Tech Bucket » Blogger

Five Lessons You Can Learn from Home Stagers to Improve Your Website Layout

Farah Abidi — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 05:35:56 +0000

Home staging is the practice of setting up a home for client’s visit. A clean and tidy home will stand much more chances to get approved and be bought, as compared to a messy place that can work as a deterrent, despite of everything else going your way (e.g. location, price, the area, etc). But this article is not about the advantages of home staging, instead it is about some invaluable lessons you can learn from “Home Staging do’s and don’ts” to improve your website design and layout.

Remember that website’s layout is becoming more and more important, especially with Google giving more importance to user’s experience and bounce rate than the factors like keyword density and all, which means your website layout should be good enough to hold the visitors for some time. Following are some invaluable lessons from home stagers that you can use to improve your website designs and outlooks.

1. No Clutter

There are some websites or blogs so cluttered and untidy that you’re forced to think that their webmaster or owner has stopped visiting this place for ages. I am not sure how one can create so much mess on their own website, because as far as I am concerned, I’d let go some earnings just to keep my site clean and tidy, but I am sure not everybody thinks like me. However, with Google Panda update slamming websites with lots of ads and links and less content, it is high time that you cut down the clutter and showcase your content instead of ads.

2. Lighting

Of course, you cannot use light bulbs to set alight your blog or website like home stagers do, but you can do the same by choosing light back grounds, cool colors, and fonts which are easy on eyes. Funky and bold colors might turn out to be a tad more memorable in first visits, but for regular users, they can turn out to be quite irritating in the longer run.

3. Neutrality

Home stagers advise the property owners to remove the personal belongings like family pictures and the likes when a client is visiting, or it will make them feel a little uncomfortable. Same goes for the website owners, it is important to avoid giving a cult like impression, it is especially true for blogs or forums catering a particular niche or you will fail to hold on some new members, just because they weren’t at home with the overall feel of your website. Your aim is to entice this feeling into each and every visitor that they are welcome.

4. Decorations

Staging is all about decorating the home (while staying well within your budget). And when it comes to websites, the various types of widgets, social features, videos and images can serve as the adornments. Try providing your visitors with interesting polls, social networking widgets, surveys, contests, videos, and images to catch their attention and make them stay on your website for longer periods.

5. The neighborhood

Home staging applies to the exterior and adjacent landscape as well. For a website, it’s applicable to your Blog and social profiles. Many websites make the mistake of not harmonizing the blog and social profiles with their website, so when you click on the blog from their website, you often feel that you’ve arrived at a different place altogether, same goes for the social profiles like Facebook Page or Twitter.

You must make sure that each and everything is complementing your website theme and style, including the blog, social profiles, and even newsletters.

Hiring an Individual SEO Optimizer

Warner — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 09:23:17 +0000

There is nothing wrong with self-optimization. If you have the entire knowledge of SEO or if you have been professionally doing this for years, then there is no problem doing this yourself. Today, there are SEO experts from established companies who use their knowledge to optimize their own websites instead of sending it to a pro firm. There are also those who choose to self-optimize small projects for their friends as an alternative to costly professional SEO fees. Yet this is not the problem.

The real problem is when large companies begin to hire the service of these experts. Instead of team-optimization, they resort to employing an independent self-optimizer to save money and to avoid paying a bunch of SEO experts. The problem worsens when this becomes excessively and rapidly popular. Many SEO employees opt to become sole optimizers for large companies (because of the promising pay), which slowly weakens the established SEO teams in serious SEO companies and forces them to reconstruct their internal SEO teams to the extent of reducing employees and workers, and worse, oblige themselves to close down their operations.

Indeed, the numbers of self-optimizers are growing along with the increasing number of economical companies that would rather pay one person than entrust their optimization to an SEO-focused company. Because of this matter, SEO companies are being forced to come up with binds and agreements that will prevent their SEO employees from transferring to other companies or leaving the company without notice, which in some ways, according to SEO company employees, have secured their jobs and limited their freedom as employees at the same time. SEO contracts are now longer, yet consequences and penalties are stricter should the employee violate the agreement. Due to this agreement, people see this as a threatening scenario and soon lose interest on becoming SEO workers, an occurrence that undermined the weakening SEO industry.

Because only an individual or a single person does self-optimization, it lacks the focus present in team optimization done in sole SEO companies, the reason why many self-optimized websites have weak keyword foundations or link building internal processes. And according to SEO blogs on the Web, self-optimization is undoubtedly cheaper, but the result you may get from excessive saving may harm your website. Many SEO experts—even the independent and non-company owner SEO experts—are educating companies about the disadvantages of hiring a single SEO expert as an alternative to costly yet focused SEO companies.

Your author Warner likes to write about technology related topics. He works with Endless Rise who provides SEO Reseller Packages and White Label SEO services exclusively to resellers.

Blog Comments – Their Uses & Importance!

Montey — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:19:57 +0000

When you start a blog, the thing that helps you to interact with your readers and to get some feedback about your blogs is the comment section. There are some who never leaves a comment on a blog, and some always leave comments if they love the post you published. Even though, it takes a bit of time to leave a comment on a blog, yet the development of communities around the blogs has augmented the importance of comments.

Devoid of community reading as well as interaction by the way of comments, a blog will become merely a one-sided medium of expression for the visitors. Whenever you schedule your blogs, it is very important to give high priority to the comments. This is why it will be good to know why blog comments are important and what is their role in blogging.

It provides a way to understand the readers

You can get an idea about the readers that are being affected by the contents you give out on the blogging and you will also realize that your content is reaching some other communities. This is a kind of indication that a number of people are pulled towards your blog. For various peoples blog comments are energizing experience, whereas, for the others these comments offers a chance to provide motivation to other people. At times, it has been noticed that comments have resulted into improvements as well as additions to some blogs. This not only benefits the readers, but also makes the blog more enjoyable ultimately.

Comments are what separate the websites from the blogs

With time, your conversation builds up, and consequently the relationship of your blog and the reader will also build up and will enhance the popularity of your blog. You should motivate the readers to be a part of the discussions, and to leave comments on the blog. You should also act in response of these comments quickly. You do not like to feel ignored when you deal with someone personally, in the similar manner the readers also do not like to be ignored and want some response from you. Once a person who owns a medifast coupons and nutrisystem discounts blog commented in my blog and he praised my post. This acted like an encouragement for me and helped me perform even better!

The positive effect of comments on the blog

< Image Credit >

You might be aware of the fact that links are very important to gain better ranking for your blog. Well, this is where blog comments play another very significant role for blogs. When a person leaves a comment on a blog, he or she also leave back some links to some other blogs or even to different websites. This is mainly done to advance the conversation, but is actually a lucky thing for your blog. Such type of links can turn out to be good resource, which can help you to discover new blogs and to find some bloggers who belong to same niche. Sometimes, the bloggers leave behind trackbacks with their comments, which link your blog to their blogs. These trackbacks are also very useful in building your relationship with a number of other bloggers and also to drive fresh traffic to your blog.

Waypoints Along Your Fruitful Blogging Journey

Katheryn — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 05:50:13 +0000

Many new bloggers have dreams of earning an income from their blog. They dream of having a large amount of traffic and of being a respected voice in their blogging community. But many also don’t realize that in order to realize these dreams, they will have to work and sacrifice quite a lot. Great traffic numbers and solid incomes don’t just happen quickly simply because you started a blog. They happen through hard work and dedication to the craft.

So what might a fruitful blogging journey look like then? Well, I’ve come up with a theoretical scenario in which we check in with you, the successful blogger, at four waypoints along your blogging journey. If you can imagine yourself in this scenario, then maybe you can make it a reality.

Day One

On day one, you launch your blog. You’re excited. You have written a great About page that explains to your potential readers who you are and why you are qualified to be blogging. You publish your first post, which outlines your goals for the blog and lists some features you hope to publish in the coming years. You enable comments and wait for your first reader. And you also spend time creating a blog roll of links to other established blogs in the hopes that they’ll notice you. You’re a bit nervous, naturally, but you’re also optimistic about this new venture. You have high hopes and can’t wait to see what happens.

Week One

After a week, you’re possibly a little disappointed. No one comments on your posts. Your traffic numbers are very small; in fact, probably the only people who read your blog consist of your close circle of friends. But you persist. You write intelligent posts. You respond to comments when they do happen. You try to link to other interested articles by more established bloggers. And you sincerely seek to overcome your frustrations. You are beginning to understand just how much work this entire production demands of you.

Month One

You’ve finally caught you first break: an established blogger randomly read one of your articles and linked to you in a response on his blog. Your traffic spiked for that day, though it has since fell off. Now you have tasted what it’s like to be read and responded to, and with that newfound excitement you throw yourself into your task. You understand that your hard work can and will pay off. You can see success right around the corner.

Year One

A year later, you are blogging well and smoothly. You have some income from ads and your traffic is steadily increasing. You haven’t broken into the big time yet, though you are starting to realize that some assumptions you made about blogging were unrealistic. Instead, you have figured out how to play to your strengths and monetize your blog most efficiently. You are recognized as one of many important voices in your blogging community, and you have developed many worthwhile relationships with your fellow bloggers and readers. You are happy with how things are going, and you’re looking to expand your blogging plan in order to take the next step to more lucrative internet-related opportunities.

Magazine3 – Best Premium WordPress Themes

VISHAL — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:45:59 +0000

Magazine3 is a new premium WordPress theme club with a focus on creating innovative WordPress magazine themes. They currently have 3 magazine themes available: Ultimate Showbiz, GameUp & StyleLife, and plan to release two high quality themes each month.

Here is the detail about the 3 themes.

1. StyleLife -

StyleLife is elegant, unique & colorful Lifestyle WordPress Magazine Theme that gives a whole new look to your website. Its loaded with backend options panels and functionality.

2. GameUp -

GameUp is minimal yet elegant WordPress Gaming magazine theme. Its a perfect theme for Gaming portals and Gaming blogs. GameUp can give your website a total fresh look.

3. Ultimate Showbiz -

Ultimate Showbiz is perfect wordpress theme for Entertainment websites, Media Portals and Entertainment News Blogs. Very Flexible Cms type WordPress Theme with a great features.

Perfect Blogs Require Customer Relationship Management

VISHAL — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 07:35:00 +0000

Internet is becoming a new source of marketing for the people who usually do not have much time for marketing. There are many internet marketing sites that have been set up to build goodwill and satisfy customers with quality products. Every company advertises their products in different websites or blogs to attract customers for buying those goods.

Blog is derived from the term “web log” as it s a type of website. Term “web log” was firstly used by Jorn Barger followed by Peter Merholz whointroduced its short form “blog”. Blogs evolved from online diary in which people used to keep a runningaccount of their personal lives. It can be easily made by anyone for the motive of earning some money or for doing some social activity. Blogs are made attractive and interactive by adding features like “leave comments” and even messages via widgets can be sent to each other. This makes it different from normal websites.

Blogs can be distinguished from each other on the basis of type of content. The types of blogs are as follows:

1. Device: A blog can be differentiated by the device that is used to write blog in it like “moblog” should be termed if the blog is written by means of mobile phones.

2. Media Type: Blogs contains different Medias many a times. According to different Medias blogs can be called “vlog” when it comprises video, “photoblog” when it contains pictures and when a blog comprises of some sketch it is called “sketchblog”.

3. Genre: Blogs may have a theme of special topic such as technological blogs, parental blogs, educational blogs, etc.

4. Personal Blog: It is the most common type of blog. It is an ongoing commentary kind of blog by an individual. Twitter is the most renowned example which allows people to share personal blogs.

Blogs always need to maintain its goodwill. It can be done perfectly by customer relationship management. It is also known as CRM in short. This management states that the owner of the blog must interact with customers, sales prospect and clients. CRM consists of many variations like sales force automation, customer service and support, marketing, analytics, technical support, etc.

Customer relationship management helps to acquire new clients through excellent contact management by offering service from a team of trained and skilled specialists of this field. Therefore, the crm objective is to find and attract new customers and also retaining the precious old customer by providing them different types of facilities.

Add Sharing is Sexy widget for Blogger / Blogspot

VISHAL — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:39:00 +0000

There are many more social bookmarking widgets available for blogger. But Sharing is sexy widget is more cool than other widgets. I am posting a simple tutorial to explaining the steps of adding this widget to your blog.

Follow the simple steps :

Step 1 : Sign in to Blogger
Step 2 : Go to LAYOUT — Edit HTML -> Expand Widget Templates
Step 3 : Add the following code before

Step 4 : Now find the code

Step 5: Now add the following code after

http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/MdLq‘ title=’Subscribe to RSS’/>

Step 6: Now see the red link in the above code and replace it with your feedburner id.

Step 7: Save Template. Done.

Hope you like this post. Don’t forget to pass your comments here.

Links : Original Credits