darkzonemedia.com

A great addition to your website is a blog — like this one

My personal favorite for blogging software is wordpress. It is quick, easy, user friendly and OH YA, IT IS FREE!!!!

Wordpress is HANDS DOWN the gold standard for blogging.

I bet your host already offers wordpress as an option! It will be on your CPanel (or in the case of Go Daddy, it is in your options but you have to dig a bit. It is there in your control panel)

Wordpress is a one-click install if your host has it. SUPER EASY — POOF ! Then you can start blogging and changing the design and adding all the little goodies that wordpress has. I will have several wordpress tutorials here such as how to modify the design, how to customize the header, how to customize the blogroll with links you love, how to SEO your blog, how to put pictures in your blog, and much more! Wordpress will allow you to do almost anything and it is very easy so don’t worry, you will be a blogging pro in a matter of hours!

Once your wordpress is installed, you simply login and click on the tab that says WRITE or the link that says write a new post and type in the box like you are writing a paragraph. If you want, you can write in HTML but there is no need. Wordpress is great at taking your plain text and converting it so if you don’t know HTML at all, no worries, just type and when you are done, press PUBLISH and there it is!!!

More on wordpress coming soon. If you do not have your own site and still want a blog, you can do one on wordpress.com or on blogger.com. Neither have the same options as having your own blog and wordpress.com restricts commercial content, but they are both a good option if you do not have your own site.

Your favicon is that little icon that shows up beside your website in the search bar or in the bookmark where it shows a little graphic or letter rather than just being blank.

So now that you know what I mean, how exactly do you make one of these things.

Well you can make a simple graphic in any program that will save a PNG. Like fireworks, photoshop, digital image studio, etc. most graphics programs. Make your image a square. 16×16 is the size that you will be doing on your icon so don’t try to get too elaborate here. A basic small graphic with not too many colors. Maybe try scaling it down to that size in your PNG so you can see how much detail you will lose. Keep is SIMPLE!! Keep your colors simple too, 4 color will have less load time than anything more so keep it simple to save on load time and to prevent it from just looking like a blob.

Once you have your PNG file. You will need to find a software to convert it to .ICO type. This is not a graphical type but a windows type of file. There are many softwares and plugins that do this, some free, others not. PNG2ICO is a nice inexpensive software but it requires you to do some work at the Run Prompt so be sure you know what you are doing and follow all the instructions on that software before you start.

Image Icon Converter is another software and does not require you to be quite so computer savvy but the results are really basic. So, making a VERY simple piece of art in the first place is critical!!!

Remember if you have a question, you can e-mail us. And if you don’t know what you are doing, LEAVE IT ALONE!!! This will not make or break your website if you don’t have it!!

Yep! A webmaster blog. We will be putting a ton of cool info on here for you to enjoy. Everything from how to optimize your site with great tools like Site Map Generators, Google Webmaster Tips and other great ideas to get your site the solid things it needs to rock those listings!!

We will also have fun things on here to like themes, templates and other cool things so check back often as this develops!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!