do the following things:

1. Get a domain.
2. Choose and buy a hosting account.
3. Connect the two together (not always that simple).
4. Install WordPress (either by hand or through an auto-installer).
5. Get a theme and upload it to your hosting account.
6. Install the theme itself.

With this new service, on the other hand, there’s just one step:

1. Pick a theme at ThemeFuse and tell them to handle the setup process for you.

I mean, you can’t beat that. I believe that this service truly is the perfect solution for every beginner to get a site as quickly and effortlessly as possible. What do you think? If you decide to take advantage of this service, don’t forget to shot me a message and let me know how it went.

- Written by Karol K. -

The WordPress benefits

The CMS allow you to add text, images and videos quite easily, which is why the trend of blogging is at peak. To establish a WordPress blog or website you don’t need any sort of technical skills, it’s quite simple but extremely powerful. Using control panel you can manage each and every aspect of your blog; you can create, delete and modify web pages and posts, implement themes and add plug-ins.

It offers countless themes and most of them are available for FREE, you can easily choose your desired theme based on your requirements. Another prominent aspect is that it is designed in PHP an open source platform which means if you have knowledge about PHP, you can easily customize it to develop your desired CMS. Along these bright features I would like to highlight is plug-ins, it offer support for countless plug-ins for instance if you are planning to add social media sharing tool, all you have to do is to install and configure your desired social media plug-in.

How to find the best hosting?

Once your blog or website is ready, the next phase is to publish it online in order to make is accessible via www. To publish a website web hosting service is required, there are numerous different types of hosting services available these and there are several hosting companies as well which makes it a bit tricky to choose an appropriate and reliable WordPress host. The best way to select a reliable web host is to check out customer reviews or visit web hosting review sites, that’s why I always suggest people to read siteground review as they are provide highly authentic and accurate reviews regarding their services. If you are planning to publish WordPress website, make sure your web host offer total support for plug-ins and applications.

UPDATE: We just got the winners for this contest, please see below this article.

About TemplateMonster.com

At TemplateMonster, you can find and download a monstrous amount of premium website templates. You can also find a ton of themes for popular CMSs such as WordPress, Jigoshop (for your WordPress online store), Joomla!, Magento and much more.

What Can You Win?

• one of three WordPress Themes

How to Win?

If you’d like to win a premium WordPress Theme of your choice, please comment on this post and tell which of TemplateMonster WordPress Themes you’d like to get for free and why.

For example: “I want to win a WordPress Theme # 43105 because it’s perfect for my corporate blog.”

Please follow this link to choose the WP theme you’d like to get. If you win, this theme will be your prize.

Note: you can choose from more than 1800 WordPress themes which are available at templatemonster.com. There are themes for personal blogs, portfolio sites, corporate blogs and other projects.

Here are a few more facts you should know:

• No purchase or payment is necessary to enter or win.
• The giveaway ends on April 15th, 2013
• The three lucky winners will be chosen at random and notified via email. So be sure to provide a valid email address. It will only be used for contacting you if you are the winner of this contest.

Good luck to everyone!

The Winners

Congratulations to :

• Bartosz
• elena
• alin

You are selected as the winner of this contest. As the winner you’ll get one of three WordPress Themes from TemplateMonster.com. And TemplateMonster’s staff will contact you with the information how to get the prize.

We also wish a big thank you, to everyone who participated. Stay tune with our cool giveaway next!

Website admins have to keep their sites free of improper links and if they don’t, then such websites will be heavily hit by spammers and flooded with myriads of malefic outbound links, which directly lead to Page Rank fall. One of the reason for the website positions drop in Google or Yahoo happens after the search robots analyze all links at a website and discover this site connected to any kind of improper content, even via links posted in sections meant for user-generated content, i.e. comments and forum. Improper links might also violate AdSense policies, causing your account suspension. That’s why accidental links can strongly harm your project and no suspicious comments or forum posts should be tolerated.

There are dozens of sufficient anti-spam WordPress plugins, both paid and free. Unfortunately, despite all wealth of choice, there is no perfect solution for all the troubles we might face when dealing with spam attacks as spamming methods keep evolving.

Here are three major methods that can be used to mitigate or prevent link spam on your WordPress website or forum (along with their vulnerabilities):

Method #1: Human verification tests (CAPTCHA, etc)

Such tests can be added into registration or comment forms to prevent their automatic submission. This sort of verification means certain textual or visual challenge, like answering a question or solving a small puzzle, which should be pretty much a cakewalk for a human, but difficult for bots to pass. It’s a quite good and popular security option delivered by many special WP plugins. However, even the most sophisticated human verification tests can be easily passed by a human spammer or hacked during so called relay attacks when human operators are involved to do the tests.

Method #2: Solutions that use blacklisting techniques to screen out spam automatically (Mollom, Akismet, etc)

There are some popular WP plugins with different “intelligible” mechanisms to recognize and filter spam comments or forum posts in automatic mode. Owing to proprietary methods such plugins can detect, blacklist and block spam attempts by IP address, presence of blacklisted links/words in posts, etc, so the vast majority of spam is discarded at the entry. This is a quite effective way to rebuff spam attacks, however, it isn’t 100 percent reliable. Due to certain technical mistakes, like availability of suspicious words in a post or other “false alarms”, a chunk of valid comments can be rejected, while certain portion of spam omitted. In other words when you employ such a solution for your WP-based site, you should be ready to stay yet watchful and manually clean up links that were missed, or drag something valuable off the spam queue.

Method #3: Manual moderation of comments and posts

You have to manually check and moderate each bit of user-generated content to be sure there are no spam links. Spammers can be tricky though – lets say they might not blatantly ‘spam’ your site with tons of malicious links in every post making them easy to see and discard, but they can hide a link in the dot within some half-wit post to complicate your task. So this method implies that you have a sufficient group of moderators and, after all, it appears much more time-consuming, expensive and less efficient when you come across a large volume of comments and posts submitted for review. In fact you just risk to spend all your time moderating comments and posts to keep your site safe, but not developing it.

As you can see using these methods separately or in a combination can’t guarantee complete safety for a site and its visitors who still remain in a risk zone and their PC might be infected with malware or occasional breach of unwanted content. So let me introduce you the strategy our team of enthusiasts have created for spam prevention on our own projects. This strategy involves the last line of anti-spam defence (in addition to all other methods) and contains definite basic strategies that many webmasters can make use of:

• When a suspect data appears among your website user-generated content it should be automatically turned into indirect link in order to evade relating your site to any unverified web resources. This decreases the possibility of occasional PR drop or AdSense account suspension.
• Posts and links shared by regular users and visitors should be out of danger to be rejected or blocked.
• Internet audience, following any suspicious links, needs to be protected or be aware of opening the potential spam content (adult, malware, spyware, etc.). Such links should be accessed via interstitial pages, indirectly, and with certain precautions to get the users out of risk.
• The other important factor to be mentioned is the shortening of links. Links may contain some inappropriate words and affect the quality of your content.
• Malicious websites must be cut off from tracking the source from which the user is redirected. This approach decreases the possibility of new spam attacks.

Sur.ly WP plugin is based on these principles, and it can work both independently or as the last line of your anti-spam protection to ensure complete safety. It replaces all potentially dangerous links with secure ones to interstitial pages on Sur.ly so your site is secured against getting into “bad neighborhood” due to spammers. You are welcome to share your ideas and use our plugin for free.

- Written by Alex Dobrov, freelance web developer, member of Sur.ly team, tool to make outbound links at your site surely safe -