Wordpress is simple, minimalistic and yet extremely powerful. However, being easy-to-use, the engine has also some huge disadvantages - e.g. “naked” Wordpress is very inefficient when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Reason: there is simply too much to tweak, too many plugins to use and too many details to take care of.

Title, Meta-Description and Keywords determine the way your posts are shown in search engines, and thus how appealing they appear for random users. The better description your weblog provides, the better idea users will have about the content of your post, which results in the amount of your page impressions. Furthermore, if your Wordpress automatically generates several URLs for a single post (date, id, title of the article), you might run into serious problems with search engines. In fact, sites with the so-called Duplicate Content are often penalized and can be excluded from the search index for several months.

Therefore it’s extremely important to have a profound understanding of what can and should be done to avoid penalization and ensure optimal presentation in search engine results. Popular Wordpress Plugins Optimal Title and Head META Description offer help, but their possibilities are limited.

So if you’d like to have a more comprehensive solution, you should consider the not-so-well-known wpSEO-plugin, which is an effective Wordpress-plugin which can help you to achieve optimal results in search engines. The plugin comes from Germany, was written by Sergej Müller and has been recently released in Version 2.0. So, what can you do with wpSEO?

wpSEO: More SEO for Wordpress

You don’t have to do everything by yourself. If you are running out of time or simply aren’t that enthusiastic about the coding process, you might be willing to consider special “coding services” to get your job done in time. Particularly since there are dozens of such services, the price is usually quite reasonable and worth the time you save, headaches you avoid and further projects you can keep working on. However, whether the result is sophisticated or not, is the matter of personal experience - at least it should be.

The companies and designers listed below do not design web-sites; instead they convert drafts and sketches (mostly in the Photoshop-format, .psd) into the (X)HTML-Code (with CSS-styling). The prices depend on the desired processing time. The faster you’d like to get the work done, the more expensive the coding will be. Some service providers offer optional extras - for instance, AJAX-Scripting and further interactivity.

(X)HTML/CSS Coding-Services

Web developers may already have heard of Yahoo’s new AJAX and DHTML framework. Maybe not - Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) has yet not gained popularity similar to Script.aculo.us, Prototype or Mootools.

But it certainly will. Spot on - Smashing Magazine introduces Yahoo’s User Interface framework.

Editor’s note: be aware that libraries and frameworks often tend to generate not “optimal”, sometimes even bloated code. In YUI’s case especially if you use YUI Grids you might end up with dozens of div-containers even although you don’t really need all of them. Therefore it is almost necessary to verify the quality of the generated code before applying it to your web-site or web-applications — to maintain the quality of your code and save you a lot of headache in the future.

Introducing YUI - The Rising Giant

PFO Stripes [ Demo ]

High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article we present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.

Please notice that the listed WordPress themes are presented in 8 sections: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog.

You might also want to take a look at our previous selections:

• 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
  An overview of beautiful, but rather unknown themes you might have missed.
• 21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Themes
  A quite pretty selection of elegant yet well thought-out themes.
• 10 Fresh and Clean Themes
  The beauty of these themes lies in their clean look supported by a legible content presentation.

You want them — you get them. This page may take a while to load; therefore please be patient and don’t hit “Reload” too often.

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

Productivity is a tricky thing. Once you’ve found your way to get things done, you aren’t likely to change anything until the system (your workflow or your tools) doesn’t work any more. For instance, many developers tend to use the very same versions of applications they’ve been using over years. After all, you get things done and you’ve got used to it — so why should you introduce any changes? “Never touch the running system” is the principle which is often followed in such situations.

Productivity Boost: Key Stroke Launchers>>