How to size your images in WordPress when using the Thesis theme to make it fit neatly into the left-hand column and how to link to a larger image where required.

Sometimes when you add an image to your content it will overlap with your widgets or your picture box to the right. To avoid this from happening its best to make the max width of your image 475 pixels or less. You can of course resize any image using the HTML image code (when editing the post click HTML at the top and then find the (read the {} as <> since if I use proper HTML code WordPress will try to use it as regular HTML code):
{img src=”http://yourdomain.com…” alt=”my special picture” width=”800″ /}

and change the width=”" attribute to 475 however this has to negative effects, first it might distort your image and second the full size image still needs to be loaded. The better approach is to resize the image using an image manipulation software such as GIMP, see my resource page for details here.

If by reducing your image you lose to much detail then upload both images to your server, display the smaller version in your post and link the smaller version to the larger one using this code:
{a href=”http://your-domain.com/images/larger-image.jpg” target=”_blank”}
{img title=”Description of image or image title” src=”http://your-domain.com/images/smaller-image.jpg” alt=”hover over text” width=”400″ height=”300″ /}{/a}
Effect would be this:

and if you would like to see this with a caption then put this before the above code please read and replace {} with [] here:
{caption id=”" align=”alignnone” width=”400″ height=”315″ caption=”text under picture”}
code as above
{/caption} and effect is:

Your Content Ready Website

The Thesis theme is part and parcel when you purchase our content ready website, find out more here.

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Find out what the Pretty Link Plugin can do for your Internet Marketing efforts.

This is just a fantastic plugin. One of the the really important things we need to know in our Internet Marketing efforts is what works and what doesn’t. The basic thing it does is to redirect from our custom URL to an external URL. Eg we might have a external URL http://secure.hosting.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/id=QWNERTY, which is our ugly affiliate link and it also tells the visitor aha he’s an affiliate. Pretty links now allow us to setup a custom URL http://yourdomain.com/hosting, cool isn’t it? So when someone clicks our custom link it redirect them via the external link to the relevant page and records their click in our database so we have a record of how many people clicked a certain link and we get some more info like what browser they were using their domain name etc. Pretty Links allows us to:

1. To have shorter URLs
   eg instead of http://yourdomain.com/yourcategory/article-name/ we can have http://yourdomain.com/rbt
   which is useful for Twitter or for promotions
2. Keep stats about clicks
3. Hides the external URLS and shows our custom URLs instead
4. We can group links to get combined stats for them
5. Market Samurai uses Pretty Links to integrate with WordPress
6. We can find out who we are sending traffic to and start talking to them to encourage them to send traffic to us

This plugin is so good that I’m now making it part of our Content Ready Website product. To find out what the Content Ready Website is all about hit this now.

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Just incase you are wondering if all will go well if you upgrade.

I just upgraded from WordPress 2.84 to 2.8.5 and have these plugings installed:

Add to Any, Akismet, Podpress, Tweet this, YARPP, Google XML sitemap, SEO friendly images, Subscribe to comments, WP spamfree, WP Supercache, Target Blank In Posts And Comments, WPAudio, Fast and Secure Contact Form, MM Forms and Source Codes in Comments

I used the automatic upgrade option and all went well.

Looking for resources to enhance your web presence then click here to see resource I recommend.

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I can not believe what I discovered today. This reminds my of James Schramko’s saying: “It’s all BS until you test!”.

I did a broken link test on my site today and for all pages I get a result that the link could not be checked because of an exclusion in robots.txt. This is a major disaster because this means that none of my resources and pages are being indexed and therefor not found via any search engine.

After a bit of research I found out why this is, there is a privacy setting in WordPress that allows you to block search engine spiders from crawling your site. Now there might be reasons that for certain sites this is a good idea however why the WordPress guys have set the default to blocking spiders is beyond me. Or at the very least a warning should appear on your site to ensure you are made aware of this fact. I assume their idea was that you should only open your blog once you have added content.

Anyhow here is how to fix it:

logon to wp-admin > settings > privacy and you’ll see to options for blog privacy:

Follow this to find out about testing tools including for link checking

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After some feedback and discussions I have re-visited my previous post:
Do you know the 15 aspects of your web presence (website) that you must address to be successful?
to structure it in categories that make it easier to decide which category you want to DIY or outsource.
The aspects of your Internet Marketing IM) Strategy are:

1. Market Research (what “burning” problem are you resolving, what keywords will people use to find you, what products or services will you sell)
2. Website (domain name and hosting, WordPress or Joomla, site appearance and how will customers buy and pay eg payment gateway, shopping cart etc.)
3. Content and sales strategy (posts and pages that need to contain text, audio and video and user generated content such as FAQs, testimonials, blog comments etc)
4. Build you customer list and keep in touch (name capture, auto responder, newsletter and adding value to every communication)
5. Monetise your website (sales pages, affiliate sales, paid consulting, paid forums or member only content,)
6. Get Traffic (SEO, PPC, social media, feeds, forums, affiliates, book marking, ping, mirror, directories and ezines)
7. Testing, a saying of James Schramko is: “Unless you test it’s all BS!” (website analytics, conversion rates, onsite visitor behaviour, landing pages, PPC ads and keywords, split testing of different calls to action etc.)

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Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

My comments to this are that getting emails to wehere they need to go can be very frustrating indeed. The other day I received an email from a customer of having received the wrong product. After investigating I found out that the customer had actually received what they ordered but they had order the wrong item, so I sent an email explaining what had happened and a couple of days later I get another email complaining about the same issue so I sent them another email. Finally we had phone contact and it turns out that I was getting the customer’s emails but they were not getting mine.

Aweber really has one of the best auto responder services out there and for the first month you can subscribe for $1.00, so click here to give it a go now.

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In all of my blogs I’m using “Internet Marketing” as the summary of all Internet activities you undertake. The impact your Internet Marketing activities leave on the Internet is your “web presence”. Some people refer to the web presence also as a person’s or organisation’s Web Influence Zone.

Internet Marketing are all activities you do with or about your website such as adding content, improving its visibility (SEO, PPC, social media …), link building or improving its outcomes such as increasing quality of traffic and conversions and as mentioned above the outcome you achieve is then your web presence.
A basic measurement of an individual’s or organization’s web presence is to do a Google search on the name and the more pages are returned the greater the organisation’s or person’s web presence.

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