7 Cool WordPress Tricks And Hacks

Here’s I’ve listed 7 most wanted WordPress tips and hacks that I hope will be useful to your WordPress experience.

Display Categories In Horizontal Drop-Down Menu – If you want to put your category on the navigation bar, dropping down the sub categories in second-level drop down.

1. Add Gravatar For Post Author – Useful post help you add Gravatar to your post titles to highlight the comment author.

2. Add Gravatar For Post Author – How to add some simple PHP code to your WordPress template and make linked images appear instead of text for your categories in posts.

3. Format Images For Feed Readers – Get your blog content to display properly, even in feeds.

4. Create Really Cool WordPress Date Button – Display your blot post’s date in the form of button.

5. Create Mobile Version Of Your Blog – Create a mobile version of the website within clicks with Mofuse.

6. Turn WordPress blog into CMS (Content Management System) – Your WordPress blog don’t have to look like a typical blog display. It can be something more fun.

6 Cool WordPress 3.0-Ready Themes You Can’t Do Without

As WordPress 3.0 was released, there are new features that allows anyone to simplify the entire blog optimization. However, many people have had to update their theme in order to be compatible with the new WordPress releases, while other probably looking for a theme that works flawlessly with WordPress 3.0. While find free WordPress 3.0 ready themes could take time, to simplify the job below I’ve listed 6 cool WordPress 3.0-ready themes for any needs. I hope you enjoy this list.

1. The Morning After

The_Morning_After

2. Akylas

akylas

3. Hydrogenize

hydrogenize

4. Mansion Theme

Mansion_Theme

5. Photoblog

Photoblog

6. Tech 9

Chunky

How To Turn Your Blog Into An E-Commerce Site With WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin

UPDATE – 4 September 2011 – Someone recently ask me how do I set up an e-commerce website through WordPress platform. The email message I received from my reader was:

“Hi Nicola, I need to receive money from my blog. I just wanted to know if it’s a good idea to go ahead with the store idea. Can I integrate a shopping cart into my wordpress website? If so, what is the fastest way to go?”

Well, the answer is simple, the answer is yes, and in this article I will show how do that.

While in my recent article I mentioned that one of the reasons websites fails with e-commerce is due they do not have a good Payment system, today I want to focus your attention to one of the better, if no the better WordPress shopping cart plugin out there, for those who would to turn their WordPress blog or website into a profitable store online.

It is a great plugin that provides you useful information such as product details, tax prices, remove/edit items, shipping options and much much more.

How To Put A Shopping Cart On A WordPress Blog And How I Do Turn My WordPress Into An Ecommerce Page.

tribulant_logo

The WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin is a plugin for any wordpress blog or website that allows anyone blogger or webmaster to install an online shopping cart in a fast and simple way, and turn WordPress into a strong store online.

As you could see in detail below, the interface is very easy to use which allows you to set up your multiple products as add images to show, as list them into multiple categories as well.

One thing people has need to do when they choose a Shopping cart software to add to their blog, is to check up that there are many elements included within the shopping cart and checkout process.

Well, WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin have not any problems because includes several features for any needs, here’s I’ve put down some of these:

  • Product Categories
  • Digital Downloads (MP3s,PDFs)
  • PayPal Gateway
  • Credit Card (POS)
  • Multiple Products
  • Discount Coupon Codes

If you want to see all the features includes within the package, look here.

A WordPress E-commerce Moneybookers And Paypal

The best part of this plugin is that not only let you start an wordpress e-commerce moneybookers and Paypal from scratch, but it also provide to your customers multiple payment methods such as, 2CheckOut, First Data (Linkpoint & YourPay), Realex Payments (redirect), eMatters (HTTPS), Ogone PSP (Basic), Authorize.net (AIM), eWay (Shared), credit card (POS), bank wire and manual/custom payments.

So, you do not risk to have your potential customers lost due they can not pay your product through Paypal. Often, I saw on certain blog an ugly Paypal button placed below any products… Nothing more wrong. Why? The reason is simple, not all potential customers have an account with Paypal, so you need to give them the ability to choose the right payment system for them.

How Do To Installation It

  • First at all, download the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin from the downloads management section in a ZIP archive (you may need to login to your Tribulant Software account in order to access your download).
  • Once done, then extract the ZIP archive named wp-checkout.zip and you get a folder called “wp-checkout”.
  • Upload the wp-checkout folder to the wp-content/plugins/ directory of your WordPress installation. If you are upgrading, overwrite all existing plugin files from an older version.
  • Log into you WordPress dashboard, then access the “Plugins” panel and activate the “Checkout” plugin.
  • Access the “Checkout ” administration menu item and the submenus to manage the plugin. This can be found on the left hand side of Your WordPress Dashboard

How To Use This Plugin

When you use these type of software into your website, remember that there’s nothing more annoying to have complicated page full of produtcs, as having to fill out an unnecessary amount of input fields in a form as well.

Well, once the WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin is installed you are able to set up the features you need, creating product categories and add products you want as well, and better yet setting the checkout process in order that become as easy as possible.

Below, I’ve put only some of the main feature, you can find with this plugin

Categories

When you create a new category will be createda WordPress post/page that display the category title, keywords, description and all the products with pagination.

Configuration Settings

If you go on your WordPress dashboard, then “Settings” section you can customize and configure your WordPress shopping cart plugin. You can set in particular:

  • Checkout Appearance
  • Discount Coupons
  • Email Settings
  • Extra Product Images
  • General Configuration
  • Payment Methods
  • Product Settings
  • Products Loop/Paging
  • Shopping Cart
  • User Related Settings

Manage Coupon Codes

coupon

The plugin also allows to activate the discount coupons feature. You can create unlimited discount coupons, each with a unique code/string and distribute these codes so that users/customers whom purchase products from your online shop can apply these codes in order to receive a discount on their order.

In my view, this is a cool features, people like discount and can be useful to increase your montly income stream.

Orders Sections

manage_orders

Through the “Orders” section of the WordPress shopping cart plugin you can manage all your shop orders. You have the ability to view orders, create new orders, edit/change existing orders and remove orders as needed.

In a nutshell you can check:

  • Order Specific Details
  • User
  • Completion Status
  • Shipped Status
  • Sub Total
  • Discount Applied
  • Shipping Total
  • Total
  • Created Date
  • Modified Date

Add Images

images

With the WordPress shopping cart plugin, you can also add additional/extra images to the current products in the plugin database in order to illustrate/demonstrate your products more efficiently to your users/customers.

Shopping Cart

In the “Settings” section, you can change the way the shopping cart works, and add: 1. Shop Logo; 2. Shop Name; 3. Product Details; 4. Product Options; 5. Product Price; 6. Quantity; 7. Product Total; 8. Selection Checkboxes; 9. Sub Total; 10. Shipping Charge; 11. Discount Coupons; 12. Order Total; 13. Update Cart Button; 14. Checkout Button; 15. Continue Shopping Link; 16. Discount Coupons

shopping_cart

System Recommendations

  • WordPress 2.9 or higher
  • PHP 4.2 or higher
  • short_open_tag On
  • safe_mode Off
  • MySQL 4 or higher

Price

If you want to turn your blog into an ecommerce site, Wordpress Shopping Cart Plugin has a lot more options and features to justify the non-free price. The plugin goes for $49.99 isn’t espensive if you want to turn your sit einto an e-commerce site. Consider it as an investment, that surely will bring an economic return.

Download  WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin

Which Are The Common Blogging Mistakes To Avoid?

These days I no longer need to learn how to set up my blog, or the problem to increase my site traffic, but there was a time not too long ago when I was just a newbie blogger making every mistake I am going to share in this post. These are the common mistakes I made in four years as blogger and are all mistakes that any blogger newbie could do.

Inside the content:

  • Basic Mistakes
  • Blog Promotion Mistakes
  • CMS Mistakes
  • Blog post Mistakes

Basic Mistakes

basic_mistakes
Image Credit: Mannan3

1. Choosing a free blog hosting – When it comes to build a blog just look at hundred if not thousand of free blog hosting out there, but if you want to running a fully customizable blog you need to a professional hosting.

In this case I always reccomend to everyone Bluehost, not only because I use it on some of my blogs, but because through the fantastico button it let you install WordPress in less than 30 seconds. Another hosting service that integrate the fantastico button is hostgator, so if you don’t like Bluehost you can use this one.

2. Going with a bad blogging platform - You need to install the right platform to build your blog. In all my blogs I use WordPress for several simple reasons. It is flexible and has a lot of plugins. If you are good at programming you can use it anyway you want. It easy to set up a forum along with the blog, TAGS are supported by search engines hence more traffic, easy to use widgets like related posts, popular posts, recent commentsetc.

3. Choosing the wrong extension - This is one of start up mistakes people do when it comes to domains. My recommendation when it come to domain is to choose a dot com. All my blog are dot com. Dot com is the default everyone tries first if they don’t know the extension.

4. Going with a long domain – This is another big mistakes when it comes to domains. You could come up with the 48 character site name, e.g “howabloggernewbiecanmakemoneyonlinewiththeirblog.com”, sure It may explains exactly what your web site is about, but certainly your visitors will not remember it. So I reccomend to choose a domain name with max 7-8 characters.

Blog Promotion Mistakes

blog_post _mistakes
Image Credit: Batikart

1. Commenting (Spamming) on blog posts – If you are thinking to gain links or “authority” by using blogger comment on high ranked blog, then forget it. Google hates who are deliberately spamming other sites to increase their site rank.

2. Social Bookmarking – Many people submit their blog post on many social bookmarking site as possible by thinking that their site traffic will increase quickly. I have used this strategy for several month but I have received very low traffic.

So, don’t wasting time. Instead, I reccomend to choose two three of that sites, like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon and submit your post on them. Look at my Stumbleupon account to see how many traffic I can reach in low minutes. My recent articles “9 Lessons That Helped Me To Turn My Blog Into A Money Making Machine” has received 242 view in only “15 minutes and 32 seconds”.

CMS Mistakes

cms_mistakes
Image Credit: the english guy

1. Not using tags - When I started the3dtechnologies I did not used tags in my blog post. Also, I’ve noticed that is one thing that many people don’t tend to do on their blogs. The reasons why is so important add tags is very simple. It brings 70% of my organic traffic. If you have a good theme like mine, every tags will appear below each post. All you have to do is use keywords that people might type in search engines to find your article.

2. Threaded comments – Threaded comments is a great way to encourage people to comment on your blog and help you builds a community around your blog.

3. They disable comments – If you are an affiliate marketer this is the big mistake you can do. Before to purchase a product, usually people are looking for review about that product. Now, If your article is about a new WordPress theme, is very important know an honest opinion of those have tested that product. So, be sure to enable comment.

Blog Post Mistakes

Image Credit: Abizern

1. Blog frequently – Many people start blogging by writing 3 or more post daily, and finish to writing one blog post per month. If you want your blog to be separated from the millions out there, I reccomend to write at least one post each one or two days.

2. Don’t writing for people – Often I read post such as “WordPress 3.0 beta was launched” or similar. Sure, it’s all good, but if you want to attract the reader attention, you need to think what may be useful for your readers. You need to write with your readers in mind.

Before start writing, try to answer at this question: What is helpful for my readers? What my readers is looking for? then, you can provide the value necessary.

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. Franklin P. Jones

One Theme, New One Panel Interface

It was almost few months ago that there were some of the new features introduced to One Theme. Well, I’ve been keeping an eye on One Theme website these days, and there was a variety of upgrades since then.

Whereas One Theme used to consist of only one theme (but three “layouts”), it has since expanded to four themes: Default, Fun (shown below), Modern, and Professional.

one theme

The four One Theme present the same kind of features. They may appear similar, but each theme has been created for  different purpose. For instance, One Theme Professional, may be better used for an online news magazine. Also, each of the themes sells for the same price.

One Theme Dashboard

The new design of One theme is very clean and simple and has a lot of new features, but one of the highlights is the introduction of one panel.

In brief, is a new plugin that manages all the premium themes at One Theme. To don’t lose your existing configuration, one panel works within the default WordPress dashboard, thus, make it easier to  manage all the one theme features(see image below).

one panel

Once you log in your WP Dashboard, click on the button in the left WP dasboard sidebar. One Panel allows you to access to image upload, post gravatar, thumnail generator, ad manager, and much more. The thumbnail generator help you to save a lot of time because allows you to automatically generating the various sized thumbnails and place it on your blog’s front page.

Also, One Panel allows you to set the post footers, backup files, FeedBurner, featured videos, and so on. Nine recently used functions are highlighted on the main page of One Theme, giving you one-click access.

To get a full sense of what this theme is all about, you can check out this video. This video goes for 22 minutes.

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Buy One Theme,  And Get Free Upgrades For Life

Once you pay for One Theme, you are able to get free upgrades for the time One Theme team continue to produce updates for One Theme. Note: You need to have a valid license and it seems that you need to purchase each of the themes separately. Buying One Theme Default does not give you One Theme Fun for free.

Each of the themes sells for $39.00 and there are different kind of license options. One license for a single installation is $60, while for two, three, four, and five licenses are rispectively  $110, $160, $210, and $260.

Buy One Theme Now

Thesis Review – A Premium WordPress Theme

Recently, I talked about the Affiliate Theme, which in my view is the perfect WordPress blog theme for Affiliate marketing.

After my article, I’ve received a few direct messages on Twitter where some people mentioned they were using the Thesis Theme created by Chris Pearson and Brian Clark, which is also a very powerful theme for affiliate marketing. I can attest that Thesis theme is  a great theme because I use it on myblog, Cabinrentalsideas.com as you can see.

However, both themes allows you easier to create a professional blog in three simple step: download the theme, upload the files, activate the theme. That it! Very fast, especially if you don’t have HTML and CSS knowledge.

You can also customize design and look of your blog, and definitely does optimize it for search engines and give you a lot more power of your blog than the default WordPress set-up.

Thesis Vs Affiliate Theme

thesis vs affiliate theme

It clear that before you go spending your money you need know what is better for your business.

Thus, I made a quick Google search to see if there were reviews that do  comparison between Thesis and Affiliate Theme.

Usually, people looking for a middle ground between a free and a unique custom theme. There are many premium themes. One of the most well-known premium themes out there is certainly Thesis, a paid-for theme that allows anyone to create many different styles and types of theme.

Thesis theme allows great flexibility and user are able to have a great control through two control panel menus. Some of main features include:

  • People can select as many columns as they want, customize the width of each of these columns, and put it where they want.
  • Whether you want a standard homepage, or “Features and teasers”.
  • Choose the size, and type of font you want in all the different sections of the theme.

The theme also allows to choose either version within one overall theme. The SEO control is another great options that allows you to control the seo of each post.

Compared to other premium theme support, Thesis has a free support forum. You have a free liftime and the response to queries are very quick.

Here, a summary of the main features compared:

Thesis Affiliate Theme
Layout chooser Yes Yes
Layout widths Yes No
Color Picker Yes Yes
SEO Yes Yes
Easy installation Yes Yes
Change the background image No Yes
Support Forums Forums
Price $87 lifetime upgrades $97 no upgrades
Multi-use Package $164 $147

Both themes are very professional with great admin panels. The themes are hard to compare why fulfill different needs. For quick changeable websites, I prefer Affiliate Theme, but for common sites (as I said before I use Thesis on my blog cabinrentalsideas.com) then Thesis is my choices.

WordPress Theme For Affiliate Marketing

UPDATE - 30 January 2011 - So you want to use WordPress to create killer landing pages? So you want to starting your first affiliate website without any effort?

If so, recently I came accross another great way to help people on their goal of making money online through their affiliate site.

It’s clear that, while you could certainly attempt to do affiliate marketing through your website, it probably that without a specific template optimized for that purpose, your chances of success will greatly diminish.

Today I’m posting about this product because I think can be a valuable opportunity for every affiliate marketers that want to increase their affiliate conversion rate. The product in question is a WordPress theme, simply called “Affiliate Theme” which was developed only for affiliate marketers.

How you will find out through this review, it seems that have everything you need to allows you to build mini-sites, landing pages and review sites, and yes, you can also use it for a blog if that’s what you want.

So, if you are ready to working with the most well-known affiliate programs, then keep reading and I’ll tell more about this great theme.

Affiliate Theme: What Is?

Unique blog Design team has released a Premium Worpress Theme that allows any affiliate marketers to create a strong affiliate website from scratch.

Unique Blog Designs began on August 22, 2007 with the re-launch of John Chow dot Com – a top blog about making money online and internet marketing.

Compared to standard WordPress themes or building sites from scratch using frontpage or other similar software, this new special theme simplify the entire process of creating affiliate marketing sites.

Affiliate Theme Is a premium WordPress theme built for those who want create and manage affiliate sites to selling affiliate offers. It’s a great way to save a huge amount of your time that you normally use to creating different landing pages. I tested it for a few days, and I was able to set any elements of my WordPress blog without need to go in and hack the code. It let you with just a few click to controlling any elements of your blog.

affiliatethemes

Affiliate Theme: A Flexible WordPress Theme

For a newbie is extremely easy to customize a theme with Affiliate Theme. The entire layout of affiliate theme is fully customizable(look the images below): You can setting your theme from 1-column theme to 2,3,4 column theme and decide if have a left-column sidebar or right-column sidebar. Thus, you do not need to have multiple themes to get six different website layouts.

You are also able to control blog width, built-in opt-in forms, built-in subscribe via email form, built-in Adsense. Also, you can change the background colors or images, font, homepage title and header graphics, and much, much more.

affiliate themes

CLICK HERE TO GRAB YOUR AFFILIATE THEME

Price

“Affiliate theme” starting at $97 for a single site license, $147 multi-use or $197.00 super affiliate.  I would highly recommend getting either the Multi-Use or Super Affiliate packages if you want to use it across multiple sites as well as give you free upgrades for life. It’s enough expensive, but in my view it worth.

The following video teaser gives a good quick overview of how it works:

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The Better Affiliate Marketing Guru’s Are Affiliate Theme Testimonials

“If you want to increase your affiliate marketing income (by promoting affiliate programs or CPA offers) I give Affiliate Theme my highest recommendation.” John Reese, Income.com

“Affiliate Theme is by far the SIMPLEST system for setting up, tweaking and PROFITING from affiliate marketing using WordPress. If you like easy, this is it.” Yaro Starak, BlogMastermind.com

“This is awesome! Never before has it been so easy and fast to set up dedicated landing pages and mini-sites. I love working with WordPress and Affiliate Theme makes it MUCH more efficient!” Zac Johnson, ZacJohnson.com

“If you’re an affiliate marketer and you don’t at least use Affiliate Theme to TEST, you are WAY behind the curve.” Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney.com

Why You Must Grab This Theme?

  • Easy to customize and lost of options. Change colors, fonts, header graphic, navigation style, and even page layout from the theme option panel.
  • Fully optimized theme for PPC campaigns.
  • You will get more than 30 unique header graphics that are suitable for different niches.
  • A premium WordPress theme exclusively designed for creating affiliate sites or landing pages.
  • Built-in color-pickers for changing the colors of everything without touching any codes.
  • Better and easier Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
  • Theme support forums.
  • Easy integration of tracking scripts.
  • Comes with 6 in-built homepage layouts and 3 inner page layouts.
  • Lifetime access to affiliate resource center, which is fully loaded with valuable resources.

Conclusion

According to  Unique blog Design team the next versions of the Affiliate Theme,  will offer even more options. It also will be able to add an opt-in box to the layout and creating squeeze pages and sales pages.

I really like the different layouts, and how easy it is to change the headers and footers. Obviously the “Affiliate Theme” doesn’t make all the work, because you need to go to increasing your site traffic if you want to start making sales, but this theme will help you to simplify the entire process.

CLICK HERE TO GRAB YOUR AFFILIATE THEME



THE3DTECHNOLOGIES

The3dtechnologies.com is an encouraging blog, dedicated to helping people build a business online, creating killer graphics design to increase product page conversions, as learn to save money, as extreme frugal living as well, so you can earn more and save more. I'm glad to have you here!


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