Using Artisteer to Develop WordPress Themes

Your theme is the first thing visitors will notice when arriving on your site. Although it may be the content that drove them there in the first place, it’s the design that will help them decide on whether to stay and read more.

The Artisteer program is one of those methods that can help you develop a great looking theme tailored to your desires. There are many features in this program that make it a wonderful tool, especially for those who plan on developing more than one website.

1. User Interface – The user interface of Artisteer is incredibly easy to manage. Each tool is self-explanatory and nearly every aspect of the website can be altered. The layout of the tools is chronological and will help any user customize a blog theme from top to bottom, literally. Adding images, font sizes, icons, and more can be altered to make your site look and feel exactly how you want it to.

The WYSIWYG editor will show a representation of what your page will look like when a visitor is browsing it. Any aspect you change can be seen within Artisteer and you can make easy adjustments in order to produce the theme you are envisioning.

Whether you need a specific pixel dimension for your blog’s width or imposing borders around the blog itself to give it a drop-shadow effect, the Artisteer software can handle it all. While the preset suggestions will randomize a look and feel for the website, you can change any aspect you wish in order to create the perfect look to fit your niche.

2. Graphics – Although you don’t need Photoshop or Illustrator to create impressive graphics, it doesn’t hurt if you have these skills. You can develop all of your graphics, icons, header images, and more using any image development program you have including Paint. As long as your image is saved as a supported graphic type such as a JPG, PNG, and others you can add them to your theme.

These images can range from small icons or bullets to as large as background images for your site. There is truly no limit to what imagery you can use within the software. However, keep in mind that your website could perform poorly the larger and more elaborate your images are.

3. Exporting – When you are done with your masterpiece, simply export the theme as a .zip file that is usable by WordPress. Once you are in your Admin panel for WordPress, browse and install the theme like you would any other. Your website will look exactly as it does in the Artisteer WYSIWYG editor.

Artisteer will allow you to save these .zip files for installations or .artx files for editing your templates for future updates. You may find that a specific font or color scheme isn’t widely accepted by your target audience and using the .artx file in Artisteer will allow you to make quick changes and theme version numbers to keep track of your progress.

Looking to add that personal touch so that you get credit for developing such a beautiful template? Artisteer will allow you to embed your name, link to your website, and version information within WordPress so that anyone using or seeing your template will know who made it and where it came from. This could help others click on the information at the base of the page to drive additional traffic to your own website.

4. Ideas – Artisteer gives you the ability to create as many themes as you want for any occasion. You can make a different theme for your blog corresponding with the seasons. Holidays can be accentuated by developing graphics and color schemes that match such as cool colors and white for winter. The possibilities for design are only limited by your own imagination. Backgrounds, overlays, and even java video can be used in this development program to provide a unique look that no one else in the world has.

5. Extenuation of Development – Artisteer doesn’t just make themes for WordPress. A wide variety of other content management systems are also able to utilize these templates such as Joomla, Blogger, and Drupal. You could provide themes and designs for friends and family. You could even assist others in a professional atmosphere by helping them develop an attractive site using the Artisteer program.

6. Continued Support – As Artisteer has gained so much popularity as being one of the best template and theme design programs from the various content management systems, there is little fear from the software becoming outdated. Versions and upgrades are constantly available from Extensoft, Inc. and available forums are constantly utilized by users in order to share knowledge and help with virtually any problem should one arise. The responsiveness of the staff is impressive and they can be very helpful if you’d rather contact them directly.

You can sift through the websites looking for that perfect theme for your blog, or you can create exactly what you want. You can pay someone to develop your themes for you, or you can buy Artisteer and make them yourself whenever you want.

You don’t need extensive programming or graphic design knowledge in order to create a lavish theme perfect for your content. You only need a basic idea of what you want your blog to look like.

Author Bio:

This is a guest post by Liz Nelson from WhiteFence.com. She is a freelance writer and blogger from Houston. Questions and comments can be sent to: liznelson17 @ gmail.com.

Comodo’s Free Site Inspector –Malware and Blacklist Detection For Website Owners

Comodo recently released SiteInspector, a free service which has been designed to automatically check owner operated websites on a daily basis to ensure the sites remains malware free and, has not been captured by a blacklist. If the worst happens – Comodo will immediately notify the website owner by email, so that corrective action can be taken.

Despite the fact that the free service is restricted to checking 3 pages on a domain, it’s a tool worth considering if you are a webmaster. Any free service that can help web site owners keep the malware hounds at bay – is worth considering.

You certainly don’t want a prospective visitor to see this!

Signing up for the service is a simple process, as the following screen captures indicate.

Following initial sign up you will receive a receipt notice.

While on the SiteInspector screen, click on “Manage Subscriptions” ……..

to set up both the site you wish to cover, and the form of coverage.

Any after the fact changes, require a sign in to your account.

The first report from Comodo – click to expand.

Fast Facts:

Daily Malware Scanning – SiteInspector scans your website for potential malicious code injection on a daily basis and notifies you if any such event has occurred, so that you can take action against them in a timely fashion, before the injected code starts affecting your visitors’ computers.

Blacklist Monitoring – Comodo SiteInspector checks major blacklists such as Google Safe Browsing, PhishTank, Malwaredomainlist, Malcode, Clean MX every day to make sure your website is not listed. If it is, you will be immediately alerted so that you can take remedial action and remove your site from blacklist, minimizing the downtime.

Immediate notifications means you react faster – Immediately after a problem is discovered, we’ll dispatch an email notification alerting you. Your support technicians don’t have to wait for angry customers to complain that your site contains malicious content

Independent external testing from your customer’s perspective – SiteInspector connects to your website in the same way that a customer would. If it discovers any problems with your website, it is likely your customers will be affected too.

No software downloads. No complicated set up – SiteInspector is a website checking service that runs remotely from secure servers managed by Comodo, so the user is not required to install software on their machine or network. Account management is done via our 100% online interface. All you need to do to take advantage of this great service is sign up, configure your tests and let SiteInspector do the rest.

The Comodo sign up page is here.

Boosting Your WordPress Blog Site’s SEO And Traffic Tips

It can take some time before you get a large amount of views on your blog, but there are ways to increase the chances of internet users finding your site. You can’t just rely on referrals and traffic links – your blog needs to be optimized.

This article looks at some of the easy and basic steps you can take to improve your site’s SEO and visibility.

WordPress is by far the best site to host your blog. Even if you have a blog on your own site, you can still boost your own site with another blog on WordPress. All you need to do is create links to your original site and all your work on your WordPress blog will be working for your main business website. In this way, you are creating crucial inbound links for your website – all on your own.

So the question arises, how do you make your WordPress blog rank higher? Luckily, there are a number of plug-ins and tools you can use to boost your blog.

Here’s a look at some simple techniques related to search engine optimization that will greatly improve your blog visitor numbers.

• Use Your Own Domain Name. Domain names actually can have a lot of influence on the way your blog will come up in a search. Purchasing your own domain name and setting it for your WP blog is very easy. You want to make sure you know how to choose the right name. Do some research before you commit.
• SEO Tools. There is a range of plug-ins to improve your blog’s onsite search engine optimization. Some plug-ins allow you to track the rank of the keywords you are focusing on, while other sites will improve the way your whole blog is viewed by Google.
• Video. Videos on Google’s YouTube are a great way to get rapid results and rank high in searches. By posting your videos on YouTube, and linking your blog as a part of your video description, your chances of ranking higher are greatly increased. Always embed your own YouTube videos on your own blog, and make sure you have plenty of content with crucial keywords for Google around your website.
• Social Media.WP makes it very easy for your blog posting to interact with your social media. Add each of these functions so that you are automatically sharing your posts on your main social media profiles. Adding buttons on each of your blog pages is very simple and will make it very easy for others to share.
• Commenting On Other Blogs. By commenting on other blogs and leaving your link, you are showing interest in other people’s work, and showing a way for them to see yours. You will find that there will be many comments and links on your own site before too long. Be careful you do not start following the practice of many on WordPress, which essentially equates to spam. Spending the time to create quality relationships is essential.
• Keep it Regular. Regular posting and interactivity is essential. A new visitor will view the validity of your site by how regular you post. If you have not posted in a while, users may assume you are not there any more. Current content gives validity to your older content. If you don’t have current content, it is easy for users to assume all of your content is no longer valid.
• Submit to Blog Directories. There is a huge array of blog directories, which allows internet users to see a list of blogs on a particular topic. Constantly keep listing your blog with all and any directories you can find. The more directories you are listed with will mean a higher chance of being found.

Above all, be yourself. Keep your topics fresh. If you are interested in something, your posts will reflect that. Write when something is of interest, and keep those posts for later. Forced writing to keep to a schedule may mean you are not writing good content. Online marketing and SEO is something you build over time. The need for patience and consistency cannot be stressed enough.

Guest article from Sachin.

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Spice Up Your Blog And Forum Comments With BBCodeXtra Firefox Add-on

I must admit – I love to pore over readers’ comments following articles I’m checking out on other sites. Courteous comments (which by their nature, raise the level of intellectual persuasion), will often elevate a mundane article above the crowd of similar articles. The article may be the main meal, but reader comments are, in many instances, the spices that give it the oomph, the zest and the zing…….

If you’re the type of Internet user who likes to express your point of view, or share your wisdom and your insight by commenting on forums, on Blogs, or on any site which engages with its readers by supporting comments – then you’ll find BBCodeXtra (which adds Bbcode, HTML, and XHTML context menu commands to Firefox), very useful.

With BBCodeXtra installed you can markup your comments to display bold, italic, or underlined text, and more. As well, additional submenus increase functionality substantially.

Here’s an example in which I’ve selected “cool application” for italicizing, “just one more” for underlining, “you” to reference a URL, “much more closely”, for a block quote, and finally, “Always good to see your comments), for bolding.

The BBCodeXtra context menu commands makes it very easy to add emphasis to your comments – without the need to learn coding.

Settings menu

You can create a custom tag to insert a fixed plain text or symbols like ©, ® e ™ (both HTML entity or UTF characters).

System requirements: Firefox, Seamonkey.

Download at: Mozilla

Note: A comment tip from regular reader Michael F. pointed the way to this terrific add-on. Thank you Michael.

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Is Awesome Screenshot Browser Add-on, Really Awesome?

So, is Awesome Screenshot, a screen capture add-on for Firefox 4.0 (which I recently installed), Chrome, and Safari really awesome? If you’re an active Blogger and you have a need to capture web graphics, or you’re the type of web enthusiast who likes to share unique content, then I think you’ll agree that it just might be.

Using Awesome Screenshot by activating its Browser toolbar push button icon

(which launches the add-on’s toolbar), you can capture a visible part, a selected part, or an entire web page. You then have the option to annotate the screen capture with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and even text.

Sample Capture

Saving the image to your Hard Drive, or sharing – by uploading the image to the Pict image hosting site, is a snap. In the following illustration, I’ve uploaded the sample capture to http://awesomescreenshot.com/0879qyp64, which, when clicked, (try it), opens the following.

This neat add-on doesn’t stop there though. You can share your capture on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Buzz – and even email it with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail.

Fast facts:

Capture

• Capture visible part
• Capture any region
• Capture the whole page
• Crop any portion and show crop dimension

Annotate

• Annotate it with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text
• Erase the sensitive information with blur tool

Share

• One-click Upload the screenshot to awesomescreenshot.com
  and get a sharable link
• Hard to guess URL to allow private sharing
• Share the link to Twitter, Facebook, email etc.

To see  Awesome Screenshot in action, watch this YouTube video.

Compatible with: Firefox 4.0, Chrome, Safari.

Download at: Mozilla, or the developer’s site.

Note: No restart required for Firefox 4.0 add-on.

Just a quick word on Firefox 4.0, which I’ve been running for a few weeks.

Contrary to most of the hype I’ve been reading regarding Firefox 4.0 which attempts to reposition Firefox 4.0 as the “reinvention” of the Browser, it’s simple not so.

Yes, there are major differences under the hood in this latest version, some of which you may find valuable, but in terms of productivity increases, I doubt if an average user will notice. For example, I have a very high end Video Card which Firefox 4.0 is designed to take advantage of – I have yet to see any improvement in performance based on this.

The following type of pseudo scientific testing is misleading, and really just twists reality out of shape – “performance tests on the Kraken, SunSpider and V8 benchmarks, for example, Firefox 4 blew away previous versions of the browser, with performance results between three and six times better.” The test results may be accurate, but unless you can count in milliseconds, I doubt if you’ll notice any appreciable increase in speed.

Nevertheless, if you’re a Firefox user, you do need to upgrade for security reasons. But don’t expect that you’ll be walking into a new and exciting Browser world.

With all the new releases, upgrades, and what have you in the Browser market in the last few weeks, and the accompany trumpeting of “were the best”, “we’re the fastest”, “we’ve got the best technology”, ad nauseam – it very much reminded me of children bragging in the school yard.

It would be helpful for average users if certain tech journalists, and the product developers, stopped trying to “sell” browsers as if they were used cars, it seems to me.

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Free Yankee Clipper 3 – A Powerful Windows Clipboard Extender

Since I write a Blog article on a daily basis, which generally involves much editing, I need a Windows clipboard extender which gives me much more versatility than the standard Windows clipboard offers.

Yankee Clipper 3 is a free little application that handles Text, Rich Text, Graphics, and of real importance to me URL’s. A great feature is the ability to launch copied URL’s directly from within the program.

I prefer simple programs that are functional, easy to understand and use, and that don’t involve extreme learning curves; Yankee Clipper 3, qualifies in every way.

Yankee Clipper 3 is simply to set up, and just as simple to use.

Fast facts:

Saves past 200 text and RTF, 20 BMP and Metafile, and 200 URL clipboard entries.

Has the ability to save and re-use “boilerplate” clippings. Simply right-click on the item and select “Send to boilerplate”. Unlimited boilerplate collections can be created.

URL aware- links copied to clipboard can be instantly launched.

Can float on top of other applications for fast pasting.

No size limits for “clippings”.

Prints any text clipboard entry, nicely word-wrapped.

This is a simple program to understand and use.

Has a global hotkey to make the application visible when hidden, and another to instantly show and select past “clippings” without showing the application.

Clippings can be dragged & dropped to/from YCIII.

Can strip unwanted “quote” characters (“<“, “|”) from “clippings”.

Support for Internationalization. Install include Italian, French, and German.

Yankee Clipper 3 is a worthwhile program for students, bloggers, and writers. In fact, anyone who needs or wants to save time by collecting, managing, and reusing everything that was copied to the Windows Clipboard.

Languages: English; French; German; Italian.

System Requirements: Any 32 Bit Windows setup.

Download at: Intelexual.com (registration required).

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Free StatCounter – A Serious Blogger’s Best Friend?

Are Blog statistics important? Maybe – maybe not; it really depends on why you blog, the type of content you produce, and on your expectations for readership.

If you are a serious Blogger, you may have already concluded that the Internet playing field is not level; that your site cannot compete with corporate sites that specialize in the same content that you offer. But, there are exceptions – and your site can be one of the exceptions.

Great content is the critical ingredient in the success recipe. But, it’s not the only ingredient. I have a great many friends who are serious bloggers, who regularly produce great content, but whose readership growth does not reflect the efforts they put into creating this great content.

Anyone who has been in a management position is, or should be, familiar with this old truism from the late management guru Peter Drucker – “What gets measured, gets managed”. Having spent most of my working life in management, I can assure you of the general truth of this statement.

Measuring the performance of a business operation, (a serious blogger is in business, in a sense), and then acting on the results of those measurements, is critical to both the short and long term success of any business. Measuring customer expectations (and then listening to the customer), is arguably the most important.

We are all familiar with General Motors, a notable example of what can happen to a company which chooses not to listen to customers. Elementary analysis of customer expectations, appears to not have been one of General Motors strong points.

In order to be a successful blogger, and compete with “the big guys”, you need the ability to measure, and manage, your Blog’s important metrics. Since you can’t talk directly to your customer (the reader), to any great extent – I grant you “comments” are important – you need an unbiased tool, one you can rely on, which will will help you interpret your readers needs, wants, likes, dislikes, and more.

StatCounter is a free measurement and reporting tool (a more comprehensive upgrade version is available), which, if used appropriately, can help you measurably increase your Blog’s web presence, and help drive more visitors to your site.

Fast facts:

Free, Fast, Responsive, Quick loading and Reliable Service.

Invisible Tracking – no ads on your website.

Accurate real-time website statistics with detailed visitor tracking and analysis.

It couldn’t be simpler – pasting a piece of code into your Home Page starts the process which will provide you with the following information.

Summary

Popular Pages

Entry Pages

Exit Pages

Came From

Keyword Analysis

Recent Keyword Activity

Recent Came From

Search Engine Wars

Exit Links

Exit Link Activity

Downloads

Download Activity

Visitor Paths

Visit Length

Returning Visits

Recent Pageload Activity

Recent Visitor Activity

Recent Visitor Map

Country/State/City/ISP

Browsers

System Stats

As an illustration, here are several examples of “Recent Pageload Activity” from my site. Clicking on the graphic will increase the size, or use your Browser magnifier.

As you can see, just this one screen can tell you who your readers are, where they came from, what they found interesting, and more. To put it another way –in this case, StatCounter is reporting my readers needs, wants, likes, dislikes, and so on.

I use StatCounter every day to help me listen to my readers, and to determine what it is they need – what they want to read, and what’s important to them. Taking this small extra step, has paid off in helping me establish an Internet presence that might otherwise have been much more difficult.

If you are a serious blogger, StatCounter, used appropriately, can increase the pleasure that blogging gives you. After all, which one of us doesn’t like to see our efforts produce results.

One caveat: The free version of StatCounter is restricted to the last 500 web site hits. For most people though, this restriction should not be an issue.

You can signup for this free service on the StatCounter site.

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