As mentioned many times, one of the best aspects of using wordpress is its extendability.  If you are using wordpress to power your small business web site or blog, there are several plugins that are unavoidable.  Of course, it’s always a good idea to check out the wordpress most popular plugins page or to just Google for phrases such as top ten wordpress plugins.

In my opinion however there always seems to be one plugin missing from these top ten lists.  It’s a plugin that I cannot do without myself and which I have used in many a project.

I’d like to mention it here because I am sure that almost any above average wordpress user (business bloggers for example) needs the functionality this plugin offers.

I am talking about, the widget logic wordpress plugin, which is arguably one of my favorite wordpress extensions.

When this plugin is installed and activated,  a little ‘widget logic input box’ will appear in each widget that you are using (in the administration of wordpress of course !).
Depending on what ‘condition’ you place inside that box, wordpress will show or hide that specific widget in your sidebar.

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I’ve always been a big fan of Content Management Systems. The thought of being able to control appearance of a presentation through a set of back end controls always made me enthusiastic. Years back, when a CMS was a new concept, only businesses with big budgets could afford and they were usually built up out of a core base and / or custom coded parts. Aside from this, implementing a CMS and teaching business employees how to use them a difficult process because concept of system usability was still in it’s baby shoes.

Thankfully, things have changed, as nowadays, thanks to open source, content management systems are widely and easily available at merely the click of a download link.

The good news is also that CMS systems such as Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are all free to use,  for both NPO’s (non profit organizations) and commercial businesses.

WordPress  is originally a blogging platform. This means that the software was primarily focused around the functionality which are necessary to publish a blog. A blog is a chronologically organized collection of content rich pages (articles, video’s and so on).

The idea behind blogs was that it a simple to handle CMS should make it possible for anybody without technical knowledge to publish content on the internet without any effort.  This is the main reason that blogs have become so popular.

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I just received a message with the intend of bringing to my attention a newand free SEO tool. The tool is called KPMRS, which is short for Keyword Position Monitoring Report Service.

In the words of the KPMRS team, what their free SEO tool does is this  :

” It tracks your website positions for keywords phrases for a specific URL on Google, Yahoo, Bing and provides a nice report of your site’s rankings over time. “

Though haven’t used the free sign up yet, I did want to give this tool a short mention because for a long time, an easy way of checking keyword positions in the search engine was indeed missing.

Have you checked this tool out yet ? If  so, what do you think about ?

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Have you ever clicked your own adsense ads ? I bet you haven’t ! Maybe you’ve just done it once ?  Or maybe just by accident (it can happen you know) ?

Have you ever asked your friends to click on your adsense ads ? You wouldn’t do that right ? Have you ever devised a plan that’s sophisticated enough to trick Google into believing it’s different people clicking your ads, while in reality it’s just you traveling from location to location by bicycle ?  You would never do that, would you ?

The above examples are concepts of what the online marketing community calls ‘click fraud‘.  Click Fraud is when publishers of sponsored links (Google adsense or yahoo search marketing) deliberately click these sponsored links, on their own web pages,  in order to earn they commission money from those clicks.

Old topic, but never ending, since people are doing it all the time.  The reason I am writing this blog entry is because I have been repeatedly asked by someone to ‘click their adsense ads‘.

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I love wordpress. I use it for blogging, affiliate marketing landing  pages and even small business web sites.  One of the main reasons, that I like the wordpress software so much is that aside from its user friendly administrative back-end (client friendly), it is very flexible  when it comes down to themes (or templates).

Though it took a while for businesses to finally understand the power of blogs, but by now,  most are using blogs in order to enhance their online presence in a number of ways.  Blogs, and therefore wordpress have in my opinion become effective online business tools.

No wonder we now have numerous web shops that sell commercial wordpress themes in almost any shape, design or category.

Personally I like to build my themes almost from scratch, by for instance customizing the default theme that comes with wordpress.

This said,  I’m not surprised that quite a few clients whom I do web consultancy services for  (usually starting businesses or entrepreneurs doing web projects) like to consult me on if it’s worth it to buy a ready wordpress theme.

Though I could easily list a number of advantages of custom made wordpress themes and argue why it’s a good idea to have a template  designed from scratch, there certainly are some advantages to buying a ready wordpress theme …

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