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Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
15 Secrets That Can Make Your Next Blog Design More Effective
Have you ever thought about what a huge impact a blog’s design has on its perception by readers? If you’re going to run a blog as a business (or part of your business), branding should be one of your biggest considerations.
And if you’re going to pull off a successful branding job, design is essential. Having a clean, reader-friendly design that is structured to accomplish your goals is, next to having excellent content, one of the best things you can do to help your blog succeed. Let’s look at 15 secrets that will help your next blog design stand out and be successful.
10 Samples of How Blogs Display Their Posts
When it comes to designing a blog, one of the main elements of the design is how the posts are going to be displayed on the front page. Here you see some trends and samples of how other blogs are displaying their posts.
There is no perfect recipe for designing the way a blog will be displayed, it vary mostly depending on the content of the blog, the style of it’s design, the amount of posts made and much more. The most important thing is to first select all elements that you want to display and place them the way it will play out the best on your design.
5 Essential tips to Create a Good and Original Listing Post
It’s easy to see that “Roundup/listing” posts are the biggest blogging trend of the year; every single blog you go to has a listing of something, the coolest this, the best of that, some blogs don’t even have any other content besides listings.
It’s very hard to be original when you have thousands of listings being posted everyday, and you don’t want to disappoint your users by showing them something they have already seen before.
Pushing Your Blog to the Top — 10 Ways to Make it Happen
With an average of over 900,000 blog posts being made per 24 hour period, it’s no doubt that it’s easy to fall into the sea of unknown blogging mediocrity. But have you ever noticed how some bloggers meet with almost instant success?
Have you ever been to a blog and immediately felt at home? Have you seen how some blogs become landmarks, places that people refer back to and compare other blogs to? Here are 10 ways to make your blog one of those landmarks.
The Benefits of Running a Blog as a Freelancer (Tips Included)
Blogging is a great way to advance your career and business, even if your only willing to blog part-time. Starting a blog is a fun way to compliment your portfolio, share what you know, get into the community, and overall upgrade your freelancing career quite a bit. Here are a few of the benefits, and 20 tips to get you started. read more
10 Must-Have Plugins for Your Wordpress Design Blog
Wordpress is used by bloggers and content managers everywhere. It’s particularly popular amongst the web design blogging scene, mainly for it’s ease of use and it’s massive library of plugins that extend the functionality far beyond what the bare bones system offers.
Let’s take a look at 10 must-have plugins for your Web Design related blog… read more
101 Killer Wordpress Plugins to Meet Anyone’s Needs
Wordpress is easily the best and most robust blogging platform available today. Part of the reason for the success and “staple” status of Wordpress is due to the availability of thousands of plugins that can take your blogging experience from novice to pro overnight.
Thanks to the Wordpress community, there has probably been a plugin (or 6) developed for nearly every problem/situation/need that has ever arisen when it comes to using Wordpress. read more
Create a Community Blog with 10 Wordpress Plugins
1. Customize Your Community
This plugin will allow you to create custom login, registration, and lost password pages, while letting you place them within your current theme.
The Customize Your Community (CYC) Plugin for WordPress was conceived by Sugarrae will help you theme your backend WordPress pages using your existing WordPress theme and will not show obvious traces and branding of Wordpress on the registration, lost password, login and logout pages to all users. Additionally, the CYC plugin will also theme profile.php pages for all registered users that are labeled as “Subscribers” in your administration panel as well as redirect “Subscribers” to their profile page upon login, bypassing and hiding the traditional WordPress dashboard”.
It also adds in the possibility to show a captcha on the registration form.
2. Register Plus
Register plus can add custom fields to your registration page, and let users set up their own passwords. Check out the plugin information below for even more features.
Enhance your Registration Page.
Custom Logo Tired of that WordPress logo getting all the attention? Upload your own custom logo image and get your brand in the spotlight.
Password Field Hate those forgettable auto-generated passwords? Allow your users to set their own prefered password during registration. Includes that sweet Password Strength Meter from the Profile page.
Invitation Codes Is your blog super exclusive? If so, you better require an invite to join your high end crew. Setup multiple codes and track where your new users are coming from with the optional Invitation Tracking Dashboard Widget.
Disclaimers Worried about legal liabilities? Setup a general disclaimer, licence agreement and/or privacy policy for new users to agree to during registration.
Captcha Validation Hate spam? If you don’t want those spam bots registering with their very own passwords, you need some protection. Includes a simple captcha easy enough for real humans to read as well as the ability to add a reCAPTCHA.
User Moderation Need absolute control? Check out every new user yourself and hand pick who can stay and who gets the boot before they are able to login to your site. (Manage under Users > Unverified Users)
Profile Fields Want more done sooner? Have new users fill out there entire profile or just bits you need all during registration, you can even make them required.
User Defined Fields Not enough info yet? Add your own defined fields to the registration page for users to fill out. It also adds the new fields to the profile page as well so current users can add their own info and update as needed. Now includes the abililty to add date, select, checkbox, radio and textarea fields!
Duplicate Email Registration Got multiple users using the same email address? Easily solve this prediciment without forcing them to sign up with unneeded email accounts. Also useful for administrators to create another account with one email address.
Customized Admin & User Registration Email Tired of the same old emails when someone new registers? Spice it up with your own From/Reply-To address, customized subject and customize the entire message! You can even disable those tiresome Admin notifications for new registrations.
3. WP Forum
While BuddyPress still holds the most popular title for Wordpress forums, this plugin will create a forum without the need of Wordpress MU. It’s also much more customizable with a bit of PHP knowledge.
Simple discussion forum plugin for WordPress. With support for different skins, 3 included by default, changeable from the WP admin interface. Admin can choose if unregistered posting is allowed and Captcha (optional) is used for spam control. Tight interaction with Wordpress makes an easy to use and aminister plugin.
4. WP Polls
A popular widgetized plugin to create custom polls.
WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.
All the information (general, changelog, installation, upgrade, usage) you need about this plugin can be found here: WP-Polls Readme. It is the exact same readme.html is included in the zip package.
5. IntenseDebate Comments
Adds a bunch of functionality to the comments section of your blog, encouraging comments and debate.
IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!
Full comment and account data sync between Intense Debate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments.
6. User Community
This plugin allows more options for user profiles. With this plugin users can have profile pages, photo galleries, link to posts from your blog on their profile, and much more.
A plugin to build user communities all around WordPress, mainly it’s around having a well integrated profiles system. This plugin will provide all needed functions and widgets to make it easy and flexible the ways to show all information about a user. Also, there is some user privacy settings to permit which information to show in the profile page.
With this plugin, you can manage you user profiles and have a user list. For each user, a profile page is provided. The information shown in the profile page is based on your privacy settings. Also, you can select the user list order, ascending or descending, and ordering by different fields: ID, login name, display name or date registered. WordPress avatars can be replaced by local avatars. And also a user picture at big size, is shown in the user profile page. This requires the Gallery component running. For the user profile pages, the labels for IM addresses can be replaced by your own. (As example, you can change ‘Yahoo IM’ for ‘Skype’). This requires the upcoming WordPress 2.8 or to apply this hack to your current version.
In the WordPress login page, the WordPress logo can be replaced, and the links will be changed to point to your blog. (By default the WordPress logo is shown and the links point to the WordPress site).Features:
- Paged user list and the user profile page.
- Customize the logo on your login’s page by uploading a new logo.
- Manage user galleries and upload user pictures.
- Moderate user pictures by using WordPress capabilities (Optional moderation).
- Links posts authors and comment authors to user profile (Optional).
- Use the local avatars if them exists. User can select which picture to use as Avatar.
- User photo is shown in the profile page. A photo Gallery is also provided. User can select the picture to show from loaded images.
- Settings page for profiles and gallery.
- A plugin to use local avatars in bbPress 0.9.x. (Needs an additional download).
Future Planned Features
- Custom user fields. For registration and profile.
- Privacy settings per user.
- Private messaging.
- bbPress forums integration. (Evaluating this feature).
- And some other under consideration. Like a framework to extend the plugin’s functionality.
Languages included:
- English
- Spanish
- Catalan by Jordi Canals
- German by Arne Gockeln
- Dutch by Johan de Meijer
- Portuguese (Portugal) by Tiago Almeida
- Portuguese (Brasil) by Alicia Ayala
- Italian by Livio Di Puorto
- Byelorussian by Marcis Gasuns
7. Co-Authors
A simple Wordpress plugin that allows you to have multiple authors on a blog post.
Allows multiple authors to be associated with a post. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. Additionally, co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is usual). Editors may easily add co-authors via the ‘Post Author(s)’ or ‘Page Author(s)’ boxes on the post/page writing page.
8. Admin Msg Board
An internal message board for those with access to the WP admin only. Great for blogs with multiple authors.
Admin Msg Board is a plugin for Wordpress that will add a messaging system in your Wordpress admin area. This works for weblogs that are written by more than one blogger, so they can communicate with each other, without leaving the WP system. Messages can have up to 140 words like in twitter, and you can choose whether to write to all users or select recipients
9. GD Star Rating
A well-developed star rating system for posts, pages, and comments. Many star templates available, with developed customization.
GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and also add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating. Plugin also supports multi ratings.
10. Invite Friends
Once a community WP site is all set up, encourage new users with this plugin.
This plugins main goal was to provide the ability to any of your registered users, to invite more people to the community.
Some functions:
- invitation sending
- invitation cards limit per site
- after activation, the user is logged in automatically
- after activation, the user can be redirected to a custom URL
- activation screen is using the same styles as the login screen (if you have customized login screen it will affect the activation screen as well)
- Dashboard for custom settings Plugins > Invite friends settings
- i18n support (localized messages)