Design and Branding Blog | BrandFreeze » Blogging

Top Places to Find Premium WordPress Themes

Brandon — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 03:41:12 +0000

There are many places to find WordPress themes. Below I’ve compiled a list of the best places to find premium WordPress themes. Enjoy!

UpThemes

With their Theme Club, you gain access to their collection of premium WordPress themes and top-notch support. Build amazing websites for your clients (or yourself) and get help when you need it.

Why choose Press75.com? In short, their themes are unique, clean and efficient with several key customization and content management options. Basically, you get everything you need and absolutely nothing you don’t.

WooThemes

Their themes are all built on a solid code framework which they have fine tuned over time. With a new backend to let you easily control the theme options and multiple theme styles to every theme, it won’t take you long to get up and running.

Themeforest

At ThemeForest you can buy and sell HTML templates as well as themes for popular CMS products like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal with prices ranging from just $5 up to $40. Items are priced on the complexity, quality and use of the file. The site is home to a bustling community of web designers and developers and is the biggest marketplace of its kind.

RocketTheme

Welcome to the new home for the very best in Joomla Templates, Drupal Themes, WordPress Themes, phpBB3 Styles, Extensions, and the very best web development community bar-none!

Thesis Theme

Thesis Theme for WordPress is a premium template system designed to serve as the rock-solid foundation beneath any kind of website. Over 25,793 people rely on the airtight SEO, incredible design flexibility, and lightning-fast loading times that Thesis provides.

MojoThemes

MOJO themes is a marketplace for everyone to BUY or SELL themes and templates. They sell themes for the most commonly used CMS and e-commerce platforms on the web such as WordPress, Tumblr, Joomla, and Magento. Their templates range from basic PSD templates to complex HTML site templates.

Templatic

A place to get out of the box, premium and awesome WordPress themes to fulfill your needs in different areas of blogging and web design. From a simple Blogging theme, to a complete e-commerce integrated WordPress theme, they are releasing themes in diverse range so you can use WordPress as a CMS.

WPRemix

WP Remix 3.0 – the only theme on the net that offers WYSIWYG page template editing.
Over 50 page templates to choose from.

DailyWp.com

Free and premium WordPress themes for blogs, portfolios, news, and more.

StudioPress

StudioPress themes are a perfect solution for small businesses or individuals looking to establish their online presence with a WordPress blog or website.

SoloStream

It doesn’t have to cost a lot to publish your new blog or website, and it doesn’t have to be difficult. With WordPress and Premium WordPress Themes from Solostream, you can get a professional-looking website or blog up and running for less than a hundred bucks.

PremiumPress

Design and develop quality, feature rich Premium WordPress Themes for small, medium and large businesses. Their themes include a shopping cart theme, coupon site theme, classifieds theme, and many others.

Headway Themes

Who says you have to dig deep into HTML to change the layout of your site? Headway’s Visual Editor lets you do anything from create a standard blog page to creating an e-commerce site.

ElegantThemes

From ElegantThemes.com, “I created this website to provide WordPress themes of quality and integrity. I craft my themes with a goal of simplicity and professionalism and strive to inject each design with a dose of modest elegance. I believe that your website is not just a tool, it is an integral part of your identity. My job is to respect each customer by providing attractive and userfriendly templates that will help you achieve your online goals.”

ThemeJam

ThemeJam delivers professional quality themes for WordPress. They take it further and give you additional formats to complete your online presence. Formats include WordPress themes, site templates, and email templates.

Viva Themes

They create quality and professionally designed WordPress themes. They offer themes for your business, blog or personal sites. All of that comes with excellent free support.

Obox Design

Gorgeous design and functionality that you would normally only be able to attain from expensive professional agencies. Obox creates premium themes built for multiple platforms.

WP Zoom

WPZOOM is a small team of two talented web-designers which create Premium Themes for blogging platform – WordPress.

ithemes

iThemes is one of the leaders in producing high-quality premium WordPress themes for photographers, designers, and businesses.

Gabfire Themes

Gabfire Themes was founded in 2008 by Mehmet Ozekinci a 29-year old independent web designer and web project consultant based in Estonia.

Organic Themes

From OrganicThemes.com, “Aloha, Organic Themes is a complete WordPress theme solution company founded in the remote town of Lahaina on the Hawaiian Island of Maui. Lahaina is referred to as the art capital of the Pacific, and we believe our beautiful surroundings and healthy environment translate directly in to the design and development of our premium WordPress themes. At Organic Themes, we work hard to play hard.”

Theme Shift

ThemeShift WordPress themes are professional-looking and extremely well-coded. A lot of handy features let you turn your blogging software into a CMS. Packages include theme updates. You have access to the latest version at any time and get a mail when a new version is published.

NattyWP

From NattyWP.com – “We are developing professional wordpress themes and provide efficient support of our templates. Join the club and choose the membership that suits your needs. We are proud to invite you to the best wordpress themes club and provide you with the full access to all our themes, as well as tutorials, support and the community forum. Join us now!”

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Q&A with BuySellAds Founder, Todd Garland

Brandon — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:05:23 +0000

BuySellAds.com was founded in February/March 2008 and helps online advertisers and website publishers buy and sell ads better. Below Todd shares his insights and experience in rapidly growing BuySellAds.

For those readers who are preparing to launch or have recently launched their app/web-based service, can you share what you guys did early on to attract those initial customers for BuySellAds?

The first thing was having an app/product that solved a common problem. Since we were initially solving this problem for ourselves, telling our story was very easy, natural, and resonated well with the initial users we approached. With BSA we were lucky in that it was very obvious who could benefit from using the app. We weren’t competing with other ad networks, we were competing with the individual website owners who were currently doing by hand what BSA was built to do. It was very grass-roots, sending legitimate personal emails and letting our passion for the business show through with fast and accurate support.

What do you attribute to BuySellAds’ success? How have you grown so quickly?

Two things. First, we were making website owners (mostly freelancers) more efficient – people who tend to always be busy, and for whom time is real money. Second, our intentions have always been very genuine and transparent from the start, and we have been extremely consistent for over 2 years now. Consistently delivering for your users is key. It’s a great way to build loyalty and the only true way to win business month after month.

How are you currently marketing BuySellAds? Can you elaborate on what has and has not worked well for you?

We still have a very grass-roots approach. Our best marketing comes from our users who recommend us, write blog posts, and tweet about us. After that it is our support. Providing great support has really strengthened relationships with our users. Any company who doesn’t provide awesome support these days is crazy, it’s the easiest thing to get right. All you have to do is care.

What role do you think design and usability has played in the success of BuySellAds? Has it given you an edge over the competition?

Since the majority of our users are web designers and developers (or looking to market to them) I think that design has played somewhat of a role. I say somewhat because the early versions of BSA weren’t pixel perfect (the current version isn’t either). However, when it comes to usability, I think it’s played a larger role than design. It is so incredibly easy for someone to buy an ad through us, people get addicted. It’s fun. You can get your ad live on some serious websites in only a few minutes. The design and usability of our site is always something that we will work hard to improve. It is a personal passion of mine, and I value this aspect of our business highly.

What are the key metrics for your business that you review regularly?

Well, to be honest, we have been growing so quickly that I do not look at all that I should. The metrics that tend to put me in a good mood or a bad mood are our total cancellations, total new purchases, total recurring purchases on a daily basis and on a month to date basis. These three stats hold the pulse of the business and allow me to make basic decisions on where to focus our time from week to week. Beyond that, we tend to dive into publisher specific earnings and advertiser specific results while trying to make recommendations and sell more ads.

Looking back, what are the top three things you wish you would have done differently since launching BuySellAds?

I wish that I would have quit my full-time job sooner and focused 100% on BSA before Jan. 1st 2009. I wish that I would have started delegating sooner – I am a control freak and teaching other people how to do parts of my job is a hard thing for me, because I enjoy every aspect so much. Lastly, I wish that I had not spoken with venture capitalist. While I greatly appreciate meeting those that I did and was fortunate to hear their valuable advice, I was never fully committed to raising money and it ended up being a huge time commitment.

What tips would you give someone who is launching an app for the first time?

This is almost a bit cliché these days, but it’s true: get it out there, launch, constantly iterate and improve.

Thanks for sharing your experience with our readers Todd!
Be sure to visit their website at http://www.buysellads.com

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Ultimate List of Share Icons for Your Blog

Brandon — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:08:51 +0000

Here are some of the best social share icons I’ve found. Share your content in style with these social share icons for your blog. Enjoy!

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iPhone Apps to Help You Manage Your Blog

Brandon — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:31:45 +0000

Below are the three iPhone apps I use daily to plan and manage BrandFreeze. Which iPhone apps are you using to manage your blog? Please share in the comments below.

Evernote

I use Evernote daily to jot down and organize ideas for blog posts and develop a simple editorial calendar for upcoming posts. Evernote also allows you to search for text within photos, which comes in handy if you need to snap a photo of notes written on paper or on a whiteboard.

http://www.evernote.com/about/download/iphone/
Price: Free

AnalyticsApp

AnalyticsApp gives you access to your Google Analytics data on your iPhone. I keep track of overall traffic and drill down to see which sites are referring visitors and which posts are receiving the most traffic. This information is key when planning for upcoming posts and gaining a better understanding of the types of content that interest readers most. It’s definitely worth the $6.

http://analyticsapp.com/
Price: $5.99

Tweetie

I use Tweetie to keep up with what’s happening on Twitter and I’ve been using it for a while. I gave the TweetDeck app a try but prefer Tweetie. Do you use Tweetie, TweetDeck, or another Twitter app for the iPhone?

http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/
Price: $2.99

Thanks for reading guys!
Which iPhone apps are you using to manage your blog?

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Interview with Grant Friedman: Founder of Colorburned

Brandon — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:48:47 +0000

Today we have Grant Friedman, a freelance designer and founder of Colorburned. Colorburned is a popular design blog that provides design news, resources, and tutorials from around the web.

Tell me more about your background. How did you get started in graphic design?

I got my start in graphic design about 10 years ago. Back then, the Internet was still relatively new to everyone. I volunteered to figure out how to distribute a newsletter to the membership of a student organization I was involved with over email.
It didn’t take much time before I began taking classes in HTML, Dreamweaver, and Macromedia Fireworks.

Eventually, I migrated over to Photoshop and Illustrator. Today, I’m a design junkie and couldn’t be happier!

How long have you been doing freelance work?
I’ve been doing freelance work since the beginning. I used to have a full-time job working for the government a while back but I’ve been freelancing and blogging full-time for a about 2 years now.

What type of projects do you typically work on (branding, website design, print design, etc)?
I will work on all sorts of projects. I’m happy to do branding, web design, or print but typically I like to work on projects that don’t involve a lot of code.

What tools/apps do you use to help manage your work?
I’m fairly old-school in terms of project management. I handle most of my projects through careful organization of email. There are a lot of project management apps out there but for the most part I’m just too small-time to make the most of them at this point.

What advice would you give to other freelance designers who are just getting started?
I always give the same advice to aspiring graphic designers. When you’re just starting out most people will try to take advantage of you. They will say things like -”since you’re just starting out we can’t pay you much money or we can’t pay you much but this job will be a great opportunity to build your portfolio”. Don’t let this happen! Whatever you do make sure that you are fairly compensated for your time. It’s very hard to get over the stigma of being some one who will do work for free. It’s better to be thought of as some one who charges a fair price.

I see that you have a book coming out entitled Retro Style Graphics (1000s of Style Palettes). What is it about the retro style that enticed you to write a book about it? When will the book be available?
If you were to tell me 5 years ago that I would be publishing a book in the near future, I would have called you crazy! But after my blog started to take off about a year or so ago, the thought of writing a book seemed a bit more plausible, although far-fetched. That was until Angela Patchell of Patchell Books contacted me about writing Retro Style Graphics. I’ve always been fascinated with retro-inspired design so I enthusiastically agreed.

Click the Book to Pre-Order from Amazon

The book is essentially a resource style guide of retro-style graphics. The book will include an attached CD which will contain Illustrator brushes, Photoshop brushes, vector graphics, textures, color palettes, lists of retro fonts, links to tutorials, and much more! The book should be available some time in October or November of 2009.

Tell me more about Colorburned. When did you start the blog?

Colorburned originally started as a means of promoting my portfolio. At the time, I had just left my position with the government and was preparing to find a design job in the private sector. The more I got into blogging, the more I found myself drawn to the freelance lifestyle. When my blog began to take off several months later I just kept at it. Now I rarely update my portfolio and plan to eventually migrate it away from the site.

How many people do you have writing for Colorburned?
There are 11 authors on the site but I am the only one who contributes full-time.

How often do you post new content?
I try to publish new content about 3-5 times per week.

Since launching Colorburned, how have you seen it grow. Walk us through the stats for the site 6 months after launch, a year after launch…
When I first started Colorburned in May of 2008 the site was receiving about 1,200 visits per month. By November of that year Colorburned was receiving over 60,000 visits per month. By July of 2009 Colorburned had doubled that figure and is now receiving about 120,000 visits per month.

In terms of RSS subscriptions, the site now has over 5,000 and growing. I have to say that one of the most flattering statistics however is the number of followers my site has on Twitter. By the end of September I’m hoping to have reached the 10,000 follower mark which would be an amazing accomplishment.

There are a number of plug-ins, scripts, and customizations within the design for Colorburned. Can you give us a list of these?

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin for displaying related posts
Glider.js to power the slider for featured content
Darren Hoyt’s TimThumb Script for auto-creation and auto-resizing of images to create the dynamic thumbnails below the featured content slider

There was also custom work done to integrate Twitter below each Commenter’s avatar as seen here:

For a nice run-down on the inner workings of the site check out this case study from E.Webscapes.

Give us the run down on the Hardware and Software you use.
Sadly, I’m currently running a couple of 5 year old Dell computers. I’ve been meaning to upgrade to a Mac but I’m holding out until one of them dies. In terms of software, I’m still running CS3 right now but will upgrade as soon as I buy a new computer.

Thanks for taking the time Grant. We look forward to following your continued success with Colorburned, your freelance work, and your new book.

Be sure to check out Colorburned.com and follow Grant on Twitter.

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Thesis Theme: SEO Goodness and Design Flexibility

Brandon — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:43:46 +0000

About a month ago I decided to purchase Thesis Theme for WordPress. I had been hearing a lot of hype and finally took the plunge. I read a lot about the flexibility it allows for search engine optimization, ability to quickly make changes to your layout, image settings, etc… Well, it definitely lives up to the hype.
This is not a paid post. I’m just a fan of Thesis.

SEO for Your Blog and How Thesis Can Help

Regardless of whether or not you’re a marketer or if you even care about search engine optimization, you need to make sure you take the right steps in making your blog search engine friendly. It doesn’t take a lot of work, especially with Thesis. By selecting a few checkboxes you can choose portions of your site to block from being indexed by the search engines, preventing bloat and diluting results. You can also check a box to use canonical URLs.

In general, editing title tags and meta-data is simple however Thesis allows you to do this even easier by expanding a menu within your Thesis Options in WordPress and entering your title tag and meta-data in a provided field.

A side note on SEO for your blog:
Here’s a video of Matt Cutts at WordCamp in San Francisco earlier this year. Matt leads Googleâ€™s Web Spam Team and in this presentation he provides pointers on optimizing your blog for the search engines (Matt also uses Thesis for his blog). The presentation is entitled “Straight from Google: What You Need to Know“. It’s a bit long at 46 minutes, but contains a lot of great information that you can implement immediately.

Getting a Little More Technicalâ€¦Using Thesis OpenHook

Another feature that I love about Thesis is “Thesis OpenHook”. It allows the “rest of us” to easily work with hooks in WordPress and insert bits of CSS, HTML, JavaScript, or PHP to include content in pre-defined locations within your site. As you can see below once you add Thesis to WordPress and install the Thesis OpenHook plug-in you’ll be given access to an interface for OpenHook, where you can quickly add content within these specified areas of your site.

Once installed youâ€™ll also be given access within WordPress to “Thesis Custom Styling” where you have quick and easy access to your “custom.css” file to add and edit styles. In addition, you’ll also have access to “Thesis Custom Programming” where you can edit your “custom_functions.php” file. You can make changes to functions right in the custom functions file or simply add the needed function within the Thesis OpenHook interface. So to recap, these “hooks” allow you to easily insert content into various blocks of your site. For example, “thesis_hook_after_post” allows you to add standard content after each blog post. This would be where you would add your share icons that appear at the end of each post.

Designing/Editing Your Blog Using Thesis

Design Options
Within “Design Options” you can edit fonts and their sizes across various sections of your blog and also easily set the number columns, their order, and the width of each.

You can also set preferences for Posts that are displayed as Teasers and select the information you’d like to display for each such as Post Title, Author Name, Date, Number of Comments, etc… In addition, you can select the date format, specify the text for your “Read More” link for each teaser and the font sizes for the various elements of the teaser.

Thesis Options
Within “Thesis Options” you can edit the way in which the Header, Bylines, Posts, Archives, Tagging, and Comments are displayed.

For the Header you can determine whether you’d like to display the site name and tag line in the header of your blog. You’ll probably want to add a custom graphic for your header so in that case there would be no need to enable the displaying of “Site name” and “Tag line” for your header.

For Bylines you can edit various information you’d like to display for each post, along with adding or removing “no follow” for author links.

For Posts you can edit preferences for your “features” teasers such as whether you’d like to display the full post or an excerpt, set the Read More” link for your post and choose whether you’d like to display links to the previous or next article.

For Archives you can easily select the display format for you posts. You can choose whether you’d like posts displayed as Titles only, all Teasers, the same as Your Home page, or as excerpts. Sidebar and Administration options are in this list as well. Not much to talk about with these. You can simply choose whether you’d like to display the default sidebar widgets and show the admin links.

Under Tagging you can edit where tags will be displayed (on single entry pages and/or on index and archives pages) and select whether you’d like to add “no follow” to tag links.

There are a number of other settings within Thesis Options such as defining the positioning and size of thumbnails and post images. In addition, you can edit the pages to include in your primary navigation, their order, and the text for each.

Before using Thesis I was still concerned about the flexibility and if you could really customize it to look the way you wanted. But as you can see from the examples below, you can rip it apart and really customize it any way you wish. The support has been great as well and there is a community of users who help each other get the most out of Thesis no matter if you’re a newbie or an experienced coder.

Below are a few examples of sites running WordPress with Thesis:

If you aren’t very technical, or if you are but want to make editing and optimizing your blog a heck of a lot easier, I would seriously recommend checking out Thesis Theme (non-affiliate link).

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Setting Up a Simple Backup Process for WordPress With the recent attacks on older versions of WordPress (pre...

Setting Up a Simple Backup Process for WordPress

Brandon — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:45:28 +0000

With the recent attacks on older versions of WordPress (pre 2.8.4) and some bloggers losing months of posts I thought I’d share one of the easiest ways I’ve found to setup a backup process for your WordPress blog. I’m using the WordPress Database Backup plug-in (WP-DB-Backup) and automatically emailing a copy of my files into my Gmail account each day. I send them over to my Gmail account because the amount of storage with Gmail is sufficient and it’s easy to organize them into a separate folder via Gmail’s filters. It’s a very simple way to automatically back up your blog and perhaps some of you are using it, but for those that are not, I highly recommend it. I feel a bit like I’m stating the obvious with this post, but I’m still surprised at how many people are not setting up some sort of process for backing up their blog.

To get started, you’ll want to login to WordPress and download the WordPress Database Backup plug-in.

Next, set up an email forwarder within your hosting account to forward these backups over to Gmail. You can call it backup@yoursite.com . Here’s a screen shot of how I set it up within my hosting account:

Next, login to your Gmail account and click “Create a Filter”:

Enter your domain forwarder in the “To” field and click “Next”:

For options, click the following check boxes as shown below (Skip the inbox, Mark as read, Apply the label, and Never send it to Spam) and select “New Label” from the drop down menu for “Apply the label” and give the filter a name. I named mine “BrandFreeze Backups”.

Finally, click the “Create Filter” button.

Now, over in WordPress click Tools > Backup and you’ll see the various settings for the WP-DB Backup plug-in including the Tables and Plugins you’d like to backup:

Backup" title="Tools > Backup" width="145" height="172" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-506" />

Another option on this page allows you to run manual backups and choose where you’d like to send the file:

For our automated backup we’re going to use the “Scheduled Backup” options. You’ll want to enter your email forwarder (backup@yoursite.com) as the “Email backup to:” address. You can then schedule how often you’d like the backup to run and select any tables for your plug-ins that you’d like to backup as well.

Once you have selected your desired settings, click “Schedule Backup” and you’re done.

Now, your blog will run automated backups and send them right into your Gmail account where they are organized via a filter. I have mine scheduled to backup once a day and I view the filter once a week and delete all files from the previous week except for the most recent…just to save space and keep things tidy.

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20 Creative Ways of Displaying Share Icons

Brandon — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:59:24 +0000

Twitter and Digg and Delicious – Oh my! In seeking inspiration for different ways of displaying share icons, I compiled a list of 20 design blogs. Below I’ve included the various ways these blogs are displaying share icons. Any others that should have been included? Leave a comment and share.

Freelance Switch

Hongkiat

Tutorial9.net

Viget Labs

Mashable

InspiredMag

Outlaw Design Blog

SixRevisions

UXBooth

Fuel Your Creativity

Best Blog Box

Colorburned

All-for-Design.com

Base6Design

AndySowards.com

Ideas on Ideas by Eric Karjaluoto

InstantShift

Web Designer Wall

Think Design Blog

Pro Blog Design

And those are 20 creative ways others are displaying share icons on their blogs. Leave a comment below and let us know who else is displaying share icons in a creative way.

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Interview with David Leggett: Founder of Tutorial9.net

Brandon — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:09:34 +0000

David Leggett is a designer, blogger, and founder of Tutorial9; a leading website that provides Photoshop, Web Design, and Photography tutorials. David shares his experience in developing and growing Tutorial9, and provides advice for bloggers who are just getting started.

How did you get started in design?

Playing with 2D and 3D editing software was sort of a childhood passion of mine. Between a copy of Paint Shop Pro and Cinema 4D, I spent hours every day experimenting and dabbling on the computer.

I’m not sure I could justify that as design though. I believe that I’ve only just scraped the surface of designing, or creating experiences specifically built for certain groups of people in recent years. There is something about crafting an entire experience that greatly interests me.

Tell me more about Tutorial9.net….what’s your mission for the site?

Tutorial9 is a community platform for teaching and sharing resources. As a whole, we teach Photoshop, Web Design, Photography, and share useful downloads all for free. We pride ourselves in quality resources, and a super friendly community.

Our mission is to be the ultimate user-generated tutorial website by providing the best free resources online, and to inspire the community to lend helping hands to one another.

How long ago did you start Tutorial9?

We started working on Tutorial9 in December of 2007, and we launched May 1st, 2008. It just turned 1-year old, and it’s growing stronger every day!

I love the design of the site. How did you develop the concept? How much did it change from conception to final implementation?

Tutorial9 may only be a year old, but it’s already undergone 4 redesigns. A lot of our early attempts to capture the right mood and offer the right experience didn’t quite work out. Our current look is a huge step in the right direction, but it’s not flawless… Then again, a website is never actually 100% perfect!

The concept is slightly evolved from our original monochromatic look. Blue is sort of our color, but Tutorial9 never felt as friendly and fun as it actually was when we stuck to so few colors. The current design really put some emphasis on our creative side: Our background is chuck full of swirls and design elements that immediately identify T9 as a creative site.

Under the hood though, a lot of thought was put into the actual interface so that there is a balance between form and function. The site looks pretty, and also is very easy to use.

Which WordPress plugins do you use for Tutorial9?

These are the important ones – the fewer plugins, the better performance you typically have!

All in One SEO Pack (I actually really despise “SEO” as a practice, but this plugin is very useful for on the fly editing of page attributes that would otherwise require more work in the backend)
Dagon Design Form Mailer (Best. WordPress. Forms. Evar.)
Similar Posts (Modified)
Role Manager
SyntaxHighlighter Plus (For fancy code in scripting tutorials)
WP-CommentNavi (Paged Comments)
WP-PageNavi (Paged Category pages and archives)
WP Super Cache (Must have for power users)

How often do you post new tutorials?

We usually have 1-2 new posts every week. Our community is growing, and we’ll likely raise the bar to 2-3 very soon!

Typically, a tutorial or resource will take anywhere from 3-10 hours to complete. We try to make sure our resources are highly polished before sharing them with our community!

How many people do you have contributing to Tutorial9?

Currently, there are about 40 Active users who have contributed some sort of resource to our community.

We consider many of our viewers to be active contributors as well. Tutorial9 depends on its active community to help spread the word when new posts go up by sharing it with others socially. Without our awesome users, we wouldn’t be where we are today. It really is their website.

How many monthly unique visitors were you receiving 6 months after launching? 1 year after launching?

200,000 unique visitors at six months
400,000 unique visitors at one year

We’re expecting close to 500,000 for September 2009

What’s next for Tutorial9? Where do you see the site a year from now?

Right now we’re still focusing on building a strong foundation with our community. We’re really depending on our users to help us build the most useful free resource out there – and so far they haven’t failed to disappoint.

In the next year, we’d like to have Tutorial9 be the largest community tutorial platform online with an awesome reward/recognition system that showcases our top contributors and most helpful users.

How were you able to grow the site so quickly?

My recipe for a successful site is very simple:

Passion + Hard Work + Striving To Help People = Foundation for Success

Tutorial9 is all about helping people. Our contributors are all very friendly, helpful people who really care about other people in the community. We make sure that we reward our contributors amply so that they can share really top of the line resources with our audience.

How do you currently market the website?

I’m not really into all that marketing jazz. I think marketing can be a very good thing (despite all the bad stuff going on in the advertising niche – when done right, it isn’t a bad thing), I’m just not a marketer myself.

The community has really been our means for spreading the word about the site. By publishing great content, we’re constantly being featured in other design blogs, and our viewers are always sharing us with their friends and on social bookmarking sites.

What advice would you give other bloggers who are just getting started?

Value is key to building a successful blog: If you can offer something of unique value to your readers, everything else sort of falls into place over time. Think of ways you can help your specific audience. Can you educate them in something you know very well? Can you save them time or money? Can you make them laugh? Be Helpful!

I see that you have two additional websites, UX Booth and the soon-to-be-launched BetterBlogger.net. How will BetterBlogger.net help its readers become better bloggers? Tell us more about these websites.

UX Booth is a blog about user experience design. It’s a group project with a growing community (not by any means my personal project, just one I’m lucky enough to be a part of!) UXBooth is really a site that helps other designers and developers build better user experiences. We’ve recently had the privilege to share some of what we know in publications like the Smashing Book!

Better Blogger is a personal project of mine that will be launched “When It’s Ready.”

The whole idea behind Better Blogger is that there is so much absurd information about blogging (as a profession) on the internet that it is difficult for a new blogger to know where to start. There is so much hog wash about getting rich fast, making money without any effort, and terrible marketing techniques. My goal with Better Blogger is to share useful information from real life experiences that will help people get started on the right foot – and also help experienced bloggers grow their sites even more.

Here’s where David gets his work done:

David, thanks for taking the time to share your experience with us. We’ll be keeping a close eye on Tutorial9 and UX Booth as they continue to grow and on the lookout for the launch of BetterBlogger.net.

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Q&A with BuySellAds Founder, Todd Garland

For those readers who are preparing to launch or have recently launched their app/web-based service, can you share what you guys did early on to attract those initial customers for BuySellAds?

What do you attribute to BuySellAds’ success? How have you grown so quickly?

How are you currently marketing BuySellAds? Can you elaborate on what has and has not worked well for you?

What role do you think design and usability has played in the success of BuySellAds? Has it given you an edge over the competition?

What are the key metrics for your business that you review regularly?

Looking back, what are the top three things you wish you would have done differently since launching BuySellAds?

What tips would you give someone who is launching an app for the first time?

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