As I promised you in the last post, I will explain you how to start your theme design according to the draft you made. I normally use Adobe Photoshop for the design. I assume that you have a good knowledge about Photoshop.

The first thing you must do is creating a new file, selecting the size and resolution. Once you have done it, the next thing you must do is putting guide lines on the design according to the measurements you have marked in the draft. I have shown above the draft I made to design the current theme of this blog. It looks little messy but I think you can get an idea about that. This design is little complex and needed more CSS stuff compared to general themes available freely.

The most important thing here is marking all the segments using guide lines and decide on where to slice the final design. If you go with guide lines, this will be very easy and accurate. Make sure that you put the line to the correct pixel. This is very important. Once this is done, you are ready to go with your design. It is a good practice if you use only the web colors if you use CSS background colors in your design. And make sure that you design with the category of the theme in mind.

In the next post I will explain you about the slicing the design and how to make the graphic web friendly and easy to load.

Image courtesy: Donncha @ InPhotos.org

After some effort, I could manage to install my own Wordpress theme in my blog which you see now. Please let me know your comments on it. If you are interested of designing your own Wordpress theme, here’s a good news that I can tell you. I’m going to start a series of posts from today explaining very simply about how to design a Wordpress theme from the scratch. Before reading further, I recommend you to read the following post which I published few days ago. Click here to read that post.

To be honest, you must have a good knowledge in Photoshop, CSS and HTML, and a brief knowledge on PHP if you really want to design a Wordpress theme by yourself. The first thing you must do is drafting your design. Following are the main aspects that you must consider when drafting your design.

1. How many sidebars you want.
2. Does your theme need to have a fixed width (for screen resolution like 800X600 or 1024X768) or a floating width?
3. What colors you plan to use.
4. The heights and widths of the components of your theme. For an example, the header, footer, sidebar and any other custom component that you like to add.
5. In which places that your components should appear.
6. In which order that your components should appear.
7. Do you need to add widgets to your sidebar?
8. What are the pages that you require?

After considering the above mentioned factors, you must draw the template in a paper and clearly indicate every detail required to start the design. It must include all the widths and heights, colors, component placement etc. if your draft is complete and clear, your theme design will be easy and accurate. Remember the famous saying “A well begun is a half done”. I wish you all the very best in your Wordpress theme design first step. If you have any questions feel free to contact me. You can reach me through admin@best-internet-guide.com.

In the next post I will explain you about the theme design.

Image courtesy: roughdrft

If you are an online merchant, you will definitely use a shopping cart application. If you have an online store and willing to earn money using a shopping cart software, I’m going to explain about a good ecommerce software which does more than any other in the market.

This software is called “Ashop”. It is a hosted shopping cart software which you will not want to worry about hosting and complex configurations. The significant aspect of this software is the offering of test drive and 10 day trial. Which you must do before buying any software or an internet service. If you are not confident about it, definitely you can save some money. Following are the main features that I belive which stands out from other shopping cart software.

World class easy, no installation set up & Hosted

This is the most significant feature. This will ease your stress on installing it in your server and definitely save some money if you hire a person to do this.

Use your own domain

You will not have to do much. Just few basic configurations and then you are ready to go.

128 bit SSL security on admin and checkout

This will build the customer satisfaction and trust on your products.

24 hour live support from admin panel (Monday to Friday)

Another very good feature for a general person.

Email accounts on your own domain

This will improve the recognition of your business.

No plugins or programming required

This is the best ever thing. You don’t need to be a programming guru and spend money for a guru.

Build a complete online store product and information pages

You can customize your products here.

Web based store administration

You can select what to sell, what not to sell and the stock status.

Free tech support (phone, email, online chat)

This is a must have feature where many software don’t have.

No graphic design skills required

You need not to be a graphic design guru and you can also save money if you are not a guru.

No HTML knowledge required

You will save money by not hiring a guru.

Rich Text (WYSIWYG) Editor with custom HTML section

Free ecommerce software user manual, tutorial movies and knowledge base

A good way to learn it. Tutorial movies are very effective.

Free upgrades for life

Many software charge for upgrades.

Multilevel password restricted admin entry

This will ensure that no one will hack your account.

These features are only few of this software which has more than 100 features. If you are interested, have a visit to the site Here and check all of them. And you can also try the demo and the trial. I wish you good luck on your business.

click here to read more

Image courtesy: 4_EveR_YounG

If you know about blogging, you must have heard about the world’s most famous blogging platform WORDPRESS. Wordpress always believes on open source and work according to that. Thanks to this feature, a blogger who is using Wordpress as the blogging platform is free to do any customization for his/her copy. Obviously anyone will first go with the customizing the theme. I also use Wordpress as the platform for this blog and when I started, I found a theme and did some modifications and now you are seeing my customized theme in this blog. But the original theme has done by another great person. I was curious about how to design a Wordpress theme and looking for some information wanting to start designing my owned theme. I write this post to inform that I see a brighter path now and developing a professional looking Wordpress theme. When I finish this I will put it here for you all to download free without putting into my blog .

I thought that it will be better and interesting if let you all know how I started this and what I have learned so far. I will add more posts when I proceed with it. To tell you the truth when I started, I had no idea what so ever about theme development. I did some research with the help of Google and Wordpress itself and managed to get information to start this learning process. Wordpress Codex helped me a lot. I found that the following aspects must be considered before starting real design and coding.

• You must have a sound understanding about CSS and HTML components and a web design software like Dreamweaver.
• You must have at least a little understanding about PHP and identifying PHP code from the existing templates.
• You must have a good knowledge on a graphic design software like Photoshop.
• You must be aware about the Wordpress theme design guidelines provided by Wordpress.

Then you will need a pen or pencil with some drafting papers. If you are OK with all the above mentioned factors, you are ready to go. But keep in mind that if you are starting from the scratch, it will take more time for you to design the first theme. I’m experiencing this. But when you finish your first theme, it will not take much time to design the next themes. If you are willing to find out how I’m doing this and to download the completed theme in the future, I recommend you to subscribe for my RSS feed in the top right hand corner or Here.

Image courtesy: Simon Pais-Thomas

This post will be interesting for people who are interested in driving more traffic to their websites. In this post, I will explain about how to use the famous real time video website YouTube to generate traffic to your website. This will take little time and effort but it will ultimately work as a good traffic source to your website.

Millions of people around the world use YouTube daily. They are looking for videos according to their interest. If you can produce a video which satisfies their interest and which they will think interesting, they will definitely visit your website. But there are few important things you must consider when you produce your video to publish in the YouTube.

Make it useful for the viewer - This is a thing that many web masters don’t understand. Many web masters try to embed their sponsored advertisements and promotions to the video thinking that the viewer definitely be interested. But the truth is viewers simply ignore this.

Quality production - Your video must have an acceptable quality. Or else the viewers will be annoyed and bored and go away from the video. The worst is, they will put negative comments about your video which will sabotage your ultimate hope, free traffic to your web site.

Put an attractive message at the end - This is the most important and critical part. You should figure out a fascinating and invitational message to put at the end if the video which will emphasis the viewer to visit your website. If you can correctly find the words, your dream will come true.

If you follow these guidelines you will definitely get free traffic from YouTube and you will also find comments about the videos you make which will give a hint about the user feelings and how can you improve your videos to be more user friendly, get more ratings and ultimately get more traffic. As I mentioned above, it will take some time to see the results. But when you start to see them, it will be a steady traffic flow. So get to work. You’ll find many tutorials on the internet about how to make videos for YouTube. I wish you good luck on your video promotions .