WebPro Web Design And Local SEO
The great thing about using WordPress is that you don’t really need to be good at web design to use it. Although it was originally used for blogs, now it’s used for full static web pages as well. Beyond the capability of its great looking free themes, WP has a whole library of cool plugins as well. Almost any functionality you can think of has a plugin for it. See my post below for some of my favorite WordPress plugins.
Most of the web design modifications you’d like to make can be done through the Dashbaord, but occasionally you’ll have to make php code tweaks. That’s really not that hard to do, considering there is documentation  all over the internet for this purpose. The founder of the company that runs WordPress is named Matt Mullenweg, an entrepreneur living in San Francisco. Matt was on the Adam Corolla podcast not too long ago, and it was a great episode. Adam clearly didn’t know who Matt was, or what WordPress did. So that made for some comical moments.
It is known that Google likes WordPress blogs as well. This is because they are set up to be search engine friendly. Plus they allow comments to encourage user participation, so their content gets updated often. This makes Google’s spider come and crawl the site more often, indexing your pages and passing link juice.
Well I am a fan of working on my online business, but I also like to relax. I was looking around online and I found an Arizer Extreme q vaporizer review, which gave me the information I needed to decide. Let me know you, this thing gives some serious vaping action. After I program all day, working on my wordpress sites and so forth, I fire it up. It’s got both a whip and a bag. That’s the cool thing.
Not too many people know about vaporizers yet, but they are really catching on. They work by turning your “active ingredient” into vapor. It’s definitely way better than smoking. I don’t think I’ll go back to smoking. Sometimes I am out at clubs and people are smoking, it kinda irritates me. Not to mention that I am apparently allergic to smoke. So in general it is something to avoid. I was over at a shop the other day and I noticed they were selling vaporizers – they had a lot of the different brands. I also bought myself a little pipe, that would have been something cool to get.
Anyway, it’s been pretty hot in L.A. lately. Up in the Valley it gets to be over 100 degrees sometimes. But over by the beach the temperatures are generally more moderate. Sometimes it’s pretty sunny inland but it gets overcast by the beach.
Well it’s summertime in LA now and it has been HOT lately. It’s been over 90 degrees on the West Side and sometimes over 100 in the Valley. Â Nonetheless, the nights can still get pretty cool. Sometimes I like to chill in the backyard patio of my building, and one thing I’m considering buying is a fire bowl. These things are really cool. They’re basically a bowl that you light a fire in. So they’re good for those chilly nights. They also emit a neat-looking glow.
On particular fire bowl that I am looking at is the Landmann Ball Of Fire. This has to be among the most unique fire pits available. It’s shaped like a large ball. The fire is contained in the lower half of the bowl and the top half is covered by a wire mesh. At night, when there are no external lights around, it looks like a large glowing ball. I think this would make a great conversation piece for a backyard patio.
Otherwise just the usual stuff going on in LA. Next weekend they are going to shut down the 405 freeway from Friday night till Monday morning. Apparently it’s going to snare up traffic everywhere in the city. The 405 is connected to the 10 and the 101 so I expect those freeways will get pretty jammed up. Personally I think it’s a good plan to just stay local for that weekend, or to take an out of town trip. Â Palm Springs or Vegas might be good options. Then again, everyone else might have the same idea about getting out of town. So I would leave Thursday night or early Friday morning if I wanted to make good time on the 10E or the 15N. Also you should remember that the 15N is the happiest freeway in the world. But the 15S can be the saddest freeway in the world 
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what happens next weekend.
Recently there was an update to the Google toolbar pagerank. A lot of sites were affected by this update. Personally I had several sites gain in PR and one lose PR. The site that lost PR was a PR3 aged domain I had purchased at auction, so I was a little disappointed about that. However, when I bought the domain I was fully aware of the risks involved, so I’m not complaining. It’s all part of the SEO game.
There’s quite a lot of due diligence involved in buying aged domains with high PR. Â First you have to do a check for Fake PR using a site like rankchecker.com. Then take a look at the whois info to see if the domain was ever dropped. Then examine the backlink profile using a tool like SEOBook. Personally I like to see a diverse link profile from several different high-PR domains. The rule of thumb is: you want backlinks from at least three sites with equal of higher PR. Preferably, you want links from inner pages, because it’s less likely the webmaster will take those down. And of course you prefer contextual links to sidebar links.
If all of this looks good you can proceed to make a bid on a site. Right now things are a bit jump with the PR update so I’d hold off till things settle down.
Recently, the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) officially approved a way to indicate the author of a post or article. Why should you do this? Well, any webmaster has to be worried about having their content stolen by ‘scraper sites’. If you use authorship markup in a post, it gives the search engines a way to identify the original source. In turn, they can use this data to prevent a scraper site from outranking the original (although, they haven’t yet confirmed they will do this.)
So how to add the author attribute? It’s easy. First of all, create an author page for yourself. Then, when you write new content, link to your author page like this:
Author: Webpro
Next, you have to edit the html of that link – simply put the rel=”author” tag within the hyperlink:
Author: <a rel=”author” href=”http://www.webpro-designgrafico.com/about/webpro/”>Webpro</a>
There you have it! Now the big G knows that I wrote this content, and those lousy scrapers can’t rip me off.
Web design is one of our passions, but another one is movies! Although we are webpros, we do enjoy catching a flick from time to time. One of the best we’ve seen lately was X-Men: First Class. Honestly, it’s the second best action movie of all time, behind Point 
Break. I thought the script was excellent, the characters were well-developed, and the directing was top-notch. There’s so many movies that cost $200 million to make, but it seems like they can’t spend an extra $1 million to write a decent script. The director was Matthew Vaughn, who previously made the movie Kick-Ass.
In Los Angeles, Â I meet a lot of people who are aspiring actors or actresses in the film industry. I even have a friend who is a medical doctor, and he works as a film consultant for movies and tv shows. Personally, I am glad that I am a web designer and seo consultant – it’s much more stable work. I can’t blame people for trying to make it in the entertainment industry though. I just wish they would stop complaining about their agent.
In fact, I think that working as a web designer would be a good occupation for someone trying to make it as an actor. If you have the right clients it pays well, and it gives you the freedom to choose your own hours. It definitely beats waiting tables!
Chances are you have come here because of a failed WordPress update. This often happens if your internet connection times out during the update – it’s happened to me a few times. You may get an error message similar to:
Fatal error: Class “WP_List_Table” not found in mysite/wp-admin/includes/list-tables.php
Don’t worry; all is not lost. In my experience here are the steps to fix it:
1. Log in to your FTP account. If you don’t know what that is, then unfortunately you will have to find a different tutorial on fixing a failed WordPress update.
2. Go to www.wordpress.org. Click on the link on the homepage to download the latest version of WordPress. Open the zip file.
3. Re-upload all the files and folders into your FTP account – EXCEPT the wp-content folder. That means upload and overwrite the wp-admin and wp-includes directories, along with all the loose files. However, do NOT overwrite your wp-content folder!
4. Go your yoursite.com/wp-admin and you should be able to re-run the installation.
Lately I’ve been using Unique Article Wizard for creating backlinks to my niche sites. I bought it becuase it’s among the best-reviewed mass article submitters; it’s the one recommended by Pat Flynn in his post The Backlinking Strategy That Works. It’s not cheap – it costs $67/month. When I first started doing creating sites and doing SEO I couldn’t have imagined paying that much for an online marketing tool. However, my sites are making a bit of money lately so I decided to try it.
Like most IM software, there’s a bit of a learning curve. You’ll have to learn their system for submitting articles, which will take 20-30 minutes. The videos and documentation are pretty good. However, one annoying part of the UAW system is really not clear from the instructions: the reasons why an article can be rejected. More on that in a moment.
Now that I’ve used the software quite a bit, I can say there’s a few minor irritations with UAW. First of all, their article approval process is a bit slow. It seems that articles are not reviewed until the evening of the second day after you submit – in other words, if you submit on a Tuesday afternoon, the article will not be reviewed until late Wednesday night (probably while you are sleeping, if you are in the US). So you won’t know until Thursday morning whether your article was approved or not. If your article is rejected, then you have to start the process all over again. So now the delay is 4-5 days before your article starts posting. Plus they don’t review articles on Sunday, so it could take even longer.
Why would an article be rejected? Well, the most common reason I’ve received from UAW support is “Sorry, but” Unfortunately, many of the articles I have available are product review articles, and these are exactly the type that get rejected. So I can’t just take my product reviews, spin them, and submit them to UAW. I’ve had to write entirely next content to get it approved. This costs extra time and expenses.
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Ever needed to add an extra $1.00 to your Amazon order so that you can get Free Super Saver Shipping? Here is your answer:
Tarzan Tattoos.
Amazon filler item. Get one - It might be the best decision you make in the next twenty seconds.
Yes, Tarzan tattoos. I really can’t say enough nice things about them. Many times they have saved me $6.99 in shipping costs. Personally I have never applied the tats. I can’t imagine the author, Steven James Petruccio, makes much money from them. How much margin can you get on an item that costs one dollar?
Now if you need to add $2.00, there is another option – look for the book:
A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Mr. Jonathan Swift. Some say this book is fantastic satire. I say, for two dollars, how can you go wrong? You are likely to learn a lot more from this book than you will learn from Tarzan Tattoos. In fact, you may want pay the extra dollar and get the Swift book anyway.
Whenever I install WordPress on a new website, I have a standard set of plugins that I add as well. Here’s a few that I have found to be quite useful (all available at www.wordpress.org/extend):
1) All In One SEO pack – This is a great plugin that automatically optimizes your blog for SEO purposes.
2) WP Table Reloaded – Sometimes I like to align or center images, and this plugin makes it easy.
3) Custom Contact Form – This is the best contact form plugin. However, it’s a little hard to understand how to use it at first. Now that I’ve spent some time with it, I love the functionality it provides.
The WordPress theme that I like to use most often is the Studiopress Agency theme. I’ve found that Studiopress themes make some great-looking, SEO-optimized sites. They’re all run off a ‘framework’ called Genesis. Each theme is $79, or you can buy their whole package for $299.
There is a bit of a learning curve with the Genesis framework. Now that I’ve built several sites off Agency, I’ve got instructions written out for each of the little tweaks I want to make. Studiopress is helpful in that they provide plugins like Simple Edits and Simple Hooks for some of the most common changes. They also have a decent support forum in which most questions are answered within a day.
Well, summertime is almost here and that means I am ready to grill. My diet is heavily weighted toward protein ever since I read The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. I’ve been trying to cut back on the carbs, and so that means I need to eat more meat. Essentially this means I am eating a lot of chicken, beef, and pork. I also add some veggies and legumes to ensure I am getting enough calories. Ferriss points out that calorie count alone isn’t enough when you are dieting; you also have to watch your macronutrient balance. So this means lots of protein, some fats, and very few carbs.
This means I have to find lots of interesting recipes for different kinds of meat. Often this means I will end up grilling on one of my portable bbq grills. I get some organic beef or chicken from Trader Joes and throw it on the barbecue grill. I get some nice sear marks on one side, then try to flip it just one time during cooking. This usually results in some excellent grilled meals.
If you’re looking at getting a grill, I definitely recommend you get one from Weber. They are the best maker of portable grill on the market today.
