It’s officially been announced, the release of the Standard theme’s third edition will be out in June. If you are a WordPress theme junkie like me, you know that you must have only the best and are even willing to pay for it. In my opinion, Standard Theme is the best out there for bloggers and for $50 you can have the newest version coming out or for $99 you can have that theme for life in all of its updates.
We are so excited to announce the release of our first eBook. This has been in the works for almost three months now and everything culminated today. We have been asked SO MANY different blog questions over the last few years that we felt the need to write a blog post series. Yet, this was only a temporary solution. We wanted an all-inclusive document put together that when someone had any kind of question for the new blogger or a veteran needing a refresher.
[This article is part of the Blogging 101 series to help people start up their very own blog.]
After a few months of writing articles and networking through social media and commenting, it will be interesting to see what you started with and where you have come. To be able to know how far we have come, we will need to use some specific tools that allow us to measure our success. Below is a list of five things to help you produce the best results when measuring your data.
[This article is part of the Blogging 101 series to help people start up their very own blog.]
This step of the process may be a simple one for some and something that others want to skip when they shoot for putting together a blog. But if you do not do the ground work now, you could find yourself doing a lot of complaining, being constrained because of lack of options, and ultimately spending more time fixing problems in the end than taking the time now.
If you are using Twitter for anything more than a hobby, be it networking with like-minded people, marketing a product, or wanting to do research on something, you need to find tools to better utilize it.
The problem is that there are currently no free solutions that are able to completely maximize your use of the social media. But we did some research and hunting for you and have five great tools that you can use and grow your influence rapidly.
Here is my view this morning at Panera Bread. Writing blog articles for Churchm.ag this morning and then going to write some code in the afternoon for a WordPress theme.
What’s your view like?
From day one, we have had some sort of blogging strategy that directed our energy, gave us measurable goals to achieve, and know where adjustments are needed. With a year long 2011 plan, we reevaluated it every quarter to see if changes needed to be made and an adjusted vision for the site would come about. The goals of the blog in the fourth quarter did resemble a bit of what it started out at the beginning of the year, but we had differences.
With the new year comes a couple of major shifts in our strategy, some of which we shared already. Below is our detailed list of the blogging strategy for the new year with clear and hopefully attainable goals. Tomorrow, we will share with you our new social media strategy and what we hope to do in the new year.
Over the course of the year, we hope to follow a model established by Kolby Morton on his site to publicly review every month how the goals are going. Depending on the success and failures of these goals, we may have to make changes at the quarterly intervals and would love your input as we go along in this process.
What is your blogging strategy?
We did a guest post over at Churchm.ag you should check out. Here is a link to the full post and below is a snippet:
One of the best aspects of WordPress is how easy it is to customize your website and the community of developers that have invested time into creating a great product along with complimentary themes and plugins. However you want to utilize WordPress, blogging or eCommerce, there is a plugin for it.
Here is a list of the top five free plugins that are essential to any great WordPress website that you should check out. Each of these have been utilized for several months and many have been compared to similar plugins and found to be the best of the bunch.
Disqus Comment System
One of the premiere commenting plugin systems that provides a great design layout as well as integrating well into WordPress. It is a quick and simple install that has become popular on my blogging circles and improved community discussion for many bloggers. With a great comment management system and always necessary avatar implementation, it is a definite improvement from the WordPress setup.
The future remains promising for this plugin. They have a very active developer base that quickly upgrades their plugin when a new WordPress update comes out. At the same time, a new feature called Disqus Ranks is currently in beta, available to premium members, and will soon roll out to free users as well. The hopes is that it will reward frequent and quality comments from visitors.
We did a guest post over at Churchm.ag you should check out. Here is a link to the full post and below is a snippet:
One of the top WordPress plugins available right now is the Digg Digg plugin. With its customizable social media integration into your website and the flexible positioning, it is becoming one of the most used plugins. But the best aspect that makes it worth getting immediately is the option to allow it to float on the right or left side of your website. This allows the social media buttons to always be present to your viewers and has the potential to significantly improve traffic to your site.
Yet, even with its great compatibility and marketing design, the look of the widget is only average. Fortunately, they encourage users to stylize the widget so that it is seamless with your web design. We will show you one great way to incorporate a CSS3 design technique to better integrate the Digg Digg plugin into your website.
To access the plugin’s editable CSS code, login to your website, click on the ‘Digg Digg’ button in the administration menu and select ‘Floating Display’. Assuming that this display is enabled, you have configured where this menu would be displayed, and the position of it in relationship to your content on the page, we can move down to ’5.1 Initial Position’. In the textbox, add the following code within #dd_ajax_float { }.
We did a guest post over at Churchm.ag you should check out. Here is a link to the full post and below is a snippet:
WordPress is a powerful platform to use, making it the most utilized blogging platform. One of the aspects that make it such a popular and customizable program is the custom page template. Page templates are custom files that will be put in your theme directory. When finished, you will be able to create a new page for your WordPress site and set the layout to your customized template. This can turn any ordinary page on your website from a simple page of content into a dynamic webpage.
We will take a look at how to setup a page template file and add it to the page you created. But what the page template actually does is up to you. Maybe you will display a photo album from last month’s Church potluck or create a page that displays all of the free files you have ever uploaded onto your website.
The new WordPress default theme, TwentyEleven, actually has two page templates in its install: Sidebar Template and Showcase Template.
