Tweak That Blog Theme!

Tweaking your theme on your blog or web page can have amazing effects on your readership and success of your business. Here are some simple ways you can make your theme stand out from the rest.

How to Tweak Your WordPress Theme

There are literally millions of different themes available on the Internet. You can choose one from sites that sell them or give them away free. You could also have someone custom-make your theme, which could cost you a good amount of money. If you choose to select one already made, there are things you can do to make it customized to suit your taste.

• Header. Create a header with your business or blog name on it. If someone stops by your page and sees a header they have already seen somewhere else, they may be inclined to move on.

• Background color or pattern. There are simple ways to change the background color to your theme so it matches your header and provides readers an easier to read web page. A basic pattern can make a nice background as well, diagonals and stripes seem to be pretty popular these days, but don’t be afraid to be creative.

• Text color and font. Choose a text color that will be visible on the background color or pattern you have chosen. You also want to pick a font that is clear and large enough for people to see. You don’t want people to have to strain to see the information you have provided for your customers or readers, because they will give up and leave your site. Avoid colors like pale grey and yellow for fonts.

• Incorporate pictures. Images are a great way to capture someone’s attention and give them a reason to read what you have on your website. You can grab stock images, create your own graphics, or browse free photo sharing websites.

• Do not clutter. Some themes have many frames so you can fit a lot of information on the page. Take out some of these frames so your page looks organized and clean. You don’t want people to have to search for things for too long or again, they will leave your site.

The Importance of Tweaking Your WordPress Theme

Many of the reasons why you should tweak your theme are listed above, but there are additional benefits to doing this.

• Make it your own. You have your own personal style for your blog or business site; don’t settle for someone else’s taste when it comes to what you want to present on the Internet.

• Tailor it to your readers and customers. You know your audience best, so make the page that will be pleasing to them. The more people like your site, the longer they will stay.

• It’s easy. Making a few changes to your WordPress script is not difficult. Sometimes all you have to do is change a few codes and you are all set. There is a lot of information on the Internet that will guide you.

Finally, you want to tweak your WordPress theme because it will give you the success you are looking for in a blog or business website.

Deep Linking Explained

Deep linking is the process of linking to a specific page on a website, rather than just the homepage. For instance, a regular link would point to mysite.com, but a deep link would point to a specific page on that site, such as mysite.com/page1.

Some corporations try to discourage deep linking, as it allows users to visit a specific page, while bypassing advertising on the front page of the site. For most people deep linking is very helpful and actually sought after. The following are a few reasons why deep linking can help a business.

Deep linking greatly increases a user’s ability to find exactly what they are looking for on the web. If you were on a website researching chicken recipes and saw a link for chicken pot pie, when you clicked on it, you would expect to be on a page that had a recipe for chicken pot pie.

You would be disappointed if you ended up at a main page of another recipe website and had to search through all their recipes in order to find the recipe you thought you were linked to. When a website owner deep links to a specific page that contains the specific content their readers are looking for then the reader is much more satisfied.

Not only does deep linking help the website visitor but it also helps the website owner with keeping tabs on their tracking. They are able to see exactly which pages of their website are getting the most links. This can help them decide what the most popular content on their site is and what their visitors are looking for.

This can also help in the search engine rankings. If there was a site about tropical birds that had links coming in to various pages on different types of birds, when someone searched for “parrot” then the parrot page would come up. The person would be able to visit the page that allowed them to learn exactly what they wanted.

If you participate in any pay per click advertising, use deep linking to point to exactly what your ad is talking about, which will help your conversion rates. For example, if you have a site about gardening and place an ad for shovels, using deep linking in the ad to point directly to the shovel page rather than pointing to the home page.

If the ad pointed to the home page, there may be some visitors who would navigate towards the shovels they were originally looking for but some would leave the site altogether. If the ad points directly to the shovel page more people would buy the shovels and that would increase the conversion rates.

Start creating deep links in a blog and link to specific content on the site. Include deep links in articles submitted to reprint directories. Experiment with this idea and see if traffic increases.

How Using CSS Makes Life Easier

Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS, is a computer language that describes how the website should be presented. It shows what the background color is, what size of font is displayed and so forth.

CSS is designed in a manner that makes it easier to define how text should look. If you are familiar with HTML, you will know that it was designed as a structural language. When the web was in it’s early development stages, websites were not “pretty”. In fact, HTML didn’t contain bold or italics tags until the mid 1990’s.

When someone uses CSS to build their website, they do not have to include a bunch of opening and closing tags, as would be needed with HTML. With CSS, not only can the website designer have the ability to set the colors, text and the background of any element, they can also create borders around images and define how much space these borders contain.

Another advantage of using CSS is that it centralizes all the commands for a specified visual effect. If a web designer wanted all of the headers on a website to be blue, they can simply create one rule in CSS that defines what each of the headers will look like.

If that same web designer were using HTML, they would have to add font tags around each header. If the website contained 40 pages, the designer would need to add 40 font tags around each header. As you can see in that example, creating one simple rule in CSS was a lot simpler and less time consuming. If the web designer wants to change the heading color from blue to red all they would need to do is change that one CSS rule, versus changing each font tag again.

The “cascading” part of CSS comes into pay when a web designer wants to add a specific style to a web page. To maintain a common theme throughout a site, the designer could save the style sheet to it’s own document and import it on any page they want to carry the theme to. If the web designer wants one page to stand out against the others, they can create another style sheet on that page. The two style sheets would cascade, and the web browser will display the style sheet that is specific for that page.

Some browsers allow the reader of the website to change the CSS of a page. This is called Reader Style Sheets. The reader could set all links to a special, pre-defined color. This is a great tool for color-blind web surfers.

Another bonus to CSS is that, when implemented, it creates smaller file sizes. Your pages won’t take as long to load as those written in HTML.

A good way to practice working with CSS is through a blog. It doesn’t matter if you use Blogger, WordPress or TypePad because they are all written with CSS. These sites also have CSS tutorials to help along the way.

10 Social Bookmarking Sites and Why They’re Good

Social bookmarking is a system of sharing Internet bookmarks with other Internet users. There are many websites that allow you to share your favorite web pages and network with other users. Here are a few of the most popular:

technorati.com – This site allows users to share their blogs, photos, videos and more and boasts almost a million and a half visitors each month.

del.icio.us – This site is a very popular and was one of the first social bookmarking sites to really take off.

digg.com – This site receives 8.7 million visitors each month. Visitors can look up any topic and receive instant information and statistics.

stumbleupon.com – This is a relatively new site and it combines myspace with social bookmarking. Users can make up 5 of their own pages on any topic they want.

reddit.com -This site allows users to view what’s new, what’s hot at the moment and what the weekly stats are.

fark.com – This site’s main page has categories displayed that allows the user to go directly to topics such as sports, business, politics, music and more.

mybloglog.com – This site combines social bookmarking, blogging and social networking.

blinklist.com – This website is still in beta testing and it’s mission statement is more about how people can use the service for keeping track of their own research.

ma.gnolia.com – This site isn’t quite as big as some of the others but it is very easy to use and has a lot of information to make the process of social bookmarking understandable. This is a great site to get started with.

tailrank.com – This site keeps track of the conversations between blogs to help find what is hot on the web. The user can search on any topic they like or view randomly through categories such as politics, video, technology and entertainment.

These sites are all varied and, while they share in social bookmarking, they are all geared towards different audiences. To get the most out of these sites you may want to combine the use of several of them. For instance, you can list your blogs on technorati.com and ping the site when you update your blogs.
Then join a site such as stumbleupon.com and set up five web pages about various topics found on your own website. For instance, if your website featured information on guinea pigs, one of your stumbleupon.com sites could feature information on feeding guinea pigs and another page could feature information on the type of environment they should be kept in and so forth.

Meanwhile, keep your bookmarks in del.icio.us to share with other users and visit a site such as tailrank.com to keep track of what other people are blogging about. This can inspire new blog posts for your own blog, which would then mean you’d have more pings for technorati.com and the cycle would just start over.

All of these elements would work together to create more buzz for your website and introduce you to people with similar interests. This could lead to more web traffic and even some future joint venture partners, which, in turn would lead to even more traffic (but that is a whole new topic for another article).

How to Move a Blogger Hosted Blog to It’s Own Domain

Blogger makes it easy to present your blog on its own domain without blogger.com in your URL. Many people prefer to present their blog without the blogger name in their URL. If you’d like to use blogger but don’t want their name in your domain, here’s how to do it:

Step 1. If you don’t already have a domain name, like www.myblog.com, you’ll need to get one and register it. It can be a .com, .net, .org or any legitimate address. Note: you do not need to pay for hosting services, only purchase a domain name.

Step 2. Now you need to create a CNAME record for your domain with the DNS, Domain Name Server, associating your domain with ghs.google.com. Each domain registration service has their own instructions on how to do this. Blogger.com lists directions for changing your CNAME for several domain registrars like GoDaddy and 1&1. If your domain registration service isn’t listed at Blogger, contact your registrar to find out how to do it. It’s normally a fairly straightforward process.

Step 3. Change your blog settings. Now you will need to get into your blog’s settings and change them so that the correct blog shows up when people visit your site. Get into your blog’s dashboard and click on “Settings”. On the toolbar across the top you’ll see several tabs. One of them is labeled “Publishing” Go ahead and click on that. Now you’ll see it says “You’re publishing on blogspot.com” and below that it says “Switch to custom domain” Go ahead and click on that. Enter the domain you registered and you’re good to go. Sometimes it takes a little while for the redirect to kick in so give it a day or two. If it still isn’t working, make sure you entered your DNS changes correctly.

Your blog should now be shown as having its own domain. Congratulations!