Just a quick post about the color scheme change on this blog. I originally downloaded the Flexibility 2 WordPress theme but hadn’t done much about changing the default color scheme. Thought it was about time to do so.

I created a new header and changed the overall color scheme from red to blue. I liked the red but a lot of people who are using this theme have done the same as me and kept the red theme so it really needed a whole new color to make this blog unique.

I was originally going to keep the background in the dark grey color but it looked a bit flat and lifeless so I changed it to a gold color. Still not sure about it yet but I will take a look again in the morning with fresh new eyes to see if it looks a little off.

What do you think? Any suggestions about how to improve it or do you think it looks okay?

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Recently we have been thinking about selling some of our domain names. We probably have about 50 of them at the moment – of those about 30 of them are just parked with no website attached.

It kind of comes with the territory when you develop niche websites so you buy the domain with the full intention of building that website in the near future. Unfortunately there is never enough time so the domain names sit there year after year until one day you really you are never going to get around to building them.

So today we decided to put a few of those domain names on the market. Now we aren’t in a rush to sell so we probably overpriced them a bit but we are just going to test the waters and see if anyone bites.

So how do you go about selling your domain names?

There are really only 2 ways to sell a domain name:

1. Sell it yourself – The advantage of this method is that you don’t have to pay a commission on the sale. However the downside is that it can be a little risky if you don’t know what you are doing

2. Getting someone else to sell it for you – the advantage of this method is that you can rely on someone else to do the work for you. You simply list your domain name and then wait for the sale. The payment is made securely and there is less risk of something going wrong. The disadvantage is that you have to pay a commission on the sale.

How Much is My Domain Name Worth?

In order to sell your domain name, you need to know how much it is worth…or at least have a basic idea. Most domain name sellers like Godaddy provide appraisal services. However, oftentimes you will have to pay for the privilege. If you want to get a basic idea of what your domain is worth you can try this free service. But remember that it is only a computer spitting out an answer here so don’t take it too seriously.  Your domain name could be worth a lot more or a lot less – it all comes down to how much someone is willing to pay for it.

There are so many factors that come into play when valuing a domain name including:

• the length of the url
• how many words are in the url
• the type of extension ie. .com, .net, .org etc
• does it have hyphen

A good way of determing a price for your domain is to check out past sales for domain names similar to your own. One of the best places for this is Sedo. This is one of the biggest buyers and sellers of domain names so you are sure to find a domain name or two that relates to yours.

Where is the Best Place to Sell a Domain Name?

Good question. There are hundreds of different brokers on the net but one of the biggest and the one that I use is Sedo. They have over 11 million domains on their site so they must be doing something good.

It is easy to add a domain and the commission for a sale is 10%. You simply set your price and then sit back and wait for a sale. There are a few different methods of selling your site – you can auction it, set a fixed price, or choose the Make an Offer option. I like using the fixed price but I also combine it with the Make an Offer option.

We are going to be holding a contest on one of our blogs and have been looking for a WordPress plugin that will give our visitors the ability to vote for their favorite blog. My initial thought was that I would have no problem finding something suitable and I was even willing to pay for it! But unfortunately the options were limited and very disappointing.

However, I did end up finding a WordPress plugin called WP-Polls which as the name suggests provides the ability to add a poll to your blog. The only problem was that I was looking for something that would allow me to add an image of each blog so that our visitors could see exactly who they were voting for. My initial assumption was that this plugin wasn’t capable of doing that so I kept looking for something that did.

During my search I came along a blog post at the zebida.com website written by Hesham. It describes how to add thumbnails and links using the WP-Polls plugin.

YES!…now I had the answer I was looking for. So my initial assumption that I couldn’t add images was wrong but I didn’t care as I now had everything I needed to create the blog contest.

How to Use WP-Polls

If you want to create your own blog contest using WP-Polls then this is what you need to do:

Step 1: Upload the WP-Polls plugin to your blog and activate it.

Step 2: Click on the Polls option on the left hand menu on your blog Dashboard and select Manage Polls. It will most likely be at the very bottom of the screen.

Step 3: You should already see a Poll listed. This is just an example poll but you can use this one instead of creating a new one. So go ahead and click the Edit link next to that poll.

Step 4: On the Edit Poll screen you will be able to enter the details of your contest so just overtype the information in the Poll Question and Poll Answer sections and select the options that suit you in the remaining fields. In the Poll Answer fields you will be able to add html in order to add an image but we will get into that in a little more detail below. For the moment just enter text into these fields.

Step 5: Click Edit Poll to save the changes.

Step 6: Add a new post and in the html part of the post add the following code: [poll id="1"]where ’1′ is your poll ID. You can find the poll id in the Polls list on the Manage Polls page.

Step 7: Now save your post and preview it and you should now see your poll on the page.

Now for the Good Stuff…

So if you are like me you are probably wanting to add some images to each option. The code  below is what I used for my blog competiton. It displays the radio button above the image, provides a link to the website and also includes a horizontal line under each image.

To use this code you just need to paste it into the ’Poll Answer’ fields in the Manage Polls section. Obviously you will need to replace the links to correspond to the correct urls and image sources that you will be using. You can also play around with this if you know a bit of html – bold the text etc. I did notice that these fields were limited to only so many characters so you won’t be able to go too crazy here.

Title of Blog Here<br>&amp;nbsp;<img src="wp-content/uploads/2009/10/imageofblog.JPG" ><br />
<hr>

You can see in the image below exactly where to insert this code. Once the html has been entered just click the Edit Poll link to save your changes.

So now  if you have done everything right you should see something like this on your blog post.