www.affiliateconfession.com

Several days ago I wrote a guest post for John Chow about some basic things you can do to improve your blogging and earnings online. One of those things was to leave comments on other blogs. If you don’t think that works, you should probably talk to Tom Ross of Push Standards, because that’s exactly how Tom got my attention and more importantly, my business.

Tom left a comment on a post here at Affiliate Confession and as I do to many who leave comments, I visited his blog and was really impressed with what I saw. I had been semi-actively looking for a designer or company to give Affiliate Confession a custom look and the web sites Tom features in his online design portfolio caught my eye. Tom’s work is uncluttered, pleasing to the eye and being that I spent 7 years designing Yellow Pages advertising, his designs just made me want to hang out and study them for awhile. I love to look at nice work and think, ‘I wonder how he did that?’ or ‘Hmm, how many Photoshop layers did he use on that one?’

Since Tom is an independent “Young entrepreneur and web designer” as he states in his blog header, I thought I’d shoot him an email through his Hire Me page and see what we could work out. Now, if you’ve seen the prices that some of the larger design companies like Unique Blog Designs have been charging, you know getting a custom Wordpress theme is an expensive endeavor. But after sending a few emails back and forth to confirm what I wanted and the look I was trying to achieve, Tom’s rates were very affordable. I can’t give you an exact quote because there are specific things that you have to work out with Tom, or any designer. However, the level of complexity in a blog design has a lot to do with the price.

Not knowing what to expect when dealing with a designer completely online, I was very impressed with Tom’s professionalism, enthusiasm and patience. The whole process from my initial contact to finished project and getting the theme implemented, took about 20 days and Tom was incredibly helpful in working with me to get the design online and in working order. He researched problems, emailed me code a couple of times and patiently explained some issues to get things working just as I wanted.

When you are ready to get a custom design for your blog or want to put together a nice, clean looking web site, I highly recommend Tom at Push Standards. I know you will be pleased with his work.

Now, if you already have a cool looking web site that’s CSS based and not full of tables, Tom has another interesting project he’s recently completed. CssGalleryList.com promises to be a constantly updated list of sites that accept nicely designed CSS sites. I guess a problem with many of these gallery sites is that they come and go and Tom wants to help out designers and owners of custom designed sites by keeping his gallery list updated.

Tom has already compiled a list of nearly 50 galleries to submit your site to and links directly to their submission page for your convenience. It only takes about 30 minutes to submit to all of these sites if you don’t get stuck like I did, looking at cool designs. Some of these galleries have nice PR4 and PR5 rankings and would be a great asset to get an incoming link from. However, don’t think you can just submit a Blogger.com site, a standard Wordpress template site or just try to spam these galleries. They are looking for high quality, customed designed sites.

Many thanks goes out to Tom Ross for helping me brand Affiliate Confession and giving me the custom look I wanted. If you need a designer for your blog or web site please contact him and remember, keep commenting because you never know how it will turn out.

Alan

I’ve been tweaking all day and adding stuff here and there and as you can see, there’s a new design to Affiliate Confession. I probably shouldn’t be messing with some of the stuff I’ve have been because I know just enough php and CSS to destroy a nice work of art. There are just a couple things more that need to be fixed and all should be well.

Some notable changes, other than the cool design, are the Most Popular Posts and the Most Commented Posts sections at the top. These sections were previously at the bottom, but how often do you scroll to the bottom of a blog? Hopefully this will make visitors more aware of the most important posts and to see what everyone else is commenting on and reading. I’ve also installed a Feedburner stats box on the upper right so you can see how many people are subscribed to Affiliate Confession.

A new Archives Page has been added as well and the monthly listed archives on the sidebar that you see on most blogs has been removed. You can now see every post on Affiliate Confession from that page and have a look at each post title to see if something catches your attention rather than having to scroll through page after page of monthly posts.

You will also notice that there are 2 more 125 x 125 advertising spots available on the sidebar and a 468 x 60 banner spot in the header. As soon as I figure out how to get the sidebar banners to rotate so you don’t always see that same ad in the same position, 3 of those spots will go up for sale as well as the top banner. The initial cost will be $25 per month for the 125’s and $50 per month for the top banner. If you are interested in advertising on Affiliate Confession, you can contact me here.

I’ll be running a contest starting sometime this week, maybe tomorrow, to officially introduce the new theme and later this week I’ll also let you know who designed the theme as well.

Sorry for the late and short post, but I’ve been at it all day trying to get it just right and it’s time to take a rest.

Please let me know what you think of the new theme.

Alan