You probably noticed “Live Traffic Feed” widget that I have in the right sidebar and today I took a deeper look what else I can get from it… Turned out this little widget is quite more powerful than it looks from outside.

In the basic view FeedJit display visitors in real time with the link to the referring page so you can check who sending you traffic right from your front page. If you click on “Watch in real time” link on the bottom of the widget it will forward to the FeedJit website where you can see more extended results.

For example if visitor was referred by the search engine – there will be exact search term he used to find your site. Also it shows browser and operating system visitors are using and if they left your site by clicking on one of the links – you’ll see which link it was. Two more options – visitors map and statistics for most popular pages.

Since the time WordPress has introduced wigetized sidebars customizing WordPress powered blogs became much easier task. With huge amount of plugins and widgets available for free download webmasters can pick and choose what kind of info display on their’s blogs, where to place it on the pages and all that can be done without ever changing the source code or template files. All updates can be done directly from the blog admin panel after you’ve done small modification to your theme.

In the default (Kubrick) theme there is only one widgetized sidebar created and you can see it if you go to “widgets” option in the “Design” section of your WordPress admin panel. You can place unlimited amount of widgets there but the problem is – you have very little flexibility how these blocks will look on the front end. Appearance of all elements are controlled by the same styling options assigned to the ID=”sidebar”.

Here is a simple tutorial how you can create new widgetized zones (I call them “zones” since they do not have to be placed in the sidebar), place them anywhere on the page and have full control over the style of each widgetized zone.

If someone doesn’t know – EntreCard is a social network for bloggers that supposed to help building traffic to your blog. The way it works – you “drop” your card into the EntreCard widget on any site you see it (look in the dark sidebar to the right on my blog) and get credit for it. The owner of the site where you dropped card will also get credit for it and your banner will appear on his EntreCard member dashboard. He may return the favor and visit your site.

After you generate some credits (you also have an option to purchase credits directly from EntreCard) you can use it to buy one-day banner ad on the website of your choice. The prices for these ads are determined by how many people are paid and waiting for theirs turn to display the banner. Also every website owner have an option to decline any ads.

Ideally this system should work and if used properly could generate quality targeted traffic. The problem is – not every one understands meaning of Targeted Quality Traffic…

When creating new website everyone wants to make it unique and pretty. I don’t see any problems with it as long as “beautiful design” does not hurt your website in the long run. There are thousands of designers out there who can create great graphics but have no idea how to make a website:

• user friendly
• search engine friendly

Here are some basic guidelines you should follow to satisfy both – human visitors and search engine spiders.

Let’s start with human visitors…
They are the primary target and will define if your site worth to look at. Your goal is to get them interested from the first visit and willing to come back for more information again and again…

Make your site to load as fast as possible

Two major elements that slow down your website are images and external scripts. Always slice background images to the smallest elements possible and optimize them for web.
If you have more than one script powering up your website, like blog and directory for example – create one common “images” folder and use it for both templates.

Sometimes I get an inspiration to improve my blog with new element or plugin and that’s where problem starts. Sure I can hard code new snippet directly into template file or spend couple of hours trying to find suitable solution on WordPress website.

There is a very good chance that feature I want to include on my blog has been already implemented by someone but I have no idea how he named this plugin or which section he posted it in.

Last time I got lucky thanks to the Pixel Shoppe with his recommendations on plugins that I can use with WordPress blog.

They were describing AdSense Manager plugin which supports multiple ad networks and that’s exactly what I was looking for. In addition this plugin gives you full control over ad placements without need to modify styles or source files.

I found more good recommendations on other WordPress plugins, tweaks and template modifications. General tips for bloggers section they have is also interesting read…