First off, I highly recommend managed WordPress hosting for any WordPress website out there that is beginning to have issues with speed, security, scalability, or downtime. That being said, the three tops dogs in the managed WordPress hosting arena are WP Engine, Synthesis, and Page.ly. This review will cover just Synthesis, but if you would like to see our review on all three, please visit our Managed WordPress hosting review.

The Good

Right off the bat, I’ve got to mention that Synthesis is run by Copyblogger Media, LLC. The same people that are behind Studiopress, Scribe SEO, the Genesis Framework, and much more. Copyblogger Media and Brian Gardner are some big names in the WordPress community, so you can be assured that this is going to be an amazing product.

Synthesis Screen Shot

Synthesis definitely delivers on the increased performance. Just by switching to Synthesis, we were able to notice a significant decrease in load times on our website.

When I began to dig deeper, it was nice to see that Synthesis is making use of nginx, PHP-FPM, APC, and they have a maximum of 12 websites on their shared stacks, which is all amazing!  With shared hosting you can expect one server to host 100′s of websites. It’s nice to see Synthesis caps this at 12.

Synthesis also has great security. Because Synthesis only host WordPress, they can fine tune their servers to the needs of WordPress. Synthesis also had external security audits and a slew of other safety features.

To give you an idea of how fast Synthesis is, you can visit our managed WordPress hosting speed test case study article, or check out the speed test screenshot below.

Synthesis Speed Results

As you can see, our test website loaded in 1.701 seconds, which was just slightly slower than Page.ly and WP Engine. Also, Synthesis did a great job of caching static content which would help repeat views appear super snappy, which should increase customer happiness.

Synthesis was also very easy to get running and Cody gave me some amazing support when I made a mistake with using the wrong domain name. DOH!

It Could Be Better

Synthesis is great, and I really love that it is backed by Brian Gardner and Copyblogger Media. Ideally, I would like to see more of a guarantee on security. Yes, it’s nice to hear about how secure your hosting is, but what’s going to happen if your website happens to get hacked even after all of the security? I would like to see Synthesis bring some kind of  guarantee about protecting websites from hackers. WP Engine guarantees that they will unhack your website for free if it is ever hacked. Maybe Synthesis can do something similar?

I would also like to see a few more pricing plans. As the plans are now, the lowest plan is $27 per month, and it comes with 2,500 daily unique visitors, which I think is pretty good. The next level up is 20,000 daily unique visitors at $97 per month. That’s pretty steep in my opinion. I would like to see a price plan between $50-70.

The Bottom Line

Synthesis managed WordPress hosting is definitely a great way to go for your WordPress hosting. You’ll get great performance at prices cheaper than WP Engine or Page.ly. Synthesis is also backed by Brian Gardner and Copyblogger media, so you know you’re getting a solid product. If you are having any issues with your current host, I highly recommend at least giving synthesis a look.

Page.ly is a managed WordPress host that first began in 2006, but relaunched in 2009. As a managed WordPress hosting solution, Page.ly is definitely a much better provider than shared hosting. What follows is my recommendation based on general information and my experience with Page.ly during the managed WordPress hosting speed test case study.

What Page.ly Does Well

As I said above, if you have having issues with your host being slow or your host not being able to keep up… Then Page.ly is a great solution. With Page.ly you can expect automatic core updates, increased security, amazing speed, and better than average customer support. Page.ly also does automatic backups which can be a lifesaver if your site gets hacked, or you accidentally nuke your website. I’ve done that before…

Page.ly Screenshot

Page.ly also has the advantage of having several top-notch clients such as Vonage, Texas A&M, New Relic, and others. Page.ly is definitely doing something right. We can back this up as our websites also saw speed increase to about 4 seconds per page load on average and did not have any security issues.

Page.ly also backed up their service with super quick customer support. I usually received responses to my support requests within about 20-30 minutes, which is perfectly fine with me. Although, one time they did seem to get a bit short with me.

Where Page.ly Falls Short

Page.ly Not Hacker Proof

I have to agree that Page.ly has great security. They run their infrastructure on Firehost, which is arguably the best when it comes to secure cloud hosting.

That being said, I would like to see Page.ly offer some sort of guarantee about the security of their website. This could be something similar to WP Engine’s guarantee that they will un-hack your website for free, or it could simply be a slight discount when there is downtime.

Joshua Strebel has already responding to this suggestion on managed WordPress hosting compared.

One other thing that truly irritated me was that I had to pay $5 to get FTP access. Why would I want to pay $5 extra for FTP when I’m already paying for top of the line hosting? When I asked Page.ly on twitter why they do this, they responded with “to save inexperienced users from themselves.” This irks me, and is one of the reasons that I would not personally recommend Page.ly as a managed WordPress host.

Bottom Line

Page.ly is a good choice for a web host, especially if you are currently on a shared host and having issues. You will definitely notice your website is faster and better customer support than most hosts. I would like to see them add some kind of security guarantee and change the $5 FTP fee. If those are minor inconveniences for you, then go ahead and give Page.ly a try.

If you are looking for the best in hosting though, we recommend going with WP Engine. WP Engine is also giving all Art of Blog readers 3 months free. Use coupon code ARTOFBLOG to get that special offer.

One of the benefits of going with managed WordPress hosting is that it’s supposed to be fast. To put that in perspective, a testimonial on Synthesis’ website from GeekBeat.tv says, “the site’s load time was reduced from 7.5 seconds to 1.4 seconds.” Holy batman!

Now, we can all agree that having a fast website is important. Not only do slow websites drive away visitors and sales, but Google is now including page speed in it’s ranking algorithm!

With your website’s speed being this important, we wanted to objectively compare our top 3 managed WordPress hosts: WP Engine, Page.ly, and Synthesis. To compare three different hosts though, we needed to set some basic ground rules to be used during the speed test.

The Ground Rules

Art of Blog Speed Comparison Screen Shot

All speed tests were done using the same theme, TwentyEleven, with the same content that consisted of a gallery of several images and an embedded Gist from Github.

I used the base configuration for each host. For Page.ly and Synthesis I did use the W3 Total Cache plugin and I even used Synthesis’ recommended configurations for Total Cache. I did not use a caching plugin for WP Engine because they handle all of this behind the scenes.

All speed tests were done using Web Page Test‘s analytical review tool using a server out of Dulles, Va and IE8. I also ran each test twice and took the lowest (fastest) first view time for each web host.

And all speed tests were done with the cheapest hosting level for each managed WordPress host. Therefore, you can expect even better performance if you’re willing to shell out some more cash. WP Engine offers an integrated CDN starting at the professional plan and Synthesis also runs NGINX-only servers on their advanced or enterprise configurations.

Winner – WP Engine

As you’ll see in this screenshot below, WP Engine is stupid fast. Yes, stupid fast is the word for it.

1st Place Speed Results - WP Engine

WP Engine does a few things really well. First, they have amazing customer service. Second, all of WP Engine’s optimization and caching happens on the backend, so it’s basically like magic. WP Engine will automatically compress content, minify CSS and JS, compress images, and much more. There’s no plugin or setting to configure. You just worry about writing great content, and WP Engine takes care of everything else. I love this.

WP Engine also does a great job in caching static content. This is very important when you have visitors that view more than one page on your website. Our WP Engine test site had 13 requests for the first view and only 2 for the repeat view! This makes your website super quick for your visitors, which keeps them happy and on your website longer ;)

Due to it’s speed, great customer service, and other great features I recommend WP Engine for everybody. It is a bit more expensive, but as you can see, WP Engine packs a punch and it’s worth every penny.

2nd Place Tied – Synthesis

Although WP Engine was first, Synthesis and Page.ly weren’t that far behind. Although Page.ly was slightly quicker than Synthesis, Synthesis did a much better job of caching content. Therefore, Page.ly would be slightly faster on the first view, and Synthesis should be faster on repeat views. You can make the ultimate decision as to who won.

Synthesis Speed Results

Up until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t even heard of Synthesis (Even though they’re owned by Copyblogger Media…). But here these guys are duking it out and doing a great job. As you can see Synthesis had some pretty amazing speed on our test site. They also did amazing when it came to the repeat view. Our Synthesis tests had 13 requests on the first view and only 4 on the repeat view. That’s slightly more than WP Engine, but that’s still great. This will keep your website loading super fast for your visitors.

Synthesis also had great customer service. When I signed up, I put in the wrong URL and was having some problems. DOH! But I submitted a customer support request and Cody hooked it up and had me going quickly!

Also, even though Synthesis uses the W3 Total Cache plugin, they make it stupid simple to get the plugin working by giving you a file with their recommended settings. This means no guesswork for you and great performance! That’s a win in my book.

I would recommend Synthesis for anybody looking for managed WordPress hosting at a great price. They don’t quite have all of the features as WP Engine, but they’ve still got a great service and a terrific price.

2nd Place Tied – Page.ly

Below are the original results for Page.ly, and the most recent with a live domain are below. I want to maintain some transparency.

Page.ly Speed Results

Another thing I noticed is Page.ly didn’t do a good job of caching static content. Our test website had 13 requests for the first view and had 12 requests for the repeat view. Page.ly did do well with everything else though as far as compressing text, images, and generally serving up our website pretty dang fast!

Also, Page.ly had great customer support. I had an issue with permissions where I wasn’t able to delete or change files on my account through SFTP. After submitting a support request they had this fixed within maybe 15 minutes. This was probably just because I was using my account right after it had been provisioned, so no worries on the service.

**Per Page.ly’s Request I did a retest with a live domain and the results are below.

Page.ly Speed Results Retest

Commentary

As the screenshots show, WP Engine was clearly the fastest managed WordPress host, but Synthesis and Page.ly are not too far behind.

The big difference to me is that WP Engine completely takes care of the caching and other aspects of performance behind the scenes. Page.ly and Synthesis both take advantage of the W3 Total Cache plugin where the only thing WP Engine gives you is a clear cache button. I like this approach because that way I don’t have to worry about if I have all of the settings correct. So big props to WP Engine for taking care of that automatically and still being the fastest.

The results also show that Synthesis and WP Engine both did a good job of caching static content. You can see this for yourself if you look at the difference in requests between the first view and repeat view. Page.ly had 13 requests for the first view and 12 requests for the repeat view. Synthesis had 13 requests for the first view and 4 requests on the repeat view, which is pretty good. WP Engine had 13 requests for the first view and 2 requests for the repeat view! This is an important metric that can help describe the page speed as the visitor navigates through your page.

I’d like to repeat that throughout this managed WordPress hosting speed test case study, that I received excellent customer service from all three hosts. I talked with WP Engine through twitter and Page.ly and Synthesis responded to my support requests within 30 minutes! Not too shabby ;)

Bottom Line

All of the managed WordPress hosts are fast! If you’re looking for the best speed performance, I’d have to recommend WP Engine as they were 1st in our speed test case study. If WP Engine is a bit too pricey for you, then I’d have to recommend Synthesis because they came second and also have the best prices in the managed WordPress hosting arena.

Page.ly is also a great choice. Although they did not have the fastest service they did have some great customer service and very quickly resolved a conflict I had with permissions.

Special Offer

Right now, WP Engine is giving all Art of Blog readers 3 months free hosting when you sign up with coupon code ARTOFBLOG!

WordPress logo on a Pumpkin = Amazing!

I personally think that WordPress became so popular because it is the easiest web publishing platform out there. When I build websites for clients, I usually put them on WordPress. But, out of the box WordPress isn’t the easiest platform to use when you run a large or popular site. There are known issues with security, speed, and scale when it comes to using WordPress on large scale projects. These run from the pharma hack or TimThumb vulnerabilities to your website being slow due not caching content.

Sure, you can take care of the speed, security, and scaling issues if you want. If you’re a technical person, you might enjoy reading about Nginx, PHP-FPM, load-balancing, Varnish, etc. But if you’re not, then you might want to look into Managed WordPress hosting.

Managed WordPress hosting is like putting together a Secretary, Einstein, and the Hulk together! All three of our managed WordPress hosts offer great customer service, all of them have WordPress experts on staff, and they all help protect you from all of the internet bad guys.

WP Engine, Synthesis, and Page.ly will all make your website faster, more secure, and more reliable so you don’t have to worry about your website going down when Oprah tweets about you. That being said, Art of Blog has looked at and used all three of these managed WordPress hosts and we have found the best in two categories: Best managed WordPress hosting overall and best managed WordPress hosting for the money.

Best managed WordPress Host Overall – WP Engine

WP Engine Screenshot

Alright, so I don’t think it was any surprise that WP Engine is at the top of the “best overall” category. You can read our whole WP Engine Review to get all of the good details, but I’ll give you a short summary here.

WP Engine has amazing customer support, and if you contact these guys for anything (ask Trafton if he’ll marry you) they will respond quickly and friendly. Just the other day I was asking WP Engine why I was having an issue loading a script into a text widget and they immediately began looking into it. IT turned out to be a problem with where I was getting the script from. I have also heard stories where these guys have checked code line by line to find a bug for a client. One of WP Engine’s philosophies is, “Kicking ass at your job is the only salesforce we need,” and I think WP Engine exemplifies that.

Looking beyond customer service, WP Engine also has a rock-solid product. One thing that stood out to me is WP Engine will fix your website for free if it is ever hacked! Yea, you read that right. WP Engine also has several other features that I really like:

• Automatic daily backups
• Core updates within an hour
• One-click staging area button
• One-click back up button
• Curated plugins

These guys are definitely at the top when it comes to managed WordPress hosting. But, they are expensive. Their entry level plan is $29 per month and includes up to 25,000 monthly unique visitors. Their next step up is $99 per month and includes up to 100,000 monthly unique visitors. I should also note that Jason Cohen has openly said that they’re not nazis about your monthly unique visitors. If you get a traffic spike for a month they’re not going to force you to upgrade. They’ll work with you. By the way, that’s another win for customer service.

WP Engine is giving all Art of Blog readers 3 months free when you use coupon code ARTOFBLOG at checkout!
See Plans and Pricing »

Best Managed WordPress Host for the Money – Synthesis

Synthesis Screen Shot

Where Synthesis really stands out is it’s backed by Copyblogger Media, LLC. You know, the people behind Scribe SEO, Genesis, and Premise. Synthesis is very much like the other managed WordPress hosts in that they take care of the caching, security, and speed for you. On a test website I set up with Synthesis, I was able to see my page load time drop from about 10 seconds on a shared host to about 5 seconds. That’s a significant decrease in load time!

One thing that really interests me about Synthesis web hosting is that they have a block of servers dedicated to running their Genesis theme. If you didn’t already know, Mark Jacquith was hired to consult on the Genesis theme and ensure that it used WordPress security best practices. So, you can bet Genesis put together with secure hosting is a great combination as far as security goes.

Another thing that really stands out to me about Synthesis is that Copyblogger is bringing the same technology to you that they use to run their websites that generate over 2.5 million page views per month. They’re bringing serious in-the-trenches expertise to the table.

Synthesis also gives you the most hosting for your money when you look solely at the page views per month. At $97 per month, Synthesis allows you 20,000 daily unique visitors (about 600,000 monthly unique visitors). At $99 per month WP Engine allows you 100,000 monthly unique visitors. At $149.95 Page.ly allows you ~500,000 monthly visitors.

As you can see Synthesis is clearly the cheapest managed WordPress hosting solution. They also run a great service and are backed by Copyblogger Media, LLC. If you’re looking for great managed WordPress hosting, but are on a budget, I suggest you go with Synthesis.

Page.ly – Runner Up

Page.ly Screenshot

So Page.ly didn’t get an esteemed award from Art of Blog, but they’re still a managed WordPress hosting service. They’re just somewhere in the middle. They’re not cheap and they don’t have all of the features of WP Engine. On their website they say, “Wherever you hear companies talking about Managed WordPress Hosting, they are following our lead.” Well, that may be true… But just because you’re first doesn’t mean you’re the best.

Page.ly has also said that they “have made it [their] mission to be the most secure WordPress web host around.” That’s a great goal. But until Page.ly offers some kind of guarantee, such as WP Engine’s guarantee that they will un-hack any website for free, I can’t put them at the top of a list. Even Synthesis had a core developer of WordPress do a security audit on their Genesis theme.

Bottom Line

If you’re looking for the best of the best, definitely go with WP Engine. Their customer service alone makes the extra money worth it for me. But, they also give you a great hosting experience and some great extras such as a one-click staging area and one-click backups. Synthesis is my second choice because they deliver great hosting at a great price.

Special Offer

For all Art of Blog readers, WP Engine is going to give you 3 months free!

Use coupon code ARTOFBLOG to claim your 3 months free!
Get Started »

If you’ve been involved in the WordPress community at all over the past year or so, you’ve undoubtedly at least heard of WP Engine. You might have even visited their website, seen that their cheapest hosting package is $30, then ran for the hills. Well, after using WP Engine for about 6 months, I’d like to give you an inside review, and explain to you why I think WP Engine is worth every penny they charge.

Also, WP Engine has agreed to give all Art of Blog readers a special offer when they create a new account! So read on to find out more about WP Engine.

Why WP Engine?

WP Engine Screenshot

WP Engine is a fully managed WordPress host that aims to take care of 3 main issues with WordPress: Speed, Security, and Scalability (The three S’s). As a bonus, WP Engine does those 3 things with amazing customer support. Sure, if you’re just getting started blogging, it may be hard to justify spending at least $29 per month on a hosting account. But, if you run a small business or do any marketing online WP Engine can help you increase your traffic and revenue.

A quick look at the WP Engine reviews will show that WP Engine users experience significant speed increases for their websites. This is important because Google began including site speed into their ranking algorithm in 2010. On top of this, there are other case studies that have tied site speed to revenue online.

• Amazon concluded that they increase revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds they decrease their loading time.
• Yahoo increased traffic 9% for every 400 milliseconds of improvement.

Bottom line, if your website is slow, this can drastically affect your website’s revenue and traffic. But WP Engine can also help you run a better website by making it more reliable. Downtime for your website leads to decreased revenue. With WP Engine’s scalability and security, you won’t have to worry about your website going down at the wrong time.

My Experience with WP Engine

I moved one of my websites over to WP Engine in January. When I first logged into my WP Engine admin area, I noticed a few things that really grabbed my attention.

WP Engine Admin Area

In the admin area, you can simply push a button to create a staging area in no time at all. This staging area is very useful for testing out new themes or design changes. I found it very useful for making edits to the PHP in my theme. Sometimes all it takes to bring your website down is leaving off one single character. This is not a mistake I like to make on a live website… The staging area lets me test code changes on a site copy, then move them over to my live site when ready. Pretty nice, huh?

Also, I noticed that WP Engine does not let you use your own caching plugin. This is because WP Engine automatically caches everything. Now, I love WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache as much as anybody else. But, to be honest, those plugin can be a pain to really tweak just right. WP Engine does all of the caching automatically for you!

I also wanted to do a speed test of my website before and after I moved to WP Engine. With my old shared host, I was getting about 10 seconds for a page load. Just by switching to WP Engine I noticed my page loading time go down to about 4 seconds! Yea, I’ll take that ;)

But, I have to say the best part about moving to WP Engine is the customer support that I get. That’s honestly what you’re paying for when you move to WP Engine – Great people and experience. Any time I have had a question about WordPress I have been able to get a quick answer through twitter and email. The only time I ever had an issue was when WP Engine changed their pricing structure. I ended up emailing support, somewhat irritated I should add, and found out that the pricing plans were in my favor. DOH!

Wrapping it Up

If you run a small to medium sized website, then I think WP Engine is the perfect host for you. In the 6 months that I’ve had WP Engine, I’ve only had two gripes. The first is that there is no SSH access. The second is that WP Engine does not take care of email. But there are very minor gripes. Email can be taken care of through 3rd party services like Google for free, and WP Engine doesn’t allow SSH for security reasons. I can live with that.

After all is said and done, WP Engine is a solid host, and now my host of choice for any new web development projects I have.

Special Offer

If this review of WP Engine isn’t enough to make you want to switch hosts, then maybe this is. For all Art of Blog readers, WP Engine is going to give you 3 months free!

Use coupon code ARTOFBLOG to claim your 3 months free!

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 (6926)

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.

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.

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.

Screen Capture of the Dreamhost Management Panel

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!

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:

Follow @jpetersen

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.

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

Tweet

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]

Tweet

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