Steve Kaufmann is a Canadian entrepreneur. He is the founder of The Linguist Institute which is now known as LingQ, a language learning system based on the methods he himself uses to learn languages. He speaks 11 languages, plus his native English. He is a successful blogger and writes on his The Linguist on Language Blog. His blog is very popular in the industry. It’s interactive, trustworthy and offers genuinely useful information for the LingQ language learning system but also for language learning in general. Simply put a typical story of a successful blog, a great business promoter that many of us are trying to develop.

BDS: Steve, welcome to Blog Design Studio, before we proceed with the questions can you give us some basic information about your company LingQ.

Steve Kaufmann: In simple terms LingQ is a language learning system and community. People learn from interesting input, audio and text, most of which is contributed by the members. We have some rather unique functionality which makes it easier and more enjoyable to gradually acquire language skills. Most of all it is a great community of people with a common interest in language who are helping each other and themselves. There is also mutual tutoring and error correction but in a way that is integrated with our learning methodology. I started this activity about 6 years ago after a career in the international trade of wood products, an activity in which I am still engaged.

BDS: How has your blog helped you in promoting your business?

Steve Kaufmann: My blog is one of the largest referrers to LingQ. It also helps to create some credibility for us amongst people who learn languages on the web.

BDS: What are your customers getting out of your blog?

Steve Kaufmann: Readers of my blog are not necessarily customers. I hope they are getting interesting and useful information, and the odd bit of debate and controversy. I try to vary the posts between providing sources of useful language content, ideas on language learning and general ranting on all kinds of subjects.

BDS: How often you post a blog?

Steve Kaufmann: Once every two or three days, and sometimes more often. I tend to post when I have something to say. I guess I should be more regular.

BDS: Do you use social networking websites like Facebook and Orkut to promote LingQ?

Steve Kaufmann: I do not use Orkut. All my posts appear on Facebook and Twitter. I do not really understand how it all works, but we get a lot of referrals to LingQ from Facebook and Twitter so I guess it does something. I am a little new to all of this social networking. I do not go around SMSing from my cell phone.

BDS: Do you think the design is important for your Blog/Website?

Steve Kaufmann: Blog design is key. A blog is like a store. People are more likely to come in to an attractive store than one that is not. The design has to suit the tastes and interests of the target group. Aside from the appearance, ease of navigation is also important. I think it is important to really think through what information you want to display where.

Thank Steve for giving us your valuable time. We wish you good luck with your social media marketing strategies! We hope that your experience will surely help spread the idea of importance of social media marketing in business.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

So you want to create a high-traffic site? It’s so cool to have all those plugins too. But will WordPress be sufficient for your high-traffic site? Will it survive tons of heavy traffic every day? Well the answer can be yes as long as you take care of few things. Here are some tips on how to speed up your WordPress site. Before you go ahead with this blog post, you should go ahead and read the following post as well – Unclutter your blog.

Stay up to date with the latest WordPress version and plugins

Staying up to date with the latest version of WordPress is really a must do. Make sure always to stay updated with the latest release of WordPress in order to boost performance of your blog. This is not just for fun, in every update, there are many upgrades that will enhance the performance of your blog but also you will prevent your site from security risks. You should do exactly the same with WordPress plugins. Keep them up to date, it’s as important, and for the same reasons.

Turn off, limit or even delete unused plugins

One of the biggest issues that causes WordPress sites to slow down is leaving too many plugins active even when you’re not using them. If you are using more than say 15 plugins on your blog then you need to check to see if you really need all of them. Some plugins can have many scripts and code. So if you’re not using a plugin disable it and give Wordpress a break or maybe delete it. Keep the plugins that are really necessary for your site to run and than disable the ones that aren’t needed. You can lower the number of plugins during heavy traffic times by turning off a few WordPress Plugins temporarily and than you can reactivate them again after the heavy traffic volume has died down a bit.

Be careful with the server requests

All of the items that you have on your page like html page, the css page, javascripts, images, movies, and any other item will generate separate requests for each of them to the web server. Having in mind that the server can handle a limited number of requests at a time, you should try to make things easier for it and reduce the number of items to a second server. First are the images. Your embedded images can be uploaded to an image sharing site like Flickr and by that use the big Flickr servers which can withstand the load much easier. The same for videos, upload to YouTube, Google Video or any other video hosting site and then use their embedding function from their servers within your own page.

Clean up and compress your code

Compress your CSS, i.e. get rid of the white space and get everything neat and clean and than put JavaScript into a single file and load it at the bottom of the page in footer.php. This way the styling will load first and than the JavaScript. Optimizing your code this way actually can do a lot for your load time. At first you might not notice any difference, but it will make a huge difference to your blog speed. White space like indented tabs, line breaks, etc. which you use for better readability are slowing down your blog. Decrease white space and be sure to use shorthand and will be able to speed up your site’s load.

Page Speed is a wonderful Firefox extension that has been released by Google to help webmasters to optimize their blogs and websites. This plugin minify’s the javascripts and even tells you that how one can optimize the performance of the scripts and thus overall improving the speed of the blog.

One another way to speed up the blog’s performance is by using few of these plugins -
1. WP-Super Cache – This plugin creates a cached copy of the dynamic pages and thus doesn’t load up the server with dynamic requests. Find out that why using this plugin is such a good idea and why it makes to our top plugins for wordpress list.
2. Optimize DB – This awesome plugin will optimize the tables of your database and thus improving the overall performance of the blog.
3. Shrink-O-Matic – This is not a WordPress plugin, however an Adobe AIR based application that reduces the image size and eventually speeds up the loading time of the blog pages.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Well, it plays approximately the same role in representing your blog to the world as looks do for women. A pretty woman will definitely be “right” at the moment she appears in front of the people. Later on, she may turn out to be stupid, boring, or even malicious, but she has won the first battle anyway. The same goes for your blog. You may have the best of the content however if you don’t have a good blog design, you’ll still lose a lot of readers just because the presentation of the blog isn’t that good.

Your blog’s design is very important to you. It reflects on you and how you’re perceived by other people. Believe it or not, first impressions do count. A good blog design will absolutely give you a better first impression. It encourages the people to click and read a bit further and get to the all-important content. In the wide world of blogging, the content might be the king, but the design is the queen. So use your first impression and give the content of your blog a better chance to be seen by the world.

In one of earlier poll (which unfortunately is still running, we’ll change it soon) results we found out that more than 80% of this blog’s readers think that blog design is really important in a blog’s success. Apart from that there are some of very renowned blogger/designers share there views about blog design -

1. How important is design to a blog’s success? – by Vandley Design.
2. Better keep a log on your blog (quoting Kiruba Shankar, one of the most prolific bloggers from India)
3. How important is blog design service? – Performancing

What makes a great blog design?

Again a lot has been already said on this particular topic, so I thought it would be best to share those wonderful links with you all -

1. 5 Characterstics of good blog design!
2. What makes a design good?
3. Ten important traits of a good blog design.

The design of your blog is just as important as any other aspect of your business and it will be wise to plan it in your budget. In blogging you can always change things, experiment, see what works and than use it. So take care of your blog design. Start with experimenting in a WordPress theme and if someday you decide to hire a blog designer to help you out, the Blog Design Studio is available and eager to help you any time.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Parts of the loop

The loop has three parts:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Part 1) Here stands the content that you want to be displayed in the Loop

<?php endwhile;?>

Part 2) Here stands what is displayed when the Loop is over

<?php else : ?>

Part 3) If there’s nothing to display

<?php endif; ?>

Template Tags in the Loop

Basic tags:

if (have_posts()) – checks to see if you have any post.

while (have_posts()) – if you do have it, while you have any post, execute the_post().

the_post() – call for the posts to be displayed.

endwhile; – this is used to close while()

else – is what to do when you don’t have any post at all

endif; – close if()

Than there are more template tags within the Loop that will output things such as the post title, the permalink, the content, etc:

<?php the_permalink() ?>

– This tag echos the permalink of the post

<?php the_title(); ?>

– This one echos the post title

<?php the_time(’F jS, Y’) ?>

– This will echo the date, for example July 4th, 1776.

<?php the_author() ?>

– This will display the author’s name

<?php the_tags(’Tags: ‘, ‘, ‘, ‘<br />’); ?>

– This will display the tags assigned to the post, separated by commas, and followed by a line break

<?php the_category(’, ‘) ?>

– This will display the categories

<?php edit_post_link(’Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?>

– This will display the  edit post link which will be visible only to those with permission.

<?php comments_popup_link(’No Comments »’, ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?>

– Will display the link to the comments. This will not be displayed on single posts or pages.

The rest of the tags are available at WordPress Codex.

Posts Nav Link

After the loop you should make the pagination that you see on the homepage, archives, and search results (but not on the single posts or pages):

<div>

<?php posts_nav_link(); ?>

</div>

where

posts_nav_link() – call for the Next and Previous links

If there are no posts to display then the following will be displayed after the <?php else : ?>:

<h2>Not Found</h2>
<p>Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.</p>

Insert ads after the first post

OK, now let’s hack it just a little bit. The ads usually are displayed on the blog sidebar, footer or header, but if you think that’s not the best solution then you can insert them after the first post. You can do this by replacing your current loop with the following one:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

<?php $count = 0; ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<?php $count++; ?>

<?php if ($count == 2) : ?>

//Paste your ad code here

<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

<?php else : ?>

<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

<?php endif; ?>

<?php endwhile; ?>

<?php endif; ?>

That’s more or less what the loop in WordPress is about, its parts, template tags, necessary “navigation” after it and maybe the “ads” too.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Here are the themes listed:

1. Facebook Lover

This is my favorite one and have attracted my attention immediately, the reason is obvious, it’s Facebook style, the social-networking site that is now more popular than porn.

2. Mental Disorder

I have had hard time choosing my favorite one between this and the previous one, what attracted me here apart from the very cool design is the small width of the theme which reduces left-right eye movement consequently increasing the reading speed and reducing the reading effort. And that background… sometimes is getting me out of this world for a moment or so, it’s like instant sci-fi, cool!

3. Papel Continuo

Eh, the good old times when paper was ruling the world , a truly unique design, great idea.

4. Bigsweaterdesign

Run by Vincent Maglione, whose last name means “Big sweater” in a rough literal translation, he not just succeeded  in making a parallel between his name and the theme but also to build a wonderful, very interesting design.

5. Infinity

A complex, irregular design with real artistic touch, still very easy to navigate.

6. Jrvelasco

7. Lee Noris

8. Color Paper

9. So Suechtig

10. WebDesignerWall

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

View Live Blog

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

View Live Blog

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

View Live Blog

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

WordPress is a blog publishing application and content management system. It has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between.

Theme or WP theme are all the files you’re using: texts, images, codes, etc, etc. Every theme has at least two files: index.php and style.css. You tell your theme where everything goes within index.php same as you do in index.htm and you tell your theme how everything will look like within style.css. Apart from these two files the theme can contain:  home.php, single.php, page.php, category.php, archive.php, search.php, 404.php, comments.php, comments-popup.php, author.php etc.

Probably you already know how to install WordPress by now. Make sure that your WordPress engine is running, then go ahead and drop your folder that contains all the HTML in it into the wp-content/themes folder. Wp-content contains all the content, uploads, themes, plugins, upgrade files, etc, etc.

OK, let’s go.

Step 1 – The basic template files

First of all change the style.css by pasting this into it:

/*
Theme Name: WordPressify your XHTML in 5 simple steps
Theme URI:
Version: 1
Author: Blog Design Studio
Author URI: http://blogdesignstudio.com/
*/

After that change index.htm to index.php and that’s it, now you have the two basic template files.

Step 2 – The breakup

Now open the index.php file, than simply cut and paste the content this way: the header of the code in new file named header.php, the right column in a new file called sidebar.php, the footer in footer.php than just save the rest of it like it is.

Step 3 – header.php

After all that done, now let’s take care of the separate files one by one. Open header.php and replace the <head> with this code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<title><?php wp_title('&laquo;', true, 'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" media="screen" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo bloginfo(stylesheet_directory) .'/js/domtab.js'; ?>"></script>
<?php if ( is_singular() ) wp_enqueue_script( 'comment-reply' ); ?>
<?php wp_head(); ?>

Done? Than go to the menu, get rid of the li’s, but keep the wrapping ul and the current page item. Type this in:

<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>

Than put these into the current page item:
Into <li class=”

page_item page_item_1 <?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>current_page_item<?php } ?>

than into <a href=”

<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>

Save, refresh, and that’s it. Your menu is dynamic now.

Step 4 – index.php

Now let’s take care of the posts. Here you got “the Loop”. “The Loop” is a code that has information passed through it. Then it ‘loops’ or goes through the Database number of times to get the data required.

OK, now take the beginning of the loop:

<?php if(have_posts()) : while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

And place it before your content i.e. the post, than close the loop with this:

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Now fill in the content tags, the tags that pull the information from the database within the loop.

<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title() ?>

gets the title of the post

<?php the_time('j M, Y'); ?>

gets the time (day, month, year)

<?php the_author_posts_link() ?>

gets the author

<?php the_category(', '); ?>

the category

<?php the_content('read more'); ?>

displays the contents of the current post.

<?php comments_popup_link('No Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments'); ?>

displays a link to the comments

Here is an example with the content tags in bold:

<div id="leftcolumn">

 <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class="post">
<div class="title">
<h2><a href=" <?php the_permalink() ?> "> <?php the_title() ?></a></h2>
<div class="postdata">
<?php the_time('j M, Y'); ?> written by <?php the_author_posts_link() ?> in <?php the_category(', '); ?>
</div>
</div>
<?php the_content('read more'); ?>
<div class="postcom"> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments'); ?></div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php else : ?>
<h2 class="center">Not Found</h2>
<p class="center">Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.</p>
<?php get_search_form(); ?>
 
 <?php endif; ?>
</div>

Just don’t forget to put these include tags in the code:

At the beginning of the index.php:

<?php get_header(); ?>

This tag includes the file header.php from your current theme’s directory.

At the end of the index.php:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

includes the file sidebar.php from your current theme’s directory.

<?php get_footer(); ?>

includes the file footer.php

Step 5 – sidebar.php

The Sidebar may look difficult, but it isn’t at all. Simply put this into the ul:

<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar('Sidebar') ) : else : ?>

<?php endif; ?>

Than create a new file called functions.php, and paste this into it:

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Sidebar',
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
?>

Now you can go to Appearance >Widgets in your wp-admin and add the some widgets like categories, archives etc.

Well, that’s it, now you have a fully functioning homepage. The only small thing left is to take care of the single.php, page.php, archive.php and 404.php. Now again create four new php files: single, archive, page and 404.

Copy the contents of index.php. Paste that in archive.php, than replace

the_content()

to

the_excerpt()

than paste it into single.php. Delete the comments_popup_link, navigation links and the read more link. Paste that in page.php. Copy everything from page.php now, and paste it into 404.php. Than post this in the post area:

<div class="post">
<div>
<h2>Error 404 - Not Found</h2>
</div>
</div>

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

The company’s name is After The DeadLine and as I said earlier that this service/plugin actually proof reads your blog posts and tells you if you’ve made spelling or grammatical mistakes or not. After The DeadLine has been already integrated in WordPress.com & is available as a free plugin for WordPress.org users.

The bad thing about it is that – I deliberately made few grammatical mistakes while writing this blog posts and it couldn’t pick up even a single one, although the good thing is that this plugin is intelligent enough and as announced by Matt – it will learn as more and more people will start using it.

I would suggest that bloggers should install this plugin and use it before publishing their posts as not only this will help bloggers like me (who don’t have English as part of their culture). Of course, proof reading of posts is possible if people use expensive software like MS Word or Apple Pages, however not everyone can afford those software, so I’m sure that this free plugin will surely help them in improving their writing style and will ensure that there will be far less errors in their blog posts.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink