Ok, I was just introduced to this niiiiiice way to estimate blog’s worth in money, thanks to one of the SEO guru’s who uses it to check how much his blog worth, based on Technorati popularity and probably something else. This is my result for toptut.com, you can go to their (PR7) website and recheck. This is NOT a joke tool…

(Oh and, I am not selling my blog this cheap! )

Of course I know it’s not the real price of this blog, I am been objective about it and can say that real price is probably 5-10 times less, however, it’s a very smart and tricky way for the guy who made this tool and powered it, to get tons of free backlinks, especially from high PR sites, as naturally everyone wants to brag, hey, look how much my site worth! Unlike Blog Juice or other tools who can mercilessly show you that your site doesn’t worth a broken penny, this one is been generous (who cares, it’s not like they would pay this sum to you) and therefore get rewarded for their generosity. Damn, smart move.

This tutorial will show you how to easily make frame such as the one you now see in Windows Vista releases or the so-called “aero vista” style design. There are a several techniques for making these semi- transparent frames around the picture with rounded edges, I will show you the technique I use.

1. Start off by making a background. Since this will probably be a graphic for a website, and we want to stick with the web 2.0 standard, I suggest making a gradient bg, with slightly darker hue at the top, fading towards the middle, but do not make the hue dramatically different. Same colour only a tiny bit darker.
2. Take some picture you are going to put inside your Vista-like frame. We will go ahead with the style and use a photo of a leaf with some water drops on it, which I pulled from Photoshop Photo Stock website. This image is not free for commercial use so we only put it here for learning purposes. Take your picture, copy and paste it unto your gradient background. Make sure there are at least about 50 px of distance between the image and the edges, otherwise we will not see the frame properly.

3. Select the layer with the image, and go to Layer >> Layer style >> Stroke

…and add a wide white border to the image, as shown on the screenshot. You must select the mode “outside”, otherwise your border’s edges won’t be rounded. Also, they will only be rounded if the border is thick enough, i.e. you won’t see much of the rounded effect on stroke settings below 5px.

4. Duplicate the image with white border layer. Select the upper layer and go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur. Apply the blur settings and shown on the enclosed screenshot. Roughly speaking, the more blur you add, the wider will be your semi- transparent frame later. Ideally keep it approximately as wide as the white border, this way the proportion will be reserved; otherwise having a too think white border or a too wide transparent frame will not look organic.

5. Go to the layers panel, and select the upper (blurred) layer. Reduce it’s opacity to about 30%, (or less, or more, depending on how lucid you like your frame to be). You will be seeing it on your screen as you reduce the opacity (opacity, not the “fill”).

6. Select the lower layer (not blurred one) and go to Layer >> Layer styles >> Drop Shadow. Add shadow settings as shown on the screenshot below. This will give your frame some more depth.
7. Now we will add some shiny / glossy effect to complete the result. This step is optional, as many people are not big fans of shines. Create a new layer. Using the Elliptical Marquee Tool, draw a circle as shon on the screenshot, which will cover approximately about 1/3 of the image. Choose the Gradient Tool (from white to transparent) and draw a line from the top of the circle to it’s end, or a bit more than the end, as we will only fill the selected area in the circle anyway. Once your ellipse got filled with gradually fading white, Select the eraser tool and remove the white circle from outside the picture, so that only the piece inside the picture will remain.
And… here is your final result:

Click HERE to download the free .PSD file of this tutorial. The download was available freely for 30 days, now it’s for Lorelei Web forum registered members only.

I know picture and theme is not something that would fit perfect in blogs tutorial, but it’s just a must. Perfect illustration for love that has no boundaries…

I found it on some site where most of the pictures are about funny animals, pulled together from some other sites… Here are a few more I particularly liked:

I recently wrote an article about it on my other blog, Now G Net, but thought I’d share these thoughts and info with this blog readers as well. The article mainly discusses what are the advantages and the disadvantages of having 1 OR many websites. Both “techniques”, if we can call it like that, have their up and down sides. That post also went up on Pixel2Life and Tutorialized, so I guess it was not that a bad article.

While writing I was mainly inspired by my personal experience, and how which technique played to my benefit. Like many, I started off with a small “starting capital”, if we can it a “capital” anyway, and slowly developed a network of websites. First I only had once website and it had advantages (which I discuss in my article), but after a while, when I decided to expand my little empire I realized I need more, much more websites, and moreover I need to “throttle” the subjects to avoid making a messed up huge site that can’t possibly get targeted visitors due to been too busy. This is why this blog is separated from my other blogs and websites.
You can read the entire, very comprehensive overview of the online strategy HERE. Here is a small summery…

My personal opinion? I’d say make a few sites, and make them different. There is no point in making 10 stall sites about articles with similar layout, structure and more or less identical content, because if your visitor did not like the first site, he wont find the others any useful as well, while if he did like it, he will stick with the site he visited first, bookmark it and won’t look further. Some people find bright layouts to be irritating, others love it. Some websites’ content are more targeted to the older audience while others are mostly visited by teens, and if you have a wide variety of website, you can play wise with your traffic and make the maximum out of it, for both yours and visitor’s benefit.

Read the full overview of making 1 website vs. 100 websites .

First I wanted to make a separate blog for photography only, but since it’s just a project (for now), I thought I will expand the stock in this blog. Here are some photos taken in Greece. All the pictures are original (not photoshoped) and come in 1280*1024 resolution, 4 photos in total. Please read the enclosed ‘license’ file for information about the license of these free photos.

Click on the image below to download. If you use these pictures on your website, blog, or implement them in your design, a link back to www.toptut.com somewhere in the credits is required. Enjoy!

Although some of you may think that promoting a blog is same as promoting a website, we - the bloggers, know the difference. Bloggers have more opportunities to promote, although this article will try to focus on “website” in a more general sense.
Sometime, when your website has little traffic, it is not necessarily because of bad SEO or poor promotion, sometimes it’s the small mistakes webmasters make while developing a site, which keep causing long-term damage. Here are some of the common mistakes and how to avoid them to maximize continuous traffic…

1. Keywords in URL’s. This means, the title of each page and the URL itself should contain some of the essential keywords which can potentially draw traffic from SE to your website. Blogs can easily modify the permalinks to titles, and webmasters of regular website should just give each file the appropriate name, for example “searchenginesoptimization.html” is better than “page273.html”, from Search Engines’ point of view.

2. Size (of other sites) does not matter. Don’t neglect small traffic generators; having said that, I do not advice you to buy massive links from small websites that send you a few visitors a day (although for some of you that is already a lot), but if you have an opportunity to get a link from a relatively small site with relevant theme, do not waste the opportunity. Don’t forget that any webmaster is dreaming to see his site getting recognition, and will do his best to promote it, so any link from a “small” site can potentially become a link from a “big” site, in a few months. Just have faith and hope other webmasters will do the job for you.

3. Size (of your site) matters. Yes, it’s good to have a big… website. You can brag, you can gain world’s domination… OK, serious now: the bigger is your website, the more potential it has. One hundred articles will naturally cover a wider variety of keywords and miscellaneous keywords “joints”, rather than one article. Also, it can potentially interest more visitors from different countries and cultures, as again - your guest is likely to find something interesting for himself after browsing one hundred topics, which may not happen if you only have a few measly articles.

Read More  "Give your website’s traffic Nine Lives"

Please read the Terms of Use of these WordPress Themes before downloading:

Terms of Use:

1. These WordPress Theme was released for free under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, therefore please do not remove the credits and links to loreleiwebdesign.com or/and Toptut.com at the footer of the template.
2. You may offer this template on other websites for a free download, as long as the credits are reserved intact. Please do not hotlink the download to our server.
Should you have any questions regarding the Terms on Use, please contact me at lorelei@loreleiweb.com
3. Much as I’d love to help everyone, I am sorry but due to very busy schedule with my other websites, I am unable to provide personal support with regards to installation or modification of the theme. If you wish, however, to receive assistance, please feel free to discuss it in (my) Lorelei Web Forum

Click on each image to go the page with more info, live preview and download details.

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Good question. A friend of mine, who is a big fan of mine design, or at least appears to be, asked me a few days ago, if I make such beautiful WordPress themes, wouldn’t it be wise to use at least one of them for my blog, this will serve as an excellent live demo and “free advertisement” of my themes, since toptut.com had a very decent traffic. I come to think of it, yes, it would definitely be “wise”, but… I dunno, I just prefer not to sew my own dresses.

Edit [ April 15th 2007] - After some deep thinking, I decided to change the old layout of the blog to something new, fresh and blue. Main concern for getting rid of the Thirteen theme was not it’s “lucky” number, but the fact it was based “only” on 2 columns, and as the site has grown and gained some dough and needs more space for banners, links and and other stuff that fill the blog. Basically I needed 3 columns and a wider template as having a 1280*1024 and a slim, compatible with 800 width resolution layout seemed like an outdated solution. Moreover, I was after a web 2.0 look (whatever it is) and thought it’s indeed time for having my own layout for my own blog. so… Hope you like it!