Can good design be deceiving?

Sometimes I come across a site that wows me with it’s design and right away I think” the service it presents must be as good as it’s design” and I sometimes buy from it without hesitation fascinated by it’s great design.

It happened with me recently with WPMU DEV, just as I saw the way they displayed their products and advertized their themes and plugins, I couldn’t resist and I signed up right away, however, after logging in and using some the plugins and putting them to real-world test, I got a bit disappointed.

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Looking for best hosting?

I am, and I have to say it’s a very tricky and confusing task, to find the best hosting company to put your sites on.

Since I first started hosting my sites I’ve been a loyal customer for bizland.com however, lately, I started to see lots of down time which made me annoyed and I tried to contact them many times but didn’t get a satisfactory response.

And as my site is based upon WordPress that poses extra challenges, and I have to say my experience with Godaddy hosting was the worst for WordPress sites, and it took my triple the usual time to get a site ready on it earlier this month.

Looking around, asking people and not relying on Google search( which gave me loads of unreliable reviews mostly affiliates who benefit when you sign up for certain hosting companies, so definitely can’t be trusted!), I came to narrow my search to two of them, dreamhost  and bluehost and  I am in the last phase of choosing between them.

So, from  your experience, what’s your favorite hosting company and why did you choose it?

Hope to hear from you.

My Site is redesigned

After about a year of the old look, I decided to do a complete overhaul for my site.

Now with a wider layout, cleaner and simpler design which gives more focus to the content itself.

Also, gives more focus on my portfolio and work which has been spread into categories to allow for easier access.

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WordPress 3.2: What I like most!

First watch the official video for WordPress 3.2 to see the main highlights about the new release.

My Personal Favorite Features:

1. The new Full Screen Write mode lets you focus on what you want to write and not worry about anything else, really cool!
2. The Dashboard has a nicer and cleaner look now
3. The ultra-fast automatic updates is really a breeze, as now WordPress overwrites only the new or changed files, a long awaited feature.
4. The New 2011 default theme is a lot nicer and has some cool features that you will enjoy and can get you started in no time with a new site that looks good.

Well, those are my top 4 favourites, What’s yours?

Share you thoughts and impressions about it with us.

WordPress 3.2 Be careful before you upgrade!

I’ve just been notified that WordPress 3.2 is ready to be installed and as I am always happy to upgrade to the latest versions, a word of caution is important this time as the release notes state that WordPress now only supports PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0

So, you need to make sure your server supports those before upgrading.

How can I be sure?

• Log into your hosting account’s control panel and see which versions your site supports
• Or, ask your hosting support about which versions are installed.
• Or, better install a plugin called Health Check, which does the homework for you and gives you a message as to whether your server supports the latest release of WordPress or not. Simply install and activate and it does the check for you automatically.

So, be safe better than sorry.

I will prepare a video walk-through to cover the new features in WP 3.2 soon.

As for me, I’ve used the plugin, and it proved that I am good to go which made me upgrade and things ran smoothly.

Hope it works for you too.

WordPress community… Thank you!

After I wrote my last post, WordPress… I am disappointed by a week or so I found a solution to my problem that I discussed over there thanks to the wonderful community that supports WordPress and makes it worth sticking to.

The Problem:

I found out that the whole problem was caused by having a custom post type that starts with an Uppercase name, Pharmacists instead of pharmacists, this lead to the break of the custom post type when I upgraded to WP 3.1.

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