I wanted a lot of custom pages on my site along with social media widgets and a way to show off my best projects, so without needing the PSD files I opted for a Professional Licence, competitive at $48 (Full pricing info here).

One-Click Installer

We’d just read about the One-Click Installer on all of the FrogsThemes templates – it sounded pretty cool but did it actually save any time? Well, yes it did! Starting on a new site with a fresh install of WordPress, I just uploaded the theme zip file through the WordPress admin like normal, clicked “activate”, and this little beauty popped up:

Of course I chose “installing this theme on a brand new website”, I was impressed by the explanation and the warning before going ahead.

If you choose the other option “installing this theme on my existing site”, you get to pick and choose which bits of your old template to overwrite. Very clever.

Anyway, I clicked the green button and away it went.

What Does My Site Look Like Now?

The first thing I did was check my site to see exactly what the theme installer had done, and, well…it had done basically everything. The site was populated with menus, pages, widgets and dummy content. Not absolutely loads but enough to let you see the layout of the site and how everything worked. I can rename, delete, move or change everything but my little WordPress site looked like a proper working (and pretty professional) website.

Options Framework

The next innovation FrogsThemes offers is something they call the options framework. It’s meant to allow to easily customise your theme however you like, and it’s accessible via the “Theme Options” tab in your WordPress dashboard menu.

The fact that no coding whatsoever went into this fills me with joy. Not only could I do this, but any one of my writers could do this too.

What’s even better is that Pegasus Pro comes with a bucket load of page templates ready-made, so I just had to pick a few to get the sections on my site that I wanted. It was just a matter of swapping the dummy content for the options that I wanted. Again, no need for a developer to intervene, and it saved me a lot of time and effort.

FrogsThemes Support

In the interests of writing a full review, I thought I’d better try the FrogsThemes support. You have to be logged into FrogsThemes to open a support ticket (which makes sense), and I got a reply in a couple of hours from a nice chap called Nick:

FrogsThemes.com – The Verdict

FrogsThemes might not have as many themes as its larger rivals just yet, but Pegasus Pro is probably the most innovative and at the same time *easy* theme I’ve ever used. If the quality of this is anything to go by the rest are well worth the $48 licence, and for just $148 you get all the Photoshop files too.

I’ve never seen anything like the One-Click Installer before and I’d recommend it to anyone setting up a brand new WordPress site. It lets you see exactly how your site would look if you’re using all the bells and whistles – great for people who want their site to do a little more.

The Options Framework is also impressive – really simple and yet you can customise the whole look and feel of your site. It turns your WordPress Dashboard into a lot more – a whole design kit in one place.

According to the site, FrogsThemes have at least one more theme rolling out in the next couple of weeks (a blogging theme this time) and all we can say is Watch This Space.

To start with it is a good idea to know a little bit about what you need an seo company to do before you start and so you need to think about what keywords you need to rank for and what your budget is each month. Knowing these two pieces of information will make it much easier for you when it comes time to shop around for a seo company.

There are some absolute essential on-page and off-page seo factors that you can address pretty much straight away and in many cases you can do a lot of them yourself if you have some reasonable understanding of computers and html.

1. Title Tags

Title tags are one of the most important aspects of on-page seo as these tags tell the search engines what is inside the website. A good analogy here is to think of a title tag as a label on tin can in a supermarket. The label essentially tells you what is inside. So you want to make sure that your homepage or index page title tag has some or all of the keywords you want to rank for i.e. telling the search engines what is inside your website.

One key point in title tag formatting is that each page on your website should have its own individual title tag and they should be descriptive of the content on the page. Also a title tag should be no longer than 70 characters as Google will not look past the first 70 characters.

A good title tag should look something like this:

Your Websites Main Keyword | Second Keyword | Company Name

2. Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are actually not a ranking factors for Google however it is good practice to include them in your website as they do feature underneath the title tags when Google returns the search results. Furthermore Google will highlight the keywords in the meta description that a person has search for and studies have shown that people are more likely to click on your site when highlighted.

Meta descriptions should be a minimum of 150 characters and no more than 180 characters and they should be unique on each page to avoid duplicate content issues. Also it is important to remember that while Google doesn’t take into account meta descriptions for rankings other smaller search engines might, so it is definitely worthwhile doing it.

3. Content

With a new website you need to get the content on your website to be high quality and original which means not copying from other peoples websites. Google looks at duplicate content and so if you copy from a website that is already indexed on Google then your site will really struggle to rank well as they will know that you have just copied another site. So make sure you take your time and spend time making sure that there is lots of good information on your site with unique views and descriptions.

Remember that people link to good content and so if you can produce content that people will find useful then you will get more links and links are vital to success in the search engines.

4. Accessibility

With websites you need to understand that search engines can only search your site if it is correctly linked and has a good site structure. A search engine can only crawl and index a page if it can reach that page and so you need to have a good think about the layout of the site to confirm that all the content and pages are accessible.

Small websites tend to be easy enough to do, however when you begin to start looking at big enterprise websites or ecommerce websites with lots of information on then you need pay extra attention to this point.

5. Inbound Links

Getting inbound links is often referred to as link building which means getting links from other websites to point back to yours. These links can often be gotten from directories, blogs, forums and other related websites.

A good way to look at links is to think of them as votes and so the more links (votes) you get from other websites, the more trustworthy and relevant Google will view your website and then rank your site higher.

However it is not just about getting lots of links as Google is far more complex than that. You need to be getting links from high Page Rank websites whenever possible as Google counts that link (vote) with a lot more authority as it is a trusted website. Also you need to think about the anchor text of the links which means you need to have the keywords you want to rank for hyperlinked back to your website. Finally it is best to try and get links from sites that are related to your topic or industry, for example a football shirt website will want to get as many anchor text back links from good quality football related blogs.

So when thinking about building links, try to make sure you tick these boxes:

1.     Anchor text back links (links with your keywords hyperlinked).

2.     Good quality websites with high Page Rank (getting links from trusted websites).

3.     Content relevant websites (links from websites related to your industry or topic).

4.     Good spread of links from many websites (you want a good spread of links from different websites, not just the same site).

To help you out getting your site indexed on Google quickly we have provided you with 8 top notch directories to submit your site to.

• Xom Reviews
• About Us
• FreeIndex
• Hot Frog
• Gumtree
• Global Brown Book
• 1^st Directory
• My Directory Live
• Linkedin
• Professional on the Web

This was a guest post from J21Media who provide an affordable seo service to businesses in the UK.

We had our regular designer, David Vuu the Melbourne Web Designer, create us a Photoshop file of our new site which was used for the Codemyconcept.com order.

The order process

The order was placed with Codemyconcept on the 27th November, and we paid $258. This consisted of 2 html/css pages (our home page is different, in case you landed on this page directly), then the additional charges for Cufon ($10), CSS dropdown menus ($15) and coding to a WordPress theme ($119).

The pricing is definitely competitive,  I have absolutely no complaints here.  I’m not sure why they don’t take payment immediately, as this would speed up the process. They sent me out payment details after taking all the order details.

Codemyconcept at work

Once the invoice was dealt with, a coder was assigned to my job.  He was quick in turning the psd into fully coded html/css pages which looked great.   Up till this point I was extremely happy, it looked like this was going to be an easy job to complete, and an easier review for me to write.

Codemyconcept then missed the job deadline by 6 days.

The problems

The first one was obviously missing the deadline, with no real explanation why.

If you check our homepage, you will see “recent news” in the left column, with post titles and a snippet.  These are our recent blog posts.  These should have linked to the recent posts, but didn’t.  So there was absolutely no way for the visitor to use those to navigate to the posts.  This has since been fixed.

If viewers did manage to make it to a blog post, they would find all the comments were not viewable, and they couldn’t add a reply either.

Both of the things above were the biggest issues I had,  but they were quick fixes for my own coder so certainly not a huge problem.

If you look at the breadcrumb navigation on this post above, its not laid out very well, it should have a ” > ” after the category, but before the title.  I’ve added an image above as we do intend to fix this.

None of the images will align right, the Project Summary image I have used at the start of this post should be aligning right in the post, but isn’t.

This sentence is a quote, using /blockquote

As you can see, quotes are not working. It looks exactly the same as any other text so its hard to quote anyone properly within a post. It should have at least been indented to the right.

Codemyconcept.com – The verdict

The final product is “okay”, but not perfect.  I would have been more willing to overlook the minor errors if they had delivered on time.  I can accept lateness, or I can accept errors, but not both together.

I never bothered sending it back to be fixed, as once they missed the deadline by such a long margin, I’d lost confidence a little so I chose to pay my own coder to fix the 2 bigger errors.   As you can see, the other problems are minor enough that we launched with them in place, but they are on the to do list

I’ve seen them return good work, and on time, before so I’m not sure why this one didn’t go as I thought it would.  A friend told me he also had some delays with his project,  emailed to complain and the CEO Mike La Rosa wrote back to him personally, so hopefully its something they are working on.

They are certainly in a crowded marketplace, so for me “okay” isn’t good enough.  psd2html are slightly more expensive, but with a 2 day turnaround time.

So is their claim of being “The best psd to html company on the planet” true?  At this time, the answer has to be “not even close”.

They are providing an average service at a below average cost,  but unless you value your time at zero (or like playing with code) you’d probably be better going elsewhere. If you are working on a tight budget where every last penny counts, maybe you will want to check them out. For me its a little frustrating, as none of the errors are major, so they were close but just fell a little short.

edit – Just added this post to a 2nd category and hit the publish button, another error in the Breadcrumbs. I’ll set this post to 1 category only for now.

You arrive at a party. People are chatting, eating nibbles, topping up drinks, laughing, looking intently at someone holding court and generally gazing round the room.

You grab a chair, stand on it and at the top of your voice shout “I sell cars! Does anybody want to buy a car!!!??”.

The room falls silent and every body thinks, who the fuck’s that idiot?

In the words of a well known Fast Show character you say “I’ll get mi coat…..” for you the party’s over.

Most people wouldn’t dream of doing this, you intuitively know it’s inappropriate and you know it’s unlikely to further your business cause.

The Party – Take Two

You arrive at a party. People are chatting, eating nibbles, topping up drinks, laughing, looking intently at someone holding court and generally gazing round the room.

You start to mingle. Seeing an open group chatting you listen in to see what they’re talking about. You comment on what people are saying, maybe throw in a joke and generally add some value to the social interactions.

The conversation dries up and seeing the ‘new boy’ some kind soul asks what you do. “I sell cars” you say.

“That’s interesting, come and meet Susan, she’s in the market for a new car and needs some advice”

Now at this juncture you may once again want to go for the hard sell whipping out your business card faster than a C-lister whips out her tits at a photo opportunity, again, slow down, don’t rush in. Give Susan some impartial advice, be genuine, don’t look for a sale, establish yourself as an honest broker of information and help.

Susan asks for your email address because she’d like to ask you some questions about cars and “….there’s no way I’ll remember all this just now…“. You’ve got a fan.

Monday morning an email arrives from Susan. In it she says …”I hope you don’t mind but I passed your details to a friend of mine who’s also looking for a car…“. You’ve got another fan.

If you’re a seasoned business networker none of the above will be news to you. You know how it works, you know how to build trust and how to get business through referrals and recommendations. Well guess what, web based Social Media, that buzz phrase you’ve heard but don’t get is just the same. You join parties, you add value, you build trust, you put something in, you listen and ultimately you get something back.

I Thought This Was An SEO Blog?

It is. Building on-line trust by participating in social media activities often results in people seeking out your on-line presence, your website. If they like what you are saying on your site, or if your site’s got some useful gadgets they’ll link to it to tell others. As links are the currency of search engine rankings these links will help your site to rank better. It’s not complex……

Social media isn’t complicated. If you participate and add value you’ll get something back, if you jump onto the chair and start shouting you’ll fall flat on your face and deservedly so.

This was a guest post from the SEO Specialists at redevolution.com.

Gavin Littlejohn, content thief

It seems like moneydashboard.com have decided that writing original content is too much work, and have decided to start stealing it from our discountvouchers.org site.

Moneydashboard.com are ran by:

Gavin Littlejohn

Chief Executive Officer

Entrepreneur and founder of Money Dashboard, Gavin is passionate about building great teams that share his vision. Has been through start-up previously and has the battle scars to prove it. Lives in the idyllic Scottish Borders (30 minutes south of Edinburgh) and enjoys cold beer, contact and adrenaline sports (now from a distance) and spending downtime relaxing with his family and friends.

Click to enlarge

I know content theft goes on every day, but with a company with a supposedly reputable team behind it, you would think they aren’t going to stoop to this level. Thanks Gavin!

Perhaps some of their £1m funding should have been put towards content.  I’d highly recommend Textbroker.com.

Update:

We can see you

If you’re going to spend an hour reading it, I’d love to hear your comments.  You found the contact form, so presumably you seen the submit button.  Feel free to comment below if you prefer.

But vworker.com user PixignStudio has taken it to new depths, so I felt a warning post was in order so that anyone else can avoid this scammer.

We hired him to do the very basic job of copying a website from one domain to another, and changing the colour scheme/logo.   It quickly became obvious he had no idea what he was doing, with comments like these:

your server has zend wp and lot of frame works do i have to upload every thing?

original site it contain two different sites or two different frame works
on main its zend and in chris folder it has wp

dont you have any documentation or plain template that some one may provide you we he done this.

When this all got a bit tiresome, we asked him to complete it within the next day, or cancel the job. His replies:

ok sure i will but please pray for me as my laptop just get crashed

does the website and database resides on same server i think or should i gave this {redacted database info} in database location for configuration?

hi sure we go in self mediation.
but wont i get anything as i have put lot of time upload every thing even the database and files.
atleast pay me 15$ for this

At this point we put the job into arbitration, changed all the passwords and hired someone else to complete the job, which was done perfectly.  So after admitting he hadn’t completed the job, he realised we had hired someone else and the job was now complete. So he then attempts to change his story and comes up with this lie:

i asked my friend to fix it and he says he have done it, i checked it and its running, if you don’t want to pay for cancellation fee then its upto you, we might go for the arbitration.

But PixignStudio is forgetting one important point – he isn’t going to be able to say what country/city his (imaginary) friend logged in from and allegedly complete this work from -  a point we can easily prove by giving the vworker.com arbitrator access to the FTP access logs on the server.

I look forward to seeing if vWorker.com ban this lying scammer, I will update this post with the outcome.  I would recommend everyone avoid dealing with pixignstudio on any of the outsourcing websites.  Vworker seem to be doing a great job of trying to chase away the customers who keep them in business.  I’d write some more, but I need to go deal with this arbitration that even Stevie Wonder could see who is in the wrong in…

Dear Yahoo! Directory Submit Client,

You are receiving this message because your site has been listed in the Yahoo! Directory under the Regional/Countries/United Kingdom or the Regional/Countries/Ireland category path. Because of this, your site has also been appearing in the U.K. & Ireland Directory. (http://uk.dir.yahoo.com/)

We are notifying you that the Yahoo! U.K. & Ireland Directory will be shutting down on November 18, 2010, and your site’s listing in that directory will be eliminated. Your site listing in the U.S.-based Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com) will remain unchanged.

…

We understand that appearing in the Yahoo! UK & Ireland Directory may have been important to some of our U.K.-based customers. Because of this impending shutdown, as a courtesy, we are offering you the following options for your listing.

1) You may continue to maintain your listing through the Yahoo! Directory Submit program. Your site will remain listed in the Directory as it is now and the applicable annual fee will apply on your anniversary date. No further action on your behalf would be required.
2) You may request a refund of the most recent fee you paid as part of the Directory Submit program. Your Directory Submit account would be terminated immediately, and your site will then be removed from the Yahoo! Directory. If you wish to proceed with this option, please email cc-directory-submit-billing-e2y@yahoo-inc.com with the Order ID, your YahooID, and the URL of your listing. In order to take advantage of this refund, Yahoo! must receive a fully completed request no later than 5 p.m. PDT on November 18, 2010. Otherwise, Yahoo! will conclude that you have selected the first option.

I really cannot understand this stance – they are keeping the international directory running, so it would take no extra work to keep the UK version running, and continue to collect $300/year payments from everyone listing.

If you are listed in the UK directory and choose to keep your listing, you will still be linked to from the international version, so it is still worth maintaining it, in my opinion.

Outside of the Best Of The Web directory, there really isn’t many UK specific directories worth paying to list in today. If you still think any are value for money, feel free to drop a link in the comments

Conventional wisdom holds that the way to find a great real estate deal is to look for a distressed seller. As a result, short sales have gotten a lot of attention over the past few years. Potential buyers who are considering making an offer on a short sale should be aware of the realities of short sale transactions and know what pitfalls to avoid.

Due to the nature of the current real estate market, there have rarely been so many terrific deals available to home buyers. Many people consider short sales to be great opportunities for buyers. In reality, short sales, by their nature, are usually not especially good deals for anyone involved. A short sale is not necessarily a better deal than a traditional listing.

Short sales are, in fact, a last-ditch effort designed to keep the seller and the lender from ending up with even worse deals. At one time, short sales were protracted, frustrating experiences for buyers, who often ended up with nothing but an outdated pre-approval letter after months of waiting. Recent legislation has improved things somewhat by requiring banks to determine their minimum acceptable net proceeds and respond to offers within 10 days, but it’s important to remember that short sales are not intended to benefit the buyer.

Short sales are only an option when a homeowner owes more money than the home is actually worth and does not have any way to get the money to make up the difference at closing. The idea is that the buyer doesn’t end up with a foreclosure in her financial history and the bank that made the unfortunate choice to finance the original purchase avoids the expense and risks of foreclosure.

Buyers often assume that, because the sellers have agreed to accept less than what they owe on the home, it will sell for less than market value. Many people liken short sales to liquidation sales and assume that the object of a short sale is to unload the home in a hurry at a discount. This is not the case. When banks agree to short sales, they do so reluctantly because, in a short sale, the lender often ends up agreeing to relieve the sellers of their financial responsibility for the shortfall.

The bank knows that the house may be worth less than the borrower owes on it, and they may be willing to accept an offer that leaves them in the red. However, there is no reason for the bank to accept less than the market value of the home. From the bank’s point of view, the home’s market value is already a discounted price.

As part of the short sale process, the fair market value of the home is established through the use of comparables and/or appraisals. The idea is to determine what the home is actually worth and settle for that amount. Because the home’s value is based entirely on the selling prices of similar homes in the same area, a buyer is not usually going to get a better price on a short sale than on similar homes in the area.

Revenue for the year to the end of March was up by 52% to £339.7m, with international sales rising by 142%. Many shoppers look for an Asos discount code.

Pre-tax profit was £15.7m against £20.3m the previous year, due to £12.9m of relocation costs. Taking out these costs, profits rose 41% to £28.6m.

The company said it remained on track to hit £1bn of sales by 2015.

This is obviously wrong, that site has more than 100,000 links.

I have found a simple way to continue to get the link data for now. You simply need to do your search on a different Yahoo (ie United Kingdom) – click here to see the same search results in UK. On that link I can see the following results:

For now you can do any backlink analysis as normal on Yahoo UK, so enjoy it while it lasts!