A self-hosted site is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to build a stronger brand image. If you want a professional web presence, you must have your own domain and web host. For just a few dollars per month, you give your site credibility and recognition.

What should you look for in your web host?

1. Close to 100% uptime
   You don’t want your site to be down when potential customers want to view it.
2. PHP 5
   You want new PHP scripts to work flawlessly.
3. Enough storage space
   Try to determine what you plan on putting on the server. If you want to use your space for backing up important documents, make sure there is enough space, and make sure you can password-protect a directory.
4. Enough bandwidth
   Try to find as much bandwidth as possible so you can upload enough to your site at a time. Downloading, which includes each page view, also counts as bandwidth.

So far, the best option I’ve seen for web hosts is 1&1. Right now you can sign up for just $6.99 a month, and get the whole first year free! This includes 150GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth. I recommend the 1&1 Home plan, but you may determine one of the other plans better suits your needs. They also offer vouchers to save you money on Google Adwords, Citysearch, Spreadshirt, and other external services. It’s really an unbeatable deal.

The worst paid host I’ve worked with is GoDaddy. They advertise frequently, but their services are terrible. Their support is of no help, and then they try to sell you support. They also lose websites from time to time. The interface is restrictive and it is difficult if not impossible to set up a decently functioning WordPress blog due to all of the restrictions they put on your site.

Please do not even consider one of the free hosts. They often put ads all over the site to generate revenue, and offer extremely limited services (no email, no FTP, no PHP, no domain).

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Ovaltine, which originated in Switzerland as Ovomaltine (meaning “egg and malt”), has a variety of logos around the world. In the United States, Ovaltine was best known for its Rich Chocolate flavor, with an All-American script logo on a blue oval.

The old logo represented years of commercials where children asked for more Rich Chocolate Ovaltine, which tastes great and is great for you.  The can stood out on shelves with big, bold, high contrast letters, in a friendly script.

The new logo sports a cleaner, simpler, more European style. It seems they are going for a more upscale look, while also trying to illustrate the drink mix’s great taste.  The flavor has been moved to the bottom of the container, and there is no mention of tasting great. The can is also labeled as “Rich Chocolate Mix” instead of “Rich Chocolate” so consumers don’t expect premade chocolate milk.

Overall, it looks weak, pretentious, and blends in with every other chocolate mix on the shelves. I noticed Nestle’s name on the can, so maybe Nestle is trying to market Nesquik for children and Ovaltine for sophisticated adults.

As a nostalgic adult who also enjoys interesting packaging, I greatly miss the old cans. Fortunately, most stores still carry the old style, so it will be a while before I only have boring cans of chocolatety powder.

Which Rich Chocolate Ovaltine would you rather put in your shopping cart?

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1. Go to the edit screen for the post or page where you want subtitles.
2. Under the Custom Fields heading, enter a new custom field name. Type subtitle in the Name field. Type the subtitle text in the Value field. Add the custom field.
3. Add the below code in your post or page template after the title code (or wherever you want it to appear) and save.

< ?php
{ $subtitle = get_post_meta
($post->ID, 'subtitle', $single = true);
if($subtitle !== '') echo $subtitle;} ?>

Voila!

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In order to boost the public image of a company known for selling beef jerky infused with mechanically separated chicken parts and mystery flavors, Slim Jim refreshed their logo. The new logo definitely brings more thoughts of “spicy” and “modern” to mind, compared to the old logo which looks like it had been on the shelf since 1989.

However, I can’t help but think they used a checklist of design cliches from the year 1999.

1. Make everything 3D
2. Rotate it to make it edgy (because people love tilting their heads to read)
3. Have the letters burst out of their container, because that is exciting and shows motion
4. Give text a jagged, metallic appearance, which represents the future

The snack itself is rounded, so the metalization of the logo looks like a design-by-committee idea to modernize the logo without giving it much thought.

They could have updated the logo by using less saturated colors and ditching the shield. Imagine the original slim jim logo with dark reddish brown letters (like a juicy steak). That’s it. Cool, huh?

What do you think of the new logo? How would you have changed it?

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1. Excessive ads- This nonprofit can’t get hosting without the unprofessional ads? I would even volunteer to host them for free.
2. Missing images- What is supposed to be in this box? A logo?
3. Boring and repetitive text- Two blocks of text without any images scare away visitors. I actually read the text and saw that each paragraph essentially said the same thing

Honorable mention: The site is translated into Spanish underneath the English part. Would anyone know to look down there? Probably  not.

Give your organization a professional face on the web. Hire an expert who has experience with user interface design, and knows how to draw visitors to a site.

Have you seen any bad websites lately?

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1. Akismet- It is hard to grow a site when you keep getting comment spam. Hardly anything gets through, and it is very simple to use.
2. All in One SEO Pack- This optimizes like you wouldn’t believe. You can fix your titles, keywords, descriptions, block spiders, and more. I’ve been able to get great results with small sites.
3. FeedBurner FeedSmith- You can manage your feed subscribers much more easily and utilize the great functions of FeedBurner.
4. Google XML Sitemaps- A great boost to SEO. Google uses sitemaps to help them determine what information should be indexed. This plugin helps.
5. Lighter Menus- Let’s face it, drop down menus are much faster to navigate, and you don’t need to waste time or space when working on your site. (This is not needed for WordPress 2.7 and above)
6. Plugin Central- Easily install and update plugins from your dashboard. Since you don’t need to use ftp anymore, you can quickly manage plugins anywhere. I think it is still easier than WordPress 2.7’s autoupdate for plugins.
7. Subscribe To Comments- Let people receive notification that someone responded to their comment. It may be useful to them, and may also bring them back to the site. Always encourage discussion.
8. WassUp- Real time stats (OS, browser, host, referrer, location, top content, top searches) help you determine which content and marketing efforts are working, and give you immediate satisfaction when you have site visitors. Plus, there are great sort options.
9. WordPress Thread Comment- The site may be hard to understand, but setup is simple, and you get an attractive, useful implementation of threaded comments upon activation. WordPress 2.7 added threaded comments, but this is easier and better, in my opinion.
10. WP-DBManager- You never know if something will go wrong with your database. Back it up and optimize it at least once a month.

Notable omissions:

• WP Super Cache- When your site becomes a hit, you will probably want to cache your pages so your server is not overrun. For sites with less traffic, a cache plugin can be annoying since you can not see updates to your site immediately.
• Post-Plugin Library- Great for a power user, it lets you use the connected Similar Posts, Recent Comments, and Random Comments. I was able to combine with the custom field to display an image with each similar post. However, it breaks many other plugins and can cause errors in WordPress. Update: These plugins are not buggy anymore, and are very powerful.

What other plugins do you use?

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