I spotted the following ‘valuable’ piece of advice from a web designer based in Northern Ireland (via Twitter) and it’s a lesson worth learning…
OK, so you’ve thought about a fantastic name for your company and it’s time to purchase your website domain. Before you hit the purchase button, it’s always a good idea to run your decisions past someone else.
Why? Because, by shortening two words or more by simply removing the spaces in your business name, your domain name could attract an unwanted audience. Read more…
One of the best things I like about blogging is being able to write about anything, at anytime, from (almost) anywhere.
Today, January 6th 2010, the UK has been gripped by ’snow fever’. The main TV news, tabloids, social media networks, everything and everybody has had just the one subject to talk about – snow!
The image accompanying this article is of my koi pond and garden, taken with my Nokia N95 mobile phone at 8.00am. Looks pretty doesn’t it? Read more…
You would be amazed how many professional bloggers there are out in the blogosphere.
There are literally thousands of guys (and gals) making a small fortune from their blogs, and in some cases a big fortune!
How do they do it?
There are many ways: Google adspace, affiliate schemes, advertising, product sales and more. They make it look easy to rake in a lot of cash, but if it was so easy everyone would be doing it!
Now I’m not a pro blogger. It takes time and hard work to make a full-time income from blogging and, frankly, I don’t have the time. However, I do make a small income from this blog (around £100 a month) and you can from yours too.
Read more…
Are you considering the ‘full fat’ version of WordPress for your blogging platform?
Regular readers of Blogging Crew know we are evangelical about using WordPress. Frankly, we love it! However, although downloading the core files is pretty easy, setting up everything else can be a little daunting, and more than a little time consuming when all you really want to do is start writing!
Thankfully, Davco Media can take all of that hassle away from you. They are now offering a new service, which includes hosting, installation and setting up WordPress for you.
The cost of the package is only £24.50. That’s a special offer price until December 31st as it usually costs £39. It really is a brilliant offer!
You can find more information about the package here and let Davco Media set up your WordPress blog in no time.
With hundreds (if not thousands) of plug-ins for WordPress to choose from, and going through them all is really hard work!
After a trawl through them, these plug-ins could provide your WordPress powered website with the added functionality to make it even better.
Take a look at these selections: Read more…
I have previously written about how useful the Wordpress “read more” teaser is. It enables the reader to “scan” the first few lines of the article and then make the decision to read the rest of it or not.
WordPress makes it easy to break up long posts so you can save space on your home page. Simply insert the ‘more’ tag while editing a post, and WordPress will display the text that comes before it as a “teaser” followed by a link to the rest of the post.
By default, when a reader follows the link, the single-post page is loaded and the browser “jumps” to the next piece of text. This jump can be disorienting, and some bloggers prefer to link their teasers to the full post instead of the anchor. I certainly prefer to do this. Read more…
Have you set yourself any blogging goals?
If you have, great. If you haven’t, I’d suggest you should.
A common blogging goal is to reach the milestone of X number of followers. Aiming for 100 initially, then 1,000, then 5,000 and so on.
Many Twitter users, perhaps even the majority, strive towards achieving a specific ‘followers’ goal.
Yesterday (May 13th 2009) Xavier Lur had 66,988 followers on Twitter! Read more…
What do Bloggers and blog readers love?
Their partner? Perhaps.
Their Children/Parents? Probably.
Lists? 100% guaranteed.
What about a list of lists? Absolute utopia!!!
Here’s a top 40 list of lists for you to dribble over, all related to building, managing and marketing a website.
They have been grouped in to categories to help you find the juicy bits you’re interested in easily. Read more…
OK, it’s time to ‘fess up! Since starting Blogging Crew I’ve pretty much ignored the Drupal platform and I need to put that right.
Don’t know much about Drupal? Here goes…
Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize content on a website. Drupal powers a wide variety of websites, including… Read more…
Tinyurl.com is a brilliant service. If you’re new to blogging and don’t know anything about it, tinyurl.com allows you to transform really long URLs (Unique Resource Locator – or the web address to you and me) into shorter and user friendly ones.
As an example, the ‘real’ URL of this post is http://bloggingcrew.com/2009/05/short-url/ and by using tinyurl.com the shortened version is http://tinyurl.com/cjbtxo. Reducing it from 42 characters to 25.
In situations where you have a limited space or characters to use, in Twitter for example, where there are only 140 to play with (20 less than a standard text message), it becomes very useful.
A couple of months ago I came across an even better URL shortening service called bit.ly. With bit.ly you can track the stats behind the short link, like how many clicks it got, where the links came from, which country the user was in when he/she clicked and so on. If used with Twitter, the service also tells you if your message has been re-tweeted. It’s all updated in real time too!
If you’re curious, http://bit.ly/psIFY (only 19 characters) is the shortened version of this post! 
