When I set up this blog I used the Cutline WordPress theme from Chris Pearson. It's a visually appealing design that had the modern look I was after. Still, as I'm sure all designers know, there's no design that can please all people all of the time and so I set out to tweak the theme to suit my particular style.
Note: I highly recommend this theme. It served as an excellent starting point and there's no way I'd even be close to having a design in place without Chris' efforts.
The first tweak I made was to remove the header images. They're a good idea, but the out-of-the-box version of the theme uses images that are unrelated to my topic so they had to go. One day I may put something more relevant back in just so I have some eye candy. I'm not sure at this point what kinds of photos would make sense for an SEO/SEM blog.
After I removed the header images, I decided I needed a tag line for the site. Something short to give a hint of my blog's theme since the title might not be obvious enough to new visitors. Another change for the header is the swapping out of the H1 tags for stylized span tags. I don't think it makes sense to have the site title set as H1. Better to have the article title as H1 and squeeze out a bit more on the search engine optimization (SEO) side.
Moving to the top navigation section I decided to remove the archives link. I've never understood the value of date-based archives, but I'm sure I'm going to guess I'm the minority since so many blogs include them. I also made the rollover color for the top navigation elements blue instead of the original green to come closer to the web standard of links being blue.
For actual posts, I made the post title an H1 as I mentioned earlier. I also made the comments link that appears below the title blue and underlined to make it clear that people can click on it. In addition, I added an edit link that I can use to edit a post quickly. You can't see this link as it is available only to those that are logged in. I also removed Chris' version of tags and instead installed the Bunny Tags plugin.
For the right navigation I removed the date that appeared beside the recent posts. The date was stylized in a way that required me to actually decipher the meaning. Does 12.7 mean December 7 or July 12? I also don't think dates in the navigation are important. After all, is someone not going to read something if the title is interesting but the date is recent? Or will someone read a post with a boring title, but a recent date?
I'm sure I'll make a few more tweaks, but for now I'm quite pleased with how things have come together. Thanks again, Chris!
- SEO Checklist
- CSS Rollovers for SEO
- Google Sandbox Check
- Google Supplemental Results
- Tagging Partial RSS Feeds in WordPress
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