Theme Review: NewsPress

By Kevin | Published: November 7, 2009

From time to time, I like to showcase great themes that bloggers can use on their site. This time around, it’s a WordPress theme designed for blogs and magazine sites, with an emphasis on images. You can find it here, but read on to learn more about the theme and how you can use it to your benefit.

NewsPress is a magazine and news theme designed for any niche, but for the bloggers who want a clean, professional-looking theme that costs nothing.

NewsPress WordPress Theme

You’ll notice that the theme has a clean overall look, which is both optimized for speed and search engines.

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RSS is Quickly Dying, Twitter is Replacing It

By Kevin | Published: November 5, 2009

I realize I might receive disagreement from some, but these are the ways I see RSS subscriptions and Twitter followings growing or evolving.

The past few years have been great for bloggers. Finally, they’ve been able to receive some form of a reward for their work, even though the traditional media still feels that they [we] should but shut up. Traffic grew, regular/return readership rates increased, and blogs saw success in many ways. Bloggers went onto bigger things, as they outgrew their small blog, and there are many bloggers that are making a full-time income, or more from their writing and work.

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Use FiveSecondTest for Important Design Decisions

By Kevin | Published: November 3, 2009

FiveSecondTest is one of those tools that was created to do one thing, and one thing well, and in this case that is testing websites. Let’s say you are a designer and want to roll-out a new design for your blog, but don’t know where your focus currently lies. After all, you might think differently from what your visitors think, mainly because you are the designer, and they are the visitor,  if you get the point.

FiveSecondTest

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Can Link Exchanges Still Work?

By Kevin | Published: November 2, 2009

Link exchanges were introduced when there were relatively few blogs. People just didn’t go on the web to look for new content. They typically only visited a few sites per day, due to the speed of the Internet, and everything was more close-knit. Today, there are millions upon millions of blogs, and there are some that are so similar to one another, that it is difficult to tell them apart.

When you think about link exchanges, it traditionally revolves around sharing some of your favorite websites, with the other blogs returning the favor. Today, the only way to do this is by focusing on some of your favorite blogs, and linking to others through regular posts.

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Comparison: Blogger and WordPress.com

By Kevin | Published: November 2, 2009

I’ve received some questions in the past about the main differences between the blog platforms, and I want to clear some of the misunderstandings up as best as I can.

This chart compares the main features of both platforms, including the positives and negatives. Obviously, I couldn’t incorporate everything into the table, and some of the features I am a little more biased towards one platform, but in the end, it is a good comparison between the two.

BloggerWordPress.com
Online Storage1GB, Stored within Picasa Web Albums, Upgrade to 10-400GB ($20 to $500 per year)3GB, Stored within Your Blog, Upgrade to 5-25GB ($20 to $90 per year)
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Link: Woopra versus Google Analytics

By Kevin | Published: November 1, 2009

Google Analytics has been the main player for nearly everyone that has a blog. The suite and tools included are enterprise-class, giving you everything you need to run a campaign or track what people are searching for within your site.

Google Analytics versus Woopra

Woopra recently came out of private beta, and now everyone can have an account, but for anyone with over 30,000 page views during the month, they will have to upgrade to a $4.95/month package or higher. Receiving ten million page views per month, you’ll be paying well over $1,800. Google Analytics is free up to five million page views, and I doubt that the limitation is enforced for all sites. As long as you spend $30 ($1 minimum budget within AdWords), you can continue using it once you break the threshold.

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A Quick “Optimization” Tip for Twitter

By Kevin | Published: November 1, 2009

This post will be rather brief, but still fairly important. Twitter has grown into a great distribution point for bloggers and content creators. The reason why? There are so many extensions that can be used. For example, as long as I have connected to TweetMeme at least once in the past, all my new articles will automatically be published there, making it possible for others to re-tweet them on their own accounts.

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Break Away from the Pack on Twitter

By Kevin | Published: October 31, 2009

Covering how to be effective on Twitter in the past, this post will continue that one in some ways, by teaching you how to become an influential part of Twitter. If you haven’t already realized this, Twitter (along with Facebook) will forever change the way we communicate with one another, in near real-time. There is no longer the wait that email used to have, plus it isn’t one-sided like chat.

Break Away from the Pack on Twitter

One of the keys to becoming a bigger part of Twitter is realizing how it works, and I’ll be covering some of those basics here.

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