Flame Scorpion

Design is very important to any website. If your website design is not that good you can always re-do it, but it will cost you a lot of time and money. Probably you have seend websites with bad design but which are still looking good. This is because the images on the website that compensate.

Most websites these days are showing a gallery of images at the middle of the homepage. In a slider you can add pictures representin your product, or you can show featured posts on your website. If you run wordpress you can install a slider plugin, there are a lot but most of them have bad design or let you only to upload certain size of photos. Recently, I stumbled upon SlideDeck 2, which in my opinion is the best slider plugin for wordpress.  [Read the rest of this entry…]

Most of the WordPress users have more than one site. Even if it is only a personal blog, or a presentation website. Usually, webmasters are having 5-10 websites to manage at one time. Few of them are websites for main businesses, others are blogs, presentation websites or feeder blogs for main websites.  In all cases, it is hard to update all of them whenever an update appears, or whenever you want to add a nice widget that you found on the web.

The standard solution for WordPress is the multi-user version. However, it is not a very good idea to have many websites under the same installation and on the same hosting, so the wordpress multi user is intended to be used by more users, not for more websites. The right solution for this situations is ManageWP. A web application that will let you manage all your wordpress sites from the same place.  [Read the rest of this entry…]

Several years ago wordpress was considered very insecure. It is an open source software, anyone can see the source code. This means that hackers can freely analyze the code for exploits. WordPress developers are working hard to keep it secure, but once in a while there are holes that no one tought of until some hacker finds them and eventually report it to others. When this happens, a security update is made to fix that hole, until anything bad will happen. What happens if you do not update your WordPress ? [Read the rest of this entry…]

The Internet has grown rapidly in the past few years. Almost anyone has access to a computer with Internet these days. This means that you can practically find all the people you know online, but the truth is that you are having a hard time connecting with all of them. Why ? Because they are using different social networks.

To stay connected with all of you friends you will have to use several social networks: facebook, twitter, linkedin, myspace, hi5, etc. Maybe you will want to ask: why not all your friends are using the same network ? There are many reasons: they are too shy to open a facebook or twitter account, they are used with the old one and don’t have the time to learn the new one, they are happy with the old one, etc.

You don’t have to change your every connection or to login into 20 social networks to stay connected with all of them. You have to use the right tools. MyLife.com is a web application that empower you to manage all of your social networks from a single place. Among the supported social networks we can find: facebook, twitter, myspace, linkedin, etc.  You can monitor the activity from every social network account you own. You can also be sure that your profile is updated in all places.

This is the video that brought my attention, making me to think that it will be possible to monitor every connection I have.

Anyone who wants to use WordPress for their blog is going to be torn between choosing a free or paid WordPress theme. In most cases, however, a paid theme will be the better option for several reasons. Perhaps one of the most significant such reasons to choose a paid WordPress theme is simply the fact that most are already search engine optimized. Regardless of your blog’s topic, you cannot ignore the free traffic that search engines can send you.

Most people who use a free WordPress theme are stuck setting up many different plugins that are required to properly optimize their blog for the major search engines. Paid themes typically come with many of these features already built in, eliminating the need for any such separate SEO plugins. This is a huge advantage for anyone who wishes to optimize their website to receive as much search engine traffic as possible. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Tracking visitors is something that anyone should care about. The more information you have about your visitors the better is for you. If you run your website or blog on wordpress you can choose to have a plugin that will deliver the stats directly to your admin panel, or to use an external analytics software like Google Analytics or Statcounter.

While both options will deliver the results that you need, the user experience and the level of detail can make the difference.  [Read the rest of this entry…]

DMOZ is probably the directory that drives the most value to websites. A site listed will get quality visitors every day and good value for search engines. People want desperately to be on dmoz and they will do anything, but surprisingly, they don’t do simple things that will count on their mission. I don’t understand how people want desperately to list their site on dmoz, but they can’t do simple tasks like writing a normal title and a good description. Few years ago I had a site with not too much links poiting to it, but when he made to dmoz, the pagerank went to 4 and I am sure that at least half of the value was from the open directory.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

An image is worth a thousand of words. How many words an infographic is worth ? Well, that depends on the amount of information on it. We would like to make a step ahead and try to bring some of the content we create into images. On the begining, our friends at Conosco created a nice infographic for us. [Read the rest of this entry…]

The latest version of WordPress is about to get released. This is not a big update, only few improvements on the user interface. For example, now you have more control from the administration panel on the template you are trying to edit. Now it is possible to make changes to a theme and preview it, but the changes won’t be visible to your visitors until you finish all the changes.

There are other small improvements in different areas of the administration panel. The most improvements are made on the code from the back, that most people never used. Some work have been done on the XML-RPC, themes and custom headers API. Also, they made optimisation and we will be able to see performance improvements on WP_Query and to the translation system.

Internet Explorer gives a lot of headaches to web developers, because the guys at microsoft was always left behind by Mozilla, Google or Apple with their browsers: Firefox, Chrome and Safari. If you want to build an original design for a website, you do your drawings, export the images, write the code and test it in different browsers. You may have errors that are easy to fix. There are 99% chances that if you run the tests on Chrome, Safari and Firefox to have to same output, but, changes are less than 5% to work well in Internet Explorer. Even if the code is w3 standard compliant, there are some things that won’t work in Internet Explorer ?

[Read the rest of this entry…]