We all know(or ought, to as far as articles about passwords tell us):

Insecure = password, hello , viper, bookshelf
Not very secure?= tdiavnd (today is a very nice day)
good? = t1dwtBd! (this one day today was the best day!)

“All of the good password cracking programs include foreign words, backwards words, etc.” Sarah Granger

What makes passwords strong ? = ¬What do hackers look for ?

They look for alphanumeric passwords with 1-4(years) numbers and 1-2 capital letters and 1-2 punctuation marks. This way the amount of work necessary to crack a 8 char password that uses alphanumeric+punctuation+capital letters gets down from the theoretical 218 Trillion to a mere ~1 Trillion (which is 4 times the amount necessary to crack a 8 char pure character password) that is from 3½ Min’s to 12 Min’s (worst case).

In conclusion: choose long pure character, easy to remember passwords like (my new mac-book air sucks because it hast no CD drive installed) mnmbasbcihncddi = 50k years or choose short passwords with many strange hard to remember signs $&!BA12# = 83 days.

One final thought: have a different passwords for all your sites!
Wordpress = wp -> +1(be creative here…) -> xq -> xtdiqavnd (s. above)
so you don’t have to worry about giving colleagues your password and can use 1 password for all sites.