There are thousands and thousands of Wordpress plugins out there trying to get your attention. But do you really need that many? To be honest, an average blog only needs a few plugins to get it really running. If you have too many plugins, you’ll end up having a blog that’s slow to load and will end up having too many complications with newer Wordpress updates. So knowing that you should only have enough plugins to make your blog functional (and visitors happy), take a look at the top 10 most useful Wordpress plugins.

What’s the purpose of a robots.txt file?

First off, lets clear the reason why everyone should use a robots.txt file. When the search engine crawlers (Googlebot, MSNbot, Yahoo! Web Crawler) arrive at your website, they first check if a robots.txt file exists on the root of your domain (eg. www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt). If it does, they use that as a guideline for crawling and indexing your website and its pages. If it doesn’t, they just try their best to crawl your website. But that’s where the problem begins. When a crawler reaches a page that doesn’t have any links, it will stop crawling there. For instance, if you link to a small pop-up page that contains nothing but text, crawlers will goto that page and stop the crawl there because it can’t find its way back. The solution to this is to block the page from being crawled in the robots.txt file.

A simple navigation menu may suffice for many, but those that want to go the extra mile and be “that” site users will remember often times utilize a really unique and cool navigation menu.

1. Fixed Fade-Out Menu (CSS + jQuery)

A pretty cool fade-out menu tutorial by Mary Lou at Codrops that gives the users an option to fade the menu in/out by hovering the mouse.

Now, everyone might be quick to jump on the bandwagon and vote for Wordpress. But there has to be a reason why so many people still use Google’s Blogger platform. Here we will analyze the advantages and disadvantages of both services. Use this guide to figure out for yourself which blogging service is right for you.

With Wordpress as popular as it is, the amount of crappy themes out there literally “litter” the internet. If you type in “Wordpress themes” in Google, you’ll get #1 – the official Wordpress theme directory that offers not-so-pretty themes. Then #2 and on, you’ll get websites made for profit, websites that offer hacked themes that secretly include a link to their website, or both.

Use this gathered list of my personal favorite websites that offer links and downloads for free, reliable and high-quality Wordpress themes to save yourself the hassle of digging through the junk.

Choosing the right keywords before beginning your SEO efforts can save you a lot of time in the future. Use this list of helpful tips to keep you in check while doing your research.

It can be especially frustrating for the independent webmasters that are looking to create a new niche-targeted website but find themselves stuck on picking the right market. In this post, I’ll give you a few guidelines and tips to help you find the right and successful niche for your new website.