Pack a Mail Blog

Archive for the ‘Hints & Tips’ Category

Borders on a picture can make a big difference and with Photoshop  you can add borders with little difficulties, once you learn how to do it. Follow these steps to make your image stand out from the rest of the page with a cool Photoshop border.
Step 1 – Start Photoshop and open the image that you want to add a border to.

Step 2 - To create a border around the entire picture, open the Select menu and choose Select All. To create a border around a certain section, use the Selection tool in the toolbar and select the area you want.

Step 3 – From the Select menu, choose Modify and then Border. In the dialog box, choose the pixel size of your border

Step 4 – Locate the color palette on the left-hand side of the screen. Click on the top square and select a border color from the palette. Click OK.

Step 5 – Select Fill from the Edit menu. In the dialog box, choose the options to apply to the border.

Step 6 – Click OK to view the border. If the results aren’t what you want, select Undo from the Edit menu to remove the fill, then try again.

Step 7 – Use the Save As command in the File menu to save the new picture.

Tips & Warnings:

• The greater the pixel size, the thicker the border.
• To create a splattered-looking border, select Dissolve from the Options section of the Fill command.
• Before editing a picture, save the file under a different name by selecting Save As from the File menu. This allows you to edit the picture without worrying about the original.

Maybe you started a blog and haven’t kept up with regular posts. Or you post regularly, but haven’t been able to build the reader community that you wanted to develop. Or maybe your blog just looks old and tired. As long as your blog is sleeping and not dead (give it a nudge to make sure), there’s hope!

Here are a few fairly painless ways to give your blog an energy boost and get yourself excited about blogging again in the process.

Check Site Analytics for Clues
Your first step should be checking your site analytics (if you don’t have an analytics tool set up, now is the time to do it) and your feed stats to see how people are finding your blog and what they’re reading. This will give you a good idea about what to focus on in terms of content.

Your blog’s awakening may be as simple as writing more on a specific topic, adding a new category or working on using more SEO-friendly keywords.

Change Your Theme
It may seem superficial, but blogs are often judged on their looks. If your blog has confusing navigation, an ugly header or just lacks something to draw readers in, it’s a great candidate for a fresh theme. If you’re using WordPress, there are so many free themes to chose from, and a number of excellent premium themes that can literally change the first impression your blog makes overnight.

You may also want to consider including more images within your posts, and possibly selecting a theme that uses thumbnails throughout the blog. Pictures work!

Line Up a Guest Blogger
If you’re struggling to post consistently, don’t have the knowledge and experience on a specific topic, or just want to add some variety, guest bloggers could be an option. It’s not always easy to find good guests, especially if you’re still trying to shake the cobwebs off your blog. But if you’re successful, the positive results can have a lasting impact.

Put the Focus on Your Readers
If you feel like you’re talking to an empty stadium, it may be because you’re not inviting anyone else to participate. Try relating your posts back to your readers by asking targeted questions when relevant.

Polls, contests and other reader-focused activities are a great way to build engagement, too. A captive audience won’t gather overnight, but with time and consistency, you will see a gradual change.

Post Something Controversial
One way to shake up a quiet blog is to get people fired up. Take a stand on a hot topic, post a rebuttal to a popular blogger’s perspective, talk about alternative ideas, or whatever it takes to generate some traffic and activity around your blog. Be warned that once you do this, the pressure is on to continue the fire with future posts, and you may have a lot of passionate comments to field (not a bad thing!).

Use Social Media
Get your blog set up to feed into your Twitter, Facebook and other social networking accounts, and be open to having dialogue about your posts off your blog. That’s right, all engagement and interaction doesn’t have to take place within your blog comments. It’s a win if you’re able to encourage people to click through and hopefully continue to follow along.

Add Video
Give your readers some great information and a peek at the “live” you. A video blog post here and there can not only make you more relatable and real, but you may be able to pull in the interest of a whole new audience.

There are a lot of ways to rejuvenate a sleeping blog. If you’re willing to go through some trial and error as you test out new ideas, consistently post relevant content and give your readers what they want, you’ll eventually hit your mark and be able to keep your blog awake and alert.

Have you experienced a comatose blog? What have you done to make your blog function more effectively?

Without a doubt, for a self-hosted blog, WordPress is the best blog CMS that you can get. However, being a popular and open source software, it also means that hackers have full access to the code which they can scrutinize to find any exploits they can use to hack into any WordPress-enabled site.

On the good side, one of the best things about WordPress is its plugin system that allows anyone to install any plugins or create your own plugins to extend its functionality, including improving security.

Here, I have listed some wordpress security plugins (and a couple of tricks) that you can use to secure WordPress blog.

All the plugins and tricks listed below are meant for WP 2.7 and above. If you are still using an older version of WordPress, it’s time to upgrade your blog.

Protecting Your Login

1. CHAP Secure Login

This plugin uses the CHAP protocol to encrypt your password.  The password is first salted with a random number (nonce) generated by the session, followed by the md5 transformation algorithm. This result is then sent to the server where it is decrpyted and authenticated. This is a zero-configuration plugin, which means you can use it immediately after activating it.

2. Stealth Login

Stealth Login obfuscates your login page by allowing you to define a custom login page rather than the default wp-login.php. In the event that your password is leaked, the hacker will also have a hard time finding the correct login URL. A good use of this is to prevent any malicious bots from accessing your wp-login.php file and attempting to break in.

3. Login Lockdown

Login Lockdown is useful in preventing a brute force attack. What Login LockDown does is to record the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, it will lockdown the login function and prevent any people from that IP range to log in.

4. AskApache Password Protect

This plugin adds an additional HTTP authentication to provide a second layer of defense for your blog. You can set up password protection for your blog using HTTP Basic Authentication, or you can choose to use the more secure HTTP Digest Authentication.

Note that this plugin might/might not work depending on your server capability. If your site does not pass the AskApache configuration tests (the tests run by the plugin to detect your server capabilities), contact your web host and see if they can make changes on the server side.

5. Semisecure Login Reimagined

This plugin provides a “semisecure” login environment by encrypting your password with the RSA cryptography

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Many businesses are moving their web sites toward CMS platforms so they can quickly serve up fresh content on a regular basis. This is a great way to keep visitors and search engine spiders coming back. But it’s not a solution to ineffective copy, especially on static pages of your site. And even CMS sites have static pages – About, Services, Contact, etc. – with content that can quickly get stale or simply stop functioning when they should be getting site visitors to act.

Perhaps you just threw those core pages together, your stats show the pages aren’t converting well, or you’re just long overdue for a revamp. The good news is that freshening up your web copy doesn’t have to take long to do and can have a noticeable impact. Here are a few updates to consider.

Update Your Bio

If you’ve recently won an award, presented at a conference or completed a training program, you should work it into your bio. But you don’t need a major change in your credentials to revisit the copy here. Does the page quickly sum up the highlights of your background and experience, show a little of your personality and make it easy for visitors to “get you?” If not, reworking this page is a great idea.

Add a Social Element

If you have a LinkedIn account, Facebook fan page, Twitter account or blog that you use for business, your site should have easily identifiable links or icons found throughout your site. If you tweet primarily business-oriented content, you may even want to incorporate your Twitter feed right into your site.

Change Up Formatting

It’s amazing what a visual facelift can do for your copy’s readability and interest factor. If you have solid paragraphs of copy, try adding bullets and subheadings to break it up and make it easier to read. Even something as simple as changing your link styles (color, decoration, etc.), can make visitors more willing to click around.

Cut It In Half

Paragraph after paragraph of text is rarely effective. It’s just too much information that your visitors probably don’t care about or don’t have time to read through. If changing up the formatting doesn’t help on its own, take a good long look at your copy and ask yourself if you really need that much. There is probably a shorter and more direct way to get the point across.

Repeat Your Call to Action

You want your site visitors to do something; you wouldn’t have a web site if you didn’t. That call to action needs to be placed on every page where it’s relevant. Do you want them to schedule a call, email you for your rates, opt-in to your list? Tell them that, and don’t be afraid to repeat it.

When is the last time you took a close look at your core pages? Do you think a freshening up is in your future?

Website loading speed has become the most important part of the website development from last few years. In other words the target is not only developing website but to code effectively in order to improve the response time of the website.

Why Speed optimisation of your website is Important?

At Pub Con, Matt Cutts from Google said there is strong attempt to influence in Google to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads.

Following are the few website speed factors which are If not handled properly may affect your website loading speed:

• Redirects
• Cookie Sizes
• Dom Access
• Use of Images
• Components size

We as a professional web design company have recommended a few essentials of how to optimise for website loading speed, so please click on the “Read More” for full article:

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