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Helpful Articles and Tutorials about Wordpress, Web Design and Internet Marketing

How to Make Your Face Show Up Beside Your Google Search Results

06 January

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Wherein we expose the voodoo of making your picture show up next to your Google Search results, which can increase your click through rate 150% Have you noticed lately that Google has begun showing some people’s pictures next to search results? This is known as a “rich snippet” and it’s basically cheating at search engines. Everyone who has a blog and cares about their Google search rank should make this happen, so without further ado, here’s how to make your photo show up next to your search result in Google, and how to test to make sure that you’ve configured everything right. But first, why is having your image show up with your results important? Benefits of Having Your Photo Show up Beside Google Search Results Internet marketers know all about the effect a smiling face can have on first impressions and sales conversions. Seeing a human image increases warmth and trust, and generates a better first impression than the same content without a picture. Faces are fascinating, and the effect holds true regardless of the forum. Since people spend mere seconds skimming search results before they click on one, a picture could make the difference between being clicked on [...]

Dark Side Web Developer Archetypes

09 December

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What follows are the four most common dark side web developer archetypes, complete with tips on how to spot them. Have I missed anything? Have you experienced one of the [d]archetypes? Let me know in the comments…  The Time Machine These people are human time machines, using the power of the internet to take people back to yesteryear through a combination of clip art, gradient overlays, bad use of space and comic sans. Their own website looks like it’s circa 2000, yet they’re offering their services to others. This person should be in the market for a web developer, not trying to become yours. Tell tale signs: Their website is either hugging the left hand side or it is in the middle of the screen, as in the very middle, like there are gaps above and below it. Excessive use of clip art and gradients in buttons and backgrounds. Tiny squares representing their portfolio. The site is either too cluttered or has too much void space. The results: A website that looks like it should only exist through the Way Back Machine. It’s difficult to manage from the back-end (you probably won’t even be able to do it yourself) and has [...]

Buying a Theme vs. Getting a WordPress Website Developed by a Professional

09 December

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There are many ways to go about getting yourself a WordPress website. This post explains the difference between buying a premium WordPress theme and getting a site developed by a professional (and everything in between). WordPress is as accessible as it is versatile, and therein lies its beauty. On the one hand, you can get a free wordpress.com hosted blog, use their default Twenty Eleven theme or pick a free one from their search repository and use the widgets they provide. That’s for the casual user, someone getting their feet wet in the world of blogging until they either lose interest or discover they need something more self-branded and professional. On the other hand, you have self-hosted WordPress engines powering corporate websites with thousands and thousands of dollars in development costs. Chances are, what you need is in the middle. Free Versus Premium WordPress Themes The first thing people realize they need to do when they venture into the world of WordPress is pick a theme, which determines the main look of their site. They scan through the free themes and quickly realize the downside (I’m not going to create a bullet list for the upside, because the only benefit to using [...]

Facebook Cover Photo Design Ideas and Templates

10 May

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This post includes some of the best examples of Facebook cover photos, ideas and instructions for creating your own and Photoshop templates for pages and profiles that you can download. Post your own cover photo in the comments if you’d like to share your work! Death, taxes, and now — Facebook timeline. Whether you accepted your fate graciously as an early adopter or kicked and screamed until Facebook forced the new profile upon you, there’s only one thing to do at this point. Design your cover photo. For all of timeline’s faults, it provides a golden opportunity to showcase yourself or your business. It’s essentially free internet billboard space, and on the worlds most popular website no less. You shouldn’t let it go to waste. So without further ado, let’s get started! Cover Photo Dimensions Cover photos are basically 850 pixels wide by  315 pixels tall, but your primary profile picture violates the bottom margin a bit on the left hand side. As you’ll be able to see from the cover photo design inspiration examples I’ve included below, there are some pretty cool things you can do to play off that setup and the other geography the new layout provides, like [...]