I have written about some of the premium themes that are available for WordPress before but I wanted to tell you about a fairly new premium theme that is available for WordPress that I am quite impressed with. It is called Headway and it is different than many of the other premium themes that are available.

Headway is not just a premium theme, it is more a framework to build off of. There are a number of very good frameworks to start to build WordPress themes with but Headway has a unique visual editor that makes it easy to drag and drop different components into your theme. You can easily remove a sidebar on pages where you do not feel I is needed or add a sidebar to sections where you want it. Changing colours and font styles is as easy as a few clicks and changing the layout of a header is a breeze.

There is also the ability to use easy hooks to place content where you want it in the theme. Want to add some extra text to the footer, use an easy hook. Want to add an ad before or after a post, use an easy hook.

Many of the websites I have been working on lately are conversions from static HTML sites where clients are happy with the look and feel of their current website, but want the ability to edit the site themself and perhaps add a blog. Headway has become invaluable in recreating the clients website into WordPress.

Headway has also made the need to add the All in One SEO plugin no longer needed. Headway has taken many of the options of All in One SEO pack and intergrated them into the theme. You can control all the aspects of SEO including setting a custom title, meta description and keywords.

If you are looking for a fantastic theme framework to build your WordPress website with, or are a developer wanting an easy to use framework for your clients websites take a serious look at Headway. I have already created two WordPress based websites with it for clients and it has already paid for the developer license in the time I saved getting the clients sites done and out the door. Best of all my clients are happy because they can use WordPress to manage their websites and add new content.

If you use WordPress for your website or blog you might have noticed that WordPress 3.0 is now available. This is a major upgrade so I highly recommend you backup your database, and it would not hurt to make a complete backup of your current installation just in case something does not go as expected.

There are some great new features in WordPress 3.0 and it is a step forward from 2.9. The ability to host multiple websites with one WordPress installation will be excellent if your web host supports it. The addition of different types of pages will also allow people to extend WordPress into much more than just a blog.

If you want a great overview of the new WordPress take a look at the video below and don’t forget to visit the official WordPress blog about the release.

There are some applications that I use all the time and has made my life easier. Dropbox is one of those applications that I mostly use to sync files between my main desktop and my laptop so I always have the latest version of the files I am working on. It is also great to sync my latest favorite album so I can listen to it on the laptop as well. I was looking forward to the Android application coming out so I could use Dropbox to always have the most important files I need available on my phone. After installing the app from the Android market here is what I like and don’t like so far.

The Good

• Allows me to easily upload files from my Motorola Milestone to Dropbox.
• Can stream music to my phone, which is handy on a wifi connection.

Things I wish it could do

• Sync – I am amazed the I cannot sync at least some specific folders to my phone. This is one of the things Dropbox does best and it is missing in the Android app.
• Download a whole folder – I can download individual files, but it is not possible to download a whole folder at a time.

Dropbox on my laptop and desktop are great, but I have to admit I am a little disappointed in the Dropbox Android app. It seems like they just missed ignore what makes Dropbox great. Sure streaming music to your phone is cool, but I want to be able to wirelessly sync data, music and video to my Android phone so I have it when I am not connected.

Many people want to make some additional income from their websites. One of the most common ways for people to start is to use Google Adsense ads. Google Adsense ads are a very easy monetization method to start earning money from your website. Simply setup your account, copy and paste some Javascript code into your website and you can start earning money from every click that you get.

The problem with Google Adsense is the payout per click can be low and it can take a considerable amount of time to make enough for Google to pay you when you only get a few clicks per day. You also have little to no control over the types of ads that Google displays. While they do a good job of displaying ads that relate to your content you can never be sure of all the ads. There is also the possibility that Google will, at their discretion, ban your account and you will never get paid. Not to mention the constant changes that they often make to their terms of service that require you to update your website privacy and disclosure policies.

That being said the ease of setup of Google Adsense can make it a great way to earn some additional income. Here is something to consider though, last month for every dollar I earned using Adsense I earned $449.00 in affiliate commissions! That sounds great doesn’t it! Now don’t expect to simply replace your Adsense ads with affiliate ads and your will be rolling in the dough. With affiliate marketing it is certainly possible to make more income than from Adsense but it can take a while to find the right affiliate program to promote with your website. This can leave you with little to no income while you experiment with different programs and networks. If you are currently not making any money from your website then this is not a big deal.

Make no mistake about it, making money from affiliate marketing will take a lot more work but the payoff can be well worth it when you find the right program(s) to promote. It can take a lot of trial and error to find the right affiliate program to promote on your website. Having a blog on your website can help because you can write posts on a number of topics to experiment.

If you are looking to monetize your website more Adsense is an easy way to start, but seriously consider affiliate marketing. Your website could go from making coffee money every month to making more than your regular pay check.

Having a fast website has officially become more important this past week with Google’s announcement that they are now using site speed in web search ranking. I have always tried to make fast loading websites it is another factor that webmasters should pay more attention too if they want to not only improve their website visitors experience but also to improve their search engine rankings.

The Google blog post gives some good suggestions for tools to examine your websites speed but here are some common sense tips that can help you speed up your website quickly.

• Remove extra widgets and gadgets – Things like the Twitter widget, MyBlogLog, Google FriendConnect and even Google Adsense can all slow down a website.
• Combine your CSS files into one file – If you use WordPress this can get tricky depending on the number of plugins you use.
• Compress your CSS file – Check out CSS Compressor to help you remove extra space and optimize your code.
• Combine Javascript into one external file – This can get difficult if you are using WordPress or another CMS, but it can be done.
• Compress Javascript files – Like compressing your CSS file. It helps remove extra space and comments to compress your Javascript.Javascript Compressor
• Use Google Javascript Libraries – Google hosts several popular Javascript libraries that website can link to and load. This can improve your website speed since your visitor could possibly already have that file cached making your load time much faster. If you use WordPress check out the Use Google Libraries plugin to make it easy to start using the Google versions of those Javascript libraries. Thanks to Douglas Karr for that WordPress tip.
• Speed Up Your Website with GZIP Compression – I have talked about GZIP compression before to speed up your website. Not all hosts offer the ability to enable GZIP compression, but if you can it can make a drastic improvement on the speed of your website.
• Reliable web hosting – A fast and reliable web host is critical to server your site fast. If you are just starting out it can be expensive to get your own dedicated server to make sure your site is served fast. I do recommend you take a look at either iWeb or Hostgator for shared hosting accounts. Price wise they are competitive and I have been pleased with how fast they have been.

I am still in the process of doing some of these tips here on the LGR website as well. I have had GZIP compression enabled for a while and it has made a significant difference in the speed of the website. If you can only do one thing try to enable GZIP compression. Since I am using Wordress to power this website I have been slow to combine CSS and Javascript files and compress them. I do plan on doing more of that. Perhaps there is a WordPress plugin that can help to combine them and compress them on the fly. If I find one I will let you know.

Not sure where to start to speed up your website? Let me give you a hand. I can do a website speed audit to give you more ideas on how to speed up your website. Feel free to contact me and I will be happy to look over your website.

I recently bought a Motorola Milestone smartphone and I have been paying closer attention to mobile websites. I have talked about making a mobile version of your website available in the past but it has become increasingly more noticeable to me how important the mobile space is becoming.

Making applications seems to be all the rage but I am not sure who would use an app for an average website or blog. Sure sites like TechCrunch and CNET can probably create an app for the iPhone and Android phones and get a number of downloads but is it worth it for the rest of us? Probably not. Then there is the option to offer a customized mobile web version which is possible for the majority of websites.

I recently installed the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin to offer people using mobile browsers a more friendly experience. It certainly does offer a nicer version, and makes it easier for mobile web users to read the site.

The plugin uses the Carrington mobile theme. It is nicely designed and makes it easier for a mobile user to browse a website on their mobile device. I have not done any customization to the theme yet, but I plan on adjusting the colours and making the mobile version of the LGR Internet Solutions website match the full version a little more.

Making your current website more accessible to mobile users is something to consider for your website instead of making a stand alone application. It will allow you to provide a customized mobile experience for your mobile visitors while still providing your regular visitors your full website experience. It will also make it easier and cheaper to maintain since you will still only need to update only one website.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the LGR Internet Solutions website on the Android emulator.

I do not post the Hitler videos very often, but thanks to Blogger Shutting Down FTP Service Erik Aronesty left a comment telling us about his script to keep using Blogger with FTP. I have not tried the script out but it looks interesting. If you are being afected by Bloggers decision to close FTP publishing take a look, might be what you need. Erik had the Hitler video embedded on his site and it made me laugh, so here you are to enjoy.

I was reminded recently that I am human. I made a mistake and when I make a mistake it tends to be a big one. Now I am pretty paranoid about backing up data so when I discovered what I did I knew I would be able to restore pretty much everything from the backup I had, but there was a few pages of new content that I did not have a backup for.

As I started fixing my error I kept wondering how I was going to restore that new information that the client had placed on their website between the last backup and my screw up. Then it dawned on me, I had read the pages that the client added to the site on both Firefox on my desktop and Firefox on my laptop. A quick about:cache?device=disk and sure enough they information was cached. The only problem is that Firefox does not give you a very user friendly view of the cached files. I needed an easy way to save the information so I could add it back into the website.

This is where I discovered the Firefox CacheViewer Addon. It allows you to sort the items in the Firefox cache by key, size, type and date. Using the Firefox CacheViewer I was quickly able to find the couple items I needed, save them as HTML files and copy the information out that I was missing.

If you every need to go looking though your Firefox cache for some information that you might have lost, or just want to browse the cache and see what Firefox has saved take a look at the Firefox CacheViewer Addon. It sure helped me when I made my mistake.

It seems like a long time since I logged into Blogger.com to update a Blogger.com powered blog. Blogger.com was the only service I knew of that offered FTP publishing. FTP publishing was a great way to publish a Blogger.com powered blog to your own domain name, before they started offering custom domains. Soon I will not be able too since FTP published blogs since Google and Blogger.com are closing down the FTP publishing feature effective March 26, 2010.

For those blogs that I did occasionally update I will have to consider switching them to a custom domain hosted on Blogger.com. This will have an impact on some of my clients, since it was an easy way for them to update a blog on their website that was easier to learn than WordPress. For those clients that this will effect I will be in touch with you later this week with some easy alternatives for you to continue updating your websites.

Here is a copy of the email that I recieved regarding Blogger.com closing down FTP publishing.

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

o We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
o We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
o Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Last year I wrote a post outlining some of my Internet goals for 2009. I thought I should revisit that post again here in January 2010 and see how I did. Here were my Internet goals for 2009 and how I did.

1. Posting more regularly, hopefully on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. If possible increasing posting frequency to five days a week.
   I was doing alright with this goal until summer came around, then my posting went downhill and has never really gone up again. While I still enjoy writing for this blog, other things seem to come up. In my defense I have been taking part more on Twitter and that is often where you will find me.
2. Increasing RSS subscribers in the LGR Internet Solutions blog to 500 or more.
   Thanks to some stupidity by Feedburner it appears that I accomplished this goal having over 1000 subscribers. But if you take the Friendfeed numbers out of the Feedburner count my subscriber count has remained stable and grown slightly to 300. Not bad considering my posting dropped off.
3. Diversifying my online income so it is more dependable and less reliant on one or two sources.
   This has seen some growth in 2009. While the majority of my online income is still from two main sources I have seen growth in other areas. The majority of the growth has come from diversifying my affiliate marketing into other areas. I have plans to expand this further in 2010.
4. Increase page views and reader participation on all my websites.
   While I would say reader participation has not gone up, pageviews across the majority of my websites have seen significant increases. This has been good for income on several sites.
5. To learn new skills and apply them.
   While I never did finish the Facebook application or the WordPress plugin I was working on, I did learn a great deal more about affiliate marketing in 2009. While I was not a total stranger to affiliate marketing before 2009 I did learn a great deal about how to improve conversions and increase my online revenue through affiliate marketing. Not something that I was planning, but it has been something that I have enjoyed learning.

Overall I would say that I failed on my 2009 Internet goals. I might have failed at my goals, but I had a great year! My business income doubled, despite a global recession, and my client base has remained stable with many of my client work increasing. 2010 is already looking great with work continuing to come in from clients and my affiliate marketing websites continuing to grow here already in January.

How did you do with your Internet goals in 2009?