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Well after the last three days I've got to say that I sure wish it was Friday and not Thursday. It's been all go here in our office and now things are beginning to slow down ... at least for a little while ... but it would still be better if it was Friday.

After a little wander around some of the boards it seems as though quite a few webmasters are wondering who turned the sales tap off. Sales have dropped to almost nothing for them and obviously that's going to hurt.

Those who are in that position are trying to find some answers but how do you explain a drop like that? It's too early for the traditional summer slowdown ... if there ever has been such a thing. The economy is showing signs of improvement so people should be buying what we're selling and not hiding.

It's not the end of the month when some sponsors are winding up the scrub levels to protect their charge-back ratios. And there has been no major event that could have taken the surfers' attention away from their need for porn so who knows?

Obviously when things are tough you're going to have to work even harder and there's no point doing that unless you're going to work smarter as well. So with that in mind here are a few tools that might help you do just that.

Ultimatum
There have been times lately when I wish WordPress had been around back in the days when I was building free sites and galleries and if it had been then I would have just about killed for Ultimatum.

You can find Ultimatum at wonderfoundry.com and when you have it you'll have a tool for WordPress that lets you build layouts via drag-and-drop. Unfortunately for those of you who survive on free stuff this one is not free but it should certainly save you enough design time to pay for itself very quickly.

My one warning here is that while it's on my hard drive I haven't had a chance to use it yet but the demo video certainly looks as though it's going to be a great tool to have.

WordPress Functions
If you've been using WordPress for a while but you don't know enough to be able to go behind the dashboard and do some tweaking of your own then head over to dailydocumentation.com/wordpress/ and sign up for their newsletter.

Each day you'll get an email that contains all the information you'll need to know about a particular function. Before long you'll be diving into the backend and bending WordPress to your will.

WordPress running slow?
If something is really slowing your server down a good place to start looking is all those WordPress based sites that your running. It's unlikely that WordPress itself will be the problem but there's no doubt that some of the plugins you might be using could be causing the problems.

Plugins are wonderful little bits of scripting and coding that can really extend the functionality of WordPress and they're even more wonderful because they're usually free. But they do have their little problems ... especially when it comes to speed ... and even though some plugins may not actually be called for when a page loads they will still go ahead and load in the background.

So finding the plugins that are slowing things down can be a challenge but now there's a free tool that will scan your WordPress site and identify the plugins that are causing the problem. To grab the tool head over to WordPress.org, click through to the plugins page and do a search for 'p3-profiler'.

Once it's installed it will run a scan of your site and tell you where the problems are.

WordPress and mobile
The more recent WordPress themes that are out there don't do too bad a job at making the transition from the big screen monitors down to the screen of a tablet or mobile phone ... just as long as the surfer doesn't mind expanding and contracting the image on the screen when he really wants to see what's there.

But now the theme designers are beginning to realise that if they really want to connect WordPress sites with mobile phone users ... especially those who aren't prepared to fiddle around and expand and contract things ... they're going to have to build themes that look good on the big screen and at the same time display clearly on mobile phones without any of that fiddling around.

A number of WordPress themes that will do just that are beginning to appear and the keyword to look for ... so you know that you're getting one of those themes ... is 'responsive'. Responsive themes will look good on big screens, on tablet screens and on mobile phone screens and there are even a few responsive plugins ... such as sliders ... beginning to appear as well.

And that's it for me today, now I'm off to do a few small tasks that will result in several sites reaching the point where they're ready to go live and that's guaranteed to make me feel good.