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Learn How to Select the Best WordPress Theme For Your Blog

By on October 7, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Learn How to Select the Best WordPress Theme For Your Blog

Lets face it, there are an over abundance of WordPress themes available on the internet, and with so many out there, fitting magazine style, CMS style, and personal style blogs, how can you tell which one is suitable for your needs? Choosing the right themes can be tough at the best of times, however by making sure that you follow the following guidelines, you should be able to easily shortlist to your ideal theme in no time.

Is The Theme Search Engine Optimized?

For most webmasters, this is going to be a priority, and for those who don’t know what they are looking for, it can be a hard task in itself. First and foremost, the theme will need to load in a reasonable time. As Google has made it public that they will include a measure in their algorithm that incorporates load time into their ranking system, a theme that is so jam packed full of features will most definitely slow down your load times, and may impact your rankings.

For example, the Boardwalk WordPress Theme from WPnow is one of my favorite themes, it’s bursting with color and life, which suits my needs perfect, however, the theme is painfully slow to load. In cases such as these, you can simply use the Super Cache plugin, which will create a static set of HTML files, to allow for fast loading, every time, thus keeping you safe when Google incorporates page speed into their algorithm.

Of course, you are also going to want to be completely certain that keywords are emphasized in headings using the correct tags. The standard use involves H1 and H2 tags in both the header, and in the blog post title. Some other themes, such as the Vigilance Theme from the Theme Foundry use a special piece of code which renders an image from text, and whilst this may come across as a bad thing, the script itself renders clear HTML coding which the search engine spiders can read easily. Bells and whistles are fine, only if the result is a clean and clear coding structure that can be read by the search engine crawlers.

Does The Theme Support My Version Of WordPress?

WordPress is booming at the moment, and as such, the demand for improvements is higher than ever. It only seems like yesterday when version 2.9 was launched, and we are already on the verge of seeing version 3.0 arriving. As such, if you are looking to shortlist your theme selections, making sure that your theme is by a reputable designer that regularly updates their themes is going to be of huge importance.

One of the most renowned theme designers, WooThemes, are currently working with WordPress on their version 3.0, and as such, they work consistently to ensure that all of their themes are compatible with all versions of WordPress.

What I suggest in all cases is to install WordPress on a test domain, just to ensure that themes are compatible, and most importantly, that they work and are customizable for your blog.

Is The Theme Easy To Customize?

If everyone downloaded or purchased the same theme, the blogosphere would be a very repetitive place indeed, and would most certainly lack the excitement that it currently has. Although I do recommend all webmasters to find a good theme to purchase (more people download free themes than purchasing, instantly making your blog more unique!), it is always advisable to look into making some customizations to your theme.

Some themes make customisation very easy, in the case of the Theme Foundry, their coding structure is very clearly labeled, which is most certainly something that I believe a lot of designers should be taking note of. Knowing where the search box is in the header can save a lot of trouble locating it, especially if you only know basic HTML, as such, a clearly labeled theme is always going to be something that deserves a second look.

Where Can I Get A Good Theme?

There are many places online that will offer themes for free, and various others that will charge a fee for their high quality premium themes. Whilst I do recommend investing in a good unique theme, this is a personal choice, some free themes can be very easy to customize just so long as you know HTML and PHP. The choice is entirely yours!

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Tips When Writing Your Blog Posts

By on September 29, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Tips When Writing Your Blog Posts

When you blog you need good content to make it profitable and in order to make good content you should make sure that you know a lot on the topic of your blog. Don’t choose a blog topic that you won’t be able to write articles about daily as then you might run into problems. You need a topic where you can blog about it for months on end without needing to recover topics. Once you’ve decided on a good topic that you will be able to write on then you should follow these tips to ensure you’re writing good content.

You should always use heading in your posts and make them bold so they stand out. Headings catch the attention of your readers and work well when you need to break up a big post so that it’s readable. You should also try writing your posts in point form as much as you can because then you will ensure that more people are reading your posts. It’s very intimidating seeing a big block of content and often people won’t read it so instead break your articles into point form lists.

The last thing you should do is make sure you use pictures in all of your posts. You should try using at least one picture in your post so that it livens up the page a little bit and breaks the content up. Try inserting the picture so it’s in the content. People enjoy pictures in posts so to retain your blog readership you should make sure that you’re writing your blog posts with pictures. Some posts won’t require pictures though, and you can decide on that. Basically if you can’t find a picture that relates to the content then you don’t need to add a picture, this rare but it happens so some posts on your blog won’t have pictures.

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Two Free WordPress Themes That Can Reduce Your Blog Setup Time by Half

By on September 11, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Two Free WordPress Themes That Can Reduce Your Blog Setup Time by Half

WordPress themes are also known as layouts or templates. These are files that create the look and feel of your blog content. WordPress themes can be very simple, like the one that comes standard with every install, to the complex. Bloggers can choose from free and paid versions of templates. When choosing a template, you should choose one that will give you a lot of ability to easily customize the template to fit your branding needs. This article discusses 2 templates (or themes) that have a lot of customization features which are relatively easy to a create unique brand.

All WordPress templates allow you to customize them by going into the Edit page of the Appearance tab. If you are not comfortable with PHP and HTML code, then you may have some trouble in customizing your appearance. One benefit of the themes mentioned in this article is they are customizable through a special theme options page, which means you can get your WordPress site up and running much more quickly.

1) Atahualpa Theme

This theme is a free theme that was created by ‘Bytes for All’ and can be found on their web site where you can ask questions and get community support for this theme. Once this theme is installed, you can customize the theme in the Appearance >> Atahualpa Theme Options page. Once here, you will find a host of options to highly customize your theme. Webmasters can configure special CSS styles for things such as the header, the layout, and page features such as headings, links and menu bars. Users can easily upload header graphics that can rotate through the header graphic.

Other options that can be customized include the number of columns you want on your blog (technically you can have from 1 to 5 columns), which side you want you sidebars to be on, or what you want your widget boxes to look like. The look and feel is highly customizable and is a great start to quickly getting a professional look to your blog.

2) News Magazine Theme

The free News Magazine theme was created by Anti Social Media LLC. This theme gives you several easily customizable options that can be set in the Appearance >> News Magazine Theme 640 Options page. The News Magazine theme doesn’t have quite as many options to set up as the Atahualpa theme, but you can add code for site tracking (can be done through the use of plugins), ad rotating and just adding text or java script code to parts of your template.

One nice feature of this template is that you can easily take featured categories and spotlight them on your blog through simple dropdown selections. One very nice feature is that you can control the excerpt length of your blog postings on the index page. On 99.9% of the WordPress blogs out there, the home (or index) page prints the entire text of the blog post. A better format for visitors is to have a post excerpt and they can click a link to read the entire blog. Currently there is no function in WordPress that allows you to display excerpts of your blog postings. This blog theme allows you to display excerpts with their ‘Blog Mode Excerpt Length’ setting.

These two WordPress themes are varied enough to get you started and well on your way with your first (or second) WordPress blog. The ease of these customizable settings should greatly reduce your setup time while creating a fairly well customized blog. To make the most advantage of setting up your blog for more traffic and more automation, taking a WordPress training class will speed up creating a decent blog following.

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