Tagged : Blogging

in Tech

Woo Themes Canvas WordPress Theme Review

Since my original review on WooThemes’ Canvas premium WordPress theme, much has changed on this very versatile template.

First of all, some of bugs and quirks that existed in the first version of Canvas have been ironed out, which is a testament to the Woo team as they do actually stand behind and continue to improve their product offering. Even their WooThemes back end dashboard, known as Woo Framework, continues to improve and allow for easy customization.

As the name implies, the Canvas theme is really like starting from scratch. It provides you the basic architecture and flexibility to choose roughly how you want your WordPress website to look, and leaves you to color in the details. To begin with, Canvas offers several basic layout options: Tumblog, a pretty straightforward rolling blog format; Magazine, basically a spiffy front page with feature slider and two column post headers below; and Business, which offers a completely non-blog looking front page great for showing off your business services in a professional way, while maintaining the functionality of a WordPress blog. Continue Reading

in Tech

WooThemes Delicious Premium WordPress Food Blog Theme

WordPress is the ideal platform for food blogging and there are certainly no shortage of themes out there. While you can go with a free theme template, my personal experience is that you get what you pay for, and there are a few players in the WordPress Premium Themes arena that are doing an excellent job — one of which is WooThemes.

When WooThemes released the Delicious Magazine theme for WordPress I was pretty excited. Finally a foodie specific WordPress theme! The look is clean and magazine theme like and offers up a featured posts area at the top and a customizable spotlight area immediately below.

I like the WooThemes engine/control panel that runs their themes and this to me is the mark of a good theme maker. For this reason I tend to stick to some of the larger WordPress template makers because they have spent the time to develop the back end user interface and customization.

After using the Delicious theme I found that it mostly does what I want it to do as far as my foodie blogging is concerned and it allows me to publish a slick looking blog with little effort. There were a couple of areas, particularly the homepage section titles that required a little bit of code fiddling, but it was not a major concern. If you want to do this hopefully you have a friend that can do some basic HTML code adjustments.

The other negative is that the sidebar is slightly smaller than a typical Google 300×250 square ad. This too can be adjusted with a bit of fiddling, but be forewarned that the sidebar does not accomodate that size ad perfectly.

Minus a couple of small faults I think the Delicious theme by WooThemes is probably one of the best food blog templates going. Definitely worth the price. I personally run enough blogs and tinker in WordPress enough that the subscription that WooThemes offers is well worth it, but otherwise expect to spend about $70.

You can buy the Delicious Theme or check out a live demo here.

in Tech

Woo Themes Inspire Theme Review

The WooThemes Inspire theme is a great WordPress theme for a product website or a corporate website. As always the WooThemes crew has created an easily customizable theme with a healthy range of options.

A feature slider on the front page allows you to create custom slider content including images and video content. There is also a fully customizable navigation menu that allows for both category and page based navigation. You can also add custom URLs to the navigation bar.

Several other WooThemes widgets are also available including secondary homepage features and customizable homepage widgets.

Basically this is a premium WordPress template that you can use to get a business website up and running almost instantly. The key advantage that the Inspire theme offers over many other themes is that it allows you to build a professional looking site on the WordPress platform that doesn’t necessarily look like a blog. The blog feature is still there, but the homepage looks like any other non-Wordpress site.

I’m currently using the Inspire theme on my company’s website to good success. If you’re looking for an easy to implement and update WordPress based corporate site I’d totally recommend the Inspire theme. WooThemes is one of the best premium WordPress theme designers on the web and offers a wide range of theme types for different business types.

in Tech

Woo Themes for WordPress Review

WooThemes - WordPress themes for everyone
Wordpress is without a doubt in my mind the leading content management system on the internet. It’s free, it’s super easy to use, and customization is also a breeze thanks to an extensive community of custom premium WordPress theme designers.

I have sampled and tested a large number of premium WordPress themes for a wide range of purposes and have settled on WooThemes as my kind of “go to” premium theme provider.

Themes can be purchased on their own as singles for a low price, but their subscription program allows me to experiment with different website ideas without having to purchase individual themes at a relatively low cost, and they continuously develop and release new themes. For a one time fee + an ongoing monthly subscription fee, WooThemes allows you full access to new themes as they become available and any previously existing themes as well. The subscription is ideal for those running multiple websites.

The beauty of using WooThemes is that they make templates that are easy to customize and fit a wide range of websites or blog types like travel, retail, small business, photography, video sharing, wine, etc. The WooThemes customization interface consists of the ability to adjust layout and page template types as well as have custom colours, fonts, and custom navigation. WooThemes templates are also advertising ready if you plan on hosting internal ads, or AdSense ads, or ads from another provider. When you switch from one WooTheme to another, most of your changes will carry-over, which can be an issue when changing between custom templates from different providers.

WordPress is no longer just a blogging tool. It can be used for so much more and I have helped and friends and clients implement websites using WordPress for their retail businesses, product sites, and many other things. I have basically switched all of my own websites to WordPress even though I am well capable of building my own site.

It’s simply the most powerful and effective tool to get the job done and with a premium WordPress theme, it’s less expensive than ever. A good place to start is to buy a premium theme and customize the inside elements using Photoshop and Illustrator and work from there.

I’d recommend WooThemes for anyone looking to build a blog or a company website that wants to be in control of their own content and doesn’t have a high level of expertise in web design. The WooThemes templates are basically ready to go and need minor customization. More advanced users may want to try a framework like Thesis, but if you’re looking to get it done quickly and effectively with little fuss, than go WooThemes. Besides, if you opt for the subscription, you can always change your theme later down the road. A few hundred dollars a year is much cheaper than the several thousand it can cost to produce even a basic website.

Check out some WooThemes examples below.

in Tech

GoDaddy Hosting Review

I looked around for a useful and honest review of GoDaddy’s web hosting services and couldn’t really find one, so I decided to write one myself. I will disclose right now that I have included affiliate links from which I earn a commission in this post, but that is only because I feel like I can recommend this product.

First of all, I’ll say I’ve been a GoDaddy client for quite some time now — at least 4 years. And over those years I have gravitated to them more and more. There are parts of the GoDaddy.com service experience that I find irritating, and those tend to be their blatant upsell advertising throughout the checkout process, and their constant badgering by email, which is not all bad, but mildly annoying.

The two main reasons that I have gravitated toward GoDaddy.com as a registrar and web host are simplicity and price. GoDaddy by far offers the best price to service ratio, and I have been with a multitude of domain registrars and at least 10 web hosting companies over the years. GoDaddy, despite a bit of overmarketing, offers the best price and the easiest access to service, which means less accounts, less logistics, and less passwords. We should all be able to relate to that.

Recently I have begun to setup basic client sites on GoDaddy’s hosting programs because it saves me time and the interface is familiar. I can setup a WordPress blog, or many other popular applications like Joomla or Moveable Type, in an instant, and I will say that GoDaddy’s domain name services (DNS) are much faster to propogate than other registrars I have worked with. Typically GoDaddy takes less than 30 minutes for a domain change to occur where my other registrars will take at least 24 hours. That’s time I can’t waste.

So slowly I am migrating all of my services to GoDaddy just for sheer simplicity and future scalability. I want to be able to keep everything in one spot on a reliable server. GoDaddy is big enough that I think I can rely on them.


GoDaddy.com Hosting & Servers

The nail in the coffin for my other web hosts though was speed. I have hosting at Mediatemple.net and it is not nearly as fast. I did a test of two nearly identical blog setups at different times of the day and the GoDaddy server absolutely killed the Mediatemple server.

On the backend, the administration panel for WordPress was running multiple seconds faster per action than the one running on Mediatemple. I realized then how much time I was wasting waiting around for things to load and save and update.

So when it comes down to GoDaddy vs. Mediatemple my conclusion is that both are good services. The MediaTemple control panel layout is a little more intuitive, but not without its quirks, but the GoDaddy hosting is simply faster and cheaper. Both have the ability to host multiple domains and the only negative so far for me was having to sign up for separate email services to support IMAP for iPhone with GoDaddy (that service is included with MediaTemple).

Even with that upgrade my GoDaddy hosting for multiple sites is about $11 per month, and my MediaTemple hosting is about $20. It may not be a massive saving, but take into account that the GoDaddy hosting service is performing much faster and it’s a done deal for me. The simplicity, speed, and giant company reliability provided by GoDaddy has me sold. Their customer support via phone is also on par with other companies I have dealt with.

If you are wondering which web hosting company to choose, and you are running a relatively low traffic site (less than 10,000 views per day), I would have no problem suggesting GoDaddy.com. They also have many tools to get your website up and running very quickly.

**Note: as of this posting this site is not yet hosted on GoDaddy, but it will be soon!**

in Misc Bin

Blogging Income Stream Breakdown by Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse runs the internet’s top blog about blogging and recently he posted a breakdown of his income streams in percentages for his different blogs that he runs.

It’s interesting to know that Google AdSense is still a top earner for him, despite many other bloggers writing about a significant decline in AdSense revenue. In the video he shares that the AdSense revenue is generated largely from his Digital Photography School website and not from ProBlogger.net, where he no longer runs AdSense at all.

From an outsider perspective it would seem that readers looking for digital photography tips are probably also in the mood for buying or learning about other products that happen to fall under consumer goods. The type of reader that is into digital cameras is probably interested in new technology, which some of the AdSense ads may be portraying. Thus there inclination to seek out other information and click on ads. This versus ProBlogger readers who go to that site solely seeking information about blogging. Information products are a bit more intangible than hard goods, so it makes sense that advertising in the PPC (pay-per-click) form would be less effective.

In the end having an actual product to sell is probably the most reliable way to earn an income from a website, but a site that is tied into tangible hard goods like a gadget review site would be, can be effective for advertisement driven income generation because that type of site captures the attention of consumers in a buying mood. In a nutshell a reader is more likely to click an advertisement for something they are trying to buy, and that they have actively sought out versus something they stumbled on by accident.