Blogs can be fun and profitable, but they aren’t magic bullets guaranteeing fame and fortune. The choice between blog and splog is up to you: done right, both can work so long as your strategy matches that choice. Real blogging is the way to go if you want the most out of the search engines for each of your sites, but be prepared for the work which is involved.
Tags, or “Technorati Tags” as they are often referred to, partly to distinguish them from meta tags, are useful not only to ensure correction classification in some blog directories, but for enhancing your blog in other ways. This article looks at some of the do’s and don’ts of tagging.
Even as commercial software, WordPress would be amazing. It is easy to install and easy to use. But you are almost certainly going to want your site to have its own look and when you take a look at a theme for the first time - especially if you are not overly familiar with PHP and CSS - what you see may make no sense at all. This article will try to demystify WordPress theme files and show you that they are not nearly as complex as they may first appear.
No blog or message board is complete without plugins and mods. This board is no different, so here is credit to the authors who wrote the add-ins and a useful list for anyone looking to customize their own sites.
With the advent of higher resolutions, bigger screens and blogs, 3-column layouts have become increasingly popular. Unfortunately there is no single perfect solution which satisfies everyone’s requirements. This solution is one to use when search engine appeal is your priority. But be warned, there are snags!
As a way to help you become familiar with both the HTML and CSS of a WordPress theme, this exercise will turn a 2-column WordPress theme into a 3-column version. It is also intended to illustrate that with a systematic approach, even quite dramatic changes are very simple to achieve.
The key to making changes to WordPress themes is to work methodically. First identify the relevant HTML; second identify all the CSS which relates to it; and third, understand what the CSS is actually doing. Initially make changes by commenting parts out rather than by deleting them. Comment what you have changed and test each batch of changes before moving on to the next.
According to some estimates, over 90% of comments posted on blogs may be spam. Many webmasters react by switching comments off, but this reduces the value of blogs both to their operators and their visitors. Spam can be handled without such drastic action being necessary.
WordPress sidebar code can look confusing the first time you check it out. But that’s because WordPress is smart, can sense which page is being displayed and show different content to match. But once you see past the conditional code, what remains is both simple and flexible.
Those buttons you see sprinkled around blogs may be a little irritating, but they can be a useful way to encourage new and repeat visitors. Oh and by the way, they are not called buttons: in blogeze they are known as chiclets.
RSS feeds are a means for you to keep your visitors and other sites informed about what is new on your site. They are also a way for you to add content to your site which is automatically updated and helps keep your site fresh even when you do not have time to add your own material.
Blogs are not an “Open Sesame” to floods of search engine traffic. But they can be rich producers if you work on your content, have patience and optimize your site as much as possible. Here are some pointers to get you started in the right direction.
This is the final article in the “Create a Theme” series. In it we check out the sub-pages of the blog and tidy up any loose odds and ends. Once these final tweaks are done, your new blog will be ready to launch!
The third article in this series gets to grips with all the remaining styles on the main page (which in fact will cover most of the site). By the end of this article we have something which is actually beginning to look like a blog.
The second article working towards a babelog-style WordPress theme. This one gets the theme’s columns organized and sets the font styles, sizes and colors. It deals with the way in which browsers impose a lot of formatting we may not want (and that they don’t handle consistently) and shows how to bring them all to heel.
