How to add a stylish HTML code box to your website.

Some incredible and extremely underutilized websites that place the entire Photoshop experience online.

WordPress is a free, user-friendly web-design software program that anyone can use to build and maintain a website. It was originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog. But, thanks to the efforts of a large “open source” community of programmers working to extend and improve its capabilities, WordPress has become much more than just a tool for bloggers.

Why should I use WordPress?

1. WordPress designs are based on “Themes”. Themes are composed of images and cascading style sheet (CSS) webpage layouts, and this makes it very easy for us to customize the look and feel of a WordPress site using a pre-existing Theme and a new page layout created in Photoshop (or a layout imported into Photoshop from a QuarkXPress PDF, an Acrobat PDF, InDesign PDF, etc.). On the low-end of the design scale, you can basically drop a company’s logo into the top corner of the page and you are good to go!

2. WordPress software allows anyone to create and edit new web pages and blog “posts” using only a web browser. No knowledge of HTML or other code is required. The WordPress editing interface is very easy to use. It works a lot like simple word-processing software. And, the site administrator can grant various levels of access to others, allowing them to contribute to the website/blog. Because the interface is web-based, creating and editing pages can be done from anywhere with an Internet connection.

3. The blogging features in WordPress allow you to update your website/blog frequently, to receive and respond to comments from your readers, and to allow others to subscribe to your site content using RSS. This is great for your human customers and potential customers. It is also great for search engines, because search engines love fresh content.

4. There are many more features of a WordPress website or blog that make it much, much better than a traditional “static”, “brochure-style” website (i.e., built once and never updated after that) when it comes to search engine optimization and social media. And many of these features are taken care of automatically, requiring little or no effort (or programming skill) on your part.

How many people publish blogs on WordPress.com?
There are over 32 million WordPress publishers as of November 2010: 15.1 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 17.4 million active installations of the WordPress.org software as of November 2010.

How many people read blogs on WordPress.com?
WordPress.com blogs are very popular. According to Quantcast, over 260 million people worldwide visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over 2.3 billion pages on those blogs each month.

Where in the world is WordPress.com used?
We host WordPress blogs written in over 120 languages. Below is a break down of the top 20 languages – even though English is the biggest, we’re seeing some of the fastest growth in non-English speaking places (for example Indonesia, Germany, France, and Turkey):

English 66%
Spanish 8.7%
Portuguese 6.5%
Indonesian 3.5%
Italian 2%
German 1.8%
French 1.4%
Russian 1.1%
Vietnamese 1.1%
Swedish 1.0%
Turkish 0.8%
Dutch 0.8%
Greek 0.7%
Polish 0.5%
Thai 0.4%
Hungarian 0.4%
Mongolian 0.3%
Arabic 0.3%
Norwegian 0.2%
Bulgarian 0.2%

How many blog posts are published on WordPress.com?
WordPress.com users publish about 500,000 new posts on an average day (and their readers leave 400,000 new comments every day). Here’s a whole page of daily posting stats if you’d like to dive deeper into posts, pages, and comments published.

What are some of the best known WordPress sites?
From TechCrunch to The New York Times and the British Prime Minister, WordPress users span a broad range. Many of the Technorati Top 100 blogs use WordPress (as a matter of fact, WordPress is the most used platform among the T100). We showcase some leading WordPress sites here and here. And here are the top WordPress.com blogs of the moment.

What topics do people write about on WordPress.com?
All of them! Check out our tags to get a glimpse (other languages: Spanish, Indonesian, French, German, etc).

How does WordPress compare to other publishing platforms?
It’s a somewhat subjective call, but this paints a pretty good picture: Google Trends chart comparing the leading blogging platforms.

Will WordPress continue to grow?
Blogging is growing both in the US and especially internationally. Tens of thousands of new WordPress blogs are created every day – by regular bloggers, companies, large media publishers, and many others. In addition, we are seeing a trend that’s potentially even bigger than blogging: Publishers are starting to use WordPress as a platform to create all kinds of sites beyond blogs – large and small company sites, online magazines, social networks, travel sites, scrapbooking sites, contact managers, startups, multimedia archives, video sites, sports sites.

What’s the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?
WordPress.com is a service that hosts WordPress blogs. WordPress.org is a community where people work on the open source WordPress software. It’s also where that software can be downloaded to be run on your own web server (and about 28,000 people download it every day!) Still confused? You might want to read this.

What if I need help?

The core WordPress software was built by hundreds of community volunteers who wanted to make website building as easy to use as possible, and they did a great job. As you become more familiar with the program and you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 25 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home”. But programming HTML and changing .PHP files can still get pretty intimidating. That’s where awesome online services such as WooThemes comes in. WooThemes delivers top quality, cutting edge WordPress themes, but it comes with 24/7 professional support from seasoned web designers. They’ll give your site a distinguishing flash and have you up and running in no time. Their themes are free, but the support comes at a one-time fee of $120 and you can ask them questions about your site until your 106th birthday. It’s a pretty great deal, and their themes look magnificent.

What’s the history of WordPress and WooThemes?




How many people use WooThemes?

The 2008 boom in creating WordPress themes spawned a new theme factory in WooThemes. Don’t let the strange name fool you: this company is going places – take a closer look at how they’ve brought the affordable premium WordPress theme to a whole new level and you’ll see why WooThemes has been downloaded over 1,544,543 times. It has emerged as one of the premier one-stop theme shops where you can get the finest WordPress Themes and top-notch support while giving your website a shiny new look.

A list of the top 10 most commonly installed (web safe) fonts on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.

If it’s not an up-and-coming Google trend, you probably shouldn’t write about it. Well, that’s a little harsh. Finding the most searched and the highest-paying keywords on Google, with little to no competition from other websites, is the holy grail of every blogger. This does not happen over night. It takes time and energy, but for those who put forth the effort, it can be well worth it. Here are some tips on how to find the most searched keywords on web, and how to take advantage of some useful keyword tools offered by Google.

Take a Peak at Google Trends

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. This is a nice place to start when brainstorming new article topics.

Think Like a Searcher

Although most writers think the first step is to start typing searches into Google to see the results or using special tools designed to calculate a keyword’s earning potential, the first step is actually to stop thinking as a content provider and start thinking like a content seeker. It is critical that a website owner think like a searcher. Knowing how people search and how they string words and phrases together to find what they are looking for will provide more insight than many of the keyword tools available.

Think Key Phrases Not Words

Keyword is really a misnomer. Instead, a searcher usually types in a string of words that he hopes will give the search engine enough information to come back with a list of sites that have the answers he wants. These strings will then become the building blocks that writers use to produce posts that will capture the reader’s attention. Rarely are searches done using a single word. Single words are usually way too broad. Instead, searchers put together single words with qualifiers such as “best,” “cheap,” and “how to.” Developing a list of qualifiers can be helpful when developing keywords to target.

Use Keyword Tools

The next step is to use to use readily available keyword tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool. Content creators can type in a word or words to determine the CPC value. It is important to adjust the default settings in order to make the data more efficient and useful. The “use synonyms” should be checked, the maximum CPC field should be left blank, the columns to display should be “estimated average CPC,” “Advertiser Competition,” and “Global Monthly Search Volume,” and finally, the match type should be “exact.” This changes will provide a more accurate reading of the strength of the keywords or phrases.

By clicking on the top of the columns, the CPC’s can be sorted from most expensive to least expensive. These prices indicate what an advertiser will pay to have his advertisement show up in the top 3 slots. The search volume can be ranked from highest to lowest. Many keyword combinations can be entered and the results downloaded into a CSV file. This data can then be evaluated later. A keyword/phrase to target has both a high paying CPC as well as a high monthly search volume. A good starting point is $1.00 CPC (especially if a writer must share the revenue with a site he is writing for) and 1,000 searches per month. Some would suggest these figures are too low. Over time a writer will have a better grasp of these thresholds after he has some initial results from his own site.

Determine the Level of Competition

Once a handful of keywords and phrases have been determined, a blogger must decide whether or not it is even worth his time to develop a post that uses them. By entering the keywords/phrase into an actual Google search, he will quickly see how much competition he has. More often than not, the keywords will come back with millions of matches. Such a result usually means a return to the drawing board, but not always. Still more information is required before he should move on to his next set of words.

Use SeoQuake Firefox Plugin

Even if Explorer is the web browser of choice, a blogger should also download Firefox. The main reason is to be able to use “SeoQuake.” This add-on will give webmasters an opportunity to see how strong the competition is and whether or not any of the top 10 sites can be outranked. Sites that have a PR (page rank) of 3 can be targeted. Sites with only a few backlinks can be targeted, as well. Determining whether or not the actual phrase shows up in the page’s title can place a site on the target list, too. No one know exactly how Google ranks but backlinks and titles seem to affect site rankings. Sites that show weakness in these areas have the potential to be outranked in search results.

Once all of these steps have taken place, a writer is on his/her way to developing a search engine optimized article.

A collection of 35 fun and creative error 404 pages that are designed to minimize the damages of your website’s technical folly.

Some funny jokes/cartoons pertaining mainly to blogs.

The 10 most useful Firefox add-ons out there for web designers and developers.

A short list of the most visited websites in the United States so far in 2011.

How to get a clean and nicely shortened URL to use with Twitter and Facebook updates.