HTML and CSS – are they types of cars?

Even after mastering or even becoming slightly adept at the necessary skills like HTML and CSS that are required to put together a website behind the scenes it’s likely that the website you design isn’t going to be all that great. Blinking text, broken links, missing images – all of these things reduce the credibility of the content. If you’re trying to sell something having a website that looks professional, is easy to navigate and doesn’t have any broken links or missing images can make or break your online business.

Now that I’ve gotten all of the doom and gloom out of the way I’m about to reveal to you the light at the end of the tunnel. Making a web site is easy. That’s right. You – or even your next door neighbor can start making a web site without having to know the complicated stuff. Forget everything you have read about HTML, CSS and making a web site. You don’t need to know any of that. All you need is a great free website making tool and you can start making a web site in 5 minutes.

Free Website Making Tool Features

• Create a free website & blog
• Easy drag and drop interface
• No technical skills required
• Dozens of professional designs
• Free domain hosting

And the best thing is you can start immediately without paying a cent. Free website making options are available for you to have your new web site online in no time without costing you anything. I’ll say it again, here is your chance to take advantage of a great free website making tool.

Don’t wait any longer. Check out Weebly!

Business Cards Back In The Day
Business cards back in the day were used by people who either owned a business or employees of a particular business. The card was made up of the company logo, the persons name, their job title, their phone number and their email address.

Business Cards In The 21st Century
These days business cards are more than than just business cards – and they are no longer limited to a logo, a name, a job title and contact details. Business cards are also not considered exclusive to business owners or employees either – though this is still popular. Business cards in the 21st century are more colorful. They are more personalised and make more of a statement instead of just being a basic memory aid.

My Business Card – Ashtral Media
The business card that I designed for Ashtral Media, whilst perhaps not as ‘out there’ as the four 21st century business card designs above, still makes more of a statement than the two ‘olden day’ business card designs also above. Care was taken to ensure anyone I give my business card to knows straight away what it is that I do and that I’m damn good at it. You can’t tell from the image below but the ‘A’ to the right was printed with foil to make it metallic.

My business card is more than just a business card.

It’s a showpiece and it showcases who I am and what I love.

One of my favorite bloggers Ashley Morgan has teamed up with All Business Cards and is giving away 1000 free business cards. For information, see the following blog post: One Thousand Free Business Cards For Bloggers.

If you have recently moved a WordPress blog from one domain to a new domain, it is possible to setup a SEO friendly redirect from all of your old posts to you new ones. In my case, all of my old WordPress permalinks were the same as my new WordPress permalinks with the only difference being the domain name. Where I used blog.ashleighjames.com the new domain was happy-plastic.com and the rest of the link was the same. In order to maintain traffic and already established search engine rankings, I setup a SEO friendly redirect to my new posts maintaining the same permalink structure.

My Old WordPress Permalinks
http://blog.ashleighjames.com/%category%/%post-title%

My New WordPress Permalinks
http://www.happy-plastic.com/%category%/%post-title%

The Problem
Without setting up a redirect for every single post already published on the old domain, how could I redirect each post to it’s counterpart on the new domain?

The Solution
Sure, it is possible to setup a redirect for each post. Considering I’d had 37 posts already published that would have been a lot of messing around. For a larger blog, it would have been a nightmare! The solution in this case however was relatively simple and easy enough for anyone to implement. Using your .htaccess file, you too can setup a simple WordPress permalinks redirect that will point your old posts to your new ones.

In the .htaccess file of your old blogs root directory, delete the WordPress rewrite section and paste in the following code.

RedirectMatch 301 (.*) http://www.your-domain.com$1

Save the file and then try going to one of your old posts.

You should now be redirected to the same post but on your new blog!

To see the redirect in action, try going to one of my old blog posts.
Promote Your Website and Make Money

It redirects to the same post but at Happy Plastic instead!

First things first..
The first steps in the re-branding of a blog process come surprisingly before deciding on your blogs new name. You need an idea of what you want to portray. You need to know what your blog is about, it’s evolutionary path for the future (if any) and you need to discern your target audience. Only after those steps should you start thinking about a name.

What’s in a name?
The name of your re-branded blog should:

• Portray your vision within 10 seconds of a visitor landing on a page.
• Be rememberable.
• Be easy to spell and pronounceable.
• Be relatively short and to the point.
• And most importantly, be unique.

Choosing a name..
When considering names for your new blog there are a number of things that should be taken into consideration. To make the process easier – ask yourself the following questions to get yourself started.

• Who is your blog for?
• Why will people read your blog?
• What sort of tone will the blog take?
• Is there competition for a particular name?
• Will your new blog name limit your future growth?

The Blog of a Freelance Web Designer Re-Branded
The Blog of a Freelance Web Designer – previously located at http://blog.ashleighjames.com – received a significant amount of interest. So much in fact that the decision was made to undertake a considerable overhaul and move the blog to it’s own domain. The result – Happy Plastic – a web design and entrepreneurial blog dedicated to website design and online entrepreneurial endeavours.

Why ‘Happy Plastic’?
The name Happy Plastic jumped out at me from the beginning. Infact, once I’d thought of the name, I decided it was perfect and launched straight into the re-branding process. I bought the domain name, created a new hosting account and installed WordPress. The next week was spent on the blog design and then I had the joy of exporting and importing all of my old posts and setting up a SEO friendly redirect from my old posts to my new ones. I chose the name Happy Plastic because it was a term that I had used to describe my web design style in the past when I’d been asked what kind of websites I design. The name Happy Plastic exudes bright, colorful and Web 2.0 design. Happy Plastic is me.

I’m offering my services as an award winning web designer to one person as a once of deal. All you have to do to be in with a chance to win this unique prize is do a little write up about me and put up a link to my blog (http://blog.ashleighjames.com) or my business portfolio (http://www.ashtralmedia.com). Once you’ve done this, leave a comment on this post with a link to it.

On the 11th of April I will then randomly pick a winner and they will receive my services – a complete website design or redesign of up to 5 pages – as the prize. Note: You can enter as many times as you like but you must post my links on different domains.