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There’s a cycle for learners. You start out being new to a topic - it’s all new and interesting, and you quickly acquire a broad overview and become fairly knowledgeable. At about this point most people lose interest and move on to something else. A few spend a lot of time to learn a little bit more and become experts to some degree. The tiny few true practitioners become Doctors of Philosophy of the subject and work long and hard to make a contribution to the discipline. We could be talking about cellular Biologists, Blacksmiths or just about any other learned group of people. [Read more →]

Tags: Setting up Shop by David LaFerney
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The availability of thousands of free themes is one of the most beautiful things about using WordPress as your Content Management System. Incredible as it may seem, you will probably never find a theme that is exactly what you want. Not to worry though, personalizing a theme to look and behave like you want is pretty easy to do.

Some reasons why you might want to hack your theme:

• Remove the developers Adsense code (that’s right, they do that sometimes)
• Include your Adsense code just where you want it
• Insert Google analytics code
• Remove unwanted items from your sidebar [Read more →]

  Tags: Setting up Shop by David LaFerney
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If you ever get serious about selling anything on your site you will probably want to accept credit cards. Of course you could use pay pal or some other third party solution, but if you want to project a confidence inspiring professional image you need to go for the real deal. The way the system works is pretty convoluted, and dealing with the individual players can be extremely frustrating. If you ever have an issue you might find that everyone you talk to claims that it isn’t their fault, and may pass you off in an infinite loop of tech support line hold. However, by having a basic understanding of how the system works, and who the players are you can be one up on the game from the beginning. Also, when you’re shopping for service you will at least have a better idea of what questions to ask, and what kind of answers to expect.

Here’s the sequence of events that happen from the customer placing their order to you getting paid:

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Tags: Setting up Shop by David LaFerney
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Your choice of web host can have long term implications for your web site. Hosting solutions range in price from free to hundreds of dollars per month.

Free Hosting
You can get free hosting from several places like Blogger or Wordpress, and for some blogs free hosting may be a good or even great idea. However, free hosting always has some strings attached, because after all someone has to pay for it. Often your use of bandwidth, storage or your ability to monetize will be limited in some way. [Read more →]

Tags: Setting up Shop by David LaFerney
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What’s in a domain name? Your domain name is going to be integral to your brand, and a good one will help people to remember and return to your site. It’s probably more important for your domain to be memorable and brandable than for it to be relevant to your subject matter. If it can be both that’s just icing on the cake, but don’t get too hung up on relevance or keywords. According to Christopher Heng at thesitewizard.com your site should be named after your domain, and I completely agree.

Here are a few guidelines to help you choose a domain name:

• Unless you are targeting traffic outside of the United States Try to get a .com domain if at all possible - it’s the standard at this time and some American users will insist on typing in .com and will have trouble finding your site if you use another TLD. Even worse the site that they do find will be your competitor with the .com domain. [Read more →]
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  Tags: Setting up Shop by David LaFerney
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