Category Archives: Themes

Is your blog theme keeping readers away?

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I’m not just talking about how your blog looks. The actual code behind the design has a much bigger impact on your online success than you might guess.

Wendy of eMoms at Home did a great writeup on ProBlogger yesterday where she talked about the importance of a well-coded blog template and described the phenomenal results she saw when I implemented a much better coded them for her (the number of people that Google sent her doubled the next day). Wendy explored the reasons for that and the result was the ProBlogger post.

I want to go into a little more background here so that you’ll understand why the theme change made such a huge difference. Most people choose a blog theme based strictly on how it looks (and that’s definitely a valid concern, since it’s setting the tone for your blog) but aren’t aware that the behind-the-scenes details of the code can drastically affect the way the search engines “feel” about your blog.
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WordPress Updates – 2.1.1 and 2.0.9

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Sometimes you just can’t wait for a new version of WordPress in order to get rid of the bugs and errors you’ve found in the current one. Now, WordPress really doesn’t have a lot of these bugs, and most aren’t even noticeable, but when you want to do “exactly that one thing” and can’t because of a certain bug… that’s when it starts to become annoying.

Luckily updates are never too far away and now two new versions are out for all you WordPress users. It’s recommended (of course) that you update as soon as possible; otherwise your blog will miss out on the new features and be susceptable to the old bugs. The support on older versions, which basically means older than 2.0, is slowly fading out and all fixes are only going to apply to the newer ones. WordPress is committed to provide these updates for 2.0 until 2010, but to be on the safe side you should get 2.1 anyway (you’ll like it better to boot).

This time it’s 2.1.1 and 2.0.9 that’s out. What’s enhanced? Well, mainly the fixes have to do with the security issues it had before. Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code. It’s available for download here.

Version 2.0.9 only includes the security update, which centers around the code we use to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS), a way that malicious users can hack into your site. You can download it here.

Good luck with these updates and make sure to make it even cooler with some amazing new themes available as well:

Natural Essence is a two column, light brown and white, fixed-width widget-ready theme. Very nice looking with great design and layout but clean. Perfect match.

JD Sky is a two column, fixed-width, widget-ready theme for WordPress. If you like it simple and you’re in a happy mood, you’re probably going to like this.