Web Design Discussion

Blogs are meant to make it easy to find information however I find them still somewhat awkward to navigate sometimes. I will search through the recent posts, categories, archives and finally enter my keyword in the search box (maybe I should have
done this first) before I find the specific topic. Some blogs have posts that are not even related to the blog’s title.

Adding a Site Map to your blog makes it incredibly easy for any visitor to quickly scan all the categories and posts of your blog. All the information from your blog can be neatly arranged in a vertical order down your site map page. Your posts are automatically placed under their appropriate categories.

You can see it in action by visiting my site map page

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Many site owners make the mistake of duplicating their site’s home page. They will have the same content for http://www.url.com, http://url.com, and http://www.url.com/index.html. This will result in lost link value and therefore damage the rankings of the site’s homepage. For example you may have your internal links pointing to http://www.url.com but outside sites may be linking to http://url.com. Therefore you will be diluting the effectiveness of your site.

If you find many links outside the site pointing to both the non-www and the www version, it may be wise to use a 301 re-write rule so all pages will be redirected to the same url.

How to include the 301 re-write rule in your web site

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Wordpress has a built-in feature which allows you to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of web traffic immediately. You automatically gain backlinks to your blog.

What are pingbacks?

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If you have started a new blog or had one running for some
time, you may have noticed you’re receiving comment spam.
Before I put a stop to it, I was getting medical product
and gambling offers which have absolutely no relevance to
my web design blog.

Spammers notice new blogs via back links to wordpress.org
and once you’re noticed they will always be able to spam
you. You may soon end up with 100s of spam comments. This
not only clutters up your blog but will also eat up your
hosting space and bandwidth and therefore cost you more
money to run your blog.

How to prevent blog comment spam

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If you ever had to add AdSense Ads to a static (not
database driven) web site, you know it requires a number of
steps ie

-Download the web page from the server to your computer.

-Copy and paste the AdSense code into your page.

-Save the the page and upload it to your server. Word Press
makes it very easy because you can use the

AdSense Deluxe Plug-in

Features and Benefits

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If you have a content site or blog that has lots of content then strategically placing Google AdSense Ads on it will make you money 24 hours a day. Now intially you may only produce a few cents a day because it takes time to build traffic, however if you are willing to put effort into it you can increase your adsense revenue substantially.

How to get started

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If you building a web site you need to be familiar with image resolution. Your images need to render well on your web page
plus your web page should not take a long time to load.

What is Image Resolution?

Image resolution refers to the spacing of pixels in an image and is measured in pixels per inch, ppi, (sometimes called dots per inch, dpi). The higher the resolution, the more pixels in the image. Higher resolution allows for more detail and subtle color transitions in an image.

Image size refers to the physical dimensions of an image. Because the number of pixels in an image is fixed, increasing the size of an image decreases its resolution and decreasing its size increases its resolution. When scanning an image, the scanner translates the size of the image (inches) into pixels using resolution. When printing an image the printer translates pixels into inches using resolution.

What are pixels?

When you download pictures from your digital camera, scan pictures, or manipulate pictures with your photo editing software,
you work in pixels. Your computer monitor displays pixels, and your printer paints pixels onto paper. A pixel is the smallest unit in a computer image or display. Every image on your computer is made up of a colored grid of pixels.

Camera resolution

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7. How To Create a Google Site Map

Adding a Google Site Map to your blog helps the Google Search Engine to spider all your pages on a regular basis.
Your Word Press Template does not generate a Google Site Map automatically, therefore you need the Google Site Map Plug-in.

This plug-in generates a sitemap for the homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archive pages. It provides a static XML file in your Blog directory. This XML file gets automatically rebuilt every time you change, edit, create, or publish a post.

Installation

Simply download the Zip-Archive and extract all files into your wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then go into your WordPress administration page, click on Plugins and activate it. After that you will have a new menu point called “Sitemap” under the “Options” menu. You can alter the default change frequencies, filename and other options there. Click once on “Rebuild Sitemap” to create your sitemap the first time.

TIP
Create a normal Site Map Page as well and organize your posts into their appropriate categories. Thiis will help visitors to quickly find topics of interest. More navigation tools on your site helps the visitor to find information quickly. Now they have at their disposal: Site Map, Search Bar, Category Lists, and RSS Feeds.

Resource
Read more about Google Site Map