I am sure many of you follow the same process I would follow when starting a new website.

1. Have an idea for a new site.
2. Install and configure WordPress and install plug-ins.
3. Search for the perfect theme.

Now number 3 would always take lots of web searching, downloading, installing, activating, removing, over and over, no theme ever seemed to be just right.

Then I found the Frugal Theme. I found I can really make this theme into any look and feel I want all from within WordPress. Just about every single detail can be changed with a few clicks. It also has SEO built right in (which eliminates the need for SEO).

I have discovered that the more I use and dig into the frugal theme the more powerful it becomes. You will find out that Frugal is actually much much more than just a WordPress theme.

Are you tired of searching for the right theme? Get the Frugal Theme, you will not regret it!

Free Frugal Skins

FTP Client: The best choice here is Filezilla. Filezilla has now been around for many years and has the benefit of being free, and is continually being updated. I have used Filezilla personally for around 6 years and it has performed flawlessly for me. This is one great piece of software that happens to not only be free, but also open source.

Graphics Software: For graphics I would recommend Paint.net. Another really nice free program that is always being updated and refined. Paint.net has grown from a quite simple “paint” replacement into a powerful graphics tool. It is a light and fast program for simple image creation or editing photos. Paint.net also supports plugins that can enhance the functionality even more.

Text and HTML editor: A really nice simple text and HTML editor I would use Notepad2. For a simple no-nonsense editor that is miles ahead of the standard notepad.exe, notepad2 is a great choice for starting out with simple HTML and web-editing. It is one of those pieces of software that is installed right away on any new computer I use. Once installed, just be sure to active the line numbers feature.

Web Browser: Add a few great extensions to the Firefox browser, and you have an awesome browser and webmaster assistant all in one. So along with the basic Firefox install, this short list of extensions are ones that I use daily to assist in web design development and programming. (Just to note I use quite a few more, but those are great for getting started)

1. The Web Developer Toolbar
2. Search Status
3. Live HTTP headers

The big questions for me on Type Pad has always been:

1) Why pay for the right to use blogging software?

2) Why be  pour your blogging to a domain you do not own? To me that feels like remodeling a rental house on your own dollar.

So here is the answer:

The major benefit of using a service like Type Pad is ironiclly the same reason as the reasons not to. It comes down to this, if someone is paying a fee to a service to run their blog, then the content is likely going to be higher. All you have to do is look at all the lousy blogs on blogger and blogspot, etc…  You are not likely to find nearly the same ratio of quality blogs to spam blogs on a service like TypePad.

Any blog on typepad domain is likely going to get a natural boost for this reason.

Smush_it update: Smush_it is now a Yahoo tool and can be found here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/

Smush_It will smush a few extra bytes out of your images to make them smaller. In my experience it  shaves a little bit off each image, but if you add up  a few “k” off each image, it could add up to 20k in size. This could increase your page download speed by just enough seconds to improve your site. The way I see it is that every little thing you can do to speed up your website will benefit the site.

The best way to use smush_it, is with the firefox plugin. This makes it a snap to use, simple go to your page, click the smush_it icon and it will bring up the smush_it page and start fixing up your images.

You can see the results from this site, shaved 13k off the download size without changing any image quality or removing anything from the site. It’s like getting something for free! Note that sometimes it will change your GIF files to PNG, so you might have to change a few file references in your html.

And yes, it’s very addicting!!

Smush_it is by

http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2008/09/30/new-tool-easy-image-optimization-with-smush-it/

and

http://www.phpied.com/smushit-is-a-smash-hit/

How will you know if you website goes down? It could be hours, it could be days, but if you are not able to check it 24 hours a day? The anwser is with a website monitoring program. The program I use and recommend is a simply little application that runs on windows system. This program lets you load all your websites, then will give you either a tray notice, or an email if your site is down, or even if your site is running slow. Website Monitoring

www.dagondesign.com/articles/secure-php-form-mailer-script/

The emphases here is on secure, many times these scripts are terribly exploited by spammers, this one seems to be well done. I use this very form on many sites, and it works fabulously.

Here is a sample screen shot of the contact form.

You can use the “reCAPTCHA” tool, or the script has it’s on method using GD.

• SEO friendly (keyword, and urls)
• Easy to use (template driven)
• Low cost (under $200)
• Ownership (not leased or rented software)

Then I would recommend using CubeCart. I found this CubeCart review very helpful as well.

Using a rank checking tool is a real time saver. Rather than try to dig through results to find your site, this will give you the data in just a few seconds. The best way would be to export the data each time and name each file with the date it was run. This way you can track your ranking changes over time.

You can run the wordpress software with most hosting packages that supports PHP and MySQL. Don’t hesitate to get your business up on the web, register your domain name, and at least get something up and running. The longer you have your site out there the better it is in the long run for your website and business. Here is some great info about starting a blog.

My preferred method of getting web statistics is to download my log files, and process them locally on my own. To do this I use an ftp script I wrote to download the log files each day. Then I use awstats to process the log files into nice readable reports. Awstats works great for me, but it is a little bit more work to setup.

If you are looking for a super-easy way to get stats from your site, try Google Analytics. All you have to do is place a few lines of javascript code onto each page of your website everything else is done for you. Anaytics produces very snazzy graphs, and is simple to use, but I find there is SO much information there it can be hard to get to the basic stats I want to see.

Sometimes, you might think that you will just add stats later on once the site is running a bit, but let me tell you the best time to setup your stats is right there while you are putting your site up for the first time. It can be very hard (or impossible sometimes) to go back and get stats from the past. So just go ahead get it setup right from the get go. You’ll get addicted to your stats real quick.