Tired of the look on a couple of my blogs and as I have been changing parts of my business since the first of the year it is now time to think about changing themes on a few of them.
Really interested in what you, my reader likes when you visit a blog and more importantly what turns you off.
Time for me to step up my game on some things and your input would be helpful. Leave a comment below with your input. It will definitely be appreciated.
Look for more shortly on Google Buzz as I have been testing some things and may be running a survey on that quite shortly. In the mean time let me hear what you like and don’t when it comes to themes.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
I am always on the lookout for new and interesting themes. Yesterday I found something quite neat when finally getting into my reader and starting to catch up.
I found this site from reading Pat Marcello’s blog and this post on Artisteer. Pat and I go way back and have talked for years.
This made me sit up and take notice. Pat is not a graphic designer type and if she is using this I figure I can too. The software is available at http://artisteer.com and is a paid software that creates themes. It has a demo you can use to play with but you need to purchase it to download the theme.
I have been playing with it and will be going over after this post and buying the license. There is a personal use at $49.95 and a commercial use at $129.95 with more options to use.
See having a unique theme can really set you apart and I have tweaked quite a few over the past few years but this was very easy to use and the time saving in having a theme already tweaked will more than pay for the license for me.
If you have been having trouble trying to find the perfect theme or you buy custom themes you may want to check this out.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed. Leave your questions for the Blog Talk Radio show on Wednesday also.
Have a new plugin that I will be reporting on tomorrow if there are no new questions. This looks neat but afraid it may be a slow down pig but will report back.
Does or should a Blog have a sitemap? I see too many blogs that are all over the place in their design. I want to be able to follow some kind of “order with a purpose” in designing my blog but not too busy that it drives traffic away. It seems as though there is a delicate balance here, right.
A very good question but I think you don’t quite have the terminology quite right.
I do recommend that you use a sitemap plugin so that you can automate the spidering of your site. I do not use a sitemap for people to read.
One of the things that WordPress does quite well is to organize the navigation of your blog. The more tightly targeted your content is to a single subject the better a blog performs with a few exceptions.
One of the things I like to do especially for my niche blogs is to pick out the major areas I want to emphasize and use them for categories. If you are dealing with a very specific topic this will probably give you between 4 -10 categories. These would be your upper level keywords you want to target.
Now if you are doing a general blog like I do with my name blog it can end up being many more because it tends to be more eclectic and cover a much wider range of topics. (Not something I recommend except for name blogs.)
If I understand your real question and unfortunately this means I have to use that ass/u/me word, you are looking for a checklist more for your side bar so that it doesn’t become too overwhelming.
The key will be how you are using the blog and what your monetization is. For most I use something like this but it does vary from topic to topic.
Lead capture form – If you have followed me at all you know why.
Pages – this is where I will have things like about but it will depend on the theme as this theme lists pages in a top header so this would be redundant on this particular theme.
Categories
Recent posts
Recent Comments
Links
Subscribe Me
Tag cloud
That would be the basics but if you use things like My Blog Log I would use their widget too.
The key though is not to copy the order but see what your primary goal is. If it was to attract people to my links then that would move up as an example. It really depends on your own goals and testing and tweaking to see what gets the most attention and putting your primary goal in that position.
Hope this helps as I hate answering questions where I use that ass/u/me word. If not resubmit or leave a comment here and we can continue the conversation.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
P.S. I just updated the 7 Tips book and if you have bought it before you need to login and download the latest version.
Hi Mike, In setting up my blog, I have so far taken your steps of selecting a niche, adding appropriate plugins, setting ping list etc. Now, I’m trying to set up the aesthetics of the site. My primary concern at the moment is finding a semi-professional looking header, and finding a theme that allows me to easily upload custom headers. Any suggestions?
There are literally thousands of available themes available. The WordPress Theme Viewer probably has the largest selection. One of the things I recommend to my customers when picking a theme is to look at the test site and make sure you are comfortable with the text layout, how they display block quotes, ordered lists etc.
Once you have a theme that you like it is relatively easy to change the header graphic. If you can find one that meets your needs except for the header graphic it is time to test it.
Caveat: There are a lot of choices but not all are coded well. You may have trouble with some themes and it is not unusual for me to try 3 or 4 before finding a quality theme that is coded properly. Can be frustrating especially when it has the exact look you want.
Now if it has passed the test and seems to be stable go into the theme folder and find the header image.
Usual path will be wp-content/themes/yourthemename/img or images. Most times it will be called header.jpg or header.gif.
If it doesn’t have either of these go into the style sheet and scroll down until you see #header in the code and below that there will be the code that pulls the image so you can find what it is called.
Download the image to your computer so you can see what size it is. For example on this blog the header is 860px x 150px.
Create an image the same size and name it the same and overwrite the image on your server and you should be good to go.
That is all it will take to change the image.
Now if you have added your site name and tagline to the image you will need to go to the header.php file in your blog and remove some code that automatically displays your blog name and tag line over the image.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
What’s the best theme to use for SEO. I saw site at SEO-Themes.com. So are some themes better optimized for SE’s or can I just add plugins that will even out the playing field?
First I went over and looked quickly at their site. They don’t say what they do different just that they have tweaked the themes. I did not take the time to download one and look through it to see what changes they are making.
As I can and do get great results using plugins that has been how I do it. Title tags and targeting the right keywords has been the primary factors in getting good rankings.
I have tested this on more than one occasion and a good title tag can make a huge difference in the ranking of a post for a specific keyword.
Using All In One SEO allows you to customize the title tags and that along with the XML Sitemap plugin are the prime ones for ranking and getting indexed.
You do need to actually use it and quite often I use one title for the post and a different one for the title tag.
Now as to what makes a good theme. I really like themes that are documented with notes inside. As a general rule if the person writing the theme has left good notes they usually have created a good theme.
More than once I have tried a new theme and usually the ones thta have had performance issues aren’t documented well at all. The same has been true of other script too. This is something that the better coders around always document what is what because it makes it easier to update.
Unfortunately, you will only be able to tell this after you have downloaded the theme and in my case usually installed it. (Have lots of excess themes on my hard drive.)
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
