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I purchased this blog almost one year ago with the intentions of using the blog’sblog’s content theme to discuss related technology but with a real estate bent.
If you had a previous relationship with the past owner, please contact me if there were any commitment made that I should be aware of.
Please stay tuned for my layman’s perspective on Real Estate Technology.
Hi folks! I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been very busy lately. But today I’m bringing some great news. Google has updated public toolbar PageRank. So everybody go check your websites’ PR and you might be surprised. This blog has jumped from PR0 to PR2 which is pretty good taking in consideration that the domain is only about 2 or 3 months old. Though I’m little bit disappointed about number of backlinks which has dropped to 2,127. The reason is that I have cancelled all payed banners and links at other blogs and I have decided to build the PageRank on my own.
Of course, this is just a small achievment but it’s a great starting point. My next targer is PR4 so I’m looking forward to writing a similar post in three months.
To celebrate this little “victory” I’ve made a new theme. Hope you like it. This is the first time I’ve tried a combination of dark red and dark grey colors.
I really like this feature. It’s extremely useful and saves lot of time. Sometimes I get new ideas for posts while I’m just browsing the net or checking my favorite blogs/forums but the problem is that I usually don’t have enough time to write the post right away or simply I’m just too tired. That’s exactly the situation when this handy feature becomes very helpful. I just log into the wordpress admin panel, open a new post, fill in a title and few sentences containing as much information as possible so I won’t forget the idea. Then I save it as a draft. Once I’m in a mood to write a new post I just open my drafts and choose one of the brainstormed ideas I’ve accumulated. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
So How Does It Work?It’s pretty intuitive and straightforward. Just open the new post and fill in the tile and few sentences that describes the idea. Now save the post without publishing it. You can access your drafts from the dashboard by clicking the link in the “Right Now” box.
As you can see it’s not difficult and it will save you lot of time. Instead of spending about half an hour trying to come up with an interesting idea you’ll be able to start writing immediately. But remember not to leave unfinished posts for too long because it can easily happen that even from the title and short description you won’t be able to understand what you meant to write about. For example, I have abandoned an unfinished article called “Webdesign And Typography” for too long (almost a month) and when I have actually decided to finish it I couldn’t remember what exactly I meant to write about.
Finally, don’t delete your drafts even though they make no sense at all to you. Just leave them sitting there and maybe you’ll be lucky and the original idea will pop up in your head again.
Congratulations! This is the final part fo my guide and by the time you read this you should be able to code your own wordpress theme. This is mainly a recapitulation of previous four parts. I suppose that you have read through all previus chapters - if not, check them out: Part I, Part II Part III Part IV
You can download the working theme here (just in case there were some typos or you are just too lazy to rewrite codes - though I highly recommend you to actually manually rewrite everything… believe me, you will learn lot of useful stuff). This is how it should look like:
As you can see the theme is very simple. But that’s alright. The aim of this tutorial was to teach you how to correctly code the wordpress theme. Now you can start playing with stylesheets and modifying the looks as you wish. You are on a good way to become a successful wordpress theme developer.
There’s a little useful JavaScript function that clears input field once you select it. Imagine you want to have a search input field at your website that says something like “To search type and hit enter” or similar but you want it to clear up once you click at it. It’s pretty simple…
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Today’s post will be partially just for my own reference but I’m sure many of you will find it useful and potentionally use it at your websites. There’s a little useful JavaScript function that clears input field once you select it. Imagine you want to have a search input field at your website that says something like “To search type and hit enter” or similar but you want it to clear up once you click at it. It’s pretty simple. Add this to the header:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
function clickclear(thisfield, defaulttext) {
if (thisfield.value == defaulttext) {
thisfield.value = “”;
}
}
function clickrecall(thisfield, defaulttext) {
if (thisfield.value == “”) {
thisfield.value = defaulttext;
}
}
</script>
Ok now move to the form where the input field is located. For example, my search form here at Net Covered looks like this:
<form method=”get” action=”<?php bloginfo(’home’); ?>/”>
<input type=”text” name=”s” id=”searchform” value=”To search - type and hit enter…” onclick=”clickclear(this, ‘To search - type and hit enter…‘)” onblur=”clickrecall(this,’To search - type and hit enter…‘)” />
</form>
The trick is that all three values (I have bolded them) must be the same or else it won’t work. See? That’s it. Now you can try it at your website.
Domain names have proven their resale value and more and more people are getting involved in domain trading every day. Necessarily the “science” of valuing domains has been becoming a big business. Appraising can be described as the process of evaluating a domain name and determining its market value. There are already dozens of appraisal firms on the scene and many more appearing. But is it really worth your money to get a professional appraisal? I doubt that. Most of the time you’ll need just an approximate value of a domain and you can figure it out on your own with a little research.
Since the domain name appraisal industry is so young, perhaps we could compare it to some other industries. Real estate maybe? I have heard many people describing domain names as “virtual real estate”. However these two concepts are absolutely different. You can register a new domain for cca 10 bucks in 5 minutes flat so there’s essentially no physical value. Therefor domain names are perfect example of an intellectual property in its purest form.
Important Appraising FactorsWhen determining a value of domains you should take into considerations various factors including its length, keyword recognition, clarity, range of potential uses and many more. I’m going to divide these factors into three categories: Structure, Impact and Marketability.
StructureDot Value is the most important. Domains with .com extension are the most valuable. The problem is that most good .com names are already taken. The second best extension is .net followed by .org. Although .org seems to be somehow connected with non-profit websites so it isn’t very suitable for commercial projects.
Initial i-, e-, or v-. I have come across an opinion from DomainIQ.com. It claims that domains beginning with i-, e- or v- are of lower value. Moreover, names including “the”, “and”, “-est”, or “-ing” are worth less than those without.
Length. This one is quite simple. The fewer letters the better. Names over 15 characters long are less valuable.
Hyphens and Numbers lessen the perceived value of the domain, too.
Recognition is one of the most significant factors. Domains like Business.com, Monster.com or Baseball.com have high recognition. Google.com or Yahoo.com wouldn’t fetch a high price under normal circumstances. Their value has arised from an extremely clever marketing. The ways words are crunched together also affects recognition. If the domain name consists of more words it has a greater value if the words are in a correct word order.
Industry Relevance. If the domain name would immediately tell a customer what products or services are being offers, it increases in value. For instance, Phone.com, Garden.com or Art.com would score very high on this criterion as they are relevant and very brandable for certain types of industries.
Clarity adds a value, too. Is the domain name completely clear? Can it be spelled in more ways? For example, There.com might be confused with Their.com if you hear it on the radio (though it’s still amazing domain name).
There are also other factors that fall into this category but they are not so crucial. Positive tone, memorability and many others.
Flexibility. This one is probably the number 1 factor that determines whether you’ll be able to sell the domain for a good price. A really flexible could possibly be used for many different projects. For example Beyond.com is indeed flexible. There are almost endless possibilities for this domain name - it’s suitable for almost any kind of website. On the other hand, flexibility is not always desired. Many people will need a distinct domain that will be closely related to their business or company name. To sum it up, flexibility usually makes the domain more valuable but there are situations where it can lower the overall price.
Trademark Conflicts. Be very careful when pursaching a domain. The name might infringe on trademarks or be involved in trademark conflicts. That would dramatically reduce the value.
Current Traffic and Revenue. If the domain name points to an existing website, how much traffic does it get? How many backlinks? Any revenue? All of these factors are a great plus to the final price.
Similar domains. Look for similar names for sale in various auctions. You can also look at what websites are built around similar domains and whether they are popular and important players in the field. This can give you a better idea about an average value of your domain.
There are certainly many more factors that go into determining a domain name’s value on the open market. Appraisals, even from professional appraisal companies, can fluctuate widely. The true value of any domain is mostly just a matter of opinion and cannot be precisely measured. The real price is always dependant on how much an owner of domain is asking or how much a potential buyer is willing to pay.
There are various tools around the internet that can calculate average value of your domain. Estibot.com is one of them. Dnscoop.com is another useful tool. It calculates average value of the whole website taking into consideration traffic, number of backlinks etc.
Google’s PageRank (PR) is one of the most sought after web page attributes. The original idea was that a link from a web page to other site’s web page was basically a vote for that page. Google then used the number of inbound links (IBL or more often called backlinks) to a page to decide its importance. Based on this calculation (however there are many other factors, too) Google ranked the page and decided where it should appear in the search engine results (SERP).
Google uses scale of measurement for PageRank from 1 to 10. The lowest possible PR is PR1, the highest is PR10. The new websites tend to have PR0 which essentially means that they are indexed but they have no PR yet. Here is the official Google’s explanation of the PR.
The table above is only for a better imagination of how the the PageRank is calculated. Only Google knows the exact formula though. When building backlinks for your website remember that quality is more important than quantity. Try to get few higher PR links instead of bunch of low ones. In addition, you must be patient. Google updates the PR averagely every two months (the longest documented period of time between two PR updates was 122 days).
I’m working very hard on getting many relevant quality backlinks. Currently, according to dnScoop, there are totally 2,189 pages that contain a link to netcovered.com (Smart PageRank shows only 1664 though…). I will try to improve this number even more and I hope that during next PR update Net Covered will jump to at least PR3.
The thing is that nobody actually knows how the PageRank is calculated (except Google of course) but webmasters have discovered over the time the possible algorhitm that seems to fit into equations:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))
| Variable | Explanation |
|---|---|
| t1 - tn | pages linking to A |
| C | the number of outbound links that a page has |
| d | damping factor - usually set to 0.85 |
More simple way of thinking about it:
a page’s PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it)
“Share” is the linking pages’ PageRank divided by the number of outbound links.
The best thing you can do to become a more successful blogger is to watch your “enemies”. You should have a list of your favorite blogs and read them regularly or even better subscribe to their feeds. You should choose blogs that are popular and well established. Secondly, you should also watch over blogs that you enjoy reading even though they are not so famous yet (might be your future rivals). By doing this, you will have a greater chance to keep up with the top dogs within your niche and it will drive you to get better and better each day. With this kind of motivation you’ll become a more persistent as well as resolute blogger. OK, enough of the theory - here’s a list of my most favorite blogs and reasons why I like them:
Big Square Dot is probably the absolute winner of my list. It’s mostly about modern webdesign and wordpress - that’s why I find it very useful and inspirative. It has helped me with developing my own wordpress themes and I’ve learned tons of useful webdesign lessons there. You should really visit this one, especially if you are a designer.
Cypher HackzCypher Hackz (I always tought it was “Cyber Hacks”… the typo is almost invisible) is one great technology resource for designers and wordpress developers. It’s been around for some time already and there are hundreds of returning visitors and email subscribers. No wonder there because Cypher Hackz publishes only very relevant and informative articles.
Life Is ColourfulLife is Colourful might seem as an ordinary general blog trying to make some money online. But the truth’s it is a place full of great content and interesting posts. It’s updated almost every day and there’s a big community of loyal readers (I’m one of them). Really recommended.
Dosh DoshDosh Dosh blog got pretty unusual and unique name. That’s not the only reason I like it though. It’s full of internet marketing and social media news and articles. It’s updated on a daily basis and every post is very comprehensive an full of useful information. No desperate posts just for the sake of update I tell you.
John Chow Dot ComProbably the most famous webmaster blog out there. It’s really amazing what John Chow managed to achieve with this blog. In two years it has become one of the most popular “make money online” blogs and it’s probably the most profitable one, too (over $30,000 per month is really amazing). This blog is a great source of inspiration and ideas for all young webmasters and entrepreneurs out there trying to earn some money online.
Just a shorter post for today… I’ve just came across this really interesting and comprehensive article. It consists of long list of tips and tricks on how to effectively spread the word about your freelance services and generate new client leads. It explains very well how to get more potential work. If you happen to be a freelancer or if you are considering starting a freelance carrier, check it out!