If you’re a graphic designer that has created a beautiful design that needs to be converted into a WordPress themes, you have several options from hiring out a specialist, using an automated service or doing it yourself. Let’s look at the first option.

Hiring out a specialist is the first possibility and you can expect to pay anywhere from $100 to $200 (or more) to get someone familiar with WordPress to convert your design into a template. One thing you should make sure is absolutely clear is whether they’re creating a WordPress 3 series template or not. This series has several new features that is essential for your clients to get the most out of this CMS. Namely, menus and widgets. The WP 3 menu system is VERY easy to use and sidebar widgets are an essential function. But not all conversion specialists guarantee they’re making WP 3 compatible templates, so make sure they do before choosing them to do the conversion.

A second option which may be more usable down the road is a service called Divine. They get a very high StumbleUpon rating which is a fairly good sign it’s a usable service. (I haven’t tried their service, nor am I in any way affiliated with them.) They appear to be in Beta mode, so not all functions will be working as of this writing. There also seems to be a major limitation with their graphic output — all images are exported to GIF format which could result in some very large image files, depending on your design. Even though most people use broadband at home these days, more and more people are connecting via remote connections (phones, iPads) so having a fast download is still essential. If your design is simple this shouldn’t be a problem. But if your design has a lot of textures or photo elements, the download time will be considerable.

The last option is to do it yourself. If you have any experience with Cascading Style Sheets, doing a PSD to WordPress conversion can be a lot of fun! It can also be a bit nerve-wracking trying to find the exact style affecting your design element, but if you use the Firebug extension for Firefox you can usually find the style fast. As someone with more of a design background, I’ve come to love customizing templates for WordPress. The key thing is to find a free template in the WordPress directory that is very close, then make your changes with it, instead of trying to build a template from scratch (which is only something programmers should attempt).

The author runs a company that offers free WordPress training and develops affordable websites to help people get a website up and running fast.

Author: Peter J Harris
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Eco Friendly

When browsing the Drupal admin modules list it can be difficult to find what you need, unless you already know its name. This is a quick reference list, from which you can pick and choose modules that are the most use in your particular situation.

Note: As well as modules, you may also want to look into getting your hands on an admin theme. My personal favourite is “Rubik” from Development Seed, but there are plenty of other options available on the official Drupal site.

General admin modules

Administration menu – no Drupal admin should be without this module. It displays the admin menu at the top of your screen whenever you’re logged into your administrator account and wherever you may go on the site, for easy access.

Backup and Migrate – fairly obvious from the name but this module makes it easy to backup your database (which you do on a regular basis, right?) or migrate the database from one Drupal install to another.

Chart - uses the Google Charts API to display reports in easy to digest chart format

Masquerade - allows the site admin (or anyone with the correct permission) to view the site from the point of view of another user. Hugely useful when you have multiple user roles and need to be sure they can see everything they’re supposed to see.

Rules - you can use the Rules module to automate certain tasks, like sending a message to new users or automatically publishing new content that meets certain criteria. One less thing to worry about.

Site Verification – for those of you who are unsure about the site verification process for Google or other search engines, this module makes it a lot simpler.

Views Bulk Operations - a Views submodule (and you already have Views, right?), this basically allows you to perform an action in bulk to nodes that are listed in a view. From an admin perspective this means mass deleting nodes, for example. Huge timesaver.

XML Sitemap - automatically generate a search engine friendly sitemap.

User management modules

GoAway - makes it simple to ban users by IP, and redirects banned users to a page of your choice so you can be as polite or as rude about it as you like!

User Import - Import users into Drupal from a CSV file

Permission management modules

Better Permissions - improves the permissions interface with some snazzy javascript.

Filter Permissions - sick of the sight of the hugely long permissions page? Filter it down to just the ones you actually need and reduce the chances of you a) checking the wrong box and b) killing yourself.

There are many more admin modules available for certain situations but these are the ones that I find myself using on a regular basis. Drupal is a very powerful CMS but its administration can leave a bit to be desired so this list should get you off to a great start in improving matters.

Whatever time I can spare is usually spent helping people on forums, Twitter, and my own site about building a business website! I like to share:)

Not quite ready to set up website yourself? It just so happens I’m a freelance Drupal developer, so maybe I can help.

Author: Michelle Dancer
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Alternative energy

A stable content management system is an excellent tool which would help you in maintaining as well as managing the websites and their contents. However, you should be very careful before choosing a content management system. There are some important points that you should keep in mind before choosing one. The points are:

Efficient in basic functions: You must choose such a system which would be able to perform efficiently the basic functions, such as creating, editing, deleting and organizing the web pages. You would find often that there are many such systems which might help you in creating the content of the website but would not help you in organizing the website. Thus, you should keep in mind that your system should allow to create a website as well as organize it too.

WYSIWYG Editors: These would help you in adding, editing and changing the content of the website, even if you do not have the knowledge of HTML. Also these editors would help you in marking the headings, links and various other elements in the web page. With the help of these editors you should also be able to handle images and files which can be downloaded.

Efficient management: A stable content management system should allow you to efficiently manage the images and the files. The content providers should be compelled to add the ALT attributes to the images. Also they should be provided with the editing tools which would help them in cropping, rotating, resizing and so on. Also the content management system should help you to upload and attach the Word documents, PDFs and various other files.

Customization ability: This is the most important point to be considered. The system should be accommodating, so that your requirements can be fulfilled. It should not follow the technology as a default setting rather it should allow different types of design and content.

Good interaction with the users: Your CMS should be able to gather the feedback of the users and also should allow the third-party to chat, give ratings or use the chat. It also should allow you to collect the responses of the users.

Performing various roles: You might have various content providers who would manage the website content. In this case there is huge importance of a stable content management system. It should control the tasks of these content providers. It should support the permissions which would have the specifications about which user should edit which part of the website.

In order to find out more on secure web host and similar Hosting and webmaster related guides, check out Trusted Web Hosts.

Author: Amit Bhawani
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Captions contest

WordPress and Joomla are both free, open source Content Management Systems (CMS). They are different, however, and each product has circumstances and situations when it is better than the other. What are the many benefits of WordPress? When is WordPress better than Joomla and when should you go about choosing WordPress for your site?

WordPress is good when you need a simple site with a blog.

WordPress is fabulous for websites that just a few main pages and a blog. A site that just needs an about page, contact page, service page, and blog is perfect for WordPress.

Why?

A default WordPress installation has a ready-to-go blog available, complete with an RSS feed and a commenting system. “Recent articles” and “popular articles” widgets can be added with just a few clicks. You need to add your stationary pages and any other widgets that you want, but the blog is there and ready. A default Joomla installation, on the other hand, needs an extension or two to have a blog ready.

WordPress is good when you need an excellent media manager.

I love Joomla, but the default media manager in WordPress is much, much better than Joomla’s. The media manager stores the alternate text for the image, the title of the image, and an image caption with the image. Later on, you can just click a few times and have the image inserted into your article without retyping all the other information. That other information is important too, since it makes the site accessible to people with vision problems and it makes the site more searchable to search engines.

Another good feature of WordPress’ media manager is the ability to resize images as you insert them into the article, rather than loading them into Photoshop or another photo editing program and cropping and resizing them.

WordPress is good when you want a large community of support.

There are almost 400,000 WordPress blogs on WordPress.com alone, and WordPress.org estimates that there are 25 million web sites created in WordPress.

WordPress is good when you want to use a pre-existing theme and not do a lot of design work.

WordPress.com offers over 1,300 themes for free, and many other themes are available for free on independent sites. Themes are fairly easy to customize, but if you find one that is close enough to your end goal, you might not need to customize it at all.

Gwen Nicodemus owns and operates Shiny Newts, LLC. Shiny Newts solves technical and documentation problems for its customers in a timely, professional manner–often going “above and beyond”–by providing custom services and pre-packaged services. Visit http://www.ShinyNewts.com to watch videos on how to use Joomla, Photoshop, and Word or to read Gwen’s ebook, “Write a Marketing Plan by Filling in the Blanks.”

©2010, Gwen Nicodemus

Author: Gwen Nicodemus
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Unix inter-process communication (IPC)

One of the most dominant blog publishing and content management application up-to-date is WordPress, with over 25 million users across the globe. An open source CMS that is free of charge. Website owners and bloggers can conveniently visit the official WordPress website for free application and plugins downloads.

Fundamentally, WordPress started as a blog engine. Thanks to the diligence and skills of thousands of volunteers and coders who developed WordPress, users can now the application’s features to chance a static unexciting page into a fully dynamic customized web page in just a couple of mouse clicks. That is the main reason why WordPress is gaining its fame among the millions of web designers, organizations and businesses throughout the world.

WordPress authoritative feature ranges from a user friendly template driven system, workflow area, category allocation and more. With that said, the most wonderful thing about WordPress is that users can execute plug-ins for their specified website functionality and needs.

WordPress plugins make modification and customization simple. It is a program that accommodates diverse specifications and requirements. Likewise, it is not difficult to actualize particularly for beginners or users who are unfamiliar with web design codes such as html and php.

Here are the top 6 recommended WordPress plugins that are free to download and essential for your new blog site:

Akismet – This plugin is very beneficial to control and fight spam on your blog site. Spammers who leave comments and links to promote their sites are often offensive. Truly, a time – conserving plugin. A must for all blog sites.

All in One SEO Pack – It is one of the most commonly used plugins among SEO practitioners. Its fundamental function is to turn your posts and pages to be more search engine friendly so that you can rank higher on search results that are appropriate to your content posted. To increase traffic to website, this plugin is utilized by blog and website owners.

XML Sitemaps – This plugin automatically generates XML sitemaps for your website and gives notification to search engines when they are updated. The main purpose is to make your blog posts more search engines friendly so that they can be easily “crawled” and indexed, thus enabling people to find them on major search engines.

Broken Link Checker – This practical plugin can administer checking of outgoing links. It also eliminates dead links. Dead links are listed out because it will negatively have an effect on the website’s search engine ranking.

StatPress Reloaded – This useful plugin is used to track the visitor’s of the website. Furthermore, it provides the number of page views, spiders and RSS feeds.

SEO Smart Links – Many SEO practitioners believe in the practical use of back links. With this plugin, linking an article to another article is achievable. Moreover, this is also helpful for bloggers who want their visitors to find articles on similar subjects since this plugin interlinks the keyword automatically.

Digg Digg Social Sharing – This plugin that is accountable for the floating social icon found at the left side corner of each post. It provides user easy access to Twitter icon, thus making it easier for readers to share and endorse content.

Certainly, there are tons of plugins for WordPress that you can use to optimize your website. There are no doubts about how much quality these plugins can bring to your blogs. You actually don’t need an IT degree to have these plugins set up. There are a number of websites that will help you download and test these amazing plugins. Finally, make sure that you read various SEO related forums and blogs. Reading opinions and advices of other WordPress users will help you enhance the use of these fantastic plugins to your website’s advantage.

Are you searching for the latest autopress WorPress plugin? Daryl Chapman strongly recommends you to stopover at Leanne King blog site for the latest update on internet marketing and WordPress application and downloads.

Author: Daryl B. Chapman
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Electric Pressure Cooker