Not Your Ordinary Two Column WordPress Theme

If you’ve ever used a free theme, you know that some are just flat out junk.

To help solve that problem we’ve create one that isn’t junk — In fact it might be the best free two column WordPress theme around.

Back in 2007 we launched A Dream to Host to offer a theme that was flexible and feature rich.

More than 4 years later and over 5,000+ downloads, A Dream to Host is one of the most flexible two column WordPress themes on the web.

Originally inspired by Dreamhost’s 10 year anniversary, “A Dream to Host”  is used by thousands of webmasters for its ease of use and simple customization. Over the years, we’ve hosted hundreds of sites with Dreamhost so it just makes sense give back to the community they have helped create.

Simply put “A Dream to Host” is an extremely flexible and feature rich free WordPress theme that just works. Check out the demo and features below.

Live Demo | Download A Dream to Host v3.0 (6447)

This free Two Column WordPress Theme has been coded from scratch to be Fast Loading, SEO Friendly, Feature Rich (see below), and Easy to Customize. We spent extra effort to offer you the cleanest and easiest to use code possible so it is great for customizing.

New Features In “A Dream to Host 3.0″

When we decided we’d release version 3 of A Dream to Host, we decided to go all out and include every feature you’d need to make an awesome site.

• Extremely Fast loading: Your visitors and Google will love you! A site running this theme loads in less than 1 second in our test. CSS is only 7Kb. The entire page with background images and header is only about 10Kb. 
  
• SEO Optimized: Attract new visitors with easy via SEO. This theme comes with optimal page title tags and content presentation that’s search engine friendly. Everyone loves free traffic.
• Custom Header Image Support: Effortlessly give your site a custom header or use one of the prepackaged ones.
• Custom Background Support: Add any color background or image to your site.
• Post Image Support: Give your sites that custom feel with post images.
• Social Media Ready: Add Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Google Plus, and LinkedIn through our admin panel.
• Easy Google Analytics Integration: Track your visitors and traffic with ease.
• Custom Menu Support (Header and Footer): Add links to your header and footer. No coding required.
• Built for WordPress 3.2+: You can be sure it will run under WordPress versions 3.2 and older.
• CSS/XHTML valid: The pages validate CSS / XHTML 1.0 Transitional

Older (but still awesome) WordPress Theme Features:

You’ll find these features on most WordPress themes, but they are still important.

• Widget aware: Comes with the ability to add and customize widgets.
• Easy to read: The design uses easy to read font sizes for your visitors, while maintaining a professional look.
• Clean Code: Page code is clean – no CSS hacks are used, classes are easy to understand.
• Easy to modify: Built with simplicity and customization in mind.
• Threaded Comments Ready: Easily Create Conversation with your users on both pages and posts!
• Photoblogging Ready: Great for Photographers. Uses built in [ gallery ] functionality.

Download the “A Dream to Host” WordPress theme and feel free to use it any way you see fit.

We have thoroughly tested this theme across all the modern browsers. If you find any bugs, let us know. Enjoy!

If you really like this theme, we always appreciate links/tweets/shares of our stuff.  ;)

Don’t forget to check out Dreamhost too!

If you use Thesis, you’ve heard of the Multimedia Box and you know what it does. Right after you installed Thesis, you saw those pictures at the top of the sidebar that display randomly every time you refresh the page.

Chances are you probably disabled because you figured you didn’t need rotating images at the top of your sidebar. If you ask me, that’s a mistake.

Not only can you display images, you can display videos or anything else you want using the custom code option (AWeber forms anyone?).

Why the Multimedia Box is Important

I make my living designing websites using Thesis. Consider these two facts:

1. The vast majority of my clients place sign up forms for e-mail newsletters at the top of the sidebar.
2. The vast majority of my clients want to serve sidebar content dynamically on different pages.

Not only can you choose what to display on a site-wide basis, you can change it up on a post-by-post or page-by-page basis.

Want to serve an AWeber form by default, but show a video instead on a certain page? You can do that. How about displaying different AWeber forms on different pages for tracking purposes? Yep, you can do that too.

You can do just about anything you need to do.

Setting Up the Multimedia Box

This is pretty straightforward. The good news is, there’s no code to write…unless you want to :)

The most difficult thing you might have to do is copy some embed code from YouTube or AWeber.

Setting Up Thesis Design Options

Hint: its on the right

In order to set your site’s default Multimedia Box behavior, you’ll need to find the “Multimedia Box” options on the “Thesis Design Options” page in your WordPress dashboard.

You can choose to display photos (the default), a video, or you can use your own custom code.

Let’s assume that you want to display an AWeber form. You need to choose the custom code option.

Then, in the box that appears after you choose custom code, you enter your embed code from AWeber. It should look something like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://forms.aweber.com/form/99/99999999.js"></script>

If you happen to be a ninja and you want to use the HTML code AWeber provides and add you own styling, more power to ya!

Click the “Big Ass Save Button” and you’re done. You should see your AWeber form in the box at the top of the sidebar. That wasn’t too bad was it?

Controlling the Multimedia Box on Individual Pages or Posts

Now that you’ve got the box set up on a site-wide basis, let’s add controls for a specific page.

Keep scrolling...I promise its down there

Open a new page (or post, its up to you), and scroll all the way down to the “Multimedia Box Options” meta box.

Here you have the choice of specifying an alternative to the default Multimedia box behavior. If you leave this space blank, you are basically telling Thesis to display the default content in the box.

You can choose to display images, videos, or custom code just like you can with the site-wide options.

In this case, let’s go ahead and add a video. Grab some embed code from YouTube. It should look something like this:

<iframe width="280" height="187" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/jbn3rOPmR9w" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Copy and paste your embed code into the appropriate field, add a title and some content to your page, and click publish.

That’s it. You’re done. Now this particular page will display the video while the rest of the site displays the AWeber form you set up earlier.

You can use your imagination and use the box to accommodate whatever needs you have for your sidebar content both on a site-wide and page-by-page basis.

Styling the Multimedia Box

Look in the center column

Last but not least, you need to make sure you style the box appropriately. Thesis gives you design options to control this.

You can change background colors for the different content types, font and font size. This is fairly self-explanatory.

Of course, if you’re a ninja, you can add your own custom styles using custom.css.

Bonus Info!

I haven’t asked you to write a single line of code, and you’ve got yourself a nicely positioned conversion machine!

Of course, you can place whatever you want in the box. If you’re a true Thesis ninja, you can use thesis_hook_multimedia_box to do some really fancy stuff.

Enjoy!

Images and Photos: The Bloggers Guide

We’ve all heard the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”

You just need to be sure that those thousand words are doing you good.

Why is it so hard to find good photos?

Well for one, we all can’t afford to hire models, professional photographers and fly to exotic locations.

Even if you could… who has the time? It takes time to coordinate all of this.

But having a great photo isn’t that easy… since we focus on blogging, I’m going to do a complete overview on how to effectively use photos on your blog.

Let’s look at the reasons why photos are important.

Why Are Photos Important

Amazing Photos Create Emotional Responses

An amazing photo can help to create an emotional response to your post… it will set the tone of your post.

Advertisers have know this for decades… just look at any piece of advertising from Apple.

As a blogger you’ll just want to make sure that you are creating the right kind of emotional response.

Take this photo of a sunset, over a lake. I would say that it’s very artistic, and without a doubt creates an emotional response of calm and serenity.

Photos are your friend… don’t make them your foe.

If you are including photos for the sake of it… it can actually do your site harm.

Let’s see what negative impacts it can have on your blog.

How A Photo Can Negatively Impact Your Post

Use A Photo For Impact, Not As Decoration

Every time that you use a photo on your blog, it needs to have a purpose, and that purpose can’t be as a decoration.

Your photo has to either create curiosity, or clarify a point.

If it doesn’t do this, then the photo is actually negatively impacting your post.

Since we are talking about running an actual business with our blog, almost everything that we create will be content.

Meaning, we will be writing articles, tutorials, reviews and the like.

Your work needs to grab the readers attention… and hold it.

The wrong image will push the casual reader away… and your first-time visitor might not even give you a chance.

All your readers will see… is a sea of words. This can actually push people away… or using a bad image, can create a bad first impression.

This typical “corporate image” just screams boring… it also puts you in a state of mind that lowers your expectation. Using images like this one is a big mistake… unfortunately most people won’t stop using this type of image.

In fact your very first image is the most important image… it does a whole lot more than just set the tone of your post.

It actually has a subliminal effect and can coax a person to continue reading.

What You Didn’t Know About Your First Image

Column Width Encourages People to Read

As I said, your main photo sets the tone of your post.

But you want people to read the first few sentences. This will grab their attention and create curiosity.

If you do your job right and people read your first few lines… your chances of your audience actually finishing your post is tremendous.

You can actually coax people to start reading your posts by making the width of your first few lines smaller than the rest of the post.

A smaller column width, encourages people to read.

It subliminally tells the reader “oh this post isn’t so long… let me read this”, once you have them hooked with your first few lines… then you can continue your writing as normal.

In the case of Art of Blog, our first image width is typically about 250 px.

Just doing that, converts more first-time visitors into actually reading our post and letting them recognize the value that Art of Blog has.

Test it yourself on your blog… start by editing your most popular posts, and with every new post that you write.

At the end of your post… add a call to action.

Then see if you have a jump in people taking action… this could be more email sign-ups, page views, downloading a file etc.

Photo do more than just clarify a point, or tell a story… they can give your blog an SEO boost.

SEO Benefits of Photos

Photos Have SEO Benefits

So you now know that the right photo can set the tone of your writing… and actually create interest, and increase the chance that they’ll continue reading.

But did you know that photos can help your blog with SEO?

It’s actually pretty simple to do.

Start by correctly naming your files… be sure to use a keyword as your file name.

Never use something like “photo001.jpg”

Remember the web is about making useful information accessible. If a search engine can’t decide what your website or post is about… you’ll get passed over.

But you can do more… Fill out your alt tags.

Again, just like your file name the alt tags gives the search engines details about your website.

Right now, most search engines can’t scan images and intelligently decide what your photo is about.

Do yourself a favor and fill out this important information.

Here’s one important tip for you… don’t link the photo to itself.

In WordPress you’ll notice that when you are about to embed a photo, you have the option of creating a hyperlink from the photo… by default, WordPress links to itself.

Uncheck that option… if you leave it checked, you’ll just wasting your websites SEO link juice.

As you may or may not know, one important SEO factor is links. If a search engine sees that you are linking to something, they’ll notice it and assume that it’s important.

However, if the item that’s being linked to… is only linked once. Then the search engines will have to assume that what you are linking to isn’t worth it… and your overall reputation is lowered.

You may be linking to these photos unknowingly, not realizing the search engines thinks that you are only crying wolf.

Because if your link was important… other sites, and other pages on your site would link to it again.

Don’t Use Photos That You Find Online

Don't Use Google Image Search for Photos

We now know that photos are immensely powerful… but to make the point clear.

If a photo isn’t creating the emotional response that you want, building curiosity, or clarifying a point… then don’t use them.

They will hurt your conversion rates. So how do we find photos?

It’s tempting to just grab a great photo from another website.

A lot of people are confused with the use of photo and blogging. I can’t really blame them… it really does seem unclear.

It’s become very easy to find a photo on Google… in reality your are putting yourself in possible legal hot water.

If you go from blog to blog, you are constantly seeing the same photos.

I would say that the largest industries that use photos illegally would be celebrity gossip, fashion and websites related to sports.

I’m not talking about the big boy sites when I mention those industries… the opposite would most likely be true.

These industries spend millions of dollars purchasing photos… but even some of them slip-up and illegally use a photo.

Here’s a perfect example: L.A. Times Sued by David Strick Over Photo Copyright

David Stick is suing the L.A. Times for the illegal use of over 500 photos. The L.A. Times could pay up to $150,000 per infraction.

It’s not just the big boys who are getting sued for copyright infringement.

Here’s another example: Legal Lesson Learned: Copywriter Pays $4,000 for $10 Photo

This website had used an image that they found from Google. The post starts off by saying that they had been somewhat naive about photos found online.

They believed that if the photo didn’t have a copyright notice… then it was free to use. Unfortunately, that’s not true… and I bet that most people wrongfully believe that also.

Let’s take a look at copyright laws regarding online photos.

Copyright Laws:Online Photos

Copyright Laws are meant to protect the intellectual property of every artist.

When it comes to online photography, every photograph is protected. Even if the photo doesn’t have a copyright notice.

Even if you alter the photo and completely change the image… you are infringing on their work.

The holder of the copyrighted image is the only person who has the right to distribute, display and edit their work.

That means that even embedding the photo on your site would violate the photos copyright.

Let’s go a step further… now you just hotlink the photo.

Meaning that the photo is displayed on your site, but they are actually still hosting the image.

You are still infringing on the photos copyright… and not to mention, stealing their bandwidth.

The only legal way around all of this mess, is to get permission from the photographer… and every infraction has a compensation of up-to $150,000.

Here’s a perfect example of a photograph being stolen… I actually know the photographer, Noam Galai.

The Stolen Scream

This year a very popular interview went viral… and it was all because of a photo that Noam Galai uploaded of himself in 2006 on Flickr.

Watch the interview, it’s a fascinating story: The Stolen Scream

As you saw, Noam uploaded this photo of himself screaming.

The image went viral.

It’s appeared in over 40 countries, it’s been used on the cover of books, on t-shirts, in graffiti, on political propaganda, event flyers and on and on.

People are profiting on this work. Someone else has even taken credit for taken the photo.

In my opinion, Noam is actually being very nice about people stealing his work. To paraphrase him, every artist wants his work to be viewed by as many people as possible.

So that’s why he has such a relaxed view on the subject.

However, he is certainly within his legal rights to pursue his rightful credit and or compensation.

So what does a blogger do?

One solution is buying royalty-free photos.

Where to Find Royalty-Free Photos

Getty Images Sells Amazing Photos: But At A Price

You can use a stock photo agency.

Agencies like Getty Images charge hundreds of dollars for a photo. In many cases it jumps into the thousands of dollars per photo.

Luckily, the internet age came about.

It created a new business model for the micro-stock photo agencies. Prices dropped dramatically, because of volume sales.

What does that mean for the blogger?

Well, you can now buy these images at very affordable prices.

For just about a dollar.

But with so many micro-stock photo agencies to pick from… where does a blogger begin?

What Are These Stock Photo Sites and How Do They Work

Most of the the royalty-free microstock photo sites work on credits. Meaning that for a few dollars you can load up your account and use them to purchase the photos that you’ll need.

To make comparing them easier, I’ve created a chart.

It consist of the top microstock photo sites, and compares library size, price per credit and what I believe is the most important factor.

The “Real Cost” of a photo.

Meaning, how much would the cost of the credits add-up for a standard size image 1600 x 1200?

Across the board you’ll notice that almost all of these site have the same per credit price of $1… except for CanStockPhoto, which sells you a credit for $.50.

But again focusing on the cost of a standard sized photo Albumo would be the best value.

However, they also have the small library from our sampling.

One point that I also want to make is… this comparison chart is only looking at the details of a one-time buy.

Fololia is the most expensive when it comes to a one-time buy of a photo… but most of these sites have a tiered subscription model, which brings down the cost of a photo.

But to be completely honest, your typical blogger probably wouldn’t need a monthly plan.

You could instead save money by buying photo credits at a discount in bulk.

Also, photographers are allowed to opt-out of having their photos from being included from a monthly subscription plan.

Most photographer don’t opt-out… so it probably won’t make much of a difference.

But it is something to think about.

What are our free options? Buying a photo can get expensive… even if it’s just a few dollars here and there.

What About Free Royalty-Free Photo Sites

Free Photo From stock.xchng

A lot of the paid royalty-free photo site offer you free images.

But their free selections are somewhat anemic.

You should try out some of the free royalty-free photo sites, but to be honest.

Most of these free photo sites do link you back to one of the paid photo sites… but you can still find a handful of free photos.

This is a photo of a gargoyle in Paris, that I found on stock.xchng. It’s not bad at all.

Here are some free royalty-free photo sites for you to look at.

• FreeDigitalPhotos
• stock.xchng
• freerange
• Stockvalut
• morgueFile
• Flickr

My favorite choice is Flickr… the problem being is that not every photo is available for you to use.

Searching Flickr for Free Photos

Flickr Is An Amazing Photo Community

Flickr is such an amazing resource for photographers and photo lovers alike.

It’s a massive online community, that stays very active.

You will be able to find phenomenal photography that you can use in a blog post, ebook, flyer or pretty much anywhere.

The thing is… you can’t just use any photo.

Every photo that’s uploaded onto Flickr has a license attached to it.

However, we only want to use photos that have a Creative Commons license.

Photos with a Creative Commons license are free to use as long as you credit the photographer.

But it doesn’t end there.

It can get confusing…because every photo can have one of the six creative commons license types attached to it.

Creative Common License Types

Attribution License

The most flexible, and least complicated license. You’ll be able to modify the photo for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

As long as you credit the photographer… by linking back to their profile.

Attribution-NoDerivs License

This license allows you to copy, publish, and distribute the image, even commercially, as long as it is NOT altered in any way and you credit it entirely to the photographer.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

This license allows you to use photos in with a credit as long as they’re not modified and as long as it’s for a non-commercial purpose.

This is kind of tricky… because if you make money from blogging, you can argue that the photo is being used for a commercial purpose.

Basically, stay away from these photos.

Attribution-NonCommercial License

This is the most restrictive version of the Creative Commons licenses, but still allows you to copy, publish, and distribute the image.

But unless you are making a holiday card for your family, keep these type of photos away from your blog.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

This license allows you to copy, publish, and distribute the image for non-commercial purposes.

You’ll be able to edit the photo however you like, just credit the photographer.

But again… the NonCommercial tag stops you from adding it to your blog.

Attribution-ShareAlike License

You can freely use and edit the photo. Just credit the photographer… you’ll also have to license the photo with the Attribution-ShareAlike License.

So if someone wants to use your new photo, they are free to use and edit it.

Searching Flickr for Free Photos: Part 2

I told you that those licenses could be confusing.

Luckily, you just have to do an advance search and be sure to click on “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” along with the “Find content to use commercially” and “Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon” boxes.

Flickr Advance Creative Commons Search

And if you are a nerd like me… try creating and bookmark a Flickr quick search in Firefox. Just take a look at this lifehacker post. Use this Flickr search stringto only search Creative Common photos.

Once you find a photo that you like, you’ll have to pay attribution to the photographer.

Meaning you’ll have to credit the photographer by naming them and adding a link back to their Flickr page.

If this all seem too much for you, you can easily use a free WordPress plugin to find amazing free photos on Flickr.

Photo Dropper

Photo Dropper: The Ultimate Resource for Photos

Photo Dropperis the fastest way to add amazing photos to your WordPress blog.

It’s just a matter of doing a search, and clicking on the photo that you like.

That’s it… it’s brilliant!

Photo Dropper only searches the Free Creative Commons photo section of Flickr, and automatically adds all of the required attribution.

I really see the combination of Flickr & Photo Dropper as the best choice for finding amazing free photos for most bloggers.

Especially if you use the interesting photo section while searching Flickr.

You basically have the entire Flickr community curating photos for you.

Photos that are tagged as interesting are the most commented, liked, shared and mostly importantly a well taken photo.

I would start by searching these interesting photos on Flickr… if you don’t see a photo that you like, feel free to search by recent or relevant.

You Finally Have A Photo, Now What

I’ve drilled it into your head… don’t use a photo, unless it’s going to create interest or help to explain a concept.

You understand that.

Now you have a photo, I’ll show you how to do a simple crop to make it much more interesting.

Your Starting Photo

Before Cropping

Here’s a photo that I found on MorgueFile.

The subject is a tree in the desert… in my opinion the photo is kind of blah. The tree is smacked right in the middle, and the image looks a little dull.

Somewhat gray… the colors seems to just blend together.

Let’s crop this image. I’m going to use Pixlr.com, because it’s a free online image editor… somewhat similar to Photoshop.

However, every photo editor is able to crop images.

Crop Your Photo To Maximize It’s Composition

Cropping Image In Pixlr

The photo instantly looks much more interesting. All I did was crop the subject to the side.

It’s a basic composition technique… when you have your subject right in the middle, it’s boring.

The great painters of the past knew this, and it’s transitioned into photography and film.

Now let me tweak some of the color settings, I’m doing this manually. But you don’t need to, again every photo editor has an auto fix or auto color correction button.

Adjust Colors & Balance, To Add Depth

After Adjusting Color, Contrast, Levels & Curves

Just look at the difference between what we started with.

The end result is a photo that is much more vibrant, and interesting to look at.

So you certainly can use free photos to make an impact… in fact if you want to get even more creative, I suggest that you take a look at this tutorial: WordPress Header Design 101.

I wrote it for people who needed help designing a WordPress header, and I do get very creative with it.

You’ll be able to use my tips in that tutorial to creatively retouch your photos.

Conclusion

If you are using photos that you find from the internet… then you need to stop.

You shouldn’t be relying on Google Images… the penalty for online photo copyright infringement is up-to $150,000. It’s not worth it.

You have no excuse, you are able to find amazing photos at any budget… including free.

But again… don’t just add a photo for decoration. Photos serve a very important purpose, a great image can coax your readers to start and finish your post… and don’t forget about the added SEO boost.

Go ahead and install Photo Dropper.

90% of the time, you’ll be able to find an amazing free photo from Flickr. On those rare chances that you can’t… just search one of the paid stock photo sites.

For the most part they are very affordable.

What do you think about this post?

If you liked it… share it on Facebook or Twitter, and especially with any friends or family who are blogging or are interested in blogging.

Link Building: What Not To Do

Traffic! 

You already built an amazing website, but the world does not know about it yet. 

What now?  It is time to start building links, but building links is more difficult than it sounds.

The Power of Search Engines

The absolute best way to get and keep a flow of traffic is to rank highly for a specific set of keywords. 

This is far easier said than done, but there are some great tools that can help with the research and writing of SEO-friendly content that targets keywords. 

Without covering those aspects again, it is worth taking a look at just why targeting keywords is important, and that brings us full-circle back to search engines. 

The plain and simple truth is that potential visitors are using search engines every single day, and they rarely look past the first few results. 

Being one of those first few entries on a SERP (search engine result page) is the surest way to ensure traffic.

Google and other search engine companies know this, and they also understand that not everyone is interested in hard work. 

In fact, some people are out to do the least amount of work to get on top of a SERP, even if that entails being less-than honest. 

This brings us to link building, and it raises a key point: there are both good link building ideas and bad link building ideas.

Bad Link Building Ideas

We won’t spend a lot of time covering bad link building ideas because they are not part of a sustainable business model; sooner or later all your hard work could be made useless when a search engine determines that it is being manipulated. 

Consider this: why do search engines exist?  What is their part in the modern online world?

The answer is the search engines only exist so long as they produce relevant results quickly. 

If you discovered tomorrow that Google would only send you to websites with old/outdated/inaccurate information riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, would you consider using another search engine? 

While this might sound like a dream of Microsoft/Yahoo!, it is meant to illustrate the fact that search engines do have a vested interest in vetting the pages they recommend to searchers. 

In modern terms this means multiple independent algorithms that analyze keywords, links, association with other pages, social networking, subscriptions, and other factors. 

When one or more of these algorithms shows a site to be rated substantially higher than the others, then the site is generally flagged as being suspicious and will be evaluated.

For this reason alone it would never be a good idea to engage in anything that seems shady, such as buying bulk links. 

Instead, you are better off looking into ways to build good links.

Why Are Links So Important?

As part of the complex algorithms that helps a search engine determine the quality of content on a page or site, links play a critical role. 

Since it is not possible for humans at Google or other search engine companies to evaluate all pages, nor would it be possible for them to be as fair and unbiased as code.

A computer must perform the tasks of determining which pages and sites are more relevant than others in order to provide better search results. 

In this context, it is possible to consider links to be almost like votes from other websites. 

The more links a website or page has, the more useful it would seem to be on the surface. 

This relationship is often referred to as link juice, but it is actually a lot more complex than it seems on the surface. 

Here are a few basic points that are considered by search engines:

1)  If two sites linked to each other and neither had any other links, incoming or outgoing, then both sites would have the same theoretical rating.  For now, let us call these Site A and Site B.

2)  If one of those two sites were to get an incoming link from another site, it would now rate higher than its peer.  So, if Site A links only to Site B and Site B links to Site A, but Site C links only to Site A, Site A is now more popular than Site B.  This means it is rated higher by search engines with everything else being equal.

3)  Not everything is equal.  Links are evaluated in a number of ways, including the anchor text, their position in a text, their position relating to other links within a text, the keyword content of the text they are located in, and the overall amount of influence of a page/text that the link is contained within.

The last rule is very complex, but here is an easy way to understand it. 

Let us say that Site A and Site B both have comparable content quality as seen by a search engine (which uses several complex algorithms to evaluate text), and both discuss the latest Honda Civic. 

Site C would lend a lot of link juice to Site A if it was in a related field, such as car reviews. 

Less link juice would be passed if Site C was dedicated to the latest Barbie dolls and/or if Site C was not rated very high by search engines, but that is only the most basic way to look at it. 

Takeaway Points

The point that we want to make clear… don’t use shaddy backlinks. In recent months Google has been tweaking it’s search algorithms.

You’ve probably have heard of them… they are know as the “Panda” updates… and they’ve been altering the search engine rankings of just about every site, from big to small.

But these updates are specifically meant to target any shaddy backlink building tactics. If you focus on building a great content site, that’s easy to navigate and loads quickly… then you won’t have to worry about these “Panda” updates.

Your site will grow naturally… and the DNA structure of a site that builds backlinks naturally to one that uses shaddy backlinks is noticeable.

If you need help with improving your core content, read over Core Content Defined and Examined. This guide will help clarify the importance of creating awesome content.

Pay close attention to the reasons that core content adds to your competitive advantage… and above all, put it into action.

What do you think about this article? Do you have anything else to add? Let’s continue the discussion in the comments section.

If you like this post, feel free to share it via Twitter and Facebook.

Click here to view the embedded video.

DreamHost (DreamHost.com) promises 100% uptime on their site, which is a very bold promise for a host to make but only underscores the company’s nearly legendary server farm and network infrastructure.

For better or for worse, the company has opted for an in-house control panel, which might make installation and modification of features a little more challenging.  This is not reflected on the site’s list of supported features, which includes all the e-mail bells and whistles anyone could ask for, unlimited MySQL 5 databases, CGI, Python, PERL 5, Ruby on Rails, SSI, SSL (per IP only on some packages), and installers for many popular packages such as WordPress and Joomla!  Whether these installers will be useful when individual packages are updated is anyone’s guess, but DreamHost does seem to have a dedicated staff of competent IT professionals that are there to sort these types of problems out.

Screen Capture of the Dreamhost Management Panel

DreamHost Makes it Easy

The single shared web hosting plan at DreamHost cost $8.95 per month and offer unlimited storage and bandwidth.  The SSL implementation may not work out well for those planning on hosting multiple blogs and/or multiple online stores, so choose accordingly.  One of the more interesting aspects of DreamHost’s offerings is not found in their shared web hosting plan, but rather in their scaled VPS plan.  Referred to as the DreamHost PS, costumers currently pay a monthly fee based on a very linear formula in which $1 buys ten megabytes of RAM.  Thus, the lowest-priced DreamHost PS plan costs $15 per month for 150 MB of RAM, while the most expensive DreamHost PS plan costs $400 per month for 4000 MB of RAM.  Of course, $400 per month is extremely expensive for any VPS solution, but the unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage may help offset this pricing concern for those with very specific hosting needs.  A $100 signup fee is currently being waived, but there is no telling just how long such a promotion will last.

While there is nothing innately wrong with DreamHost’s plans, sharp consumers might be able to find better deals elsewhere.  Be wary of shopping for bargain basement hosting services, however, as there is always the possibility that one will get what they pay for.  DreamHost customers certianly get what they pay for in terms of guaranteed uptime, but there are a few other hosts worth looking at and price comparing first.

Powerful Hardware and Powerful Options

Additionally, a plan known as the DreamHost PS MySQL exists, though finding details on the plan is very sketchy.  It is possible that the plan is outgoing, and thus the lack of clear links and pricing is understandable, but the promises of faster MySQL running on separate hardware is obviously very appealing.  On the subject of appealing, DreamHost’s dedicated hosting plans starting at just under $600 a year are also extremely attractive.  Powered by 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron CPUs, and packing 4 GB of memory, the only possible downside to DreamHost’s dedicated offering is the lack of unlimited bandwidth.  Of course, unlimited bandwidth and high-performance hardware at bargain basement prices is an unreasonable thing to complain about, but the unlimited bandwidth and storage offered by DreamHost’s dedicated and VPS offerings is certainly prone to spoil more than a few consumers.  While not necessarily a gripe, it would be nice to see Intel-powered hosting solutions as well, especially since Intel has managed to gain a significant performance-per-Watt and overall performance lead from AMD.

If the aforementioned hardware setup does not meet one’s needs, DreamHost is more than happy to develop custom solutions to suit virtually any need.  Backed by generators and countless UPS solutions, the entire network infrastructure, known as Alchemy Inc., is immune to just about everything except for acts of war/terrorism, and the most devastating aspects of Mother Nature.  This is perhaps why DreamHost offers the 100% uptime guarantee on their site, but it is important to note that all of DreamHost’s servers are protected, not just those in the VPS/Dedicated hosting clusters.  Those same clusters are backed be multi-gigabit optical networks with redundant cooling solutions that are nothing short of world class.

Redundancies Are Good

It is worth noting that DreamHost has two separate data facilities located in the Los Angeles region, and their entire staff is entirely comprised of U.S. residents.  This means world class support without going around the world to find ESL speakers to handle basic problems, but it also means a professional support team that brings their calm and collected Californian attitude to addressing any questions that customers may have.  This outgoing and decidedly friendly attitude is part of what makes DreamHost so special, and helps separate them from the competition in a way that mere technology cannot hope to do.

The Bottom Line

Those looking for a great deal on an unlimited storage/bandwidth shared web hosting plan that can use a single SSL certificate will probably find DreamHost’s core offerings great.  VPS and deciated plans are ertainly worth looking into as well for those with more robust hosting needs.  Having to contact sales to set up additional SSL certificates for multiple sites is not the easiest solution, but it is possible in some cases.  Those setting up different sites with different SSL certificates, may need to look elsewhere if DreamHost’s friendly staff cannot tailor a custom solution.  That being said, DreamHost has yet to fail to impress from a sales/customer service standpoint, so it is certainly worth giving them a call just to see what they can do to help make web hosting less of a chore and more of something that one thinks about on a creative level.

Get Started with Dreamhost »

Blogging Tips and Tricks

But now you seem to be using every available minute thinking and planning your next move.

So how do you free yourself up?

Well… by putting systems in place. Basically batching and automating as much as you can.

It’s one of the most effective ways to tackle any large project has always been to divide and conquer.

If you look at any manufacturing plant… you’ll see robots and workers who only focus on one task at a time.

Use this thinking when blogging to save yourself valuable time.

Blogging Ideas

Use Google Docs to Brainstorm What to Blog About

First create a Google Docs spreadsheet so that you can keep track of your topics and keywords that you are looking to blog about.

Then visit sites like forums, Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers to see what questions people are asking in your particular blogging niche.

With your new Google Docs try to shoot for 15 new blogging topics, you’ll quickly be able to find what are the most pressing issues.

Once you have your topics, run over to the Google Keyword Tool and start brainstorming for keyword ideas… and then jotting them down on the same Google Docs spreadsheet.

By batching all of this together, you are literally saving yourself hours. You also don’t have to wait for inspiration to hit. Whenever you need a new topic to blog about, just head over to your Google Doc and pick one of your topics.

You’ll know that you already have a good blogging topic, because it’s a topic or question that many people need clarification on.

Tweeting Your Posts

Timely: Schedule Tweets for Maximum Impact

Whatever the case is… a link on twitter doesn’t live very long.

But you can test which time a day is the most effective time to tweet for your blog’s audience. Meaning if you tweet your blog post, are your readers going to be around to see it.

Let’s automate your tweets… You can use a free service like Timely to maximize your tweets potential.

Timely looks at your past 199 tweets and figures out the most effective time to publish your tweets.

They put emphasis on the time of day that your followers are actually active, the time of day that they’ve actually interacted with you… via RT’s and conversations.

With Timely you can load up your post and they’ll take care of the rest.

You’ll still want to actually interact with your followers, since social media is about being social… but at least your post tweets will always be maximized for impact.

Photos

Photo Dropper: Free Photos for Your Blog

Before you add your next image to a blog post take a look at this post from SocialTriggers How Images Improve—or Destroy—Conversion Rates

So how do we find impactful photos to use?

You can really waste hours trying to find the right photos, especially photos that you can legally use and are free from copyright restrictions.

The best way to go about this is search sites like morgueFile or stock.xchng.

These are two excellent resources for royalty free photos… but what about Flickr?

Well Flickr has a massive collection of photos, and you’ll be able to find some excellent photos that are completely free to use. You’ll just have to ad an advance search and look for photos that have a Creative Commons license.

You’ll just have to use the photo giving the photographer credit… or in technical terms “attribution”.

Since this post is about automation, you can just install the WordPress plugin Photo Dropper.

Photo Dropper makes it incredibly easy to search the Flickr Creative Commons photo database. Then with a click you’ll add that photo to your post… including the necessary attribution information.

How easy is that? Oh, and it’s also a free plugin.

Conclusion

We all know that we can save time, by batching like task together. However, sometimes it’s just hard to take a break… and actually take a step back to see the entire picture.

Start right now… head over to Google Docs and create your document… then link your twitter account to Timely and install Photo Dropper.

So, I really hope that this post has given you some ideas on how you can save time with your blog.

Let me know if you have other time saving blogging ideas… I’m really interested to see what creative ideas you all have.

Also… feel free to share this post on Twitter and Facebook.

7 Top WordPress Real Estate Themes

Today we are going to focus on real estate themes for WordPress.

All of these real estate specific themes are very well designed and laid out beautifully.

I think that the difference between these themes will come down to personal preference, since you’ll be able to customize your fonts and color schemes.

So the default layout might make your deciding factor on with real estate theme to pick.

But rest assure, whichever theme you decide to go with… you’ll be in good hands.

Let’s Begin

RealSpot

RealSpot Real Estate Theme

Right from the start you can see that RealSpot is a very clean and organized real estate theme. You’ll have multiple color options, and 24/7 technical support. That’s pretty hard to beat.

Walden Shores

Walden Shores Real Estate Theme

Walden Shores follows a minimal approach… and it looks great. It’s not what you would traditionally think a real estate website would look like, but it does have everything that a real estate business would need.

AgentPress

AgentPress Real Estate Theme

AgentPress is very attractive… it has that traditional Real Estate website feel. So it would make for a very popular choice with most Real Estate professionals who are looking for a new website design.

The Vistas

The Vistas WordPress Real Estate Theme

For offices who need multiple agent log-ins… The Vistats may make a great choice for them. Each agent can log-in and manage their own listings.

Estate

Estate WordPress Real Estate Theme

Estate is another Real Estate WordPress theme that has the traditional feel… but with a somewhat more modern twist. It’s very well designed… with it’s site navigation and your real estate listing laid out very clearly.

deCondo

deCondo WordPress Real Estate Theme

This theme shares a similar look to some of the other WordPress real estate themes… especially in layout and color scheme. It is a very attractive theme and makes an excellent real estate theme.

RealEstate

RealEstate WordPress Real Estate Theme

This theme is simply called RealEstate… it has the multiple agent logins and listing management that we see with the other themes. It also makes use of many customized dynamic widgets. Play around with the live demo… this theme might be a perfect solution for your needs.

Options, Options and More Options

It seems that gone are the days of anemic WordPress theme options. Everyone really has a great deal of options available to them when it comes to a WordPress theme.

What do you think?

Share this article with your real estate friends via Facebook and Twitter.

Writer's Block? Take Your Blogging On The Road

The most common answers involve distractions: email, Facebook, Twitter, instant messages, and anything else you can compulsively check throughout the day.

It’s so easy to watch your Twittery timeline fly by while your to-do list stays full.

But for me, and for many fellow bloggers, there is a demon far more powerful than the common distraction.

It can attack at any time and make you feel as though there’s no end in sight. The more you try to fight it, the worse it becomes. Yes, friends, I’m talking about our common enemy. Writer’s block.

If you write, you’ve undoubtedly read an article about overcoming writer’s block. I promise, this won’t offer the age-old solution of taking a break and doing something else.

Not only is it cliched advice, but it’s not particularly effective, either. Taking a break to do something else means one of two things. First, it can mean switching to an administrative task, such as correspondence or website maintenance.

Take Your Mind Off of It

Second, it can mean taking a full break to make some food, walk a few miles, or generally distract oneself with something else. Yet neither of these has ever helped me cure writer’s block.

Maybe the advise has helped you. Maybe you can clear your head while performing mundane administrative tasks. I can’t. In fact, the mundanity of the tasks necessarily puts my focus back on my writing. Taking a break often isn’t a practical solution, either.

After all, time spent walking is time not spent coming up with new ideas. Sure, maybe the walk will provide clarity. But if it doesn’t, that’s wasted time. I’d have been better off remaining in front of my monitor trying to overcome the problem facing me.

Blog On The Go With Your Phone

There needs to be some kind of active participation involved, or the change of scenery will amount to nothing more than Twitter or Facebook.

It will be just another distraction that keeps you from the work that needs doing. So instead of doing something else, why not just change up what you’re currently doing?

Inspiration, It Can Hit Anywhere

All you need is a smartphone, and the number of internet writers I’ve met who don’t own one is almost nonexistent.

Why a mobile phone and not your laptop? There are a few good reasons why the mobile phone will provide you with a more complete change of scenery.

For starters, it switches the screen size drastically. If you work on your laptop and then take your laptop to a coffee shop, you’re still staring at the same monitor.

Even if you use a desktop at home, the laptop monitor isn’t too far removed from it. Switching to a smartphone screen is a radical change that could change the way you think about your writing. No longer is there a massive void staring you in the face.

Even with the biggest smartphones it’s only a four-inch void.

Slow Down, Get Your Thoughts In Order

Another reason — and this is why I prefer smartphone blogging even to tablet blogging — is that it changes the way you type. Odd as it may sound, that physical change from the home row position to thumb typing can make a difference.

Seriously, give it a try at your desk. It really does change the way you think about your writing. You’ll necessarily slow down your brain so it doesn’t outpace your thumbs.

You’ll also eliminate any unnecessary words and maybe leave out a few necessary ones. Heck, you might even let a typo slip by. But that’s OK. It’s not as though you’re typing up a final draft.

Mobile blogging has become quite easy on modern smarpthones. All three major platforms have WordPress apps, and they’re all regularly updated. That means you can do your composing right inside the app.

Everything you type gets saved as a draft, so it’s ready for you to review when you return to your home monitor. The apps also contain plenty of WordPress features that let you do pretty much anything.

When you become an experienced mobile blogger you might even write your final drafts on yours — I’ve written plenty of articles on my new BlackBerry Dakota* and have posted them right from the device, complete with tags and images.

*You might know it as the Bold 9930. Personally, I never understood why BlackBerry didn’t just name their devices. They’re much easier to follow with names.

Next time you’re staring at your monitor with no idea what to write next, don’t go through the typical cycle of type, delete, type, delete, type delete.

Get Up and Go Somewhere

Just make sure to take your smartphone with you. Looking at that little screen and typing with your thumbs can create an entirely new environment that can help you beat writer’s block. It’s a surprisingly effective way to change things up while remaining productive all the while.

One thing that I love doing is searching on Twitter, for people asking for help. Recently I saw two Tweets that had been asking for help in customizing their WordPress header.

Those tweets became the inspiration for this tutorial.

I wanted to make this tutorial as easy as possible, and completely using FREE tools.

Let’s Get Started

WordPress Header Image Website

I created a WordPress site on WordPress.com, but this tutorial can also be exactly replicated on a self-hosted WordPress site.

The site that I created was WordPressHeaderImage.WordPress.com, and I kept the default current WordPress theme, which is Twenty Eleven.

WordPress Default Twenty Eleven Theme Header

This tutorial works for any WordPress theme you can upload a custom header.

Finding A Royalty Free Image

You can use an image that you already own if you like, but I used Stock.XCHNG to find a free image to use as my background.

Rocky Valley

Stock.XCNG is great… it’s a community of photographers that share their photos for free!

If you don’t find a photo that you like, they also include photos from iStockPhoto that you can buy.

I decided on a photo called Rocky Valley.

I loved the photo and it was 3000 x 2000 pixels. Perfect, since I needed an image at least 1000 pixels wide.

To use a header in Twenty Eleven, you need an image that is 1000 x 288 pixels.

Free Web-Based Photo Editing

I got my image, let’s edit it.

I used pixlr, they have 2 tools that we are going to use. The Retro Vintage Effects tool and Photo Editor.

Editing Rocky Valley in Retro Vintage Effects

I first used Retro Vintage Effects to quickly add some effects to my Rocky Valley photo.

Retro Vintage Effects is very easy to use… in 3 steps you can completely get a very cool, customized image.

Literally, I uploaded my photo and picked the effects that I wanted to use in about 2 minutes.

My next step was to save the new image to my computer, and then head back to Pixlr.

This time I opened the Photo Editor, and uploaded the new Rocky Valley image that I had just created.

Photo Editor is somewhat of a web-based Photoshop alternative. It’s not at all a Photoshop replacement… but it’s very powerful, fast and stable.

Stable being important here, as a professional photographer I’ve had to use online tools when Photoshop just wasn’t available… and it’s very frustrating when the photo editing software keeps crashing.

Pixlr has never crashed for me.

Preparing Your Header for WordPress

Editing Rocky Valley in Photo Editor

I now need to resize this image to fit the dimensions in my WordPress theme, which is 1000 x 288 pixels.

I went to Image, Image Size, and changed the width to 1000. I couldn’t change the height of my image here, because my proportion will not be right.

To change the height to 288, I had to go to Image, Canvas Size, pick the center box as my anchor point and clicked ok.

Adding Text

Adding Text In Photo Editor

Now I needed to add some text to my header.

Just click on the Type Tool and Photo Editor will create a new text layer for you. I typed in my sites name, which is WordPress Header Image.

You can easily pick the font and size that you want to use. In this case I wanted something modern looking, to go along with the look of my header. I used TITILLIUM TEXT, a free font that I installed on my computer. I was very impressed that Pixlr was able to use it, straight from my computer.

Uploading to WordPress

WordPress Header Image Website

Once I saved my new WordPress header image to my computer, it was time to upload it to WordPress.

I went to Appearance, Header. Here I just simply uploaded the file and saved it. Notice that I kept the option to “Display Text”. I did this for SEO purposes… search engines can’t read text in images, that’s why it’s important to fill out your image alt tags and descriptions.

However, headers don’t have these options… so I kept the option to display the text version of the sites name for the search engines.

Conclusion

This entire process took me less than 10 minutes, and I feel that my header is not bad looking at all. It has a completely customized look and feel to it, and best of all I used free online tools.

I hope that I’ve opened up your mind with the possibilities of creating your own customized WordPress Header. Most importantly don’t let something as little as a header stop you from becoming a pro blogger.

I see many people that say things like… “Oh, if I had this, then my website could be that”.

Just start blogging, you can always change the look and feel of your site later on.

P.S.

Alternative WordPress Header Image

You can use the Retro Vintage Effects tools on your finished photo again. You’ll be able to stack effects and really create a header that will standout.

What do you think?

Does creating your own header seem too difficult now?

Share this article on Facebook and Twitter, and with anyone who is starting to blog.

Headway Themes: Drag and Drop WordPress Theme Design

All of the website design customizations are done visually in Headway.

With a few clicks, you’ll be able to pick your layout, colors, fonts and pretty much anything else that you want to OCD about.

With so many options, you really have the chance to make your website look anyway that you like… with no programing, how awesome is that?

I’ve gotten a few sites together to get your creative juices flowing.

All of these sites are built using Headway, and they range from professional services, organizations and personal blogs.

Let’s Jump Right In!

Creative Headway Theme Customizations

John Hall & Associates

John Hall & Associates: Headway Theme Customization

This Phoenix real estate agency, adds an exciting combination of layout design and flash, which really makes it standout from your typical real estate firm.

GoodData

GoodData: Headway Theme Customization

GoodData offers serious analytic business intelligence data to it’s customers, and they rely on Headway to make their site easy to read, navigable & attractive.

Mothers Fighting For Others

Mothers Fighting For Others: Headway Theme Customization

Mothers fighting for others is an inspiring organization that helps orphan girls become powerful women… Amazing! They make an excellent use of incorporating photos as part of their navigation structure.

Illuminated Mind

Illuminated Mind: Headway Theme Customization

Illuminated Mind focuses on one thing… inspiring others to live and work on their own terms. It’s an excellent resource for those looking to find that spark in personal development.

Shine & Glue

Shine & Glue: Headway Theme Customization

Shine & Glue is a website design firm. They use Headway to really make a great impression, just take a look. Their site is stylish, easy to read & you won’t waste your time, since they make navigation very easy.

Paper Cut

Paper Cut: Headway Theme Customization

Paper Cut is another design firm. They decide to take the minimal route… and Headway helps them do this beautifully.

Janelle Hail

Janelle Hail: Headway Theme Customization

Janelle Hail is the founder/CEO of National Breast Cancer Foundation. Her personal blog uses Headway with stunning results.

Location Independent

Location Independent: Headway Theme Customization

This beautifully styled website uses Headway to inspire others make their dreams of traveling and working from anywhere a possibility.

Stop Thinking, Start Doing

If you’ve been putting off your dreams of becoming a professional blogger, because of self-made hurdles or just being afraid of the unknown.

My advice to you is, don’t worry so much… start doing. Research is great, but action is key.

Headway can help you get started right away. Pick it up, you’ll be able to create a site that doesn’t have that cookie cutter look… and if you decide to jump from a 2-column design to a 3-column design, go ahead. It’s just a few clicks away.

I hope that you’ve found these sites inspirational. Headway can easily cover the needs of diverse websites ranging from professional service to personal blogs, from design heavy websites to those who embrace a minimal look.

Take a look at our Headway Theme: Visually Customize Your Website. It’s our in-dept review of Headway, with a can’t miss video tutorial.

How To Build A Beautiful Website With Headway Themes

Headway + Professional Graphic Design Equals Easy to Manage, Beautiful Websites

Do you ever land on a website that is so clean and professional looking that you presume you could never develop something so high class? If you scan the landscape of the web, it’s clear that most small businesses, churches and people you find online are convinced that they have no option but to settle for cookie-cutter or third rate design. There are a lot of dreadful websites out there!

Headway is the left side of the brain that your right side yearns for.

I’m a graphic designer who is very comfortable functioning out of the right side of my brain. The creative juices flow continually, and thanks to Headway that flow isn’t dammed up on this side of the web. The juice floods right out of Photoshop and into the digital world.

You too can take advantage of the brilliance of Headway, whether you hire a professional graphic designer to supply your site with beauty, or if you are comfortable enough to do it yourself. You can have a custom, one-of-a-kind website online in no time.

Why I refuse to live without Headway

WordPress. The brilliance of WordPress only increases with time. This ubiquitous CMS will be with us for a long time, and it’s only getting better with age. Headway plays perfectly with WordPress and it makes the experience pretty awe inspiring.

• It gives me a blank canvas. As a designer it’s important for me to have a lot of liberty to dream and then put that dream on paper, or in this case, on screen. A well designed website will have a healthy mix of a variety of elements including content, clear navigation and sharp, provoking and compelling graphics. Headway allows me to break out of the confines of a walled, pre-designed theme into most any creative direction I want to go.
• A new site can be up and running overnight. Of course, the installation is a snap, and then all that remains is the fun part! Design takes some time, but if I have all of my slideshow, header and other images ready to go, integrating it into the Visual Editor is so fast and simple it really seems unfair to all of the other developers out there!
• I don’t have to code. Ever. Remember, I function primarily with my right brain. The strange_css_code($is_beyond_my); {level}of ‘expertise’}. I’m a graphic designer that is able to confidently design amazing websites and I have a bunch of clients who couldn’t be happier. Does it help to know how to work with code? To pop it into certain places? Sure, and I can do that. But, with Headway you really don’t have to.
• It’s easy for my clients to work with. After I complete a site for a client, they usually don’t mess with the design for a while—but, with Headway they could easily make updates without the need to re-hire me. The learning curve is near zero.
• Support. The team at Headway is in love with their pet project—and it shows. Not only do they have a blast developing this game changing product, they enjoy interacting with their fans and clients. They have repeatedly been there to answer simple, seemingly unimportant questions—with speed.

Yes, you should consider hiring a graphic designer

A few professionally designed slides and a header along with a smartly laid out and integrated template will go a long way in taking your mediocre site into the expert ranks.

I have seen some amazing, graphically unified sites ruined by a client who chooses to drop a poorly designed image into their slideshow. A pixilated, stretched image (people actually do that in order to get it to fit into a predefined space!) that has an opposing color scheme in relation to the rest of the site brings tears to my eyes. Such beauty should not be violated with poor design elements.

I’m going to design a site in Headway with you in just about an hour!

Now, I am cheating just a little bit since I’m going to duplicate a site I already designed. But, the only difference in the process is that I already have all of my graphic design done. So, I’ll be installing WordPress, the Headway theme and some plugins from scratch. I’ll then work with the layout and add the design elements. Let’s get started!

Starting time: 5:40pm

In the control panel of my host, MediaTemple, I add a new WordPress application to the server.

5:43pm: WordPress is installed

5:44pm: FTP Headway and plugin files

Using Filezilla, I move the files from my laptop to the respective themes and plugins folder. I have a set of regularly used plugins that I use for new client sites, but for the sake of time, I’ll only add a few that I consider to be very important: backupbuddy, Reveal IDs and TinyMCE Advanced.

5:52pm: Activate the Headway theme

5:54pm: Getting started with Headway

There’s several very beneficial fields that you will want to fill including the favicon location, SEO and other options. But, since we are in a hurry, we’ll let that slide for now!

5:55pm: The Visual Editor

Your first time in the editor, you’ll be greeted with a setup wizard. All of the choices you make can be overridden later, so don’t worry too much about what you choose.

5:57pm: The blank canvas

Here’s what you’ll see after the wizard is finished launching your new site (or something very similar depending on what options you chose in the wizard).

5:59pm: Back to WordPress Admin

Since we don’t want the front page of our site to include blog posts, we need to make some changes in the WordPress Admin.

You will need to add two new pages: Home & Blog

Under the Reading settings, you need to change your front page display setting. Choose “a static page” and then choose the appropriate pages.

You will also need to change the Permalinks settings to “Day and name.”

6:04pm: Back to the Visual Editor

Now, when we refresh the page, the blog posts will be gone and that leaf will be replaced by your home page.

6:06pm Changing some layout settings

For this site, I’m going to choose to give it a width of 1200 and a vertical margin of 0.

And I’ll give my leafs the following variables:

6:10pm: Time to change the background.

Here’s the resulting background image:

6:12pm: Adding my header

You’ll want to ignore the recommended image size. We are going to make the header span the width of the wrapper, of the website, which is 1200. I have my header saved and ready to upload, and here’s what happens after I publish the site:

To remove the tagline, click on ‘Options’ under ‘Header’.

6:16pm: Back to WordPress Admin to add my slides

Grab the image URLs so you can paste them in the image rotator in the Visual Editor.

6:21pm: Insert the slideshow

First, you need to delete the leaf that contains the home page. Keep in mind that the home page in the WordPress Admin won’t be visible, so don’t attempt to add anything to it. But, as far as the Visual Editor is concerned… and your website in its completed form… this page is the home page, the first page people see when they enter your address.

Now, add an image rotator from the ‘Leafs and Columns’ section under ‘add’.

You will want to make sure you have your site setup with two columns, plus an extra bottom leaf container.

Also, size your first column to 900, and your second to 260.

Now, click the pencil icon and we will add our slides using the URL’s from your media library.

Note, you can add in a hyperlink too if you’d like so people will go where you’d like when they click a slide. For this tutorial, we’ll leave them blank.

Now, hit ‘Publish Changes’ on the lower right of your screen.

Here’s what we have now!

6:30pm: Lets add some widgets

Now, it added the sidebar above my slideshow, but that’s not where I want it. No worries, we are working in Headway! Just click ‘Actions’ and then ‘Arrange Leafs’.

Now, just drag the sidebar to the right column.

In your WordPress Admin, add some widgets and come back to the visual editor. Publish Changes and this is what we have:

6:38pm: Lets add some images to the bottom (do you notice how clean, professional looking images makes all the difference?)

There’s a number of ways to do this, but I’m going to simply duplicate the process I used with my image rotator above. I’m going to add three more, in the bottom container. Then, I’ll add some new images in the WordPress Admin and enter those URLs into the image rotators. Note, these images won’t actually rotate. Each one will hold only one image.

I’m also going to add an HTML/PHP leaf, and put the embed code for a video in there. Note, you’ll need to resize your leafs to the width you want and then Publish Changes. Here’s what I got:

Oops…I don’t want the title of my video leaf to say HTML/PHP, so I’ll click the pencil icon and remove the checkmark from the ‘show title’ option under the ‘Miscellaneous’ tab.

6:46pm: We are almost done! Let’s change one more thing.

I don’t like the color of my navigation bar, so I’m going to change it using the ‘Element Selector’ under ‘Styles and Designs’. You can click most anywhere in the Visual Editor and change the variables! This is powerful! Change fonts, colors and more.

And here’s the new menu bar (after I changed the color for all of the navigation bar items):

6:50pm: We are done with the design!

Of course, there’s more work to be done on interior pages, but your primary template elements and layout is done and it just took over an hour! Headway is that powerful!

You can compare this test site with the actual site I mirrored here:

• www.burtonsites.com/thelab (test site)
• www.revivallab.com (actual site)

Can it get any better?

Of course! Remember we’re working with both WordPress and Headway. You can add plugins, additional frameworks and more! For example, on the actual site at www.revivallab.com you’ll see a different menu system. I chose to go with mega menus instead of the built in menu system. I also have a calendar plugin on the right sidebar instead of recent posts and a Twitter feed.

Remember, Headway makes it EASY to setup a professional website, and all you have to add is sharp design and compelling content!

Top 3 WordPress Hosting

We all know that WordPress is hands down the very best blogging platform… #2 isn’t even close.

But who’s the Best WordPress Host?

That’s not so clear. Lots of sites claim to be the best WordPress for hosting but who is really the best? We compared the top 3, see if we can find a clear winner.

Let’s focus on features, reputation, dependability, customer service and price.

DreamHost

DreamHost: Top 3 WordPress Hosting Companies

DreamHost has been around for over 14 years, impressive!

Let’s see what they offer in their share hosting package.

• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Domain Hosting
• Unlimited Email Accounts

For $8.95 per month, I call that impressive. I haven’t even mentioned the one-click WordPress installation. You’ll automatically install and configure your new WordPress blog in minutes.

24/7 human technical support is phenominal, and DreamHost includes it for free… pretty sweet!

You even get 50GB of free backup space… you’ll be able to store your website in the “cloud”. How much would you be willing to pay just for that option? You got to love that it’s included for Free.

DreamHost also has a phenomenal uptime reputation. Your WordPress site will have Enterprise-Level Reliability.

$8.95 for all of this, and a 97 day money-back guarantee is a deal in any one’s book!

For full details read our Dreamhost Review.

Bluehost

bluehost: Top 3 WordPress Hosting Companies

Now bluehost has been around for about 15 years… just one uping DreamHost. Longevity is important, and if you are shopping for a shared hosting plan, keep an eye out for this.

As for services, Bluehost is pretty similar to DreamHost. You get:

• Unlimited Domain Hosting
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Emails

Plus

• Free Domain Name
• Free $75 Google AdWords Credit

All for $5.95 per month, with the one-click WordPress installation, 24/7 technical support & anytime money back guarantee… bluehost gives you a lot.

Let’s take a look at what the 3rd king of WordPress hosting has to offer.

For full details check out our Bluehost Review.

HostGator

HostGatort: Top 3 WordPress Hosting Companies

HostGator has been offering hosting services for almost 10 years.

Again we see similarities.

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Domain Hosting
• Unlimited Emails

They also have the one-click WordPress install, 24/7 technical support, 45 day money back guarantee, plus $100 in Free Google AdWords Credit… for $3.96 per month because of a 20% discount promotion that HostGator is currently running.

Oh… and if you upgrade to their business plan, you’ll get your own private ip address and a free toll-free number that you can point to any existing number that you already have.

The business plan is currently $10.36 per month, because of the same 20% discount.

For full details make sure to check out our Hostgator review.

Save 25% off Host Gator by using coupon code ARTOFBLOG25.

Typography Basics – Some Fundamentals for Body Copy

“Designing the written page for better communication of a message.”

But that simplicity can get ugly fast.

Ask Google a question about typography and soon you’ll find yourself immersed in Classical proportions, the Golden Mean, Fibonacci sequences.

Not to mention modular systems, double-strand scaling and an infestation of rabid zombies.

I didn’t make any of that shit up. Not even the zombies. Luckily, even the more complicated and mathy bits inevitably lead to the author reminding us, “You know, there really are no rules, just guidelines.”

So, regardless of path the destination is the same: Make it look good without forsaking legibility. And hell, if we can reach the result without math, I’m all over it.

That’s the route we’ll take with this series on typography.

For this first episode we’ll breathe some life into something boring and make it, well, probably just slightly less boring: body copy.

How to tame and sexify body copy

When doing projects largely based on type, designers often make the same mistake. They say, “Yay! A type project! I’ll go find a bitchin’ headline font!”

So they jump on the free font sites out there and try to find the latest wild west font, something entwined in barbed wire or anything with the word “puke” in. And I don’t blame them; fonts are awesome.

The problem is that for any project with substantial body copy, the headlines receive relatively little air time. The reader’s eye is going to be on the body copy far longer than anywhere else, so it’s really the work horse of the project. The body copy should make the reader’s job very easy.

How do we make it easy for the reader? Here are a few different guidelines that we’ll dive into with greater detail:

• Use common fonts. Just because it’s on your computer doesn’t mean it should be used.
• Use an intelligent size so my father can read it.
• ALL-CAPS IS AN EFFING BASTARD.
• Do away with constipated or loose-boweled line-heights.

Using common fonts

You’re going to have a limited number of fonts to work with for body copy, especially online. That’s actually a good thing. Bottom line is you just can’t get too crazy with body copy without getting a fat bill from your reader’s optometrist.

I use a silly-simple rule of thumb:

If I have to squint or move my head closer to read it, it’s almost certainly wrong.

With body copy, you’ve got two main options: serif and sans-serif. A little battle rages around which is better.

The sans-serif team says that their fonts look cleaner, because they don’t have all those little serifs cluttering up the works.

But then the serif team says their fonts are easier to read because of the serifs. They act as little eye-trails, pulling the reader through.

Probably both arguments are correct and at least they emphasize the right things: cleanliness, legibility and ease.

I see site owners try to be cute or novel with body fonts or use something “unique” they happen to have on their machine. Comic Sans may be on your computer, and that’s probably where it should stay. Would you want to read something like this for much longer than one sentence?

Yes, there are websites out there that actually use these fonts. Don’t be that guy. Use a regular font.

Options for serif body fonts (GFR = Google Font Replacement):

• Georgia
• Palatino Linotype
• Book Antiqua
• Times New Roman
• Droid Serif (GFR)
• Alike (GFR)

Options for sans-serif body fonts (GFR = Google Font Replacement):

• Lucida Sans Unicode
• Lucida Grande
• Arial
• Verdana
• Droid Sans (GFR)
• Shanti (GFR)

What’s good about these? Well, without getting too technical, they’re tall enough and wide enough. Tall enough means that the lower-case ‘a’ and ‘e’ still have nice little loops. And wide enough means that the feet of, say, the letter ‘m’ or ‘h’ still have enough space in between to read as spaces and not mush together. Remember, we’re going for instant recognition.

And honestly there are some fonts I absolutely love in Google’s font directory, but I don’t use them for body copy. “Open Sans” is one of them, and I try over and over again to use it only to fail like a chump. It’s sexy and svelte, but it’s so ultra-thin it virtually disappears at anything below 22pt. But all is not lost. We can still use it, as we’ll get to in the next installment.

Use an intelligent size so my father can read it

A while ago, I visited a site on which I could barely read the body copy. I commented to the webmaster that 10px type was pretty damn small. In reply the site owner said, “Yeah, well I like the delicate look of the small type.”

Well, that’s great, but we’re not making Swiss watches. We’re making a written page and it’s supposed to be legible, lest the whole message fail.

So how small is too small? You can probably get away with 12px type, but in my web projects I almost always go for 14px.

ALL-CAPS IS AN EFFING BASTARD

When we humans read, we don’t look at each and every letter in succession and thereby build each word. We read much more quickly than that, scanning over the words and taking visual cues along the way. We note the crossed ‘t’, the curves of the ‘s’, the loops and dangly bits of ‘p’ and ‘g’, and the loops and upward extensions of ‘d’ and ‘b’. We sort of just “sense” these as our eye scans over the line, and reading becomes a breeze.

ALL-CAPS destroy that breeziness. ALL-CAPS is like typographical socialism, where each individual is roughly the same importance as his neighbor. The visual cues are gone. No more interpretive dangly bits, no more upper extenders and no more helpful negative spaces.

Best-practice suggests using all-caps for one word that really needs punch, but even then it’s questionable. Some folks think that all-caps is basically the written version of yelling at someone, and I would tend to agree unless it’s used very sparingly.

Do away with constipated or loose-boweled line heights

Now we get to one of those ultra-important things that is so often forgotten: line heights.

Line heights can make or break a project. As we discussed above in the all-caps section, we take visual cues from letters as we read. The upper and lower extenders help us interpret the words very quickly. Well, what happens when your lines of text are too close together? You get bleed between those extenders. I’ve seen projects where adjacent lines of type were actually touching in some places.

All the type starts to blend together into a nasty gravy. Not only that, it even looks harder to read as it’s blocky and ominous. Ick, check it out…

Line height of 100%

But go too loose and too spacious with your line heights and you end up with a different set of problems, one of which has to do with negative space. With too much line height the text loses punch and interest. Instead of the text being in the spotlight, the white space gets visibly heavy by comparison and starts to take on a life of its own.

Line height of 180%

So what do we do? Well, obviously we choose something in between.

The actual code you’d use on your site would be either in percentage:

line-height: 140%;

Or in ems (assuming 1em = 14px):

line-height: 1.4em

Of course, mileage will vary. You’ll find the overall appearance and feel of the copy will be a sort of ballet between line height and the width of the content itself. Play around as needed and when it just feels right…it probably will be.

By the way, for you Photoshoppers out there, if you’re working on a web comp and select “Auto” for a body of text, the result will be 120%. I almost always think this is a bit cramped and change it. And honestly, I just futz around with the numbers until I like the result.

140% works pretty well. It’s tight, but not so tight that it feels cramped. Of course your mileage may vary, but I think you’ll find gold if you’re panning somewhere between 120% – 160%.

In the next installment, we’re going to talk about everyone’s favorite topic: big fat sexy headlines!

For next time…

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading! I know it’s not the sexiest subject, so thanks for sticking with it.

Next time around, we’ll hit it Hollywood style and talk fun stuff: headlines!

See you then!

Thesis Design Customizations

You can’t deny how popular Thesis has become. Without a doubt it’s one of the most popular WordPress Themes available.

And for good reason…

Not only is it insanely powerful, SEO friendly, and user friendly.

It’s completely flexible…

So if you need some design inspiration let’s take a look at the TopThesis Design Customizations.

This collection showcases sites from different types of businesses. It even includes a personal blog and a brick and mortar restaurant.

Some of the sites prefer a minimal design, while others feature heavy customization… yet they are all build using Thesis.

Awesome Thesis Design Customization

Nerdist

Nerdist.com

Not only does Chris Hardwick have one of the most insanely popular podcast on the interweb with Nerdist… his site is beautiful, it uses whitespace tastefully and adds just the right amount of color.

MattBittes

MattBites.com

A photo equals a thousand words… I wonder what a website header equals?

In Mattbittes.com math, it equals tons. Matt runs a very successful food blog that puts all the emphasis on it’s content, while letting his creativity shine on the sites header.

Rob Maguire

RobMaguire.com

Rob is a consultant who works with Artist. He’s customized Thesis to have a professional look and he then adds creative touches with his color scheme and typography.

Immersus Media

Immersus Media

Immersus Media is a web and print design company that is using Thesis to perfectly balance playfulness, readability, professionalism and site usability.

MX Police

MX Police

MX Police offers Military-Grade Email Spam Protection. As you see, Thesis does an amazing job with the heavy WordPress design customization.

PROOF Branding

Proof Branding

Navigation, readability and a great use of color makes this site a winner. PROOF Branding does a great job with their website.

Ivy & Aster

Ivy & Aster

Stunning… is what initially comes to mind when you visit Ivy & Aster. They specialize in dresses for Bridal and Social Events.

Rocket Shoes

Rocket-Shoes.com

Drew Hoolhorst follows the very successful formula of web-design. Great color scheme, easy to read fonts, and clear navigation structure. Drew is Winning!

The Kollection

The Kollection

For the music lover and t-shirt lover… comes The Kollection. It’s another winning combination of color, typography, easy navigation and whitespace.

Radius SF

RadiusSF.com

Radius is a San Francisco restaurant that successfully uses a touch of San Francisco nostalgia in it’s web design. Overall an amazing job.

We’ve seen all types of sites taking advantage of Thesis. From service oriented businesses to personal blogs. As you can see with Thesis you can build awesome, unique and stunning sites.

But we don’t always have the funds to hire a professional designer… but don’t worry.

We got you covered, you can always buy a Thesis Skin. Then tweak it to your liking. So let’s now take a look at some of the best and most versatile Thesis Skins.

Thesis Skins That Make An Impact

Kickstarter

Kickstarter Thesis Skin

Kickstarter makes it really simple to remove website clutter, and puts your content front and center.

You got to love how clean this Thesis skin is… it’s actually built with marketers in-mind. You’ll be able to create landing pages on the fly and maximize your opt-ins and boost conversions.

Line It Up

Line It Up Thesis Skin

Here we have a pretty slick business Thesis skin, called Line It Up. You could easily use this skin for your service business, to showcase a product or for your design portfolio.

FeedPop

FeedPop Thesis Skin

FeedPop just screams out heavy customization, it has such a unique and exciting layout. If you want your site to have some personality, and still be user friendly… FeedPop is for you.

Stage

Stage Thesis Skin

This is a great looking Thesis Skin for those who are looking to have an online portfolio. You can easily feature your work with it’s feature photo slider. Designers will also love the photo grid template for organizing their work.

Thesis Magazine

Thesis Magazine Thesis Skin

Stunning, that’s immediately comes to mind when you visit a magazine site powered by Thesis Magazine. This Thesis Skin is easily to customize, you have 7 color options, 10 widget sections, a post slider and built-in ad space.

Marketers Delight

Marketers Delight Thesis Skin

This Thesis Skin is made specifically for marketers. Notice how the email opt-in form is right on top. The color scheme is gorgeous, and it’s font collection is beautiful and easy to read. Easily, one of the best Thesis Skins.

Conclusion

As you see Thesis is very flexible, you only have your imagination limiting your websites possibilites.

And if you don’t have the knowhow or budget, you can always use one of the many Thesis Skins to customize the look and feel of your website. It also doesn’t matter if you are a service business, food blogger, photographer, organization of someone looking for a personal blog.

You’ll find a Thesis Skin that will fit your needs, and budget.

Let me know what you think? Do you know of any other sites that use Thesis… or do you have a favorite Thesis Skin that I didn’t include?

Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance

Uncertainty, is the silent killer of dreams and good intentions.

Uncertainty will stop you from taking action and turn you against yourself.

Uncertainty will make you think that you aren’t good enough, smart enough, you’re too young or even worse.

Since everyone faces uncertainty, understanding how to tackle this fear is vital to your long term success.

Luckily for us you can use that anxiety as a positive. The anxiety you feel in the face of Uncertainty can be a sign that you are heading into the right direction… you are on the path to something amazing.

This week a very special book is launching, Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields – a serial entrepreneur, family man, speaker and wearer of a dozen other hats.

In the wake of the release of Uncertainty, we asked 8 successful web-entrepreneurs how they dealt with uncertainty when they were launching their business

We asked them the question: In a moment of uncertainty, how did you use it as motivation?

Below are their responses:

Using Uncertainty as Motivation:

Derek Halpern – Social Triggers

Derek Halpern: SocialTriggers.com

There are two types of uncertainty:

First, there’s that gut-wrenching feeling in your stomach when you know you’re making the wrong decision.

And then, there’s that uneasy feeling you get right before you pull the trigger on the right decision.

The trick is to know the difference between the two.

Chris Guillebeau – The Art of Non-Conformity

Chris Guillebeau: The Art of Non-Conformity

One moment was when I stole a car at age 14 without knowing how to drive. All of a sudden, I was extremely uncertain, but also extremely motivated to teach myself as I cruised through suburbia. All went well until I crashed into a brick mailbox.

These days, I don’t often steal cars, but I often use the same mental trick — to link uncertainty and fear into something that creates motivation and reward.

Benny Lewis – Fluent In 3 Months

Benny Lewis: FluentIn3Months.com

Uncertainty is a huge part of my life, since I travel all the time to completely different countries that rarely speak any English.

But uncertainty is the reason I do it in the first place; for the adventure.

It’s the same with blogging. Should I change my design? Put time into some new social media fad? Guest post? Post regularly, or write long?

There are so many questions, and too many conflicting answers to make one universal rule work. So I charge into the uncertainty and experiment.

And it turns out to be a lot of fun!

The best bloggers are those who deal with uncertainty all the time because they embrace change. Trying things out, and yes, failing, regularly are what help you to go in the right direction.

The more you fail the better – like the proverbial light bulb invention, you are eliminating all the “wrong ways”.

Research should only be to find new ideas to inspire you – actually applying them for real if you feel they could work, should be your true research! When you do try to be so unique, it’s going to make some people angry.

And that’s good.

As much of a positive difference I feel I’m making with my site, I know I’m definitely on the right track because every few days I get trolls insulting me.

Rocking the status quo will always ruffle feathers!

Jenny Blake – Life After College

Jenny Blake: Life After College

“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and insecurity is the only security.” –John Allan Paulos

Fighting uncertainty is futile. Uncertainty is truly the only certainty we have in life, so rather than fight it we do best to embrace it. If you get quiet enough in moments of uncertainty, you’ll hear your path whispering to you. You’ll hear your gut, you’ll become aware of new information, and you will move forward in beautiful ways that you couldn’t have even planned for if you tried.

I’ve had a lifelong goal of moving to New York City. After a gorgeous snowy trip last December, I decided it was time. I had no idea how I would get here, where I would live, or what to do with my condo back at home. But step by step, I embraced the uncertainty and leaned into it. It’s so easy to turn uncertainty into unnecessary worry, but if you just trust in yourself, your resourcefulness, and the power of serendipity, you will figure things out.

My other favorite quote is “That which you can plan is too small for you to live.” Take uncertainty as a sign that you’re doing great things in your life — celebrate, invite it in, and enjoy the beautiful chaos of it all.

Sean Ogle – Location Rebel

Sean Ogle: Location Rebel

For a year and a half I was paralyzed by uncertainty over leaving a job I was unhappy with. All I wanted to was to start my own business and travel the world. I thought I had dozens of fears that were keeping me from inaction. In the end I realized there’s only one fear in the world – the fear of uncertainty.

By embracing this realization, along with the idea that nothing worth doing will ever be completely certain, I started making moves that have 2 years later led me to a successful business and a beach in Bali where I sit writing this. Life would not be fun if it weren’t for uncertainty. Never forget that.

Willie Jackson: WillieJackson.com

Willie Jackson: (As Himself) WillieJackson.com

I’m of the mind that the better one gets at dealing with uncertainty, chaos and unpredictability, the better off one will be in life, business, and relationships.

I say this because most people live inside a box, terrified of change, opting for the safest choice whenever possible.

This gives change makers the opportunity to excel at every turn, taking calculated risks whenever possible.

As it relates to life: we get one shot. A life lived in fear is no life at all, so it’s important not to allow uncertainty to preclude us from making the most of the time we’ve got.

It’s human nature to accept circumstances since we’re creatures of habit, so the challenge (an essential one at that) is to be in constant posture of evaluating uncertainty in the context of growth opportunity.

As it relates to business: entrepreneurial success in particular requires a measure of uncertainty — risk of failure is the point, since the dinosaurs (businesses slow to move and adapt) in any industry will be in a rush to do the old thing.

Smaller, more nimble companies with fresh (and sometimes radically different) perspectives on the marketplace will err towards what’s risky and uncertain, sometimes resulting in outsized ROI and glory.

As it relates to relationships: approaching a woman you don’t know isn’t easy, and that’s why most men fail.

We talk ourselves out of saying hello to an attractive woman because the thought of being rejected by a beautiful women turns most men into puddles of XBOX-playing anti-social putty.

Cultivating a fearlessness with respect to rejection and mitigating risk wherever possible is the key to success here (shaving and looking presentable tend to help as well).

Karol Gajda: Ridiculously Extraordinary

Karol Gajda: Ridiculously Extraordinary

Every person who has lived a successful life or created a successful business has learned to embrace uncertainty.

If you can’t make decisions in uncertain times then others will make decisions for you. That is almost never a good thing.

But, like anybody, I’ve made mistakes.

Faced with uncertainty I’ve chosen the wrong path many times. Without fail that was because I was trying to fight with the uncertainty.

I didn’t want to acknowledge it was there and so my decision making was cloudy.

I’ve learned, in a way, to throw my hands up and expect a level of uncertainty in everything I do. That includes anything from meeting a new person to starting a new business to writing a new article to traveling to a new place.

Since I expect uncertainty to show its face I don’t get overwhelmingly stressed out about it. When I’m not stressed out I think clearly and make better decisions.

Peter Shallard – The Shrink for Entrepreneurs

Peter Shallard: The Shrink for Entrepreneurs

My entire start in the world of online business was riddled with uncertainty.

When I started out, I was looking to transition a private therapy practice and corporate consultancy business into some kind of online model.

I wanted to create freedom in my life (working 70 hour weeks had taken it’s toll!) but had no idea how to do it.

This meant that as I developed a model for online consulting (everything from marketing it through to delivering it) I was uncertain.

About everything.

Despite having advice from some of the smartest online marketers out there.

I used the uncertainty I was feeling to fuel a new belief about myself – a new identity almost. I started telling myself that I was being a pioneer in my industry.

I framed my adventure (and all subsequent uncertainty that surrounded it) as the pioneering first steps of a therapist taking their work online.

This perspective changed everything. Suddenly, the meaning of uncertainty was transformed at a fundamental level. Instead of being a terrifying emotion to avoid, uncertainty became the needle on my compass – pointing me toward more pioneering work.

I knew that, by definition, if I was feeling uncertain about something… I probably wasn’t doing anything new.

I believe this is true for everyone. If you’re looking to follow in someone else’s footsteps, or walk a well-trodden path then uncertainty is your enemy.

If your goal is to do something totally fresh and new, then expect uncertainty.

Embrace it. Use it as a signal from your intuitive, wisest self that you’re heading in the right (exciting) direction.

Harnessing Uncertainty

If you boil down the message from our 8 web-entrepreneurs, it becomes clear.

When uncertainty creeps up take it as a sign that you are on to something extraordinary.

Sure the waters may be uncharted and failure could be a real possibility.

But if you focused only the what ifs or what could go wrong, you won’t ever reach your goal.

Each of these web-entrepreneurs learned how to use uncertainty as a tool.

A tool to do amazing things.

Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance

If you are interested in learning to harness uncertainty, you need to check out Jonathan Fields’ new book.

Uncertainty is something that we all encounter, but even if we are aware of it. We may not know how to deal with it.

To learn how to deal with Uncertainty you should buy this book and use it as your guide… use it to give clarity and focus that you’ll need to develop and grow your online business.

You won’t regret it, because once you overcome uncertainty and learn to harness it – Success is just a step away.

– –

(If you think you have uncertainty in your life make sure you check out the trailer for the book to see how Jonathan overcame uncertainty to do incredible things.)

How to Load Social Media Buttons After Pageload in Genesis

When that happens, the loop forces the social icons to load individually for each post, all the way down the page and the sidebar and anything after the content is forced to wait.

The site I was working on recently had just such a case. Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons were causing the home page to take approximately 28 seconds to load until the sidebar could appear.

How To Workaround This Page-Load Disaster In Genesis

With a little brainstorming, I came up with a solution by investigating the code for each button. In most cases the code was a pairing of visual text/CSS elements followed by a script. Here is an example using the “official” Twitter button:

<a href="http://twitter.com/jpetersen" data-button="blue" data-text-color="#222" data-link-color="#D27A26">Follow @jpetersen</a>
<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

The page doesn’t require that the script be buddies with the other part in order to render, so I posited that I could put the script at the end, just before the closing tag, which is ‘genesis_after_footer’ at the bottom of the Simple Hooks plugin.

For those not familiar with the Genesis Hooks or Child Themes take a look at How to Build a Genesis Child Theme.

I separated the scripts from the other code next, and discovered that, by doing so, I eliminated several requests to that script on the individual posts that requested the same scripts at the top and the bottom of the post as a nice side benefit.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=131237106886864&xfbml=1"></script>

This made the content in the post more efficient, especially on the sites where the client wants to list all of their Twitter IDs in the sidebar: you need only paste the display portions in the sidebar and call out the scripts once at the end of the pageload.

Pair This Code With Both The Twitter And Facebook Display Codes

<div id="social-top"><div id="twitter-top"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink() ?>"data-count="horizontal" data-via="jpetersen">Tweet</a></div><div id="facebook-top"><div id="fb-root"></div><fb:like href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" send="false" layout="button_count" width="100" show_faces="false" font=""></fb:like></div></div>

Why You Should Wrap Your Buttons in DIVs

Note that I wrap my buttons in DIVs and the entire area in a div so I can move it around any way I want. Scroll down to ‘genesis_after_post_content’ in Simple Hooks and enter the following code into the box, whilst enabling Shortcodes and PHP in the hook to place the buttons immediately before the post meta info:

[post_date] in [post_categories][post_comments]

<div id="social-top"><div id="twitter-top"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink() ?>"data-count="horizontal" data-via="jpetersen">Tweet</a></div><div id="facebook-top"><div id="fb-root"></div><fb:like href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" send="false" layout="button_count" width="100" show_faces="false" font=""></fb:like></div></div>

From there, it’s a simple effort to make the buttons appear in whatever alignment using CSS since it is well-tagged for CSS manipulation and you can change them around and also place a copy under the post title with a different appearance without sacrificing pageload times, since they all are coming from scripts in the footer.

This technique also works with the Twitter follow button because it uses the same .js file from Twitter. I was disappointed that this doesn’t work with StumbleUpon because that entire display is created with the script, however, that script loads so fast I don’t care.

It’s instantaneously there while the Twitter and Facebook buttons take an order of magnitude or more longer to display. The Google + code has recently split their render code from the script: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

If It Works, Go With It

I’m sure this isn’t the only way and I’ve got a feeling that it may not be the best way to speed up the display of these social share buttons, but it’s what I’ve come up with and it’s getting the job done very nicely on every framework I’ve used it on to date.

If you want an in-dept review of Genesis, be sure to read: Genesis Theme Framework Review: Gorgeous, Flexible, and Insanely Powerful

Influence: How To Grow Your Microbrand Online

“In reality you need to worry about two things when you are building
a microbrand online. The first is converting first-time visitors
into repeat visitors. The second is finding more first-time visitors.”

That’s a quote from “How to Turn Traffic & Trust into Sales” by Nick Reese.

When you think about it… this boils down to the problem that all bloggers have had.

Regardless if you are selling a physical product, service or just have a point of view that you want to share with the world.

Think about it… even if you aren’t selling something. It feels great when
you make an honest connection with someone.

And it doesn’t matter that it’s a digital connection… you can still build
trust with someone who you have never met face to face.

In fact, I’ll say that building your online brand is much more important than
pure traffic numbers.

I would rather have a community of 1,000 loyal and strong supporters. Than 10,000
unengaged visitors.

How Do You Build This Loyal Community

If you want online influence, you are going to have to do something pretty
awesome… especially in today’s digital world. Everyone has a platform and they
sure aren’t shy of what they are putting out.

To be kind… most of it is just noise.

However, when you talk about something awesome, are passionate about it, and
start solving real problems. You’ll start attracting attention.

Do that long enough.. and your microbrand will see exponential growth.

The Snowball Effect

Just like a snowball, rolling down a snowy hillside. It took some momentum to
get the snowball started… but once it gets going, it just grows and grows.

The same thing happens online. Your actions just keeps feeding it’s self…
you’ll notice that a passionate few will start to share your content… your
organic search traffic will steadily increase.

And it all started because you were able to build that loyal community.

Your microbrand in a sense will become rock solid and pretty much unpiratedable
(is this even a word?!)

Transparency + Influence + Reach = A Growing Loyal Audience

Yeah someone can come along and steal some of your posts… but if you’ve done
your homework, your audience is just going to point it out to everyone. Also,
when “you” become the brand… it’s hard for someone to steal your personality.

Again once you’ve build this trust… you’ll be able to leverage your microbrands
reputation to grow your loyal following and convert fist time visitors into repeat
customers.

Be Sure To:

• Write Guest Post
• Become An Expert That Traditional Media Reaches Out To
• Play An Active Role On Forums
• Be Willing To Admit When Your Wrong, Publicly

Again, in a digital world. It’s easy to get lost among the crowd… but if you
actively work on becoming remarkable, solving problems, or looking at things
with a different point of view… long enough.

You’ll start to breakaway from the crowd… your products, services or point of
view will start growing a following, and if you do it right, and if you decide to
become transparent… you’ll become the brand!

P.S.

I want to end this post with an invitation to get a FREE chapter from “Traffic & Trust”.

It’s actually an in-dept step-by-step lesson on Mutual Value. If you are looking
for a way to monetize your blog or are looking to become successful with affiliate
marketing, then you should head over to TrafficAndTrust.com for this lesson.

P.P.S

Also use the comment section to continue our discussion… I’m really interested in
your experiences and thoughts on building your microbrand.

Building a Genesis Child Theme

If you’d like to customize an existing WordPress theme, especially a theme framework like Genesis, the recommended approach is to use a child theme. A child theme is a separate theme that stores all of your specific customizations. That way if the parent theme is ever updated, you don’t lose all your hard work.

There’s two more benefits to child themes. First, you have a theme that only has your specific customizations in it. It makes it really easy to see what you did on a project, and to figure out what’s going wrong. You don’t have to dig through (and figure out) a ton of code that you didn’t write just to find out what’s going wrong.

Second, if you’re always using the same parent theme like I do, all the code you develop for one project is reusable on all future projects. Of course this depends on you using a parent theme that is designed to be customized through a child theme. This means it makes extensive of actions and filters, which are two types of hooks.

Hooks: What Are They, Why You Need Them

A hook is a tool that allows you to “hook into” the theme at a certain place. An action simply allows you to execute code at a certain place. A filter let’s you modify information that’s being used by the theme. Here’s two examples (these are in WordPress, so they work regardless of the theme you use):

wp_footer is an action that allows you to execute code at the bottom of your page. For example, if you wanted to add Google Analytics code to the bottom of every page, you’d put this in your functions.php file:

function be_google_analytics() {
   google analytics code goes here
}

add_action( 'wp_footer', 'be_google_analytics' );

excerpt_length is a filter that let’s you modify how much text is displayed when you use the_excerpt() in your theme. By default it returns 55 words. If you wanted to change that to 35 words, you would put this in your functions.php file:

function be_excerpt_length( $length ) {
   $length = '35';
   return $length;
}

add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'be_excerpt_length' );

So as you see, hooks and filters allow you to modify things without editing existing code. You can do it from the safety of your own theme, where you don’t have to worry about your changes being lost on upgrade.

Genesis: The Only WordPress Theme Framework I Need

Here’s a few reasons why I prefer Genesis over all other themes:

• Hooks for everything. Anything that you’d want to be customized, can be customized. I’ve yet to find something I need to edit that can’t be done easily with an action or filter.
• Develop with code, not options. While Genesis does have a Theme Settings page, the vast majority of your development will happen with code. This means I don’t have to worry that the client will flip a switch and break the site.
• Understandable file structure. Want to figure out how to customize something in the header? Hop in genesis/lib/structure/header.php. Customizing the menu class? Look at genesis/lib/classes/menu.php. It’s easy to explore Genesis core to find all the hooks and filters you need.
• The Community. There’s a ton of other great Genesis developers that are sharing code and expertise. StudioPress listens to their users and adds the features they request. I’ve even submitted a few patches for Genesis which have made it in.
• Business. By building sites with Genesis, my projects are featured on StudioPress.com, which drives me even more traffic and business. Almost all of my work comes from StudioPress.com leads.

There’s one more thing I want to cover, and that’s where to place your code. Anything that is related to the look and feel of the site belongs in the theme. Anything that is core functionality belongs in a plugin. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if your user decides to change themes, any functionality he expects to bring over to his next theme should be in a plugin.

It’s also a good idea to turn things you use often or that the client might want to selectively turn off into plugins. And if there’s a piece of functionality you don’t want them turning off, you can put it in the mu-plugins directory, which stands for Must Use and are always activated.

Start Building Your First Child Theme

Here’s my typical workflow for building a child theme:

1. Create a subdirectory on my site for this project
2. Install WordPress and Genesis
3. Build all the site’s functionality into a child theme
4. Use CSS to make the outputted markup match the provided design
5. Send it to the client for review

This tutorial is going to focus solely on creating the child theme’s functionality. I am going to use a recent project I worked on for Civic Squared, which is a creative web agency that specializes in designing and maintaining municipal websites in Canada. The project was for the Village of Barnwell. Here is what the provided PSD looks like:

And what we’re starting with:

I’m assuming you’re using Genesis. You can build child themes with any theme, but Genesis is what I use and what this tutorial is written for. We’re also starting with a blank child theme. Once you’ve built a few you’ll see there’s code you use all the time and you’ll probably develop a base child theme to build from. Here’s mine.

How To Create the Child Theme

Go into /wp-content/themes and create a directory. I’m going to call mine “barnwell”. The only two files you need for your child theme are style.css and functions.php. You could write a completely new stylesheet for your site, but I like to modify the default Genesis one so that I don’t forget anything (taxonomy titles, breadcrumbs…).

Go to /wp-content/themes/genesis/style.css and copy it to /wp-content/themes/barnwell/style.css. Do not use @import in your CSS file to pull the parent theme’s, because when the parent theme makes changes to the stylesheet it will adversely affect your layout.

At the top of the stylesheet, change the information to describe your theme. Make sure you include Template: genesis, as that is what makes this a child theme and not a standard theme. Here’s mine

/*
	Theme Name: Barnwell
	Description: Child theme of Genesis, by StudioPress.
	Author: Bill Erickson
	Author URI: http://www.billerickson.net

	Template: genesis
*/

/* Stylesheet from Genesis 1.7.1 */

This is all we’re going to do with the CSS file, so let’s move to functions.php

There’s a few ways you can structure this file. The important thing is to load Genesis core files before your customizations, because you won’t be able to customize Genesis until it has loaded. If you look at the child themes sold by StudioPress, they all do this by adding the following at the top of functions.php:

/** Start the engine */
require_once( TEMPLATEPATH . '/lib/init.php' );

While this works, I prefer to create a child theme setup function into which I attach my functions to the appropriate actions and filters. I then list my functions below this.

Here’s what I place at the top of my functions.php file:

<?php
/**
 * Functions
 *
 * @package      Barnwell
 * @author       Bill Erickson <bill@billerickson.net>
 * @copyright    Copyright (c) 2011, Bill Erickson
 * @license      http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php GNU Public License
 *
 */

/**
 * Theme Setup
 *
 * This setup function attaches all of the site-wide functions
 * to the correct actions and filters. All the functions themselves
 * are defined below this setup function.
 *
 */

add_action('genesis_setup','child_theme_setup', 15);
function child_theme_setup() {

}

I also like to create a thumbnail for this theme, to make it easy to identify in the theme listing. Simply make an image thats 300×225, name it screenshot.jpg, and upload it into the /themes/barnwell directory.

Now go to Appearance > Themes and activate your child theme. You’ve now created a child theme!

Customizing the Child Theme To Your Liking

You’ve activated your child theme, but nothing has changed. It’s time to add code to it. I’m not going to cover everything I did on this theme, but I will cover most of the changes on the homepage. Here’s what we’ll do:

• Update Theme Settings
• Build the menu
• Setup homepage content area
• Setup footer area (search, footer widgets, actual footer)

Some things not included in this tutorial:

• Rotator – built as a plugin
• Events Manager – built as a plugin
• Business Listings – built as a plugin
• Shortcodes – built as a plugin in mu-plugins directory

Update Theme Settings

Genesis allows you to control many features of the site from the WordPress backend, without touching any code. We’ll need to make all the changes we can in the backend before we start coding. Go to Genesis > Theme Settings.

First go to Header Settings and select “Image Logo”. This adds a body class of header-image, which is used in the CSS to replace the site title and description with an image. Since we haven’t uploaded a logo yet, it will look like the title and description disappeared.

Then go to Navigation Settings and uncheck “Primary Navigation”. We’ll be building our own special navigation in the next section.

Here’s how the site should look now:

Build the menu

If you look closely at the screenshot on the first page, you’ll notice the header has the logo on the left, then the primary menu, then a secondary menu on the right. I went to Appearance > Menus and created two menus (Primary and Secondary), then populated them with the correct links. I will now create a function that sticks these menus inside the header.

This is functions.php (without all the comments at the top):

add_action('genesis_setup','child_theme_setup', 15);
function child_theme_setup() {

	// Add Nav to Header
	add_action( 'genesis_header', 'be_nav_menus' );

}

/**
 * Add Nav Menus to Header
 *
 */

function be_nav_menus() {
	echo '<div class="menus"><div class="primary">';
	wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => 'Primary' ) );
	echo '</div><!-- .primary --><div class="secondary">';
	wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => 'Secondary' ) );
	echo '</div><!-- .secondary --></div><!-- .menus -->';

}

The site should now look like this. We’ll differentiate the menus using CSS (not part of tutorial).

Before we end this section, there’s one more thing I’d like to do. Since we’re using our own menu, not the Genesis ones, I will remove the metabox on the Theme Settings page so the end user doesn’t accidentally turn one of those menus on. Here’s the updated functions.php:

add_action('genesis_setup','child_theme_setup', 15);
function child_theme_setup() {

	// ** Backend **

	// Remove Metaboxes
	add_action( 'genesis_theme_settings_metaboxes', 'be_remove_metaboxes' );

	// ** Frontend **

	// Add Nav to Header
	add_action( 'genesis_header', 'be_nav_menus' );

}

/**
 * Remove Metaboxes
 * This removes unused or unneeded metaboxes from Genesis > Theme Settings. See /genesis/lib/admin/theme-settings.php for all metaboxes.
 *
 */

function be_remove_metaboxes( $_genesis_theme_settings_pagehook ) {
	remove_meta_box( 'genesis-theme-settings-nav', $_genesis_theme_settings_pagehook, 'main' );
}

/**
 * Add Nav Menus to Header
 *
 */

function be_nav_menus() {
	echo '<div class="menus"><div class="primary">';
	wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => 'Primary' ) );
	echo '</div><!-- .primary --><div class="secondary">';
	wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => 'Secondary' ) );
	echo '</div><!-- .secondary --></div><!-- .menus -->';

}

Setup the homepage content area

Since the homepage is static, not a listing of posts, the first thing I do is create a page called Home, then go to Settings > Reading and set the homepage to “Home”.

For all the homepage-specific code, I’m putting that in the file front-page.php. So the first thing I’ll do is create front-page.php:

<?php
/**
 * Front Page
 *
 * @package      Barnwell
 * @author       Bill Erickson <bill@billerickson.net>
 * @copyright    Copyright (c) 2011, Bill Erickson
 * @license      http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php GNU Public License
 *
 */

genesis();
?>

Think of this file as a functions.php that only applies to the front page. All our customizations must go before genesis().

Next I’ll force the page layout to be full width, remove the page title, and add the rotator (building this could have been a whole tutorial on its own so I’m leaving it out):

// Force full width
add_filter( 'genesis_pre_get_option_site_layout', '__genesis_return_full_width_content' );

// Remove Page Title
remove_action( 'genesis_post_title', 'genesis_do_post_title' );

// Add Rotator
add_action( 'genesis_after_header', 'be_home_rotator' );

/**
 * Rotator
 *
 */

function be_home_rotator() {
	do_action( 'home_rotator' );
}

Now I’ll build the content area. First I remove the default loop, genesis_do_loop(), and replace it with my own, be_home_loop(). Inside my loop I have three div’s, #content-left, #content-middle, #content-right. In the left one I’m outputting the page content (the client can edit this from Pages > Home). In the middle I’m displaying the most recent posts. In the right div I’m displaying a sidebar the client can edit (Home Sidebar), then listing the upcoming events and links.

I’m not going to go into more detail on the actual code since this is more of a process tutorial. It is more important that you see how to create a custom home content area than understanding the specifics like my upcoming events query.

Here’s the total front-page.php:

<?php
/**
 * Front Page
 *
 * @package      Barnwell
 * @author       Bill Erickson <bill@billerickson.net>
 * @copyright    Copyright (c) 2011, Bill Erickson
 * @license      http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php GNU Public License
 *
 */

// Force full width
add_filter( 'genesis_pre_get_option_site_layout', '__genesis_return_full_width_content' );

// Remove Page Title
remove_action( 'genesis_post_title', 'genesis_do_post_title' );

// Add Rotator
add_action( 'genesis_after_header', 'be_home_rotator' );

/**
 * Rotator
 *
 */

function be_home_rotator() {
	do_action( 'home_rotator' );
}

// Content Area
remove_action( 'genesis_loop', 'genesis_do_loop' );
add_action( 'genesis_loop', 'be_home_loop' );

/**
 * Home Content Area
 *
 */

function be_home_loop() {
	echo '<div class="content-left">';
		while( have_posts() ): the_post();
			the_content();
		endwhile;
	echo '</div><!-- .content-left -->';

	echo '<div class="content-middle">';
		echo '<h3>Latest News</h3>';
		$news = new WP_Query('posts_per_page=3');
		while ($news->have_posts()): $news->the_post(); global $post;
			echo '<div class="news-item">';
			echo '<div class="thumbnail"><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, 'thumbnail' ) . '</a></div>';
			echo '<div class="content"><span class="date">' . get_the_date() . '</span><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . get_the_title() . '</a></div><!-- .content -->';
			echo '</div><!-- .news-item -->';
		endwhile; wp_reset_query();
	echo '</div><!-- .content-middle -->';

	echo '<div class="content-right">';
	dynamic_sidebar( 'home-sidebar' );
	?>

	<div class="events-links-entry">
		<div class="entry-header">
			<p class="col-1">Events</p>
			<p class="col-2">Popular Links</p>
		</div><!-- /entry-header -->
		<div class="entry-content">
				<?php
				$args = array(
					'post_type' => 'event',
					'posts_per_page' => '5',
					'orderby' => 'ASC',
					'order' => 'meta_value_num',
					'meta_query' => array(
						array(
							'key' => 'be_events_manager_end_date',
							'value' => time(),
							'compare' => '>'
						)
					)
				);
				$events = new WP_Query( $args );
				if( $events->have_posts() ):
					echo '<ul class="col-1">';
					while ( $events->have_posts() ): $events->the_post();
						echo '<li><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . get_the_title() . '</a></li>';
					endwhile; wp_reset_query();
					echo '</ul>';
				endif;
				?>
			<ul class="col-2">
				<?php
				$args = array(
					'limit' => -1,
					'title_li' => '',
					'category' => 2,
					'categorize' => 0
				);
				wp_list_bookmarks( $args ); ?>
			</ul>
			<div class="cl">&nbsp;</div>
		</div><!-- /entry-content -->
	</div><!-- /events-links -->
	</div><!-- .content-right -->
	<?php
}

genesis();
?>

And I also had to modify the child_theme_setup() function in functions.php to register the new sidebar.

add_action('genesis_setup','child_theme_setup', 15);
function child_theme_setup() {

	// ** Backend **

	// Remove Metaboxes
	add_action( 'genesis_theme_settings_metaboxes', 'be_remove_metaboxes' );

	// Add Home Sidebar
	genesis_register_sidebar( array( 'name' => 'Home Sidebar', 'id' => 'home-sidebar' ) );

	// ** Frontend **

	// Add Nav to Header
	add_action( 'genesis_header', 'be_nav_menus' );

}

Here’s what the site looks like after adding content to the page “Home”, adding a few events (using this plugin), and adding a widget to the home sidebar.

Set up footer

Finally, the last section of customization. Since the footer is site-wide, we’ll be making these customizations in functions.php. The footer area consists of 3 sections: Search, Footer Widgets and Footer.

To add search, put this at the bottom of functions.php:

/**
 * Add Search to Footer
 *
 */

function be_search() {
	?>
	<div id="searchbar">
		<div class="wrap">
			<p>Can't find what you're looking for? </p> <?php get_search_form(); ?>
		</div>
	</div>
	<?php
}

Next we’ll add this to the child_theme_setup() function to tell WordPress where to put that search function:

	// Add Search to Footer
	add_action( 'genesis_before_footer', 'be_search', 4 );

That works great, except the search text says “Search this website…” and the button says “Search”. In the design the search text is empty and the button is “Go”. Luckily Genesis provides us filters for these. We’ll use the handy __return_false() function from WordPress on the search text, and create a function of our own for the button.

At the bottom of functions.php place this:

/**
 * Change search button text to Go
 *
 */

function be_search_button_text( $text ) {
	return esc_attr( 'Go' );
}

And modify the Add Search to Footer section of child_theme_setup() to this:

	// Add Search to Footer
	add_action( 'genesis_before_footer', 'be_search', 4 );
	add_filter( 'genesis_search_text', '__return_false' );
	add_filter( 'genesis_search_button_text', 'be_search_button_text' );

Now let’s add the footer widgets. This is a built-in feature of Genesis, so it only takes one line of code in child_theme_setup():

	add_theme_support( 'genesis-footer-widgets', 6 ); 

You will now have 6 new widget areas accessible in Appearance > Widgets. I’m going to leave them empty for now so there’s not a bunch of text in the screenshots. If you dig into Genesis core, you’ll see it adds the footer widgets to genesis_before_footer. The default priority is 10 when attaching to an action or filter. To ensure the search shows up before the footer widgets I set the priority of the search to 4 (see the code above).

Finally I’m going to remove the default Genesis footer and replace it with my own. Place this at the bottom of functions.php:

/**
 * Footer
 *
 */

function be_footer() {
	echo '<div class="left"><p>&copy; Copyright ' . date('Y') . ' : All Rights Reserved</p></div>';
	echo '<div class="right">';
	wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => 'Footer' ) );
	echo '</div>';
}

And this in your child_theme_setup() function:

	// Footer
	remove_action( 'genesis_footer', 'genesis_do_footer' );
	add_action( 'genesis_footer', 'be_footer' );

I’m using a custom menu on the right side of the footer, so go to Appearance > Menus and create a menu called Footer.

So now this is what the site looks like.

It doesn’t look like much, but with a little CSS tweaking you can make it look like this:

And here’s the functions.php file:

 * @copyright    Copyright (c) 2011, Bill Erickson
 * @license      http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php GNU Public License
 *
 */

/**
 * Theme Setup
 *
 * This setup function attaches all of the site-wide functions
 * to the correct actions and filters. All the functions themselves
 * are defined below this setup function.
 *
 */

add_action('genesis_setup','child_theme_setup', 15);
function child_theme_setup() {

	// ** Backend **

	// Remove Metaboxes
	add_action( 'genesis_theme_settings_metaboxes', 'be_remove_metaboxes' );

	// Add Home Sidebar
	genesis_register_sidebar( array( 'name' => 'Home Sidebar', 'id' => 'home-sidebar' ) );

	// Add Footer Widgets
	add_theme_support( 'genesis-footer-widgets', 6 );

	// ** Frontend **

	// Add Nav to Header
	add_action( 'genesis_header', 'be_nav_menus' );

	// Add Search to Footer
	add_action( 'genesis_before_footer', 'be_search', 4 );
	add_filter( 'genesis_search_text', '__return_false' );
	add_filter( 'genesis_search_button_text', 'be_search_button_text' );

	// Footer
	remove_action( 'genesis_footer', 'genesis_do_footer' );
	add_action( 'genesis_footer', 'be_footer' );
}

/**
 * Remove Metaboxes
 * This removes unused or unneeded metaboxes from Genesis > Theme Settings. See /genesis/lib/admin/theme-settings.php for all metaboxes.
 *
 */

function be_remove_metaboxes( $_genesis_theme_settings_pagehook ) {
	remove_meta_box( 'genesis-theme-settings-nav', $_genesis_theme_settings_pagehook, 'main' );
}

/**
 * Add Nav Menus to Header
 *
 */

function be_nav_menus() {
	echo '

';
	wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => 'Primary' ) );
	echo '


';
	wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => 'Secondary' ) );
	echo '



';

}

/**
 * Add Search to Footer
 *
 */

function be_search() {
	?>
	<div id="searchbar">
		<div class="wrap">
			<p>Can't find what you're looking for? </p> <?php get_search_form(); ?>
		</div>
	</div>
	<?php
}

/**
 * Change search button text to Go
 *
 */

function be_search_button_text( $text ) {
	return esc_attr( 'Go' );
}

/**
 * Footer
 *
 */

function be_footer() {
	echo '<div class="left"><p>&copy; Copyright ' . date('Y') . ' : All Rights Reserved</p></div>';
	echo '<div class="right">';
	wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => 'Footer' ) );
	echo '</div>';
}

Pippity WordPress Sign-Up Form Plugin

Ok, so we all know that building your email list is one of the most important things that you should be doing as a marketer.

But you know as much as I do… That’s hard!

Especially with new visitors…

It’s happened to me… I stumble onto a site that I find amazing, read a few post, then move on because I was distracted by something else, or had a call to make or meetup with someone.

In the mean time, I’ve completely forgotten the name of the site that I had been on, and a few days later I’m going crazy looking for that post on Google.

Sometimes… I’ll find it… other times… it’s just gone. Forever!

I know that this is happening to my site…. because it happens to every site.

So when I heard that pop-ups are still converting casual readers into subscribers, I just had to
tried out a few of them. It worked… amazingly!

I had over a 10x jump in my sign-up form!

One thing that I hated, was the look of these pop-up forms. It made me feel like I have a yellow
highlighter long form sales letter. I felt like the average first time visitor… wasn’t going to trust me
with their email. Eventually, I got past that… but it was always in the back of my mind.

Another problem that these pop-up forms had, was the lack of data. I’m a big data person, so it
was killing me that I couldn’t get any analytical information. I know that if I can measure it…

I can improve it.

But none of the pop-up from had any analytical information. I was pretty much just working in
the dark… but I knew they where working… why stress about something that I couldn’t fix… right?

Well… over a year later is when I first heard of Pippity.

Pippity: No Yellow Highlighters Here

When I first saw the pop-ups, my jaw dropped. They looked amazing. I couldn’t believe that
this was a WordPress Plugin. I really thought that someone had hired a programer to built this.

With Pippity Analytics A/B Testing Is Easy

Then I found out that you could do A/B testing… at that point I was completely sold. Already knowing that the smallest changes can make the biggest differences. So I was ready to jump right in.

The personal license seemed good to me, especially to test it. It was only $49 for 1 year and had unlimited support and updates.

Installation was a snap.

I just had to upload the zip file via WordPress, and click install.

Here’s where things got interesting. Pippity was filled with so many options… it did seem
overwhelming at first.

That was just an illusion… I just went down and picked a theme, filled out my pop-up copy
and then just pasted in my Aweber sign-up form.

Customizing Pippity Is Fast & Simple With It's Powerful Backend

It took me less than 4 minutes to make my first pop-up.

Here’s what I really loved… when I was finished with my first pop-up, I had the option of cloning it. So I did.

Then I tweak my copy, and used a different theme.

I was so ready to finally do my A/B testing!

The next day I saw that my first pop-up was doing better than the second one. So I made the second pop-up exactly as the first… but I changed it to pop-up when a reader would get to the very end of an article.

Data Hounds Rejoice

A few days later… now the second pop-up is converting better.

I couldn’t believe it…

This is everything that I wanted. I really feel like the Pippity team did their homework… and the
crazy thing is that Pippity is new! Just imagine how much better it’s going to get.

Knowing that, I knew that I was a convert. I upgraded to the unlimited license.

Final Conclusion: Is Pippity Worth My Money

When I first saw that the unlimited website one year license was $164 I did think that it was a
little steep. However, after my first week of using Pippity… it seems like a bargain. At the end of
the day, I know that my most effective way to communicate with my audience has always been email.

Knowing that I can now effectively build my list up, on all my websites is priceless to me. I had
already been doing a good job of it… I just knew that I could have been doing a better job.

Pippity proved it to me.

P.S.

If you are serious about building your opt-in list… then don’t think about it. Go ahead and grab
your self a copy of Pippity. It’s becoming my favorite WordPress Plugin… and if you are going
to use your opt-ins for email marketing then use AWeber.

Because it’s agains the MailChimp Terms of Service to email any affiliate links. They’ll terminate
your account… and block you from even getting your list.

Read more about it here:

MailChimp… Not For Affiliate Marketers

MailChimp Terms of Use, Prohibited Industries

Art of Blog has been a MailChimp supporter for sometime now.

Checkout our MailChimp Review: Easy Email Marketing

MailChimp is an excellent platform to manage your Newsletters. In fact some of the largest online brands use and trust MailChimp everyday.

But a serious problem comes up if you are an affiliate marketer who uses MailChimp.

For starters, affiliate marketers are BANNED by MailChimp!

MailChimp Bans Users Who Promote Affiliate Links

Checkout out “Section F” under their Terms of Use.

You’ll see Affiliate Marketers, right in between MLM and Credit Repair. On a list
that also includes Escorts, Illegal Goods and Gambling as services and industries
that are barred from using MailChimp.

Probably not the best company for Affiliate Marketing to be associated with.

Okay, so a good majority of those industries are understandable… but what does that
mean for someone who has a MailChimp account and includes affiliate links without
realizing that they are violating these terms.

Users May Be Confused And Not Realize That They Are In Violation

MailChimp Barring Account Access

Especially after seeing some of the MailChimp themes, like the Amazon and Coupon.

In fact if you read the very next section on the MailChimp Terms of Use they even joke that if you read that far into the terms… you are probably associated with an industry that is frequently associated with spam.

MailChimp says that they’ll cancel your account and block you from your own list… if you are
caught in violation.

That’s all I needed to hear!

Imagine working hard building your list, then finding out one day that it’s all gone.

MailChimp is taking a very serious stance against term violators. They have a team made-up of
MailChimp employees and independent contracted workers using internal technology to review the
content of emails being sent out.

I don’t know about you… but that looks pretty serious to me.

Conclusion

MailChimp is a great service… but they are positioning themselves as a pure newsletter service.

I think that they do a brilliant job at that, they make it very easy for anyone to jump right in and
create a very eye-catching newsletter. They have all the analytics tools that you would expect, and
I really love their ebooks.

They just aren’t a service that affiliate marketers should be using… again not because they are bad.

They are just looking to work with a different type of customer.

If you are planning to do affiliate marketing, my best recommendation is using AWeber. You can
read my review:  AWeber: The Best Email Management System? and decide if AWeber makes sense
for your business.

To be totally fair, I haven’t heard of many MailChimp users being banned… but I just don’t like the
idea of my business being in jeopardy so easily, basically loosing all of your subscribers in an instant.

Not my kind of odds.

What do you think? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments section. I’m really interested
in what everyone has to say.