How to Blog - 4/8 Design & Tweaks | The Probabilist . com

How to Blog - 4/8 Design & Tweaks February 26, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Productivity, Technology, Blogging , trackback

Step 4 takes the design perspective into account. If you want your blog to stand out from the rest, you need to start experimenting and tweaking with your php files. The best and most common step is to simply toggle between your offline blog, the files in your wp-content folder and the WordPress codex. Additionally, it’s best to change the permalink structure for better search engine optimization.

When you look at some of the most beautiful and practical WordPress themes, take for instance the Phoenix theme by Nick La, you might get inspired to follow the same path and create your own WordPress theme in the end - all from scratch simply by trial and error learning of how css templates work.

Changing Permalinks

When you’ve installed your blog, you’ll find that the links to your posts come out numerically as a ?p=1 which doesn’t tell what your articles are about. This is why you need to go into the permalinks panel found under the options tab in the WordPress main interface. Choose the “Custom, specify below” tab, enter /%postname%/ in the blank field and press the update button. This way, your post urls will include the title of your posts, which makes more sense to the GoogleBot when indexing your content.

I found that this step was as simple as that on WordPress 2.1, but you might also get a warning message saying that you have to update your .htaccess file. This requires a bit more tweaking then to get it right, but the guys over at Tubetorial give you the fix.

Favicon

A favicon is the small pic located on the browser tabs that go along with the blog’s urls. This is a way for your blog to stand out more - and it doesn’t take much of your time. You can find premade favicons from the web, but to have one that matches with your blog design, just create a 16×16 bmp or png file on paint as I did. You then need to use a separate icon converting program to save it as an .ico file that the browser understands. I suggest @icon sushi. Next, put/upload the favicon.ico to the blog’s root directory and see if it works. If not, then add the following code under the head tag in the header.php file and it should do the trick. (Add the tags)

link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://www.yourblog.com/favicon.ico”
link rel=”icon” href=”http://www.ourblog.com/favicon.ico”

Style.css & php files

When you start playing around with these files, you’ll be glad you’ve got yourself an offline version of your blog. When it comes to altering these, it’s all up to your own taste of how much you want to change - as well as learn in the process. For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a new project (which has taken away time to update on this blog) and it’s been an invaluable experience. DIY is cheap and you gradually learn the ins and outs of what’s possible to do, but on the downside, it takes a lot of time compared to paying someone else to do the job for you.

Your first blog may never reach perfection, but it’s all about gaining the knowledge and experience to eventually reach more optimal results, so stick to figuring out at least the basics of the code that creates the blog you see in order to grasp the future possibilities. I’m in a bit of a crossroad at the moment on where I should focus my effort, but I’ll keep you all updated on a reasonable frequency.

Checklist for step 4 - design & tweaks

Permalinks - Change the structure for better SEO
Favicon - Create one to stand out more
CSS & PHP - Familiarize yourself to the basics (and beyond)
Insert images or videos - interactive content can spice up your blog.

In the fifth step of this “tutorial” (Friday, March 2nd), we’ll be tapping into utilities provided by Google to get more out of your blog’s performance.

Bookmark this page or subscribe to my feed to stay updated.

(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

Comments»

1. Aaron M. Potts - February 27, 2007

GREAT info! Also, as I just changed my own permalink structure, there is a common problem that people have with the URL’s from the old structure no longer working.

I found a simple to use WP plug in that fixes that issue. I tested it and it works great. Here is the URL. Be sure to read comment #64 as that person explains how to fix some confusion surrounding this plug in:

http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

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The site you linked for the ico conversion doesn’t work.

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