I’ve upgraded several blogs, and all seems to well. Here’s a brief list of features:
I’ll be updating the videos to go over these new features here in the next few days.
If you have a website, and you have even 1 picture on it, you need to resize the picture for the web. I know that you can go in the html code and limit the size of the picture as it’s shown on the webpage, but that does nothing to reduce the file size of the image.
You need to reduce the file size of the image. Let me explain why:
If the original image, is 2400×1900 pixels, taken on a 7 Megapixel camera, that image can easily be 5 MB in size. If connected over an average high speed cable modem, that 5 MB image will take anywhere between 30-90 seconds to load.
If someone is looking at a series of photos, how many times do you think they’ll be willing to wait 30-90 seconds for a picture to load before moving on? Even if they stay, what kind of user experience is that?
Limiting the size of the picture, in the html code, only limits how the picture is displayed on the page. It does not change the file size of the picture.
So, how do you fix it?
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for this. Here’s how you do it using Photoshop CS4:
Most, if not all other image editing applications have a similar menu.
Look for it and use it.
There are even some websites that allow you to crunch and resize images online, so you don’t even really need image editing software on your computer.
Going back to our sample, that same 5 MB picture, compressed for the web, saved at 800×600, is now only 47 KB in size and will load in under 3 seconds over the same connection.
The best part, is that most users will not notice the difference in quality between the large, slow loading picture and the small, fast loading one.
They will however, notice the difference in how fast your site loads.
If you want, you can even put a link for someone to view/download the high quality image, but there’s no need to load a high quality/ large file size and slow loading image by default.
In this video I go over how to add a page to your wordpress blog. This is a preview from the complete video series that I have for sale on the order page.
Here’s the direct link to the video
If you have any questions about adding a page after watching the video, let me know in the comments.
1. Do not pick a name with hyphens, underscores or dashes.
People don’t know the difference between them. Furthermore, imagine you’re in the elevator with someone, trying to tell them your url (aka domain name) and you have to say “double u, double u, double u, dot the, hyphen, coffee, hyphen, guy, dot com” and not getting through. Your prospect is just not understanding if you mean “hyphen (-)” or “underscore (_)” or what the url is supposed to be.
It’s just too complicated. Get rid of the hyphens and just get a domain name without dashes, hyphens or underscores.
2. Pick something simple and straightforward.
Preferably, the name of your company, but if it’s not available, pick a name related to what you do. More info about this is in the next point.
3. Perform keyword research to pick out a domain name.
What am I talking about?
Keyword research basically means researching what words people are typing into the search engines to find content related to what you are talking about. Keyword research may be completely irrelevant if you are only interested in a personal blog, and don’t care about getting readers. If you care about getting some people to read your blog or visit your site, you may want to do some keyword research.
Here’s how to perform keyword research in a nutshell:
Go to Google and type in “keyword research tool” in the search bar. Click on the “Google Adwords Keyword Tool” or on the “word tracker” tool. Read the instructions on the website for how to execute the search.
For instance, using the Google tool, if I were to type in the keyword “running” and then search on that word, I get a list of several hundred running related words and phrases that people are typing into the Google search engine when they look up running related web sites.
From here, it can be as simple as going down the list of results and seeing which domain name, that is related to what I’m going to write about is available. You could also find some other words that you hadn’t thought about and then research them.
There are a lot more things to consider when picking a domain name, specially when it comes to performing keyword research, but these 3 things should get you going.
