If you’re serious about starting a blog, and using WordPress to operate and maintain it, then finding the best possible hosting solution is going to be key. Unfortunately, the world of web hosting is a large and confusing one full of over-marketed service providers promising you the world and delivering you nothing but problems. That’s why great sites like Web Hosting Rating are so important.

The goal for the staff at Web Hosting Rating is to build the largest searchable listing of web hosts on the web. Not only do they offer just a general directory of hosts but they also include details on the plans they provide, any discount or promotional coupons the hosts are offering and, most importantly, honest reviews from actual customers.

Another great feature of their site are the articles and web hosting tutorials that they offer visitors. They cover all sorts of topics including: reseller web hosting, dedicated servers, shared hosting and security issues. While none of these articles are specific to a particular host this is a great resource for those of you new to web hosting. By spending some time reading through these articles and tutorials you’ll be better prepared to select the right hosting solution for your new blog. There are even articles that specifically mention WordPress.

One last section of the site you should check out is the collection of web hosting awards. If you’re not interested in spending a lot of time doing your own research you can visit the awards section and see which hosting provider is recommended for particular niches like “Best Budget Hosting” or “Best Blog Hosting.” This is a nice collection of web hosts for people short on time but I still recommend everyone does their own due diligence before selecting their web host.

It’s important to make the right web hosting decision at the start of your blog. If you encounter problems with your hosting after you begin blogging it’s going to be a pain to switch to a new host.

The search engines use to pick websites that had content relative to the users search terms. That is still the case today, only there are a lot more factors that affect which results will show up. One of the main factors in search results is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

One of the best ways to show up higher in search engines is by fixing your Title Tags. The Title Tags are the titles that show up on the very top of your browser. These titles help search engines determine what the name of you link is. So if you have a title tag that is completely opposite of your content, chances are you will not get any traffic from search engines.

So how can we change the title tags on our blogs? Well there is a great plug-in that does the job, its called SEO Title Tag. This plug-in allows you to change the title of your posts, your front page, your tags, and also your categories.

SEO Title Tag is really easy to install as well; it is just like the traditional plug-in with a little step on the side. There are two steps to installation, all you need to do is upload the folder into the plug-ins folder. After that, you just need to edit your header.php file with a little bit of text then you are done. It is simple as that.

So if you are really serious about getting better traffic from search engines, you definitely need to install this plug-in, and start naming your articles.

When we all install Wordpress for the first time, we all have the “Wordpress Default” theme. Most Wordpress users change the theme to a theme that matches their site and their site’s content. However, when you go in and actually change the theme, you see your list of themes, and among them is “Wordpress Classic”. This made me start wondering if anybody actually uses Wordpress Classic, and if not is there an actual purpose for it?

I searched google and other search engines to see if I could find a blog that was using the Wordpress Classic theme, and if they were, I wanted to see if it was a successful blog. However I could not find a blog with this particular theme. I guess no blog would have its theme in the description, so that is probably why I could not find it.

Since I could not find the theme, we are going to pretend that nobody uses it. So since nobody uses the Wordpress Classic theme, is there a point of actually having it pre-installed? The answer to that is yes, because you have to remember that there are some people out there that have no idea how to run a website. There are mothers out their who run a blog, and have no idea how to customize it. This theme gives extra customization for the people that do not know how to customize it them selves.

Then who knows, maybe there are blogs out their that use theme, and maybe they are successful.

Every so often I’m going to profile certain web design firms that specialize or offer excellent WordPress services. The first is BrightCherry, a web design company in Essex.

BrightCherry is a team of five people who focus on PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. The common tools of the trade. They offer the standard collection of web design services including design, coding and hosting and email packages.

BrightCherry has served a lot of clients since they started business. Their clients include hair salons, car dealerships and production companies. They’re well-equipped to handle your web design needs regardless of the industry your business is in.

What really sets BrightCherry apart as one of the premier web design Harlow firms is their appreciate and understanding of WordPress. BrightCherry understands the importance of blogging and will help you design and setup a brand new blog or re-design and modify an existing one you may be using.

In addition to offering paid WordPress services, the crew at BrightCherry maintain their own company blog in which they give away free tips for other WordPress developers and designers. Their posts range in topic from tutorials on modifying the core WordPress files to simple bug fixes for problems like empty RSS feeds.

On top of all of that WordPress stuff they’ve also gone ahead and started to release free WordPress themes for the public to use. Their first theme is already available on the official WordPress themes directory and they plan to add many more in the future to help them get the word out about their business and the services that they provide. That’s an excellent idea for other web design firms out there looking to make a name for themselves in the WordPress community.

So if you’re looking for web design Essex make sure and check out the folks at BrightCherry. They offer free quotes for anyone interested in their services.

The creators of FlashDen are getting ready to roll out their own theme marketplace soon. There’s an announcement about this new site, called ThemeForest, on a post at NetTuts.

This sounds pretty cool based soley on the reputation of FlashDen. It’s probably going to share a lot of characteristics with that site. Unfortunately, it’s apparently also going to be sharing FlashDen’s payout structure and that is pretty atrocious.

The best you can hope for, right out of the gate, is 25% for every sale of your theme. That percentage escalates (if you make your theme exclusive to ThemeForest) with the more themes you sell but the maximum you can ever make per sale is 50%. I’m not sure I like those rates very much but I’m positive a lot of theme designers will go for it because of the people behind ThemeForest.

I’ll keep an eye on this as it develops and post more about it in the future.