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UK webmaster forum – where webmaster meet for discussion

Lucian Apostol — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:20:40 +0000

You can search for information using any of the popular search engines, you can join a social media group but if you want to discuss webmaster related issues such as web hosting, domain name registration and web development, nothing beats a good old fashion webmaster discussion forum such as UK webmaster SEO forums. Way before the advent of social media, forums existed, as a matter of fact you can think of web forums as the original Web 2.0 sites before they are the only user generated sites way before user generated contents became sexy.

One of the things that sets forums apart from other interactive site includes the fact that you can start the topic you want to discuss, a good example was a member of Webmaster Serve who discovered that his website which was hosted by a company called British Telecoms is actually hosted in USA, making his site ranking in Bing search engine quite low since Bing assumed its a USA based site because it is hosted in USA. Members of webmaster serve gave him advice and suggestion on how to move forward with this issue without breaking the contractual agreement entered with British Telecom.

There are many example of interesting and informative discussion being created by UK webmaster forum members, the best way to find out more about this discussions is to visit the website and perhaps join in the discussion, membership of the site is free.

UK webmaster forum is not all about discussions,there is a very active marketplace on the site called webmaster marketplace, in this sub forum you can advertise stuff you want to sell such as advertisement space on your website, advertise for a link exchange partner, blogpost exchange even jobs for a webmaster in your firm, again, like membership of webmaster forum, posting a job at the webmaster marketplace is free. You really want to checkout UK webmaster forum if you are a UK based webmaster or need a UK targeted webmaster resources.

Why you should think local to achieve greater things at a global level

Lucian Apostol — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:26:44 +0000

With the Internet, you can practically access information anywhere and on the webmasters side, to make your information, service or product available anywhere. The hard truth is that the same thing is tried to be achieved by similar companies, in UK, India, Austria, Germany and many other places. They all know that people around the planet can buy their product, and they market it worldwide.

It means that the competition is very hard and you may seem it too expensive to market your website or product to the entire earth population. You need an advantage, to stand out from the crowd. You may think that if you provide the greatest service at the lowest price you will win the biggest part of the market. Wrong! To provide the greatest product you need too much money and there is always an Indian available for a lowest price. You need something better.

You need to stand out from the crowd locally so you can sell more globally. How is that ? If you are able to provide the best product or service from a category in United Kingdom ( which is much easier to achieve than to provide the best product globally ), you can use this to market your website to the whole world. People will be happy about your service and will recommend it to others. When other users search for reviews about your website there will be enough of them, and the best part, what the tag-line: “The number 1 product in his category from United Kingdom” means to your sales ?

To conclude this: You need to be very good to a small market before moving on. How to achieve this ? Well, there is not any shortcut be one of the best in a topic or an area, but it is way much easier that to achieve this globally. Think about facebook, they started very small, then grown step by step until they reached the masses. You have to know what peers in your area want and to provide them the best service they have ever tried. Then, build up your awareness in the area so they will know about you. Since you are targeting a smaller market it should be easier.

To do this you have to be active locally, and see what works better for that specific market. For example, if you want to to great seo for UK market, then you homepage should be a UK Webmaster SEO Forum . Then take advantage of the best promotional products in your are on a local Webmaster Marketplace. While building up awareness, make sure you hear your local people voices and build the best product for them.

After you get into your place locally, you can start hunting other markets. It will be much easier because you will have a great product, a visitor base, and a whole satisfied local market.

Jazz Up Your Articles With Stylish Numbered Lists

Lucian Apostol — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:39:28 +0000

Snappy article titles get read. One of the most popular attention grabbers used by bloggers is the “ten biggest reasons…” type of post which often achieve not only a high number of clicks but a large amount of discussion and sharing on social networks which is crucial for site marketing. It’s a shame many authors are let down by the very vanilla options available as standard when it comes to styling numbered lists and these posts often fail to stand out as a result. Here are some ideas to help you make your post more appealing.

How To Target Your Styling In Ordered Lists

We’ll start out by discussing some of the simple customisations you can make to a list then add some colours and backgrounds to get you started. The basic structure of an ordered list is shown below:

The First Point

The Second Amazing Point

…

It’s difficult for us to achieve all the desired customisations if we work with a list in that format
due to the default assumptions most browsers make. Luckily by adding paragraph tags to our
list items we can then style the text and numbers separately by styling the ordered list element
to change the appearance of the numbers and style the paragraph elements to control the
appearance of the text. So instead we would use the structure below for our list and this gives
much greater power to us to use CSS to control its appearance.

The First Point

The Second Amazing Point

…

There is one further complication to be aware of when it comes to targeting your styling for the list. The numbers are usually positioned by browsers outside of the actual ordered list element. So, if you added a background image to the ordered list then by default you might need to move the numbers by styling the list item margin and padding as well. Now we’ve covered the basic
rules let’s move onto some examples of styling that list above.

List Style Types

The simplest change you can make to your ordered list is to simply change the type of numbers used to display your list. From the classic 1, 2, 3 to Roman Numerals you have a range of choices illustrated below:-

ol { list-style-type: upper-roman; }
I. The First Point

II. The Second Amazing Point

III. …

The other available options are:-

upper-alpha: A, B, C
lower-alpha: a, b, c
upper-roman: I, II, III
lower-roman: i, ii, iii
decimal (the default option): 1, 2, 3
none:

Styling The Numbers And Paragraphs Separately

The list numbers will typically display in the same format as body text by default. You can change this simply by styling the ordered list element as discussed. This would also change the format of our text if we had not included paragraph tags to style separately.

ol {

list-style-type: upper-roman;
color: blue;

}

ol p {
color: black;
}

I. The First Point
II. The Second Amazing Point
III. …

As you can imagine this power to style the two elements separately allows you to do more than just change the colours! You can also change font sizes, style, positioning and backgrounds to create some pretty eye catching results for your article. What’s even better is that these techniques are fairly cross browser compatible so you won’t run into many issues there.

Backgrounds And Other Effects

Adding the paragraph tags does alter the appearance of your list slightly by moving the lines further apart. That is easily fixed by resetting the margin and padding on the ordered list paragraph as shown below. In addition to that we have added a background of a light blue shade to the numbers and a white background to the text so we have a nice emphasis on the numbers. As we discussed earlier we can simply pad the list item to move the text to the right slightly leaving a gap between the background and the start of our text.

ol {

list-style-type: upper-roman;
color: blue;
background: #66CCFF;

}

ol p {
color: black;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}

ol li {
background: white;
padding-left: 10px;
}

Hopefully some of these basic tips have whetted your appetite for more experimentation with numbered lists. They really are a versatile tool and with an attention grabbing list you can double the effectiveness of your attention grabbing headline!

Hosting for WordPress

Lucian Apostol — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:22:24 +0000

With WordPress growing in popularity it is the best option for anyone who want to start a website. Even if you want to put up the website to display some info about a company, a service, a product, or you want to estabilish a blog or a website online, you first option is WordPress.

There are tons of plugins that can help you to achieve the look and feel that you want. If you are 100% sure that you will go with wordpress, any decision you make from that point should be related to wordpress. After you decided to start your own website and you brought the domain, next step is to get a hosting.

Because it is so popular, most hosting providers have hosting plans dedicated to wordpress. There are also web hosting companies that offer exclusively hosting for wordpress. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use that hosting account for other scripts or software, it is called that way because it is dedicated for wordpress.

WordPress don’t need any special environment to run, just a Windows or Linux based hosting with php and mysql support will do it.

Why should you choose a wordpress hosting plan ? Well, running a CMS like wordpress will need more processing power than having a static html page. A dedicated wordpress hosting mean that there is more processing power available so the content can be managed and distributed as fast as possible.

People are asking me if a specific hosting plan can work for wordpress, and what should they choose. 99% of hosting plans around the world can host wordpress very well, but some of them ( for example godaddy ), trying to give you the lowest processing power as possible to be able to give you the lowest price in the world, they share the same processor for too many users. This is a real issue because if the processor is always at 100%, when a visitor that try to view a page on your wordpress website will have to wait several seconds until the page is prepared for him. This will not happen with a hosting plan dedicated for wordpress, where they do everything possible to ensure that wordpress is loading as fast as possible.

A WordPress dedicated hosting company is WP Web Host. They provide shared, vps and dedicated server at low prices. These servers need more processing power, but they can come up with a good price because they can lower other features that are not constantly needed by wordpress and because they can optiimze the servers with a specific purpose in mind.

A great way to research a topic you want to write about

Lucian Apostol — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:37:29 +0000

When you start writing about something, you have to be well informed. Even if it is a subject that you know about, you need to see what happened recently about it. You don’t want to write any innacurate information on your post. If you write innacurate info, you either bring the reader into error, or they will notice instantly and they mark your content as “old” or “wrong”, and probably they won’t visit your blog again.

Research is not that easy. You have to check different sources, to understand exactly how it works, what others are saying about this. So, you have to check google to see the most relevant articles about the subject, you have to check wikipedia, news, social media talk, images about the subject, etc. A lot of work to do, huh ?

Well, there is something that makes all this work easier. It is called RTBot. You enter a subject that you want to get results for, and you can select trough different types of results: Videos, Images, Wikipedia, Twitter, Social media, News, Documents and Blogs. It will make all your work easier because you don’t have to enter every site to do your research. Now, you can have it all in one place.

The address if RTBot is: http://www.rtbot.net . Happy Researching.

Top 10 Most Important Changes of WordPress in 2011

Lucian Apostol — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:11:56 +0000

WordPress has change a lot lately. Maybe the most important changes were made back in 2010, when WordPress was updated to 3.0. The change of the prefix came with some crucial changes: custom menus, a new theme and merge with MU. Despite the regulat users that use wordpress only to power a very simple blogs, these changes are not that much, but for those who want to use it for more complex websites, this changes were crucial.

That was the point where wordpress turned from the best blogging platform to the best content management system. I’ve used wordpress to build complex websites before 3.0 a lot, but most of the work I was done was in the template files. After 3.0, non-coder users can do much more changes to the look and feel of the website only from the administration panel.

Now, let’s get back to 2011. In this year 3 wordpress major versions were released ( 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 ). They aimed to bring WordPress CMS to a higher standard where more things can be accomplished without much coding intervention. Let’s see which are the biggest changes of WordPress in 2010.

10. Full screen editor

WordPress 3.2 came with some nice features to enhance writing experiences. By default, most of the post editing elements are hidden ( custom meta, comment options, change history, etc ), so it is easier for new users to figure out what they have to do in order to publish a post, but the most important change for user Experience was the adding of the full screen feature of the text editor, so there are not any distraction when writing a great post.

9. Drop Support for old versions of PHP, MySQL and Internet Explorer.

Reading this, some will think that this is a bad change. What will do users that host their website on old servers? The versions of PHP and MySQL that are not supported are very very old ( somewhere around year 2000 ). You can’t stop progress only because some guy there have a hosting server brought back in 1998 and still want to run wordpress on it. From my experience, if there is someone who don’t want to waste 1 day to move to a new hosting he is not willing to fire his old programmer who still uses non-css, html templates.

It happened to me to have a client who had all his websites on a old server. I contacted the server administrator and they told me they won’t upgrade because there might be some users that have old websites and they might stop running. I suggested to the client to move on, and he did so. If you care so much about your old and out-dated users, then you will miss all new users ( probably today they are out of business ).

As for the Internet Explorer 6, the first thing that goes in our minds is: “so, users with Internet Explorer 6 can’t access our websites ?”. This is not the case. The admin interface may face difficulties when ran on IE6, but normal users will still be able to access your website. In worst case scenario, they won’t be able to use advanced features provided by some advanced plugins. If you still want to use IE6 to access admin panel ( despite it has no logic ), then you can still use older version of wordpress.

In my opinion, altough this may have no impact in most cases, it is a big step forward.

8. jQuery upgrade.

For those who are not aware, jQuery is the most used javascript library that empower website administrators to easily create sliders, accordions, pop-up boxes, lightboxes and many other nice features. You can find out more about jquery here. The same things can be accomplished by writing simple javascript, but you will have to write much more, and jquery gives you all already done.

The main problem with using jquery elements is that you need to have the proper version. The backward compatibility is good, but not great, and this preventets WordPress to change jquery versions often. What we’ve done, as programmers, to use the newest features of jquery was to load another version of jquery. It worked but the users had to load the both versions, meaning higher loading times. So this, like the previous point, is a big step forward.

7. Admin bar.

Since WordPress 3.1 and admin bar was available when a logged in user browse the frontend of the website. I reckon that I’ve not used this feature. As a developer it is important to see in any moment how users are seeing your website, and normal users can’t see the admin bar.

For very active bloggers can be a great tool because they don’t have to enter the admin panel anytime they want to see if there are new comments. Fewer clicks, better experience.

6. Widgets are saved when the theme is changed.

It happened few times to me, to receive desperate calls from friends who were working on wordpress to tell me that all their widgets dissapeared. When I was asking what they’ve done they said that they tried to see how other theme was looking on the website. Bad move. They should have saved the widgets before they changed the theme, but no one told them to do this. WIdgets are theme dependend, when you change a theme, the sidebars are changed so widgets are lost.

From wordpress 3.3, the widgets are now automatically saved when you change a theme, and you can see them at “inactive widgets”.

5. Internal Linking

I really want to say that I was thinking at such featuer long before it was added in WordPress 3.1. I planned to do create a plugin to add this feature, but what I came up with was very complicated to use ( altough I came up with an option to link to external pages too ). However, this is a great tool to interlink your articles in a page.

Internet linking is very important for any blog. While they read an article, they should get references to other posts so they can make a complete idea of what you are trying to say, or what you are trying to promote.

4. Post formats.

This is one of the best features in added in recent WordPress updates. It may have not great impact on end non-coder users that are using a simple theme, but for developers it is like a gold mine. When a post is added, there is an option to select post format. In the theme it is specified what layout should be used for every post format. It is for common use, for example, you want to have on your site simple text posts, image posts, and product posts, and you want them to be shown different.

You can also find some themes that are already coded to support different layouts for different post formats. Add much more flexibility for theme makers.

3. Admin redesign.

In wordpress 3.2 release, the admin interface was redesigned for a better look and feel. Maybe this will be forgotten next year, but the change affected of all us, in a good way. The admin design was changed so you can access some areas of the admin dashboard faster.

More, in WordPress 3.3 there was another change in the admin panel menu. Now when you hover a menu category, the respective menu links will be displayed and you don’t have to click twice to change permalinks ( for example ). These are small changes with big impact.

2. Drag and Drop uploader.

If you are using Gmail you already know what I am talking about. How much time you lose when you click the “browse” button, then effectively browse trough your whole computer until you get to the directory where your image was saved. Such a waste. Now, with wordpress 3.3, you can simply drag and drop a file from your desktop, or explorer window to wordpress admin panel.

This is a real time saver. You know how important images are for every post, but it is the part of the post creation that I hate the most. First I have to download the image, then search for it in my computer, etc. Now, I download it, and then drag it to wordpress.

1. Twenty Eleven and Theme Framework.

WordPress guys promised that they will release a new theme every year. It is good but in terms of design, there are not many changes from twenttyten. It should be a simple theme where every theme developer should start from. And if they’ve done a very simple theme, there is not much to do to improve the simpliness every year.

Although there are not much changes on the graphic side, there are many changes on the backside. The theme comes with advanced settings so you can make basic changes from the admin panel. You can change the header image, the sidebar position, and some other minor things. I am anxious to see what they will come with next years and how many things can we change only from the administration panel.

A great thing is that if every theme creator will start from this one he will bring all this functionality to his theme. From my point of view, in future all themes will have this options added. More, they created twentyten to work more as a “theme framework”. This means that anyone can create child themes based on twenty ten. This will prevent replicating all files in twentyten, but those which are really needed In most cases you can do all changes you want only from the style.css file. If you can do this, then you can build a child theme that will consist only in a css file that will take advantage of all options that twenty eleven has, but with an unique design. If you want other html changes, you can create those files too and they will be used from the child theme instead of the parent one.

WordPress 3.3 Sonny released

Lucian Apostol — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:58:04 +0000

The latest version of WordPress has been released. Unfortunately for normal users there are not many improvements, except a drag and drop image uploader and some UI improvements that is targeting the new users so they can understand faster what WordPress is up to.

There are many improvements on the code end side, with many new API features. A good thing is that the jquery libraries were updated so now developers can add more things to wordpress without having to reload a new version of the jquery.

This being said, go and download WordPress.

How a bad web hosting service can negatively impact your online business

Lucian Apostol — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:40:26 +0000

The web hosting service is the most important aspect of your online business. Every piece of your website relies on the webshosting: the content saved in the database, the contact informations, products. If the hosting is down, your website is down and your business is 0. A good web hosting can take the stress out of you so you won’t worry any moment if your website is down or if it loads very slow.

Here are 3 ways how web hosting serviec quality can negatively impact your online business:

Downtime. If the hosting company can’t assure you an uptime of at least 99%, your website will be down often. If your website will be down 3% of time, then you are in big trouble. You may think that 3% is not that much, if you lose 3 conversions out of 100 but you have to pay much less to the hosting company then the profits are higher, right ? Well, it’s not that way. Usually a person needs more steps to make that conversion, so at one step he can get into that 3% of the time when the host is down. You will lose more than 3% in conversions. Looking just at numbers, 3% of an hour is about 2 minutes, 3% of a day is 45 minutes, and 3% of a month means 21 hours, almost a day.
Slow loading. If your website is loading very slow, a lot of your customers will give up. They will have a hard time to get to that landing page to complete that conversion. They will have to do something else while your website is loading, to open a new window, a new tab that will distract them and fail to convers. If the website is complex and have many elements, it is understable to take a lot of time to load, but the elements will appear as they load, so the user will still be able to view the text immediately and see the images later, but if when you load your website it keeps says “Waiting for website” for several seconds, then the visitor don’t know if the website is broken or it will appear later. Also, google ranking algorithm seems to take into account the website loading speed when raking websites.
Bad customer support. This is something you may not think about at the begining, but there is a time when you don’t know why something bad is happening and you suspect that there are some problems with the hosting. Fast customer support will help you to resolve the problem so you can get your website up and running again. However, there are hosting companies that prefer to employ people to do the marketing stuff, but they don’t employ people for live support, and the only way to contact them is to open a support ticket that will need 4-5 days to be resolved.

These being said, when you want to buy a web hosting service you may look at what others are saying about that service. I recommend you to look at web host ranking websites like webhostinggeeks.com or webhostingrating.com.

Contact Form 7

Alexandru — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:19:13 +0000

This is a really useful plugin. It’s quite necessary if you have any kind of website. I myself have used it on several occasions and I can honestly say you really need it.

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Try out this plugin if you haven’t already since it is really useful.

Theme-Check

Alexandru — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:06:34 +0000

The theme check plugin is an easy way to test your theme and make sure it’s up to specifications with the latest theme review standards. With it, you can run all the same automated testing tools on your theme that WordPress.org uses for theme submissions. That allows for a lot of power for your WordPress site.

The tests are run through a simple admin menu and all results are displayed at once. This is very handy for theme developers, or anybody looking to make sure that their theme supports the latest WordPress theme standards and practices.

You should really get this plugin for your website since it is really helpful.