Free Content /* BEGIN IMAGE CSS */ /* To accomodate differing install paths of WordPress, images are referred only here, and not in the wp-layout.css file. If you prefer to use only CSS for colors and what not, then go right ahead and delete the following lines, and the image files. */ body { background: url("http://www.free-content.us/wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrickbgcolor.jpg"); } #page { background: url("http://www.free-content.us/wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrickbg.jpg") repeat-y top; border: none; } #header { background: url("http://www.free-content.us/wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrickheader.jpg") no-repeat bottom center; } #footer { background: url("http://www.free-content.us/wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrickfooter.jpg") no-repeat bottom; border: none;} /* Because the template is slightly different, size-wise, with images, this needs to be set here If you don't want to use the template's images, you can also delete the following two lines. */ #header { margin: 0 !important; margin: 0 0 0 1px; padding: 1px; height: 198px; width: 758px; } #headerimg { margin: 7px 9px 0; height: 192px; width: 740px; } /* END IMAGE CSS */ /* To ease the insertion of a personal header image, I have done it in such a way, that you simply drop in an image called 'personalheader.jpg' into your /images/ directory. Dimensions should be at least 760px x 200px. Anything above that will get cropped off of the image. */ /* #headerimg { background: url('http://www.free-content.us/wp-content/themes/default/images/personalheader.jpg') no-repeat top;} */ Free Content Information and links to free content for your website. Content is King October 1st, 2005 Somewhere between ever more sophisticated graphic design and more complicated CSS, many designers have are starting to forget one of the ground rules of the web. This rule is the arguably the most important rule to follow at all times; one that you should always keep in mind when you’re designing your website. So what is it? It’s simple. Your visitors are at your website to get information. Content is King. The Search-Driven Web. Studies show that well over 90% of users now have a search engine as their homepage, and use it for around half of everything they do on the web. Unless you’re advertising your site heavily, most of your users are likely to arrive through a search engine. However, they’re relatively unlikely to just be searching for a description of your products. What are they looking for? Information. There’s a reason why the web was once referred to as the ‘information superhighway’ – while some people might be actively looking to buy things, most of them are just looking for information. Relevant Articles. So, if you’re selling products, you need to provide articles that your potential customers are likely to want to read. The bigger the audience you can build for your articles, the more conversions you’re going to have to sales. It can’t be emphasised enough just how important your content is: if it’s badly-written, or not useful, your visitors are likely to just go back to their search results page and try another link. If you give them good information, though, you instantly create the kind of loyalty that no number of advertising dollars can buy. What many practitioners of techniques like ’search engine optimisation’ don’t realise is this: you can’t fake good content. However many keywords you might stick into it, you’ll fool search engines, but not the visitors they bring in – all you’re doing is costing yourself money in bandwidth and wasting people’s time. No Time to Write? The most common objection I hear when I tell people they should write great content is that they have no time to write the amounts that would be needed – and, yes, writing can be very time-consuming. What you have to realise, though, is that there are plenty of ways around this, such as hiring a freelance writer to do some of the work for you, or using speech recognition software. You might also consider buying in content from people who resell it, or even getting your users to write the content – there’s nothing better than getting visitors to write their own content and then getting more visitors from search engines where people have found it. There are even sites offering content for free in exchange for a link back to them at the bottom of the article, although you should be cautious about reviewing the quality of content offered this way. Keep it Updated. Here’s something that many people don’t realise: it’s better to write a little occasionally than to write a lot all at once. This means that, even if you have written hundreds of articles, you should release them one by one on a regular timescale. Both visitors and search engines prefer sites that are updated often to ones that have a big pile of content dumped on them once and then aren’t touched for years. Content Makes Money. Nowadays, it’s once again possible to make money from good content without even having anything to sell. Plenty of businesses were based on advertising back in the dot-com boom, but ad prices eventually dipped too low for this to be sustainable. Ad prices have now recovered, however, thanks to text advertising. You can sign up with most of the big search engines now for context-sensitive ads for your site that are chosen automatically – Google AdSense runs the most popular service. This kind of advertising eliminates human ‘ad editors’ altogether, while producing ads that are targeted enough to give far better returns than they ever used to. Purely content-driven websites with ads are once again a viable revenue stream, and content is as much King as it’s ever been. Posted in Free Content Sites | No Comments » Free Graphics Alternatives October 1st, 2005 With Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop and most other popular image editors being commercial, paid-for software, you might be forgiven for thinking that there aren’t any free alternatives. While they’re not very well publicised, there are plenty of free graphic editing alternatives out there, if you know where to look. Here’s a rundown of some of the best. The Gimp. Despite its daft name, the Gimp is widely considered to be the best graphics editor you can get for free – many devotees compare its features to those of Photoshop. While it isn’t easy to use as most commercial offerings, the Gimp is certainly powerful, and has become the most popular image editor for Linux (which doesn’t run Photoshop). The Gimp (or GIMP, standing for GNU Image Manipulation Program) was specifically designed to be an open source competitor to Photoshop, in much the same way as OpenOffice.org competes with Microsoft Office and the Mozilla browsers compete with Internet Explorer. However, Gimp still hasn’t picked up much of a following outside the open source community, mainly because of its unusual interface. Gimp is based on the Linux GTK (Gimp Toolkit) system, and that makes its interface look very un-Windows-like, since it is broken down into small, separate components. This approach does come with advantages, however, such as the Gimp’s useful ability to let you ‘rip’ menus and sub-menus away from where they usually appear and use them as toolbars instead. If you haven’t had time to get used to Photoshop, you might even find that you prefer the Gimp’s interface. In some areas, the Gimp outshines Photoshop by a long way. For example, Photoshop comes with a rather limited selection of filters, and there are plenty of companies who make a business out of selling extra ones at a premium. The Gimp includes every filter that the open source community has ever found useful, which is quite a few, and they all come for free. Essentially, if you’re willing to take a small hit in ease of use, the Gimp provides you with thousands of dollars worth of functionality at no cost whatsoever. If you want to download the Gimp, go to gimp-win.sourceforge.net/ to get the Windows installer version. There is also a version that has been customised to have a more Photoshop-like interface – you can get it at www.plasticbugs.com. Paint.NET. Paint.NET is a recent arrival in the open source graphics world, but has gained a lot of followers in the year or so it’s been around. It offers a powerful graphics editing program with a deliberately simple interface, based on the ‘Paint’ program that comes with Windows – the fact that people already know how to use that interface has been an important factor in its popularity. The program’s development is taking place at Washington University, and is supported by Microsoft, making it likely that it might be included in future Windows releases. Paint.NET can currently be downloaded for free from www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net. SodiPodi. SodiPodi isn’t really an alternative to Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro – it’s more like a free version of programs like Macromedia Freehand or Adobe Illustrator that graphics designers wouldn’t usually use often enough to justify purchasing. It lets you draw using vector graphics, giving you the useful ability to create your own artwork instead of sticking with stock symbols. This is mainly worth mentioning here because it makes a great complement to tools like the Gimp and Paint.NET, letting you make something of your own to apply all your fancy effects and filters to when you’re making a logo or a design. You can get SodiPodi at www.sodipodi.com, although you might also like to look at another version named Inkscape (www.inkscape.org), which again has a more Photoshop-like interface. Picasa. Finally, if all you want to do is organise photos simply and get them ready for display on the web, you could do worse than Picasa. Recently bought by Google and made available for free at www.picasa.com, Picasa makes it simple to organise your photographs and apply simple effects like red-eye removal to them. Posted in Free Content Sites | No Comments » FreeSticky - Content for your website September 1st, 2005 FreeSticky.com offers not only sources to free articles for webmasters but also hundreds of other sources for free content. This is a blurb I pulled off their site. So what is FreeSticky? FreeSticky is Content & Webmaster Tools for Web Sites ! We are primarily a source of FREE and low cost content that anyone can use to increase the appeal, usefulness, traffic and eventually the stickiness of their website. Changing content and interactive web site tools are the driving force behind return visits to any website. Freesticky are also content providers, so we know what to look for when we are reviewing a web site. Their site is somewhat cluttered so it might take awhile to find what you are looking for. Also, most free content comes with some kind of catch so be sure to read the copyright clause for anything you use. Check out FreeSticky.com Posted in Free Content Sites | No Comments » Free Articles at GoArticles.com July 14th, 2005 This is taken from GoArticles.com about page. Another great resource for Free Articles. GoArticles.com is an article search engine and directory, updated daily. The staff at GoArticles are dedicated to meeting the needs of contributing Authors, newsletter Publishers and visitors by providing the best and largest article database on the Web. Our goal is to make great content available to you when you want it, not when someone decides to send it to you. Visit GoArticles.com Posted in Free Content Sites | No Comments » Free Articles from FindArticles.com June 14th, 2005 Another great resource for free reprintable articles is FindArticles.com

. They offer 5 million different articles with a ton that are free to reprint on your own site, ezine or newsletter. They offer a wide variety from arts and entertainment to sports. They also offer rss feeds of some of their latest or top articles which you can assumably post on your site. When you search for articles be sure to search for “Free Articles Only” if you wish to reprint them anywhere. Posted in Free Content Sites | No Comments » Free Reprintable Articles May 15th, 2005 Articlecity offers free reprintable articles that you can use for your web site, ezine or newsletter. I’ve have used Articlecity for a bunch of sites I own and they work great. Now free things usually come with some kind of catch and yes articles from Articlycity come with some. If you use any articles from Articlecity you must leave the articles as is. That means you must leave the authors name and info about the author at the end and you may not edit it in anyway. Sometimes authors say how their articles can be used. You will notice the grey box at the bottom of each article that gives info about who the author is, URL and sometimes credentials. Leave this info intact. It’s not optional to leave it out. If you do you could be hit with copyright infringement and that is never good. Give the authors credit. It’s a small price to pay for a free article. Make sure you read any articles you plan to use. Some writers are better then others. Sometimes it takes just a quick scan to determine if an article will help or hurt your reputation. I’ve noticed that some articles have misspellings or contain opinions that don’t match mine. It’s good to read any article you plan to publish in full. Articlecity has tons of articles and lots of categories. Be sure to check them out. Posted in Free Content Sites | No Comments » Welcome to Free-Content.US May 15th, 2005 Hi, my name is Jeff. I’ve been a web designer for about 6 or 7 years now. I’ve recently gotten into publishing directories and other web sites and have been on the search for good content. I never knew there was such a wealth of information out there that could help give life to my sites. In finding these usefull resources I thought it would be great to keep a record of what I find. So that is what this blog will be about. Well, I will keep you posted soon… Posted in Free Content Sites | No Comments » Other Recent Entries Content is King Free Graphics Alternatives FreeSticky - Content for your website Free Articles at GoArticles.com Free Articles from FindArticles.com Free Reprintable Articles Welcome to Free-Content.US Archives October 2005 September 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 Categories Free Content Sites (7) Blogroll Web Designers Article Search Event Photographers Meta Login Valid XHTML XFN WordPress Free Content is proudly powered by WordPress Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)

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