48 Blogging tips, tutorials, techniques & resources
Ultimate List of Blog Heading Templates & Titles for Blogging
"Below I have collected a huge list of great blog heading templates and titles for blogging. You can use these templates to customise your blog title and is a great resource if you ever have writers block."
14 Inspiring CMS Showoffs
"The popular CMSs all have strong community offerings including forums where you are encouraged to show off your latest creations, a great place to start when evaluating the software. Browse the list below to find some inspiration, some of them have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to, to stay inspired."
Why Content Management?
"Content managed websites have been around for a while now, but this particular area of Website Design has not been tapped to its full potential. The ability to keep content fresh, and easy to change, update or edit is becoming increasingly important as search engines continually upgrade the criteria they use to rank websites."
WordPress Optimization - 5 Ways to Clean up and Speed Up Your Blog
"There’s a lot we can do as individual bloggers to optimize the performance of our sites. Reevaluating the need for a particular plugin, inspecting server load times, and tossing out scattered database remnants helps to keep things humming along."
Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers
"With our attention forever dividing, how can you rise above the fray and be not only seen but selected for the opportunities you seek? Here are some thoughts on the matter."
Top 10 Security and Protection Plugins for Wordpress
"With every site you build there are going to be security risks and issues, there is no way around this, it is going to happen. All we can do is minimize the damage, be ready for it and take action. Wordpress is now the most popular Blogging Engine, this will not mean an increase attacks, but it will have the highest potential of attacks."
Search Engine Traffic & New Blogs
"I’ve learned a number of things about search engine traffic and blogging through this experience that I believe can be encouraging to new bloggers that are struggling to draw traffic from search engines."
20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider
"I thought I’d highlight a few ‘pages’ that I have here on ProBlogger as examples of pages that bloggers might want to develop to promote their blog to different groups of people. Some are more essential in my mind than others but all have been helpful in the development of my own blogs."
markItUp!
"markItUp! is a JavaScript plugin built on the jQuery library. It allows you to turn any textarea into a markup editor. Html, Textile, Wiki Syntax, Markdown, BBcode or even your own Markup system can be easily implemented."
5 Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress
"When I first started building sites in WordPress a year ago I was disappointed in the quality of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins available. During that time I put several plugins to the test, and here are the five I use exclusively to optimize my WordPress sites."
20 More Free First-Class Wordpress Themes
"In this article we present 20 fresh free high-quality WordPress themes. Unfortunately, over the last months they haven’t gained the popularity they deserve which is why they are now featured on Smashing Magazine. All themes can be downloaded, customized and used for free — in personal or/and commercial projects."
The Dynamics of the Subscriber Impulse: When Do People Decide To Grab Your RSS Feed?
"Regardless of where and how they become exposed to your website and content, however, I believe that certain reactions will need to get triggered on the visitor’s mind before he arrives to the conclusion that he actually should click on that small RSS icon."
The Blogger's Guide to Search Engine Optimization
"While we wrote a 300+ page book about SEO, only a dozen pages are needed to cover how to do SEO for a blog. Why? As search improves, Google and other search engines collect more data, which allows them to recommend and rank blogs based on how well people trust those blogs."
20 Types of Blog Posts - Battling Bloggers Block
"Change up your posting form - find new blog topics. In the same way that it’s easy to get ’stuck’ in always posting in the same voice - it’s also possible to get stuck in always writing in the same form or genre."
Find Ideas for Posts by Using Forums
"Forums can do much more besides driving traffic and helping to promote your blog. They also contain an insane amount of information that can inspire you and give you tons of ideas for writing articles for your blog. Even better yet, forums are full of questions."
Under the Microscope: Six Strategies for Building Viral Content
"This week at Skelliewag has focused on viral content — content that, by its nature, is designed to be shared via social media, word of mouth and links. It’s content that others want to talk about, and will turn readers into promoters of your content."
37 Viral Post Ideas You Can Use Today
"Viral articles are word of mouth worthy, and will grow your site more so than any other kind of content. I want to focus on 37 concrete ideas for viral posts that should be readily applicable to your niche. This post could be a useful port of call the next time you run out of inspiration, or if you want to try something different with your content."
The Blogger’s Library: 28 Free eBooks and Excerpts for Bloggers
"Looking for some reading material? These eBooks cover topics ranging from content creation, promotion, social media, general blogging, business blogging, making money blogging to web writing/copywriting, SEO and design."
Warning: Use These 5 Surefire Headline Formulas at Your Own Risk
"When you understand why the original headlines worked, you’ll be able to select an appropriate structure, and you’ll be a better headline writer in general. If you don’t, you might not only write a bad headline, you might come off looking bad in general. So, here are 5 more headline templates that work, but use them at your own risk."
31 Professional WordPress Themes
"If you’re serious about blogging, and are trying to run a quality blog on a specific topic, you need a good design. Ideally, you want to have a unique design, built by a designer, though you can get away with a pre-made theme if you’re on a budget, or if you want to wait until the blog can pay for the design."
45+ Must See WordPress Themes
"We’ve selected minimalistic solutions, Elegant Themes, Artistic Themes, Photo Blog Themes, 2 and 3Column themes, Unique Theme Ideas, Mobile Theme and much more - all of them make use quality, elegance and a user-friendly interface."
Grid-based design: Part 2, Designing blog theme templates
"I'd like to discuss doing grid-based theme design for open source content management systems, e.g. Drupal and WordPress. The purpose of this article is to give you an idea of how to approach blog theme design using a grid system. After reading this, you should be able to create a fully-functional grid-based design and HTML prototype that can be coverted into a theme template."
Copyright Explained: I May Copy It, Right?
"That’s time to put facts straight. In this post we’ve collected the most important facts, articles and resources related to copyright issues, law and blogging. We’ve also put together most useful tools and references you can use dealing with plagiarism."
Integrating CSS with Content Management Systems
"Building CSS editing features into our content management systems allows us to make style changes as easily as we make content changes. In the future, managing the design of a Web site at the tactical level will be as easy and efficient as managing content."
Helping your client maintain markup quality
"One thing that is particularly frustrating with caring about Web standards and accessibility is what often happens after your work is done and a site is handed over to the client."
Mastering Your WordPress - Theme Hacks and Techniques
"Throughout this article, we’ll be focus on many WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites."
10 Fresh, Elegant and Clean Wordpress Themes
"Let’s take a look at 5 fresh and elegant and 5 simple Wordpress themes you might be willing to use for your next project."
21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Wordpress Themes
"Let’s take a look at 23 fresh, usable, simple and and elegant WordPress themes, which have been released over the last few months. Among other things, we’ve also selected some of the new minimalistic solutions - all of them make use of clear and precise typography. They’re definitely worth a look."
83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen
"However, most Wordpress themes are either used too often or just have nothing to offer - particularly, if you are looking for a free, impressive and professional design. However, sometimes search is worth it. In the gallery below you’ll find 83 free Wordpress Themes you probably haven’t seen yet."
100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
"In this article we present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects."
63 Essential Wordpress Hacks, Tutorials, Help Files and Cheats
"This is a fairly comprehensive list of the Best Wordpress Tutorials, Hacks, Help Files and Cheat Sheets (call it what you like).They are written to make life easier, to help us expand Wordpresses functionality, to give us a better understanding of Wordpress and how powerful a tool it is."
10 Questions Every Blogger Should Ask Themselves Before Posting
"To help you in these crucial editing stages, we thought we would lay down some important questions bloggers can ask themselves so they can make an honest, constructive and critical appraisal of their work before posting it up for the world to see."
Useful WordPress Plugins
"Not all plugins are useful, in fact some are very bad written that will mess up your site or harm your WordPress installation. So how do you know which plugins are right for you? Well, here is a list of plugins that I have used or played around before."
What Kind of Front Page do You Need?
"Much can be said about the index of your site’s contents. Usually, it’s the first thing people see. To show your direct traffic a good time, it makes sense that the way you have your home page set up serves a great deal of importance to your first impression."
How to Use WordPress for a Portfolio Site
"Now that we’re done with a large portion of the technical basics of Using WordPress (WP) as a CMS, let’s continue on with the next step: Using WP for a portfolio site."
48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress
"WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms (if not the most), is capable of being more than just a blog platform. It's capable of being a full-blown CMS (Content Management System). WordPress' robustness never ceases to amaze me."
16 Blogs With Unconventional Layouts
"I’d like to tackle one of the new directions in blog’s layout that I consider using in my new design - it’s the trend of featuring only the latest article on the homepage while providing an easy access to a number of previous articles."
CMS and the Single Web Designer
"Content Management Systems free designers from the gruntwork of individual web page production. They may also free companies from the need to retain design staff. How do content management systems work, and what impact will they have on a web designer’s job?"
How to Write a Better Weblog
"Great writing can’t be taught, but bad writing can be avoided. Mahoney shares tips to enhance the writing on your personal site, blog, journal, etc."
Evolving Client Content
"Content management systems are only as good as the content they manage. Garrity explores the care and feeding of low-budget clients who need high-quality content."
7 Ways to Get Involved in the Design Community
"There are countless resources online for designers, and the community around these sites is very strong. If you are a designer you should be actively involved in one way or another."
10 Reasons Web Designers Should Blog
"Maintaining an active blog has been one of the best decisions I ever made in terms of my career. I feel that every designer could greatly benefit from running a blog if they have the desire to share their thoughts with others."
Top 30 Wordpress Plugins that are actually useful!
"The amount of Wordpress Plugins available for download are endless. This list contains plugins that I have tried and tested, and for the most part have used in a live site."
The Best Wordpress Admin Themes You Could Possibly Find
"Wordpress Administration can be a bland and boring thing. Time for a change, freshen things up. The availability of WP Admin themes is not great, so I have compiled a list of the best admin themes available."
WordPress Theme Hacks
"In this article, I’m going to share some of my WordPress tricks with you on how to make a better WordPress theme. I’m not a programmer nor developer, so I will focus more on the frontend development."
Developing a Wordpress Theme
"Instead of coming up with some more themes, we decided to write a tutorial on how to develop a wordpress theme which we are sure will help a lot of you to design as you wish and bring them out into WordPress."
Navigating WordPress source code
"If you really want to know how WordPress works, if you want to know what you can do with it and what you can’t, you have to look inside WordPress. Spend some time with its source code."
Wordpress Plugins & Tutorials: Your Pick
"In this post we'd like to give you an opportunity to share your knowledge and help us to create the essential list of Wordpress life-savers - plug-ins, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready to hand developing web-sites upon Wordpress."