Guest post by Terry Roper
Many of us want to have an asset that will pay us every month but in our busy busy world time is precious.  So to avoid the grunt work involved in getting a legitimate, profitable website up and running we can just buy one. The question frequently asked is “How much should I pay for a website?’

This is yet another one of those excruciatingly vague questions that most people in the online industry will hear quite a bit. The fact is, some websites are only worth $100 or $200 (like a custom design for a blogspot blog, as an example). Others have literally millions of dollars of value in them (like a website and database for a major car dealer, which keeps track of and can search for tens of thousands of cars, and has complex search criteria, a user sign up, custom made graphics, custom made promotions added on a regular basis, etc., etc., etc.)

Don’t worry. You don’t have to spend millions for your website. But you should know what you’re paying for. But it is important for budgeting that you understand the cost of an online store website.

One way to separate “types of websites” is by comparing Custom Design websites to Template websites. There are several major differences to these types of sites.

Photo by Ruben Bos (under CC)

Custom Website Design

Here are some positives about what you will receive with a Custom Website Design:

• A fully unique website, built to your specifics.
• The opportunity to modify or tweak specific features that you would like to change or alter.
• The option to have special “moving aspects” on your website, such as a “flash banner.”
• Added customization.
• Your banner creation is generally included. You could also purchase a logo design from the same designer or design company.

Here are some downfalls to getting a Custom Website Design:

• They cost significantly more. Designers charge anywhere between $60 and $150 per hour (on average). Even a simple website, to suit small business’s needs, will generally cost well over a thousand dollars. If you want to have more than a couple of pages, or any additional features, or if you want them to put in your products for you, it will cost well more than that.
• You’re “stuck with it.” Once your website has been given to you, you cannot easily modify it yourself. This means your website is stuck as is unless you learn HTML, or continue to re-hire your designers for changes and revisions. With a website that’s not changing, it’s far more difficult to adapt to your market, and you will generally not be as well ranked with the search engines.
• It’s a little risky. Because you’re hiring someone for their time, not necessarily for a specific product, it is very difficult to get a refund from a design company if you’re not satisfied with your design. Most design companies have a contract which specifies that they only do a set number of alterations once they’ve made the website, even if you don’t like it. This means that if your number of alterations runs out before you like the website design, you may be stuck with a low quality site.

Template Website Designs

Here are some positive things about getting a template website design, or template website builder.

• They are generally the same quality as custom website designs. Despite what designers will try to convince you of, most templates were made by professional designers in the first place, so the quality will be similar.
• They are far easier to modify. If you don’t know HTML coding, or have access to expensive photo editing software, it is far easier to modify a template website. Templates usually come with easy to use website modification tools, which allow you to change and add text, images, and more on your website. This means you can update more frequently, adapt to your market, and become more “liked” by the search engines.
• They come with all the features “built in.” While you have to pay a website designer to add a store for your online store website, all of the important features are already included in a template website.
• They are easy to expand. It can be a large and expensive task to add a page on a Custom Website Design. However, adding pages, products, categories, etc., is very easy with Website Templates.

Negative things about Template Website Designs:

• Other people will have the same templates. It may be attractive and effective, but it’s not unique. Other people will have the same borders, backgrounds, and navigation that you do as a result of what a template is. Of course, most people visiting your site won’t notice this, and most won’t have seen the other sites with the same design, but it is still a downfall.
• You have to learn the builder. Even with dedicated customer care or technical support, you won’t be given step-by-step-by-step directions on the website builder you are using, and there are some basic things you will need to learn. They may not be as complex as HTML code, but it is still something you’ll have to pick up on.
• You’re limited in the templates you can choose. If you know for sure that you want a pure black website with gold navigation and and baroque styled frame around the site, with a maroon colored pattern outside of that, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll find that specific of a template. If you’re really picky about those aspects, templates may simply frustrate you, because they are confining in that way.

So which do we recommend? Well, neither and both. Each suits the needs of different people (or, more importantly, the needs of different online businesses).

In brief:

• If you know basic HTML, are okay with spending a little more, and don’t mind spending money when you want to make changes, the advantages provided by a custom website design are likely worthwhile for you.
• If you don’t know HTML, are on a tight budget, and don’t mind investing little bit more time into your site when you need to make changes, then a Template Website Design is probably the best fit for you.

So, what can you expect to pay for each of these? Well, prices range and vary for each type of website, and especially with custom website designs you will need to do research into the special features of your site.

However, we can say that Template Sites that include an online store, an ability to expand pages, and the ability to add products/images/etc., should cost between $700 and $2000. Custom websites that have the normal pages for a store website (Home, About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Shipping Policy, Store, etc.) should generally cost between $1500 and $4000.

Terry Roper maintains the blog of Thrive Learning Institute and has been involved in web development for over 4 years. You can also write a guest article and share your expert advice.

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Guest post by Srikanth
If you are a graphic designer then you would constantly look out for new fonts to suit your work and needs. And, finding the right font for a work is really tricky. Here are some of the sites that offer free font downloads.

1) 1001freefonts: This site has a large database of various fonts. It enables you to search for the fonts and preview the selected font prior to downloading it. You can download fonts for Windows and Mac OS X.

2) Urbanfonts: This site also has got over 8,000 freeware fonts for you to choose from. You can search for the font type, preview the selected font in the same window and download the font file. The font file contains the rules for the entire font family such that you need not download any extra file. You can find both bit mapped and scalable fonts in this site.

3) Betterfonts: Offers thousands of fonts for free download. You can quickly preview and download different fonts of your choice. From the font list present in the left frame on the site you can select the font type and the quick preview of the selected font type is generated automatically. By clicking on the “download font now” button you can download the select font instantly.

4) Searchfreefonts: This site has over 13,000 free fonts to choose from. All the font files are arranged in categories such that you can find the font file of your choice easily. After you have selected the font file you can preview the selected font style and download it.

5) Dafont: In this site selecting a font of your choice is easy. The font files are arranged category wise such that you can choose a category and select the required font style from it. You can also instant preview a font style and download it. This site offers widest range of font styles. You can even find fonts of different languages apart than English, check them out here.

6) Fonts500: This site features the top 500 fonts that are been downloaded by users from some of the web’s biggest free font archives. At a glance, you may find the desired font style easily. By clicking on the font icon you can directly download the font file.

Guest blogger Srikanth writes on Tech Inspiration blog about tips, gadgets, and technology. You can also write a guest article and share your favorite tool and services.

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Have you seen multiple Google Adsense ad units and link units on any RSS feed in Google Reader? Normally Adsense allows only one ad unit in feeds, the ad size of which they automatically decide. But then Techcrunch with 2 million RSS readers is an ideal site for testing new Adsense variations with 2 ad units and ad links too!

Here is a screenshot of the Techcrunch feed in Google Reader.

Obviously this is another Google adsense feed  advertising test in going on. See how strategically Ad link units have been placed at the bottom of articles to serve as a navigation menu and two 300×250 ad units are placed side by side.

Now here is what is stranger – I tried loading the Techcrunch feed in IE, but that displayed only one ad unit. I loaded the feed in Bloglines, and still one ad unit per article. Obviously like all of us, Techcrunch can add only one adsense ad to feeds. So is this a Google reader test that is adding these additional ads? Have you seen any other feeds with multiple ads in Google reader?

This is another addition to several strange Adsense ads we spotted before  like multiple ad fonts,  2×2 ads, favicons, no titles, titles in italics and no “Ads by Google” and interactive keywords.

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How do you separate comments from trackbacks, and style comments in Wordpress 2.7 blogs? The latest WP version brought in some amazing new functionality to comments (like comment threading, paging) and some new template tags and CSS classes which made WordPress comments easier to work with and enabled easier customized styling.

New Comment Options in WordPress 2.7

We wanted to start threaded comments on our blog and also get rid of the wp-comments-post.php errors, so we needed to upgrade the QOT wordpress theme.  Our current theme has seperated comments and trackbacks, and hidden trackbacks – so how difficult could it be in WP 2.7.

I downloaded a fresh wordpress package and sourced the latest comments.php from the default theme. Then I replaced my custom comments.php with the new file. The first thing you notice is a new template tag wp_list_comments which replaces a lot of earlier comments code. This single unified class has lots of powerful arguments which can enhance the way this works to customize your template even further.

<?php wp_list_comments('arguments'); ?>

This powerful template tag sources out an amazing array of classes which can be easily styled. Also because of this new tag, most of the earlier tutorials to separate comments and trackbacks fail.

Separate Comments and trackbacks in Wordpress 2.7

I found this nice tutorial to separate comments and trackbacks in WP 2.7. I started with single.php and replaced -

<?php comments_template(); ?>
with
<?php comments_template('', true); ?>

Then you need to separate comments and pings in comments.php. Replace the following code

<h3 id="comments"><?php comments_number('No Responses', 'One Response', '% Responses' );?> to &#8220;<?php the_title(); ?>&#8221;</h3>
<ol class="commentlist">
<?php wp_list_comments(); ?>
</ol>

with this code to separate comments and pings

<?php if ( ! empty($comments_by_type['comment']) ) : ?>
<h3 id="comments"><?php comments_number('No Responses', 'One Response', '% Responses' );?> to &#8220;<?php the_title(); ?>&#8221;</h3>
<ol class="commentlist">
<?php wp_list_comments('type=comment'); ?>
</ol>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php if ( ! empty($comments_by_type['pings']) ) : ?>
<h3 id="pings">Trackbacks/Pingbacks</h3>
<ol class="commentlist">
<?php wp_list_comments('type=pings'); ?>
</ol>
<?php endif; ?>

Correct Comments Count in Wordpress 2.7

So now the comments and trackbacks were separated, but the comments count was totally wrong as it was the total of both. So the tutorial taught us to add some more code to functions.php (we already had this template file because we widget enabled our theme earlier)

<?php
add_filter('get_comments_number', 'comment_count', 0);
function comment_count( $count ) {
if ( ! is_admin() ) {
global $id;
$comments_by_type = &separate_comments(get_comments('status=approve&post_id=' . $id));
return count($comments_by_type['comment']);
} else {
return $count;
}
}
?>

Hide Trackbacks in Wordpress 2.7

Now we wanted to hide trackbacks. There is a tutorial to do this  using  jquery, but that seemed too technical for me. So I simply deleted out the trackbacks code which we had earlier used to separate pings from comments …. and trackbacks are gone. This does not mean trackbacks have stopped been recorded, they are merely not displaying. If you add the code back, the trackbacks will start displaying. We deleted this -

<?php if ( ! empty($comments_by_type['pings']) ) : ?>
<h3 id="pings">Trackbacks/Pingbacks</h3>
<ol class="commentlist">
<?php wp_list_comments('type=pings'); ?>
</ol>
<?php endif; ?>

For some reason, the comment navigation still kept showing “Newer Comments”, though comments pages were not activated. So I deleted the navigation code also. Remember this code IS required if you have enabled comments paging. Since we had only comment threading enabled, we could do away with this code.

 <div class="navigation">
<div class="alignleft"><?php previous_comments_link() ?></div>
<div class="alignright"><?php next_comments_link() ?></div>
</div> 

Styling CSS  in Wordpress 2.7

Styling comments is easy, provided you know which classes to target and edit in your CSS file. This tutorial gives you a breakdown of the huge number of classes which this wp_list_comments tag incorporates. Notice that you need to syle a new class commentlist and lists tags like comment, children, comment-meta, reply, ol, li etc. Simple adding these classes to your style.css will let you style any component of your comments. View the source code of any post page to see the huge range of classes available. For example

ol.commentlist { list-style:none; margin:0 0 1em; padding:0; }
ol.commentlist li.comment { border-bottom:1px dotted #666; padding:1em; }

For Alternate background colors of odd/even comments, use this
ol.commentlist li.even { background:#fff; }
ol.commentlist li.odd { background:#f6f6f6; }

This is how we have separated the trackbacks/pingbacks from comments, hidden the trackbacks and styled our comments in WordPress 2.7. You can check out our new threaded comments and see if you like how they work.

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P2 wordpress theme is a revolutionary new theme designed by WordPress guys that allows real time blogging, is inspired by Twitter, and if you choose this theme, it will surely change your blogging style and that of your blog community too.

Earlier Wordpress had launched Prologue Theme, which introduced the concept of microblogging on Wordpress. Now P2 promises to be a major revamp of Prologue and is determined to be much faster and cooler. So what really makes P2 unique?

Powerful comment display options are the major highlight of P2 theme – there is a threaded comment display on the front page, easily editable by the cool in-line editing for comments, with a show/hide feature for comments, and real-time notification when a new comment or update is posted.

Posts are easily editable inline and live tag suggestions help quick tagging based on previously used tags. Quick keyboard shortcuts make the basic theme function really fast.  Since you can now post  from the blog front page, and  everything is publishing and updating in real-time, you don’t need to refresh pages or even visit the dashboard!

View this video to see P2 theme in action.

So who really needs this P2 theme? Its a great theme for group blogging and collaborating with friends on group projects in schools and offices. Live blogging will be more interactive than ever.

P2 wordpress theme is reliable, well coded and is designed by the expertise of Automattic, the WordPress staff.  P2 introduced a revolutionary new concept in blogging and promises to change the way you and your group blogs forever…

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Sticky feature was introduced in WordPress 2.7 which let WordPress blogs highlight and send to top an important post on the front page despite the date of publication. But our theme did not support this feature when we selected the sticky checkbox.

Enable Sticky Posts in WordPress template

If you are using a Wordpress 2.7 compatible Wordpress theme, then it will work out of the box without any of these tweaks. If you use an older theme, it actually works in 5 easy steps.

1. In index.php add the tag
   <div <?php post_class(); ?>>

   before the article title and main post content

   <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<?php the_content(); ?>

2. Close the div tag at the end with </div>
3. Add .sticky css tag to your stylesheet style.css, and choose the attributes which will highlight the articles above other articles
   .sticky {
background: #ff0000;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
}
4. Mark a post as sticky from the Quick Edit panel
5. Visit your homepage, and check the Sticky post

The best part about this feature is you can easily change the sticky tag from the Quick Edit menu from the WP Admin, which makes it easy to quickly keep changing the featured articles on the front page, and even mark multiple articles as sticky.

Can you spot the sticky post on our homepage? Now you can do this too.

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Want to make your Twitter profile page unique? Get a free custom Twitter background design to enhance your profile, establish your brand and gain more Twitter followers.

Twitter Image is offering free Free Custom Twitter Backgrounds to Twitter influencers, those popular tweeple who have at least 5000 Twitter followers. Remember you also need to allow them to place credit for TwitterImage.com on your background. Check out their gallery and it seems they have designed for many popular bloggers like @johnchow, @problogger, @chrispirillo, @chrisbrogan, etc.

There are thousands of tweeple with over 5000 followers, so how do they decide? Fill the form and they will decide based on factors “such as the purpose of the background, the site that you link to, how often you tweet and about what, and the type of followers it’s likely that you have.”

If you can’t win a free Twitter background,  order your custom Twitter background for $100 or use some free Twitter backgrounds to enhace your Twitter profile. They also run an affiliate program where referrers can earn 20% commissions.

Disclaimer – We have no financial interest in this service. We are not member of this affiliate program.

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If you visit the Google front page today, you will be greeted with a new Google favicon in the url location bar and this is how it looks like.

Google had earlier redesigned their favicon in June 2008 and this was what it looked like till a day back.

And this is what it looked like before June 2008

Since a majority of Google users disliked the favicon, Google initiated a favicon design contest to help them get a new, better Favicon. Google says that while the final icon is a reinterpretation of one contest submission, it draws on design elements and ideas from many of them.

André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired our new favicon. His placement of a white ‘g’ on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google.

For newbies, A favicon is the small logo that appears in the browser location bar, bookmarks and browser tabs and is great for branding your site. Do you like the new Google favicon? I love it…

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How can you save ink and reduce printing costs? A Dutch company has designed a new font called Ecofont which promises to use 20% less ink while printing.

How much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink.

We tested Ecofont and here is what an enlarged version of the font looks like with all the spaces between.

When printed in regular font sizes (they recommend size 9-10), these holes are hardly noticable, but they save ink. The sans serif format also helps to save more ink. The Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for both PC and MAC. Ecofonts works best for OpenOffice, AppleWorks and MS Office 2007.

Download Ecofont. Its all about saving the environment.

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WordPress 2.7 is going to be released in a few weeks and they are on lookout for icon designers to create new icons which blend with the new ’smooth’ look.

The icons are required for the main navigation sections, plus a matching pair of list/excerpt view icons for the table screens like Edit Posts. That’s a total of 13, and for the navigation icons they need a larger size for use in the screen headers.

The style they are looking for is subtle icons, with a classic/designed look, thin lines, maybe a little old-fashioned looking. They’ll be grayscale by default, possibly with a color version for active menu items. Since WordPress 2.7 is due to release on November 10, icon designers will have two weeks to finish the design job.

They are looking for qualified professional icon designers with a portfolio to show off. Email them with why you want to design the icons, and include a link to your portfolio. The deadline to send in your request is  Saturday night, October 25, 2008. Hurry.

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