As you might have noticed, last week our website was hacked (together with all the other that resided on the same account), and as a result we spent a few days offline or you might have seen the “this is an attack website” message in your Firefox browser.  In any case, the issue has been fully resolved 2 days ago and seems like we are back online and it’s been very stable.

So since we are back, I want to update you with some of the breath taking news that are coming up on toptut. First of all, we are planning to release at least 7 new wordpress themes for our readers, during July. We will have themes dedicated to webmasters, developers, designers and technology. Moreover, we are welcoming a few guest posters who will share their knowledge about increasing Adsense revenue, boosting affiliate sales and making money online, so additionally to our 7-days e-course which you see on the sidebar, we will have more useful lessons coming up, so please stay tuned.

And that is not all, we will also be giving away discount vouchers for MacBooks, iPhones and at the end of the month we will be giving away again free personalized business cards. How do these summer plans sound?

However, all this will take place only when I am back from my summer vacation, this year I am going to spend 2 weeks in Paris. By the way, for the first time I booked my hotel at HotelsCombined, and luckily it was a great choice, as I managed to book a 4-star hotel in the center, really cheap!

Ever dreamt of getting 100+ twitters overnight? Or even more? 500? Now, it’s possible in the most legit way, with twiends.com.
Twiends works on the simple principle — follow others and get credits, when you have credit points, others will follow you. Some people, for example, offer 10 points in exchange for a follower, and you can set your credit on 2 points per follower, in other others you earn 10 points for following person X, and then you have credit for 5 new followers, it’s that simple. Plus you can get free credits for various things; email subscription, referring other members, blog posts and so on.

Main Advantages?
You can buy credits by subscription and watch your followers count going up every day. This is really ideal if you are participating in programs like Sponsored Tweets, where you are paid to tweet, based on your followers count. It allows you to get even thousands of followers fast, and most important — without having to follow back and ruin your quality score ratio.
You also have a choice of sorting followers based on country and interests match, which allows you to narrow down the audience to a very targeted group of Twitters.

Disadvantages?
Just like any other popular service, you will get a few abusers who think they bypass the system by creating fake accounts, so some of your followers won’t be real (I know they are not real if they have 1000+ followers and not even single tweet!). Of course it’s a very small percentage of them, maybe 5% based on my experience, but just be aware of that. Moreover, some members unfollow, after they have earnt the credit for following you. That’s rather annoying, but maybe if I was an interesting Twitter I’d have had better chances of keeping my fans. I don’t use Twitter all that much so I can’t really tell how well does it perform for me.

The only thing I can be sure about, that it instantly will boost your followers count, I got 400+ new fans in less than a week, and I didn’t even need to return the favour, as long as I have credits on my account. If you are serious about your Twitter business and this social network i valued to you, you are going to love Twiends because this a great pain-free way to gain popularity.

I personally wouldn’t be concerned all that much about those who unfollow you, because they lose credits earnt (only they are not aware of that, yet), so most likely they would want to earn them back and have to follow you once again. Also, don’t be worried about the fake accounts, after all the number of followers often has a psychological impact. Ashton Carter has 3 millions of followers, does anyone care if even half of them are not real? So go grow your network now, it’s free!

Happy Easter, Dear Readers! Cherished time to celebrate Christ resurrection, gathering with family and friends. Welcome springtime festivals with the blossoming Tulips in all the hues, enjoy the Easter egg hunts and give colored eggs to your family as a gift, representing the sunlight of spring. Get dressed in Sunday Best and relish on the yummy chocolate treats, watch furry bunnies and chocolate rabbits hop and skip, as you cheer in Easter holiday season. Wish your family, peers and associates a Happy Easter, with popular candies elegantly styled with ribbons and Easter eggs in a gift basket, but don’t forget to also greet your online friends, family and colleagues with an Easter eCards! This is the fastest, easiest way to put a smile on one’s face, absolutely free.

In the past, the Easter Sunday was generally reserved for the baptism of a large number of catechumens. Also, the council of Lateran (1215) ordered that those who reached the age of reason had to take the Holy communion at least once a year (in French “faire ses Pâques”). So Easter is the most important Christian celebration of the year. In the Germanic languages, “Easter” – also called “Pascha” – was taken from “Eastre”, the Saxon goddess associated to the Spring. Indeed, many years ago, the Saxons celebrated the god of the Spring, called “Eostre” and held festivals every year to celebrate the Spring Equinox, when the day and the night were equal length. These festivals were celebrated to ensure fertility across both the land and people. But today we live in the era of technology and most of older traditions were lost with times, today we send SMS messages to greet each other, send out digital greetings, and give real gifts only to friends and family members within our reach.

And Here is Our Gift to YOU!

We, at toptut.com, also decided to give our readers 2 small gifts. We partnered with two most popular websites and want to offer you bonuses that will be available ONLY the next 7 days, until the next Sunday, April 11th 2010.

Save 10% off of Your Next Order of $250.00 or More! Order your very own, customized booklets, brochures, business cards, calendars, letterhead, postcards… whatever! Enjoy the discount and remember it’s a time limited offer.

50% OFF Web hosting at iPage + Exclusive Bonuses, highly reputable, reliable web hosting service. This week you can pay 3,50$ a month, instead of the regular price of 6,95 $. Plus, additionally to the halved price, iPage will also give our readers: FREE Domain (for life), FREE Security Suite and $50 FREE Facebook ads credits, FREE $50 Google Adwords credits and $25 FREE Yahoo Search credits. Get it NOW!

Enjoy this bright holiday and we will be back next week with more tutorials about affiliate marketing and making money online!

Google has a habit of creating social networks that don’t seem to match up to the likes of Facebook, Twitter and My Space, but don’t leave them out of the race yet.  When Orkut was limited in India and Brazil, the hype was quickly lost but they have done it again. The new social connection service offered by Google is Google Buzz. With Google Buzz you can share real time updates with your friends as well as photos, links and so on. You can easily connect to other social networks you currently use such as Twitter, Flicker, Picasas and Google reader by simply importing all of your data from these sites.

The new Google Buzz is a hybrid that is inclusive of micro blogging, social networking and chat, just like some of the services already offered in Gmail. Here are a few tricks of the trade to get you up and running in Google Buzz.

• You can add Google buzz on your blog
• The ability to disable e-mail notifications
• You can add more connect sites such as Google reader, flickr, Twitter, Picasas and blogger.
• You get great keyboard shortcuts such as Shift+l= like a message, m=mute or ignore conversation, r= add a comment.
• Google buzz searches feature can show you the latest messages that match your search
• You can hide the Google buzz counter

Some helpful searches include:

Author: gmail.com- this allows you to find messages that are written by a specified user, you can even employ the use of partial names.

Commenter:@gmail.com – this allows you to find all comments from a specified user.

Adding has: photo or has: link to your search will restrict results to only messages that contain photos or links. (Example: Canada has: photo)

You can also view Google Buzz photos in slideshow format.

Keep in mind that when you upload a photo to Google Buzz it will be added to Picasas web album. When you click a thumbnail Google Buzz opens a light box which helps to navigate with ease between your images. There is no option for slideshow but it is available in the Picasas website.

Webtreats has released a new treat for us, the wordpress users. inFocus is Powerful Premium WordPress theme, comes with an impressive fully customizable jQuery homepage slider with 3 different staging effects. Whether your a WordPress pro or just a beginner this theme has you covered. With a huge custom back end area you have complete control over the look and style of your theme. Add images to your homepage slider, add as many sidebar widgets as you like, pull in your latest tweet from Twitter and much much more all without having to touch a single line of code!

For your convince inFoucs comes with 10 skins to choose from.

Theme features:

• jQuery Slider
• Custom Sidebars
• Custom Widgets
• Portfolio Gallery
• Ajax Contact Form
• Social Bookmarking
• Page Templates
• Multiple CSS Styles
• 34 custom Style Shortcodes
• Breadcrumbs Navigation
• About Author Box on Posts
• jQuery Drop-down menu
• Font Replacement (cufon)
• Huge Tabbed Admin Area
• Layered PSDs are included for easy modification
• Extensive Documentation Included

Demo | Details | Download

I am happy to introduce yet another eco-supportive theme, this time with an inbuilt gallery, admin options, and more great feature. Admin panel allows you to:

1. Configure the speed of the  jquery-powered animated slideshow (add only numbers from 0 to 65000).
2. Configure slides category.
3. Logo Url – that you can change by adding a link to the image you want to use instead of your logo.
4. Configure Twitter account.
5. Configure Feedburner Address.
6. Configure Facebook link.

Apart from the convenient admin panel, the theme is ready for a TweetMeme plugin and TimThumb — so you can easily upload files without having to resize them.

Demo | Download Biolery

The theme is widget ready with 3 sidebars (one on the right, one under the content and one in the footer) where you can place any widget you like with ease. (right sidebar and content sidebar are flexible in width. Footer sidebar has a fixed width). Based on a GPL TwittPlus theme by Turcu Ciprian.

If you like the motives of wood, photos and distant places, and run a blog dedicated to these theme, then this design is right for you! 2 Columns, thumbnails, ready for gravatars and no need to use custom fields if you wish to post a new post with a thumbnail — the script will automatically resize the images for you!
As always, the download is free for everyone!

Demo | Download

If you are a web designer then obviously the first thing that an employer looks at is your portfolio. When you send your CV somewhere then keep in mind that you are not there. As a web designer, it is important that you display a record of your previous achievements, projects and work done. Your portfolio is important because it speaks on your behalf. Often the employers look at your portfolio even before looking at your CV.

Employers are usually getting dozens if not hundreds of CVs which create a sense of tension for the employers. When sending your CV, you should ensure that your portfolio should stand out from the rest. Imagine a guy piled up in CVs and portfolios. Guess what will he be looking for? If you send a portfolio that does not attractive or does not suit his needs, he may not be able to understand your abilities.

Let us face a simple fact that whatever you send along with your CV represents yourself. There are a few things that you should think of before sending a portfolio with your CV. The first thing in this regard is that you cannot possibly be there in short-listing process. No matter how good you are, if you didn’t create a good portfolio, no one will be able to judge your abilities therefore it is important to mention your major achievements in the field of web designing.

If you did something out of your ordinary field of expertise like say if you are a web designer and you managed a team or you did some branding, it will cause a good impact on your prospect employer. If all of a sudden you think of something and you add it to your portfolio, it won’t be noticed until it is really good and suits the need of the employer. The industry is important as well. Be sure to rearrange items in your portfolio that can match with the current business of your prospect employer.

Another important point is clarity. Do not show your creativity on the portfolio page. Rather, simply create a list showing your work and then let your work speak for itself. As a general rule, the icons on the page should be big and can be replicas of the websites you have worked on. It is also important that you have your own web page. If you do not show your own webpage, people might be wondering that if you are such a good web designer, why you don’t have your own webpage.

It is extremely important that your employers can find what they are looking for in your CV and portfolio. If you are going to present yourself and list services that do not match up with the needs of your employer, you won’t get short-listed. On the other hand, if you add too much which does not correspond to your experience, you will have to face an awkward situation at the interview so never under-describe or over-describe yourself. While it is important to tell about your positive points, it is also important that you do not take any credit for the work that you have not done.

These few guidelines can help you build a better portfolio as a web designer and will get you through difficult situations.

So, we finally switched to a new version of design created by Sol Orior. dot com and coded by Sramek Design dot com (see credit links at the footer).  I had a really great job done by Tomas from Sramek design, my PSD was converted to WP in no time, so if you need coding services, I really recommend this one. What are the advantages of the new design? First of all, LESS ads. No ads at the bottom of the post, cleaner and better user experience was my top priority.

Secondly, cleaner design, cleaner sidebar. With like I said, less ads and less unneeded links at the sidebar, we now have a clean, mostly dedicated to banners sidebar which allows easier navigation without visitors confusing partners’ links with internal links. Another good change is enabling threaded comments, readers can reply to each other or I can comment and answer a question of a particular person without getting lost in posts that have a lot of responses.

Other things we added:

• Re-Tweet button at the top of each post.
• Top navigation with drop down menu and a nice Ajax effect.
• Advertise Page is now fully automated.

Last but not least, the blog will now be much more frequently updated, so you will find plenty of new, useful content for you!

The design is not fully finished, so I am still working on little tweaks here and there, however, I was so eager to pull the new outfit on my blog so I couldn’t wait. If you find any bugs and problems, please leave a comment so i will look into it. Anyway, what do you think about the new look?

So, many readers noticed and complained that this blog is not updated regularly enough and that we have less interested content than before, so I decided to take action before it’s too late. We used to have 4000+ unique visitors every day, and now we will have even more. That’s a promise.

First of all, and I guess that would be an essential step, we are going to have a new design. Our new layout (we are still negotiating with a few leading web design companies) is going to be easy to navigate, clean, and of course with a much reduced number of adsense slots, which as I learnt irritates some of the readers. Although some of the Adsense position bring in over 100 $ a month (and just imagine how much is it in total!), I finally realized that Adsense is a Pay-per-Leave program, and the few hundreds of dollars I collect from this blog does not worth losing the readers.

Another thing that is coming up probably in a month or so is my eBook, – the full guide to making money online. It will be a huge and detailed guide to how YOU can make money online, too. The book will be absolutely FREE, no hidden fees. I’s sure you are going to love it but meanwhile, stay tuned because the new layout is coming up hopefully in a week or less,  and the ebook is a month or less, feel free to subscribe if you don’t want to miss an update!