A long time lensmaster asked: how do you value a squidoo lens? It turns out that TheFluffanutta has made a lens valuing tool that at least has the right factors in there. Here is what it says about  my top lens:

http://www.squidoo.com/spirituality-quotes

Estimated value of ‘spirituality-quotes’

Current Lensrank: #104

Average Lensrank: #85

Worth $160.62 over 6 months (inc. InfoLinks).

Topic Lensrank: #2 in Religion & Spirituality

Rating: 307 thumbs up

Worth $30.70.

Favorited by 225 Lensmasters

Worth $22.50.

Traffic: 356 visits per day

Worth $256.32 over 6 months if ECPM=$4.0.

Backlinks: 258.98 score

Worth $129.49.

Lens Age: 39 months

Worth $7.73.

Total Value: $612.36

Based on the data shown above.

Let’s start with the assumption that you’re working online for the long run. You’re not in it to make a quick buck, but to get income for years to come. Perhaps you’re even online, like me, to share your knowledge, your writing, your inspiration.

That income on squidoo can come from two things: lensrank and sales.

Starting with lensrank:

A consistent top tier lens made $21,- last month. Lensrank has been consistently rising over the past several years, so that lens will make at least $250,- this year. Fluf’s tool takes only 6 months into account but that just won’t cut it for me. I’d only sell a lens for at least a years revenue- and the projected revenue, not just the revenue it made last year.

Traffic: that only helps as far as it’s a sales lens, or by keeping that lens in top tier. This is why Fluf mentions EPCM – the amount made per 1000 visitors. Well, for most of my top lenses that’s directly related to lensrank, so this metric doesn’t add much. But for my sales lenses it’s more important than lensrank.

Popularity: that’s really only relevant as an indicator of future possible backlinks. And even there it’s not worth much.

Age: the older the lens, the better. An old lens is more likely to do well in Google. It needs less extra links to improve Google rankings. It has a certain Google ‘trust’. That’s worth money.

Backlinks: these are actually part of the reason I started on squidoo. I didn’t so much want to make money as make use of the link potential TO my own site. Because squidoo has made me money, I am now linking from my old site TO my lenses, but that’s another story. Anyhow, existing backlinks make a big part of a successful lens’ worth.

Would I sell that lens for $600,- ? I would certainly be tempted, but I think I’d pass. Let’s look at that online income again:

That lens is part of my online strategy. If I loose it, I loose the links to my original site I built the lens for originally. I would loose the traffic (and potential PR as well as income off that traffic) to my other online ventures. I would loose many of the links I got TO that lens on squidoo and elsewhere as part of my link-graph (the links pointing towards my online property collectively). And last but not least, I would loose the residual income off that low maintenance lens for years to come.

Making money online is not a short term adventure: it’s a long term one. And a lens that makes 250 dollars a year is (in terms of interest – at current low interest rates) the equivalent of having $2500 in the bank at least. For the sake of this explanation I went with an interest rate of 1% – which is low even by todays standards. Unless you need the money real bad, why sell it for anything less than that $2500?

Of course the reasoning is only valid for a lens that’s in top tier consistently and has backlinks.

A consistent second tier lens might, by the same reasoning, be worth $1000,-. Which is not something anybody would be willing to pay. So just keep it.

Lower tier lenses are another story: they generally don’t make significant money, so I’d be willing to sell some of them for as little as $50,-. But even that’s more than anybody is willing to pay. Fine by me… I don’t need the money. Why that much? Because I value my time. It’s a rare lens that I spent less than an hour in making. I make $70,- an hour doing webdesign. Why would I sell a lens for less?

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Post tags: link building, money, online promotion, sales, search engine optimisation, Squidoo tips

lakeerieartists invited me to blog here, so I thought I’d check out her blog in more detail. It turns out, she’s already written about the most important things. She’s discussed:

• How to article (which can be big)

• Selling a Tangible Item (which makes me most affiliate income)

• Becoming an Authority (which gets you links and visitors that trust you)

Since the main points have already been covered, I thought I’d just share my experience with some specific niche lenses.

There’s a reason why making money online is generally such a long road: there are several steps here:

1. Finding a niche you can generate traffic for
2. Generating traffic for it, which always takes time
3. Finding a way to sell within that niche (or another one)

Time plays a part here. When you’re starting out, you’ll be happy with 10 visitors a week. In fact, on many of my lenses I’m still happy with that. But that’s not the sort of traffic that will get you sales, in general (though there are exceptions).

So if you can have a niche with substantial traffic within a year of starting out online, you’re actually doing quite well. That means you’ve not only started out with keyword research and great titles, but also that you’ve been able to generate links to that content. Note that this gets harder with each year that passes.

Then, if all goes well within the second year you can start being effective at selling. It took me much longer than that actually.

The challenge is to find a niche, or a niche within a niche, where you can rank your content (with SEO knowledge practiced of course) AND make sales.

My top lenses are prime examples of this challenge. My top lens is also my oldest (almost two years old). It was based on keyword knowledge from my own old spiritual site. It gets about 2000 visitors a week, but it has only sold two books this year and 5 products over it’s lifetime.

That’s very little in comparison to the amount of visitors it gets.

Another top lens of mine Red Cheeks, how to get rid of them! recommends an actual product as a solution to a problem. So you’d expect sales, especially since it also gets about 1000 visitors a week. That’s true, it does get sales, but over March I still did not make as much from affiliate sales there (amazon modules) as I did on lensrank related earnings. That’s with a whopping 22 sales that month.

But I would not have been making any sales if I had not the smarts to recognize that the ‘rosacea’ niche was crowded. That is: search for ‘rosacea’ on google and you’ll find lists of webpages on the topic, with the word ‘rosacea’ in the title. That’s including an authority community site by and for Rosacea sufferers. So I decided to just describe my skin issues the way I always have: as red cheeks. I’m not even sure whether a dermatologist would diagnose me with rosacea or some other skin complaint. And I honestly don’t care. I thought that perhaps the same would be true for other people. I’ve since of course seen, in the traffic, that I was right.

The way the title is phrased is the result of a slow development. I don’t remember how I started, but the classic ‘how to…’ format is certainly not the way I started the lens out. I just found that people were finding me for that phrase and decided to adapt the title to that fact.

This is, by the way, why I absolutely advise people to adapt their lens title over time. This should be done slowly and patiently, not every week. That’s way to quick to be able to decide what phrases people are typing into google.

Of course it’s not really an easy lens to turn into a series, especially since I’m no dermatologist. However, I did create a spin off lens that looks like it is part of a series. The fact is though, that I came up with it by taking over a very different lens: Going Red – women and heart conditions. I found that that lens did not actually get me traffic of people looking for information on heart problems in women, but of people who turned red. The heart conditions lens never was very successful.

However, the spin off lens was obviously related to the rosacea lens and I with some keyword research I adapted the title to include the main reason people go red in the face: embarrassment. But as you can tell from the URL, I originally thought people would be looking for help with getting red over stress, not embarrassment. By now this lens has become a forum for teens and early twenties people who go red whenever anybody pays any attention to them. Those comments are a sad read.

It also sells as much as the red cheeks lens, with only half the traffic.

I guess the message here is that sometimes it takes a combination of simply trying things out, keyword research, link building and luck to get from nothing to traffic to sales.

First published on http://advanced-affiliate-marketing.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/advanced-affiliate-marketing/niche-and-sell

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Post tags: google seo, niche, sales, sales tip, sales tips

NOTE: in the coming month, squidoo will be changing their nofollow policy.

I’ve been thinking about Squidoo and SEO lately. Well, what else is new, right? Turns out I’m not the only one. One of the issues is that there are quite a few useful modules where squidoo nofollows links, though you’d expect the links to be followed.

Greekgeek has a full list here: Squidoo Modules. Checking that list against the live modules IS necessary. Several modules I checked were not up to date. See below.

But that’s a large list and let’s face it, there are only a few modules we use regularly. So this post is just pulling out the modules you’d love to use, if ONLY the links were followed (and therefore useful for SEO purposes).

About Me – nofollowed will become followed

The about me module is great from a PR perspective: showcase your best lenses and who you are. Too bad the links are nofollowed.

My Lenses – nofollowed will become followed

List your lenses on some criterion (like newest, last updated, topic etc.) Really a great feature, if the links were followed, but they’re not.

Text with BIG Picture – nofollowed will become followed

This one is a surprise. Since the text/write module has followed links, I’d have thought this one would too. It doesn’t. So don’t put links in that module that you want followed. On the other hand, this does mean that you can link the image in the big picture module for an affiliate link. Affiliate links should be no-followed.

Text/write – followed

The links here are followed. If you upload a picture and add a link to it, that link too will be followed (and you can’t manually add a no-follow attribute). This means you should NOT link the image you uploaded here with an affiliate link. Affiliate links should be no-followed.

Featured Lenses – followed

Greekgeek’s list is wrong here, thankfully. The featured lenses module IS followed. (just checked)

Featured lensmasters – nofollowed will become followed

If you thought you were giving lensmasters you were featuring a nice backlink, you would be wrong: the  module is nofollowed.

RSS – some followed, some not: will become NOfollowed

The RSS module IS followed (to my surprise). So you’re actually promoting your blog with links as well as exposure when you use the RSS module.

The RSS WIDGET on the other hand (on the sidebar) is nofollowed.

The RSS Mashup module (where you can show the latest posts from several blogs) is NOFOLLOWED.

Well, that’s the list of modules to watch out for. Just when you thought squidoo was easy

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Post tags: link building, promotion, rel-nofollow, squidoo seo

I’m working on a CMS for a large site: over 700 pages.

I am using a horizontal menu for the main navigation, but when people are deep in the hierarchy, it makes sense to show them the children of the page they’re on as well as the parents, BUT NOT the other main level pages.

This turns out to require a bit of tinkering. First up I’m using the FlexiPages widget, which comes as close as I can get out of all the PHP code I looked up and the plugins I tried. This shows a bit too much even with the best of settings (it does offer a lot of settings).

I’m letting it:

• Organize by menu order
• Show only related subpages
• Show hierarchy with unlimited depth (Three levels deep I still want the subpages to show)

Using the widget logic plugin I’m showing the widget only on pages, using: is_page()

This gives me almost what I need …I now have a menu on my pages (not my posts) that shows all the top level pages, and the tree the current page is in, as well as any siblings to the current page I’m on, as well as children of the page I’m on.

All good, but I don’t want the top level pages to clutter things up. All else failing, I looked under the hood to see if I could hide the stuff I didn’t need, using CSS. Turns out, FlexiPages gives very granular classes to each level, so I could do that. Here’s the CSS I ended up using:

/* flexipages_widget styling */

.flexipages_widget li a{
display: none;
}
.flexipages_widget li li a, .flexipages_widget li.current_page_parent a, .flexipages_widget li.current_page_ancestor a
, .flexipages_widget li.current_page_item a{
display: block;
}

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Post tags: blogging platform, cms, css, menu, wordpress

Two online friends of mine asked (or got) advice by me recently about optimizing their blogspot (aka blogger) blogs.

Blogspot is a much simpler platform than WordPress. WordPress has two types of pages: posts and pages. Blogger has only blogposts. WordPress has two ways to organize your posts: categories and tags (and an extra option I don’t understand, so I won’t explain it here). Blogger only has labels, another word for tags.

Alright, so that’s the basis: we have a platform with only blogposts, and only tags to organize things. So how do we make sure our content is interlinked well and the right keywords get into the page? That’s the issue here: how to SEO a blogspot blog.

The Blogspot / Blogger Title Tag

Like WordPress the default title of a blogger post is ‘blog title | blogpost title’. You will want that reversed. In WordPress I’d tell you to pick the right theme or install and SEO plugin. In blogspot you’re forced to edit the code of your Template. Luckily if you screw up, you can ask blogger to put the original template back.

1. So, go to the HTML editor of your template
2. Find the line that says: <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
3. Replace it with:
   <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageName == &quot;&quot;’>
   <title><data:blog.title/></title>
   <b:else/>
   <title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
   </b:if>
4. Click ‘save’
5. Check your blog to see if you screwed up

[Hat tip to 911 need code help]

Tell your users who you are: about page

I know, there is the option to use feature your blogspot profile on your blog. However, that profile is not very useful for SEO purposes. Anyhow, Blogspot has just introduced the option to create pages for your blog, and I advise you to use it. Create an About Page. On it you should have:

• A picture of you that’s reasonably flattering, or in line with the image you want to portray on the blog (you know, funny hat if it’s a funny blog etc.)
• Some personal information about you that’s relevant to the blogtheme
• Some links to related stuff you’ve done online and where you can be reached on say twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc.

That’s it really.

The reason you don’t want to use the blogspot profile is that it has rel-nofollowed links in places where you really want your link to be followed. So instead put up a picture widget and a link to ‘pages’ – aka your about page – below it.

Interlinking related stuff on your blog and getting keywords in there

This part is in two: you need to use the right tags (aka labels) on your posts and you need to add related links at the bottom. I’ll start with the related links. I have not actually tried this, so I’ll refer you straight to an online tutorial I found: How to add a related posts widget to your blogger blog.

Now for the really hard stuff. No, it’s not more code. It’s using labels to organize your posts. This sounds so easy, but I’ve seen too many people mess up their tags, and have had enough trouble keeping my own tags in order, to know it only seems easy.

So here’s another try at explaining how to do tags. On a blog you don’t have to worry about using tags other people are using: it’s all your blog after all. But you still don’t have much reason to want to create tags that are only going to be used by one post. Why? because a lonely tag is a page that’s a LOT like the original blogpost. That’s duplicate content and search engines don’t like that.

So, if you can, always select your labels from the labels you’re already using. Blogspot makes this easy, simply select that option when you’re writing your post.

But how do you choose your post? I’m afraid it takes some analytical thinking. Think about how a library or a shop would categorize what you’ve just written. Is it fiction, is it a book review, is the movie you’re writing about fantasy, romantic comedy or something else… In other words: think about categories that describe what your post is about, that are more general than the post itself. After all, you want other posts (past or future) to ALSO be using that label.

Oh, and you get bonus points for using words searchers use when looking for your content. Don’t let that determine your tags though. Even if you have no chance at ranking for say ‘Buddhism’ (a very competitive niche), if you’ve written 5 posts about that, they should definitely all be labeled ‘Buddhism’.

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Post tags: blogging platform, google seo, indexed, tags, traffic

This is one of those ‘blogging to remember’ posts. I’m working on using WordPress as a CMS on a site that has 700+ pages. In order to properly organize things, I need to be able to mix ‘news’ (aka the blog part) with the ‘static’ pages (aka the pages). In other words: I need a side menu (aka widget) that shows links to relevant pages on some of my posts.

In trying to figure out a solution, the biggest problem was that you have to remember that getting things done on WordPress PAGES is very different from getting the same thing done on WordPress POSTS, though I think the below method could be adapted to work for both. It’s specifically made however to get links to PAGES showing up on specific POSTS. For the reverse other methods are probably more efficient.

This turns out to be doable, though not easy, using a combination of the Query Posts plugin and the Widget Logic plugin.

So here’s the plan:

1. Show links to the children of one page, using Query Posts
2. Show a widget only on posts in a category, and the category page, using Widget Logic

Show links to the children of one page, using Query Posts

This is the hard part: finding out what the post ID is of the page whose children you want to show. On a site that uses WordPress as a CMS, you’re likely to use Pagemash to organize your pages. An added benefit is that it has information on each page included, like the page ID.

Note that number down somewhere. Now we’re on to the Query Posts widget. It’s a bit scary, but not as scary as the PHP you’d have to type to get the same result, so we’ll dive right in.

1. Install Query Posts.
2. Head over to ‘widgets’.
3. Drag the Query Posts Widget to the place in your sidebar where you want your menu item to show.
4. Open it up. Your settings are going to be:
   1. Title: what you want to show at the top of the widget (easy, right)
   2. Display: ul – assuming you want the widget to look like every other widget you have.
   3. Post_status: leave blank or set to ‘published’
   4. Post_type: Select PAGE
   5. The next fields are left empty, till you come to:
   6. Post_parent: enter the number you found using pagemash: the number of the page you need to see the children of.
   7. You don’t need any other fields, so just leave them empty.
   8. Click ‘save’ for the settings of the widget to be saved
5. Head over to your blog to see the result. An extra menu featuring the children of that page you selected should appear everywhere on your site. We’ll get to how to limit that next.

Show your widget only on some posts, using Widget Logic

Install and activate the Widget Logic plugin. Then post the following code into the newly appeared field that appears at the bottom of your query posts widget (and every other widget).

is_category(‘X’) || (is_single() && in_category(‘X’))

Where X is the category-slug. The category-slug is the bit of text you see at the end of the URL of that category page. If you’re not sure, you can find the category slug under ‘categories’, in the ‘posts’ menu. Here’s what the rest of the code means:

is_category(‘X’) is for showing the widget on the category page.

|| is for OR

(is_single() && in_category(‘X’)) is for single pages in category X.

That should be it. Click ‘save’ again in the widget, and head over to your site to check whether the extra menu item REALLY only shows up on the posts in that category, and on that category page. If it shows up nowhere, you mistyped your PHP somewhere. The field in the Widget Logic plugin is a bit small, so open a text editor to check it out. Do you have apostrophes where you need to? Are all your brackets closed (that is: does every opening bracket ‘(‘ have a corresponding closing bracket ‘)’)?

Good luck.

Added fun: showing the parent page as well!

Unfortunately the above method does not allow for showing the parent-page as well as the children of that parent, so what I ended up doing was create a dummy page that redirects to the parent page. It shows up in the menu, but when people click on it, they get to the parent page. This sort of redirection stuff is easily managed wit the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin. It’s such a simple redirect plugin, anybody can use it. You know, no messing with .htaccess and any of that. It just ads an extra field to each page and post and tells you to enter the URL you want it to redirect to. For an post or page within your CMS, you can simply use the page slug.

If you’re going to use this for permanent redirects like in my example, select ’301 redirect’. If it’s temporary, use ’302 redirect’.

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Post tags: cms, menu, techniques, wordpress

From the searches that get people to this blog :

Should I have a seperate blog of each squidoo lens?

Good question. As usual I’m going to give you the quick answer first:

Have a blog for each NICHE you have squidoo lenses (or hubs on hubpages) about.

The problem comes next: how are you going to make sure that blog is getting found by search engines? There are three methods:

1. Interlink all your blogs – and have each point only to the lenses in that niche
   I don’t do this. My niche blogs link ONLY to niche pages, whether lenses, hubs or article pages.
2. Put your free blogs on domains that are so well interlinked within, and already ranking in the serps, that you don’t need to promote your blog. Vox and existing niche nings are examples of this.
3. Make a link wheel for each topic you have lenses about: niche blogs on blogger, vox, wordpress.com etc. Each interlinking, each linking back to your squidoo lenses and other (paying) online properties.

Or of course… Make one blog for all your lenses and promote it in the squidoo network.

Whatever you do: if you are going to make a blog ONLY about squidoo lenses, do NOT host it on blogger or wordpress. They may just ban you for linking out to only one domain. Instead put your blog on one of the squidoo blogging platforms.

The advantages of having several interlinked niche blogs:

• They all get link leverage & google will likely smile on the lenses you link to.
• You tap into the links existing domains have to promote your own stuff.
• You tap into existing AUDIENCE on those hubs. Blogging on Vox for instance means reaching the audience of Vox bloggers in that niche. Audience = people = good

The disadvantages of having several interlinked niche blogs:

• Spreading yourself too thin: You have less chance of developing a longer term relationship with people in a niche if you are not consistent in where your best content is being posted. How will people find you? How can they keep up with the genuine great stuff you keep producing if you are publishing it on several platforms?
• How will you have time to create genuine great stuff if you ARE spreading yourself thin?

These are questions each online marketeer has to figure out for themselves.

Back to the original question:

Should I have a seperate blog of each squidoo lens?

One answer:

If you stick to one niche, you will only need one main blog to accompany it, however many lenses you make.

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Post tags: blogging platform, niche

Misinformation about SEO always ticks me off. It’s usually simply old information being recycled because the people involved don’t keep up with the SEO blogs.

In her latest post, AJ said:

The link back from the Tiger Clipart lens to the Year of the Tiger lens has been changed to “no follow”.

The reason she does that is because these links spoil the ‘wheel’, but she doesn’t want to delete the links, because they’re good for users.

Some history:

When the rel-nofollow attribute came out, it was meant for links that got sold, but SEO’s also started using it to ‘sculpt’ pagerank. That is: to give link juice to those pages of their site that they felt were most important, at the expense of pages they did not value as much.

However, in the words of Matt Cutts (THE Google Search spokesperson):

[S]ome crawl/indexing/quality folks noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums).

So last year it was announced by Google that this strategy no longer works.

The new policy means that pagerank evaporates after using rel-nofollow. That is: it does NOT get redistributed to the followed links.

This also means that putting rel-nofollow on any links to your own content, is like throwing drinking water into the sea: it does nobody any good.

So – put your users first: link out to whatever content is relevant for them & make that more important than any link wheel. And please don’t punish yourself by rel-nofollowing links to your own content. AJ – Please?

BTW – I have a mashup of all the important SEO blogs on my SEO Mentor lens.

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Post tags: integrity, rel-nofollow, search engine optimization

Alright: spam alert. This tactic can seriously cross the boundary between creating original content that adds something to the web & content that is only there to make your other content rank.

That said, building links is part of any web publishing business. And looking at the backlinks to Katinka Hesselink the other day, I was stunned at the percentage I had directly created myself. And Katinka Hesselink Net gets some serious traffic. Of course the other links are probably just as important, if not more so.  But if you have to start somewhere…

The reason I am writing this blogpost is that AJ has finally ventured out of squidoo to branch out to other online web properties like hubpages and article sites. This is cause for celebration. Everyone who does that, and links back to squidoo where relevant, is likely to make more on squidoo, or hubpages, than those who limit themselves to just squidoo. Or just Hubpages. Or just that one article site they started on years ago.

She’s doing all this with the idea of a link wheel helping her on. Here’s the simple link wheel:

Honestly I don’t quite get why she’s not putting the squidoo lens at the hub of the wheel. My principles for this sort of thing is simple:

1. Create original content on the site that is most successful for you
2. Create very different content in the same niche, on a site that’s not as successful for you. Link back from there to the first.
3. Create something in the same niche on blogger, wordpress, vox, etc. and link to the first and link to the second, or the third, or the fourth. (am I still making sense?)
4. Vary the order of the wheel per project.
5. Link to your content where you can from niche sites that have their own backlinks

But another way of summing this up is:

• Make sure you don’t publish your stuff at only one place online.
• Make sure you own your best content.
• Interlink all your content.
• Link more to the stuff that makes you money.
• Make sure that everything has at least one backlink.
• Don’t create duplicate content.
• Don’t link out as much from stuff that makes you most.

Your best content should be on places where you are likely to be rewarded for it with either links or money (or both).

You should not put content on sites that are going to steal it or republish it. You should own your own stuff. Mahalo is one site where it’s very possible an editor may step in to change what you’ve done. They lost me that way. There are other examples too.

To close I want to quote Alex who apparently got AJ to that point of branching out:

People start scrambling for $25 here or $15 there. Sure, this can add up to a few hundred dollars a month, if you want to have the time to do that, but you do yourself  or others no good in the process.

…

I will take the $25 a month direct payout and celebrate the hundreds I’ve made indirectly from the publishing sites.

What he’s saying is that the sum is more than the parts. Just be sure the content is real all over.

How I do the link wheel

The main thing to remember is that you want your money making stuff to rank. So that’s where the links have to go. But that doesn’t mean they can’t link out… Here’s what I do (roughly):

Don’t take such drawings too literally. The trick is to make sure everything backlinks that doesn’t rank on its own.

The wheel sites can be anything that is on topic.

Don’t forget to make a new niche blog for any new niche you enter. And don’t list them at your public Blogger account.

Money making sites A, B and C can be anything. From a special squidoo account devoted to a niche, to a hub, to a niche blog you’ve put up on blogger (with affiliate links), to a niche blog you’ve put up that’s self hosted on it’s own domain name. Note that this is still a wheel: the money making sites are not linking out to the articles you put up on sites that do NOT make you anything, like blogspot and wordpress.

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© Spiritual Marketing for Marketing Spiritual, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: link building, promotion, traffic

This blog is made on WordPress, using the Thematic Theme. Thematic comes with 13 widget ready areas (most of which you’ll never use), is coded well for SEO and flexibility of design etc. All that is why I started using it about a year ago, and yet I’m leaving it behind…

Thematic is a Theme Framework. That is: it is designed well enough out of the box for a functional website, but the underlying code is done so well, that you can make almost any design you want out of it – without having to switch themes. Having done that this week I know: switching themes is a lot of work. All the custom work you did for one theme needs to be redone for the next. So why did I put myself through that?

I bought the Thesis Theme yesterday. I bought it because it is fast, it has more built in options and because I have a big web design account these days and really can’t afford to be slouchy on the details. And, of course, Thesis is a theme framework too.

In Thesis you don’t have to code to get rid of links to author pages. In Thesis you don’t have to code to go from one to two to three columns.

To get your own design, you do of course need to code CSS. I spent most of the day yesterday moving over my spiritual blog All Considering to this new theme and recreating the old look.

The result wasn’t exactly the old look, but I got very close & some of the new is an improvement I think. Turns out the underlying HTML coding is granular enough that I could get very close to my old look. Very close indeed. Any differences are choice, not necessity.

What I like: the inbuilt ‘magazine’ look - that’s customizable. I chose the default: two posts out of 10 in full view, the rest only showing snippets. But if you want the real magazine look, you can go with all ten in magazine look. And of course, if you want to change the wordpress settings, you can have as many more as you want.

What I like: not having to create a new page for the home page and yet have the homepage look different from category pages and tag pages.

What I like: not having to install as many plugins. For most uses the All in One SEO Pack is no longer necessary, though I’ve personally put such specific settings in there that I’m still using it. Not that I recommend it: everybody should move on to the new Light SEO plugin. It has the exact same features as the AiOSEO used to have, before they started charging money for ‘extended features’. And yes, this new one can be used in combination with the e-commerce shopping cart for WordPress.

Other plugins I get to uninstall:

• The Google analytics plugin
• Robots Meta plugin

They’re useful for SEO, but their functionality is built into Thesis.

A must have plugin for the lazy coder (or those who don’t know enough PHP to manage) is the Thesis Open Hook plugin. Hooks are great, or so people say. But my PHP was never quite good enough to be able to use them for my custom ideas. I’m getting there, I’ve typed more PHP in the last week than ever before, but still – if I can avoid it, I will. This plugin makes inserting code in unlikely places a breeze.

Thematic has many custom hooks as well: any good WordPress framework does. The difference is in the plugin: no messing with the functions file for simple things like putting adsense at the end of every post.

I’m going to go one step further with Thesis: I’ll be using it on WordPress as a CMS for a site with 700+ pages. This means that having the ability to easily tweak the menu is no luxury – and yes, that’s what Thesis offers. This brings it close to what Joomla has in terms of customizing your menu, without coding. Not quite there, but then I never needed that amount of customization.

So now you know why I ended up paying for a theme in the end… Pagespeed and easy customizations. And remember: pagespeed is no luxury these days. Google is actively rewarding fast sites in the Serps these days.

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© Spiritual Marketing for Marketing Spiritual, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging platform, css, page speed, php, priorities, search engine optimization, techniques, Traffic from Google: Seo, wordpress