Ok, just a quick hit today. I’m going to try to start showcasing some of the free stuff I use. A lot of it will be free WordPress plugins, free WordPress themes, and other tools and sites that I really use myself.

Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about a plugin I’ve been using for about 6 months or so now called Link Juice Keeper. Basically this plugin will automatically 301 redirect any non-existant pages on your site to your home page. It’s super simple to set up, and literally starts working once you activate it.

So why is this useful? Well there are actually a couple reasons. Probably the main thing I like it for is using it with expired domains. I generally only try to pick expired domains that have a diverse link profile – at least a handful of real contextual links. Most of the time, in this case, the links pointing back to the expired domain point to a variety of different pages within the site. That means, if you do noting, and put up a brand new site, you will have a ton of nice links pointing to a 404 page… What a waste. Now, many people will use the wayback machine or cached pages in google and recreate the old pages on the site. In some cases this is worth the time, and in other cases, it isn’t. Personally, I’ve found that this works great, and is the fastest way possible to avoid having a ton of links pointing to 404 pages.

Also, another good use for this tool, would be if you were converting an existing site to WordPress. Generally, if you’ve got any kind of non-Wordpress site, it’s going to be hard to keep the exact same URL structure for every page in the site. This is a quick way to avoid a ton of 404′s from search results and keep your traffic level stable as you transition to a new site. Now this probably isn’t as useful for this application, but it would be a lot better than manually setting up 301 redirects for a large amount of pages.

So overall, this is a plugin I use quite a bit. You can add it to your WordPress via the admin if you search for Link Juice Keeper, or click on the link above to visit the plugin page and download it.

Well, it’s been a long time coming – I’ve been hinting at the release of my second WP Commerce series theme since January, and without further ado, here it is!

WP Commerce Flex is a huge upgrade from the first theme in the series – WP Commerce Steel. It features a variety of options, solid SEO-friendly CSS layout that is easily customizable, and built for seamless integration with PHPbay and PHPZon.

Here are the features:

*Simple CSS based color scheme for EASY customization

*SEO friendly layout – main content appears before right sidebar in the code

*No images to edit, fast loading

*Custom sidebar position for S2P Integration

*Featured Content Gallery Integration

*Suckerfish Drop-Down Menus

*Built in Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions (opens in a lightbox). Just update with your website address and email

*8 convenient sidebar positions

*Yoast Breadcrumb plugin integrated into theme

Check out a live demo of WP Commerce Flex

See WP Commerce Flex in fully configured and in action on this laptop batteries site (Please DO NOT click on the ads).

I’ve had several requests, so today I’m releasing a header source file for the WP Commerce Steel theme I released yesterday. The header contains all the typography and styles you’ll need to create your own custom header/logo for your WP Commerce Steel powered site.

One important thing to note – the height of the header graphic should not exceed 100px. If you make your graphic taller than that, you’ll need to do some custom editing to the CSS file in order to make the theme display properly. You can increase the width of the image by several hundred pixels with no side effects.

To replace the title and sub title with a custom header open up header.php find the H1 and H2 tags, completely remove them and replace with the image tag for your header.