Daily Resources for Web Designers & Developers by Andy Sowards » Wordpress

Seven Amazing Ways To Obtain Passive Income Online

NTHEMES — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:17:14 +0000

Last year, the owner of a Word Press site made a record sale, he received more than $50,000 by selling the respective masterwork on market websites. It’s true, it’s a record and it’s an exception, but a lot of money may be gained from selling website templates. It’s awesome not only because the amount of money is respectable, but also because it’s catalogued as passive income.

You don’t have to be an expert accountant to know that all income may be “brutally” divided into two main categories:

Active income, is in fact the payment received for the work you have done- i.e., the .ai file of a logo or of a vectorial drawing, the coding of a website etc. Unfortunately the money received are usually dependent on the number of hours worked or on the number of projects finished.
Passive income is the kind of the income that isn’t regularly realized. This income is formed by selling templates, drafts, usually products that may be sold multiple times and each buyer is customizing the purchased product.

Definitely, the active types of income are safer but it is work that takes up your time and while the days are still 24 hours long, it’s more than obvious that your time is limited. The passive incomes are unsure, nobody may rely solely on these kinds of earnings to pay the monthly bills but is very advantageous because it’s the result of a single item created. Designers work to have an active income but, superficially thinking, they ignore the “passive” possibilities. In order to highlight some possibilities of making money while sleeping, (this is not necessary!) we have created this post for you. We hope this will help anyone who wants to gain more money passively and wish you good luck in yours attempts!

1. Sell stock photos

This is a very nice activity and some people really make some good amounts of money from. It’s simply: you buy a good photo camera, enjoy nature with your family and friends and of course, the best landscapes are immortalized. The best shoots are uploaded on various online photos markets and over time, the interested people will turn into buyers. Depending on the inspiration of the photographer and the quality of the images, this can became a reliable source of extra money.

The benefit of this is obvious, you enjoy some amazing moments and your happiness brings money once it is well photographed. The happier you are, then the more creative you can be with your Photography and capture your images from an interesting perspective that can capture the interest of viewers and turn even more into fans & buyers.

2. Create Amazing WordPress Themes & Sell Them

Making $50,000 from a single theme is fantastic but, once again, it’s a record and not always typical. In spite of that, creating amazing Word Press themes that are very customizable and easy to use for the less code savvy expert is a good plan. Apparently, this kind of job seems to be more and more profitable because people really like the beauty and the potential of Word Press but can’t always afford the custom CMS experience, and that is what is affordably brought to them by Templates and Themes.

Selling website templates will be always a profitable affair, there is a human trait that is common, and that is not to be patient, and these are the solutions that require the least amount of time to setup and create an online presence. It’s smart decision to profit from this!

3. Sell articles

There are some signs that show us that in 2012 and the next years, the role of writers will became more and more important. The algorithms of the search engines will base more on the power of text content and the blog owners know this intention. Anyway, on the Internet are presented many market places where articles may be uploaded and sold. A problem related to selling articles is the price, these are very low comparing to the work done but there are places where a 1000+ words length article can be sold for around $30-40 (obviously, the quality is high, well-written and containing precious information).

4. Sell graphic files

Every day lots of Designers start many personal projects and some of these get finished while others are still in progress. Surely, each designer has some abandoned files that need very few improvements or changes to be polished, and these could become nice products to sell. A pragmatic guy will collect these unused files and upload them to a websites that sell graphic files and some people may be interested and buy these. An abandoned model of business card, an unfinished logo or a cool favicon are potential items that may be sold and bring some money to the original creator.

5.Sell “how to” e-books

Another solution for passive income is the creation of “how to” e-books. These are usually .pdf format and the length varies, from few pages to max 50 (even more but it’s not recommended). The great advantage of these books is the fact that don’t require very much time to be written (comparing to printed books); these are created by experts and are summaries of more complicated topics & tasks. The mechanism behind this is very simple: someone who is at a pro level writes a .pdf explaining a situation or how to resolve a problem or teach them a subject, and an individual who is interested in the Topic buys it. It’s beneficial for both sides, isn’t it?

6.Write a book

For those that want more, writing a book is the next logical step. This is a more complicated activity but it’s globally known what kind of benefits writing a good book can bring, if it’s interesting and useful, the author will bring in a good profit from it. Unfortunately, the creation of a good book isn’t a job for amateurs; it’s a very difficult and time consuming activity that can take months or years.

7. Create T-shirts designs

Inspired designers who have enough time may create T-shirts concepts that can be sold. It’s cool to play with your imagination, create something cool then sell it. T-shirts are very popular and if you think up enough good ideas this practice can result in a very fun income stream for you.

As you can see, anyone can add some extra bucks to their budget, but this is nothing more than paying attention to these different techniques of making money. Clearly there are a ton more ways to make extra money, but these are the most effective and common at the moment. Our Final Advice: don’t expect fast results, this is more about patience and quality! Things that are gained easily, are often not worth having

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10 Simple & Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins For Your Blog

Leif — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:21:50 +0000

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Trying to find a Word Press plugin that best suited for your needs can be a bit of a hassle sometimes. Having a contact form is very important for your blog, which allows your visitors or advertisers to get in touch with you. But it’s very important to keep it simple and user friendly along with creative look involved.

WordPress is one such great platform that will allow you use simple plugins and get the contact form in minutes. We tried to list 10 best of those plugins here to save you time and frustration!

1. Contact Form 7

2. Contact Form By Contact Me.com

3. Fast Secure Contact Form

4. Simple Model Contact Form

5. A Capture Contact Form

6. 123 Contact Form For WordPress

7. Cool Contact Form

8. Tiny Contact Form

9. Slick Contact Form

10. Visitors Contact Form

Do you have a favorite Contact Form Plugin that we missed? Share it below in the comments and help the community!!

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How To Lower The Impact of Google Panda – 5 Tips For Search Traffic Recovery

HTMLFirm — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:43:48 +0000

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When it comes to the online world and the norms attached to it, Google Panda penalty is one of the most talked about things. In fact, the recent few months have shown a lot of iteration in Panda. Panda was released in Feb 2011 and ever since then many websites have experienced a slowdown in the traffic volume. Most of the websites ignored Panda considering it just another new thing. But that is exactly what made the situation complex for them. But websites can not really afford to lose traffic.

Panda Image via Shutterstock

What needs to be realized by website owners is that if they want to recover from Panda penalty, it is imperative to put plans on hold and start taking action right away. What needs to be done first is to figure out why Google panda updates are affecting your website. And in what way it is affecting your website? If you find out that your website traffic is going down after every update then you should plan a good SEO strategy without any delay.

Before proceeding any further, let us see what exactly Google Panda penalty is. Google Panda actually is a big tweak in the search engine algorithm. The main purpose of this penalty is to push up the standard and good quality websites and lower down the bad quality site content. Very different from other updates, Google Panda is actually a domain level penalty. What this means is that even if a website has 10 good quality pages then too its ranking can get hurt. However, fortunately there is a way out. In order to check Google Panda penalty, it is always best to check Google Analytics for the dates for any traffic rise or drop.

There is a drop in traffic in some cases while in other cases there is an increase. If your website has experienced a drop in traffic, then your website certainly lacks in something. Another possibility is that you might be having certain aspects that made Google push you site down in terms of quality and reliability. Now what you need to do here is- find out what exactly the reason is. The problem could be anything like poor quality content, improper SEO, load time or even the design as well. Read further and you will find out on what major aspects should you focus in order to lower down the impact of Google panda penalty on your website.

Site indexed pages

Index Image via Shutterstock

You need to have a clear idea about how Google indexes your website pages. You can go to Google.com and look for the site- domain.com. Now replace domain with your domain address. On doing this you will find all the pages of your site that are indexed in Google. Now you need to analyze which pages are indexed. Moreover, you must ensure that none of your tags, labels, categories or any other part which does not hold any value is indexed. You should then go to the last page. If it says ‘show omitted results’ then click on it and check if your website’s pages are indexed with parameters like replytocom or iSalt etc.

Now if you are fed up of URL parameters and other useless link which is getting indexed in Google because of non-canonical tag, then you should use .htaccess code for clean WordPress URL.

User behavior

Behavior Image via Shutterstock

You must remember that user behavior is one of the most important factors for search engine ranking. Everything from bounce rate to time on site play an important role. One of the reasons for bounce rate could be the too cluttered look of your website. And if page views/visit is low then you need to work hard on your site’s content and design. Visitors might be abandoning your website because of poor or irrelevant information, too many ads, slow load time etc. Your aim should be to improve the bounce rate and increase the number of page views/visits.

Poor quality content

Quality Image via Shutterstock

Most of the times, website owners add posts and content without giving a thought to its relevancy. This certainly invites trouble and can bring Google panda penalty. To get an idea about the quality of content you should have, go to Google.com and search for ‘SEO optimized content’. Now go through the first five results. Analyze them and rate all the pages on the scale of ten. Then try to figure out why you rated a page higher than the other. Although all five pages have the quality content but there will be certain aspects in each of them that would make you rate them all differently. If you are able to find an answer to this, you are going in the right direction. When you find out the thin content on your site then you should re-edit the posts, now index them and then remove them from Google search.

Too many advertisements

Tokyo Image via Shutterstock

It is not possible to operate a website without any advertisements. Even Google never asks you to have no ads. But problem occurs when a site has too many ads. Moreover, what complicates the matter even more is the addition of ads in a manner that give a cluttered look to the site. This will certainly bring trouble for your website. You are even more prone to inviting panda penalty if you add ads in between the posts. Hence you should avoid doing this. Do not include too many ads and do not keep them around your content.

Site SEO

SEO Image via Shutterstock

Many people think that panda means death of SEO. However, this is not true. Fact is that Panda enhances the algorithm and makes Google search even better. You should only make use of safe SEO practices. Make use of Sitemap, backlink building, Canonical URLs etc. also pay attention to your on page SEO. If you have not done the SEO of your website, then you are missing out on too much like quality traffic and better rankings. You also need to pay attention to factors like Page speed, poor backlinks etc. to get a perfect idea about your website’s weaknesses, let a layman browse your site and ask for the opinion. If the person faces any problem, you will be able to find out the specific area your website lacks on.

Besides this, you should always search in Google for the topic you are writing on. You should properly analyze the content of first 5-6 results. This will give you a clear idea about what all you need to focus on while writing. In a nutshell, you should write quality and detailed posts, regularly update your site, do social bookmarking, have a clutter free layout, use Breadcrumbs and make use of sites like YouTube to drive more traffic.
By doing all the above mentioned things, you can certainly recover from the panda penalty and can once again start receiving better and targeted traffic. Just make sure that you do the right things in a right manner.

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10 Free WordPress Themes for Creative Professional Work Portfolios

Amanda Tradwick — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:59:40 +0000

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Whether you are a photographer, a designer, or an artist, you will need a Web design that shows off large, beautiful pictures of your work. If you are looking for a simple WordPress theme, there are several free themes that are suitable for creative work. Here are 10 of the best free themes:

Grace

This minimalist and muted photo theme puts your photos on display. There is a rotating banner of featured photos, and a featured mini gallery of recent photos. You can add widgets and set options for customization.

Fotofolio

This Jquery integrated theme allows you to choose featured photographs, customize the appearance, and add blog posts or news articles. It is a simple, understated design that highlights your work.

Autofocus

Photos of your work can cover the whole front page of your site with this theme. You can set your own options for different layout styles, each with an emphasis on photos of your work. You can also set it to integrate photos from your Flickr account.

Snapshot

You can choose between two different theme layouts and three different color schemes with this minimalist theme. It has built-in SEO options and the ability to customize headers, sidebars, and more.

Revolt

This funky design allows you to customize the header with your own message and photo. The body of the layout features your creations and your blog posts. The theme is packaged with plug-ins and comes with support. You can also be featured in the community forums for using the theme.

Video

If videos are what you need to feature, then this aptly named theme is perfect. You can select featured videos for a slideshow, then showcase thumbnails of your video gallery. The front page is completely customizable, and the theme includes support.

Modern

This minimalist design uses a grid-based design with a sidebar, putting all the emphasis on your photos and your work. The theme includes video instructions for easy customization.

Suburbia

This magazine-style layout includes logo customization, threaded comments support, and built-in SEO features.

Viewport

Sliding panels display recent works and posts on this clean theme. Video and various photo formats are supported.

BizzFolio

This theme features a levitating Jquery slider to showcase recent works. It includes the ability to customize the homepage and “about” page, and there are 5 custom CSS styles.

Of course, no WordPress theme can ever truly offer all the features you need to create your own unique blog to reflect your own personal style. Hiring a Web designer like Andy Sowards can ensure that you get a Web design (even a theme) that is customized especially for you.

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And you thought WordPress was just for Blogging? 7 Unique Alternative & Non-Traditional Uses for WP

Jennifer Hill — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:30:10 +0000

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And you thought WordPress was just for Blogging?

With the thorough increase in the utilization of open source content management systems for various web based application, the relevance of WordPress Development has grown in indefinite leaps and bounds. In the year 2003, WordPress came into existence, initially as an effective blogging tool and publishing platform. Sooner than one could note, it was being used as a customized back end process for developing and maintaining websites. Its user friendly characteristics was the main reason behind such a development.

What really makes WordPress development an undeniable option for the aspiring web designers, and the individuals and organizations looking out for sturdy web development platform, is that it follows a plugin architecture and has numerous priorly existing WordPress themes. Thus WordPress can be easily customized and modified, in order to cater to the highly personalized needs of users. Plugins are the simple software fragments that adds additional functionalities to the WordPress powered blogs or websites and WordPress themes Customization apart from defining the top quality look and appeal of website or blog, also provides with benefits related to functionality and operations.

In today’s time WordPress has no longer remained a plain Jane solution for developing web applications. What initially started off as an effective blog publishing platform, is now being used for various other web development services, apart from blogs. The seven other ways in which WordPress development can be utilized, apart from the traditional usage in the form of blogs, is discussed further in the write up.

1.Create enigmatic Social networking with BuddyPress, a WordPress Plugin

Talking about the WordPress plugins, we should move a step ahead without mentioning the noteworthy services being provided by BuddyPress – a WordPress plugin meant for social networking. WordPress brings to you thorough and comprehensive solutions for a creating a social networking site around your WordPress powered blog or website. BuddyPress is an effective and one of the most widely used Plugins which enables the users register at your website and create their own profiles. Along with that they can post messages just like Facebook and etc, connect and interact with other users, even engage in community discussions by creating groups and lot more. With the easy to use WordPress plugin, a thorough social network can be created for any type of website – be it a school alumni association, a corporate website wishing for user interaction, a high school football team creating their own networking or various organizations wanting to create niche communities.

Besides BuddyPress is all set to grow and expand with time. It boosts of an exhaustive number of WordPress developers, working on its modification and customization through the online community of BuddyPress. BuddyPress offers its users more than 330 plugins, thus the social networking enjoys the benefit of being highly scalable, as and when the need arises. And then the feature of being highly easy to use and customize, is inherited by BuddyPress as well. Any of its plugins can be easily installed and used, and can be easily managed right from the WordPress dashboard itself.

2. Build dazzling photo galleries with WordPress Development -

This is has more relevance for a professional photographer and / or designer. If the photography and designing bug and bite you and you need a sturdy platform to showcase your creative side, WordPress is the best available option for you. No need to knock the doors of portfolio website in order to display your own portfolios. Instead create your own website and display all the images and designs in a highly digitized and search engine friendly way.

It may be of particular interest for you to know that most of the CSS galleries also uses WordPress Development to create dazzling photo galleries. The benefit WordPress Development provides is that it does away with the required need of coding in order to create the website. WordPress is highly user friendly and with the available set of themes and plugins etc, amazing photo galleries can be created through WordPress Development. As a designer, it may be quite a task for you to decide upon the theme of the website to go with your designs and images, but all the effort will be worth it, if you are looking out for a sturdy platform and robust frameworks.

3. Create Brochure sites and static websites with WordPress -

A brochure type website are the best for an entrepreneur to strategically position and promote their business activities then be it an idea, an institution and related concepts. Brochure websites or static websites are created for the purpose of disseminating information amongst the users, making them aware about the particular idea or concept etc and does not necessarily require dynamic features and user interaction. WordPress Development gives you highly profitable features to create a static or brochure website. Besides owing to its expandability, a WordPress powered static website can anytime be easily transformed into a feature rich and highly interactive dynamic website.

4. Develop Ecommerce website with WordPress tools and plugins -

Step out of the stereotypical usage of WordPress for blugging. With the arrival of WordPress 3.3, astonishing ecommerce stores can be created with WordPress Development. These tools and plugins are available freely over the Internet and can be utilized to turn your WordPress powered website or blog into a money producing machines. Ecommerce websites, in todays time are a hit with the users. A lot of Internet users find it irresistible to shop through ecommerce platforms and online stores, sitting comfortably over in their homes. WordPress 3.3 has introduced to the world, highly enigmatic ecommerce integration options – through WooCommerce, Cart66, WP- Ecommerce, Shopp and etc.

All these tools and plugins are available for free and can be easily customized. Besides the premium versions of each of them are also available and by paying a little extra you earn amazing tools to transform your simple blog into a competitive ecommerce platform.

5. Earn money by providing superior services through Membership Sites -

Membership sites are a really popular option these days for ambitious website owners to make money and provide superior services. Membership sites are those sites which provides premium, details and much sought after services to their subscribers and charges money from them in return. It follows a simple rule of thumb, make available the best premium services like the best and easy to apply tutorials, provide the with good resources and informations, e-books and web seminar etc and charge accordingly from them for providing unparalleled services.

WordPress Development helps in you in creating highly robust membership sites, without requiring any specialized coding and etc. Owing to WordPress plugins and WordPress customization, beneficial Membership sites can be easily created.

A membership site may not be an out and out business affair, you can also make a WordPress powered membership site for friends and family, for various clubs, other organizations and etc. Even Facebook provide such an option of creating membership websites, but the options out there are limited but through WordPress you get limitless options for creating any type of web applications – then be it a membership site.

6. Handy Collaboration Tools to Facilitate Association and Group -

WordPress can group together various users with its handy and easy to use collaboration tools. One can creatively use WordPress as a detailed discussion board which is open for general public. This is a very advantageous feature of WordPress. For instance, nearing the exams, a class or a complete section can join their individual minds on a WordPress collaboration platform and discuss the problems related to exams. Teachers may join in too and provide easy solutions to their problems. This is a highly creative use of WordPress and rest assured, is a very interactive, modernized use of the same.

7. Opportunity for the recruiters to create job board and forums

Another unique mode of utilization of WordPress is through creating forums and job board. WordPress provides you with amazing plugins to create descriptive forums and job boards. The same plugins, which you require, can be searched down from the official website of the WordPress. Besides a WordPress Developer can easily customize the plugins according to your needs, to provide you with the feature you require. The reason why you must consider using WordPress for creating job boards and forums is that WordPress is very convenient to use and highly flexible. Not only do you get job boards in an instant, these are highly personalized and at par with your requirements.

These were the seven different ways in which WordPress Development and WordPress Customization can be utilized. Being a favorite of search engines, and highly easy to use, scale, modify and update, WordPress is amongst the top options available for the web developers and Internet users. Creatively use WordPress features for a unique web product and enjoy long term success with the same.