Not everyone has the talent or patience required to design a good site. I’ve been referring people to template services for years, but I recently came across this site that caught my eye. What sucks about most design services is that their sites are not caught up enough with the modern Web 2.0 style, but Stylish Web Design (Or is it Stilysh?) is by far one of the better web design companies I’ve seen in a long time. Their services include customized programming, logo design, SEO, and continues website maintenance. Not to mention the sexy design of their site, but their portfolio is pretty impressive as well.

So if you’re getting frustrated with your site hop on over to Stylish Web Design and get a free job quote.

Click here for Custom design

Design directory

Yes, it’s another one of those. It seems that every blog has its own tips for increasing traffic, so I decided to add my own tips that seem to have worked for my site

My first website was bluebutterflyweb.net which was set up back in 2005 for a school project while I was learning PHP and simplistic web design. I eventually made that a personal site, but I didn’t really care about search engine placement because the only traffic I cared to generate was from my friends and colleagues. In August 2006 I changed the domain name to v-nessa.net. It wasn’t until I redesigned my site back in Dec of 2006 that I started caring about people actually finding my site…I only had about 400 unique visitors a month which is obviously equal to pathetic in the eyes of the internet world. Three months later, I look in my stats and see that the traffic has nearly quadrupled since my first launch. Putting the pieces together I came up with a list of what worked for me.

1) Write what people want to read.

The giant cluestick should have slapped you with this one. If you don’t write what people want to read, no one will read. Try to keep your blog focused on a niche…it’s ok to post on other topics occasionally, but try to keep your blog based on a general category to build a good reader database. For instance, you’ll see that my blog is primarily focused on programming and technology, with mild tangents of topics that no one probably cares about.
Also, be original. It’s ok to post on topics that are discussed in other blogs, but add your own twist and you’ll find that people will be less likely to turn their heads. You’ll always want “features” on your site that no one else has so people will have to go to your site to get it. You can offer your own scripts, themes, wallpaper, etc. to encourage people to come to your site.

2) Make it pretty

Have you ever seen a dog so ugly that you wanted to gouge your eyes out with a spoon rather than pet it, even though the owner says it the best dog in the world? I could probably say the same about your blog. No one likes an ugly site, or a site with a gazillion popups. Get yourself a good host, good blogging software, and a nice theme. I’m not saying this just because I’m employed there, but InMotion Hosting would be a good start for all of the above — for as little as $4 per month you get your choice of 5 bloggers that can be installed with a click of your mouse, not to mention a free domain name.

3) Watch your stats

Know where your traffic is coming from. I use AWstats on my server so I can see exactly how most people are getting to my site, like which search engine terms they are using, who’s linking to me, etc. I’ll occasionally see a crapload of search hits for a topic that I didn’t even write about…this lets me know what people are searching for and I’m therefore more likely to write on it because I know that people want to read it. It’s also helpful to know which sites are linking to yours so you can continue to keep tabs and possibly create even more traffic from that site to yours.

4) Search engines are your friend

This one should come second in the “duh” list, and it’s possibly the hardest point to write on in a post like this. I’m not going to lie — getting a good placement in search engines is not easy for some people, but if you don’t get listed no one will find you. There are a lot better resources out there that can elaborate more on this topic, but here are the key points:

- Check your code – You should make sure that the coding of your site will allow search engine spiders to properly crawl your site, meaning that your HTML should be clean and properly formatted. Using professional blogging software like WordPress can eliminate your need to worry about this.

- Use META tags, descriptions, and anything else you can squeeze in there – If you do a ‘view source’ on my site you’ll see that I have a variety of keywords set up. META tags are still valuable to most search engines, so don’t ignore them.

- Use SEF URLs – Search Engine Friendly URLs are formatted in a way that will allow search engines to find them. A link that looks like this will probably make Yahoo want to commit suicide:

http://domain.com/index.php?page=4&id=something&sess=123456778909

Try to make your URL’s formatted in a way that search engines understand:

http://domain.com/pages/page

If you are using software that generates dynamic URL’s like in my first example, you can create a rewrite rule in your .htaccess. Most software developers of blogging engines have additional plugins or re-formatted .htaccess rules that you can use.

You’ll also want to name the URLs approriate for the type of post. For instance, if you were writing a post on sex and candy, a url extension of …/sex-and-candy/ would probably score higher than ../index.php?page=123456.

- Use Sitemaps – I can’t stress how important this one is. A sitemap is just how it sounds — a map of your site. They are very easy to make, and can be submitted to Google or Yahoo in seconds. There are several sites out there who offer to generate them for you at no cost, but if you are using blogging software there may be a plugin available for you. For Wordress I use this.

5 ) Get listed

There are hundreds of blog directories out there, and the more that you can get into the better. If you go to the ‘Stuff’ section of my sidebar you’ll see several places that you can register your blog. This is called “Social Networking.”

6) Let people link

You should be somewhat reliant on other bloggers to help you, whether it be on their sites or in a blog directory. If you make this easy you’ll find that your visitors will actually do it, so add some links at the bottom of your posts to allow your visitors to instantly add your blog to social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Technorati, and Digg. I use Sociable, which allows you to add over 50 different links to popular directory sites, even though I only chose the most popular.

7) Socialize

This is a tip I kind of found by accident, when I started posting on my friends’ blogs and random forums. When people read my comments they clicked on my site too. Forums can be a little trickier, but you’ll want to try to link back to your site as much as possible without spamming. Put your URL in your profile and signature, and try to link back to your site if you have relevent information to share. For example, I recently posted my Ruby on Rails tutorial on the cPanel forums, and suddenly I’m getting 100 more visitors a month from people learning how to install Ruby. Do use caution with this method though, as some sites frown upon users linking to their own sites.

I figured out a way to create a php website crawler that can be run via web browser instead of command line. You can use this to harvest links from a website for use in a database or search engine…or to see how easily a spider or bot can creep your site. Try it here!

<html>
<head><title>PHP Website Crawler</title></head>
<body>
<font face="verdana" color=#66ccff">
<form id="crawl" method="post" action="">

<label>URL:
<input name="url" type="text" id="url" value="<?php $url; ?>http://website.com" size="70" maxlength="255" />
</label>
<br />
<br />
<label>
<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Crawl!" />
</label>
<br />
</form>
</body>
</html>
<?php
if (isset($_POST['url'])) {
$url = $_POST['url'];
$f = @fopen($url,"r");
while( $buf = fgets($f,1024) )
{
$buf = fgets($f, 4096);
preg_match_all("/<\s*a\s+[^>]*href\s*=\s*[\"']?([^\"' >]+)[\"' >]/isU",$buf,$words);
for( $i = 0; $words[$i]; $i++ )
{
for( $j = 0; $words[$i][$j]; $j++ )
{
$cur_word = strtolower($words[$i][$j]);
print "$cur_word<br>";
}
}
}
}
?>

I decided to post a list of the WordPress plugins that I’ve found to be the most useful, a majority of which I use on my own site.
To see a list of plugins to avoid, see my other post.

1) WP Google Sitemap Generator

This one is by far the most important if search engine rankings are important to you. Once you install the plugin, it will automatically generate the sitemap.xml file that Google and Yahoo use to efficiently index your site. While I’ve always had good search engine rankings, my traffic doubled in January after adding this plugin, with triple the hits stemming from Google searches.

Download from Author

2) Adsense-Deluxe

If you’re looking for a better way to display your Google Adsense ads, this plugin may be benficial to you. You can store several different types of Google ad units, then call them by adding a simple HTML tag to your posts, varying with each different unit that you store.

Download from Author

3) Akismet

I can’t tell you how annoying comment spam is, and how many I find in my moderation queue every week. Akismet is pretty good at identifying spam comments and keeping them from bombarding your blog…it also ‘learns’ to identify spam based on what you tell it.

You should already have this plugin as it comes by default with WordPress, but if not you can download it here. You will need a WordPress API as well, which you can obtain here.

4) Ultimate Tag Warrior

Ever envy those sexy tag clouds you see on other blogs? You can always make your own, but for WordPress, Ultimate Tag Warrior is the best way to create your own customizable tag cloud. It can be implemented into your site’s sidebar with one of the many simple codes provided, and it automatically updates every time you add a new tag or category.

Download from Author

5) Sociable

This plugin easily allows your visitors to add you to over 60 social networking sites with the a click of a button. You can customize which sites you wish to include in the selection, as well as where the list appears. You can see an example of this below each of my posts.

Download from Author

6) WP-Cache

Working for a webhosting company that spends a major focus on server monitoring, we send out a lot of notices to customers whos WordPress sites are just killing the server. WordPress itself is lightening fast, but factor in all the plugins, images, and traffic, you’ve got yourself one slow-ass site. One of our system admins started recommending WP-Cache to customers, and it seems to have really helped both on the server end and the speed of the customer’s website itself. It basically does just what the name suggests — it caches commonly-accessed pages to avoid excessive and repetitive use of the database.

Download from Author

7) SRG Clean Archives

If you have a large website with a lot of articles that you want visitors to be able to find quickly and easily, you might want to implement an archives page. SRG Clean Archives will generate a pretty list of all your articles organized by month, and allow you to display them as a separate page or on an existing on. If you need an example, you can view my archives page.

Download from Author

8) Counterize

This plugin allows you to display tons of different stats on any part of your site with a simple HTML tag. You can choose which ones you want to display, as well as adjust the context in which they are shown. While I stopped using this plugin in favor of writing my own (for dignity purposes), it would look something like how I have my hits displayed in my sidebar.

Download from Author

9) Download Manager

If you are offering downloads on your site, whether it be themes, plugins, scripts, etc., you might find it valuable to track how many download you are getting. By adding a simple URL extension to your download target, you can have the Download Manager track and log who is downloading your files. You can also control who is allowed to download them, and how often.

Download from author

10) WPG2/WP-Forum

Nothing really annoys me more than when someone adds a gallery to their site that links off into something that does not look like part of the site at all. When people have galleries, shopping carts, etc. that are all linking to parts run by different web applications, the end result is the appearance of an Angelina Jolie-type family. It just doesn’t fit together. WPG2 is a wordpress-Gallery2 bridge that is used to display images from a separate Gallery2 installation within a single page. Similarly, if you are using forums you’ll find the WP-Forum plugin to be a tasteful way to add phpBB-like functionality to your site. If you have other software that you’re in favor of using, you could probably find a WordPress bridge for that as well.

Download WPG2 from Author

Download WP-Forum from Author

11) Subscribe to Comments

Wouldn’t it be nice to know when someone responds to one of your comments on one of the bazillion blogs you read? This plugin will give your visitors an option to subscribe to comments, and receive an email when someone posts a new one. You can also see who is subscribing to comments on your blog.

Download from Author

12) Fancy Pullquotes

This obviously isn’t the most vital and functional plugin, but it can add a whole lotta sexy to your blog posts by pulling out select words and placing them as large blockquotes off to the site. The version I’m using is slightly modified, but you can download the original from here.

13) wpPHPmailer

What most people don’t know is that the vast majority of php software will use the mail() function by default which sends mail out as the php user “nobody.” Nevertheless, this function has now become the feature most commonly blocked by major hosting providers. The reason we started blocking php mail() is that a customer’s software can become exploited and send out thousands of emails past our regular hourly sending limit because exim doesn’t limit the mail sent from the php user “nobody.”

On another note, some email providers are now blocking mail that comes from ‘nobody’ or marking it as spam, which can also cause your mail server to be blacklisted. Try sending yourself a message from your WordPress admin panel then look at the email headers when it is received. Most likely you’ll see the original sender as nobody@yourmailserver.com.

phpMailer is a popular php-based mailing agent that has been tweaked into an easy-to-use WordPress plugin to allow you to send mail via SMTP. I highly recommend using this as an alternative to the native php mail handling of WordPress, whether your host blocks nobody mail or not.

Download from Author