Giveaway - Win A Premium Wordpress Theme And Expert Support

This week we have another great Giveaway courtesy of ReadyThemes and CodeinWP.Five of our readers will win a Premium WordPress theme but it gets better ! As part of your prize after you choose your theme you get two hours consultation with a WordPress expert to help you make the theme a perfect fit for your site.

WordPress themes can be found almost everywhere on the web today. While there are many free and great themes around, often it may be a little tedious to find a theme that is truly suitable for your specific need. After you have found your desired theme, the next step is the most crucial part, customizing it to the way you want it.

Sometimes asking for support from the theme creator may not be as prompt as you would like, as you are not the only one using the theme who needs help. So wouldn't it be better if you could get a professional WordPress consultation to solve all your theming woes?

Today, we are glad to partner with Ready Themes and CodeinWP to giveaway a premium WordPress theme plus 2 hours of Free WordPress consultation to 5 lucky readers.Details on how to enter are at the bottom of the post but first let's look at Ready Themes and CodinWP.
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The Best Websites To Learn HTML And CSS For Novice Bloggers

Guest Post - Our host is Christopher Forsythe, who looks at some great sites to learn the basics of coding.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

If you are thinking about starting you own blog, than it's extremely important for you to have, at the very least, a basic understanding and knowledge of how HTML and CSS can properly work to your advantage. Although learning these different coding languages may seem difficult and somewhat foreign at first, as you continue to familiarize yourself with the basics of HTML and CSS, the process will become more clear and easier for you to use. It's critical for you not to give up on learning the specific codes and maintain practicing how to create them in order for your blog to be fully successful. As you continue to learn the "ins and outs" of coding for HTML and CSS, there are many outlets that consist of different websites that will prove to be extremely beneficial in your quest to master these computer languages.Below we list the best sites you can visit to help you learn the basics and get you on the way to become an expert coder.
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The Best Online Back Up Options For Bloggers

We all know the importance of saving or backing up your stuff and many of you will have experienced the frustration of loosing your work in the past.Before auto save features on Emails and indeed blog posts those of us online at the time often pulled our hair out after accidentally deleting an email or blog post draft.While thankfully we don't have to worry about constantly saving such content as we go when it comes to other data backing up is as important as ever.

An example of this for Blogger users occurred when connecting their blogs to their new Google + accounts.When using your Google+ profile as your blogs main profile you also connected all images used on your blog to your Google+ profile.Many blogger users did not realise this and either to reduce clutter or accidentally they deleted the images on Google+ with the knock on affect that the images also disappeared on their blog.One example of this was a blog I worked on recently that lost images from over 200 posts and unfortunately she had no back ups.

So it makes sense to back up your files such as images, video, music, documents, scripts and other work but how does it work and what are the options ?

Online Cloud Back Up

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Spice Up Your Blog Threaded Comment Style For Blogger

I have received a lot of Emails and comments over the last year or so asking about the comments we use here on Spice Up Your Blog.When Blogger introduced threaded comments early last year I wanted a bright looking comment section with the authors comments easy to distinguish from readers comments.

The solution we came up with using some simple CSS adds some cool style to the comment and avatars as well as showing the author comment (That would be your comments on your blog) in a different color.We also overlap the commenter name with their avatar.All unique features for Blogger comments and originally for Spice Up Your Blog but so many have copied it without permission I though we might as well share it with all our readers.

The comments are almost the exact same as you see here on SUYB with some subtle differences so you can see exactly how it will look on your blog by checking out the demo below and scrolling to the comments.

Add Comment Style To Your Blog

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Six Life Lessons Your Parents Taught You About Blogging

Guest Post - Our host is Gerrid Smith, who makes an interesting comparison between the lessons we learned as children and how we can use them as bloggers.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

It’s a very frustrating reality in life as we age when we realize that we are more like our parents than we think. The life lessons our parents taught us while growing up that we denied as truth seem to start flowing out of our mouths later in life to our own children, and we begin to take the advice as actual wisdom.

Some of these ideas and concepts can be applied to your blogs marketing approach as well! Let’s take a step back, look at our marketing techniques and make sure that we’re behaving the way our parents wanted us to:
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Understand The Pros And Cons Of Free WordPress Themes

Guest Post - Our host is Paulius Rasytinis, in this post he looks at the advantages and limitations of using free Wordpress themes on your blog.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

There are lots of discussion about free WordPress themes and whether they are a good solution for your website. Opinions differ, but the truth is that it all depends on your website and what you wish to achieve. Small personal blogs or starter websites may benefit from a free WP theme because it is a quick and inexpensive way to setup your website. Complex corporate websites will often do better with a premium theme.

What is very important for free WordPress themes is to understand their limitations and to accept them. Chances are that a free theme won't offer many premium features, but perhaps that's not what you need at the moment. Another important thing to keep in mind is security. It's important to download free WP themes from reliable sources, such as WordPress.org free theme directory (http://wordpress.org/themes/).

Best Things About Free WordPress Themes

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Top 5 Backlinks Checker Tools For Your Blogs

Guest Post - Our host is Gagan Masoun, here he has a collection of tools to keep an eye on the links your blog is receiving.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Google will penalize all sites making backlinks with black hat techniques. So, always create backlinks with good methods mainly posting great content people will naturally link to.But you can boost your links with white hat methods like: blog comments, guest blogging, forum posting etc. They are most important factors in determining your blog’s page ranks. There are two type of backlinks; Do follow and No follow. Today, in this post we will provide you information about "Top 5 Backlinks Checker Tools for Your Blogs".

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