Posted by kristinewirth on May 27
After a little bit of internal debate, I’ve decided to make this blog a “nofollow” blog – or in otherwords, put it back the way that it was.
For many, many months, perhaps even a year or two I’ve used a plugin which disabled the default “nofollow” on WordPress blogs to help folks out; give real people who are trying to build a real business online a little bit of help by providing them a real, honest-to-goodness link to their site.
But…alas, no more.
The amount of spam that I get has quite honestly gotten way out of hand. And I’m tired of performing maintenance on comments.
The last straw was when I received a comment that still had the spin tags contained within it! How’s that for professional?
It’s just taking up far too much of my time and I feel bad for those who are truly trying to build a business online and really need decent “dofollow” links.
So, hopefully, this will help reduce the amount of spam I get on a daily basis.
Just for the record, I’ve received over 400 spam comments in the last 30 days.
I ALWAYS check out the site that’s being promoted and while this used to be a way of dealing with spammy comments, I obviously can no longer take the time to deal with them.
Maybe at some time in the future, when things settle down a bit and I’ve been taken off whatever “dofollow” blog directories I’m on, I’ll re-implement it but for now, it’s all “nofollow”.
- Kristine
Posted by kristinewirth on January 15
What follows is a video on a software called Artisteer which allows you to nearly instantly make your own WordPress themes. As a matter of fact, the new design for KristineWirth.com was created using Artisteer.
Check it out…
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Click here to visit Artisteer (sponsored)
Transcript:
Hi there! This is Kristine Wirth from KristineWirth.com and today what I wanted to do is create a video that tells you how to design and make your very own WordPress theme using an awesome new software that I’ve just learned about.
The reason I decided to create this is because lately I’ve noticed that a lot of free wordpress themes on the market have begun to embed their own linking code within the footer that is encrypted which means is that if you try and remove those links you’re entire blog will stop working.
Typically what the provider of the free WordPress theme will do is add links to other sites that they own in the footer, or in other words at the very bottom of the website. Some of these links are harmless while others can lead out to websites that will hurt your blogs reputation.
For the record, I’m not referring to a link to the author’s website here. Because I strongly believe that you should continue to attribute the author of the WordPress theme. They did after all, create a free theme for you, put it on their hosting platform and allow anyone at all to download them for free.
What I’m referring to are those links that could hurt your search engine positions and those links that are encrypted so that if you try and disable them or remove them, your blog stops working all together. Why this matters is because WHO you link to DOES matter when it comes to the search engines.
For example, if you created a blog about “cute little puppies” but a search engine noticed that the footer of your blog linked out to gambling sites, loan sites and the like, you’re not going to gain much credibility in the search engines eyes.
Now, this is not a video / blog post on the legalities of these actions or the moral issues of these actions but rather just a way to show you how you can simply forget having to worry whether or not a free WordPress theme is linking out to undesirable websites and instead just create your own.
So, all that said, I was really excited when I learned about this new software which allows you to create your very own WordPress or Blogger theme, or an HTML page and not have to worry about those external links; plus it’s relatively cheap.
Additionally, you can use this software to create a theme exactly the way you want it. No more hunting around for the “perfect” theme.
So, let’s take a look shall we?
The software is called Artisteer and you can download a free copy to play around with all you want. It’s a fully functional copy of the software. However, if you haven’t purchased a license and attempt to download the themes you create there will be “trial” text over the entire site; and I’ll show you what that looks like here in a moment.
But first, let’s take a look at the software itself.
You can download a trial version in its entirety here.
When you first open the trial software, you’ll be provided with a few buttons. The first two, “try standard edition” and “try home edition” are what will get you into the software.
The difference between the two is this:
First the price – there’s about $70 difference between the two types. If you want to export the themes you create as Drupal, DotNetNuke and so on, you’ll need the standard edition but the home edition will allow you to download as WordPress and even as a blogger theme.
So we’ll head into the home edition.
Notice I’ve got three choices here. To either work on a Blogger template, a WordPress Template or even a straight HTML page.
We’ll choose WordPress.
A default theme will appear that you can then start to modify.
If you don’t want to do it piece by piece, you can simply click the button that says “suggest design” at the top of the page.
If you find a theme that you like while using “suggest design” but don’t like the colors, just click “suggest colors” and it will run you through a wide array of different color styles.
The same goes for fonts, layouts, backgrounds, buttons, blocks, article design, headers and more.
When you’re ready, just click “export” at the top of the page.
You can also click the artisteer logo on the top left to preview the template in a browser first.
If you decide to do a blogger template you can also upload the template directly to your blogger account.
Like I said, I was very impressed with this software. You don’t need to be a techie or have any kind of programming skills whatsoever.
Plus, if the software wasn’t already good enough, you can also redistribute or even sell the templates you create. The only caveat is that you cannot include the header-> foreground photos from the software. On their FAQ page, they offer a more detailed explanation.
So if you’ve always wanted to design and make your own wordpress themes without having to learn a bunch of coding language, this software is exactly what you need.
We’ll talk soon!
