There are many websites that provide free html blog templates and I am talking about Google Blogger templates on this occasion; although there are free templates for any type of website, blog or not. This shortish post is intended to take the slog out of finding them. A small word of warning about free blog templates. They are written by talented and skilled people, yes. But the people at Google are the most talented and proficient of the lot. Google hires the best people, they can afford to. What I am saying is that the templates that Google produce function beautifully and although they can be customized (and the Blogger team accept this) sometimes the customization looks good but doesn’t function as well as the original template.
It is a bit like buying a Ferrari and asking the local garage to do a bit of work under the bonnet (hood in the USA). When you customize you have to be careful. Also, I don’t know about you, but when I see a slick blog I have a feeling that it is going to contain weak content because the effort has gone into making it slick. The old fashioned sites often have great content and content is king as they say.
The bottom line is that function is more important than form. As a result I would make sure that the template functions well in all ways before finally adopting it.
Secondly, I notice that Google generally and the Google Blogger people as well, have extremely simple and functional websites. They are almost plain, a little boring perhaps, but highly functional and useful. Sometimes the look of the site gets in the way of its function. Take the blogs with fancy backgrounds. A website provides these (The Cutest Blog on the Block). They are nice and the blogs that use this service are very pretty. But they will load more slowly because you are loading an image for the background. Sometimes they will load considerably more slowly if in addition the blog has lots of widgets containing third party scripts pulling in stuff from other sites. Add to that some large jpeg images on the blog and it will definitely load slowly. This can be a put off for visitors in a high speed world.
With free html blog templates you can either download from the site that provides the template (and then upload it to your site) or copy all the code and paste it into your edit template window. The former is probably the better. I look at the technique further down this post for people who have not tried this.
Anyway here is where you can find free html blog templates. The first three also provide information about getting the best from Blogger blogs (like this site but on a bigger scale):
1. The website, Bloggerbuster, is perhaps one of the best sources for free blog templates as the lady who runs the site, Amanda Fazani, has templates on site and she links to other sites (as I recall) that provide more examples. Plus she provides a lot of useful tips etc. This is the page to start from: http://designs.bloggerbuster.com/
2. The next website that provides blog templates is run by a guy called “Enviroman”. He is a self confessed introvert who must spend all day in front of the computer! He also must be concerned about the environment – good for him. He has a good site but it loads way too slowly (to speed up load times, click the refresh button while it is loading – this gives it a kick up the backside and speeds things up a bit). While Bloggerbuster provides new looking designs, Mr Enviroman tends to focus more on extending existing designs (e.g. more columns etc.). I prefer the gentle modification of a blogger site as you can retain the perfect functionality of the Google team’s template while adding your personal touch (see for example my contribution: Add Third Column to Minima Template). Here are a series of pages from Enviroman to visit and explore:
http://www.bloggertipsandtricks.com/search/label/templates
3. Another well known site dealing with customization of Blogger blogs and one I would call part of the “Big Three” is, Tips for New Bloggers. These guys (there appears to be more than one person) have been on holiday for the last year or so! Their site still does damn well. They tend to do what Enviroman does and provide customizations as opposed to complete new zam bam designs. This is the link to the “template” label which will show a series of posts on this subject:
http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/search/label/Template
4. The next site is dedicated to providing free html blog templates. It contains hundreds of templates. This is the best site for choice. I uploaded one to test it (see it here: http://cats-how-to.blogspot.com/
To upload the new template:
I’ll talk you through how to produce what I call a “Wikipedia style” table, the only table (really) worth producing; an elegant table with a fine border. I would not get involved with tables that have thick borders. When I see these I think novice etc.
You don’t need to know html table codes. It is useful to know what to look for but to write a table in html is pretty well pointless, in my opinion, as the html editors create great code for tables and the editors are free downloads. The following is an example of the code for a simple elegant table. The end result is shown below the code. Note: I am using simple html not CSS to produce sophisticated tables.
| <table |
Produces this:
| This | That |
| One | Two |
This can take on any number of variations (the table inside the box):
|
|
Or this:
|
The code for the latter (the inner table portion) is:
<table
style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); width: 100px; text-align: left; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"
border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td
style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; background-color: rgb(102, 51, 102); color: rgb(255, 255, 204);">This</td>
<td
style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; background-color: rgb(102, 51, 102); color: rgb(255, 255, 204);">That</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td
style="text-align: center; background-color: rgb(51, 102, 102); color: rgb(153, 255, 153);">One</td>
<td
style="text-align: center; background-color: rgb(51, 102, 102); color: rgb(153, 255, 153);">Twoc</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
The strength of these tables for me is that they are elegant, look professional and easy to produce. But ironically the border setting for them all is always “0”. They have no border. The border is produced inside the cell spacing, by setting a difference between the table colour and the cell colours.
OK, so how do we produce tables like this at will and in an endless range of combinations? As I mentioned you don’t do it manually. But you need to know how to get the elegant fine line border and how to fill in the table with colour.
As mentioned, the underlying method is to create a table and paint in the table with a desired colour. The colour will be the colour of the border (note: remember there is no border, as the border is the colour in the cell spacing). The table should be given Spacing of one pixel (enter “1” against “Spacing”). The cells inside the table are then painted in a different colour. This will be the colour of the cells. When the cells are painted in, what remains of the colour selected for the table is just the border, all the rest is the cell colour.
The key is to use an html editor to give flexibility and speed. There are many free editors. I use NVU. It is a free download. Once downloaded it can be installed in the usual way. Here is the home page for NVU
Once you have NVU installed (or any other html editor which should have the same facilities) you will usually write your webpage in it but if you simply want to write some html code to, for example, create elegant html table codes that is fine.
These are the steps employed in NVU to produce the above tables:
That is it. You will need some practice and experimentation obviously unless you know it all already! When the table is right for you go into the “Source” window and copy the page and paste it into the webpage that you are working on.
If you are working in the Blogger Blog compose mode window to write your post, the best way to transfer the table produced in NVU to your post is as follows (note: if you simply copy and paste the code the result is unacceptable):
Html table codes are all about working in a decent html editor and producing simple and elegant tables.
Is it possible to make easy money on the internet? I don’t believe it is. Why should it be easier to make money on the internet than on the ground? We are dealing with the same business principles, the same clients and business associates, ultimately. In short we are still dealing with people. Sure there are differences. These are both good and bad. But the differences are not the kind of differences that make it easier to make money on the internet. They simply relate to the methods of making money because of the nature of the internet.
In fact, the very ease of starting an internet business can be its undoing. The start up costs, in terms of hard cash, can be almost zero. This is very attractive to millions of people, particularly cautious people. A lot of people hanker after running their own business but are frightened. The internet lets them put their toe in the water of the business world with no downside, no risk. However, most successful business people are not averse to taking financial risks at some stage. An overly cautious approach is the death knell to successful business building, in my opinion. The great benefit of low start up costs also creates false expectations and a carelessness which combine some time down the line to demotivate and before long fizzle sets in. Another failure.
The great benefit of the massive world market that can be tapped into on the internet is also both a positive and a negative. A huge market means lots of customers. A huge market also means lots of suppliers (websites). And that means a ton of competition in which you can drown without a trace. It is easy to be completely invisible on the internet for ever. No one will ever read what you say unless you learn how to get noticed. And that is the first indication that the start up costs are not that low after all. You’ve gotta learn how to do it. That translates to time, your time, hundreds of hours of it and more. And time is the equivalent of money in the business world. The start up costs are not low after all.
Making money on the internet from scratch is about a lot of up-front work and the income comes much later down the line. So if you are alone, the financial start up costs are low but the effort start up costs are high. You can’t buck the economics. Of course, you can get someone to build the website for you and you can advertise using Google Adwords. That reduces work start up cost but significantly increases financial start up costs. The formula is in balance.
How about those, make easy money on the internet websites? They often get lots of traffic. I see many with Alexa rankings in the 20,000 and better. That means at a guess, unique visitors in the order of 50,000 per day. Some of these visitors buy into what these sites are selling because they have learned that it is not easy to make money on the internet but can’t quite accept it. So they turn to that warm helping hand at a very enticing cheap price to get their site noticed and to make quick bucks. It is very tempting, I know, but to be avoided.
The truth is that if you are making about $2,000 dollars a month the safe way you will need about half a million USD in the bank at about 5% interest. That is before tax. Some people take years to earn that and most (99%) never save that amount over their lieftime. I am talking worldwide. What I am saying is the effort needed to earn or make enough money to achieve a monthly income that supports you is high. And you can’t, in my view, buck that formula. There are stories of people making fortunes on the internet but they put fortunes into it and got more out. The fortune that was put in was made somewhere with great effort.
The bottom line is this, the financial model is always in balance. If it is easier one way it is harder in another way. Expectations to make easy money on the internet should be curtailed, reined in. For individuals with no particular outstanding talent it will be hard work and a long slog but no less enjoyable for that for the right person.
If we are to “succeed” (and this is a personal and subjective concept) on the internet with blogs we need to consider not only search engine optimization and all its facets but also how to put it all to use efficiently. Speed blogging and efficient blogging is more a necessity that a luxury and this is why.
First, lets get the concept of “success” out of the way. In this post success is deemed to mean getting the maximum number of visitors and page views and therefore revenue. For some people, though (and rightly so) it will not mean that.
As you gradually progress up the Alexa hill to the lofty ranks of the bigger established wiz kid sites you find yourself in the first division and you have to raise your game if you are to keep on going up that slippery slope. Sometimes these sites have more than one person creating the content and there will be a geek of a computer person who gets a head start on the likes of me and thee. We have to compete against this.
Provided you turn out quality, original content, the faster you do it the better; that is a no brainer and the best way to compete against sites where more than on person creates content. So, what does that mean? We have three major sources of knowledge from which we create content:
If everything we write comes straight from our heads and no where else this is the fastest way to create. That is extremely unlikely and people who are looking for quick fixes can sometimes fall into the trap of doing just that; waffling on in a conversational way churning out unchecked information that is simply poor quality. So we need to fall back and rely on the internet. And books should, where possible, be used to supplement internet information for the sake of fresh information and to check the internet, which can be unreliable (but can also be extremely reliable).
I find the old clichés are true. I have small windows of what I call “enlightenment” on problem solving and ideas when (a) in the shower and (b) after about half a glass of wine – absolutely true. These should be used where possible. Memory though is gradually damaged by excess alcohol consumption! Ideas should be jotted down as they are fleeting and can disappear as fast as they arrive. And they should be left to mature for a day to check if they are as good as first thought.
I would guess that these are often ignored. I wouldn’t ignore them. Old books can provide new content under fresh circumstances and also stimulate new thoughts. Often book material will overlap with internet material but there are often small pieces of new information in books that are not readily found on the internet. Working with books is also easier than using information from the internet as it is a hard copy avoiding the need to jump from tab to tab or window to window when using websites for research. When you get to know a book you know where things are and working fast becomes a breeze.
Perhaps this is where the great savings in time can be made. I recommend these ideas for speed blogging and efficient blogging:
Speed Blogging and Efficient Blogging -- Further reading:
In terms of getting traffic to your blog, Page Rank Improvement is equally as important as ensuring that your web page is search engine optimized (at least to a minimum level: see: How To Get Traffic To Your Blog), perhaps more so. Judging by an interview with Matt Cutts, a Senior Engineer at Google, (or he was in 2005 and as far as I am aware he still is – who would leave Google probably the best employer on the planet?) this is the case.
| Lets think of the basics: Google is a highly profitable business based on internet use. Internet use is founded on the fact that it is a useful service. The more useful it is the more it grows and so does Google and Google’s profit. It is that premise that underpins Google’s concept of Page Rank, which in turn is based on quality inbound links (backlinks). Sites that are the recipient of quality inbound links are good quality sites providing a useful service. Thus is what Google wants more of. And so do we and all internet users. |
Here are two questions asked of him (from the website: http://www.seroundtable.com and reproduced under a creative commons license):
Question: Let's go back to text links.
Answer: Best links are earned, not sold or traded. You may not get what you pay for. He said, if someone is selling text links, they should give you a free test trial to make sure it works. They have both manual and algorithmic approaches to detect paid links. He said Google.com gets emails asking to trade links. The guy who came up with the pixel homepage thing, that was creative.
Question: Do you use the toolbar to figure out what to crawl and how often?
Answer: Nope. Its all pretty much based on PageRank.
OK, what does this mean? Answer: that inbound links are very important as it improves what Google call Page Rank. This, as I understand it, is a measure of a website’s worth or value on the internet. It is measured by the number of inbound links. This means the number of other sites referring to your blog by linking to it. By far the best links are those occurring naturally and voluntarily because these are genuine and “real” i.e. not bought or exchanged.
It is claimed, in the answer above, that Google can differentiate between “real” high value links from good Page Rank pages from bought links and there are a lot of online businesses selling high value links. These are links from web pages that have high Page Ranks. A high Page Rank is one above 3 (PR 3 or better is the target and the higher the better).
The more high quality naturally occurring inbound links you can get pointing towards your blog the better. If your blog (and web pages on the blog) have a decent PR, Google will favour it in listing pages (with decent PRs) higher in search result listings (note: this concept is disputed by the author, “Enviroman” - username, of the blogger tips and tricks site). Page Rank improvement ultimately comes about by writing good original content. That is the core of any website. And it is not really of any great value to simply regurgitate other people’s stuff. It is best to have an opinion, good or bad! One point worth making is that it is possible to provide your own inbound links, legitimately, by writing articles for other sites (article sites) and embedding links in those articles. The site that gains the most from this is the article site, however. Another way is to get listed in high page rank directories. These are good starting points. I wouldn’t listen to people who promote the idea that you can get instant thousands of backlinks (inbound links). This is not real and the Google algorithm will, I believe, spot this. It may even go against your blog or other website.
Once I did buy some inbound links but I stopped the process mid-stream as I realized the only way is to keep building good content, publicizing the website and using SEO as best as I know how. These are the three planks of success on the internet and the fourth flows from them: Page Rank Improvement.
Note: Anyone who leaves a comment of ten lines can leave a link to their site in the comment. While this page is the home page that means an inbound link from a PR 3 page.
My blog gets up to 2,700 unique visitors daily (see below). Here is a review of a top listed (by Google) SEO Blog software website. I think that people search for this in order to find some sort of software that will search engine optimize their blog automatically. The whole tortuous thing done for you. That doesn’t sound right to me. People don’t and can’t do that. So although as far as I am concerned the truth is that there is no shortcut to getting your work listed by Google in search results at a position (first page) that makes it useful, I am reviewing Jeff Johnson Underground Training Lab, Free SEO Blog Software and Traffic-Getting Training Tutorials.
Traffic for Pictures-of-Cats.org Blog -- Statcounter. 20-5-09.
Jeff Johnson’s website gets lots of traffic; a vast amount. A testament to the number of people who want to get their blog noticed. When you go to the site he tells you why he gives stuff away and then asks you to sign up. You confirm by email and then an email is sent to you, which purportedly contains the magic SEO Blog Software and tutorials.
In the email, he says that “Your” free software download link is below (in the email). But where the hell is it?! I am still looking. I am writing this at the same time that I signed up; it’s in real time. After about 15 lines of email in which he asks that we watch out for future emails he says,
“Here are your Free SEO Blog Software download instructions: Very Important! My Free SEO Blog Software is being replaced by my new SEO tool called "Traffic Getting SEO Plugin" for Wordpress.”
It is starting to look odd, already. He calls this, “Traffic Getting SEO Plugin(TM) for Wordpress”. Further down the email there is a link to a “review” of this software. I didn’t click on this because I already don’t trust this. It is probably OK but I don’t use Wordpress and I am not sure that my computer is going to be alright afterwards.
“Reviewing” the software is the first stage. You then have to login to get the download. Jeff says,
“Use this login information to access the download page:”
Then below that is a link above which are the words,
“Download the Traffic Getting SEO Plugin here:”
So, do we have to login for the Wordpress software or can we get it from the email? I am confused but I am not going to click on the link. That is it for me. I couldn’t find the SEO Blog software that I was looking for and expected from the language used. If he had simply provided a link to the product he said he would deliver, I would have continued.
Frankly, there is a lot of “white noise” out there on the internet. By white noise I mean distracting information and get rich quick type schemes (it is the guys who run the schemes who get rich, if at all, not us). They all prey on people who are struggling to make some money on the blasted internet. We used to have a dream that you could make real money on the internet more easily than you could elsewhere. That dream has died. It is as tough on the internet. But it suites a lot of people to make a living on the internet.
However, if you use Google Blogger as free blog hosting then you have made a good choice in my opinion because Google will tend to list Blogger blog posts after about 2 months and provided that you make more than a few of them! It is all about quality and quantity of content; posting regularly but not too speedily that the quality suffers.
I have made several posts about improving your chances of getting your blog noticed:
By the way I make about $1,000 (USD) per month on the internet so it can be done the old fashioned way!
Is Site Sell Site Buildit a Scam? I am writing this in response to the video arguments and text arguments of Allyn Hane: Master Of My Own Domain (this is the page). He says that SBI or Site Sell is bullshit. What he means is that you cannot succeed on the internet by being spoon feed “how to” information, as SBI do, and succeed in the long term. The only way to succeed in the long term is to know coding and internet marketing, the whole kibosh, the lot. After all, you wouldn’t go into any business without knowing a good deal about it and having the skills to perform, would you?
Normally I would say, yes, and agree that the internet business is no different to normal business. This is what Allyn Hane is saying. The truth, though, is that the internet business is not quite like any other business. For example, html code is only in existence to provide us with the means to put stuff on the internet. We don’t need to know all about it.
Sure it helps to know about it but by far the most important thing is how to express knowledge not how the internet works. And to put things on the internet at a simple level is relatively easy. There are many successful yet simple sites. Dr. Evoy advocates simplicity. His site Sitesell.com is a good example (at one time it had Alexa 500). So you don’t need to be an internet guru to succeed on the ‘net. This then supports the SBI model. They do the coding for you until (and this is important) you have found your feet and are ready to jump out of the box and do your own thing.
I know this lady in the video above, not personally but as a person who has succeeded using SBI. She's smart. And yes you need to be smart to really succeed with SBI.....
Note: If you found a bad review of SBI!, it was most likely part of a group of unscrupulous competitors who recently wrote and published a bunch of fake reviews about Site Build It! (Include link where you see fit).
One of the great barriers to succeeding on the internet is to get off the ground. It is a complete mystery, still, to a vast number of people. And a good proportion of these people have lots to give. They just don’t have the means to do it and Site Sell or SBI gives them the launch pad, the means to get on the internet, progress and learn until they can stand on their own two feet. You cannot find this anywhere else, as far as I know.
I know that the founder and chief executive, Dr. Evoy, (now a consultant by the way) also founded one of the great affiliate schemes on the internet (5 Pillar Club) in which SBI people sell the SBI products on the websites that they build with the help of SBI (neat that) but few of them sell the product to any great extent, if one is honest.
It is a slightly clunky product when compared to Google Blogger for example - no doubt about it. It needs modernisation, I think (update: they have introduced new templates). But I am sure that the board of directors have decided that they must keep the $299 yearly subscription frozen under the barrage from Google Blogger and the other free website hosting businesses. The gorilla Google (I actually love Google) is hurting Sitesell and SBI. SBI sites are a little unsophisticated compared to Blogger sites. But, and this is one of the keys, it doesn’t matter if a site is a bit clunky (it may actually help if it is not too slick). The overriding factor is content, what you say and what images or videos you put up on the internet. Simplicity is all and Allyn Hane knows that because his site is simple and effective.
He succeeds on the back of what he says. One of Dr. Evoy’s mantras is to keep it simple and say what you know (on the basis that you know something worth passing on to the public) in your voice while leaving all the distracting bits and pieces, the mechanics and the "white noise" (distracting information on SEO) to him and Site Sell. This is very appealing to women stuck at home with a bit of time on their hands, for example. Yet, I agree that the selling and persuasive powers of Dr. Evoy are so good that the vast majority of new starters think that they can make a viable amount of money by following SBI tutorials and building 30+ pages.
This will never work. Most, almost all in my view, make an amount of money that is so small as to make it of no real consequence in their lives. But they live in hope. I am being brutally honest and some will disagree with that. But some go on and develop, using SBI’s great tutorials, to learn the basics and then to experiment and in effect they are learning on the job. That is invaluable. I am one of those people. When I started I knew next to nothing. I learned from SBI. I experimented and did my own thing and realized late in the day that it is better to stick to SBI methods and to keep it simple (I made mistakes, of course).
There is a mass of “white noise” out there, distracting information that pulls you off the straight and narrow SBI model. I am still learning. I have a long way to go. This site is a subdomain of my main site, www.pictures-of-cats.org. It is very easy to set up a subdomain using SBI tools. Another little advantage of SBI. There are numerous support tools and they all free us up to produce content. SBI would drive a computer geek to distraction because it is designed for people who know nothing about html and the internet but who have knowledge or a skill on other topics that are just as valuable. It allows them to express themselves on the internet. And you know, a lot of computer savvy people have very little to give the world other than their computer knowledge and even that knowledge they have difficulty in disseminating.
It is quite rare to find someone who knows the mechanics of html and another interesting and useful subject as well. SBI and Site Sell overcomes that obstacle. You only have to know one element of that double act. You can ignore the html bit and still succeed. This is very valuable for many people who are excluded from disseminating their knowledge on the internet. It opens doors to many people. A very important point that is often missed however is that not only does Site Sell SBI give people access to a world wide audience who would otherwise be excluded, it optimises the page for you.
And such are the SEO skills of Dr. Evoy and his team that the pages that a novice produces are search engine optimised to a very high degree. This is a hidden benefit but the most important part of the SBI process. This is what makes SBI sites more successful than other sites. I am sure that a novice building a web page with SBI in the most simplistic of ways (using what SBI calls, “blockbuilder”) is better optimised in a way that allows it to be found and listed by the search engines than many a page produced by computer and internet geeks. SBIers are, after all taping into the formidable SEO skills of one of the best in the business, Dr. Evoy.
There are many useful features but one, for me, stands out. Site Sell, SBI call it C2 (content version 2). It is a form that is designed for visitors to fill in to allow the site to be built in part them (see an example in action). The trouble is this; precious few use it. I have over 7,000 uniques daily, some days at the moment, and I only get 1 to 2 submissions daily. This is to be expected because few visitors are motivated to give you something. Most people are out to receive something; information etc. But so effective is this form that I use it myself and to great effect as pages automatically produced by it are routinely listed by Google on page one of a search and not infrequently in the top 5. And this applies to Google.com and Google.co.uk searches. This gives a clue as to the effectiveness of SiteSell's SEO abilities. So having achieved an Alexa rank currently of 103,000 (at June 2009 it is 94,000) after less than 2 years building the site and making about $1,000 (USD) a month I am pleased with SBI (the site is not yet optimised in terms of making money, by the way and I made $1,200+ in May of 2009) .
The annual SBI fee of $299 (2009) can be recovered in a fraction of a single month. The SEO facility alone makes the money well spent. I know there are aspects of SBI that are outdated and clunky as I said but at its core it is still highly effective and provides a service that is perhaps unique and especially attractive for people who are stuck at home and who want to work while caring for children as a good example.
I think that the kind of remarks made by Allyn Hane when he says that Site Sell and SBI are a scam and bullsh*t are from a person who has not (with respect to him) fully grasped the benefits of the process. He is falling into that trap of being obliged to write a webpage (to produce content) without having fully read about it or, better still, having experienced it. He won’t mind because all he is really doing is bringing in traffic to his site. He is being deliberately provocative but at another person's expense it should be said. Whether his post is accurate or not is secondary to provoking reaction in the public. And that is OK.
I can understand that. But SBI needs defending from these slightly misleading articles. Update late August: I am one of the people who has benefited from SBI. I would not have succeeded without the knowledge I gained through working with them. This site is a subdomain. The Alexa ranking is around 80,000 (at June 2010 the Alexa ranking is 55,000). I owe a lot of that to SBI Sitesell. I really do and I am not just selling SBI. The site makes about 2,000 USD per month undermonetized.
I am a 60 year man with no previous experience of website building and within 2 years I am in the top 80,000 sites in the world. There are hundreds of millions of sites. And a lot of sites that are doing worse than mine have a team of geeks working on the site. I work entirely alone! And being 60 it keeps me alive! I need to do something and be focused. My site and SBI give me that. One great thing about SBI is that you can walk away if it doesn't work out for you at no cost as far as I remember. And you can change the website domain once and restart without charge. I did that because my first two month attempt I decided would not work. SBI are very helpful but best of all is they teach you as you work how to get your site noticed by Google and the other search engines and that is so very important.
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| Facebook contributes. |
When amending or upgrading a page of your website delete images with caution. It takes a considerable amount of time for Google image search to favour your images; perhaps 18 months for an image to appear on page one of an image search results page.
If you are thinking of changing the image on the page that you are working on it is advisable to do a search in Google for images under the name of the html file of the page that you are working on.
For example, I am working on my “Cat Facts” page on which there are several images. On a Google images search for “cat facts” I noticed that three images from the current page are on the first 2 pages of results.
I will make sure that those images stay put and I intend to work around them, deleting text around the photo and rebuilding that way to preserve the hard earned success of the current situation.
We should back up Blogger Blogs. However, the chances of the Google Blogger team deleting your blog without notice or warning is extremely unlikely even if you have done something wrong and if you have breached their terms you deserve to be deleted! The chances of Google’s servers crashing and fatally losing all the Blogger blogs would seem to be infinitesimal as there are hundreds of millions of blogs and the Google guys are too smart to screw up and lose websites permanently. Google can, however, under the terms of the contract delete blogs (terminate the service) and/or suspend the entire service, without notice or liability (it is free after all -- see Summary Google Blogger Terms and Conditions) but it would be a massive blow to the image of Google if lots of blogs were deleted accidentally or under a change of policy. Their Blogger service is fantastic and it drives a lot of their business. Think of all the Adsense on Blogger Blogs for example not to mention the publicity to Google that these blogs bring. I guess if there was a change to policy regarding Blogger blogs it would be that the service would become no longer free, which would limit usage. That said I am sure 90% of Blogger sites are very small and don’t cause Google issues of storage etc.
So why back up Blogger blogs? Peace of mind essentially. And there is a remote chance something might happen that was unforeseen. What about terrorism, for example? Google is the epitome of capitalism; an icon of the capitalist society. It does concern me a little that a terrorist group might target Google servers to attack the West. That said terrorists need Google as much as we do!
What is the best way to back up Blogger blogs, the whole caboodle? The Blogger Tips and Tricks website (enviroman) says that the best way is to do it is manually by copying the HTML of each individual post to a Notepad (txt) file. That sounds good but mighty laborious, if you have a large number of posts.
Google Blogger have a much easier system; their import and export function. You can download the entire blog to your hard drive using the export function and if required import it back to the Google servers and publish all the posts at the same time. In other words return to the status quo ante. I am not sure if this includes the comments but I would have thought that it does as the Blogger team say that this feature allows us to “create copies of your own blogs” i.e. the entire blog – update: comments are also exported and can be imported. The kind of file that is exported and imported is the same as the file type that is downloaded and uploaded when you save the template when customising it. It is an “xml” file (a Blogger export file).
These are the steps to backing up your Blogger blog:
Click on “Settings” and:
That is it. If, in the unlikely event, the file has to be uploaded to restore the blog, the procedure as stated by Google is:
That’s it….
Google image search builds traffic. I run this Blogger site which is part of the main site: http://www.pictures-of-cats.org. Pictures of Cats.org (PoC) is about pictures of cats, for sure. But it is about much more than that. There is a ton of information on the site; lots of words. More words in fact than pictures. Yet most of my traffic to PoC comes from Google Image Search. 
As the internet gets faster with improved broadband speeds (and in the long term it will get even faster) the old clichés about using small picture files to keep page load times quick are becoming redundant. We were advised to upload pictures not larger than 15,000 bytes. This is a small image. I use larger sizes, up to about 30,000 bytes. If there is only one image on the page I go up to 80,000 bytes. However, image file size needs to be considered every time to ensure decent load times.
Here is an image of the top 5 referrers to PoC (referrers means those sites and pages from which traffic to PoC arrives) for May 2009 (to day 5):
The important thing to note is that the No.1 referrer is Images.google with www.google a close second. In the top 20 referrers 8 are image searches. As said, Google image search builds traffic.
I don’t do anything special to get the images seen by Google. I simply ensure there is an “alt” tag. Even when there is no alt tag Google finds them. I find it is best to leave the pictures alone once on the page. Rotating pictures to freshen up the page is not a good idea as Google does take its time to find and list images. This is not because of something Google is doing but because of the enormous number of images on the internet. It is wiser to refresh with new text.
I tend also to make sure the image and alt tag chime with the subject matter of the post to ensure that the post or article is focused and coordinated. Please don’t forget that Google image search builds traffic. And when using Blogger it is best for SEO purposes to have a Picasa Web account and to upload the pictures using the compose mode image uploader. These images are saved on Google servers and listed in your Picasa Web album. Google image search lists Picasa Web album images so make them public if you can.
Pictures with captions in Blogger blogs is fiddly unless you use Windows Live Writer. When inputing text and pictures into your blog using the compose input window of Blogger, pictures can be aligned or not. You have the choice. But you do not have the choice to add a caption to the image if it is left or right aligned unless the caption is already embedded in the image using image manipulation software before uploading. If the image is centred or left unaligned a caption can be added by using text in the usual way under the image.
Code can be used to add a caption to left and right aligned images. Below is the code for aligning and captioning an image. It is coded to align right. Just change the word in red, “right” to “left” if you’d like the image aligned left:
<table align="right" border="0"
cellpadding="10">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<center>IMAGE CODE HERE</center>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody><caption align="bottom"><font
color="#000000" face="Arial" size="1">
<center>CAPTION HERE</center>
</font></caption>
</table>
This code requires the image to be uploaded onto a server such as Picasaweb and the image location accessed and inserted in the code. The tag is <img src=”URL of image” alt=””>. A 
As can be seen the caption forms part of the image. It is called a “Watermark” in Windows Live Writer but I think it makes a nice caption that is extremely easy to create:
Most companies use Internet Explorer as it is supplied with the computer, I guess. This is very bad policy and probably costs companies worldwide millions, perhaps billions in lost productivity over time. The speed with which one browses the internet and the ease with which one finds, collates and stores information from the internet is very important in terms of productivity for companies yet they are unwitting using the worst browser.
Not only is Internet Explorer slower to render pages, it is also less tolerant in rendering them. It is a comparatively clunky piece of software compared to Mozilla Firefox, which is currently the best of the lot, overall. The fastest and potentially the best (but not quite there yet) is Google Chrome.
The figures are from http://news.cnet.com. This is appalling news. It is ridiculous. The IT guys at these companies are sleep walking. The employees and bosses don’t know better, however. Perhaps the IT guys stick with IE because they have learnt the software and are less familiar with the other browsers. The main reason for sticking with IE is that these companies use the MS Windows operating system and IE integrates with this. Plus they probably feel that security is good or best with IE. There is also the inertia issue. People just know IE and don’t want the hassle of changing. This mentality applies to all software. For example, MS Word is the most commonly used word processor but others are better. I use Google Docs.
The truth is that Microsoft (MS) dominates the market and consumers be they individuals or companies live with that because even today most people don’t know much about computers. MS are riding on the back of that apathy and inertia.
When I build web pages for my site www.pictures-of-cats.org I always check rendering of the page in IE as even though it will render well in Firefox and Chrome, IE will screw up on something and make the page look wrong or misalign something.
Companies really need to do some research on this to work out how much more efficient they can be with a better browser. And perhaps Firefox can do something too in terms of making their excellent product more interesting to companies. A free educational program directed at the bosses might be a start as the culture, methods and decisions to change comes from them. Most companies use Internet Explorer but they shouldn’t.
My thanks to Russ Adams on Twitter for leading me to this story.
From Most Companies use Internet Explorer to Home Page
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