SAYZLIM.NET

Sitepoint The Art & Science of CSS FREE Download

2008-11-20T03:34:24Z

FREE STUFF WORTH $29 ! I’ve just woken up and check my email, guess what? Sitepoint is giving out one of their e-books worth $29 for FREE, absolutely for free. No special requirement, all you need to do is follow them on Twitter or visit this site.

Unbelievable? If you’re one of the web designer or blogger who tends to design your own template, take this opportunity and grab this marvelous chance because this is the rare chance to get The Art & Science of CSS from Sitepoint for free.

I’m in the middle of exam right now and I try to write this entry as fast as I can because this free giveaway will end in 14 days. So hold your mouse and download your FREE The Art & Science of CSS from Sitepoint right now.

Further more into the book
In this The Art & Science of CSS, you’ll find out how to create a beautiful and functional web design with CSS. Starting from the header, navbar, images, background and etc.

Like most of the Sitepoint E-books, it is written in a simple language and many cool example for you to view. This full color e-book will give anyone who is interested in web-design a huge boost in their design skill.

What’s my rating?
As a beginner in web design, the e-book is totally awesome, I own most of the e-books from Sitepoint and this e-book is making me feel excited. This is definitely the 9/10 e-book you should check out. Whether you are web-designer or not, you can get this e-book for FREE.

How to get it?
Just follow them on the Twitter or you can visit this site for more information on how to get the e-book. Remember that the free give away will end soon, so take your chance right now.

A Small Wish From a Kid

2008-11-10T14:08:57Z

I don’t hope for toys, I don’t hope for candies, all I need is my parent and a place to let me sleep peacefully every night

Imagine this. Your kids are running around the field and playing with his friends. He doesn’t need to worry anything and he get the protection from his family, these kids can play with each other without fear. You’re his angel, these kids believe that you can do anything. And if you’re one of these kids, then you’re very lucky.

But try to picture this, suddenly the war breaks. These kids need to run away from their country and wander to a new country just to seek protection. A new country where they don’t even know what they’ll face there. The boys need to fight for survival and most of the girls are vulnerable to any kind of abuse.

Hence some questions come to my mind, do these kids really need to go through this? If it is some kind of test for these children from God, isn’t it too much? For me, the children is the future of this world. For me, the children should be playing and exploring. They are the angel of this world and the one who will carry on what we should have done.

But that is what most of the refugees face, especially the children. I don’t know what I can do to help them, only by writing this post and let people know that there are some kids out there who are lacking of education living in fear and uncertainty.

I’ve been a member of BlogCatalog and BloggerUnite always remind me one thing. You’re not living in this world alone, you can’t be selfish. While you strive hard to pursue your dream, you can also contribute to other people by taking some simple action. So, I think it’s time for me to stop and listen to these children small voice.

How to Use Comment and Turn Visitor into Reader

2008-11-04T13:54:02Z

Original Image by : Lumaxart

Comment Marketing is also known as one of the ways to drive traffic to a blog. Comment marketing is commonly used by a new blog to achieve a certain traffic because they are desperately want to gain instant traffic. Sometimes I find it’s funny to see a forum post with title like this “How to Get 1000 Visitors in One Day”.

I can accept that because It is one of the copywriting skills to create a headline that grabs attention.

But do you know that commenting also requires skills? This idea appeared when I was sleeping in the car (It is said that ideas always comes out when you’re relaxing).

Perhaps it is one of the habit I usually follow. I am expecting a good result by doing so. I’ll guarantee that your comments will work better if you follow these habits.

1. Add Value, Share Your Experience
I often see a comment that said “Thank you, it is great”. I feel great whenever I receive comments like that because I know readers find the post helpful. But it will be greater to add value into your comments rather than a simple thank you.

How to add value?

Easy, all you need to do is to choose some of your blog post which you think really relevant and can add value to the blogger’s post. Share what you’ve known related to the blog post. Using search engine to provide more content can also add more value in your comment.

2. Leaving Feedback to Fellow Commenter
After you add value into your comment, blog owner and his readers will read the comment too. Especially if your comment carries value.

Well, what’s next?

The comment form always let us to leave our website URL. Most of times,the commenter will leave their homepage URL. Now let’s change this habit, everytime you post a comment, leave your most relevant blog post in the comment form. If you do this way, you’re not only adding value but also turn his readers become your readers too.

3. Comment on Related Blog
If your solely purpose is to turn visitors into readers, then the best ways is to comment on relevant blog. Beside the content of your blog and the blog you comments are similar, it can also let your blog post have more exposure because most of time you’ll have more opportunity to leave high value comment in their blog.

4 Comment Whenever You Want
I’m not a regular commenter but I do follow the progress of the blog I subscribed. Most of times, these blogs are the blogs which have the same approach and age. If you really want to leverage your blog by building relationship with the blogger within your niche. Then you can find out how to do comment marketing with Felix.

Summarizing all the habits I have shared, I can show you a example of art commenting. (I wish I am left-handed)

Name : Sayz
Website : http://www.sayzlim.net/2008/10/5-characteristic-of-a-good-blog-design/
Comment : Blog design do plays an important part in blogging. I tweaked my blog design and it turned most of the visitors into readers. Some of the blogpost I find it is worth to read are [blog link] by [blog author]. There is a website which provide template if you don’t plan to create your own template, it can be found in [blog url]

Now for some practice, why don’t you try to add value in this post? And please share your experience with us later after practicing these skills.

5 Characteristic of a Good Blog Design

2008-10-25T19:58:20Z

I was once an online game player and was very poor. I had no gold for my character because I spent all my gold for my equipments but not on the accessories. Since my character had no accessories to show off. Whenever I tried to ask people with the same level, same status but different accessories to join my party, what I get is rejection.

This is what happen when we’re not building a good image, it applies the same in blog. People will be hesitated to build relationship with you if your blog design is not notable at all.

I often see a blog with a lot of ads, some of the optimized for Adsense template can be found around the web.

The design above shows us an optimized adsense blog design, but I won’t use that template since it contains one of my defined bad blog design characteristic.

So what makes a good blog design?
1. Relevancy Between Content, Author and Design
Ever visited a blog with colorful design talking about how to earn money online? My first thought will be like this “Is this guy for sure? With this colorful page, is he serious making money online?”. And I’ll read his content, then realize his writing is not as colorful as his blog design.

The blog above is written by a 14 years old young kids. The yellow color give us a hyper-active feeling and you can see her writing is energetic too. The balance between the content and design reflect the author.

2. Guiding Readers to The Content
A good blog design is able to help your readers to navigate your blog. It tells readers where they should go after visiting your home page or finished reading your blog post.

Copyblogger.com embeds the left sidebar only with subscribing button and the resources from his blog. As the readers open up his homepage, the left resources button will give them the chance to dig deeper into his blog.

Another example of good blog design is making use of the navigation bar to guide readers.

Abloggerblog.com is making use of his navigation bar efficiently promoting his blog posts. We can see his latest post and what this blog have in his homepage without scrolling the bar. Once you click the post link, you’ll find the subscribing button on the corner right.

3. Clear and Contrast Between Font Color and Background Color
The use of font can be one of the fatal killer move for a blog design. A misused background and font color can kill your reader’s eyes.

You can measure the contrast between the font and the background with this color contrast tool.

Measuring the contrast between your font and background color not only let you know if the current font color is readable enough for your readers but also can give you more option in choosing color.

4. The Art of Choosing Image
Slicing, cropping, choosing font, arranging layer. That’s what I do with the photos I intend to use in my blog post. Before I start to use image in blog post, I never realize there was so many type of image and tools we can use to edit photo.

One of my favorite blog, Skelliewag.org uses flickr photo in her blog post. Choosing the image with flickr is not an easy skill but with some learning and using Picnik for basic editing can give your blog post another professional look which will give additional plus into your blog design.

5. Simplicity Makes Me Easy
Do you know why some people prefer fast food? I don’t like fast food but whenever I need to get something to eat but clueless, I will order fast food. Sometimes when I hang out with my friends at mall and they ask me “What shall we eat?”, to make it simple I’ll answer “KFC”.

Another characteristic of blog design is making simple. If you can remove unnecessary navigation bar, categories, widget then remove it. Because a simple blog design can show the reader what this blog about. A good example of can be found in the Skelliewag blog design.

By limiting the use of categories and the navigation bar can show the information you has in your blog.

Ask Your Reader
Take this question and include it in your next blog post.
“What does my blog design tell you when you visit my blog for the first time, what is my blog content judging from the homepage alone?”

ablogger.com Review

2008-10-11T20:07:11Z

Sing by Sayz
I am a man who only review the blog I like and provide quality contents… la… la… la…

Do you want to know how to start a decent blog? Blogging has become one of the tool to express ourselves online and some people already generate income from it. Despite what is your goal to blog, you need to learn basic if you start from zero. And the blog I’m going to review will be one of your solution.

abloggerblog.com
abloggerblog.com is a blog focusing in “Blog Coaching” which I believe most of the newbie blogger need to learn some skills step by step. There are many factors in blogging, so if you’re guided then the chance you don’t need to recreate blog is higher (Blogger at least delete their blog once and start anew).

The blog has a decent amount of quality articles for blogger to read. List of the blog fundamental and the SEO tools where every blogger need it. Every blogger have their own unique style, even in the SEO and how they generate traffic. But every blogger need to learn this, TAO? Trial And Error phase. Now you can learn how to blog properly with the course which only need 2 months (I assume) rather than TAO for 1 year.

Blog design is made as simple as it can. And the font size is big enough for every reader to read. At least, don’t broke these simple rules of blog design.

The author of the blog is a 22 years old man from Singapore who start blogging 1 years ago. His name is Felix or Wei Liang. He achieves 590.201 in Alexa rank and 50++ readers in a short amount of time.

How to Generate a Unique Blog

2008-10-19T17:21:16Z

Original Image by : Torley

I’ve been wondering what do I need to create a unique blog. We can start by defining the meaning of “unique”.

Unique (p): (followed by `to’) applying exclusively to a given category or condition or locality; “a species unique to Australia”
Singular: the single one of its kinds; “a singular example”; “the unique existing example of Donne’s handwriting”; “a unique copy of an ancient manuscript”; “certain types of problems have unique solutions”
highly unusual or rare but not the single instance; “spoke with a unique accent”; “had unique ability in raising funds”; “a frankness unique in literature”; “a unique dining experience”

What is a unique blog to me?
A unique blog is a blog where it is different in their own ways, very unusual and we can’t find it on every blog. It can be unique in the design, writing style, marketing style, etc.

As you can see, if we want to create a unique blog, we must be different. Not only in blog design, but also in writing style and the ways we present something. We can have the same content, but we can be different by using a different approach.

How to make a unique blog?
Until we start to do the thing we like, we will never bring out our personality into our blog. We won’t be able to create something unique if we are imitating. If we want to be unique, we must learn how to express our feeling. I won’t be able to guide you when it comes to generate a unique blog, but I can share with you some of the tips that can get you started.

Be Personal
Getting personal doesn’t mean you blog all your personal life. But we bring our personal style and like into the blog. Try to start from your blog design, use the color you love and the layout you prefer. Don’t worry if anyone can read your writing or not, but do something you like first. And you can correct it later, because blogs are like people. They grow and become more mature along the author.

Researching
Even though we need to become selfish when trying to create a unique blog, the selfishness can be balanced by adding researching into our process. Because the readers that will judge if your blog is unique and bring out your personality or not. Whatever the change you make, a further researching can make your blog get a better score in that area.

Try Something You’ve Never Tried
We’re growing very fast when we were baby. The reasons why a baby can learn how to walk and communicate so fast just because they don’t stop learning and try something new. When they know walking is difficult, they’ll try to grab something nearby them to help them learning faster.

How about you? Do you want to stop trying something that you’ve never tried? Something which might be able to make your blog unique?

Continue When You Feel Good with it
Every human have an ability to judge if something is worth to continue or not. When you feel good to implement these new things, the further steps is to continue doing it.

Will you stop doing the things you like at first? Yes, and your judgement will make you stop doing it when the time comes.

How to Gather Blog Contents When You’re Out of Idea

2008-10-19T17:23:07Z

Originial Image by: Grafik Mekanik

What’ll you do if you don’t have enough content for your blog post? This is a common question newbie bloggers will ask, but luckily God bestows us with a brain that can produce countless ideas for us to write.

Finding blog contents or gathering blog contents is an important skill for bloggers. Not everyone can create 100% original content without being influenced by external sources. New content is made up from many sources you have interacted with. That’s why you can find some similarity between your post and another blogger’s post.

How to gather content efficiently?
1. Google Search Engine
You may use Google Search Engine every day, but do you know the syntax? The uses of syntax appears when you use “Advanced Search”. Here are some common uses of syntax in Google Search

+ (query): the keyword will definitely appear on the search result page. It can be used when you want some keyword to appear on result page.
E.g. Make Money +Blogging will have blogging in your result but “make” “money” can vary.

- (query): contrary of + (query), your result page will not show the keyword with – typed.
E.g. Make Money –Blogging. The result will not show any blogging keyword in there.

Exact result: Use quotation mark for exact phrase
E.g. “Make Money Blogging” will return you a result with the word in that order, or called exact result.

For more explanation to use search engine, you can view this video to become a wise searcher.

2. Stumble Upon
StumbleUpon is a Web 2.0 service where you can stumble the website category you prefer. How does it help you to gather blog content? I will stumble for a while to see if there are any interesting articles or websites for me to write. So when I find one, I’ll note down and continue to expand that idea later.

Why StumbleUpon?

I choose StumbleUpon because the stumbled website consists real good content. If we want to create great contents, we need to be influenced by great contents too. You should check this post if you’re using StumbleUpon.

3. Forum Discussion
Forum is a good place for gathering idea; we can see what people need and what they think. You don’t need to join the discussion but it will bring a greater impact if you can ask some feedback or live up the discussion.

4. Friends
I believe friends play an important role in blogging, sometimes you don’t realize that you have used too much time in blogging. Stop blogging for a while and go out with your friends. Ask them if they have visited your blog and ask their opinion. Whether the feedback is good or bad, you should give your thanks because they have used their time to visit your blog.

I often ask my friends if anything can be added in my blog in order to assist other people. Because some of them know nothing about blogging, I’ll ask them to read and see if they understand what I want to deliver to the readers.

5. Blog or Blogger?
When you’re a blogger, you need to interact with other blogger. The reason we should interact with them is to find out how they are doing with their blog. You can ask them how they market their blog, what is their next plan. And see if you can work together to achieve the target.

Subscribing to the blog you like can inspire you to write more influence content. I am often inspired by some blogs with relevant contents, so why not subscribe?

I have started my college and I won’t have too much time to blog, I have set a target to get 50 subscribers by the end of the month. Please help me to achieve this target by subscribing to it, that’s why we need to know how to set a reasonable target.

12 Bad Blog Designs You Should Avoid

2008-10-13T14:29:33Z

Beside content, blog design is also one of the parts that play an important role in blogging. For some blogger who always seek the way to improve their blogs, the unity in blog is significant. In this post, I’ll list out all the common mistakes you should avoid if you want to have a better blog.

PS. In this term, blog design not only point to the layout and its color. But blog design consisted of balancing between content, layout, functionality, usability, and all “lity”.

1. Excessive Ads
We know that some blogger wish to make money or at least making money from Adsense and the banner. Just want to make more money doesn’t mean you need to put a lot of ads on your blog. Try not to be very intrusive, you’ll gain a lot more by putting ads on a right place.

2. Bad Color Scheme
When your text is not clear for visitor to read, and when your friend have complain your blog design. The color scheme will determine if the readers will read or not. The combination between background color and text color is the primary thing you should pay attention to unless you want to create a bad blog design.

3. Too Much Crap
This is the term they use; you put all unnecessary widgets on your sidebar, header, and footer. You think it is cool, but the truth is nobody needs it. I’ll not subscribe to these blog because their design really irritating me.

4. Actual Content doesn’t Appear on the First Screen
People should be able to track your actual content easily, try to let visitor know what you have on the screen without letting them to scroll down first. If you can, let them see all high quality posts on it.

5. Surprise from Music
Some people may visit your blog during work time and they don’t want their boss to find out that they are slacking reading a blog. I hope no more surprise from you, or at least. Don’t make it auto play, let the reader choose to play the music or not.

6. Inappropriate Language
I know some of the website who uses a “real cool” language to attract visitor but I don’t think it’ll help your readers. One of the website using this as their style is I Can Have Cheese Burger. It’s up to you, but I really don’t recommend you to try this.

Image from : Brent Nelson

7. Very Slow Page Loading
It is very rare to see anyone using dial-up to connect to Internet but remember, if your page need more than 10 seconds to load, 80% the visitor will click back button and never come back to your site again. Choosing a suitable image and file type will save you from slow page loading problem.

8. No About Page
For a blog, it is a must have page. Visitors will want to find out who is the author of a blog, what they do and why do they create this blog. You can use “about page” to sell yourself and sell your blog. Selling means promoting, not selling your blog for money.

9. No Navigation Bar
Navigation bar is like a compass in a website/blog. When you don’t put compass in your blog, the visitor will get confused when they dig too deep in your blog. What is the characteristic of good navigation bar? It is considered as good when they assist your reader to find content and read your posts.

10. No Entry Points
Entry points are the links, or door to your posts. They can be in archives, blog roll, categories, or tags. If you can provide relevant entry points on your blog, the chances that visitor will read your post become very high.

11. Irrelevant Blog Rolls
I know there are some trends where bloggers exchange link with each other. What I find funny is for a “Health Blog” has blog roll linked to “Finance Blog”. Don’t exchange link for a useless link. But use your blog roll to link something which is relevant or at least useful to readers.

12. Dead Links/Broken Links
You can use this website to check if you get any broken links on your blog Sitemap Generator . Donate $5 can help you find out where your broken link located.

I’m not saying having the characteristic above means you have a bad blog design. However, if you think remove something will give your blog a better score. Why not? I’m sure you’ll click back button immediately when you stumble to a blog, have you ever asked why you leave that blog?

How to Use Google Analytic to Gain Subscribers (Part 2)

2008-10-13T14:22:12Z

Make money online niche is just another lying competition. Well, do you understand what I mean? I only want to scream out loud on these words. But it carries some meaning too. This is the second part of gaining subscribers through Google Analytic.

On my first post, I’ve talked about what Google Analytic is and I’ve prepared some data to show how it works. Let’s do it step by step.

1. Choosing Keyword

From the list of your keyword, choose the most relevant keywords to your site. I usually choose the keywords I want to focus on or I choose the keywords that bring the most traffic to my website. However, you need to consider the relevancy between the keywords and your contents. The more relevant it is the higher chance you can turn the visitors into subscribers.

2. Tweaking Your Post

If you figure out which post your keywords are pointing. You can immediately begin tweaking your post. I can find out easily just by looking these keywords since I only write one post on acne problem and blogger template. Here is the list of tweaking tips.

Ask for subscribing at the end of the post.
Tell the readers why they must subscribe, make it related to your post.
Read from the reader view, if you can answer why they type these keywords, all you need is to give them more option in exchange for subscription. Usually most of the visitor will be gladly to subscribe if they find your post solve their problem.
Add more value to the post by research more on these keywords.

3. Evaluating

This is a common sense, but not all blogger realize and do it. You need to evaluate the post you have tweaked.

Does your post become better after tweaking?
Is the reading flow goes well with the content?
Does your keyword still targeted or saturated by your added contents?
If you’re the reader, will you subscribe?

I think with these simple steps above you can increase your subscriber significantly. I don’t recommend you to do this all the time, but make sure your new content still up to date and while you have some spare time. Take a look at these graphics and do some tweaking on your post.

Gaining subscribers is not that difficult at all, you only need to spend your little time in forum to exchange RSS subscription. But the most difficult part is to turn your subscriber into loyal readers. Do you think you have the ability to turn these subscribers into reader?

Are You an Isolated Blogger?

2008-09-09T20:32:18Z

Whether you are alone or not, life is always full of enjoyment. So enjoy it while you can.

Gosh, it is 3:08 AM here when I write this post. I’ve been having a rough time to manage my time. Working and college at day and thinking what should I write for you guys at night. The difficult part is to make sure my posts benefit everyone. :D, but that is what life all about, full of enjoyment. I have just woken up from my deep sleep when I write this post.

Blogger, have it own community too. You can have this community in Twitter, Facebook, MyBloglog or BlogCatalog. I am the member of BlogCatalog and I find this community is weird and funny. However, I gain much knowledge from it, although I can smell some rats are lurking around there and making some pointless discussion.

Because I have posted this post. Let me share with you some benefit of having your own communities.

Gaining readers, only if your content entice them.
Gaining knowledge, you may know something that you don’t even know.
Researching Idea, when you have one idea and need feedback. Go for communities.
Building relationship with fellow blogger within the same niche if you focus on certain niche.

Why do I write this post? I just want to you to find a place where you belong. Who wants to ask you promoting your blog all the time and putting your affiliate links all over the site? Come one, blogging should be fun rather having a hard time with it.

In addition, check out this video, Polybore makes it. It is very cool, although I find it’s kind weird seeing some avatar. Nevertheless, I love it. :p