Another popular resource for website designs as well as blog designs is the popular Template Monster where themes come with a download fee and are generally better quality if that’s important to you. My personal favorite would have to be Elegant Themes. For a small membership fee of just $19.95 you’ll have access to over 35 professionally designed themes. When I say professionally design I really mean professionally designed. The themes are simply stunning, well coded, well documented, and even come with a Photoshop file so you can make any design changes your heart desires.

For even more themes there’s always Google or the place called Woo Themes featuring a number of different themes that come with a small fee. What most people do is buy or download a theme, and then hire a blog consulting company to personalize that theme matching their specific needs. This method saves them quite a bit of money comparing to hiring a blog design company to design one from scratch.

One day my friends came over with a french press. I was back in business. Next day I went to the local Target store and got myself some coffee beans and a french press. I’ve now been using it for almost two months and I’m loving it. I think this is what I was looking for all those years. It is extremely easy to make a perfect cup of coffee in exactly 5 minutes. Heat some water, grind beans, pour hot water over the beans and wait 3-4 minutes for the coffee to steep. Then pour it in your favorite coffee cup. Watch some YouTube videos for more detailed instructions.

What’s your favorite coffee or coffee beans?

This post however is not about consumer products and cheap cell phone plans, don’t worry. It is about taking payments online. If you have a personal website or a blog, you’ve probably heard about PayPal. If not, PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. Up until a year or so ago PayPal was pretty much the only choice for someone who wanted to accept payments online in a matter of minutes, without dealing with merchant banks, payment gateways etc.

Today, PayPal has a competition from Google with their Google Checkout service. It is just as easy to setup, and even faster (based on my experience) to pay for a product or a service. In fact, one of Google’s requirements is to let your visitors buy something on your site or pay for a service with one click of a button! We all know Google makes great, solid products and services, and you can rest assured Google Checkout is just as good as any other Google product. Again it’s all about choices, so if you’re already accepting PayPal on your site, why not add Google Checkout and present your visitors with a choice? Who knows, maybe you’ll increase your sales by gaining a share of Google Checkout fans.

Another benefit of Google Checkout is the ability to link it to your AdWords account, and any time you run your AdWords it will display Google Checkout logo making your Ad stand out from other sites that don’t accept Google payments on their website or a blog. It also adds trust and recognition to your site, which is a must for any e-commerce site.

It is full of great articles. They’re so easy to read and usually not a single one is boring and full of useless information. Entrepreneur’s website is just as good in terms of content, and they have a Twitter and a Facebook account where you can talk directly to the editors and provide feedback or ask questions. I highly recommend signing up for a subscription, following them on Twitter, and becoming their Fan on Facebook where you can get an additional dose of amazingly useful information.

What’s your favorite magazine, and why?

I’m writing this post on my BlackBerry Tour. The application is really easy to use, it is packed with features and looks great!

I highly recommend this to any WordPress user that has a BlackBerry phone (iPhone version is also available). It is becoming more clear that WordPress is years ahead of its competition.

You can download this application from BlackBerry World App site by searching for the keyword: wordpress.

Happy Mobile Blogging!

There was even a movie released last year called Julie and Julia (available on DVD) that’s all about blogs and cooking. Since it’s about blogs I just had to watch it :) You see, I started working with blogs in 2002 (you can read more on our About Us page) and just a couple of years ago you would have to really look hard to find a magazine or a book that mentions blogs. Now it’s all over the place which is both shocking and exciting at the same time. To me anyway. Before people used to say “If you don’t have a website you are not a real business”, and today it’s “If you don’t have a blog you are not a real business”. Amazing how far blogs have come.

It is fun to watch getting Fortune 500 companies become our blog hosting and consulting clients. Companies like Adobe, TIME, Cisco, Washington Post, CapitalOne, Harvard, Expedia, National Geographic, and many others. Over the years we’ve assisted many companies and individuals with various blog requests, and I’m really looking forward to helping many more in 2010, and years to come.

If you don’t have a Blog, Facebook or Twitter — you should really start one. It’s fun, and to some it’s life-changing.

Most articles are really interesting, and full of artful pictures. My favorite stories are the ones that talk about how authors started their blogs and what inspired them, the tools they’re using, and more. I’m into that kind of thing if you haven’t already noticed :) However, there’s one thing that makes me cringe! If you look at the URL’s those bloggers are using you’ll notice that 98% of them are something.blogspot.com or something.typepad.com or something.wordpress.com — Ouch. I can understand why some blog owners want to save money and use free (or really cheap) blog platforms such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com, but why on earth would you not use your own domain name with your blog?!

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. First of all it’s not professional to use something.freeblogplatform.com; it is more difficult to remember; you are promoting someone else by mentioning their free service every single time you tell someone about your blog, and you are telling others that you’re using a free blog platform which tells me you are not as serious about your blog; and most importantly — you’re stuck using that platform. That’s right. If you ever decide to switch to a different service, you’re stuck using that free service because it’s not your domain name and you can’t take it with you should you ever decide to move your blog somewhere else. If the free service you are using decides to close its doors — say Bye to your blog. I can go on and on why it’s one of the biggest mistakes people make.

The solution is simple, cheap, and 100% effective — invest $10 and buy your own domain name! Then map your domain name to your blog and start promoting your name instead of me.someone.com. Now you are fully independent from your free blog provider. You can use any service you wish; you can grow you blog without worrying about the stability of the free service you’re on; you can just pickup and go wherever your heart desires; it makes you look professional, and easy for others to remember the address of your blog.

So I don’t blame you if you are using (or wanting to use) Gmail as your business email — I do and I’m loving it. But my absolute pet peeve is when I get business cards that have someone@gmail.com or someone@freeservice.com — it doesn’t look professional, in fact, it kind of looks cheesy. Well you are in luck. Not too long ago Google started offering a service called Hosted Gmail. It’s now called Google Apps. It allows you to map your own domain name to a set of Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Videos and more.

By mapping your domain name to Gmail you can use you@yourdomain.com instead of you@gmail.com and you will be able to send and receive email using the familiar Gmail interface. The service is free, it comes with a web based control panel where you can create additional email accounts, adjust various email settings, and more. Each email account you create comes with a little over 7 GB of disk space. So if you’re hosting your blog on a shared hosting account with a limited amount of disk space, you can configure your domain name to use Gmail for your email, and get so much more disk space at no additional cost. In fact, if you need more disk space Gmail has a Premier Edition (for a fee) which gives you 25 GB of space and 99% SLA (reliability). The service is also redundant, which means if your hosting account is having some issues and your blog stops working — your email continues to work!

I’ve helped many customers with that kind of configuration, so if you have any questions post them below and I’ll do my best to answer them all.

Well now you can with ECHO by js-kit.com. It’s a plugin that replaces your WordPress blog’s comment form with a new, much improved and advanced comment form. Not much of an explanation, I know, but just look below on our blog — as you can see it looks great, it’s very easy to use, it’s fast, and most importantly it crawls Facebook, Twitter and other social networks looking for conversations mentioning your blog posts, and if it finds something, it places them right on your blog comments where they belong. Many popular blogs like Technorati.com are already using it on their blog.

As of today the plugin is only available for WordPress blogs and the price is just $12/year. That’s right just $1/month and if you ask me it’s well worth it for what it does. I’m in talks with ECHO team to develop a version for Movable Type, so the rest of the blogosphere can enjoy it as well. Be sure to check js-kit.com to learn more about it and watch a video mentioning the benefits.