blogging 102

Reading time: 9 – 15 minutes Every so often I take time out of my busy Email Marketing Consulting schedule and steal an afternoon just for myself. A few months ago I decided to take one of those days. With five glorious hours ahead of me I pondered how best to enjoy my break. I really wanted to do something memorable, something that would inspire me and something that would last long after my special day was over. So I did what everyone does on an afternoon off I got a tattoo. I had never gotten a tattoo before and did not know which shops were the best but I was on an e-newsletter list of a shop called Brave Tattoo. I had joined the list while they were running a contest to win a Harley. I didnt win but stayed on the email list because I was impressed with how creative the tattoo shop was with their e-zine. There was always two or three professionally written articles about tattoos and a whole bunch of tattoo design suggestions. I really looked forward to their bi-weekly e-zine... 

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes The purpose of this post is twofold in terms of blogging.  First I wanted to introduce to you two plugins you might not have ever seen.  Secondly I wanted to talk about professionalism for designers. Plugin One is an affiliate publishers best friend.  Adrotate is every bit as good as Max Blog Press’s Ninja Affiliate.  Not only will the last several versions of this plugin provide you with quick affiliate masking slash redirect through your own site, it keeps track of your banner impressions and click throughs.  Version 2.4 even has a feature to block banners when they reach a certain number of impressions or clicks. Unlike Ninja Affiliate version 2.3.1 of AdRotate works quite well in WorPress Mu.  There are things to be aware of though.  If you use the banner wizard you can not later make the link an auto redirect link, you will have to stop rotating the banner and make a new entry.  Secondly in version 2.4 he automatically sticks a link back... 

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes The First thing you need to do when thinking about a theme is deciding who you are designing it for. There are a number of tools that will tell you what your visitor’s monitors resolution is set to and this is a key factor to consider. As often as not these days new computers come with a wide screen monitor and most of the older 17 and 19″ 4:3 monitors were capable of 1280×1024. Like I said use one of the many site tools to figure out what size people are viewing your blog at. For me 1% were using 640×480, that is just too small to design an effective money making blog. 9% were doing 800×600, which can be done, but 90% of my viewers were using something more, so I chose to go bigger. Only 25% had resolutions above 1440, meaning If I went higher than that 75% of my people would lose something and I Almost certainly would love that low res 10% crowd. I settled for going with a width of 1000 pixels for the theme. Some of the...