There are many lessons for us to learn from this, about ourselves, and our readers and customers. Read the post You Aren’t Average for insights, and comment below.

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


You Know More Than You Think

What is Headway?

Headway is a premium (aka paid-for) WordPress theme. It is designed for those who don’t have the time and/or knowledge to customize a theme using traditional coding methods, and instead gives them a easy to use tools, such as drag-and-drop and color-pickers, with which to easily redesign and customize their site. Even if you are a pro at this sort of thing, custom hooks and the usual custom CSS are also available.

The thing that will blow you away in the new version, is the Visual Editor – you can edit your site at the same time as seeing exactly what it will look like!

The video below shows a preview of how this works, prepare to be excited about the design opportunities for your blog! (click here if you can’t see the video)

I had a chance to meet some of the guys behind Headway at BlogWorldExpo, and they are excited about the brilliant customizable features in Headway, and have even more planned. As you would expect, any owners of Headway today will get access to new versions for no charge.

The version in the video is not quite ready for release, but you can get this easy WordPress theme here very soon.

If you want to promote Headway yourself and make some money, you can sign up as an affiliate here.

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


Headway WordPress Theme Preview

Essentially a customized free theme, changing the background, adding the logo, customizing the colors, adding an opt-in form and so on was only a couple of hours work. As usual, adding the content is the most time consuming aspect, and that’s still a work in progress.

I added a “lightbox” effect on the Media page, so photos of the wildfires opened larger in the same window. Also on that page, we added a branded demo video

There is a password protected page for fire departments to get access to locations of where the fire protection systems are located. Adding a contact form is easy in WordPress, and the blog appears on a separate page from the home page, giving it more of the look of a traditional business website.

An About page, some Testimonials and an overview of the Products complete the blog. Pretty quick, simple, yet good looking and very visible.

Overall it was relatively quick and simple. There are still a few more tweaks to add to the site and enhance it’s ease of use, plus content changes, but the design is all done.

Take a look at the site if you want to learn more about ways to protect your home from wildfires or have a look at the press release that talks about how a homeowner saved his house from a wildfire.

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


Home Fire Protection Case Study

JS Kit Echo Comments

You may have noticed that all my blog posts had 0 comments for a few days. This was while the team at JS Kit imported my old comments into their system. Used by sites such as Technorati and Guy Kawasaki it essentially pulls in other places where your blog post is being talked about into your blog posts comments. This keeps your blog as the central hub for your online activity, which appeals to my sense of neatness adn order!

So Twitter tweets that mention your post, Diggs, or Friendfeed updates are added to your post comments. Facebook doesn’t seem to be on there yet but I’m hoping that will be added soon.

Give it a try below in the comments and see what you think. I’m still playing with it but it looks good so far. It costs $12 per year to use, and I was a little disappointed in how long it took for them to import my comments – 6 days. I did provide them with the wrong URL to login (oops), but over 24 hours for each email reply and no reply over a weekend is frustrating for a new customer.

Lijit Search

The second addition is the lijit search. I had a great demo from Perry Quinn at Blog World, their plugin essentially replaces the standard WordPress search sidebar widget. The search results are similar in a way to JS Kit in that they also show results from my extended network. So Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and various other sites are also searched and relevant results displayed in a Content tab on the results page. It’s at the top right of each blog post page so give it a go and see if the results work for you. I’m not 100% it’s all working yet.

Although I would turn them off if I could, the ads that appear on the results page are part of a revenue share, so if you’re looking at earning some money on your blog it may be worth giving lijit a try.

As always, I’m interested in your comments so please let me know what you think below.

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


Blog Changes On BTG

If you’re on my email list you will have already heard it, but as we know, Membership sites are a popular way of making money online, and the model was talked about extensively at the conference. Coincidentally, my online friend Yaro Starak has announced he is re-opening the doors to Membership Site Mastermind next week.

I don’t promote many training courses, and all I do I have personally been on myself and this is no exception (my WordPress Blog Training Videos is the result).

He’s released a couple of videos in the past which are well worth watching. The one below is The Blue Sky Video, and there is also The Slide Show Video.

As usual I offer no incentives (aka bribes) for signing up for this course through my affiliate link, I want you to sign up for it if you think it’s for you, will benefit you and help you achieve the lifestyle you want. Enjoy the videos though!

Oh, and if you notice something new about the comments, I’ve installed JS Kit Echo. They have to do a manual import of my old comments, but an enhanced service is now available, feel free to try it out! I’ll be writing a post on my experience with it another time.

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


Return Of Membership Site Mastermind

You can still join me and get 20% off any pass using coupon code RICKNDAVE20 if it still works. Speakers such as Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, Guy Kawasaki, Leo Laport, Kara Swisher and many many more will be there. Plus it’s the home of WordCamp Las Vegas that I’m hoping I’ll have time to attend.

If you’re going and want to meet up, send me a note and we’ll see if we can work something out, it’ll be great to meet you I’m sure.

If you feel like stalking me, my schedule for BlogWorldExpo is probably something like this:
http://blogworldexpo09.sched.org/BlogTechGuy.

It’s also embedded below but the formatting and link duplication makes it a little unreadable.

Until then, have fun!

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


Vacation and Blog World Expo

It was to my surprise then when I noticed I had gone over 200 clients. New client building has never been my aim, I am fortunate to have long term relationships with many clients that are over a year long. However it’s pretty exciting to hit the 200 client milestone, and thought I would share three of the many, many things I have learned (and am still learning):

1. Everyone is a beginner sometime – No matter how many times you’ve done something, there was always a first time. This may be the client’s first time, so remember how it felt.
2. Honesty goes further than promises – If you can’t do something or don’t know how, it’s more advantageous to say so than say you can do it and do a half-assed job of it.
3. This client is number one – No matter who else calls or has work waiting, the current client work is the number one priority. It often doesn’t make financial sense to do it this way, but it makes moral sense to me!

So a huge thank you to the 200+ clients who have helped build my business to what it is today. I’m always happy to help.

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


Top 3 Things I’ve Learned From Over 200 Clients

Ekin Ertac has produced a WordPress Template Tag Cheatsheet that lists the available template tags and what they do. You can download it in PDF from his site.

It also includes tips on a standard theme structure, what the loop is and a couple of example navigation menus for good measure.

[Via WeblogTools Collection]

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


WordPress Template Tags Cheat Sheet

Where to get good advice is a source of worry for me sometimes, and also where to refer my clients to when they ask. Of course there are great courses and businesses out there too, and often I point them towards this man, Brendon Sinclair of Tailored Web Services. Here he is talking about getting good search engine rankings (if you can’t see the videos, go here):

While that was good, here are some of his finer moments:

No bull, no spin, just good, solid, actionable advice. Good on ya mate!

You can follow him on Twitter at @brendonsinclair, but how his ego fits into 140 characters, I’m not quite sure!

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


Straightforward Marketing Advice

You can read the full details here, but please don’t ignore the Upgrade notice.

Backup, using a plugin like WP DB Backup (while you’re there, set it to regularly email you backups).

Why not also go to Tools > Export and backup all your post/page/comments in a smaller XML file. This can be useful too.

If you like you can backup your uploaded images via FTP in the wp-content folder, but that’s up to you.

Then Tools > Upgrade.

Some people will have to upgrade manually depending on their server setup, so here are the manual upgrade instructions.

While you’re at it, take a look at upgrading your out of date plugins too, why not?

The basics: Upgrading is easy, fixing a hacked blog is hard.

Post from: Blog Tech Guy


Fixing A Hacked Blog Is Hard