BlogCraving

PSD to WordPress Conversion Instructions

January 21, 2012 By Travis 1 Comment

Section 1 – Designing a WordPress theme in Photoshop

Designing a theme for WordPress in Photoshop is straightforward. In our example today, we will create a simple two column fixed width theme. Before we start, we need to decide what the width of our theme will be. I chose a 980-pixel sixe because it will fit on most screens without the need to scroll form side to side, as most screens today are at least 1024 pixels wide.

To get started create a rectangle that is 1024px x 768px. This will serve as our background for the theme. You can color your backgrounds or even add an image. For our tutorial, we will color the background blue.

Next, we will layout the theme container. Later this will be defined in the web pages we create, but now let’s add a white rectangle 980pxx768px. This represents the themes overall width and the container that will hold our theme.

Now that we have the basic layout done let’s look at the different sections we will be creating. Our theme will have four basic sections:

Header
Content
Sidebar
Foote

We will add each section to our theme layout starting with the header. For this tutorial, I have decided to create a header that is 175px tall and I will add 13px above the header also. To do this I will create a box that is 188px x 980px aligned with the top of the page.

I now have the basic header shape in place. Remember I added 13px for a border at the top so I want to represent that in my design. If you have an image for your header, you can now format it to the right dimensions and paste it into the PSD like this.

I have decided to put the menu right below the header and to make it approximately 30px in height. To do this, I will create a rectangle 30px x 980px under the header image.

That is it, we have a design we can now transfer to a theme. Before we start coding, let’s look at some of the basics of a WordPress theme. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Wordpress Tagged With: PSD, Templates, theme, wordpress

The Day of SOPA / PIPA Protest Begins

January 18, 2012 By Travis Leave a Comment

Google and Wikipedia have begun their protests of the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation before Congress.

<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/31100268">http://www.vimeo.com/31100268</a>

Wikipedia has taken their own site down and offered a landing page that enables users to lookup contact information for their elected officials.

wikipedia homepage sopa protest 480x345 The Day of SOPA / PIPA Protest Begins

Wikipedia's protest against SOPA as seen on January 18th, 2012.

Google also decided to make a statement. Google did not choose to take down its service like Wikipedia, but instead made their opinions very clear with a stark Google Doodle and link for more information.

google homepage sopa protest 480x350 The Day of SOPA / PIPA Protest Begins

A view of Google's homepage on January 18th, 2012 during the SOPA / PIPA protest.

Act Now

Tell congress to not censor the web and to not cripple our innovation economy. – Google Take Action PDF

Believe me when I tell you that if this legislation passes, it will fundamentally change the way each and every person in the world experiences today’s open Internet. SOPA / PIPA will release a mob of uncontrolled censor police across the web, fueled by major corporate greed.

I like Google’s SOPA information page headline: Stop Piracy, Not Liberty.

In this legislation, entire websites can be instantly removed from the Internet-based on simple claims of copyright violation or piracy by a content owner. The bill also requires pages/sites in violation to be removed from search engines and other aggregators. The simple possession of a cached page in violation, like a search engine would have for Indexing purposes, would cause that search engine to become a target.

Therefore, search engines will be forced to quickly comply with the demand to remove pages and sites from their SERPS as a matter of self preservation.

The bill also addresses the income of websites. Sites with content said to be in violation can have their advertisers prohibited from transacting with the violating site. The legislation goes so far as to force PayPal to suspend payments.

Top top it off, the bills would also force ISP’s (such as Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, etc) to block users from going to offending sites all together.

Government censorship? You’ve got to be kidding.

The power of the bill rests in the courts deciding the merits of an infringement case. A SOPA / PIPA case would essentially allow the United States Government to decide what is a true piracy claim, and how to properly handle the remedy.

Essentially, government sponsored censorship.

The very fabric of the open and free Internet will crumble once it is left up to the government to validate the web’s content. Can we afford to put this kind of power in the hands of the government?

The desire to kill Internet piracy is a nobel goal. However, it cannot come at a higher price [liberty] than the corporate interests [money] it aims to protect.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: PIPA, Piracy, SOPA

Jetpack for WordPress

January 17, 2012 By Travis Leave a Comment

The new suite of plugins called Jetpack (by WordPress.com) offers an all-inclusive set of features for self-hosted blogs.

One of the things I am asked most by friends and strangers:

That plugins do I need for my WordPress blog?

I get this question most often from people who have recently moved their blogs over from WordPress.com to the self-hosted WordPress.org version.

The core of both platforms is nearly identical with the exception that the self-hosted version requires you to install all of your own plugins. Most, but not all, of the features available in WordPress.com are available as one-off plugins in the open marketplace.

Unfortunately, you are responsible for updates and anything that goes wrong if they experience bugs.

I’ve used WordPress for about 7 years, and in all that time I have always wondered why certain plugins do not just come with the core WordPress.org download. I know the reason is that WordPress.org is an open source program that does not want to play favorites with certain developers. It makes some sense.

Finally, Automattic released a solution under the brand name, Jetpack.

Jetpack includes:

Subscriptions – Let users subscribe via email.
Image & RSS Links Widgets – Add them to your sidebars.
Gravatar Hovercards – Enhance your Gravatars by allowing users to hover over a Gravatar to see more information about that user.
WordPress.com Stats – The good old stats program you are used to from WordPress.com.
Twitter Widget – Tweet Tweet
Shortcodes – Add embeddable content, like video players, to your posts with easy shortcodes.
Shortlinks – Utilize the WP.me link shortener.
Sharedaddy – Add social media sharing buttons to your posts.
After the Deadline – Hands down the best spelling and grammar checker for WordPress.
Vaultpress – A premium (paid) service for backing up your entire blog.
Beautiful Math – Allows you to add geeky math equations in posts.
Enhance Distribution – Ping your content out to all the search engines and content aggregators.

There is a pretty significant benefit of automatic updates. The group of plugins will automatically update as new features and bugs are fixed. Jetpack also claims that new features will automatically be included as well.

I’m also glad to see that Automattic is starting to take advantage of their name…and making things Automatic.

Filed Under: How to..., Wordpress Tagged With: plugins

The First Steps in Turning Your Hobby Blog into a Business

December 29, 2011 By Travis 1 Comment

Inevitably, most hobby or amateur bloggers wake up one day and realize that they could turn their hobby blog into a business. Yeah, you might not be able to quit your day job, but you might be able to earn yourself enough money to take a vacation or by yourself a new iPad.

Mr. Hobby blogger does some quick Google research and realizes all they have to do is throw some Adsense code on their blog template, and the checks will start rolling in!

Fail.

Do not pass go. Do not collect new iPad.

What the heck happened? Mr. Hobby blogger actually has a pretty sizable following for his site all about Legos. Sure, it is a hyper specific niche, but there’s an audience for this stuff. He has even received invitations to attend major toy conventions.

Mr. Hobby blogger has actually talked to marketing folks from the Lego Group Inc. about his site, yet they do not seem interested in sponsoring his website. What’s the problem here?

No one is taking you seriously because your site does not look like a serious business.

Yes, we’re talking about kids toys here so of course it does not have to look like the Dow Jones homepage. But here is what’s making you look amateur:

Your website URL is: http://legofreak.blogspot.com.
Your email address is: [email protected]
Your “About” page talks about where you grew up and has a picture of your dog on it.
Your blog template is the same template used by 2.4 million other bloggers.
You are secretly obsessed with funny animated gif files.
You steal photos from other websites. You loooove Google image search.
Privacy policy? What’s a privacy policy?
You don’t have or use a web analytics program.

There are probably a few more issues, but these are the most common.

You’re content is probably some of the best Lego related content on the Internet. Unfortunately, it is hard for legitimate advertisers to take your site seriously.

You get an A+ for content, and a D+ for execution.

Here is your homework assignment:

Run out and register a Lego related domain name. Maybe don’t use the word Lego in the domain since it is a registered trademark, but pick something in the “building block” arena.

Once you’ve got that domain name locked down, set up a real email address. [email protected] would be lovely.

Write out a better About page. Talk about the site and the type of content you hope to deliver to your audience. If you happen to know some data about your readers, here’s your chance to highlight it. Think of this as a soft sell for why an advertiser might be interested in doing business with you.

Move your blog to a self hosted system such as WordPress.org. There’s plenty of cheap (like $6 per month) hosting out there. Sign yourself up, and get WordPress installed. It is not hard and you can get it all done in under an hour.

Pick a better template that fits your blog’s theme. If you are really committed to this, hire someone to build a custom template for you. You should be able to get this done for a less than a couple hundred bucks for something basic, but classy.

Stop stealing photos. Yes, it is easy to do a Google image search and rip pics from someone else. Unfortunately, that’s kind of illegal. However, hope is not lost! Solicit photos from your readers. I’m sure there are Lego fans out there that would love to share their creations with you.

If you find pictures on another site, ask the owner if you can use them. Often times, they’d be happy to let you use a photo in exchange for a link back to their site from the post.

Google what a “Privacy Policy” is. There are stock templates out there. Get your hands on one and get it up on your site. Many ad networks and direct advertisers require that you have a privacy policy on your site. Plus, it make it look like you know what you are doing with this whole “business” thing.

If you haven’t already, sign up for Google Analytics. Run, don’t walk. Sign up right away and start measuring your traffic. Your advertisers are going to want to know how much traffic your site gets. This is how you will know.

Get out there and make us proud.

Filed Under: How to... Tagged With: blogging, start up

Top WordPress Plugins and Widgets for Bloggers

September 29, 2011 By Matt Leave a Comment

WordPress is the best blogging tool anyone can use. The most exciting part of WordPress is that it is flexible to use and has many options. Users can get more plugins to have much more fun while blogging. Here are some recommended WordPress plugins to make the blogging experience more adventurous.

WordPress plugins and widgets are categorized based on their usage.

Manage Comments with WordPress:

Subscribe to Comments: To allow readers get notifications of latest comments posted on an entry.
WP AJAX Edit Comments: This allows wordpress users to edit commentary on posts inline.
WP Grins: Allows users to include clickable “smilies” on posts and comments.

Prevent Spam with WordPress:

Akismet: This plug-in intelligently prevents users from receiving spam.
Bad Behavior: These are a set of PHP scripts to prevent spambots from accessing the site.
Digital Fingerprint: This helps in detecting theft of your content.

Expert SEO with WordPress:

All in one SEO Pack: This helps users by optimizing the WordPress Blog for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Broken Link Checker: This helps one to monitor and notify them when the links on blogs are broken.

Easy Navigation with WordPress:

Homepage Excerpts: These make both posts and excerpts flexible to use on the homepage.
WordPress Mobile Edition: This indicates when a visitor logs on to your site through a mobile device.
Random Redirect: This plugin allows the user to create a StumbleUpon link to the posts on the blogs.
Wp-Cumulus: Makes 3D tags and categories in a rotating sphere.
Clean Archives: This displays the archives in lists with uniformity and clean presentation. Visitors can easily find the article or blog they want by checking in the category according to content, day, month and year.

Twitter Plugins with Twitter:

TweetSuite: This incorporates twitter into your blogs along with other tweet plugins and widgets.
WP Twitip ID: This allows users to put in their usernames to the comment forms on blogs.

Admin Management Tools in WordPress:

PodPress: This enables the user to add many designed features to make their blogs exciting and ideal to host Podcasts.
Admin Drop Down Menu: No more double clicking on the admin screen. This plugin allows you to choose from a list making things easier and quicker.

There are many more plugins for various necessities. You can easily download those which work best for you.

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: plugins, wordpress

Your Blog Traffic Blueprint – Part Two

September 19, 2011 By Ellen Leave a Comment

In the last post I explained a number of different ways you could get your blog optimized for traffic and then methods in which you could drive traffic through the use of backlinking. The good thing about a lot of backlinking methods is that not only do they help your blog to be recognized as important by search engines like Google; many of the methods drive traffic directly to your blog because of the insightful content you are providing.

In this post I am going to lay out a blueprint for you that you can follow step-by-step and then in later posts I will give you more details on how to actually set up each of these methods to maximize their impact on your traffic stats.

Do the preparation steps in the previous blog post.
Write five articles related to your niche – this is not as hard as it seems – you can simply rewrite your blog posts to create unique articles.
Use Camtasia Free software and PowerPoint presentation slides to create videos out of your article content – don’t mind being in front of the camera? Then use that, but you want to create five videos based on your five articles and you will need five PowerPoint presentation slide shows for traffic generation as well.
Create an audio file of all five of your articles. If your article content is quite short just make one audio file including the information in all five articles.

Okay so at this point you will have five articles, five videos, five PowerPoint presentation slide shows, and at least one audio file. All of these files will contain backlinks to your site and if you can include a call to action (without sounding spammy) in the content as well all the better. Now you have to get these out on the net.

The Articles

Your articles are going to provide a hub for the rest of your traffic efforts. Firstly you want to submit them to Ezinearticles.com. Unless you are a premium member this is going to take a few days for the articles to be approved. You are also going to submit your articles to the following sites:

But wait until your articles have been approved on Ezinearticles.com first – EZA does not like duplicate content. Don’t forget to ping your article links (the actual link of the page your article is on) as well as Stumble it, Twitter it and put the link up on Facebook.

Next you want to find some graphics to go with your article content and then head over to Squidoo.com and set up five lenses using your article content and the pictures you have collected. Each article will make an individual lens. If you have not made a Squidoo Lens before then check out the help tutorials they have on their site which are very good or courses by people like Tiffany Dow or the PotPieGirl. Again once you have your lenses finished then ping them and use your social media links to put the word out about them.

Well that should be enough to keep you going for the moment. In the next post I will explain more things you can do with your articles and also where to post the other content that I had you create.

Filed Under: How to..., Site Traffic, Wordpress Tagged With: blog traffic, traffic generation

Your Blog Traffic Blueprint – Part One

September 18, 2011 By Ellen Leave a Comment

Generating traffic to your blog is something a lot of bloggers have trouble with. But if you use the traffic blueprint I have outlined below then you will have swarms of traffic hitting your site every time you write a new post.

Setting the Groundwork

Getting prepared for traffic to your site is something that you should be thinking off from the moment you install WordPress on your new domain. Before you start generating traffic you want to make sure that you have installed all of the plug-ins outlined in our previous post here [Link to 5 Essential Plug-ins You Blog Must have]. To keep Google happy your site will need to have a Privacy Policy page, a Terms and Conditions Page and a Contact page at the very least. You should also make sure that you have a minimum of three blog posts on your blog, with more scheduled or planned before you put this traffic plan into place. Ideally you should aim for one new blog post for your blog daily for about a month, and then at least three times a week thereafter so that your blog always has good fresh content coming in.

Setting Up Backlinks

If you are not familiar with SEO then it is unlikely that you have come across the term “Backlinks” before but these are a vital part of your blogging success. In a nutshell backlinks are links on other sites that point back to your blog, or a specific blog post. The more backlinks your blog has the more valuable it is considered by Google and other search engines. So you need to set up a system to start generating backlinks as quickly as you can.

Warning: There are a lot of companies online that claim they can get you hundreds or even thousands of backlinks for the price of a cup of coffee – Do not use these methods. They are considered spam and can get your blog banned from Google permanently if you use these “Black Hat” methods.

Your pinging will already be creating backlinks for you but you can go a lot further with this. Just some of the methods you can use include

Putting articles on article directory sites like Ezinearticles and GoArticles
Putting up videos on YouTube and other video sites (TubeMogul is good for this)
Creating audio files and placing them on sites like iTunes
Blog commenting on other blogs in your niche
Forum posting on relevant forums in your niche
Posting an ebook of your content on free ebook sites like Free-ebooks.net
Setting up related pages on Squidoo.com and HubPages
RSS feeds
Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon

Now before you go thinking that this could be a lot of work, remember that you can outsource a lot of these tasks and as we will show you in the next blog post – a lot of these ideas come from recycling and repackaging content you have already created. See you on the next post.

Read Part Two

Filed Under: How to..., Site Traffic, Wordpress Tagged With: blog traffic, blogging, traffic to your blog

6 Copy Writing Skills for Bloggers

September 16, 2011 By Matt Leave a Comment

Every blogger blogging for marketing wants to improve his or her writing skills to make a huge impact on people reading their blogs. The skill to capture the reader is a priceless asset. The main trick is to present the idea to sell to the readers, without making them feel apprehensive or forced.

Here are 6 copywriting skills for bloggers to help them achieve their marketing goals without scaring the readers away.

1. Know Your Product: There is the need for the blogger to has enough knowledge about the product he or she is promoting. Be sure that what all that advertisements about the product say is true. Knowledge about the product will make you feel confident about supporting the product while writing. The reader needs your assurance of the products being genuine. After reading your blog they need to feel the need for what you have written about. Unless you sound convincing and enthusiastic yourself, they won’t be convinced either.

2. Understand Your Targeted Audience: Naturally not everyone will be convinced about what you are promoting. There are a number of reasons for that. For example; the reader might not need what you are promoting, or may not have the finances for it. Age group also matters when it comes to relating with clients. The youth requires a different approach from adults and professionals. Therefore knowing your customer type helps in knowing what approach will work well. We do not want to drive away the customer, therefore try being persuasive rather than dictatorial.

3. Outline the Benefits: Provide an insight to the benefits of buying what you’re selling. The audience needs to know what they will gain from the product. It has to work for the reader, therefore when you write, talk about the benefits. If you do not tell them what they will gain from the product they will lose interest and leave. The best approach is to highlight the benefits and make sure they are clear enough. Avoid using feathery words, be as simple and clear to understand as possible. The reader should be able to see the positive impact and how it will change their lives for the better.

4. Create the Need: This is the main challenge with copywriting skills. The reader must be left with the need to act urgently. Offer a bonus gift or present for a limited time as an available opportunity to avail right now. They have to feel the need to decide immediately. You must understand that once the reader leaves your website without acting, they are lost. Therefore, you have to attract them and convince them to take the step. Offer them a thank you gift and capture their email address to be able to send them newsletters and updates in their email.

5. Be Short and To the Point: Avoid lengthy and meaningless posts. Be short, brief and informative. Always make sure the information in your blog is authentic.

6. Revise Your Work: Always cross check your writing for spelling mistakes and meaningless sentences. Do not be repetitive and present the work in an attractive and lively way to leave the reader happy to be on your site.

Filed Under: How to...