I spent a lot of time viewing other people’s blogs and it’s fascinating to see how blog designs have changed and how users and designers adapt to those changes. These changes can be attributed to the rise in blogs and blog designers, which leads to competition of the “mine is bigger than yours” type. But more noticeably is the need for practicality in an attempt to give visitors what they want in a simple and effective way.

Popular Trends :

Post Thumbnails : It’s much easier to find what you’re looking for by quickly looking at a picture instead of scanning a bunch of texts. Post thumbnails provide an insight into what is contained or referred to in the particular post.

Drop-Down Boxes : Drop-down boxes don’t exactly qualify as something new, but it does provide a way for designers to put a large amount of categories / pages /  posts in a small amount of space, and still have it look good.

You’re here because you’re a blogger and blog because they want people to view and appreciate whatever it is they’re writing about. The easiest way to gage how popular and useful your writing is comes in the form of comments. The more people comment about how much they enjoyed your writing or if you can give them more information, the better you’re doing. Comments also provide a sense of community to your blog.

As any platform grows so does the time bad people spend on spamming and breaking it. WordPress is updated frequently and is seen as a very secure platform to run your business off. But like most software security holes do popup from time to time, and it only increases as users use more and more free plugins and themes. Below are a few tools to help you combat spam and possible security threats.

In previous posts I’ve covered various tools or “plugins” which help you optimize your WordPress SEO. This post provides a quick guide to settings that work well with all those mentioned plugins. It is also important to look at other parts of your blog structure such as permalinks and sitemaps.

In an earlier post I spoke about the importance of Search Engine Optimization and speficially focused on two very popular WordPress plugins Platinum SEO Pack and All in One SEO Pack. This post on the other hand gives a more general overview of the variety of different plugins that are available for SEO.

To start off with this should not be confused with our other post entitled, “How to turn your WordPress site into a social network”. This post aims to provide you with the resources to increase activity between you, your reader and your members.

Increasing visitor activity on your website has many benefits. Firstly it creates a sense of “buzz” for new visitors, which immediately tells them that other readers have found your blog interesting and informative. Secondly, similar to “buzz”, engagement breeds engagement, which effectively means that apart from wanting to find information as quickly as possible, readers want to engage with other readers, and will do so if a simple and effective opportunity is provided to them.

Social Networks can be seen as the biggest internet phenomena, not only in recent history, but in all of history. Everyone wants to get on the bandwagon as Facebook and Twitter takes over the internet. You have more than one option if you plan on setting up your own niche social network. You can find third-party-hosted-providers such as Ning (which you will have to pay for), SocialGo or Wall.fm just to name a few. If you prefer and opensource solution, which you host yourself, you can find options in the form of Elgg, PhpFox and Dolphin.

WordPress has a vast community of plugin developers and users, which means we’re sometimes provided with more plugins than we know what to with. The case is no different when it comes to WordPress SEO plugins. If you want your WordPress blog to be found by search engines and also perform well, you need a great SEO plugin. This is where All In One SEO Pack and Platinum SEO Pack come into play. Both these plugins are considered to be of a very high standard and provide you with the necessary tools to optimize your search engine results, and where you have two great FREE products, there will be a versus.

Every time you setup a new WordPress self-hosted blog there’s certain things you have to do if you want to be successful. One of them, which is possibly the most important, is search engine optimization or simply SEO. Good SEO practices ensure Google and other search engines can find and correctly list your blog content in the search results.

WordPress is a great blog and CMS, but the default install needs a bit more attention to reach the optimum amount of search engine love. Fortunately for us WordPress users, thousands of people have been contributing to WordPress plugins which provide us with all the necessary SEO tools.