Blogging | Webdesigner Depot

27 Jan
15 useful plugins for multi-author blogs
Blogging, Plugins, WordPress
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Managing a blog with a single author can be time-consuming enough, but adding in multiple authors can exponentially increase the amount of time and effort it takes to manage.
There’s editorial workflow, scheduling, and author management to consider, among other things.
Below are fifteen plugins that can make managing your multi-author blog a lot easier.
They include editorial workflow plugins, scheduling and calendar plugins, and plugins that will benefit your authors or make it easier to communicate with them. Read more
23 Dec
Interested in contributing to Webdesigner Depot?
Blogging, Freelancing, News
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Webdesigner Depot is always looking to add some new regular content contributors!
With more than 80,000 RSS subscribers and over 340,000 Twitter followers, WDD is great exposure for bloggers and designers alike.
We’re looking to hire some regular paid bloggers with a strong design background.
Contributors should be able to write at least one blog post per month, between 1,200 and 2,000 words.
Read on for more details! Read more
25 Nov
How to optimize your blog’s RSS feed
Blogging, Google, SEO
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Your RSS Feed is sometimes the only way your visitors experience what you have to offer on a regular basis.
It serves to inform and entertain, but is also an essential tool for driving traffic back to your website and improving your overall search-engine ranking.
If all your feed does is show a poorly formatted excerpt of your posts, the hundreds of visitors who are not hitting your main site everyday will have no reason to read your content or share it with others.
When optimizing your RSS Feed, you have to consider the kind of content you curate. There are several reasons why you may want to use your feed to generate clicks. You may have a product, feature or art-directed element to your full site that needs exposure, or your content may be largely image-driven.
Here are some simple tips for optimizing and RSS Feed that will improve its functionality and get it to produce positive results for your site. Read more
15 Nov
Tumblogging: WordPress vs. Tumblr
Blogging, WordPress, tumblr
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Tumblogging, posting short, often multimedia, blog posts on sites like Tumblr, has been consistently growing in popularity for a couple of years now. Tumblr is the most well-known tumblog service out there, but there are also themes that can turn your WordPress blog into a tumblog-style site.
Tumblogging is a great option for those people who don’t want to post long blog posts, but do want to share images, music, videos, and other snippets of content with their followers.
There’s less pressure with a tumblog than there is with a regular blog, and it’s often viewed as a much more casual kind of presence. So the question becomes, which platform should you use?
Should you sign up for Tumblr? Or should you host your own tumblog with the self-hosted version of WordPress? Or is there something else entirely you could do? Read on to find out. Read more
26 Sep
How to become a prolific blogger
Blogging, Tips, tools
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Whether you are a web design freelancer trying to win new work, an entrepreneur promoting your web app, or a corporate drone looking to enhance your career, you will need a blog. In fact the personal blog has almost become a requirement for any web professional.
The problem is, they are a pain to keep up. Sure we all start off well. We launch our blog with one or two posts in mind. However, we quickly give up and the site is left to stagnate.
The problem is twofold: One, we run out of material worth writing about. Two, writing posts is a painful process.
What then, should we do? We know that posting a few times a year really isn’t worthwhile and yet we struggle to do anything more.
Fortunately it doesn’t need to be this way. Blogging can flow easily if you can just start and maintain your stride. Let me show you how.
Read more
6 Sep
Why you have a broken blog and how to fix it
Blogging, Blogs, WordPress
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You have a broken blog. In fact it is not just your blog. Its pretty much every blog out there. The problem is that blogs are fundamentally flawed.
Blogs are great if you use them for their original purpose. However, we often use them for a lot more than a chronological series of posts that have a short shelf life.
Take this website. The articles posted here are a valuable resource and yet, like most blogs, when they have slipped off the front page few will ever read them again.
This is the heart of the problem. Despite attempts to use categories and tags, most content posted to a blog is lost in the ever-growing archive. This is such a waste both from the perspective of the user, who is missing out on valuable advice, and the website owner who has low page views and high bounce rates.
This is a problem I face on my blog and so I decided to research possible ways of solving the problem. What follows is a list of the most effective techniques I discovered from reviewing other sites. Read more
6 Apr
How to Drastically Improve Your WordPress Blog’s Comments
Blogging, How to, WordPress
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In general, bloggers focus on traffic for their blogs; after all, numbers of visits and page views are easy to quantify and are useful if you are looking for advertisers.
However, the most successful bloggers will say that collating these figures is not what’s important; rather, creating a community around a blog is the essential part.
The first step to creating this community is to attract high-quality comments.
To help you do this, we’ve laid out some key factors to keep in mind. If you have others in mind, please suggest them in the comments below… Read more
9 Feb
The 7 Personality Types of Bloggers Today
Blogging, Blogs, Web Designers
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We have looked at the different types of designers, developers and clients in previous articles, but there is one viewpoint from which we still haven’t looked at ourselves.
We all have our designer, developer and client hats on as we surf blogs such as this one, but many of us are also bloggers. Anyone can be a blogger, but not every blogger improves the quality of content on the Internet.
A successful blog is the result of a lot of hard work by the blogger(s) who run it. The extent of its success depends on the blog’s style, its content, its focus on its core subject matter, as well as its marketing and publicity.
It is time to look at the 7 different types of bloggers who contribute to the quality of the web in the hope of creating an engaging and entertaining playground for all.
Read more
13 Jan
Selling a Theme by the Thousands: What Thesis Teaches Us
Blogging, Business, WordPress
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About two years ago, Chris Pearson’s WordPress theme, Thesis, passed the $2 million mark in total sales.
It’s a remarkable achievement for a design-based product, particularly given the industry. Here is a theme-not a platform, but a theme-beating many of the world’s leading independent design firms in revenue, all through passive sales.
This means that the design industry no longer offers only services, but also offers products to its own designers and developers.
While the industry has held many opportunities for work, a designer’s pay has traditionally been based on hours rendered and total output. Pearson has achieved a breakthrough with this theme, cementing the immense value of design-based products. Read more
6 Jan
Too Many Blogs?
Blogging, Information, Internet
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A few years ago, blogging was the be-all and end-all of online content creation.
Individuals and companies alike all wanted to get in on blogging, and they saw it as the best way to reach people.
Blogs about blogging sprouted up everywhere, telling people how to create better blogs, how to make money from their blogs, and how to get more traffic.
But has the blogosphere grown so large that there are, simply put, too many blogs out there?
Is blogging going to fall by the wayside in favor of other forms of user-generated content and social media? Where do blogs fit in the age of Twitter and Facebook? Read more
3 Sep
In-Depth Review of Tumblr’s Custom Theming Ability
Blogging, tumblr
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Tumblr. If you’re a savvy tech maven, you may have heard of, or had the chance to use, this powerful microblogging platform.
No wonder; millions of people have chosen Tumblr as their blogging service, and the average Tumblr user creates 14 original posts every month. Half of those posts are photos, and the rest consist of text, links, quotes, music and video.
Tumblr is nothing to sneeze at. It has proven itself worthy of receiving cash infusions from two venture capital firms and a number of angel investors.
If you’re thinking of climbing on board the Tumblr train, this article is your golden ticket. We’ll discuss what Tumblr is and how it works, then we’ll look at how to customize it. We’ll cap that with a few miscellaneous bits of wisdom—things I wish I knew when I got started with Tumblr. All aboard! Read more
19 Apr
20 Reasons You Shouldn’t Be a Freelancer
Blogging, Business, Corporate
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We’ve all read countless articles on the reasons you should consider freelancing.
They often make it out like anyone still working in the corporate world is just a schmuck with no ambition. But the truth is, there are plenty of reasons not to start freelancing.
Below are twenty such reasons, all laid out so you can make an informed decision about whether freelancing is really something you want to do in your career.
There’s nothing wrong with staying in a corporate job, just as there’s nothing wrong with setting out on your own. But it’s a choice every designer and developer needs to make for themselves.
One note: when we talk about “corporate jobs”, we’re talking mostly about design firms with multiple employees (whether they’re corporations or not), but most of it also applies to in-house design teams at large companies. Read more
10 Mar
WordPress vs. ExpressionEngine: Apples and Oranges?
Blogging, Expression Engine, WordPress
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This post has been a long time coming. Whether on Twitter or in the blogosphere, the question often arises, and I have been asked numerous times for my opinion on the ExpressionEngine vs. WordPress debate, and why one would choose one content management system (CMS) over the other.
My usual answer is that they cannot be compared. While WordPress had made huge strides in usability, for anything other than a blog it is an apple.
ExpressionEngine, with the release of version 2.0, makes for a lovely platform that is, as we will see, an orange. Read more
9 Feb
Free Speech and Freedom of Information: Advice for Bloggers
Blogging, Information
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The information bloggers choose to put out there often has a huge impact on how they’re perceived and what others online think about them.
And what many bloggers don’t realize is that information they put on their blogs can have a direct legal impact.
Even if what you’re posting to your blog isn’t breaking any laws, it may be considered unethical by others, which can often be just as damaging.
Here’s a guide to free speech and freedom of information specifically for bloggers. Legal issues, ethical issues, and other things to consider are all covered.
If you have additional input or advice, or disagree with anything here, please speak up in the comments. Read more
30 Nov
Internet Famous: Becoming an Online Celebrity
Blogging, How to, Internet
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Some people dream of being famous from the time they’re quite young. They crave the spotlight, and will do anything to be the center of attention.
They want nothing more than to become a celebrity, to have legions of adoring fans, and to have their name recognized the world over.
For others, fame is a means to an end. They want to be famous so people will buy their product, hire them to do something they love, or to influence others to support a cause they really care about.
They see promoting themselves and becoming a celebrity as a way to further their career, business, or other efforts, and nothing more. In many cases, these people would prefer not to be famous if they could be as effective in other ways.
Whichever category you fall into, if you’re reading this article you’re probably interested in becoming an Internet celebrity. Read on to find out more.
Read more
14 Sep
How to Display Your Content on a Blog’s Front Page
Blogging, How to, Web Design
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The front page of a blog is obviously of great importance to the overall design.
Up until a few years ago, most blogs simply showed posts in order of publication, the most recent at the top.
Then excerpts became popular, and later magazine-style front pages.
The purpose of the front page will, of course, vary a bit from one type to another; for example, a personal blog will be different from a professional multi-author blog.
In this post, we will take a look at the options that bloggers and designers have for showing content on the front page, and some reasons for choosing each. Read more
19 Aug
How to Blog Effectively
Blogging, How to, Writing
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A blog is a great tool with which to express your opinions, build a community, network with others and drive traffic to your website.
However, a lot of designers are not sure how to get started or what to blog about.
I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now, but I’ve been blogging effectively (in my opinion) for only several months.
My blog posts used to go unnoticed, and I’ve now realized that this was because of a lack of structure and commitment.
So, what’s involved in the process of writing an effective blog post?
Read more
2 Jul
20+ Useful Desktop Blog Editors
Blogging, CMS, WordPress
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If you’re a power blogger, or someone who blogs regularly, across multiple blogs, with detailed, in-depth posts, a desktop blog editor can make your life infinitely easier.
At least when it comes to the blogging aspect of it. There are a lot of blog editors out there.
Some are browser-based, some are standalone. Some work across different platforms while others are only for Windows or Mac OSX. Some are paid while others are free.
The main thing they all have in common, though, is their ability to streamline your blogging process.
Below are more than 20 great desktop blog editors. There are options for every budget and every platform. Some even let you blog without blogging software. Read more
13 May
10 Ways to Launch a New Blog with a ‘Bang’
Blogging, Blogs, Freelancing
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Do you want to enter the blogosphere like a quiet librarian enters a classroom, or do you want to rock the stage? I am definitely one to rock stuff out and in this article I will share a few tips to help you make an attention grabbing launch.
If you want to give your blog an exciting launch, your blog needs to be valuable to your target audience, otherwise your hard work will be in vain.
Ask yourself this simple question “Does my blog provide something that a thousand other blogs don’t?” If you don’t have something special to offer, no one will care when you launch or how you launch.
There will always be a certain category of blogs that will not qualify for a special launch and it is up to you to determine if your blog fits that category. Now let’s look at 10 ways that you can launch your new blog with a ‘bang’.
Read more
13 Mar
40 Comics Strips for Web Designers
Blogging, Comics, Freelancing, Internet
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With the massive exodus towards online publishing, many people hardly reach for the newspaper these days. If there’s one thing I truly miss from the newspaper, it would be reading the comic strips.
There’s something magical about comic strips that seems to lighten your day and make you feel good. There’s certainly something to be said about starting your day with a bit of humor.
I figured that we’re so immersed in the Internet that it would be cool to compile a list of funny strips related to web design, the Internet and of course blogging.
Take a few minutes from your busy day to relax, have some fun and see how many of these situations relate to you… Read more
21 Feb
The Workstations of Popular Websites
Blogging, Blogs, Design
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As a blogger myself, I’ve always wondered what other people’s workstations look like. I realize many of you probably wonder the same thing, so I’ve decided to prepare this post which includes photos of work spaces from popular blogs and websites.
Most pictures show Mac computers being used, sometimes in conjunction with PC’s and/or laptops. It’s also interesting to see how some spaces are very clean and minimalistic, while others draw inspiration from busier set ups.
Thanks to all of you that participated in this fun article and sent their images. Finally, if you have a popular website or blog and would like to be featured here, simply contact me so that I can include it here. The article will be expanded as other photos get submitted over the coming days.
Now, let’s go explore some interesting workstations and get inspired… Read more
6 Jan
I’m LiveBlogging This RIGHT NOW
Blogging, Social Media, WordPress
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Liveblogging may very well be the future of traditional news media and blogging. Now you can stream information live on the internet and Twitter while an event is happening using nothing more than your laptop and free LiveBlogging software.
People have been doing it on a widespread basis for the past year, thanks to a plethora of free LiveBlogging tools that have sprung up almost overnight.
Whether you are a business striving to build a name and reputation in your industry or you are a web designer or web dev pro building a reputation, you need to be aware of Liveblogging and the tools used to conduct it.
We have moved from the “I’m blogging this” world to the “I’m Liveblogging this” world very quickly. People are no longer satisfied with hearing news after it has happened – they want access to news while it is happening. Read more