Sep 24 2008
Host Color, a global Quality Web Hosting provider introduced today it’s special WordPress Hosting service. The company launched WP hosting plan priced at $2.99 per month to provide more choice for the growing community of WordPress site owners.
May 28 2008
Some people say they like the previous version of WordPress blog platform. Well, there are few reasons for me to believe that. I found personally the new WordPress version has few issues with my web hosting environment. Although in my previous blog post I said that the new features of WordPress are neat, the image upload issue I just discovered made me somehow upset. Fortunately, the customer support representatives of my web host, Top Hosting Center, quickly resolved the issues. And guess what? They told me how they did it! Very excellent customer service and transparent indeed.
Continue Reading »
Apr 15 2008
The Web has expanded immensely – so much that advertisers clash with each other in getting good advertising spaces on high traffic websites to promote and gain exposure of their products and services.
Basically advertising involves costs as it does on television, radio and newspapers. Online advertising however, offers various ways to promote your products and services for free. Social media channels and online communities offer such opportunities in getting your products known beyond geographical borders.
Like other media channels, paid online advertising on high-traffic websites usually is a cost-efficient and timely marketing move. However, there are situations when such activities backfire especially when the advertisements are placed on irrelevant sites or placed in wrong advertising space.
This blog post sparks a series of discussions about online business promotion. Of course, this is aimed to help you bait real customers in the World Wide Web and making more money from them.
To have a head start, we will discuss the first and significant online business promotion channel: search engines. Continue Reading »
Apr 02 2008
Last March 29, I saw another notice in my WordPress control panel telling me that the latest version of WordPress, version 2.5, has been released and my installation must be upgraded. I’ve read from many blogs that this version will bring new looks and speed to the WordPress control panel. So, without further ado, I instantly downloaded the new version from WordPress official website and upgraded mine.
The upgrade process went very smooth and definitely transparent. As usual, WordPress guys made things easy – no “computerese,” no jargons whatsoever, just good steps. After I upgraded, I was redirected to the WordPress login and it is where my impression begins.
The login design has been changed for better. It looks very neat and fresh now, unlike the blue one that we used to see in the previous version which, in my opinion, was large.
The center of improvement came after I logged into my WordPress control panel. I was surprised – indeed, there are big changes. The first thing I noticed basically is the design. The new WordPress 2.5 default dashboard configuration displays recent comments, incoming links, WordPress development blog, popular plugins and the typical box news.
The default main menu now comes with only five items: Write, Manage, Design, Comments and Ratings. The Write menu item when clicked displays the Write Post page featuring the revamped (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) WYSIWYG WordPress blog editor. The Manage menu item lets you manage posts, pages, links, categories, tags, link categories, media library and like before, boasts WordPress Import and Export function. The Design menu, on the other hand, is equivalent to previous “Presentation” menu. The Settings, Plugins and User menu items are now displayed in small font to the upper right portion of the administration panel.
Another thing that is noticeable with the new WordPress is the speed. It is a whole lot faster than the previous one – one thing many bloggers will like (including me). The one-click plugin upgrade is superb. It asks for your domain’s FTP login information, and then it upgrades the outdated plugins for you.
My conclusion is that I very much prefer the previous blue-themed control panel. When I found that the color scheme can be changed to classic through the Settings, however, my little disappointment vanished. Now, WordPress 2.5 looks good and I love it like other bloggers do.
Mar 18 2008
Few days after I published my previous post disclosing the features of their Speedy hosting plan, Top Hosting Center (THC), sent me a token of appreciation through email. They put a file attachment along with their message which I initially suspected a virus – hehehe – no, it was not. The file was zipped and when I took a peek through WinRAR, I figured out that its contents constitute a theme for WordPress, a popular blog platform written in PHP language. Why the hell would they give me that? Oh, intriguing. What do you think?
So what I did is that I unzipped the files to my local disk and uploaded them to this WordPress-based blog. I logged in to my blog’s control panel and see how the theme looks. The theme is called “THC Alpha,” a two-column WordPress theme that looks good. I was impressed of the decency of the design which carries an air of formality.
Download the THC Alpha theme for WordPress here.
Here are the screen captures of THC Alpha Wordpress theme:
My review for THC’s Speedy hosting plan is still being written and no matter how many WordPress themes they will send me, it will never influence my judgement to their Speedy plan. Anyway, THC made it clear that what they gave was just a token of appreciation – so there is no bad motive behind unless you think otherwise.
Visit official Speedy hosting plan page at THC.
I just added another item in the menu called “Resources.” That page will be populated with useful media (themes, e-books, among others) that you would like to check and download. It is pretty barren as of the moment though, but you will love that page eventually.
Feb 08 2008
Earlier today, I came across a website called JS-Kit from nowhere. I was immediately caught by it when I read that it offers something interesting to websites and blogs. Because it sounded like there’s another useful WordPress plugin to me, I decided to peruse further and give their services a try. Now, here’s my honest review after playing with their services for few hours.
What is JS-Kit?
I was intrigued when I found out that JS-Kit is not a set of WordPress or any blog platform plugin – and it’s not exclusive to blogs either – it works with any web page. JS-Kit is in fact, a package of web services that you can take advantage in many ways. It works similar to a widget. JS-Kit comprises of five different services that work amazingly with each other: Navigator, Ratings, Reviews, Comments and Polls.
The installation is flawless and very easy. You only need to insert the code snippet they provide for each service, and then load the page in the browser and poof – there you go. If you’ve ever tried using Google Analytics or StatCounter’s web analyzer codes then you’ll find the installation process similar.
One of JS-Kit’s weaknesses is that it will not run on websites that block JavaScript (since it is mainly powered by that scripting language). Therefore, there is no hope adding it on MySpace or Friendster which potentially could promote socialization.
Jan 19 2008
For quite some time, I’ve been using Google Analytics for my WordPress-powered blog as my primary tool in tracking and analyzing my website’s traffic. It’s a free service (like other Google features) for site statistics and help site owners in their decision-making, site planning, and marketing. It benefits even more those site owners who avail user Google Adwords to increase their marketing, since that service works in conjunction with Google Analytics.
Recently, I found another free statistical tool that works similarly like Google Analytics. However, unlike Analytics, it does not work only as an invisible web tracker, but it can be configured to act as a hit counter too. It is also much faster and responsive, quickly loading than the Google counterpart. It accurately reports site statistics in real-time. The reportage includes popular pages, entry and exit pages, referring sites, keyword analysis, search engines, visitor information, paths and length, visitor map, among others.
Jan 15 2008
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of my favorite buzzwords in the Web 2.0 era. It refers to the process of improving the volume of visitors, the quality of traffic from search engines, and higher ranking of a website in search engine results page (SERP).
SEO is significant to site owners (regardless of the nature of the site) because it promotes greater chance of getting a higher position in SERP. Higher rank usually means greater probabilities of being searched by people, bringing traffic to their website and creating opportunities. If you just created a blog website powered by WordPress or you have an existing site that is not optimized, here are the most common effective methods you can do to improve your SERP rank.