Anyway, there’s a function in WordPress that will allow you to have your blog automatically publish an article at a certain date and time. All you have to do is write the article as normal. Add a title, some text, tags and select the categories etc.

Next if you look to the right of your typing area (just above where the publish button is) you will see some text that says “Publish immediatley” with an edit link next to it.

Click the edit link and you will see some date and time boxes appear. Here you just have to add the date and time you want the article to be published to your site.

Next, you MUST hit the publish button, if you don’t the article wont appear when it’s supposed to!

Then you can just sit back and relax while the articles publish themselves!

This functionality is great if, say you have a blog or site that you don’t want to spend time every day posting on. Just spend a few hours writing up a tonne of articles and let WordPress publish them of you every day.

I plan on writing a load of articles at the beginning of each month for some of my sites, then I’ll let WordPress do it’s thing and I only have to work on the site for one day towards the end of each month!

You could also use this if you’re going on holiday or wont be near a computer for a while!

So if someone wants to keep up with what I’m doing, you can find me at http://twitter.com/jmz360.

For the past 3 months now I’ve been working on a huge project of mine. The project is focussed on photographers and will allow them to create and manage an online portfolio of their work without having to worry about hosting, finding software, designing anything or basically anything else that is remotley technical.

I’ll post a full list of current features when I get time as well as a list of features that have been earmarked for future inclusion.

At the minute the basic engine behind the site is fully working but with me working 4 hours a night overtime (tonnes and tonnes of customer websites to do!) the development of this project has been slower than I had hoped.

The name of the site is PikFolio (incase you hadn’t guessed) and you can head on over to PikFolio now to put your name down for a beta invite if you like. You can also keep checking the dev blog for more information on how the project is coming along.

Finally, if anybody thinks this would be a cool project to get in on, let me know at jamesowers [ a t] gmail [ d o t ] com I have noticed that this is a much bigger project than is wise to take on by myself so any designers, coders or marketers let me know!

A bounce is when a visitor comes to your site and leaves, either by closing their browser, clicking the back button or moving on to a new site without going to a second page on your site. This may not seem very important but, if you have a 70% bounce rate then that means 70% of your visitors are leaving your site without having a look at more than one page, which obviously isn’t very good.

Obviously there is very little chance of you getting a 0% bounce rate but there are a few things you can do to keep it down.

First of all, dont clutter your page with ads too much, if a person comes to your site and they cant clearly see the page title and content they were looking for or if the page is full of ads or unrelated text then they are pretty likely to bit back on their browser.

Make it easy for users to navigate around your site. Content rich sites are good, but dont make your navigation & logo so minimal that people can find them.

Make sure the content is the first part of your site that people see. This part is pretty similar to the first point but it is important! If people have to look for your content they will most probablt just leave.

Finally, and this could be just me but I hate sites that have big, flashing or noisy ads, especially ones that make noise or play videos automatically. If anything like that happens I’d click the back button as quick as I can and find what I was looking for on another site!

The last thing I wanted to mention is social bookmarking sites. If you are advertising your site through any sort of social bookmarking site such as Digg then you pretty much just have to accept that you will have a higher than average bounce rate. This is because the Digg user will probably have seen your article and thought “I’ll read that!” then read it and headed on over back to Digg for more articles. There’s not a lot you can do about it, but if you follow my tips above you might be able to get your overall bounce rate down.

If you have a look at this post you can see pictures of the new post screen and the dashboard.

I must admit, I’m especially excited by that dashboard view. It seems to have built in statistics and a top searches facility which would be very nice additions to the wordpress admin panel!

Anyway the site started 19 days ago as a pagerank 0 and 19 days later I checked the pagerank, only to be surprised that it’s jumped to 2 already! I’m not going to get too carried away because it could be some sort of fluctuation but fingers crossed!

What really amazes me is that I haven’t done any sort of link building or anything, all I did was to regularly make a post (I’ve tried to keep to one every other day at the least) and set up a large ping list (a guide on this later).

Anyway you might want to check out some UK Film Reviews

Anyway this is a quick post to let people know that this site isn’t dead! I’ve been working hard over the last few weeks at work to get the software we’ve been developing perfect, there are still quite a few little bits that aren’t working 100% but it’s getting there.

I’ve also been doing an absolute tonne of work for work at home, I’ve been trying to get 4 hours of overtime done a night because we just dont have time to work on any websites at work at the minute. It’ll be worth it when the paycheck comes in at the end of the month though!

With all that going on, I’ve still managed to get a few of my own sites done aswell.
First of all, some freelance work for a holiday home to rent in mallorca which included using the FrogCMS system with a custom skin and some custom features.
Next I’ve been working on a few of of my own sites, one of which is ready to be revealed to the world! The name of the site is FilmZone and the basic idea is to offer people the chance to see New Film News and Reviews. The site is ran on a super modified wordpress backend with a premium theme for the frontend. I’m working on getting a ton of content up there so that people start finding it. I want to get 100% organic to it so that I can have a practice with different types of monetizing it.

As I said before I’ll be adding the new articles I have for this site when I get the chance so keep checking back. If you fancy making some extra money, and think you can write articles on the web development subject drop me a message via the contact page and we’ll see if we can work something out.

In this tutorial you will see how to create this contact form and style it so that it looks like this. In the future I am going to make some further guides on how to take the information entered and send it to yourself using PHP or ASP, but that’s for another day.

Right, so first of all we’re going to need our form. I am going to use this one. Your free to use this code if you don’t have a form of your own. Here’s the code for the form:

Now as you can see the form is very simple and doesn’t look very good at all just yet. We’re going to fix that though.

First of all, we’re going to give the form a css class so that we can style it and all the elements within it. To do this we simply change:

To:

You will notice I added a class to our form rather than an id. This is simply because you might want to use more than one form on your page and using a class will keep the page valid whether you have one form or ten.

Simple, eh? Now lets start styling.

In our CSS document, we’re going to add a style for our form. So we add:

All of our styling will go between the { and the }. Now, I dont want my form to be too wide so I’ll add a width to my CSS.

Next, we’ll add a font, a font colour and a background colour.

Now that the basic styling for our form is done, we can add some styling to the labels and inputs. First of all we will tackle the labels with the following CSS.

All the CSS above is pretty simple, we used the “display:block;” so that all the labels will start on a new line. This means we dont have to add any breaks (
tags) after every line. After we added the styling to our labels you can see that the form is starting to look a lot better. Now for the inputs.

Again, I haven’t used anything to difficult to style the input boxes but they look a lot better! You might have noticed the submit button is a bit screwed up, dont worry, we’ll be fixing that later. But first we will make the textarea look better with the following CSS.

So now the form is looking fine and dandy, apart from that pesky submit button. Lets add a class to it.

Change:

To:

Now our submit button has a class of submit. Now for the CSS.

Again, we have used the “display:block;” style to put the button on a new line without using a break. I have also added a background colour, padding, a border and margin. All of these are pretty simple CSS styles. If you need help with the different CSS styles check out the beginners guide to CSS tutorial.

As you can see, our form is looking very nice now and it has all been done with some simple CSS and minimal extra HTML. You can see the finished CSS form here.

favourite wordpress plugins. If you think I’ve missed something that should be on this list, leave a comment or get it touch with me using the contact page.

Backup Wordpress

I put this one first because it seriously is the most inportant plugin of all if you’re going to put any sort of effort into your blog.

You could lose the content of your blog at any time, for a million different reasons. Anything from hacking to a host problem, or even simple human error can see you lose your months or years of hard work in seconds. Backup Wordpress is a handy (and free)

plugin that will automatically backup your database or your whole site at regular intervals. You can also do a manual backup anytime you fancy. It will even email you the backups!

Setting Backup Wordpress up is as simple as all wordpress plugins and requires minimal configuration. So dont risk losing your data, back it up!

Comment Luv

I’ve mentioned this plugin on my blog before, but it’s worth mentioning again. Comment Luv encourages users to post on your blog by showing a link to their latest bog post underneath their comment. This plugin is great for increasing user interactivity with your site.

Comment Rellish

This plugin is good for getting users that have commented on your blog to come back. The first time someone posts a comment on your forum, it sends them an email saying whatever you want. I reccommed saying thanks for their comment and asking them to

check back to the site every now and again.

The best thing about this plugin is that it will only send them an email the first time they comment, so they wont get angry about being bombarded with emails if they post on your blog a few times!

Askimet

This plugin comes bundled with wordpress as default, make sure you have it activated! It checks every trackback, comment and pingback on your blog to make sure its all legit and there’s no spam. If you have a popular blog it can save you hours and hours of trawling through spam.

All in one SEO

The All in one SEO plugn does exactly what it says. It provides pretty much everything you need to optimise your blog for search engines, and it’s even better when you combine it with other SEO plugins such as the sitemap generator below.

Some of its features include:

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others

Google XML Sitemaps Generator

This plugin will automatically generate an XML sitemap of your website. Google, MSN and Yahoo search engines all love XML sitemaps which means they can easily find and list every one of your pages in their search engines. The sitemap generator will even rebuild your sitemap when you create a new post and it will ping Google, MSN and Yahoo to tell them that the sitemap has been altered so they should re-spider it!

Before anyone asks, the images above the posts are just random. They are mostly images that I’ve seen on IStockPhoto that I’ve liked.

The new tutorials will be coming, Monday at the latest.

Oh, and I’d be most grateful if you would sign up for my RSS Feed!