Web design is complicated. There’s a heck of a lot to learn. Typography, usability, color theory, the list goes on… ProBlogDesign has collected together 26 blog design tutorials from the web that take you through the process of designing a blog, from scratch.

If it’s time for you to learn a new style of design, working through a complete project in one of the guides below is the best way to start. These posts take you step by step so even if your Photoshop skills aren’t the best yet, you won’t be left behind!

Source: 26 Complete WordPress Blog Design Tutorials

Everyone loves to laugh. Have you imagine there are many funny things about blogging? bLaugh is a MAD Magazine for the Blogosphere. You can find lots of funny comics of the blogosphere there. Expect parodies of “A-List” bloggers all the way down to the meme of the day – no holds barred.

We have collected the following Top 25 Funniest Comic Strips About Blogging from bLaugh. Please feel free to share your favourite ones as well. Now sit back, relax and laugh please.

Shrinking Self Esteem

Vowing Wedding Favors

Good Quality Pet Blogging

(more…)

By now, most of you should know that WordPress can do more than just a blog platform. With WordPress, plus some plugins, you can build almost any type of websites.

WebDesignerWall has written an article: 30 Untypical WordPress Sites, which shows 30 websites that use WordPress for different purposes — from general websites to portfolios, ecommerce and corporate sites. I am sure this post will open up more ideas for you to use WordPress.

Source: 30 Untypical WordPress Sites

Neil Patel has published a really interesting article on TechCrunch. He taught us How To Grow Your Blog Through Customer Development. When you think about growing your blog, whether it is a personal, professional or company blog, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

Chances are it is something related to traffic or subscribers. Getting more traffic or subscribers is never a bad thing, but if you really want more sustainable traffic you first have to understand the people coming to your blog. If you can’t make them happy, how can you expect your traffic to grow?

You have a vision of how you see your blog and where you want it to go. The reality is that your vision may not match up with what your readers are expecting. So instead of assuming things about your readers, start getting feedback from them.

Without understanding your audience you won’t know what they like and dislike. Take the next few hours and start analyzing your blog and create a game plan on how you can grow your blog.

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/02/how-to-grow-your-blog…

The Wall Street Journal has published an interesting article “America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire “. We can see some interesting numbers/stats for blogging. There are over 20 million bloggers in America, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income.

Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall.

Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products. Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging. One percent make over $200,000. And they report long hours — 50 to 60 hours a week.

the Technorati report says that of those bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, the average income is $75,000. True, it’s not the median, but it is the average. We can quibble about how easy it is to make this kind of money — but the point is, the huge potential is there.

Source: America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire

One of the reasons people love WordPress so much is its great flexibility. You can change the software’s appearance with themes. You can enhance its functionality with plug-ins. And, last but not least, you can totally unleash WordPress’ power with hacks. Some time ago, we published a post showing Most Useful WordPress Hacks.

Recently, SmashingMagazine has do it again with 10 new and totally killer WordPress hacks to make your blog stand out from the crowd. As usual, they won’t just list the hacks alone. In each entry, you’ll find an explanation of the code as well as the kinds of problems that the hack solves. It includes:

1. Create TinyURLs On The Fly
2. List Upcoming Posts
3. Create A “Send To Facebook” Button
4. Create A Maintenance Page For Your WordPress Blog
5. Display Related Posts Without A Plug-In
6. Automatically Retrieve The First Image From Posts On Your Home Page
7. Resize Images On The Fly
8. Get Your Most Popular Posts Without A Plug-In
9. Highlight Searched Text In Search Results
10. Disable Widgetized Areas Without Editing Theme Files

Source: 10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks

279 Days to Overnight Success tells the story of The Art of Nonconformity, but more importantly, it offers 11,000 words of free advice on how to create your own success with your own project. He offer this information freely.

You will learn How to become a Full-Time writer in 279 days from 279 Days to Overnight Success. It tells you exactly how the world domination strategy for establishing your brand. And it teaches you how to avoid the vampires who want you to fail and why Adsense (and most other Web Advertising) sucks. Moreover, you can learn how to stay off the Digg home page and still get all the traffic you need.

Bloggers, writers, online artists, and anyone otherwise interested in creating a new career or expanding their influence using social media. If you want your online presence to grow far beyond what it is now, you should download 279 Days to Overnight Success and read it now.

Download for Free: http://chrisguillebeau.com/3×5/files/2009/04/279days.pdf

Many new Internet marketers obsess over Google pagerank believing it to be the route to rising in the search results, where in fact pagerank is just one of many factors involved in your search engine ranking and, most misleading, what you see in the Google Toolbar is very inaccurate anyway.

Authority in a search context takes into account all the elements of a site then determines a grading on the spectrum from completely authoritative through to no authority at all. The more authoritative and trusted your site, the better you will rank.

How to Grow Your Google Authority? There are many factors that directly influence your Google authority including the domain, quantity and quality of links, plus traffic elements.

Source: How to Grow Your Google Authority

ForTheLose has shared with us 7 Wordpress Theme Trends and How To Implement Them Yourself. It includes Tabbing System, “Featured” Post Display, Post Thumbnails, Cross-Browser Transparency, Animated Dropdown Menus, Modal Boxes and Theme Options Pages. Most of them are very useful and very easy to implement it on your own WordPress blog with the detailed installation documents.

Source: 7 Wordpress Theme Trends & How To Implement Them Yourself

A personal brand is in many ways synonymous with your reputation. It refers to the way other people see you. What do you stand for? What ideas and notions pop up as soon as someone hears your name?

If you’ve been around for a while you’ve probably already developed a personal brand. People recognize your name, what you’re working on, what you offer and what you’re about. That being said, your personal brand might be a little weak and disjointed. If you’d like to make it stronger, Skelliewag is going to help give you the tools by outlining what he believes to be the components of a strong personal brand.

Source: How to Start (or Start-over) Building Your Personal Brand