I’m an avid WordPress supporter. That’s why you’re now looking at this WordPress blog. That doesn’t mean I’m against or anti-blogger.

The main concern to me about having a blog with your own domain name (powered by WordPress) and a free hosting blogspot with blogger.com is “ownership”.

Now, while having your blog using WordPress as the blogging platform is the ideal case, in terms of ownership and full control, you’d still need to leverage on the popular blogger.com to have your blogspots.

The ultimate advantages of blogspots are – it’s FREE! Yes, zero dime required to start a blog. And also, blogspots tend to have high (ready) traffic and (Google) search engine ranking position (SERP).

The only thing I’m “sick” of blogspots is the skin or theme. The default skins are so uninteresting and boring.

Worry not. There are tons of free blogger templates available online that you can use to face-lift your blogspots. Here’s one of my top recommendations :

http://mashable.com/2007/09/13/blogger-templates/

The blogger skins there are absolutely stunning! Try it!

Choosing a good web host is one of the most important steps in webmastering.

Bottom line, a good web host must be reliable with good SLA – service level agreement.

Here is the list of important criterias that must be included in a good web host :

• Supports PHP and CGI
• Ability to addon unlimited domains
• Able to create unlimited mySQL databases
• 99.99% uptime guarantee (SLA)
• 24/7 helpdesk support
• Include cPanel and Fantastico
• etc.

If you search for “asiapac web hosting”, you’ll see VREWebHosting.com on the 1st page (if not number 1) in Google. With web servers located in world-class data centers in Singapore, VREWebHosting provides the fastest response time to Singapore, Australia, India, China, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Indonesia and other Asia Pacific countries.

Hence, if you are in need of a reliable and quality web host, VREWebHosting should be your top choice.

Here are 2 of the best FREE Photoshop alternatives :

1. Paint.NET – http://getpaint.net

2. GIMP – http://gimp.org

Both are excellent graphic editors that support layers.

Between the 2, Paint.NET looks more sophisticated and can be rather intimidating for beginners. For those new to graphic editing, I’d suggest to try GIMP.

For those who frequently download files from the Internet, or simply hope to download files faster … much faster, I’d strongly recommend :

Free Download Manager

It’s a freeware which allow you to download (multiple) files at amazing speed. The best part is, it’s FREE!

Try it. You’ll surely appreciate this piece of software.

When anyone ask me which is the best blogging platform, I’ve only one answer – take a look at this blog … the answer is definite. It’s WordPress!

Basically, there are only 2 blogging platforms. Free or hosted.

Free blogging platforms refer to Blogger.com and WordPress.com (do not confuse this free hosting platform with the hosted one powered by WordPress).

Hosted blogs are blogs created at your own web server, usually with your own registered domain name.

Take WebmasteringTips.com for example. This is a hosted blog created with the web host cPanel (Fantastico). And the blogging platform for this blog is WordPress – the best blogging platform that I highly recommend you to use.

Advantages of the (hosted) WordPress blogging platform :

1. Full ownership – of the domain and content. You can have your own branding.

2. WordPress is extremely search engine friendly.

3. There are tonnes of free plugins you can use with WordPress.

4. There are tonnes of free WordPress themes (just like this one).

So the next time you’re deciding on which blogging platform to use, it’ll be WordPress!

There are the 3 “F”s which I’ll always try to avoid during web development.

No Flash

That’s right. I’ll avoid embedding flash (movie) in my web pages. The top reason for this is that when there is flash in a web page, it’ll take a long time for the page to load. If the visitors see nothing on your web page or are simply impatient to wait for page to load fully, they will just click “Back” and you’ll lose one valuable click.

No Fanciful Graphics

Similar to that of flash, I’ll make sure the size of the graphics and icons on my web page are less than 100KB (under 20KB for icons).

Frankly, it’s the texts that are important. It’s your salescopy that help you to sell, not graphics – technically.

The 3 best graphic formats to use on web pages are JPEG, GIF and PNG. Other than these 3 graphic formats, the rest such as BMP, TIFF etc. are a no-no for webpages.

By maintaining small sized graphics, web page will load fast. Ideally, a web page should be fully loaded within 15 seconds.

No Frame

I’ll always avoid using frame in my web page design. This is more for SEO consideration.

Take for example, my internet (fax) business website www.ezfax.com.sg. It is using frame. If you click on the tabs such as FAQ or Contact Us, you’ll noticed that the URL as displayed in the browser stays at www.ezfax.com.sg. It looks like there’s only 1 page.

In SEO terms, it’s better to have lots of web pages per website/domain so that each HTML page has a good chance to get good ranking on its own keyword.

Another reason to avoid frame is to eliminate navigation issue. At times, a new page might load from within the frame. Of course, these can be resolved by correcting the HTML codes but this might prove too technical for the less savvy.

When WordPress blogs are first set up, the permalinks are always ending with /?p=XX ie. http://designingweb.org/?p=1 etc.

Imagine you’ve blogged till your 100th post, what will be the permalink of the 100th post? You guessed it, it’ll end with /?p=100.

All the default permalinks will look almost identical except for the post number. That is not benefiting in terms of searh engine optimization.

To make the permalinks search engine friendly, it is best to include the title of the post as part of the permalink … move your mouse to the permalinks in this blog and you’ll see the difference!

Do a search in Google on the keyword “webmastering tips” now and you’ll see that the number 1 ranking is this blog and number 2 ranking is my first post (below). These are phenomenal results in SEO terms.

P.S. To edit your permalink structure, log in to your WordPress admin, Settings, Permalinks, and set /%post_id%/%postname%/ as the Custom Structure. Click Save Changes and your permalinks are optimized for the search engine.

The first and most important step for SEO (search engine optimization) is Keyword Analysis.

Keyword Analysis is akin to business feasibility study. Before you buy any domain to start any website, the first thing you must do is to determine how many possible searches are there for the respective keywords; this gives you the idea on the potential amount of clicks that could reach your website via search engines.

The best keyword analysis tool is none other than https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Why is it the best? Because it’s from Google itself and it’s FREE! Frankly, there is no need to invest in any other high-dollar keyword analysis tool.

With this Google keyword tool, you can also know the CPC (cost per click) of a keyword. If you’re trying to earn from Google AdSense, you’d want to choose a keyword with high CPC. In contrast, if you are the (AdWords) advertiser, this is the possible amount of CPC that you need to bid to appear as Sponsored Links in Google first page for the particular keyword.

If you’re not using this keyword tool yet, try it. You’ll love it for sure.

WebmasteringTips.com is ranking number 1 in Google.com for keyword “webmastering tips”, in less than 7 days of its launch!

The best thing is, I’ve not even started my WordPress SEO (search engine optimization) yet except that the keyword is in the domain name. In fact, the keyword IS the domain name.

Stay tuned and I’ll reveal to you how I fine tune this WordPress blog to become a search engine power-magnet.

P.S. WebmasteringTips.com is not indexed in Yahoo! and MSN search engines yet but I’m in no hurry to submit to them manually as I know the Google spiders will propagate WebmasteringTips.com to other search engines as well.

P.P.S. Definition of “spider” as in Wikipedia : A Web crawler (also known as a Web spider, Web robot or Web scutter) is a program or automated script that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms. This process is called Web crawling or spidering

Welcome to WebmasteringTips.com!

In this blog, I’ll show you all the tips and resources to create effective and profitable websites. That’s right, the keyword here is PROFITABLE.

To me, a website must be profitable, else it is not a successful one. There is no point to set up probably the most beautiful site but if it doesn’t rank high in search engine, have no traffic, or can’t generate revenue, then it is not a good site.

Being a webmaster for close to a decade and set up more than a hundred (personal and clients) websites and blogs, my main objective here is to show you the tips to “short cut” your website development time, and most importantly, to create effective and profitable websites.