1. Uninteresting Posts

Before you start your blog, think about your goals you want to accomplish. Define your target readership and don’t forget that your future readers are common, real people and that you need to write posts that people enjoy reading and they will reward you by returning to your blog regularly. Getting the visitors is easy, making them your regular visitors is hard. Write in a conversational style and on one particular topic. Don’t worry about blog traffic but focus on quality contents.

2. Ignoring Search Engines Optimization

You should follow a basic but important search engines optimization tips that will make your page perfectly optimized like:
-Your blog URL should contain the primary keyword you want to optimize for.
-You should use your primary keywords in the title of your post and your secondary keywords in the body of your post.
-You should use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts.

3. Off to a Vacation Every Week!

Write often and write regularly so readers and search engines will visit your blog more often, post on weekdays, because there are more readers and than post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts. Even if you keep a low pace of posts, say 5 posts per week still be available for your readers most of the time.

4. Terrible Design

There are two things that your blog design should not be: complicated and visually unappealing. If your blog design is complicated it will make readers distracted from reading your content. It also can slow down loading and will drive impatient visitors away. But if your blog design is simple and visually appealing it will be more attractive to your regular readers and also you can submit it to some CSS gallery site that feature great designs and get some extra traffic from there too.

5. Not Spreading the Word About Your Blog

Don’t just post on your blog and leave it like that. Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums, submit articles and post a reviews to newsgroups. You must work a little bit harder and be active to generate traffic, read lots of other blogs, leave trackbacks, simply you should become part of the community.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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What’s 100% GPL(free) Commercial Premium Theme?

I thought it would be better to tell you that what exactly PremiumMod blog is all about. Not only that educates us about PremiumMod blog, it educates us about the concept of Free GPL Commercial premium themes too.

We modify commercial GPL WordPress premium themes and release it to public for free, with the main idea of creating a movement – for more people to produce high quality WordPress themes based on commercial GPL themes and make it available to public (in GPL license, of course) for free.

What’s more interesting to see is that the judges of the competition are veterans of WordPress and I’m sure that any theme that will win the competition will be high quality theme as it will definitely be hard to please these judges with ordinary work.

• Ian Stewart, the author of ThemeShaper and creator of the Thematic theme framework.
• Mohammed Haris, the owner of Design to WordPress.
• Hongkiat, a fellow Malaysian and the author of HONGKIAT.COM.
• Leland, the author of Theme lab.
• Dainis Graveris, the author of 1stwebdesigner.

Other than that, I came across a post by Michael from WPEngineer who is advising his readers that they shouldn’t use stolen premium themes. Well, I completely agree with him and the reasons are -

1. The efforts of the theme designer should be rewarded with some money. It takes lot of time and effort to develop a wonderful theme that can be called a premium theme. If the developer will get his share of money, i’m sure they’ll produce even better quality themes which will only help you.
2. Pirated theme can most likely be infected with spyware – As told by Michael, his friend’s stolen theme had code which was coded with sites to two spam links. If someone can put link to spam sites, then you can imagine that they can be linked to the spyware as well.
3. Even better – Why use them when we have free premium mod themes available on internet?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Attention span

Is the amount of time a person can concentrate on a task without becoming distracted. Estimates for the length of human attention span range from 3 to 5 minutes per year of age in young children, to a maximum of around 20 minutes in adults. Combining what we know about attention span and how the mind works, I suggest that writing process should be punctuated with periodic activities. Your hippocampus will fill up after about 20 minutes and needs a break to organize and store the information.  So every 20 minutes take a 5 minute break.  During your break, move your body and relax your mind. These breaks not only do not decrease productivity, but may even increase it somewhat.

Here is a good way to make the process of writing work for you:

-Write in spurts. Write for about a 20 minutes, half-hour at most, than take a five-minute break.
-During your break stand from your chair, move your body, stretch and relax your mind.
-Really turn your mind on full for each “study spurt.” Get the most out of each spurt. Be active, involved, and thinking.

Make your mind work for you, don’t work against it.

Have a pleasant stretch Mak!

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Typography is the art of arranging letters, words and paragraphs, and how they interact with each other in order to make them more readable, or more visually appealing. Good typography is just as important on a Web page as it is in the other mediums and it should be easy to read and pleasant as in every magazine or newspaper. Sometimes typographic style and its accompanying attention to detail have been overlooked by website designers, forgetting that 95% of web design is actually typography and the fonts you use are important as they will affect your website’s overall visual impact so it’s important for every designer and developer to know the basics of typography.

The basics of typography

There are few most important things that every designer should know. Here is a short list of the basic terms used in typography:

- Weight is actually the boldness or lightness of certain font. Usually two font weights: normal and bold are used.

- Leading is the height of the spacing between any two lines in a section. The best amount of leading is usually half the height of the font’s size. Or if the font size is 12px then the leading should be 6px.

- Line Height is the height of a line including the leading added. So in the previous example, if using a font size of 12px and consequently 6px of leading that makes a line-height of 18px.

- Letter Spacing also called tracking, refers to the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in a line or block of text i.e. is the default width of space between any given set of characters.

- Kerning should not be confused with letter spacing. Letter-spacing refers to the overall spacing of a word or block of text affecting its overall density and texture. Kerning is a term applied specifically to the adjustment of spacing of two particular characters to correct visually uneven spacing.

- Word Spacing is the width of the space between two given words.

- Rendering is the way every browser, application, and operating system interprets type. Usually every browser will render type differently.

- Baseline is the line upon which the text rests.

- Ascender & Descender are any lowercase letters that rises above or drops below the baseline.

The Tips

Now let’s take a look at few Web Typography tips that can make your web page or blog better looking:

1. Size

Don’t set body text below 10 or 12px and, if possible, make it bigger. Remember, what’s legible on your monitor, might not be so on a 15 inch MacBook. If any doubt, make it bigger. Also reading on a computer screen is more tiring than reading on paper, what you see on the screen is not as clear as black print on white paper.

2. Space

Make your type comfortably spaced. Leave enough blank spaces in your pages especially in content-heavy layouts, where spacing considerably contributes to the readability of content. By leaving enough white space you help the reader to offset large amounts of text and his eyes to flow more smoothly through the text as well as providing a good separation between elements in the layout. A good rule of thumb is line-spacing that’s at least 140% of your text size.

3. Contrast

Contrast is huge factor if your text will be easy to read. Cool looking text on a colored background, might seem like a good idea, but it makes reading the body text a lot slower and even painful. Text is primarily to be read and the contrasts should make it easy on the eyes and easy to scan quickly so make sure that it contrasts enough with the background . Avoid long stretches of reversed out text i.e. light text on a dark background which cause that effect of light lines in front of your eyes minutes after you turn your look off the screen. Black on white is still the standard contrast colors and for a good reason so stick to it.

4. Headers

Headers are the first element in typography that the user notices. Their size is equally important as the size of the body text. Don’t use too big headers that can cause users to lose their spot and ruin the flow of the content. Don’t use small headers too, because they will ruin the hierarchy of the article and will not draw the user’s attention as it should. It’s important to find the balance and provide enough space between the header and body text.

5. Be consistent

Consistency is also very important for usability and readability. When you choose a header size, color and font, it should be the same size, color and font for all the headers of the same importance. For example All <h1> and <h2> headers in an article should look identical.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Chromotherapy also known as Color therapy or colorology is a type of holistic healing that utilizes colors to achieve optimal health and it has been practiced by many races throughout the world for centuries. Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras applied color light therapeutically and ‘color halls’ were used for healing in ancient Egypt, China and India. Colors bring emotional reactions in people, when a color is seen, it can have an emotional impact and physical reaction. Different color provokes different reaction in humans: calming the nervous system, reduces blood pressure, energize, stimulate, increases Neuromuscular tone, stimulates happiness, brings on a sense of security, regeneration etc.

Today Chromotherapy is widely used in Home Design, Automobile design, Developing Study Materials, Food packages etc. Knowing that color plays a major role in setting up a particular mood or state of mind. Smart Web Designers can use it when it comes to modeling websites, picking out the color scheme for their design and affecting one’s feelings, moods, and emotions. Color is a powerful element, and one of the first things you notice when coming to a new website. It also resonates with you when you leave. Color immediately sets a mood in any space. The right choices and combination can transform your Blog and imbue all who visit it with new levels of energy.

Depending on the topic and what emotional impact you want to achieve on your Blog, you can choose suitable dominant color for it:

Green

Nature, fresh, cool, growth, abundance. It is the color of nature. It is associated with money, animals, health, healing, life, harmony. Regulates the pituitary gland, fights depression, bulimia, and other psychosomatic conditions affecting the gastric system. It is useful in calming the nervous system, fights irritability, insomnia.

Blue

The color the majority of the world population calls its favorite color. It represents to “Trust”. It is associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism. It’s calming. Stimulates the parasympathetic system, reduces blood pressure and calms both breathing and heart-rate. It has anti-inflammatory and muscle relaxing effects. Fights both physical and mental tension and is used to assist in relaxation.

Red

The color of danger. It can imply risk. It is associated with love, passion, warning, excitement, food, impulse, action, adventure, excitement, strength, sex, passion, speed. They say this is good for food websites. Is used to energise and stimulate. Affects the heart by increasing pulse rate, and the muscles by increasing their tension. Influences vitality, and increases body temperature. Can be used to develop excitement and sensuality.

Yellow

Warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness. It is associated with curiosity, playfulness, cheerfulness, amusement. Increases neuromuscular tone. Purifies blood, helps digestion, and has a cleansing effect. Strongly stimulates happiness, brings on a sense of security, as well as a strong feeling of well-being.

White

Is associated with innocence, purity, cleanliness, simplicity. The color of pure innocence.
Used for regeneration. Also, provides energy and balances the chrono-biological rhythm, by stimulating the production of serotonin, a substance which regulates both sleep and the nervous system. Re-balances the psychophysical and hormonal systems in people who suffer from seasonal depression.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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WordPress is the best blogging platform and there is no doubt about that, other than that it is also becoming the first choice CMS (content management system) for corporates too. One of the major reason for the same is that WordPress is pretty simple and even though it has got less inbuilt features, there are thousands of plugins that are available for free and extend the it to match the existing CMS. It’s simplicity attracts thousands of developers and is one of the fastest growing CMS at the moment.

Because of this simplicity offered by WordPress, there are many developers who create high quality plugins, however many plugin authors develop the plugin whose code quality is not up to the mark and thus causes issue. We at Blog Design Studio have faced many issues while integrating various plugins in our themes and we always felt the need of a repository that has listed only high quality plugins. I’m sure that the team and Incsub must have faced the same problem and thus in order to address this issue, they’ve launched an app store called WP Plugins.

WordPress plugin developers can upload their plugins on this WordPress powered site and allows them to sell them to users. Plugin authors get the option of selling the plugins for one time fee or as subscription based offer that gives users the access for support and future upgrades.

My opinion about WP Plugins

There has been a wonderful conversation going on at the TechCrunch’s post about this App Store, where there are mixed reactions for this particular service. There are some hard core fans (open-source fans) who didn’t like the idea of this App Store, however if I were to give my opinion, I would say this idea is fantastic as this particular option allows plugin developers to develop high quality plugins without worrying about marketing, selling options. Other than that, users will also be able to access high quality plugins at one single place. It definitely is a win-win situation for everyone, however, the idea will only flourish or will be helpful for users only if there will be enough plugin developers who’d sign up for this initiative and not launch their own app stores in future.

Although, I do agree that they should mention that they aren’t affiliated with WordPress! There are some people who just don’t get it by looking at the site and seeing no logo of Automattic.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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This phrase emerged in the USA in the early part of the 20th century. Its introduction is widely attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title “One look is worth a thousand words”, in Printer’s Ink, December 1921.
It refers to the idea that complex stories can be described with just a single still image, or that an image may be more influential than a substantial amount of text. Today in our dynamic world this is more important than ever before. Today we must absorb large amounts of data quickly.

In WordPress it’s quite easy for you to add images to your WordPress site. Upload them directly from within WordPress by using the built-in file uploading utility in the post screen or use any FTP Client software to upload as much as you want images to your WordPress site. In WordPress you can resize images and create thumbnails too. Actually there are three size settings available for you: thumbnail, medium and large.  In the same moment when you upload an image, Wordpress will automatically generate these three image sizes not affecting the aspect ratio. The thumbnail is a resize with a crop, and the other settings are “max” width and height. So don’t worry.

Styling your images on your Wordpress blog/site

Most likely your theme is already styling your images i.e. it is set to put a border around images in your posts, and float them to the left or to the right, and most of the time this is working good for you, but sometimes, you would like to style them in a different manner. In those cases you can easily change this “default” styles by few simple edits in the HTML code.

At Blog Design Studio in most of our themes we use these styles for the images:

.alignleft {
float: left;
}
.alignright {
float: right;
}
img {
border: none;
}
img.alignleft {
float: left;
margin: 5px 10px 5px 0;
}
img.alignright {
float: right;
margin: 5px 0 5px 10px;
}

And here is what you get:

But let’s say you want to add a thick black border around the picture. Before the /> that closes the tag just insert: style=”border: 3px solid #000000″

You can add space between the border and the picture too:

You can float it to the left:

Or to the right:

And of course you can add margins according to your preferences:

Optimizing your images for WP

You should not overlook image optimization. This is also an important part of WordPress SEO. By writing good alt tags for images and clever thinking of how you name the files, you can get extra traffic on your blog from the different image search engines. You can help your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what’s otherwise hidden to them too.

Heavy images can cost you traffic. Your visitors won’t wait 10 seconds for your image to load! So you should optimize your images for the web.  Your images should be in either .gif or .jpg formats (.gif is best for logos and navigation buttons, while .jpg is best for photographs.)  Reduce the size of your graphics so that they take as few bytes as possible while retaining acceptable quality.

In following posts, we’ll come up with some of the tools and plug-ins that will help you in making your life easier when it comes to dealing with images!

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Steve Kaufmann is a Canadian entrepreneur. He is the founder of The Linguist Institute which is now known as LingQ, a language learning system based on the methods he himself uses to learn languages. He speaks 11 languages, plus his native English. He is a successful blogger and writes on his The Linguist on Language Blog. His blog is very popular in the industry. It’s interactive, trustworthy and offers genuinely useful information for the LingQ language learning system but also for language learning in general. Simply put a typical story of a successful blog, a great business promoter that many of us are trying to develop.

BDS: Steve, welcome to Blog Design Studio, before we proceed with the questions can you give us some basic information about your company LingQ.

Steve Kaufmann: In simple terms LingQ is a language learning system and community. People learn from interesting input, audio and text, most of which is contributed by the members. We have some rather unique functionality which makes it easier and more enjoyable to gradually acquire language skills. Most of all it is a great community of people with a common interest in language who are helping each other and themselves. There is also mutual tutoring and error correction but in a way that is integrated with our learning methodology. I started this activity about 6 years ago after a career in the international trade of wood products, an activity in which I am still engaged.

BDS: How has your blog helped you in promoting your business?

Steve Kaufmann: My blog is one of the largest referrers to LingQ. It also helps to create some credibility for us amongst people who learn languages on the web.

BDS: What are your customers getting out of your blog?

Steve Kaufmann: Readers of my blog are not necessarily customers. I hope they are getting interesting and useful information, and the odd bit of debate and controversy. I try to vary the posts between providing sources of useful language content, ideas on language learning and general ranting on all kinds of subjects.

BDS: How often you post a blog?

Steve Kaufmann: Once every two or three days, and sometimes more often. I tend to post when I have something to say. I guess I should be more regular.

BDS: Do you use social networking websites like Facebook and Orkut to promote LingQ?

Steve Kaufmann: I do not use Orkut. All my posts appear on Facebook and Twitter. I do not really understand how it all works, but we get a lot of referrals to LingQ from Facebook and Twitter so I guess it does something. I am a little new to all of this social networking. I do not go around SMSing from my cell phone.

BDS: Do you think the design is important for your Blog/Website?

Steve Kaufmann: Blog design is key. A blog is like a store. People are more likely to come in to an attractive store than one that is not. The design has to suit the tastes and interests of the target group. Aside from the appearance, ease of navigation is also important. I think it is important to really think through what information you want to display where.

Thank Steve for giving us your valuable time. We wish you good luck with your social media marketing strategies! We hope that your experience will surely help spread the idea of importance of social media marketing in business.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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So you want to create a high-traffic site? It’s so cool to have all those plugins too. But will WordPress be sufficient for your high-traffic site? Will it survive tons of heavy traffic every day? Well the answer can be yes as long as you take care of few things. Here are some tips on how to speed up your WordPress site. Before you go ahead with this blog post, you should go ahead and read the following post as well – Unclutter your blog.

Stay up to date with the latest WordPress version and plugins

Staying up to date with the latest version of WordPress is really a must do. Make sure always to stay updated with the latest release of WordPress in order to boost performance of your blog. This is not just for fun, in every update, there are many upgrades that will enhance the performance of your blog but also you will prevent your site from security risks. You should do exactly the same with WordPress plugins. Keep them up to date, it’s as important, and for the same reasons.

Turn off, limit or even delete unused plugins

One of the biggest issues that causes WordPress sites to slow down is leaving too many plugins active even when you’re not using them. If you are using more than say 15 plugins on your blog then you need to check to see if you really need all of them. Some plugins can have many scripts and code. So if you’re not using a plugin disable it and give Wordpress a break or maybe delete it. Keep the plugins that are really necessary for your site to run and than disable the ones that aren’t needed. You can lower the number of plugins during heavy traffic times by turning off a few WordPress Plugins temporarily and than you can reactivate them again after the heavy traffic volume has died down a bit.

Be careful with the server requests

All of the items that you have on your page like html page, the css page, javascripts, images, movies, and any other item will generate separate requests for each of them to the web server. Having in mind that the server can handle a limited number of requests at a time, you should try to make things easier for it and reduce the number of items to a second server. First are the images. Your embedded images can be uploaded to an image sharing site like Flickr and by that use the big Flickr servers which can withstand the load much easier. The same for videos, upload to YouTube, Google Video or any other video hosting site and then use their embedding function from their servers within your own page.

Clean up and compress your code

Compress your CSS, i.e. get rid of the white space and get everything neat and clean and than put JavaScript into a single file and load it at the bottom of the page in footer.php. This way the styling will load first and than the JavaScript. Optimizing your code this way actually can do a lot for your load time. At first you might not notice any difference, but it will make a huge difference to your blog speed. White space like indented tabs, line breaks, etc. which you use for better readability are slowing down your blog. Decrease white space and be sure to use shorthand and will be able to speed up your site’s load.

Page Speed is a wonderful Firefox extension that has been released by Google to help webmasters to optimize their blogs and websites. This plugin minify’s the javascripts and even tells you that how one can optimize the performance of the scripts and thus overall improving the speed of the blog.

One another way to speed up the blog’s performance is by using few of these plugins -
1. WP-Super Cache – This plugin creates a cached copy of the dynamic pages and thus doesn’t load up the server with dynamic requests. Find out that why using this plugin is such a good idea and why it makes to our top plugins for wordpress list.
2. Optimize DB – This awesome plugin will optimize the tables of your database and thus improving the overall performance of the blog.
3. Shrink-O-Matic – This is not a WordPress plugin, however an Adobe AIR based application that reduces the image size and eventually speeds up the loading time of the blog pages.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Well, it plays approximately the same role in representing your blog to the world as looks do for women. A pretty woman will definitely be “right” at the moment she appears in front of the people. Later on, she may turn out to be stupid, boring, or even malicious, but she has won the first battle anyway. The same goes for your blog. You may have the best of the content however if you don’t have a good blog design, you’ll still lose a lot of readers just because the presentation of the blog isn’t that good.

Your blog’s design is very important to you. It reflects on you and how you’re perceived by other people. Believe it or not, first impressions do count. A good blog design will absolutely give you a better first impression. It encourages the people to click and read a bit further and get to the all-important content. In the wide world of blogging, the content might be the king, but the design is the queen. So use your first impression and give the content of your blog a better chance to be seen by the world.

In one of earlier poll (which unfortunately is still running, we’ll change it soon) results we found out that more than 80% of this blog’s readers think that blog design is really important in a blog’s success. Apart from that there are some of very renowned blogger/designers share there views about blog design -

1. How important is design to a blog’s success? – by Vandley Design.
2. Better keep a log on your blog (quoting Kiruba Shankar, one of the most prolific bloggers from India)
3. How important is blog design service? – Performancing

What makes a great blog design?

Again a lot has been already said on this particular topic, so I thought it would be best to share those wonderful links with you all -

1. 5 Characterstics of good blog design!
2. What makes a design good?
3. Ten important traits of a good blog design.

The design of your blog is just as important as any other aspect of your business and it will be wise to plan it in your budget. In blogging you can always change things, experiment, see what works and than use it. So take care of your blog design. Start with experimenting in a WordPress theme and if someday you decide to hire a blog designer to help you out, the Blog Design Studio is available and eager to help you any time.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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