Many bloggers often tend to add few images to their posts to grab the reader’s attention. Images are always effective to make your readers understand few things which you cannot express in words. Sometimes, your user may find them so useful or interesting, that they even like to share it with others on forum or their blog. But few people will just copy the direct image link for sharing instead of linking it to the post. While few others try to steal your images and it is called as bandwidth theft. Either way, it will start consuming more bandwidth on your hosting account. Also, they not just steal your bandwidth, but also your image’s search engine ranking. So you lose both traffic as well as bandwidth.

Communication is one the greatest process which enables people to transfer information to someone whom you want to be keep informed. Though the means of communications have been evolved, there are times when you have no other way other than opting for good old method of leaving a sticky note to your friend, colleague or a relative. Sticky notes help transfer informations like to-do list or a message to someone who comes in to your place after sometime when you are away.

We had earlier taught how to display random posts in WordPress without using any plugins. Now this short tutorial will teach you how to display recent/latest posts on your WordPress blog without using any plugin. Though there is a widget that display recent posts in your sidebar, it doesn’t let you display anywhere else you like to. Say for instance, if you want to display the recent posts in footer like the one below in this blog, you will have to use few lines of code along with few template tags. So let’s get started!

A hyperlink on the web is a reference to an object on the Internet. It can be an image, a static/dynamic page, a movie file or even another website domain. We use the HTML tag <a>, called the anchor element to generate links. If you don’t want to read the theory, you can skip to the example directly.

Adding a link to an HTML page is quite simple and the syntax for that is,

<a href="url">Link text</a>

Many casual bloggers using WordPress tend to use a theme with minimalistic design. This is mainly because their content doesn’t require flashy looks. For instance, a programming blog doesn’t require a flashy design. It doesn’t even impress the visitor if the theme is more jazzy than detailed. So it is always better to keep elements as minimalistic as possible to get more attention on the main content. These minimalistic themes not just make your blog look simple and better, but also saves lot of bandwidth since it uses very less images and scripts.

New to WordPress Themes? Read: How to install wordpress themes.

Here are 10 coolest WordPress theme with minimalistic design:

1. min

Download | Demo

Beautiful Sunflowers

As everyone knows, WordPress is the god of blogging platforms, it lets you do many things which others can’t do. Image Caption feature was introduced in WordPress 2.6 and it comes really handy when you want to put a small description or a title of the image that you are using. This is just one among the countless features that wordpress has managed to include into it’s CMS. Sometimes, an image without a background and border might look beautiful, but not when you add a caption to it. So this tutorial teaches you about how to add a good looking background and border to your captioned images.

It is very important to make your blog visitors to interact with your blog and to make them stay longer. The longer they spend time on your blog, the longer your contents get exposed. There are several ways to make this possible. One of the most easiest and simple way is to display random posts of your blog. Just display it under a post or in the sidebar or wherever you wish to, and it will do the rest by attracting your visitors to read more posts.

One of the best things about WordPress is that the quantity of themes available on the internet. The numbers of themes available are astronomical. The enormous availability of themes is because of the open source licensing and is easy create to new themes. Web Designers can easily create new stunning and unique wordpress themes and release it for the public to use them. This short tutorial teaches you about how to install a wordpress theme on a self-hosted wordpress blog.

It’s always good to have better average time on site of a visitor. The more the visitor spends time on your site, the more chances that you can earn. Even sites like Yahoo.com struggles to increase the average time of their visitors.

Having a related posts plugin on your WordPress blog or any other blogging platform or CMS will make your visitors to discover more interesting things on your site. If you think this plugin just lists out the posts related to the post the visitor is reading, then you are wrong. It also tempts visitors to keep on looking one post after the other. So this increases the average time on site. And chances are, you might get more clicks on ads.

Here are some of the plugins/modules for CMS’es:

WordPress – WordPress Related Posts
Drupal – Similar Entries
Joomla – Related Posts for MyBlog

This tutorial teaches you about how to optimize your WordPress blog to search engines in about 60 minutes. If you are getting started with blogging using WordPress, you can make your blog appear on radar of search results just in 2-3 weeks. But you will have to work a little which isn’t difficult either.

Before starting off with this tutorial, I assume you have your latest version of WordPress installed on your server. If not, I recommend you to upgrade it, because some plugins which I mention later in this tutorial may not compatible with your older version. And please register at Technorati.com before starting off (you will know why later). If you are already on those services, skip that step.

Now let’s get started.