Web Design – Page 4

Advantages of becoming a top commenter on this site

March 25, 2007 by Tricia

In an earlier post I was telling you that I’ve been working on our sites and that I’ve added a few new WordPress plugins as well.

One of the new plugins is one that allows me to show who my top commentators are in my right side bar.

See that area below Recent Comments? Yep, that’s where my top commentators for each month will be show. I can change that to daily, weekly, monthly or yearly top commentators if I want. Right now it’s set to monthly but I might change it to yearly.

One thing that I like about this new plug in is that it gives my top commentators a real link. There is no rel no follow tag added to the link, so Google can pick up the link. This might help you, my visitors and those making comments, build your sites Page Rank. So it’s in your best interest to leave comments on this site and work towards becoming the top commentator each month.

SimpleTags a great WordPress plugin

March 25, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve been busy working on organizing, fine tuning and even changing the themes for several of the blogs that my husband and I work on.

One of the new WordPress plugins that I’ve added to a few of our sites is called SimpleTags. It’s a wordpress plugin that allows me to tag each post, bring up related posts, and create meta tags for each page of my site, as well as a category and tag cloud.

Take a look at my category section on the right. I have a tag cloud there now so that you can see what subjects I talk about most. The tag cloud is in a roll up menu that I made using the Flooble Expandable menu script, and I’ve labeled the cloud “Category and Tag Cloud”. You can’t miss it if you’re looking for it.

If you do take a peek at the tag cloud you’ll notice that one of the biggest topics right now is “General Musings”. Now really … not everything I write about can be categorized as general can it? In fact there’s probably very few things that really are general. I just got lazy when I created this site and didn’t use categories as well as I should have from the start.

I know that a lot of people make this mistake. How many of you have a huge category section called “Uncategorized”? Yeah, I suppose the subjects you’ve talked about really are uncategorized if you left them in the default WordPress category, aren’t they? LOL

If you want to optimize your site so that some of the topics you write about will end up coming up on search engine search result pages you really should go over your site and make sure that each of your posts are categorized properly. Or that your posts are at least in somewhat descriptive categories. Believe me – you’ll end up getting a few more visitors if you do categorize your posts properly, and your current visitors will be able to explore your site and read any posts that you’ve written about on subjects that interest them too.

Use Quik-Find contextual ads to replace Adsense public service ads on your site

March 15, 2007 by Tricia

I don’t use Google Adsense on this site, but I do use it on a number of our other blogs and websites. I do pretty well with Google Adsense, but sometimes I think I could be making more money if it showed ads that were even more relevant to my sites content.

I may have a solution that lets me combine Google Adsense and another form of advertising at the same time. You see, I was just visiting the Quik-Find.com: Web Search Engine Directory and I discovered that they have an advertising program called Quik-Find contextual ads.

You can use this new ad program to replace the public service ads that show up in your Google Adsense advertising area from time to time. You can also use it to block out your site competitors ads too. You might even find that you make more money using the Quik-Find Contextual Ads than you do with Google Adsense and decide to get rid of Google Adsense altogether.

One great thing about Quik Find’s contextual ads service is that, while it is contextual, you can still select what type of content gets advertised on your site. To get more information about this new advertising system please visit quik-find.com.

Tricia’s Musings gets organized!

March 15, 2007 by Tricia

Remember those posts two weeks ago about finding this sites focus and working on re-organizing it?

Well ….

Didn’t anyone notice that the site looks a little bit different?

I really thought about designing or heavily modifying an existing theme to give this site a new look, but it seems that the majority of my visitors actually like this fresh green theme, so I decided to keep the current theme.

I did however tidy up the sidebars. See … look at the left side, isn’t that a lot nicer to look at? Yes I still have banners and advertising but a lot of it is in expandable menus now so that if you chose to look at the banners and buttons you can easily do so. I got rid of a few things too. Hopefully the site loads a bit faster now.

The right sidebar still has advertising but it’s mostly text ads. I did ad one new form of advertising to the right sidebar thought. See the “Ads by AuctionAds” section in the center of the “google” area in the right sidebar? That’s a new advertising site created by Text-Link-Ads. AuctionAds just launched a few days ago.

The auction box shows hot eBay auctions from categories that I’ve selected for this site. Keep an eye on that box. You might find a deal that you can’t pass up.

Take a good look around. I’ve added some new plugins that help organize this site better, and provide some benefit to my regular visitors.

I’ll tell you more about the plugins in another post.

Mind numbing weekend

March 12, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve spent the weekend working on all of our websites and blogs. Mostly behind the scenes stuff like organizing categories and fixing messy code. Mind numbingly boring stuff if you ask me, but it had to be done.

As you can see I haven’t even begun to start fixing this site up. Yes the side bars will get a make over and I’ve got some new features that I want to try out on this site that I think you’ll enjoy.

Unfortunately when I get busy working on a site I loose track of time. Next thing I know it’s 4 a.m. and if I’m close to finishing what I’ve been working on I just stay up and finish it. No matter how tired I am.

I wish that I could tell you that I did something exciting this weekend, but unless you find staring at a computer screen exciting it’s been a pretty dull weekend over here.

There should be some great changes on all of our sites over the next week. As you visit this site and our other sites and notice the changes I’d love it if you’d give us some feedback on the new features and look of the sites.

Advantages of becoming a top commenter on this site

Tricia’s Musings gets organized!

Mind numbing weekend

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