This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question, just write a comment below.

CaptiousNut asks:

I’ve been blogging for 5 years but have never really, until last week, looked into ‘professional strategies’ to increase my traffic. I am using Blogger, and it looks like no one else is using it.

Am I handicapping myself with it?

I have been saying that getting your own domain name is a must for a long time, but many people still ask that question, so let’s talk about it once again. More specifically, let’s list the three main reasons why having and hosting your own domain is important.

1. You don’t really own your Blogger blog.

If you read Blogger’s ToS, you’ll discover that you don’t really own the blog. You do own the content you’ll write there, but the domain and the platform are properties of Google. The first consequence of this if that if you violate any of the service policies your account might get suspended and you’ll lose your hard work.

The second consequence is that you won’t be able to sell your blog, should be become popular and profitable one day.

2. Having your own domain gives you credibility.

Since Blogger is a free platform, you’ll find all sorts of blogs there. Sure, there are some good ones, but the majority is low quality, and you’ll have a lot of spam blogs that are created just to manipulate search engines, too.

As a result most people get suspicious as soon as they see the .blogspot on your domain name. That is why having your own domain will give an immediate dose of credibility to your site.

3. Hosting your own domain gives you more flexibility.

When you host your own domain name you’ll have complete control regarding the software and the setup that will be used there. You’ll be able to use simple HTML pages, to load a CMS like WordPress, to add special scripts and so on.

As your blog grows you’ll find that this flexibility is vital, as it allows you to expand the scope of your site and generate more traffic and money.

Would you add any other reason as to why getting your own domain is vital?

(Via Daily Blog Tips.)

Factors on Generating Traffic to Your Blog: “

Over the last few weeks I’ve had three conversations with readers regarding different sources of traffic.

In each case I had a number of email exchanges with each blogger (all on the same day) and ended up laughing to myself at the common theme but extremely different opinions being expressed by each of the bloggers.

In each case the bloggers had strong opinions (and experiences to back those opinions up) on what type of traffic was ‘best’ and how to get it.

1. In one case the conversation started with a blogger telling me that I focus too much upon social media traffic and not enough on traffic from search engines. Their niche didn’t work with social traffic but with search traffic they did best.
2. In another case the blogger told me that they’d been told to forget about search traffic in their niche and work more on building traffic from other sites and to convert it into ongoing traffic with newsletters.
3. In the last case a blogger told me that in their opinion the best type of traffic was social media traffic and they didn’t see the point in newsletters.

I was reminded through these conversations just how many different valid approaches there are to blogging. I also came away with a few thoughts that I thought I’d jot down here on the topic of driving traffic to blogs.

1. There are Many Valid Sources of Traffic

The above chart shows just 8 of many sources of traffic to a blog. As I write this others are already springing to mind (for example some bloggers run paid advertising to drive traffic to their blog – others get it from banner exchange programs). The reality is that there are many potential sources of traffic.

2. The ‘Best’ Source of Traffic Varies from Niche to Niche

As I thought about the 3 bloggers I was chatting to above it struck me that each had found great sources of traffic but that they were each operating in very different niches.

The first blogger who had written off social media was in a niche that people were simply not using social media for (I won’t reveal the niche as I don’t have their permission but it was a very very niche focused blog). Perhaps they could have driven a tiny bit of traffic with social media but for them Search was a much better place for them to invest their time.

3. Different Sources of Traffic Will monetize differently

Another important factor to consider is that some sources of traffic will monetize ALOT better than others. I’ve found that search traffic can work very well with AdSense for example (it depends upon the niche and intent of the reader). People arrive on your site searching for specific information, read your content, see an ad that relates to their search term and click on it.

RSS readers on the other hand don’t tend to convert for AdSense as they tend to be loyal readers and many don’t even click through to your site to read your content. RSS readers (and social media traffic) however can convert really well for affiliate promotions or selling your own products to.

4. Traffic Patterns Change over the life cycle of a blog

As a blog matures its sources of traffic often quite naturally change.

There’s no typical one size fits all pattern to this but at first the traffic might mainly come from other blogs or forums where you comment – or blogs where you guest post – or articles that you write. In time you might start to see more traffic from RSS or newsletters as a few people subscribe. Perhaps then some traffic will come from other sites who link to you (people who subscribe via RSS might have their own blogs) and from social media. After a while your search engine ranking might kick in as a result of the links from other sites and your guest posting and article writing and you might start seeing Google traffic. Once your blog is more established you might start seeing social bookmarking viral events that spike your traffic.

Again – this is not going to be the pattern for all blogs but in time traffic will naturally start to come from different places – the key is to try to leverage it for ongoing good (trying to get your blog to be sticky rather than just having one time visitors) and to work out how to convert that traffic for the goals you have.

5. Bloggers should be open to different approaches

While each of the three bloggers had discovered great lessons and good sources of traffic for their niches and the life cycles of their blogs – I was left wondering in each case whether the bloggers were being a little too closed off to different sources of traffic that perhaps could have added to the overall mix of traffic.

I see a lot of SEO type bloggers write about the worthlessness of social traffic for instance. One common comment that I get from some SEOs (definitely not all) is that social media traffic can’t be monetized. The reality could not be further from the truth. It won’t always convert but it certainly can. For example I know in each of the E-book launches that I’ve done in two niches that I’ve seen significant conversions from Twitter traffic.

On the flip side of things I hear some social media focused bloggers write off SEO and say that it works itself out and you don’t need to optimise your blog for search if you just produce good content. While there is some truth in that (good content does tend to generate natural incoming links to some extent) with a basic understanding of principles of SEO and a few minor tweaks a blog can rank much better in search engines without compromising the integrity of the content.

I guess what I’m getting at is that if you get exclusive about the type of traffic you are after you could actually be limiting the potential of your blog’s incoming traffic.

6. Too many Eggs in One Basket Can Be Dangerous

I used to be very focused upon search traffic in my early days of blogging. I worked hard to optimise my first blogs for search and got to a point where I was making a full time living from the ad revenue I was getting almost exclusively from Google. As a result I got a little lazy in some of the other areas – I didn’t work to convert readers to be loyal with newsletters or with prominent calls to subscribe to RSS, I didn’t build too many relationships with other bloggers to generate referral traffic and I was very inactive in social media (although it was much more limited back then).

As a result when Google decided to adjust their algorithm one day and my rankings dropped (and almost completely disappeared) in their results I lost almost all of my traffic – and as a result almost all of my income.

I was lucky in that Google readjusted their algorithm a couple of months later and I regained a lot of (but not all) of that traffic but in the mean time I looked for and found a ‘real job’ – and more importantly learned an important lesson about the power of having more than one source of traffic.

That experience was the beginning of me doing a few things that included working harder on capturing readers as subscribers (email and RSS), networking more with other bloggers in my niche and getting more involved in promoting my blog in other places (mainstream media, social media etc). My hope in doing all of this was to build up other sources of traffic so that if Google ever switched off my traffic again (temporarily or permanently) I’d at least have enough traffic to survive.

Google still does send me around 40-50% of my traffic (it varies a little from blog to blog) but I’m in a position now where I could survive for an extended period if it all disappeared (not that I’d like for that to happen).

7. The Importance of Personality and Being Yourself

I’m sure there are other factors that are at play that might be worth considering when looking at traffic. One of these (that I’m yet to fully think through) is personality type.

For example a lot of my my technically thinking friends seem to enjoy the challenge of SEO a little more. They love experimenting with and testing what happens when they make small tweaks to different aspects of their blogs. They’re constantly testing different setups and do quite well from it. I am not technically minded and find their attention to detail very very unusual (and so far from where that I’m at that I feel like I’m from another planet).

Other friends are perhaps a little more social by nature and as a result seem to do well on Twitter.

Others seem to do better by applying their freakish ability to write blog posts that get tonnes of links from other sites and which do brilliantly on social bookmarking sites..

Others are networkers and spend a lot of time interacting with other bloggers and site owners and tend to get links and traffic that way.

Others just seem to be brilliant at building community on their blog and as a result retain almost everyone who ever comments and build new readers from those people telling their friends.

I guess the lesson here is to be yourself and work with your strengths. Of course you don’t want to let your strengths dominate so much that you ignore or become lazy in areas that you’re not as strong in – but do follow your natural abilities and leverage them as much as you can.

Remember that there is no wrong or right way to generate traffic for a blog. If you were analyze the sources of traffic on many top blogs you’d find quite different factors at play!

(Via ProBlogger Blog Tips.)

WordPress is arguably the most popular and the best blogging platform out there. You might have installed WordPress on your site, but you might be scared to experiment with WordPress worrying that you could break your site and WordPress.

Experimenting is one of the best way to learn new things and if you break your site, you probably might not want your visitors to see the fault as it might leave a bad impression. So, it is necessary to have the ability to learn WordPress and try new themes, plugins and other items without putting it online where people can see.

So, the best solution is to install WordPress locally on your computer. It will save you quite a bit of time since you can just put your files inside your WordPress folder without having to upload it to FTP. You can do anything you want with WordPress without a worry which surrounds you when you put it online. The possibilities are endless. Here is a step-by-step instruction on how to install WordPress in localhost using XAMPP. I hope it will become a great use to you.

1. Go to the official XAMPP website. We are going to use XAMPP as it is one of the best Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. It is very easy to install and use.

2. Select your operating system and which format you want to download. You can either choose a zip or a exe format. I would recommend the .exe file. There are also portable version such as XAMPP lite, but using XAMPP is just fine for what we need. There are also add-ons available such as Tomcat, but it but they’re not necessary for our use, may be something you want to experiment with at a later date though!

3. Open the installation file and you will be presented with a window. In, the destination folder, choose your destination. ‘C:\’ is recommended. Click install to start the installation (Won’t take more than a minute or two!)

4. When the installation is almost done, an MS-DOS window opens, You might think you have to type a bunch of codes, but that’s not the case. This window just helps you set your preferences. The answers are just yes and no.

First question it will ask you is whether you should add a desktop shortcut. Type ‘y’ for yes and ‘n’ for no.

5. The second question it will ask you is whether you want to locate the XAMPP paths correctly. Type ‘y’ for yes. I would recommend saying yes because XAMPP usually locates the paths correctly for you, much easier!

6. The third and last question it will ask you is whether you want to make XAMPP portable or not. You can choose which ever one you want, but i would recommend saying no if you aren’t going to be making use of the portable functionality (We won’t be in this tutorial) because it makes it easy for us to see the path such as C:\ and easier in the browser.

7. After this is done, XAMPP starts configuring and you will see this appear in the window. Press Enter and XAMPP will have been correctly installed in your computer.

8. Go the the destination folder you gave (such as C:\) and look for ‘xampp-control’ and open it. Now that XAMPP installation is complete, it is time for us to start using it.

9. You should see this open up. This helps us specify which services we want to start.

10. Click start on ‘Apache’ and MySQL. They are services required for running WordPress. XAMPP uses port 80 as a default port, so if you have any issues, try making sure no other programs are using the port (Skype occasionally tries it). It will say ‘Running’ next to the modules if they are started. The others don’t need to be started.

11. To check if XAMPP is working, open your browser and type ‘http://localhost/’ and you should see this. Yes! we are good so far. Choose your language for the list.

12. After that, you should see a page saying that you have successfully installed XAMPP on your system. Hoora!

13. Now that we have successfully installed XAMPP, it is time to get WordPress. Go to wordpress.org and download WordPress. Extract the folder.

14. Now, the steps get critical. Make sure that you do these steps carefully or the installation of WordPress probably won’t work. Go back to XAMPP folder (C:\xampp) and go inside a folder called ‘htdocs’.

15. This is where we are going to put the WordPress folder. Copy the wordpress folder that you extracted and put it inside the ‘htdocs’ folder. Note: Make sure that when you copy the WordPress folder, not the folder above it such as ‘wordpress-2.9.1″

16. We need a database for WordPress so that we can install it in our computer. Go to your browser and go to localhost (http://localhost/) and click on phpMyAdmin and you should see a page like this.

17. We need to create a new database for WordPress. Look for the ‘MySQL localhost’ section and you should see some boxes, and on top it says ‘Create new database’. That is what we need.

18. On the box on the left, your will enter a database name. You can name it whatever you want. I will call it ‘wordpress_test’. Then, on the next box, your will see a list of options. Scroll to the end and select ‘utf8_unicode_ci’. We are going to use this option because it supports expansions and ligatures. Click Create.

19. You will be notified that the database ‘wordpress_test’ has been created.

20. Now, go inside xampp/htdocs/wordpress (for example C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress) . Then, we need to setup up wp-config. This is to configure wordpress to fit our database, username etc. Many people are familiar with this step.

22. Rename the ‘wp-config-sample.php’ to ‘wp-config.php’ so WordPress will recognize your config file (Depending on how you’ve set up Windows, the .php may or may not be displayed. If wp-config-sample doesn’t show it visibly, don’t add it on to the wp-config when you rename it). Open the file you have just renamed (wp-config) with your favorite text editor (e.g. Notepad, not Microsoft Word!).

23. Now you will need to change these parts of the wp-config.

24. So, inside the DB_NAME to the right you will see ‘putyourdbnamehere’. That is where we will put our database name. Delete the putyournamehere (without deleting the apostrophe) and put ‘wordpress_test’ (remember that is what we called our database in phpMyAdmin).

In the same way, put ‘root’ in the DB_USER part. Then on the next part (database password), leave it blank, since we haven’t set a root password for our MySQL.

We will also not change any part of the DB_HOST because localhost is what we want and it is already localhost. This is just a test site, so no other configuration is needed here. Now, we are done with the configuring. It will be easier to understand what I am saying by the illustration below.

25. Save and close the file (wp-config.php). Next, open your browser and go to ‘http://localhost/wordpress/’. Hooray! It worked. You will see this screen and once again, many people are pretty familiar with this process. Put your blog title and email and click ‘Install WordPress’

26. Success! You will be notified that WordPress has been installed. You will get your username and random password. Copy the password and click ‘Log in’.

27. You are now in the login page. The username is admin and paste the password. Don’t worry about memorizing the password as we will change it.

28. Success again! We are in the wordpress dashboard. The very first thing you might want to do is change the password. On the red bar, click on the ‘Yes, Take me to my profile page’.

29. Scroll down and change your password, then update profile.

30. Yes, now you are all set. When you go to http://localhost/wordpress. You should see your blog with the default theme Kubrik.

31. You are done. There are a few other things I would like to remind you. In the XAMPP Control Panel , Apache and MySQL have to be running. You don’t need FTP to change stuff in wordpress. Just go inside xampp\htdocs\wordpress and change everything there. For example, if you want to add themes, just go inside wordpress\wp-content\themes and put your themes there.

32. There you go. That wasn’t too hard. You can now master WordPress without worrying about breaking your website and you will also save some valuable time. Go celebrate!

Then, come back and you are free to experiment with WordPress any way you like. Try out new posts, themes, plugins and explore the wonderful world of WordPress.

If you have any problems or want to ask a question, feel free to comment below. I will try my best to answer your questions.

I would also appreciate it if you commented what you are going to use WordPress in localhost for. I hope you enjoyed this post!

(Via Pro Blog Design.)

Promoting a new blog can be quite daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. As you might expect, breaking down blog promotion into small, actionable tasks eliminates the mental road block you’ve probably experienced when trying to wrap you head around how to get people’s attention. You don’t have to do everything in this list, and some items will have a greater effect then others, but every tactic will at least drive some traffic, and any traffic is better than no traffic.

Content
1. Write a list of over 100+ resources or ideas.
2. Write the definitive guide to something. Spend time making this awesome.
3. Release a manifesto.
4. Release 2 manifestos.
5. Interview cool people. People like talking about cool people.
6. After your articles are indexed in search engines, break them up into smaller articles and submit them to ezinearticles.com (and other article directories).
7. Or just pay someone to submit the articles for you.
8. Write a list of all the cool blogs and people in your niche.
9. Check out the most popular content on high trafficked blogs. Create similar content but applied to your own niche.

Facebook

10. Start a page.
11. Make that page awesome.
12. Start a group.
13. Make that group awesome.
14. Create a Facebook app for your blog.

Fundamentals
15. Wait. After you’ve taken action it can take a short while for traffic to arrive.
16. Be patient. Some bloggers may seem like overnight successes, but if you look back in their archives, they’ve been creating content for a long time.
17. Motivate yourself.
18. Read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
19. Have an interesting story and overall purpose.
20. Embrace the Law of Reciprocity. Everything you give will come back exponentially.
21. Make blogging easier.
22. Take action every day. Just get one important thing done every day and eventually you’ll start getting traffic. The more you do each day the faster your blog gets traction.
23. Find people with blogs at a similar level to yours and help each other out.
24. Turn off your computer, do some cool stuff, turn on your computer again and blog about it.
25. Understand the importance of context.
26. Be consistent. You don’t need to blog every day but try to stick to at least some sort of schedule.
27. Make it a numbers game. Decide upon a definite plan of action (eg. 20 blog comments per day, 1 guest post per week etc) and stick with that.

Online Video
28. Create videos and distribute them through tubemogul.com
29. Or for wider video distribution trafficgeyser.com may work for you (expensive though).
30. Respond to YouTube videos with your content.
31. Include your full blog address at the TOP of your video descriptions.
32. Take your time with devising video titles and tags.
33. Convert your video to multiple formats, with slight editing changes, and upload it to video sites multiple times, targeting different keywords. The content remains the same but you can test what videos and titles work the best.
34. Buy the accounts of popular YouTubers and then add your blog address to the descriptions of their videos.
35. Start the first live show in your niche (Ustream, Justin.tv and LiveStream are popular choices). Make sure you record the shows too so they can be distributed as a podcast later on.

Other Blogs
36. Be the first commenter on the posts of popular blogs. But still provide value.
37. If you can’t be the first then comment anyway. But try to be the first.
38. Stumble and Digg cool blog posts you find and let the blogger know via a comment. If you have something worthy on your blog, they’ll probably reciprocate.
39. Use google.com/blogsearch to find fresh blog posts and then leave intelligent comments.
40. Link to blogs of a similar size. They’ll notice and then good stuff may happen.
41. Write a guest post for a large blog. You may not always get published, but when you do the traffic spike will be significant.
42. Write a guest post for a small blog. You’re more likely to get published and build relationships with the next wave of A-List bloggers.
43. Write some more guest posts. Can’t hurt, that’s for sure.
44. Join a blog network.

Paid
45. Start a StumbleUpon Ads campaign.
46. Get reviewed.
47. Buy some ad space.
48. Send out a press release.

People
49. Attend relevant meetups.
50. Tell your friends and family about your blog. Have them tell everyone they know.

Podcasting

51. Start a podcast and submit it to the iTunes directory.
52. Convert audio files to video files (just use Windows Movie Maker or iMovie) and send them out via tubemogul.com
53. Submit it to some other podcast directories.

Search engine optimization
54. Write linkbait.
55. Have any video or audio content transcribed and posted to your blog.
56. Register your domain name for 10 years.
57. Take advantage of sites scraping your blog’s feed by interlinking posts. Simple way to get deep inbound links.
58. Use Thesis.

Social networks
59. Join every social network you can.
60. Or, just join a couple and be really active.
61. Become active in relevant ning.com communities.
62. Convert blog posts to PDF files and submit them to Scribd – include your blog url in the description and document itself.
63. Add your Scribd documents to relevant groups.
64. Submit your best posts to blog carnivals.
65. Join relevant forums, add your blog address to your signature and start posting intelligently.
66. Sign up at ping.fm and use twitterfeed.com to auto post your latest blog content to a bunch of social networks.
67. Create lists on Amazon.com
68. Write reviews on Amazon.com
69. Better yet, create video reviews for Amazon.com
70. Answer relevant questions on Yahoo Answers, leaving your website as the source.
71. Or on Mahalo Answers.
72. Or even through LinkedIn Answers.
73. Start your own Slinkset, and feed your RSS feed into it automatically.
74. Submit your site to alltop.com
75. Write an article aimed at Digg (okay, that article won’t help much).
76. Also, befriend one of the many Digg powerusers.
77. Create a new thread on a forum and write up a really great guide with no self promotion. Simple way to be seen as an authority figure and to elicit comments on your writing (don’t forget that signature link though!).
78. Submit your content to dofollow social bookmarking sites.
79. Or have Bookmarking Demon do it for you (certainly a bend in ethics though).

StumbleUpon
80. Become an active stumbler to understand what stumblers like.
81. Friend people who stumble your content (they may just want to stumble more in the future)..
82. Have other people initially submit content (or “Discover” it as it’s known).
83. Place a Stumble button in your post template.

Su.pr
84. Sign up at su.pr and use it for all your short url needs.
85. Post content to your Facebook and Twitter stream.
86. Install the WordPress plugin to automate the process.
87. Identify the times that result in the most clicks and schedule tweets for them.
88. Setup your blog as a promoted website.

Twitter
89. Include hash tags (#tagname) in your tweets.
90. Search for your niche and answer any questions people have.
91. Place a Retweet button in your post template.
92. Follow relevant, popular, and interesting people.
93. Send @replies to relevant, popular and interesting people.
94. Tweet links to your content at multiple times during the day.
95. Love a product from a company that’s on Twitter? Review it and they may just notice and tweet about the review. It’s happened to me.
96. Sponsor some tweets.
97. Find cool people in your niche who live nearby and organize a tweet up (a meet up where you invite anyone on Twitter).

WordPress
98. Install All In One SEO Pack.
99. Automatically ping lots of ping services.
100. Create a theme, include a link to your blog in the footer, and then release it for free.
101. Create a plugin and release it for free. Add a link to your blog within the admin area. If it’s a good plugin people will love you for it.

(via Daily Blog Tips)

Ever wish your RSS reader worked more like a Twitter client? Or even FriendFeed, where updates just appear in real-time? Well, that idea has been gaining ground for some time, and it just got a whole lot more appealing now that WordPress has announced support for RSS Cloud.

RSS Cloud takes advantage of the cloud element in the RSS 2.0 specification. Actually cloud has been there since RSS 0.92, but no one paid much attention to it until Twitter and others ushered in the idea of a real-time web. The cloud element is used to deliver push notifications to your feed reader.

That’s essentially the reverse of how RSS readers work right now. At the moment, most popular RSS readers poll sites to see when they have new content. Another, slightly better method is to wait for a ping from your blog to let the RSS reader know when new content is available. But as WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg notes in the announcement, ‘getting every ping in the world is a lot of work… RSS Cloud effectively allows any client to register to get pings for only the stuff they’re interested in.’

The result is that new posts from your favorite blogs arrive much faster using the RSS Cloud method. As Marshall Kirkpatrick writes over at ReadWriteWeb, the difference in wait times is like ‘the difference between checking your e-mail every once in awhile and using a Blackberry to get new e-mails pushed to you as soon as they arrive.’

Sounds good, no? More news, delivered faster. Well, the bad news is that there’s really only one feed reader that currently supports RSS Cloud — Dave Winer’s River2. However, with WordPress now implementing the cloud element in its feeds, some 50 million posts a week are potentially accessible to cloud-enabled feed readers, which should be more than enough to tip the balance in RSS Cloud’s favor.

Of course there are some competing specifications, like pubsubhubbub or FriendFeed’s SUP proposal, which both do something similar to enable push updates.

WordPress has already said that its working on other ways of pushing notifications to news reader, including pubsubhubbub, so while you may have to wait a while before your favorite reader enables support for RSS Cloud and others, the WordPress announcement has certainly added incentive. And, hopefully, it will give RSS readers a much needed kick in butt — let’s face it, RSS readers aren’t exactly hotbeds of innovation right now.

Indeed Dave Winer is trying to get popular Twitter clients to support RSS Cloud. If they do, they could well end up supplanting RSS readers as the way most people get their news.

We’ll just have to stop calling them Twitter clients and start calling them what they should be referred to as: news clients.

(Via Webmonkey.)

If you’ve got a WordPress.com blog, you’ll be pleased to know you can now share an itsy-bitsy-WordPress-linky to each of your posts.

That’s right: WordPress has launched the WP.me short URL, designed for linking to your blog posts from space-limited sites like Twitter. It isn’t a general purpose URL shortener or rival to Bit.ly: it’s just for those on WordPress.com.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg writes of the launch:

-WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.

-Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.

-These are all exposed in the

-It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.

-The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.

-WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.

(Via Mashable!.)

More often than not, designers have rightfully been accused of retreating into their cocoons of ignorance as soon as their work of creating a web design is finished, leaving the dirty and more hands-on work of putting it up on the web to developers. This apathy is prevalent not only in the web-building industry, but also in software and game engineering.

The hard truth is that the buck of development should stop with designers. For optimum efficiency, designers should not only be concerned with painting the bigger picture but also building it! In this article, I’d like to share with you some reasons why designers should learn how to code.

Designing Realistic and Doable Designs

With a clear image of how the final product will be actualized, a designer will come up with more feasible and practical concepts. Being an integral part of the development process, they carry the responsibility of ensuring their designs translate well into a web-based medium that takes into account: usability, web accessibility, and achievability. A user-friendly website is not only a picnic to navigate from one page to another in a clear and concise flow of logic, but also provides a user with all the information they need without being too overbearing or cluttered. The only real way to know if a web layout works or not is learning how to build it yourself.

 Easier Communication

Virtually all products designed but implemented by different parties never satisfy both sides’ expectations, especially when it comes to intangible products like websites, software, or games. It normally comes down to a compromise between what it should have been and what, in reality, it can be.  Whereas the general idea is captured, it is seldom replicated verbatim. The panacea: designers should preach water and drink it too!  This avoids confusion, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation.

Convenient Iterative Development Process

A design, in practice, should not be absolute. By this, I mean that it should be flexible and affable to change without distorting its intrinsic essence to meet the systems’ technical constraints. These repetitive and necessary alterations can only be realized by the original designer. A designer slash developer can iterate more quickly where necessary, rather than having a developer resubmit the design to the designer, who is rarely at hand, to implement the alterations. This situation can create friction – and it often does – between designers and developers.   

Better and More Harmonious Results

I often like drawing parallels between software, web, or game development to orchestral music where the designer is the composer and the developer is the ensemble’s maestro or conductor. Imagine if the latter had the composer’s score? Wouldn’t the symphonies be awesome, captivating, and unadulterated? Not only were they crafted by a master craftsman, but conducted by their creator!

Shorter Development Time

The designers doubling up as coders implies that the design and coding processes occur at least sequentially, if not concurrently. This results in a shorter development timeframe – and who doesn’t care about efficiency?

Designers become More Marketable

Modern day designers worth their salt need to up their portfolio, and up their game, if they want to remain relevant; it’s no longer enough to have one set of skills. Oftentimes, we’re required to wear various hats: designer, front-end developer, content writer, and project manager.

By learning to implement what you design rather than leaving it orphaned in the hands of developers – you increase your value. After all, citing design and coding skills in one‘s resume does not hurt. On the contrary, it makes one less redundant and indispensable, a life and death determinant in these financially tumultuous times of corporate restructuring (read: mass retrenchments) and downsizing (read: firing).

However, in so much as designers should also code their innovations, there are downsides to this scenario.

Quoting Lukas Mathis in one of the controversial article about the topic called ‘Designers are not Programmers’¹:

If the designer implements his own designs, he is beholden to two different goals: Clean code and great user experience. These two goals contradict each other. If you have to implement your own designs, you’re bound to compromise for the sake of code quality, which is bad for your interaction design.

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Designers who implement their own designs face two issues: They know when a neat new idea will create messy code, and they know about all the existing code that would be touched by a change to the user experience. The two goals are at odds, because the user experience is all about the little details, and those little details all end up being messy bits of code you would rather not have to write.

This aptly summarizes the hard stance taken by web development purists. They are of the old school of thought that advocates for clear-cut lines between design and development.  Apparently, designers create for humans, developers create for computers. Thus, UX designers should design the best possible user interface and leave the developers to make the best possible programming decisions. While this holds some merit as I’ve found myself trying unsuccessfully to abstract my mind from the code when I’m working on a user interface, it is ultimately more convenient to have the technical and usability constraints in perspective.

(Via Six Revisions.)

WordPress has just released the newest version of their installable blog software: WordPress 2.8 – Baker.

The most notable addition would seem to be the ability to browse themes from within the WordPress Dashboard. With the Theme Browser, you can specify the color you want, how many columns there should be, and fixed or flexible width. You can then select and install themes match those criteria on-the-fly, without leaving the Dashboard.

WordPress 2.8 also offers a re-designed widgets interface, improved speed, and has fixed a reported 790 bugs. The download is available here, and the WordPress team demos the new features in the video below:

(Via Mashable!.)

Here are a few quick mistakes that I see new bloggers making (some of which mistakes I made myself). They’re listed in no particular order and I’d love for you to continue the list in comments below:

1. Giving up too early – blogs take time to take off
2. Putting off starting a blog – waiting until everything is just right before launching can mean you never do it
3. Echoing what everyone else is talking about – say something unique and share your opinion
4. Not blogging on your own domain – I know some swear by using hosted blogs but if you want ultimate control of your blog it is best to do it on your own domain and hosting.
5. Irregular Posting – you don’t have to post every day but try to establish a regular rhythm of posting
6. Being too apologetic – ’sorry I haven’t written for a while’ can end up being the most common type of post on a blog – yes apologize if you’ve messed up but don’t be too hard on yourself – keep investing your time into building your blog up rather than highlighting it’s problems.
7. Focusing more upon Quick Traffic than Loyal Readers – there’s nothing wrong with a big rush of traffic from social media or another blog – but just as important as that is building reader loyalty. Sometimes growing one reader at a time is more fruitful than getting spikes of traffic that never returns.
8. Clutter – too many buttons, widgets, navigation elements
9. Great Posts but Terrible Titles – don’t short change yourself by investing hours into writing great content only to slap a mediocre headline/title onto it.
10. Not Defining a Topic – the most successful blogs have a well defined topic/niche (or they target a certain demographic)
11. Choosing a Topic you have no Interest in – for your blog to be successful you’ll need to blog regularly on your topic for years – if you want to sustain it choose something you have an interest in or love for or you’ll run out of steam.
12. Too many Ads – I don’t have a problem with ads on a blog from Day #1 but when they overpower the content and push it down the page too far they hurt your chances of building a loyal readership.
13. Being too Insular/Expecting Readers to come to You – many bloggers starting out fail to realize that the more you put yourself out there and interact with other bloggers the more chance you have of being read.
14. Blogging about Making Money Blogging (as a first blog) – I’ve lost count of how many bloggers I’ve seen start blogs on the topic of blogging for money when they’ve never made money blogging. Start with something you know.
15. Not Being Useful – blogs that meet needs and solve problems are blogs that people will keep coming back to and which they’ll spread news of to their network.
16. Writing for Search Engines Before Humans – you can always tell when a blogger discovers Search Engine Optimization for the first time. Suddenly titles don’t make sense, keywords appear in posts for no real reason, links to other pages on the blog that are irrelevant to the post keep being used. Learn SEO – but keep your readers as your #1 priority.
17. Becoming a Stats-a-holic - the lure of checking your stats is understandable and common to new (and older) bloggers – but it can become an unhealthy obsession that leads to distraction and depression.
18. Link Baiting with Personal Attack – taking pot shots at other bloggers might get you some quick traffic – but hate breeds hate and the type of readers you attract and the culture it’ll breed on your blog could come back to bite you. Plus you’ll get a reputation that you might not want to live with.
19. Not Knowing Why You’re Blogging – while most of us don’t really know what we’re doing at the start – the faster you can work out what the purpose of your blog is the sooner you’ll start moving toward achieving that purpose.
20. Not Selling Yourself – one thing I don’t think many bloggers get is the power of blogs to sell yourself as a blogger. There’s nothing wrong with monetizing a blog with ads – but maybe a better long term strategy is to use a blog to advertise who you are and what you can offer readers.
21. Thinking You Have to Know it All – one of the best things about blogs is that they’re a great medium for involving your readers in the process of learning. Leave space for others to interact, share what they know and contribute.

There’s ALOT more to be said on this topic – what mistakes do you see new (and older) bloggers making?

(Via ProBlogger Blog Tips.)