John Cow dot Com » Wordpress

WPUnlimited – Is It a Must Have for Serious Bloggers?

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 16 May 2009 05:01:32 +0000

There are a lot of WordPress themes out there to choose from when deciding upon what to use for your blog. And while you want things to look nice, you also need to think about the functionality of different themes, and whether they will help you make money through your blog.

And that’s where WPUnlimited comes in. Not only do they offer a great theme that’s clean, and fully customizable to your own design and aesthetics, but it’s also got great functionality.

Not sure if you know how to optimize for SEO?

Don’t worry about it; WPUnlimited has simple instructions to follow to ensure that your site gets formatted in exactly the right way to make Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines love it.

As well, there’s a built-in Google Adsense advertising generator where you can customize everything about your Adsense ads – the size, the look, the feel, everything – all without having to deal with code. You can get all the info you need from the WP Unlimited Advertising tabs.

But Cow, you say, that’s all great, but looks are still important! I want a pretty site!

Don’t worry – I know that while having a functional site is the most important thing, once you’ve got that covered, it helps that it looks nice, too. And more important than that is making sure that the design resonates with your brand. Some people may not like the color choices I’ve used here, but it certainly ties in with the John Cow brand.

With WPUnlimited, the design is fully customizable. You can adjust the colors, the fonts, and other design elements, all from the ‘design’ tab in the option menu. You can control other elements as well, including the typography, site layout as well as the content width.

And, not only can you customize the design, but you can also import or export the design choices to your other WPUnlimited sites. This is especially great if you have multiple sites with a common theme, where you want them to have certain elements in common, but be unique in other ways. WPUnlimited lets you do this, without having to spend hours coding.

Check out WPUnlimited for yourself!

“WPUnlimited is exactly the type of professional template I’ve been looking for for years. The wide range of features and ease of use of customization truly make this theme a must-have for serious bloggers. You can stop searching… you’ve found it” ~ Jim Kukral

Brand New WordPress Theme Meant for Affiliate Marketing

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:42:54 +0000

As you know, I’m always on the lookout for new products or services to make my goal of making money online easier (and, of course to make me more money online.) And you, dear reader, get to benefit because then I share with you the ones that I think work. And I’ve found another one that I think works.

It’s Affiliate Theme, and it offers WordPress themes meant specifically for affiliate marketers. Most WordPress themes were meant for blogs, and you had to work within those parameters if you wanted to use them. With Affiliate Theme, you can build mini-sites, review sites, and landing pages, and yes, you can also use it for a blog if that’s what you want.

The biggest benefit to using Affiliate Theme is how easy they make it. Both new and experienced affiliate marketers will find it easy to use. You can change the look to your site without having to recreate all of your content, and you can build multiple variations of your pages without having to re-input all of your affiliate offers. With testing made that easy, you can quickly determine which pages are working best and you can make more money!

Their Theme Options panel allows you to change pretty much everything about your theme – layout, colors, fonts, header graphics, logo, and even the wording you use on your call-to-action button.

I also like that they’ve coded Affiliate Theme to be optimized for PPC and SEO campaigns. You write your headlines and page copy, and Affiliate Theme will take care of the rest. The Theme Options panel also allows you to integrate tracking scripts.

It’s also a very versatile tool – whether you hate to have to deal with code, or if it’s your favorite thing in the world, Affiliate Theme will work with both. You can either work in the Theme Options Panel, and make all your changes that way, or you can get right into their clean XHTML+CSS+PHP fully commented source code. It’s up to you.

Most of all, I like how clean the sites are graphically. This is a great option for newbies who want to put together professional-looking sites quickly. And for those of us who’ve been in IM for a while, the speed at which you can build and test the sites is astounding. And, as we all know, time is money.

I also believe that if you want people to but your tool, you have to support it. And Affiliate Theme does. They’ve got a Resource Center, where you can use video tutorials, knowledge base articles, and a user forum where you can go to for help, or to bounce your ideas off of other Affiliate Theme users.

Click Here Now to Check out Affiliate Theme

Use Virtual WordPress Appliance to learn WordPress

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:44:41 +0000

For anyone who tries to be a blogger or create some sort of information resource, the most important issue is always with high quality of the blog or site. It relates both to design and content. It takes awhile until the design makes you happy, and it can also take few iterations until you’re happy with the posts.

You create the post, and proofreading it, and post as draft, and reading it again. Then you fix few things, post it online. And then you find that you’re not so happy with some phrases, and you change them and post again…it takes awhile until you’re totally happy. All these back and forth iterations are not always convenient – you may have a bad connection. Or you have a hosting with limited bandwidth. Or you’re not sure, or anything else. Or, maybe, you’d like to see how it would look like without actually posting.

Or, you’re just like me. I’ve posted few times already that I’m thinking about moving my blog to WordPress. I want to try WordPress and see how it looks and feels like before I do it on a real blog.

I might have a solution for you. It will help you to do anything you want without actual posting or making design changes to your blog. It is very simple actually, and the magic is in virtualization. It’s hardly a surprise for anyone. Our personal computers are strong enough to be the host for both our own tasks and also for virtual computers. So, what you can do is to create your own virtual server that will only run WordPress (and its all required components, such as web server, database and php engine). You can then work with your local server while you’re trying to verify issues such as design and/or posts, and only after you’re sure – you could post it to your official blog.

Now I will explain the procedure I tested. Just keep in mind that while it shows how to work with WordPress blog engine, the idea can work for any other web or other resource you’d like to use. I looked over the web for all sorts of virtualization techniques, and the one I found to be the easiest is the VMWare image of rPath WordPress Appliance. It is the basic VMWare image of a virtual computer, which includes all required software components needed to run WordPress. Its size is about 130Mb, which is while not that small, is not big either – a connection to DSL would be enough to get it in about half an hour.

The download includes WordPress version 2.2, so you will need to update it if you want the latest and the greatest. After the download is complete, unzip the file, and start VMWare Player with the file inside extracted folder. It will start the virtual machine. Here is the example of how will the login look like after the start. I have a DHCP server running on my network, so the appropriate IP address (the picture is clickable):

Then, go to {IP}/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php in your browser (IP will be written on that login screen, user: admin, password is: password) – it will allow you to update the MySQL database and now you will have the WordPress installed. To update it to the latest version from rPath, go back to the virtual machine, and do the following:

login as root, no password needed.
execute “conary updateall”

After all updates are done, the appliance will be updated to WordPress 2.3.1. Another way to update, is to follow the standard WordPress Update procedures.

After the update, go to {IP}/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php again – and then you have the up-to-date WordPress with basic installation.

Now, you’ll be able to “play” with themes, plugins and design without hurting your live site. You can try out and build your new site. You can post here and fix those posts until you’re happy. And after you are, you can post it on your live blog. Here’s the example of my “possible” blog after few tweaks – I imported my own blog there just to see how can it look like (click to see larger picture):

This technique allows to do all sorts of experimenting while your live site is still very untouched, functional and working. It is also very helpful if you don’t have a WordPress blog yet and thinking about the move. It would allow you to play with it and to test it and to decide whether it worth the effort.

Enjoy being your own webmaster!!!

I have my own technology blog at www.thetechandcents.com. There I review all the variety of effects that technology has on our lives.