What to Consider When Choosing a WordPress Theme

April 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Choosing a WordPress theme can be very difficult considering how many different designs and styles are available. Every conceivable layout, navigation style, and design is out there waiting to be the platform you utilize for your blog or site.

Professional theme sample.

So, how do you choose the theme that is going to suit both your needs, and the preferences of your desired audience?

It is important to first take the time to really think about what it is that you want from your WordPress theme. Determine a clear set of requirements and expectations, and then browse the available professional wordpress themes to find one that will meet or exceed every single one. [Read more...]

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The WordPress SEO Guide

July 16, 2012 by 5 Comments

Using WordPress for your content management system is not only smart it’s recommended by most SEO Experts.  In order to rank well today in Google you need to have a blog and a powerful way to manage that content.  WordPress is close to prefect out of the box but there are still things you need to do.

If you are adding a new blog it is recommended to add the blog as a subfolder and not as a subdomain.  A subdomain is considered a new domain and will not carry the weight of your existing page.  Nor will you give your website the added bonus of links and content pages if you use a subdomain.

Subdomain: blog.domain.com

Subfolder: domain.com/blog/  (preferred method)

Tags & Categories

Once you have your blog installed and are ready to go you need to think about duplicate content and how you can prevent that.  The biggest problem with WordPress is the categories and tags it allows you to create.

Tags

If you have a large website with thousands of pages of content most of the time tags will help improve your SEO.  This creates additional pages that have keywords as titles.  The problem is when you have a smaller blog and not enough articles it creates pages with almost identical content.  Duplicate content is bad for SEO and will actually hurt your ranking potential in Google.

Categories

The same thing that happens with tags also happens with category pages.  Category pages can be near identical to tag created pages and can harm your SEO efforts.

To help solve these issues I recommend to all my clients to use the All in One SEO Pack.  This is a powerful plugin that has many features with the most useful is the ability to “no-index” tags or categories.  It is highly (do it) recommended you install this plugin and set up your blog to not allow search engines to index your tag pages.  This feature alone will solve most of your on-site SEO issues with WordPress.

Tip: When you categorize your blog post remember not to select too many categories for each blog post.  I always recommend one category.  If you start selecting several categories for each post then you run the risk of creating more duplicate content.   [Read more...]

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Benefits of a Bespoke Website over a Standard WordPress Template

June 29, 2012 by 1 Comment

Whether you are trying to promote your business, your cause or anything else, you will find that one thing that you absolutely need is a website. While many people consider that it is enough to have a presence on places like Facebook, there needs to be a place where people can get all of the information that they need about you right away.

When you need a website, it is very tempting to pick up a free WordPress template, but the truth is that it is always better to invest in a bespoke website, that is, one that is made especially for you.

Unique Look

Here are some examples of bespoke templates available for WordPress in various marketplaces.

Take a look at the other websites that are in your field. Once you start looking around, you’ll find that just about everyone is using the same, rather small set of WordPress templates! Some hide it better than others, but when you get right down to it, there are more and more sites that are simply taking their template from WordPress whole cloth.

Now that you have noticed it, you will also note that this creates a look where their sites all have the same appearance. When you are told that you need to stand out to get your business or cause of the ground, this is the last thing that you want!

Increased Functionality

If you are a unique cause or a unique business, chances are very good that you need some unique functionality.

For example, if you are an artist, you need to have a gallery setup for your work. You need to have a space where people can page through a number of images, and these images need to be set up clearly and simply. WordPress does not offer this kind of functionality. Think about what you need your customers or interested parties to see.

A bespoke website gives you a great deal of freedom when it comes to design.   [Read more...]

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Publishing with WordPress iPhone App

June 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Writing and blogging via the WordPress App for iPhone (iOS) and iPad has evolved tremendously.

Screenshot I took while writing this actual post.

Saying that the early versions of this app were “clunky” would be a nice way of putting it. I would argue that using the WordPress iPhone App to publish or author content was a nightmare.

I, like many urban lifestylers, spend a good part of my day on some form of public transportation.  That used to be a time that I would spend writing blog content on my old Blackberry.  I would at least have time to get a good post started or nearly completed.  Often, I could have an entire post done by the time I got to work.

The dark ages.

At the time, I was using a post-by-email plugin that allowed me to email posts to a secret email account.  Any email sent to that address would automatically be converted to a blog post.

The email subject line became the post subject line, etc.

It worked well enough but the formatting was always a little wonky.  There was no way to insert links or other basic HTML markup.  At the time, there was no such thing as a Blackberry with a camera in it.  That meant no embedded photos in my mobile posts either.

Eventually, WordPress made post-by-email part of the core platform.  During that change over, formatting continued to get even more difficult to manage.  Also, if you changed devices from one phone to whatever was next, there was a good chance that there would be some extra markup in the email that would cause formatting to be a disaster.

Fast forward a few years to the debut of the iPhone.  I immediately could not wait.  Once I saw the potential of apps on this device, I knew that the WordPress community would build a WordPress CMS App for iPhone.

And they did.

Sadly, it sucked.

The first few times I attempted to use the iOS app, I was very disappointed.  Publishing, including links, adding images, tags, content categories, etc. were all difficult to manage or completely impossible.   [Read more...]

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Facebook Creates Official Plugin for WordPress

June 22, 2012 by 1 Comment

Facebook and the WordPress development community have teamed up to build a more integrated Facebook sharing plugin. An official Facebook plugin for WordPress.

The plugin is available at WordPress.org for free.

WordPress is the largest digital publishing platform powering over 16% of the sites on the Internet.  Stop and think about that for a second.  A single platform powers over 16% of the sites on the entire Internet.  That’s pretty amazing.  As you’ve read here before, we are big WordPress fans.

Image Credit: Facebook

The plugin allows WordPress authors to tag their friends on Facebook from within the article that they are writing.  That tag shares the story snippet onto your friend’s wall.

You can also tag pages (fan pages) from within the post, or update your own status.

Make your WordPress site social in a couple of clicks, powered by Facebook.

This kind of deeper WordPress integration makes sharing authored content onto Facebook that much easier.  No more having to copy/paste the link to your latest update and ping it out to everyone manually.  You can all your Facebook promotion and post syndication from right inside the WordPress platform.  To use it is just as easy as the tagging feature in the WordPress core.

The setup is a little tricky.  The plugin requires some extra steps and signups to pass the security muster of Facebook.  Basically, you have to create a Facebook “application” in order for seamless system interplay.  The whole process is fairly painless as long as you follow all the setup instructions.

The new plugin also comes with some extra Widgets for your sidebars.  Very easy to drag and drop into the site.

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Is WordPress a Superior Publishing Platform?

March 14, 2012 by 1 Comment

Yes.

If you’re a regular at BlogCraving, you know that we are huge WordPress fans. Guilty as charged.

However, we are constantly reminded why it is a superior publishing platform.

For example, 15% of the top 1 million sites on the web are powered by the WordPress platform.  At first glance, that sounds like a big fluffy number.  Stop for a second and take a look at the caliber of publishers using the platform, and you will see it is not all fluff.

Publishers using WordPress: NBC Sports, CNN, TED, TechCrunch (AOL), Time, Wall Street Journal, CBS Radio, CBS Local, and the LA Times…just to name a few.

Recently, WordPress also announced its Partners program for companies that want to build WordPress ready versions of their products into the WP platform.  The WordPress team then certifies these vendors as “partners” basically saying that the code is compliant with the WP core.

The fact that other digital and web companies are building specific instances of their products for the WordPress community says something about the scale and quality of WP.

Getting to Partner status with WordPress is no joke either.  Their developers run through every single line of code to make sure that there is nothing being committed that could endanger the health of a WP site.

WordPress FTW.

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Tutorial: Different Sidebars for Homepage and Posts

February 27, 2012 by 6 Comments

This is an update with full illustrations to an older post.

Basic Method:

1) Find your sidebar.php file.

2) Make a copy of it.
Name it sidebar-secondary.php. Your second, third, forth, etc. sidebars
all need to start with sidebar-NAMEHERE.php. That’s part of the naming
convention in WordPress.

3) Make the content changes you need in secondary sidebar file.
This is where you make the secondary sidebar different. Whatever it is
you need to be different should go in this file. Save
sidebar-inside.php and upload it to your server.

4) Locate your single.php file.

5) Look for a line near the end of the file that looks like this: <?php get_sidebar(); ?>

6) Change it to <?php get_sidebar(‘inside’); ?> (note, the ‘inside’ part should match the name of the new sidebar-inside.php file). The single quote marks ‘ ‘ are required. [Read more...]

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PSD to WordPress Conversion Instructions

January 21, 2012 by 19 Comments

Section 1 – Designing a WordPress theme in Photoshop

Designing a theme for WordPress in Photoshop is straightforward. In our example today, we will create a simple two column fixed width theme. Before we start, we need to decide what the width of our theme will be. I chose a 980-pixel sixe because it will fit on most screens without the need to scroll form side to side, as most screens today are at least 1024 pixels wide.

To get started create a rectangle that is 1024px x 768px. This will serve as our background for the theme. You can color your backgrounds or even add an image. For our tutorial, we will color the background blue. [Read more...]

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