Finding a new host/home for your website: top10webhosting.com

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As many of you know, I had to update my hosting after I was experiencing a number of problems, including slow servers, crashed websites, and so on. It’s all behind me now, and I’m glad.

top10webhosting

But finding a new webhosting company is never easy with the thousands of competing companies and dozens of hosting review companies, too. To make matters worse, there are dozens of different types of plans all at different price points. So, when I upgraded this site, not to a full dedicated host as I don’t have the skill set to manage that, but to a virtual private host. It wasn’t important that I find the cheapest but the best hosting company in the web hosting top10.

Top10webhosting.com suggested a few options that I hadn’t thought of for virtual hosting, and if you look through the companies listed under other categories, you’ll surely find more options on the companies own websites, as I did. Also, you’ll find some interesting tips, ideas and posts on their blog.

Of the top 10 on their list, I’ve head good things about Bluehosting, LunarPages, Monster Hosting, and Hostgator, but I’ve not heard much good about Yahoo! Hosting. Do check out their reviews if you are looking for hosting, you can do feature and price comparisons before you buy. Also, don’t forget to check for money back guarantees just in case things do go belly up. I just wish they had a better looking front page… Oh, well, we can’t always judge a website by the first page, right?

How did you find your hosting company this time? Did you use a review service like this? Did you ask someone or did you just research on Google for reviews?

Reviewed for Top10webhosting.com.

New Themes: Revolution and the Morning After

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The choice of a theme for a website using WordPress used to be: blog style theme or pay a lot of money to have your website designed professionally. But now, there is a lot of interest from publishers to use WordPress as the website, so it’s getting easier to find themes that can fit that need.

news revolution

Revolution Themes by Brian Gardner is one such set of themes which allow WordPress to appear as a magazine almost. The theme makes good use of a number of factors important to magazine sites including:

  1. front page space allowing main features to be shown,
  2. lots of links to recent articles,
  3. videos and large graphics
  4. mailing list box,
  5. 486×60 box for graphic,
  6. archives,
  7. Section Pages

There is also space for a lot of other things, too, at the bottom and in the middle. Since the quality of the design is excellent, and it would likely appeal to those creating a magazine style website, it’s not free, but at $99 for a single install, it could be a good deal! His other notable themes include the Blue Zinfandel series.

While for those on a budget, there are a couple of ‘free’ themes that work along the same line of thinking, of which the best seemed to be ‘The Morning After’ from Arun Kale.

home preview tma

To get the posts working, you’d need to create two additional categories for the blog. But it looks good and might be a good way to test out a magazine format. Other features include:

  1. A three-column home page
  2. “Featured” post highlighting
  3. Associating images/thumbnails with recent posts
  4. Customisable logo/header image
  5. Easy CSS classes for adding captions and wrapping text around images in posts
  6. Asides

Whether or not your blog is becoming a magazine, the number of links on the front page to your archives in either of these formats would be a good way to drive traffic to your older posts. You could tweak the formats even more to add extra stories, this would help your older stories be found more easily, especially if you have so much of the content that is hidden away (on my primary blog, there are now nearly 800 individual posts!).

Themes, Plugins and Widgets: From A++ to B-

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InvestorBlogger has been trying out some new themes for the blog. In particular, with a growing interesting in using the WP as the website, for a number of well known magazines and lesser known ones, too, there is a growing number of themes designed for magazines and journals.

Check out the Revolution Themes by Brian Gardner, I love the fact that the themes make good use of front page space, allowing main features to be shown, recent articles, videos and large graphics. There is also space for a lot of other things, too, at the bottom and in the middle. Nice. It’s not free, but at $99 for a single install, it could be a good deal! His other themes include the Zinfandel series.

news revolution

I also found a couple of ‘free’ themes that work along the same line of thinking, of which the best seemed to be ‘The Morning After’ from Arun Kale. It works a little differently, and requires a little tinkering to get it working. I’m sorely tempted to try it out.

home preview tma

It certainly would be this blog more of a magazine format… I don’t know how that would go down with readers, but it would certainly help to emphasize much more of the content that is hidden away (now nearly 800 individual posts!).

srg clean archives

Clean Archives is back. Last month, I removed some of the bloat from blog, including the ‘Archives’ plugin. Hah! You didn’t notice it, did you!? We were still using SRG-Clean Archives 3.2, but it had been upgraded to 4.2. It’s got some nice touches, but doesn’t play well with this theme MistyLook yet, so I can’t let it have full rein just yet. It has expanding month categories, with post and comment counts. Very neat. Try it now, just go to the Archives page on this blog and you’ll see what I mean.

eye candyI added a couple of items to the sidebar, too, mostly in HTML and Javascript to make sure things go quickly. First is using Picasa WebAlbums and the HTML/Scipt Slideshow object, I uploaded all the images on IB to Picasa using the Picasa Desktop (very easy), and created the object. It’s just a bit of eye candy, really, but I positioned it between the text links to break things up and create a bit of movement in the peripheral vision area. You can click on it, if you want to, but I didn’t intend people to do much of that!

At several suggestions, I added a sidebar tool from WidgetBucks.com, too to create extra visual impact, generate some affiliate sales, but I’m not very happy with its performance right now. It slows down page movement a great deal while it loads, and that seems counter productive.

widget sales

It’s generating quite a few impressions, but hardly anyone is bothering to click on it. I’m going to experiment with size and placement over the next few days, and see if I can get any clicks. But so far, it’s zero. I’d rather use the space for something else. So that’s how I’ve been working on my blog. Some good stuff, some things to think about, and some things that need work! What have you been doing on your blog recently?