Enjoy some of the works of this artist and don’t forget to visit his portoflio to see more of his awesome work.

I would like to announce today the release of the second Design Cocktail bundle. This new premium bundle with more quality resources for creative people than before, is worth $829 and the price remains the same, only $29. You save $800 from the start!

Today thanks to the great guys of Designious I have a Design Cocktail for you.

The amazing goodies included in this pack are offered by Designious.com, Vectorious.net, Tshirt-designs.com, Paternsshop.com, WPwizz.com and Quickpayscript.com, so you can be sure that you get only the best quality products.

This is a fantastic opportunity for designers, artists and creatives of all types to get their hands on some really awesome resources for such a low price.

Here you have the official list of product, where you can almost take for nothing all this bundle.

How to Win?

Simple.

- Tweet this giveaway

- Leave  comment below with a valid name and email adress

That’s all, comments will be valid until October 31, the day the bundle is finished and the winner will be announced on a post for this purpose the days after.

Good luck to everyone!!

This time we start “again” with the really talented Greg Darroll from Durban, South Africa and his awesome vector illustrations, full of colors and humor, maybe the ironic on his art is what make the really interesting. From his portfolio we got some of the best illlustrations, to showcase theme here for you.
If you like his work don’t hesitate to visit him on  Devianart.

Let’s see what he got for us!!

It’s been a while since my last post, I can even imagine you remember right know what was it but anyway, it doesn’t matter at this point.

After having a lot of thing coming this last year I was really  busy  and the blog sadly became one of my last priorities for a while. As you can imagine, writing good content is really consuming and most if you are not a English native “so if you see spelling or grammar mistakes on my blog is normal”.

As you can see there is a new theme on the blog, but is just a really beta version, I just wanted to test it after having some problems with the WordPress upgrade last month, the lost some content (in this moment I’m scared about that) and the fact that I was working on it before letting on the side, but something I had to do.

Anyway, just don’t forget to stay in touch trough Twitter (follow me) and RSS. Because I have some other projects coming really soon.

The first thing when creating a website, after having a good company name, is the search of a web hosting company, you need the best service according to your necessities, not all the websites have the same needs, neither all providers the same plans and prices. This can become a hard task with all the companies out there offering the best hosting service everywhere, but how do you really know that one of those is the best, well, thanks to some factors like; clients and testimonials, offers and discounts, number of clients etc, but collecting all that information can be a long and painful task, most if you are not really a internet search master. In this troubled moment WebHostingSearch come to your help, they are one of the best source of information if you have to take the decision of a hosting provider.

Hosting Companies and More

In our times all this research can be done with one website, thanks to Webhostingsearch.com, there, you will find the best hosting providers, classified by different categories or services. If you are looking for a hosting to your personal portfolio or for a big company this is the place to find the best offers and services, thanks to some great tools they have prepared for you. The advantage of Web Hosting Search is that the ranking is created based on what real users say about their providers, that way you are sure to find both sides, happy and unhappy costumers for a specific company. You can take a look to some reviews and see by yourself what I am talking about.

Services

Another great feature is the categories they use to guide you trough your needs. If you may need some extra information, they have a series of articles about all kind of hosting problems and tutorials about dealing with some of the common situations, the main objective is that you will find the most adequate hosting service for you, from personal sites or small companies sites, to the big plans for ecommerce or private servers. What ever you search they have it in some way. Another tip when going to webhostingsearch.com is the web hosting coupons page, once you choose your provider, go and search for the discount code and maybe you will get a better price.

Good Stuff

They have some great articles about all web design related subjects but mostly about hosting as is their primary objective, one of the best and well explain articles they have written is 3 Steps in Publishing Your Website, is mainly dedicated to new people creating their first website, but they also have some complete articles about Linux or Programming thus anyone can learn something new. Another great help for you when just doing the first research, visit the domain search page and look if you can get the domain you want before doing the rest, is really important to me. Then go to my favorite tool, the comparison chart, select the providers you want to compare and just click on compare plans, you will get a huge list with all the important element of a hosting plan.

Bad Stuff

One of the things I personally don’t like is the fact that most of the hosting companies presented on the site are from EEUU so if you are looking for something local or closer to you is not easy to find, maybe because the website is made by people from USA but is something to get better in the future, anyway if you are hosted by a company which is not listed on the website you can totally send them a review of your hosting company.

Recently Re-Design

Old Design

New Design

They recently changed the design of the website and logo as well, that means they are really engaged with their website, and even if the new design is easier to read, changes are not evident for the normal visitor, but if you are someone interested on design I am sure you will notice it. The new design is aimed purely to the non designer visitor, as the pages are full of information everywhere, three columns instead of two and the use of white background to make easy to read all that text. The new logo is better than before, as it represent the main service they offer. To search for you is the idea of this website, and now is really clear what the website can offer you when you see its logo. The new design can help you find the information easier than before and if that was the idea of redesign, they succeed on that point, but the advertising banner on the top besides the logo can be very distracting as neither the logo looks important or the search field.

Final Thoughts

If you need a hosting provider and don’t know how to choose it, go right now and take a look at some information on Web Hosting Search, I am sure, after that you will have enough information to take a good decision and sure you will find the best cheap hosting plan for you. Including WordPress hosting, they have an impressive list of the best providers for this CMS we all love.

Today I was doing a research about some plugins I used when starting my blog and found interesting, that from the most popular wordpress plugins, I almost tested all in some moment of my short blogging career, and I am sure most of us have use them to, because they are, for some bloggers part of the site already. Plugins like Google XML, All in one Seo Pack or Akismet are known for all.

One great thing about wordpress as CMS are the thousands of plugins you can find to improve any aspect of your blog and even better you don’t need any code skills or experience to use them! For that reason they are present in all kind of blogs. These 30 plugins are the most popular because they are excellent or just useful, people who has used them, were such happy, they even went to wordpress.org and rated, to show the author and their colleagues how the plugin was really useful for them. So from there I took the 30 first and put them here for you.

Obviously you can’t have all these plugins installed on your blog because it could be a time bomb before they collapse, but you can try at least some of these according to your needs. I just give you a little opinion about them and is up to you is they can help you getting your blog better, more comments, or creating a community, here you have them.

Until now you will find on the wordpress plugin section:

7,388 plugins, 63,095,089 downloads, and counting

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin is really helpful on SEO terms, It creates a sitemap for search engines, including your pages and articles once they are created, making a simple structure to be found easily. That way you can get more organic visitors.

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.

All in One SEO Pack

>Is really helpful to create and set up the main title of your blog and every post you create, some simple and clear fields with the elements you want to optimize for  Search Engines and that’s all. There are some WP themes including this feature lately, but the plugin is that easy to use and free that it continues between the most popular.

Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

NextGEN Gallery

When you create a portfolio on your WordPress blog or site you need a beautiful way to stand your work out from the typical thumbnails, and this plugin gives you all the features you need to have a nice image gallery on your site. You don’t need to have any knowledge of JQuery to create a nice and professional gallery.

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

Contact Form 7

There are some great other contact from plugins but this one gives you the most simple set up for a form, just select what kind of form you want and ad the fields you need, that’s all. Obviously you can make a test before going live.

Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

WP FollowMe

This is one of the most recent plugins from the list, with the increasing numbers of tools twitter related, this plugin has become  a must have. A simple badge with great customization options. Great if you want to get more followers, as we all want. (follow me)

WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allows you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog.

WP-CodeBox

I don’t have it right now on my blog but I already tested for some coding tutorials I am preparing and I think is really simple and easy to use. If you do some coding tutorials it can be great to have.

WP-CodeBox provides clean syntax highlighting and AJAX advanced features for embedding source code within pages or posts.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

These is the first bookmark plugin I installed, and the set up is that simple that you just have to select what you want to appears and that’s all, it has all bookmark sites, and include a mail to a friend. On the other hand if your reader are not tech-savy they can never noticed the Share/Save button.

Help readers share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and over 100 more.

WPtouch iPhone Theme

If you want to reach every kind of user including those from smart phones this plugin can give you a nice clean interface on that small devices, your content will stand out from the rest and the visitor can have an easy access to all your articles.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device.

Easy AdSense

It helps you to set up your adsense codes on your blog, almost every place is cover by this plugin, sidebar widget, link units and google search, you copy your codes from your adsense account and paste them here. Is a simple way to get you blog monetized.

Easy AdSense manages all aspects of Google AdSense for your blog: insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box. Easy and complete!

WP-Cumulus

Ever wondering how to create a nice tags cloud with 3d animation, well, this is the easiest way you can find. This is one of those plugin I haven’t tested because is based on a flash file, so I stay with the normal tags cloud.

WP-Cumulus displays your tags and/or categories in 3D by placing them on a rotating sphere.

GD Star Rating

If you want to know how much your readers like your articles, just install it and wait to get the feedback, including post, comments, pages.

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up advanced rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog.

Sociable

The second sharing plugin I installed, you can choose what sites you want from the list and even if it has less options than add to any, it looks better on the post footer.

Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

Google Analytics for WordPress

If you are really new on the Internet and don’t know how to add your analytics code on your Theme, this plugin is for you. Get you Analitycs ID and select what you want to be traced on the site, update and wait to see the results. it couldn’t be more simple, that’s the reason this plugin is so popular.

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.

WP Super Cache

With this plugin you will have a faster loading of your pages, it creates static pages for visitors who don’t leave comments or are not logg in. This is just a better version of  Wp cache.

A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

WP e-Commerce

Do you want to include an e-commerce section to your blog/site, install this plugin and go to the options, all you can need is here. You don’t need any experience to get your shop online.

WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.

Page Flip Image Gallery

Page flip gallery is another option if you want to get a different look to your pictures. Is flash based and the final result include sound and some effects.

FlippingBook WordPress Gallery plugin helps you to create Image Gallery with Page Flip effects on your blog.

WordPress.com Stats

The best way to know how successful your blog is, is thanks to stats, more you know about your visitors more you can help them to get what they want on your site. You can use this plugin as complement of  Google Analitycs for WordPress.

You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system.

WP Security Scan

As WordPress is an Open Source CMS hackers can have access to the main code, every release try to make more secure this platform but chances are some bug appears any time. Better is to be prepared for those attacks.

Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities.

Broken Link Checker

A good blog is full of links and a great one has all the links working because that is important to Search Engines en real visitors. This plugin scan all your content for those dead links.

This plugin will check your posts, custom fields and the blogroll for broken links and missing images and notify you if any are found.

SexyBookmarks

This sharing plugin is one of the latest but is the most attractive visually, the JQuery effect and the icons are great. Personally is what I use now.

Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three.

Twitter Widget Pro

Twitter is everywhere and you have to be present on it, if you want to get some visitors and relations, this widget gives you more options to insert on your blog.

A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including parsing @username, #hashtags, and URLs into links. Requires PHP5.

FeedWordPress

If you want to show your readers what blogs you follow just add this plugin to your blog and add the feed you want to display.

FeedWordPress syndicates content from feeds you choose into your WordPress weblog.

Viper’s Video Quicktags

If you have a video blog or interesting videos to present on your site, use it to make it easy, all the customization options of the video sharing sites in this plugin.

Allows easy and XHTML valid posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and more.

Akismet

The most powerful antispam for wordpress if you are just starting with your blog, this is one fo the two plugins already installed on wordpress, so don’t deleted because is really effective.

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

WP-PageNavi

Default wordpress page navigation is boring, you can only see the next page of articles or the older, but if you install this plugin and set up a nice CSS for the navigation, you can easily give to your readers a nicer way to go trough your olders post.

Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog.

Redirection

Working with a .htacces is not the best way to solve a problem on you site when you don’t really know what you are doing, this plugin let you redirect the pages you deleted, changed or don’t want to be shown. Really practical if you change the permalink structure.

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.

Really Simple CAPTCHA

Spam is the king of comments on most blogs, some nasty comments can pass even with a spam filter,  so this simple field on your comment form can let you far from spam. Honestly I don’t like to much captcha plugins in general, because they are not easy to read sometimes, and readers are not always in the mood to field more information.

Really Simple CAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA module intended to be called from other plugins. It is originally created for my Contact Form 7 plugin.

TweetMeme Button

This is the king of twitter related plugins, I am sure you’ve seen it thousand of times in all kind of blogs, that is just because we all want to get a retweet, and readers love to do it with great content the most easy way. You can either install the plugin if you don’t want to mess with code, but you can also copy the code from the Tweetmeme site and paste it on your theme. Less plugins you have, better.

Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

WordPress Exploit Scanner

If you want to be sure your blog is safety and you are not a master of databases, instal this plugins and run it. Is that simple.

Search the files and database of your WordPress install for malicious code or spammy links left by a hacker.

WP-Optimize

Almost the same than before but with some other features about optimization and cleaning options.

This plugin allows you to clean up your wordpress database and optimize it without phpMyAdmin. Also renames any username.

WP Greet Box

This is one of those plugins I don’t have but I want it, It creates a simple and nice box on the top of your post when a visitor come from different sites and remember him that he should subscribe to your blog, including a close option if he doesn’t.

Display a different greeting message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from.

Random Pages Widget

I tried this plugins at the beginning but if you don’t have a good number of post, you don’t need it, and even then maybe you can try adding to your sidebar a Most Popular Post list or Last Post list, also there are some good tips to create your own.

Displays random posts and pages in sidebar. This increases the number of indexed pages and gives users an interesting way to browse your site.

Now, have you use some of this plugins? or do you know another who is better that one from the list. Any other you think should be on the list.

I would like to hear from you, about your experiences.

Other resources and further reading:

Top 35 Plugins of WordPress to Share Your Blog Post from pelfusion

20 New, Useful And Promising WordPress Plugins from 1st Web Designer

31 Useful Twitter Plugins For WordPress To Choose From from 1st Web Designer

20+ Brand New and Incredibly Useful WordPress Plugins from Net.Tuts+

10 WordPress Plugins Guaranteed to Save You Time from Six Revisions

Top Twitter WordPress Plugin Roundup From Blue Print Design Studio

107 WordPress Twitter Plugins from Skyje

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