What blog posts bring in the most readers?
Written by Jacob Cass on Friday, August 8, 2008 – 12:10 am
It is always interesting to see what brings readers to a blog so I thought I might share with you guys what blog posts have brought the most visitors into Just Creative Design. Maybe you could employ the same strategies to get more readers to your blog?
According to our stats from the past 7 months (see below) these are my top 10 most popular pages on JCD.
- 92 More Awe Inspiring Creative Photographs
- 56 Awe Inspiring Creative Photographs
- 30 Fonts That ALL Designers Must Own
- 99 Sites ALL Designers Must Know About
- Home Page
- Graphic Design Portfolio
- Why logo design does not cost $5.00
- The Best Graphic Design Articles from 37 Top Design Blogs as Chosen By The Authors Themselves
- 15 Signs Your A Bad Graphic Designer
- 192 Creative, Smart & Clever Advertisements
So What Blog Posts Bring In The Most Readers?
1. Long Large Numbered Resourceful Cool Lists
Upon further study you will notice that half of my top 10 posts are all geared towards the social media and they really lapped it up.
Any post that is a huge resourceful list will bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to your blog… so once in a while rather than writing 5 small posts, why don’t you spend 3 times as long writing a large list… Smashing Magazine is proof that it works and my top 4 articles prove this also.
2. Original Articles with Catchy Titles
These were my three other posts that brought in tons of visitors. Each of these posts are unique and have a catchy title and are further proof that a good article with a catchy title will work for itself.
- Why logo design does not cost $5.00
- The Best Graphic Design Articles from 37 Top Design Blogs as Chosen By The Authors Themselves
- 15 Signs Your A Bad Graphic Designer
For some ideas why don’t you try find something that hasn’t been written about before in your niche? Try going around to all the blogs in your niche and ask for an interview, ask for their favourite post and compile them together in one large post? There are heaps of other unique ideas out there. I highly recommend you visit our Ultimate List of Blog Heading Templates & Titles post for some inspiration.
Where Do All The Readers Come From?
Social Media and Google without a doubt… For some more information on social media I wrote about it in length in this post: What is the best social media website? Digg, SU, Delicious, Reddit or? and for some tips on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) read 10 SEO Rules for Designers.
The main traffic from JCD comes from StumbleUpon, Digg, DesignFloat and Google with the rest coming mainly from other design blogs… It really helps to be on other people’s blog rolls especially if they are in the same niche as you…I can assure you of that. Try to get on them, even if you have to ask.
Anyway, I would be interested to hear what everyone else’s most popular posts are… leave them in the comments!
How To Customise Your Wordpress 2.5+ Log In Screen
Written by Jacob Cass on Thursday, April 3, 2008 – 10:54 am
Here is how to customise and brand your Wordpress Log In Screen for Wordpress 2.5+ (and probably many more versions to come). If you are running an older version of Wordpress you may want to check out this post. You may also want to check out the live demo of my log in screen here.
This post comes after updating my Wordpress to version 2.5 and losing my old custom log in screen. Just a word of warning, I am not the best tutorial writer and this tutorial is for an intermediate to advanced user of Wordpress.
Update:
There are also 2 WordPress plug ins available which can customise your Wordpress 2.5 log in screen.
- Wordpress Custom Admin Branding - This changes the log in screen, as well as the logo in the header and footer of your admin panel.
- Branded Wordpress Log In Screen - This is a plugin that brands only the log in screen.
To change the logo from the Wordpress logo to your logo
- Login to your site via FTP or your preferred method and locate the file ‘login.css‘ which is found in your wp-admin/css/ folder. Open this css file in your favourite editor.
- In the login.css file look for the line:
background: url(../images/logo-login.gif) no-repeat;
and change it to your own image for example… background: url(../images/YOURLOGO.gif) no-repeat;
NB: You will probably want to make the logo around 290 pixels wide. - For the more advanced users this is where you can customise the look of the login anyway you like using CSS which I know you will. I just changed the fonts to Helvetica to match my site.
To change the colour of the background (ie. the baby blue colour)
- Open the colors-fresh.css file which is also found in your wp-admin/css/ folder.
- Locate the TWO #eaf3fa colour’s in this file and replace them with any colour you like. I would recommend a light washed out or neutral colour. I chose my site colour which is grey. (#EAEAEA)
- Don’t stop here, you can customise your log in screen as much as you like! Mine was just a quick example.
Just a note to remember to backup these two CSS files (colors-fresh and login.css) before you do any Wordpress updates as these updates will overwrite these files and you will have to do it all over again!
Once you have finished, upload your login screen to the Wordpress 2.5 Log In Screen Flickr pool.
Why?
This is a a very simple and effective way to customise and brand your wordpress login screen… It would be very beneficial for web designers designing for clients as it’s the attention to detail in your work that makes all the difference when you deal with your clients.
If you have designed a wordpress blog for a client I would highly recommend making this small, yet important, inclusion. For myself, it’s not as important as I am the only one who writes on this blog, however for those with multiple authors it surely is a must.
You also may be wondering about what that OpenID log in is? You should definitely read about it… you will regret it if you don’t.
You may also want to check out WordPress Plugins You Must Have or the Ultimate List of Blog Heading Templates & Titles for Blogging. Also don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already.
If you have any questions (and I am sure you will) please let me know.
Tutorial: How to print blog articles the smart way.
Written by Jacob Cass on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 – 2:09 pmDo you ever want to read an article while going to work or while on public transport?
Do you ever want to save an article for future use? Pin it up on your wall?
Then this is when you need to print blog articles - but how many of you have been doing it the smart way?
Yes, I know all of you will be saying “You just press File, then Print.” or maybe the smart arses out there, Ctrl+P or Apple Key+P but no, this is not the best way to print blog articles.
This article will show you 2 smarter ways to print, which will save you on paper waste and ink - aka, save you money. In this example we can get a 10 page print job down to just 2 pages (or even just 1 if you have a duplex printer).
The Old Not-So-Smart Way
First off, let’s compare the way the majority of people print their blog articles. Most people would go to the article they want printed and then press Print either from the menu bar (as above) or by the keyboard shortcut CTRL + P or APPLE + P.
If you printed the old way, it would print the header of the website, the side bars and even the advertisements (see image above). Using the 11 Essential Tips to Writing a Tutorial page as an example, using the old way, it would take 10 pieces of paper (without the comments) to print the whole article which is in turn wasting paper and ink.
The Smart Way
There is an alternative to just pressing print and this is by using the ‘Print Range’ or ‘Print Selection’ function available in all printers. This smart way will get the pages down to just 4 pages or if you have a duplex printer (prints on both sides of the paper) just 2 pages.
How To Do It?
1. Highlight the parts of the page you want selected.
To do this left click at the start of the article heading and hold down your mouse button & drag down to highlight all of the text and/or images that you want to be printed. Notice the grey highlight in the image above. This is what is going to be printed.
2. Go to the usual way you print and click File, Print or press CTRL + P or Apple + P but stop there.
3. Find the ‘Print Range’ area in your print dialogue box - see picture below. The example I am using is for a Canon Printer but your printer may be different.
4. If you have a duplex printer go to step 5 if not, Click OK or Print and hey presto, you save 6 pages of paper.5. Duplex: If you have duplex printing, try to find in your print options, a tick box that has ‘Duplex Printing’ or ‘Double Sided Printing’ and make sure this is ticked. The location of this tick box is different on every printer so this goes beyond this tutorial, but check your printer manual.
The Smartest Way to Print
There is an even smarter way to print but it is a bit more time consuming and you also must have a Word editor such as Microsoft Word. Using this way I managed to get everything into just 2 pages, or just 1 page if you have duplex printing. This way is saving you 8 or 9 pages of paper.
How To Do It?
1. Highlight the parts of the page you want selected.
To do this left click left Click at the start of the article heading and hold down your mouse button & drag down to highlight all of the text and/or images that you want to be printed. This is what is going to be printed.
2. Open your Word editor and press Paste (Ctrl + V). This will paste the article or your selection into your word editor.
3. If using Microsoft Word Go to File, Page Setup, change the Margins to 1cm on all sides. See image.
4. Go through your article and delete any images that you do not wish to have.Change the font size to what ever you find readable.5. If you have a duplex printer go to step 5 if not, Click OK or Print and hey presto, you save 8 pages of paper.
6. Duplex: If you have duplex printing, try to find in your print options, a tick box that has ‘Duplex Printing’ or ‘Double Sided Printing’ and make sure this is ticked. The location of this tick box is different on every printer so this goes beyond this tutorial, but check your printer manual.
Inspiration
This article was inspired by Vivien’s article Blog Feng Shui which told me how bloggers can create print friendly blog articles by CSS. Vivien told me how not everyone knew about the method of selection printing and that is why I have written this tutorial for DailyBlogTip’s Blog Writing Project on Tutorials.
3 More Great Tutorials:
- Optimize your Blog Post for Google - Tips that you might not have heard by Shankar.
- Effective Linking With Your Old Post in 10 Steps by Dexter.
- Protect Your Blog And Counter Copyright Thefts by Tibi
Support and Questions
If you have any questions or support feel free to ask. Is there anything I missed or some other way for smarter, quicker, more resourceful printing? Thanks.
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BE AWARE OF: Your Host, WordPress Plugins, CPU Load and being BANNED from your own website!
Written by Jacob Cass on Monday, January 21, 2008 – 11:12 pm
This is something all bloggers and webmasters should really know about so you do not have to live through what I did - 7 days of your website(s) being offline.
This is the story behind how I was banned from my own website, Just Creative Design, and how it was brought down or ’suspended’ by overloading my host provider’s CPU through the over use of my website and Wordpress Plugins and I want to raise awareness of this, so this does not happen to you.
I will recount the story as it happened of JCD being suspended and then restored along with commentary and advice along the way.
Jan 14th - All my websites are down!
When I realised my sites were down (they went to an advertising page instead of my page) I really did not know what was wrong and in the back of my mind I thought that I had been hacked just like how David Airey was, last month, but it wasn’t because I had taken his advice and checked my Google Filters and all was clean.
After this I went pretty frantic and emailed all the people I could (my hosts, their support them, my domain name host provider and also their support team - in total 4 emails).
I received pretty instant replies (between 2mins and 4 hours) from 3 of the 4 contacts however none of these could help me and told me to contact my hosts (of which I had already done). I had to wait 1.5 days for their first reply.
Jan 15th - First Contact, 1.5 Days Later
They sent me this email (see below) on the 15th of January with a very brief and vague reason telling me why the site was down and what I had to do to rectify it - they did not tell me HOW to do it and this is where the problem was and what took up so much time.
It has come to our attention (by the server not responding due to a high load) that your domain is in violation of our AUP/TOS by way of the following domain: justcreativedesign.com
justcreativedesign.com was disabled for overloading server with index.php processes.
justcreativedesign.com had to be disabled in order for the server to work. If justcreativedesign.com was not disabled, all domains on the entire server including your own domain would have remained inaccessible.
To get your site enabled, contact Emailed Removed and state your plan of action to resolve this issue and prevent it from reoccurring.
If this should happen again after the site has been enabled, the domain will need to be permanently removed in order to maintain the integrity of the server that hosts many other sites.
If you don’t know how to fix your script from using so much of the CPU, you should begin looking for a dedicated server or virtual private server.
As you can see, I really had no idea what the problem was so I went out and did a bit of research.
Jan 15th & 16th - 303 Redirection & Lots of Research
At this time I really had no idea what the problem was so I put a 303 temporary redirection on my website to point to an error message, hosted on a friends account, telling my readers that I was having some technical difficulties - doing this took 2 days for the nameservers to propagate, meaning, for 2 days I still had that annoying advertising message on my site.
Naturally after I received the email above, I wondered what it was all about, so before I replied, I set off and did a bit of research. I came to realise a small handful of people have had the same problem. The best resource and where I learned the most on CPU Load and Wordpress, was on the forum of HostGator (A leading hosting company) on Blogging, Wordpress and CPU Load. I would highly, highly, recommend to everyone, to read this whole article as you won’t regret it - I sure wish I knew about it before my site went down.
Research Conclusions & What You Should Know!
Nearly All Hosting Providers have rules about database usage (CPU Load).
This is something that nearly all hosting providers do not display anywhere on their site, and generally keep it quite disclosed unless specifically asked. You should ask your provider about your CPU Load limitations.
What is CPU Load you ask? Generally it is the amount of open maximum connections that your site can have and how much of a servers resources you may use by having all these connections used at one time. These open connections can come in a number of ways… For example, having a large spike from a social media site like Digg or by having a script or plug-in ‘go crazy’ or by having an error in your programming.
When one of these things happen you use up a lot of your host providers resources and as an example; if you use 90% of your server’s resource for over 30 seconds (a long time) your account would be suspended because this leaves no resources for the hundreds of other sites that are hosted on the same server. If this is unclear, read this article.
Wordpress Plugins are bad for CPU Load
Using too many plugins on Wordpress is a very bad thing… even if you try them out then deactivate them, it still leaves bits of code in your programming which chews up bandwidth and loading speed, so the solution to this is to have a spare Wordpress blog that you can test scripts and plugins out on.
Another thing I learned is that some plugins can conflict with one another and cause the script(s) to go crazy and repeat on itself and cause an enormous CPU Load on your server. This is why testing on another blog is perfect!
During my research I also found out that some plugins use more CPU Load than others and make your website slower to load. In particular; Recent Comment Plugins, Top Commentator Plugins, some spam protection plugins and even WP-Cache use a lot of CPU Load.
Serra from HostGator comments on CPU Load and account suspension…
“Most of the suspensions I’ve seen have been the result of scripts that have gone nuts or sites that are simply too big to be on a shared account. Shared accounts are geared toward sites that see a moderate amount of traffic, with few peaks in traffic. Those with heavy database operations or traffic spikes don’t really belong in the shared environment. Basically, for $6.00 a month, you need to have a normal website. For $78.00 a month, you can go crazy, but you need to pay for the craziness with the higher fee.”
So just be careful with wordpress plugins and test them out on a spare blog first.
Jan 18th - I Reply to Host Provider & More Waiting.
Anyway after 303 redirecting and all of my research (about a days worth) I replied to my host providers stating what I would do to resolve the issue and then 1.5 days later they came back with an email saying “Your website has been enabled“. I had to change my nameservers back to their original position and then I had to ‘wait up to 3 days‘ for my website to propagate back again.
Jan 20th, 21st - “Website Enabled” but not for me.
As I said above, they emailed me saying my website had now been enabled and it was, my website was now back up and running! (yay) - But unfortunately not for me - It was not working on my own computer at all so I emailed them again asking why everyone else was getting the site and I wasn’t. They replied:
“Propagation is the process in which the nameserver information in your Registrar’s database is passed to the 13 international root nameservers and then on to millions of ISP’s, routers, and DNS cache engines all of which will update their own dns tables with the new information whenever they choose to update. As you can see propagation is not controlled by any one company. Please wait about 3 days.”
But I knew this was not the problem so I contacted them yet again and this time they said they needed my IP, and for me to do a trace route.
I did what they asked and then they replied saying.
“121.210.114.XXX was blocked by firewall. It has been unblocked.”
Hey presto, I am now allowed back onto my own website! But this meant only one thing… I had just been banned from my own website.
Jan 21st - Banned From My Own Website and Why?
So after receiving the last email, I realised that I was just banned from my own website! The reason behind me being banned is a mystery however after my research I could only bring it down to 3 things.
- I was visiting my own website too often and was considered a spammer. (I was doing a lot of plug in testing and unfortunately I was not on a spare blog so this could be a valid reason.)
- A plugin went crazy in conflict with another plugin and caused an over load of CPU power.
- A social media spike (my stats don’t show this though).
As an educated guess, I believe it was a combination of the first two points but only god knows the real answer.
Anyway, now Just Creative Design (and my other website - E-mail Signature Designs) are online again and I have full access to them and my emails and hopefully this ordeal is completely over.
What you should do now.
After this week long ordeal I want you to learn from my misfortunes so that this does not happen to you, so I believe you should be doing these things;
- Share this article with as many people as you can (a blog post would be great - if not, any submissions to social media sites would be just as fine.)
- Contact your own host provider and ask about your CPU Load limitations.
- Uninstall the plugins you don’t need and declutter your blog for faster loading times. Remember the plugins that I said cause the most CPU Load.
- Create a secondary identical blog for you to test your scripts and plugins in.
- If you have not already, as stated above, I highly recommend you to read this article on blogging, wordpress and CPU load.
- Make sure you know ALL the contact details of your host provider, domain name provider, and their support teams and have them easily on hand. Ensure that all your contact details are correct in each of these places (I had a wrong email in one which delayed the process by half a day).
- Ensure You Backup Your Blog - Luckily I had been doing this automatically every day.
Thanks
Thanks everyone so much for those who have emailed / contacted me at the start and throughout this ordeal: Lauren, David, Vivien, Niyaz PK and for those , who followed my progress in the comments of these two posts.
I know some other people have tried contacting me but seeing though I had no access to my domain or emails I haven’t received everyone’s emails so sorry about that.
Anyway, hope this helps you avoid this problem in the future and if anyone has had this happen or know someone who has, I would love to hear about it.
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Top 5 Time Saving Plugins to Make Blogging A Breeze
Written by Jacob Cass on Saturday, January 12, 2008 – 11:56 am
These 5 6 very handy, time saving plugins are a must have for any blogger out there who wants to save time - and I mean a lot of time! I really wish I knew about these when I first started blogging… as you can see in my very first blog post: 20 WordPress Plugins You Must Have I seem to have left out 4 of the time saving plugins listed below but needless to say, they are there now!
1. Better Comments Manager
This is my favourite plugin that not many people know about and strangely enough is hardly mentioned anywhere! This plugin allows you to reply to your comments from within the Wordpress Admin Panel - you no longer have to go to the post to reply! You can also view all comments in your admin panel based by posts!
2. Admin Drop Down Menu
The Admin Drop Down Menu should be bundled with Wordpress on installation, I would like to know why it isn’t! It eliminates the need for double clicking on the Admin screens. It allows you to see the second level menu just by placing your mouse over a main menu. You can view the demo here.
3. TinyMCE Advance
TinyMCE Advance is for those of you who use the visual text editor in WordPress… This handy little plugin adds 40 extra buttons & options to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row. It does take a bit of effort to get used to it but it is well worth it!
4. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple images for your blog and it has gallery and album functionality. Check out my portfolio to see it in action. The best feature of this plugin is that you can upload multiple files at the same time - even if they are in a zip file.
5. SRG Clean Archives
SRG Clean Archives is one of many archiving systems out there, but this one is clean, uniform and search engine friendly and it can display on a dedicated page or in your sidebar. This archiving system is automatic and a great way for you (and your visitors) to overlook your whole blog at one time - saving you and them time by not digging around in your website. You can see it in action on my archives page.
6. Easy Admin Access
A day after posting, I found this great plugin that adds an admin access bar that runs along the top of your blog when you’re logged in, which provides links to the dashboard, new post and profile pages, as well as the option to log out. Very time saving!
Are there any other time saving plugins that deserve to be in this list?
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