Eric Daams

I like the Getting Started button in the middle of the header; it’s the first thing my eye was drawn towards.

Around the post titles, it feels a bit crowded. Perhaps use smaller text or lighter shades of grey for the less important bits, or leave more padding — as it is, it feels like the title of the post is getting swamped with other things vying for my attention.

It’s a CSS problem. In your style.css, find

#container {
    width:1000px;
    float:left;
    margin:1em 0 0 0px;
	position:relative;
}

And remove position:relative;

That should fix it.

Eric

Hi Cubes,

Welcome to the world of WordPress:)

1. In your blog’s admin area, go to Settings > General and tick ‘Anyone can register’; then go to Settings > Discussion and tick ‘Users must be registered and logged in to comment’

2. I use Contact Form 7 to make contact forms. Free and easy.

3. WPRecipes posted some code for how to enable this: http://www.wprecipes.com/wordpress-tip-allow-contributors-to-upload-files

Look out for is current_user_can('contributor') in that piece of code. The contributor bit means that only registered users who are classed as Contributors will be allowed to upload files; it still won’t allow Subscribers (the base level) to upload files, and for security reasons I don’t think you would want to allow that.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Eric

Yeah, I have to second Dan_85’s sentiments… A static grainy textured background would express the same thing without hurting the eyes. That background really doesn’t make me want to hang around.

Yeah, Thesis is a nice fit, especially with the content in the centre. Keep using lots of photos, as they add a lot of life and colour to the page.

I’d be careful about the “Raise money for the team!” bit above the Google ads though — Google has been known to cancel people’s accounts for encouraging clicks too much.

The thing with link exchanges these days is that they aren’t quite as effective as they used to be, simply because Google discounts the value of a link when it can detect that it’s part of an exchange. The more one-way links you have pointing into your website, the better.

My main blog is called Tea Finely Brewed, which is in the rather small niche of tea blogs. I managed to set up quite a few reciprocal blogroll links, but one of the things I’ve also found effective is to ask people who’ve linked to you before to link to a new piece you’ve written. Or if you know someone in the same niche or a related niche, ask them if they can link to one of your posts that’s relevant to them and their audience.

I’m not sure what that screenshot is of, but if you mean you want to remove that url from your WordPress.org profile, you can do so here: http://wordpress.org/support/profile/6047014/edit

A banner ad is just an image/graphic that is usually linked to the website it’s advertising. You don’t need a particular type of theme to run it, though your theme will have an impact on which banner sizes you can show (ie. if your sidebar is 250 px wide, you can’t run a 300px wide banner in your sidebar — well you could but it would look pretty crap).

I use AdRotate to run banner ads. It comes with a widget you can use in your sidebar.