In this Elegant Themes review we are going to look at WordPress themes in depth and more specifically which WordPress themes are going to accomplish the goals you want to achieve with your new blog site.

From what I’ve found out there online, when you Google “free wordpress themes” you usually get a boat load of crappy themes from over ad-stuffed websites trying to get you to click their Adsense code.

While sometimes you can find some awesome ones I honestly HAVE NOT found a darn thing better the Elegant Themes for two reasons.

1. The price point is absolutely incredible. They deliver top notch Premium WordPress Themes and killer support forums for only $20 per year.

2. They have very sexy and elegant looking themes and always come out with 2 to 3 new themes per month, and right now they have a KILLER e commerce themes in development which will be hitting the market in August.

Now with all of that said, I really think it’s worth your time to take a serious look at Elegant Themes if you have not yet because you will gain so much value simply by having a membership with them.

One of my favorite themes is called MyProduct theme which is perfect for marketers because it lets you show case an ebook or software cover right there on the front of the theme. It’s quite the powerful technique when you combine it with a little bit of keyword research and SEO knowledge.

You can see an example of the Theme in use on one of my niche websites by clicking here.

Well, with all of that said what you need to do next is take some action. I want you to click this link below and investigate Elegant Themes and decide if it’s a fit for you and your business.

Premium Elegant WordPress Themes

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One of the most common problems people have it getting their WordPress blog installed with some HOT looking themes.

That’s the reason I put this short tutorial together for you because I know how much of a pain it can be when you’re trying to figure this stuff out all on your own like I did. However, I simply just decided that I wasn’t going to let anything hold me back from achieving massive success with WordPress so I sat down for hours and figured the darn thing out the first time.

Once you do that, it’s easy to do it again and again. And that’s really what true entrepreneurs do, they come across a problem and instead of letting it turn them around they push onwards until they find the solution. We are SOLUTION SEEKERS.

So when I figured stuff out that can be a little tricky I like to give back to everyone else so that they can find out how to easily do it without having to struggle really hard. I hope you enjoy this awesome tutorial and really gain some serious value from it. If you do, please leave a comment and RT.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you want to get the BEST Premium WordPress Themes for an unbelievable price of $20 dollars then you need to check out the link below now because they price won’t stay at $20 forever…

MatthewNeer.com/ElegantThemes

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I’m sure many of you have been anticipating the release of WordPress 3.0 because of all the new things it brings to the table and how powerful it really is.

The first thing you’ll notice is a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. This theme has finally replaced the old school one with the big fat blue header we are all used to seeing so much because Twenty Ten supports all the newest features of WordPress 3.0.

A few among many of those include the merging of WordPress and MU together as one. Now you can host 1 blog on your site or 10 million all with one installation of WordPress, now that’s powerful! There are over 1,217 different bug fixes within WordPress 3.0 along with the ability to do bulk updates so you now longer have to update your plug-ins one by one anymore.

Anyways, there is literally SO much more to learn about in this brand new update. So go ahead and watch this video below now to see for yourself everything that I didn’t cover.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Whats up,

Today I’ve got a really interesting post for you that actually came as a request from a good buddy of mine @mcinpat you can follow him on twitter there.

Pat wanted to know how to change his post page titles on his WordPress blog but he doesn’t know much about code because he’s in the health & fitness niche always interviewing extreme sport superstars.

With that in mind I tried to keep my tutorial as untech savvy as possible. I really break things down and explain them in a very simple manner.

I show you two techniques to accomplish the same task. The first is the really hard way, and the second is the super easy way which requires no coding whatsoever.

Watch the video now to find out how.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://MatthewNeer.com/ElegantThemes

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial, we’ll speak soon,
Matthew Neer

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You know those cool looking icons in the tabs of your browser? You know what I’m talking about, all your favorite websites have them like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest.

Ever wonder how you get one of those installed on your WordPress blog? It can get kind of tricky cause you have to use a little bit of PHP to accomplish the task but after this quick little walk-through you’ll be a master at installing favicons.

Why You Need A Favicon

This is really important to point out because some people look at favicons as luxuries. But they’re not, they are necessities if you want to be taken seriously on the web. Why else would EVERY SINGLE website use them if they weren’t. So reason number one is use them because it makes you look more professional. The big boys will take you more seriously if you have a professional looking favicon.

Reason number two is exactly why a favicon was created in the first place. Favicon is short for Favorites Icon, meaning that when your site gets bookmarked your “favicon” is the image that shows up. This makes your site more recognizable on other computers and subliminally brands your site in the eyes of the bookmarker.

Reason number three is because Google loves them. You see, when you’re doing a lot of blogging online and you are promoting products your goal is to get ranked really well in the search engines. This way more people find you and more people will buy your stuff. One of the best ways to increase your sites rankings is to increase your PR (page rank). Google has a number of different factors that determine PR and favicons may not be HUGE on their list but you can sure bet that any site without one won’t get the best PR out there.

Creating A Favicon

First things first, you gotta actually create an image of a favicon. Ironically, this image must have something to do with your website. (who would have thought) And it’s going to be REALLY small. I’m talking tiny, like 16×16 pixels.

Now normally you would have to do this kind of work in photoshop or something similar but instead I’ve discovered a really cool resource that lets you create a favicon without any photoshop experience. But first you’ll need your image to shrink down. I suggest going to Google and typing in something related to your niche + icon. Find what you like and save it to your desktop.

Next go to http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ and upload your image file you just found. Square images work the best because they will automatically be re-sized to 16×16. Once ready, click add image and the website will kick out a favicon.ico file ready for your WordPress.

Download that file (comes a a .zip) and open it up.

Installing A WordPress Favcion

Now you’re going to need your WordPress admin opened up. So get that ready. Before we tinker with that though, we need to upload your new favicon to the root directory of your website. That means you’re going to drop the file in the very first folder you’ve got, the one with your index.html page or in this case, probably index.php.

• Using an FTP client upload your favicon to your websites main folder. This will look like http://example.com/favicon.ico

Now, since other browsers out there (like IE) are sucky (for lack of a more vulgar word) you will need to edit the header.php section of your WordPress.

• Go to your WordPress admin panel and login.
• Click on appearance.
• Click on Theme Editor
• Now locate the file called header or header.php and select it.
• Search for some code that looks like this <link rel=”shortcut icon” and ends with /favicon.ico” />. Overwrite this if it exists or add in the following code below the <head> HTML tag.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/favicon.ico" />

That’s all one line. Make sure you don’t separate the code.

• Save the changes.

To see your new favicon you need to clear your browsers cache or try it in a different one like Chrome.

Hope this quick post helped you out. It’s super fun to start playing with this stuff and get it all working like a greased up machine.

If you liked this post, syndicate it.

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Are you tired of plain, boring forms that just straight up look ugly? Have you ever wanted to integrate one of those nice big buttons that could be seen from space so that no one could possibly miss the submit button?

That’s exactly what you’re going to learn how to do right now. Let’s get started.

Okay, so here the form code from the “Before” image

<center><form action=”http://www.getresponse.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi” method=”post” accept-charset=”UTF-8″>
<label for=”subscriber_name”>Name :</label>
<input id=”subscriber_name” name=”subscriber_name” type=”text” value=”" />
<br/>
<label for=”subscriber_email”>Email :</label>
<input id=”subscriber_email” name=”subscriber_email” type=”text” value=”" />
<br>
<br>
<input type=”submit” value=”Get The eBook! />
<input type=”hidden” name=”error_url” id=”error_url” value=”http://matthewneer.com/error/”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”confirmation_url” id=”confirmation_url” value=”http://matthewneer.com/articlemarketing”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”campaign_name” id=”campaign_name” value=”internetmarketer”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”custom_ref” id=”custom_ref” value=”cannon”/></form>
<script type=”text/javascript”>var el=document.getElementById(“custom_http_referer”);if(el != null){el.value = document.location};</script></center>

I highlighted the only line of code that I changed in red. All you need to do is use type=”image” instead of type=”submit” and then add the url of the image in a src=”http://imagepathgoeshere”. When you’re looking for this piece of code in your autoresponder code it’s going to be all clumped together and look like a mess. Just know that it comes right after the last field where the user will input some of their info. It should come right after that.

Now just change that line of code to something that looks like this. (remember, this replaces the red code)

<input type=”image” src=”http://articlecannon.matthewneer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/ebook.png” />

Make sure you save your changes, refresh the page and you should see an image there in place of the original button.

I hope this post helps you out a bunch. If something wasn’t as clear as it could be please leave me a comment and let me know so I can personally help ya out.

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You ever install a new WordPress site only to see the theme displayed as plain HTML? Doesn’t that just bug the crap out of you? I know it does when it happens to me. That’s why I’m putting together this post to help you walk through fixing your broken WordPress installation and make it work once again.

A little side note, I am going to be doing this tutorial ASSuming that you use GoDaddy. If you don’t the steps will probably be similar, but not exact. I highly recommend using GoDaddy.

Here’s the breakdown: If you do something that changes the URL of your WordPress site, you need to update the database with the new URL for your site to work properly.

Have you:

• Changed the domain on the hosting account on which WordPress was installed?
• Moved the WordPress installation directory?

In both of these cases you need to fix your installation by updating the WordPress database to point the new location of your WordPress installation.

TIP: If you are thinking about moving your WordPress installation, but haven’t done it yet, you should do it the correct way. See the Moving WordPress Within Your Site section in the Moving WordPress article on wordpress.org.

How To Fix Your WordPress Installation

NOTE: Before following this procedure, we recommend backing up your database. For more information on how to backup your database with GoDaddy, see Backing Up and Restoring MySQL or MSSQL Databases.

1. Log in to your Account Manager.
2. In the My Products section, select Hosting.
3. Next to the hosting account you want to modify, click Manage Account.
4. In the Databases section of the Hosting Control Center, click MySQL.
5. Next to the WordPress database, click Manage via phpMyAdmin.
6. Enter the username and password for your database.
7. On the phpMyAdmin page, click the SQL icon in the upper left.
8. Enter the following:
   

   UPDATE wp_options
   SET option_value = ‘http://www.newlocation.com’
   WHERE option_value = ‘http://www.oldlocation.com’

   where http://www.newlocation.com is your site’s new address and http://www.oldlocation.com is your site’s old address.

9. Click Go.

After clicking Go, the database updates. Your site should resolve normally.

If you installed WordPress with Hosting Connections, the links in Hosting Connection still point to your old installation. As long as you update the links in the database, however, you can continue to upgrade your WordPress installation through Hosting Connections.

I hope this helped you out. Please leave your comments below if you have any further questions…

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Your website/blog design is the first impression you make on a visitor. You want this first impression to WOW them because let’s just face it. If your design sucks or doesn’t look professional then they are going to be hitting the back button faster than you can say “Elegant Themes”.

The Problem With Design

As a blogger, it is important to focus on great content. Sites like Craigslist deliver exceptional content yet has a horrible design. The reason people use Craigslist is because it’s the best place for classified ads on the Internet. And since we are not all as popular as Craigslist we need to integrate design into usability to create an end result that is both visually arousing and simple to use for your visitors to navigate.

However, you are most likely not a web guru who can whip out a CSS stylesheet in 5 minutes flat. In fact, you are probably using WordPress because you don’t want to fool with any of that crap. You wanted to cut out the middle man (web designer) and get a website/blog built with minimal effort, that’s visually appealing displaying your business professionally. And you want all this done the cheapest way possible. (nothing wrong with that)

Elegant Themes

Have you ever spent countless hours browsing through Google for free WordPress themes only to find nothing that completely satisfied you? After searching and searching until I was literally blue in the face I came to the conclusion that free WordPress themes are… well… free for a reason. I decided to focus my attention on finding some of the best premium WordPress themes. That’s when I discovered Nich Roach’s Elegant Themes, and they totally simplified my life online.

Hiring a web designer was also another option I have. I’ve done this before many times to the tune of $750 to $5,000. Let me just say, for that price tag I would rather do it myself. Especially since WordPress is a very simple to use CMS, (content management system) I wanted to find a design that was not only be stunning but that I could learn how to tweak and customize to be unique to my products and services.

Being a web designer myself, new sites are constantly popping up all over the web. When I design a new site I create it to be completely unique and professional. And that’s why I choose Elegant Themes for all my Premium WordPress Theme needs.

Elegant Themes – Premium WordPress Themes

Forget the ridiculous $200-$500 dollar price tag that you see on other WordPress themes or even membership sites. Elegant Themes will only cost you $20 per year. YES – That’s it, $20 per year for unlimited access to all Premium WordPress Themes, support forums, and video walk-through tutorials.

On average you will typically see 1 or 2 new WordPress themes released per month, which of course, members have free access to. Anyways, I’m gonna take a step back and use the rest of this post to showcase Nick’s work. Every design is truly a masterpiece worth thousands and they speak for themselves.

OnTheGo Premium WordPress Theme

Deviant PremiumWordpress Theme

• Six Color Schemes
• Optional Blog-style Structure
• Advertisement Ready
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Deviant

Lumin Premium WordPress Theme

• Three Color Schemes
• Optional Blog-style Structure
• Advertisement Ready
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Lumin

Glow Premium WordPress Theme

• Four Color Schemes
• Optional Blog-style Structure
• Advertisement Ready
• Smooth tabless design

List Preview Of Glow

eNews Premium WordPress Theme

• Five Color Schemes
• Optional Blog-style Layout
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of eNews

This Is Bold Premium WordPress Theme

• Five Color Schemes
• Optional Blog-style Layout
• Gravatar ready
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of This Is Bold

ePhoto Premium WordPress Theme

• Two Color Schemes
• Integrated Blog Section
• Optional Blog-style Structure
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of ePhoto

eBusiness Premium WordPress Theme

• Nine Color Schemes
• Threaded Comments
• Optional Blog-style Structure
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of eBusiness

Cherry Truffle Premium WordPress Theme

• Three Color Schemes
• Threaded Comments
• Optional Blog-style Layout
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Cherry Truffle

Pure Type Premium WordPress Theme

• Three Color Schemes
• Threaded Comments
• Optional Blog-style Layout
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Pure Type

Basic Premium WordPress Theme

• Four Color Schemes
• Threaded Comments
• Optional Blog-style Layout
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Basic

Cold Stone Premium WordPress Theme

• Three Unique Post Formats
• Threaded Comments
• Featured Articles
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Cold Stone

LightSource Premium WordPress Theme

• Featured Articles
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of LightSource

eGamer Premium WordPress Theme

• Video embedding
• Optional blog-style layout
• Opera compatible
• Author rating system
• Featured Articles
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of eGamer

eGallery Premium WordPress Theme

• Featured Articles
• Safari compatible
• Opera compatible
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of eGallery

GrungeMag Premium WordPress Theme

• Social bookmarking ready
• Featured Articles
• Gravatar ready
• Thumbnail Resizing
• Two-teir Dropdown Menus
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of GrungeMag

Influx Premium WordPress Theme

• Social bookmarking ready
• Featured Articles
• 4 Diverse Skins
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Influx

Studio Blue Premium WordPress Theme

• Social bookmarking ready
• Featured Articles
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Studio Blue

Who’s Who Premium WordPress Theme

• Featured Articles
• Social bookmarking ready
• Ajax enhanced
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Who’s Who

Interphase Premium WordPress Theme

• Social bookmarking ready
• Flickr photo stream
• Advertisement Ready
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Interphase

Wooden Premium WordPress Theme

• Social bookmarking ready
• Site-wide search bar
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Wooden

Tidal Force Premium WordPress Theme

• Social bookmarking ready
• Site-wide search bar
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Pages
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Tidal Force

Earthly Touch Premium WordPress Theme

• Featured Article
• Site-wide search bar
• Widget ready sidebars
• Random Articles – Homepage
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Earthly Touch

Quadro Premium WordPress Theme

• Site-wide search bar
• Widget ready sidebars
• WordPress 2.9 compatible
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Quadro

ArtSee Premium WordPress Theme

• Social bookmarking ready
• Site-wide search bar
• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme Option Page
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of ArtSee

Simplism Premium WordPress Theme

• 2-Tier Page Dropdown Menu
• Site-wide search bar
• Widget ready sidebars
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Simplism

Blue Mist Premium WordPress Theme

• Featured Article Section
• Social bookmarking ready
• Site-wide search bar
• Widget ready sidebars
• Adsense ready
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Blue Mist

Blue Sky Premium WordPress Theme

• Social bookmarking ready
• Site-wide search bar
• Widget ready sidebars
• Adsense ready
• Custom thumbnail images
• Smooth tabless design

Live Preview Of Blue Sky

Elegant Themes Standard Features

Most Elegant Themes have special features which I have listed above for you. But along with those each theme comes with a set of standard features. These include things like browser compadibility, PSD files, gravatars, ePanel options, and so much more.

• Widget ready sidebars
• Theme options page
• Custom thumbnail images
• PSD Files
• Valid XHTML + CSS
• Smooth tabless design
• Sitewise search bar
• Gravatar ready
• Firefox compatible
• IE8 + IE7 + IE6 compatible
• Opera compatible
• Netscape compatible
• Safari compatible
• WordPress 2.8+ compatible

Elegant Themes Features Explained In Plain English

Automated Thumbnail Resizing

The themes utilize timthumb to automatically resize your thumbnail images. Because of this, only one thumbnail images is required per post, despite the various thumbnail sizes used in the theme.

InDepth Theme Options

Elegant Themes come with an options page that features a long list of settings that makes managing the theme as user-friendly as possible.

Advertising Management

With Elegant Themes you can place 125×125 banner images in your sidebar and 468×60 ads to your post pages with ease. Advertisements are handled from within wp-admin, and can be turned on and off at any time.

Featured Articles Display

With the featured articles display you can choose to feature your favorite posts on the homepage.

Three Widget Ready Areas

This feature contains three widget-ready areas. The Business-style homepage has it’s own unique sidebar, and the footer is also widget ready.

Lifestream Integration

LightSource uses a lifestream plugin, and integrates it into the design using a javascript scroller. The lifestream is a great way to connect your blog with your other social media outlets.

Author Rating System

Elegant Themes allows you to assign ratings to each post you make. These ratings appear on the post page in a 0-5 star format. Each post that has a rating is also shown on the homepage under the “Recent Reviews” section.

Blog Style Integration

If you would rather not use the abbreviated post structure you can opt for the optional blog-style layout. When enabled, your posts will be displayed in full like a traditional blog.

Three Unique Post Layouts

Coldstone contains three unique post layouts. The default (Business), as well as Blog-style (which displays full-length posts) and Magazine-style (which displays the main sidebar on the homepage, and contains additional post/thumbnail variations).

Custom Video Interface

Videos are embedded into a unique javascript-power interface. This video interface adds various blogger-friendly features to your videos including easy social bookmarking, video rating, sharing, linking, backlighting and more.

Video Integration

With Elegant Themes you can add flash videos from your favorite social video network such as YouTube to your posts. This videos are display above each post on the post page. If no video is added, the video interface is removed from the post. (videos are optional)

About Me Section

Cion is geared towards more personal-style blogs. For this reason I have added an “about me” section on the homepage which can be altered from within the theme’s options menu. You can also designate a photo to be used.

Unique Gallery Display Format

eGallery has been customized to transform your blog into a gallery. Posts are displayed in a gallery-format inside a design that was built to draw focus to images rather than text.

Built-In Lightbox

eGallery comes with a built-in lightweight lightbox for all gallery images. Thumbnails on post-pages can be clicked to reveal a lightbox enhanced full view of the source image.

Elegant Themes Review Next Steps

Well, since you made it this far through this Elegant Themes review then you know by now that Elegant Themes is by far the best bang for your buck on the web right now. Not only do you get access to tons of super high quality WordPress Themes but you also have access to the support forum where Nick Roach will personally assist you in further customizing your Elegant Themes so they become a truly unique asset.

I have been a member of Elegant Themes for over a year now and couldn’t be more satisfied with what I got for a measly $20 bucks. If you’re serious about finding the best Premium WordPress Themes then check out Elegant Themes right now, you will simply love it!

Speak soon,
Matthew Neer

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Have you ever seen one of those cool “Connect With Me” Widgets on other people’s WordPress blogs and wondered how you could get one set up yourself? Or better yet, have you ever wondered if it was possible to add someone directly to your Skype contacts from your sidebar Widget?

Well that is EXACTLY what you are going to learn how to do today my friend. I am going to walk you through the whole process right now.

Let’s kick things off with a video tutorial to get you up to speed on how this works.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is the exact code I used to create the skype button on my blog. Simple just copy and paste this code into your Text HTML sidebar Widget.

Everything you need to change has been highlighted in red. The first red text is where you need to delete my Skype user name and add yours. The second is where you add the custom URL of your Skype icon. Or if you’d like to use mine you can probably just leave it as it is. However, I would highly recommend download the icon off my blog and re-uploading it to your WordPress blog.

<a href=”skype:MatthewNeer?add” onclick=”return skypeCheck();“><img src=”http://matthewneer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/skype-icon.png” height=”100″ width=”100″ ></a>

This is the JavaScript code you need to place at the bottom your your header.php file found in your blog theme’s wp-content folder. Make sure you pop this code in at the end of the page, after all PHP tags. Otherwise it will not work.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://download.skype.com/share/skypebuttons/js/skypeCheck.js”></script>

If you have any questions, comments or concerns please leave a comment and let me know.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it.

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WordPress Plugins are basically a way to add some bells and whistles to your blog, things that you would not normally be able to do with WordPress right out of the box. Since WordPress is an open source project (the code is accessible to anyone with virtually no restrictions) so there are developers all over the world constantly creating new plugins every single day.

The majority of plugins are just extra fun things you can add to your blog that make it more interesting for your visitor but there are some plugins that you NEED to have if you’re trying to build a true asset which will add extra functionality to your blog making it easier for search engines to find you, help more people subscribe to your blog, and increase the end user experience overall. Those kind of plugins are what we are going to be covering today.

• Akismet (http://askismet.com) This one actually comes stock with WordPress but it is an absolute must have because this plugin will guard you from all kinds of crazy spam comments. Believe me, if you don’t active this plugin you will get TONS of spam comments. You have to use your WordPress.com API key to active this and you can find that key on your WordPress.com dashboard. If you don’t have an account you can create one here http://Wordpress.com

• All In One SEO Pack (http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/) WordPress does not come fully search engine optimized fresh out the box. What this plugin does is make sure you don’t have any duplicate content on your pages when you get indexed by Google and also gives you the ability to customize your blogs title, meta tags, keywords, home page description and a few other things to make sure Google and the others pick you up just the way you want them to.

• Google XML Sitemaps (http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/) This plugin will ensure that your site gets indexed by Google the proper way and will get you listed in their results much faster. You can set up an automatic ping to the search engines every time you update your blog which will notify them of updates when you make a new post.

• WP Related Posts Widget (http://jameslao.com/) With this plugin you will have the ability to add a related posts widget to your sidebar or footer. This will help increase readership as it pulls keywords from your post and matches them to other posts on your blog so that your reader will always be receiving related content based on their interest in the article they are reading now.

• Sexy Bookmarks (http://sexybookmarks.net) What else can I say about this plugin, it’s straight up SEXY. Not only does this plugin look classy but it allows your to help get your content syndicated across social media and social bookmarking platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, and SO many more. Sexy Bookmarks gets placed at the end of your post and lets you choose which networks you want displayed.

• Disqus Comment System (http://DISQUS.com) One of the most popular comment systems for WordPress right now. This plugin allows you to display threaded comments making it very easy to reply directly to an individual comment. Disqus also implements some really cool commenting features that make your comments much more interactive like video replies, the ability to “like” a post like Facebook, direct sharing to Twitter, and many more awesome features.

• Digg Digg (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/digg-digg/) This plugin allows your to integrate Digg, Twitter, Facebook, and many other instant share buttons similar to the famous TweetMeMe button you see everywhere now. This plugin makes it super easy for your reader to share your blog with others and help get your content syndicated faster.

• Home Page Excepts (http://www.dailyblogtips.com/homepage-excerpts-wordpress-plugin/) Have you ever wanted to simply just display a short except instead of the whole blog post on your home page? Well this is the plugin for the job. It makes your posts more easily accessible for your readers because now they can view all your posts without having to scroll all the way through one to get to the next.

• Subscribe Remind (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-remind/) This plugin will automatically place text and a link at the end of your post reminding your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed making your blogs content more easily accessible to your reader.

• WWSGD (http://www.richardkmiller.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do) This plugin treats new visitors different than returning visitors using cookies to determine who’s been here before.

• Feed Footer (http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/feed-footer-plugin/) This awesome plugin lets you add footers to your RSS feeds and gives you full customization of the process. You have no word limit, can add copyright information, code with full HTML, and even monetize your RSS feeds with advertisements.

• OIO Publisher Plugin (http://matthewneer.com/oiopublisher) A very affordable plugin at $47 that lets you easily manage and control paid advertising on your blog. If you want this then buy it through my affiliate link above and I will save you $15 dollars off your purchase by using this coupon code; J2010-NEER

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