The percentage of Americans who believe that television ads are more helpful is more than one third (37% to be exact) while 17% of the people trust news paper ads. Interestingly, only 14% of the people believe that Internet search ads are of any value at all. Not surprisingly, the percentage of the people who blindly trust Internet ads are mostly youngsters while majority (46%) all age groups together say that they ignore web banners.

The age factor

Age seems to play a major role in the usage of a particular ad medium (TV, news paper, web, radio etc) in order to make informed decisions when it comes to purchases. For example, most retired people (31%) trust the news papers more than anything else when it comes to advertisements. Obviously, in retired age people get to spend more time with news papers. 50% of the people in the age group of 18-50 believe that TV ads are good enough for decision making. Needless to say, only 20% of the youngsters say they ignore web ads. Basically the younger generation that is always hooked on to the Internet make their decisions in life based on what they read on the web.

The role of the medium

In fact the ease at which one can ignore an advertisement varies between mediums. For example, it is not very easy to ignore a printed newspaper ad simply because it is permanently staying there for ever. In order to ignore a TV ad, one has to actually switch the channel while movie (DVD/VCD) ads can be fast forwarded and easily skipped. In the case of web text ads, people can most easily ignore them. Most popups will be closed as soon as they appear and people mostly skip many web pages as soon as they hear/see multimedia ads. As for some of the standard size (e.g. 468×60) banners, the general (viewing) perception is that it is an area that one needs to scroll and skip.

Conclusion

Looking at the ad trends and the insights from the surveys like the one I am talking about, it is very clear that web ads are generally meant for the younger generation. You might find some success if you run a gadget or computer related product’s campaign on the web but the success rate may not be the same with products for other age groups. This also gives some hints for making money online. Probably the niches that will fetch you more PPC/AdSense income will be those niches where the relevant products or services are preferred more by the younger generation. The very fact that the overall market share of online ads is just around 7% gives you an opportunity to potentially make money online but at the same time it is a risky medium to depend on as well.

You can access the full report here!

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: Advertising: Most people ignore web banners!

There are a number of ways to deal with the writer’s block problem and one of them is to follow profound bloggers and their hugely popular blogs in order to draw inspiration to blog about. I would like to call such blogs feeder blogs and let us talk about them in this short post.

Follow the big bosses

The ideal way to find new topics to write on is via those newsletters, twitter updates, media news and alerts from vendors, service providers, leaders and marketers of your blog niche. However, sometimes it is virtually impossible to comprehend all those information quickly enough to pick the right topic. In this case, feeder blogs provide a very good platform for you to pick your topics and all that you need to do is to follow four or five such big blogs in your niche to keep going.

It is not necessarily bad to be the second level carriers of a fresh idea. Why? Because at the end the idea is to reach out to the maximum possible addressable readers and hence being carriers of not-so-fresh information is not always bad. However, you should try to add some fresh angle to what was already discussed and should not blindly copy-paste any content. It’s also a good thing to give the credit to the original post or blog or wherever it belongs.

How to find your feeder blogs?

It is a must for a technology blogger to follow feeder blogs like mashable, techcrunch or engadget. Similarly for someone writing about blogging might want to follow the pro himself.

You can arrive at a list of feeder blogs that you might want to follow by being active on blog directories, technorati and social media sites. You can also find them on twitter or similar social networks. Yet another way of finding the pro blog list is using Google sets which is an excellent tool to find similar or related items. For example, you enter ‘problogger’ and ‘enterpreuners journey’ as the first two inputs to Google sets and click the ‘Large Set’ button. You will be amazed to see the result set (I use Google sets on a regular basis to get related items - not just related blogs)

Conclusion

As we saw, feeder blogs provide a great way to find new topics to write and propagate on. They are a great means to improve your knowledge and great sources of inspiration - not just for blogging.

Now, the question to you (bloggers, especially) is how many such feeder blogs do you follow on a regular basis? Could you name them so that the newbies get some ideas on whom to follow?

Happy Blogging!

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: Feeder blogs to the rescue…

The success on twitter is directly proportional to the number of quality followers you have. However, quite unlike other subscription mechanisms (such as RSS, aWeber) it is not at all difficult to build a very good follower base on twitter. In this post let me try to talk about a few practical tips to help increase your twitter follower base.

Tips to increase twitter following

The following are the tips to get you more twitter followers in no time

#1 Blindly follow others

The easiest way to get followers is to actually follow others. Initially you don’t need to worry too much about whom you follow but later you can be choosy. You can use twitter search (and tags) to find people with similar interests. You can also keep following your followers’ followers and friends.

Usually, at least a good number (say 20 or 30%) of the people that you follow will actually follow you back! This works instantly if you want to build followers in a matter of days (Note: Beware of a twitter ban if you are following way too many in a matter of hours)

#2 Keep retweeting

I have seen a number of tweeters who build their follower base by just retweeting quality tweets. They may not have anything great to tweet by themselves but they RT 20 or 30 quality tweets from whom they follow and this increases the follower base. However, in order to get quality followers you may have to add something on your own once in a while as well.

Those were your 10 (10 in binary = 2) tips! Probably you could read a few more tips elsewhere like customizing your twitter home, routing your other SocNets to twitter, changing profile pics etc. In fact, what really matters is the above two and it is just a matter of days before you can have 1000s of followers.

Over to you…

Basically, I am not a major twitter fan and I always thought that it is full of spam - twitter itself as well as the directories built around it! I feel that it’s more like the SMS misuse that you can see in countries like India. However, if judiciously used it may help to sell a few percentage more!

Have you got any killer tips to get more twitter followers or sell better via twitter?

Happy tweeting!

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: 10 ways to increase your Twitter followers

1. A mildly insulting epithet for an Irishman
2. A person that loves cake and is capable of eating it in large quantities
3. A person who lives in or frequents bogs

Now what I had in mind originally was the third one of those definitions (Sorry, friends from Ireland and cakelovers all over the globe)

Who’s a BlogTrotter?

In my blogssary (blog glossary) a BlogTrotter is a person who :-

• wanders around in the blogosphere and reads 100s of blogs per day
• has a few hundred RSS/Atom feeds in his/her feed reader
• prefers to live online most of their day and has very little social interaction offline
• finds not much time to blog for yourself as ‘just browsing around’ is the main activity in life
• takes pride in following famous super bloggers
• delivers dozens of tweets and retweets per day
• interacts with close friends and family via online tools rather than by phone
• aims to take up blogging as their career
• …

Over to you…

Are you becoming a BlogTrotter or already one? How many hours of your daily time do you spend online?? Have you already taken up blogging as your fulltime career or intend to do so in the near future???

Happy Blogging!

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: Are you a BlogTrotter?

I think, the selfishness is more in the MMO niche because helping each other is not a popular formula here. After all ‘money’ and ‘selfishness’ complement each other very well. And if majority of your readers are bloggers themselves (blogging tips niche) you have a very good chance of not getting any comments on your post if you don’t return the same favor on time.

Selfish and how?

You comment and I comment back attitude is the most visible part here. Even then, most of the times comments are like ‘nice post’, ‘good points’ etc. Please, unless a particular post adds value to your life, you strongly agree or disagree to the content, you don’t need to necessarily make a comment. And when you are making a comment be specific and provide details.

(An exception to the above is when you have dofollow blogs or top commentator plugin that shows easy-to-enter numbers. Please note that those who comment only for those backlinks may not have even read your post completely)

Social bookmarking and tweeting is another area of selfishness. I see a lot of retweets of late though somebody initiating a book mark by himself is rare. Mostly, you have to tweet yourself on your own posts first to get further retweets.

Bad tone on comments is relatively rare but something that I have seen in the past. Some people take pride in convincing the world that what is being written is crap (e.g. for such a comment ‘Nice paid review’. Probably, the whole world knows that it is a paid review and you don’t need to stress on that fact)

Skipping the affiliate links is another thing usually exhibited by fellow bloggers - they rather prefer to sign up directly than using your referral link The reason, why help him make more money, though it costs me nothing.

One week challenge for bloggers

Now, I would like to know how many of you bloggers are willing to do the following for the next one week (or two):

• Stop visiting other blogs and commenting there in
• Remove your top commentator plugin
• Put back rel=nofollow on your comments section

Are you ready for the challenge? Do you believe that you will still get at least 10 comments per post even after taking the above steps? (I am talking about upcoming blogs and not pro-bloggers)

Related Posts

Unethical blogging practices
Unethical blog visitor/reader habits

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: Bloggers are Selfish people!

In this post, I would like to concentrate on the deep linking topic inspired by a bunch of tweet exchanges I had with with Luis of Some Extra Pennies - a regular reader of this blog.

What is deep linking?

A Deep link is basically a link (hyperlink) that is pointed to a web page or post of another website/blog, rather than to the homepage itself. For example, when you use the commentluv plugin, you are actually creating a deep link to your last post from the post.

Why deep links are important?

In a typical search and hit (organic traffic) scenario, your search visitors mostly hit your individual posts and pages than your homepage. In the case of DollarShower, the % of search visits I receive on the homepage is just 15% and the rest of the visits land on individual posts. Needless to say, link building towards these posts are critical to obtaining sustainable search traffic. In other words, deep linking is a way to improve search hits on your specific content than your generic index page.

Ways to deep link your blog posts

There are a number of ways through which you can create deep links to your blog posts. Whatever be the mechanism, it is important to deep link using the right target keywords than just providing a URL to link. Now, let us talk about the typical ways to deep link.

#1 CommentLuv

The commentluv plugin provides a very easy way of linking to your last blog post (or a selected post). If the commentluv link is dofollow then it adds real value in terms of flowing the link juice to targeted post. There are several blogs that allow the Ajax editing of your comment, just after you post a comment. Please use this feature to edit your commentluv link to modify it for the right keywords, because you may not want to use the whole blog post title as keyword phrase (Be sure to consult the author if such an act could be marked as spam as per their comment policy)

#2 Be part of link love posts

You may want to be in good rapport with those bloggers who regularly publish link love posts. Close networking with bloggers from your niche is one of the (softer) link baiting techniques. If gently asked, many of them might link to your posts in exchange of a similar favor some other time. You may even ask them to modify the links for the right keywords if you are willing to do the same for them.

[You could in fact go for a deep link exchange even with those bloggers who do not have the habbit of publishing ‘Some day’ link love posts, if you happen to identify a potential source post and contact the author about the link building potential]

#3 Use your target post URL to comment

Using your target keywords and individual post URL (rather than blog homepage URL) to comment on blogs is another way to deep link. But as in the first case, you might want to consult the author or comply with the comment policy before attempting the same. Many bloggers, in a moment of irritation, could mark you as a spammer while moderating such comments (I am yet to publish a comment policy)

#4 Use profile URLs and descriptions

There are a number of websites and upcoming social media networks that allow dofollow URLs (some even with keywords) on the profile pages and descriptions. You could easily tap into such opportunities to do quality deep link building.

#5 InLinks campaign

The InLinks product from Text Link Ads provide a very good deep linking platform (paid service) to drive your link building campaign. There are similar products from LinkXL as well.

#6 Article submission

Organized article submission (or even article marketing) via high PR article sites can certainly speed up your deep link building campaign however, beware of those cheap services that offer article spinning.

#7 Keep changing your forum signatures

Those who are very active on forums, may keep changing the forum signatures in order to deep link to your desired blog posts. Forums, usually allow links (with keywords) on the forum posts as well once you satisfy the minimum post criteria or membership status as decided by the forum webmasters.

#8 Guest posting

Guest posting is definitely a way to improve your backlinks as long as the blog on which you are doing guest posting allow keyword rich dofollow deep backlinking. Some bloggers allow only linking to your homepage but you may negotiate on what you want.

#9 Directory submission

Submission to directories that support internal pages linking is another way to improve your deep links. Many paid link building campaigns focus on this aspect a lot.

#10 Onsite SEO - internal linking

Internal linking via the right keywords is very important - whether is in the form of plain linking or facilitated by plugins (Related posts, Popular posts etc). However, many times when you use plugins, you loose out on the keywords unless you had opted for killer post titles. One way to avoid this is to manually linking such posts and probably you can even use the default Blogroll feature to add your key post links with keywords

Other deep linking tips

• You may not want to overdo with respect to keywords so that the content and the context sound unnatural
• Picking the inner pages of highly connected websites is always an advantage if it is in the right context. Sometimes, a deep link from a PR0 .gov or .edu link will have more weightage than a link from a PR2 or PR3 .com domain
• Focus on the link strength (will talk about it another post) as well as the inbound links to the page from where you are linking. You can use a backlink checker before linking from a page
• While internal linking to your own posts, be wise - Do not use URL title such as ‘as I mentioned in last post’ etc but use target keywords without loosing the context and flow of reading
• Avoid deep linking from frames. What you may get in terms of link juice and strength may not be exactly what you percieved
• Regularly check the backlinks to your top search hit posts and use those source pages to further deep link to your other posts, if at all possible

Deep linking has its benefits regardless of whether Google changes PR algorithm or not. At the end, the quality and depth of a website’s content is decided on the basis of inbound deep links that is coming to the individual pages than just the homepage.

Happy link building!

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: Deep Linking - The most important aspect of Link Building & SEO

There are numerous benefits that blogging brings to your life than just the money part. If I list ten of those advantages in the order of priority, my list would look something like the following:

Advantages of blogging (in my theory)

(1 = top benefit or priority, and 10 = the lowest priority)

#1 Satisfaction

It gives me tremendous pleasure when my thoughts and ideas are of some inspiration to my audience - both budding bloggers and others. Yesterday I stumbled upon this new blog whereby the blogger (Tushar) has mentioned that he was majorly inspired by DollarShower to start new MMO blog. To be honest, I felt happier than the day when I got my first AdSense check (just relating to another aspect of blogging)

#2 Change the system

The power of your ideas and the ability to question the system can actually change many people’s lives. There are a number of bloggers who actually brings out issues like social injustice, crime, malign politicians and governments’ wrong doings (e.g. Kurt, our friend from Mauritius who authors island crisis)

#3 Educating your readers

Blogging is a free flowing means and free to consume mode of educating your readers. Just like the bloggers write at their paces, the readers have the freedom to choose and learn the stuff that he/she wants. Hence, providing free education is the next most important benefit for me.

(This is not just about the literature in the form of blog posts, but includes the free consulting help that you give via email, twitter, IM etc)

#4 Monetory benefits

I would be lying if I do not mention the money aspect at this point in the priority list. In fact, for many bloggers who make a living out of blogging, this may be the top priority as well.

#5 Networking (online and offline)

Blogging is not only about the engagement between blogger and the blog reader anymore but provides great opportunities to interact with a wider set of people via social networking, offline gatherings, blogger meets on a certain topic and other related events. Whether it is a low profile bloggers’ get-together or a mega event in Playboy mansion or a cruise vessel - they all serve the same purpose of networking.

#6 Writing skills

The online writing gives you the shortest possible turnaround time to become a famous writer or to continuously improve on your writing skills as compared to the print media. The instant feedback mechanism and the viral nature of the web content are the main reasons behind the instant success. Moreover, when you blog you are actually publishing more often in lesser quantities that helps you to assess and improve continuously.

#7 Reading habits

In order to become a good writer, you have to be a greater reader. As I have maintained many times in the past, it is like 80% reading and 20% writing that provides the right balance (not considering other aspects in a blogger’s life)

Great bloggers are those who read a lot and do a lot of research before publishing their ideas and hence reading is definitely an advantage or byproduct of blogging.

#8 Technical improvement

Fortunately or unfortunately, blogging is not about content publishing anymore. Most bloggers wear the hats of a webmaster, SEO expert, software developer, advertiser, affiliate marketer and web designer etc during his blogging life - apart from the main job of writing. This multi-role job definitely helps bloggers to become better technical people as they do more and more blogging. As a matter of fact, many of them have become good consultants in various disciplines after or during their successful blogging careers (e.g. our friends Kim and Harsh)

#9 Discipline

Blogging adds certain amount of discipline to a blogger’s life, at least I believe so. After I have started blogging and deciding on how much time I have to spend online and on blogging, my time management has become better and I consider this as another great advantage of blogging. However, if you are the one who spends most of your valuable time online and surrender your real life activities and responsibilities, it can lead to serious indiscipline!

#10 Blogging keeps you busy

Many people - especially those who are leading a retired life or have no other major hobbies - find blogging not only as a serious pastime but a means to keep them busy as well. Blogging can help to get rid of boredom in life and that’s my last point on the virtues of blogging.

Over to you…

Now could you tell me the greatest benefit that you derived out of with blogging? Do you agree with my priorities??

Happy blogging!

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: Advantages of Blogging

In the context of the ongoing recession, the malicious lot have started targeting search terms such as ‘credit crisis‘, ‘mortgage crisis‘ and ‘goldman sachs‘ to distract you towards unsafe websites. You might have experienced phishing attempts around those keywords, of late.

Just like these search terms lead you to dangerous websites, the selection of the wrong keywords on your website or blog can cause unexpected bad results as well.

What can wrong keywords do to your blog?

The following are some of the after effects of using the wrong set of keywords, phrases or even linking to websites who have those keyword related contents.

#1 Your pages removed SEs

Search engines like Google continuously filter out pages that have objectionable phrases, illegal/pirated content or sites that has bad neighborhood.

#2 AdSense shows nothing or public service ads

The AdSense stops serving ads to those kinds of pages or shows zero earning public service ads. AdSense can also become ineffective when the crawler finds a sequence of intentionally stuffed keywords or very long paragraphs having the same.

#3 Ban by safe internet browsing applications

The safe internet browsing applications that come with Anti-virus software usually mark your webpages based on certain patterns of keywords, suspicious scripts and downloads that have trojans or WORMs in them (could be even coming from some of those affiliate scripts). Once rated ‘red’ by these applications (e.g. McAfee Site Advisor) you may find it hard to get back your safe rating.

#4 High bounce rate

If you optimize for the wrong set of keywords (even when they are not rated), the search visitors may click the back button as soon as they land on your site because they did not get to see what they expected.

#5 Drop in search ranks

Basically, the search engine’s internal priority of your pages can decrease when the page content has nothing much to do with the keywords specified. This can also result in a drop in public (Toolbar) PR and in the long run huge reduction in search visits (or no visits)

#6 Brand image damage

The more wrong keywords or objectionable phrases you have, the more damage it causes to your brand.

Over to you…

Have you ever been banned from your Google AdSense account for using objectionable key-phrases or content? Even worse, has Google stopped indexing your pages due to the same reason?

Happy blogging!

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: Wrong Keywords and risky Keyphrases can kill your Blog

I had done some research about the script errors and the most of the WordPress support threads (pathetic!) suggested that the blog was hacked! I guess, that is the solution they give when nothing is known. However, I figured out that blogs, unlike some of the traditional websites, are more vulnerable to hacking. I have my reasons to think so:

Why blogs are easy preys to hackers?

Firstly, majority of the self-hosted blogs are served via cheap shared hosting services. As a matter of fact, they host 500 ot 600 domains on one server some of which cannot be even monitored for suspicious activities. Some of these hosting services may not even have proper security infrastructure. I read in many places about the vulnerability of certain shared hosting services (I do not want to name it here)

Secondly, most blog engines store the content in databases and there are many SQL injection threats that cannot be easily blocked. Most of these blog platforms are just evolving and hence there is no single fix to the injection hacks. I must say that the great WordPress is still vulnerable!

My next reason - many blogs are authored and web-mastered by not-so-technical people and hence they usually go with default settings. This is one of the problems that needs to be addressed by individuals.

Another thing that happened with my hosting service - HostMonster - a month ago was the corruption in their PHP installation. This lead to all blogs on a particular server to be down for 4-5 hours! Well, probably that’s the result of trade off between price and quality, I guess. For a cheaper price, you will have to cope up with support people who are not technically equipped!

What saved me the day?

Because of my recent upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1 - which I was not sure will go through - I had taken the complete back up of pre-upgrade and post-upgrade status of my directories. I actually did a folder copy of the WordPress directory on the server itself, which can be renamed at any point of time to take it live. This in fact helped me.

One of my regular habits has been the whole directory backup and the automated database back up.

How to hacker-protect your WordPress blog?

These are a few things that come to my mind:

• Always keep your WordPress version upgraded, if they have security fixes, that is
• Enable automated backup using the WordPress Database Backup Plugin
• Keep changing your server/FTP passwords, even though you might want to keep all your passwords unchanged and same for the purpose of easily remembering them
• Beware of malicious plugins, themes and widgets - do we ever suspect a plugin or widget developer?
• I have heard about login lockdown plugins and plugins that do not hand over some of those WordPress information (like version, plugins installed etc) to the hackers, but I do not understand their values. Hackers are smarter people!

Have you ever been hacked?

Have your blogs ever been hacked? If so, what measures you took since then to protect your blog better? Do you have some plugin ideas in this direction?

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: Blogs are more vulnerable to hacking than other websites!

Who can build a WordPress theme?

Anybody who has some basic programming experience (HTML/PHP/CSS) and aesthetic sense can build a basic theme. However, one needs to be a good web designer in order to build themes that has professional looks and features.

Ten steps to build your WordPress theme

The following are the logical steps involved:

#1 Write down your requirements

The very first step to build any piece of software is to compile the requirements. In this step you have to really go down to the finer details of what all information you want to show on your blog pages (mainly the homepage, individual posts-pages, archives and search results). Typically you can arrive at a list of things that you want to show on your blog by asking a few questions yourself or by getting inspired by what you have seen on other blogs.

#2 Visualize them on a piece of paper

Once you have the raw list of requirements, you might want to draw your blog layout on a piece of paper (I actually did it) or by using a free tool like MS Paint. Usually it is good enough to draw the floor plan of the homepage alone and this is the base for what you will code. Other pages are typically simple and more standardized and can be derived out of the homepage basic elements. My floor plan looked something like the picture shown below:

#3 Pick a base theme

Once you have the homepage floor plan, you need to pick a cleaner-lighter free theme that is structurally the best match for your requirements. I would like to stress on the structural match because better the fitment, lesser you will code. You could use something as generic as the WP Framework theme but for building my theme I used one of the themes (connections & lean magazine) from the WP theme designer. Basically I wanted to pick the lightest possible code base to start with. Please note that while picking a base theme, you should not get distracted by the visual lightness of the theme but concentrate on the structural aspects. As a matter of fact, I used a magazine theme as the base to build this theme. The following would be some of the criteria to pick a base theme.

• Minimal number of php files each of which is not heavy
• Has only one stylesheet file and very less javascript
• Sidebar, header, footer etc structurally match - close what you have in mind. Please note that adding an additional sidebar is not that difficult
• Basic styling and color scheme matches with your preferences
• Easy to discard unwanted stuff, most widgetized themes are good that way
• XHTML/CSS2 compliant code base. If the theme code is already compliant, further job is easier

#4 Clean up and enhance the structure as per #2

The next step is to directly get rid of the unwanted stuff in your theme. At first, you have to remove unwanted widgets and then get rid of anything like animations, badges, thumbs, backlinks to the designer etc. Most of the theme demos would have used a lot of colorful and heavy media for marketing purposes.

Once you have cleaned up the theme, you can add the desired structure to it by actually coding them or changing existing code. In most cases, you will end up making minimal changes to the index.php, header.php, sidebar.php and footer.php to achieve the desired structure. You will also work with the style sheet at this point.

You may need to worry about including the header metatags, feed - ping server tags etc at this point.

#5 Modularize or widgetize

After the structural changes are done to reflect the basic looks, you may need to enhance the modularity of the theme. For example, to add an AdSense block within your homepage, instead of inserting it directly into the home.php file, you might want to add it to another php file and include it within home. This kind of modular approach will help to maintain clean code base for future enhancements.

For step #4 and #5, you may use code samples from the web, WordPress support forums or even code from many of those free themes.

#6 Internal linking, accessibility and SEO Optimization

After building the basic structure and widgetizing, you need to worry about how the internal linking and accessibility can be improved. For example, you might want to show page navigation links in a certain way at a certain place or links to previous/next posts from individual posts etc. The accessibility aspects can be further enhanced by several plugins and widgets - e.g. related posts, recent posts. Also the placement of tag clouds and categories need to be taken care of at this point.

You should also decide whether you want to show categories and tags on posts and if so where should they appear etc. Basically internal linking is good for SEO as well as readability.

Further SEO optimization on header meta tags, post - sidebar headings can be done at this point of time.

#7 Fill widget contents

Now that most of the structural, linking and SEO changes are done, you may focus on filling the widgets and completing the basic visualization. These days, most of sidebar and footer contents are rendered as widgets and hence you need to make it a habit to store all your widget contents in one text file as a back up. This will help you to migrate to new themes or play around with the layout in the future.

Once the widgets are completely laid out, what you have is your floor plan implemented.

#8 Style it and brand

Now it’s time to put on make up to the structure. If your base theme had the color and style combination of your taste, you have less work here. Otherwise, you have some work here and this is the most tedious part of theme development, accoding to me. However, you have a wonderful Firefox addon - Firebug - to your rescue, that can be used to inspect the stylesheets of other blog themes and make desired changes to your own stylesheet.

I used some more free tools (listed below) to edit images and enhance some of them that came with the base theme. You can use free online tools, for branding purposes (logos, fav icons) and designing buttons and background images.

#9 Test it for compatibility and compliance

Once the branding and styling is completed, you can use the W3C XHTML validator and CSS validator online applications to check your code compliance. Also, you need to do some amount of cross-browser compatibility testing at this point.

Also, it will be a good time to enable your plugins one by one and test the integrated theme as a whole.

#10 Get feedback and evolve

Once you are ready, you may upload and test it further. You may want to take feedback from your readers and free review forums (e.g. Digital Point forums - Website review section). Usually, incorporating the feedback will be a continuous process.

I hope that I have explained the logical steps involved in theme development in a way that you understand. The basic theme development and customization cannot be explained in one post nor is it complete without code samples and design tips. However, I am concluding my post with some tips for those who are want to develop (customize is a better term) their own themes.

Tips for customizing your theme

• Never include unwanted or unused code in your theme files or style sheets. Also check for commented out code blocks that you may want to delete on release
• Keep checking for browser compatibility after each major feature enhancement
• Always keep ‘tagged’ daily backup of your development activities. I said ‘tagged’ (e.g. ‘header and footer completed’) because you might want to keep reverting to your previous day status due to some mess up
• As much as possible, use WordPress core functions to enhance a theme (rather than using plugins for everything)
• Avoid using tables, use divs and spans instead
• Test well on those browsers that your readers are using the most and target at least 90% of your user base. Typically, if you test on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera, you should be fine. You might want to run a special test on IE 6.0 and immediate lower versions as well
• Be stingy on images, comments within the HTML code and javascript variable/function name length. You will make your theme superfast if you take care of this part
• As much as possible, edit your stylesheets in a normal text editor to avoid code redundancy

Summary of tools

I used the following free tools to develop my theme.

• GIMP - Free image editing software
• Cooltext online tool to create buttons and logo
• Notepad to edit css, php files
• W3C validator for XHTML and CSS validator
• Firebug add-on to inspect and modify stylesheets
• Browsershots - online service to check older browser compatibility
• YSlow addon for Firebug to test the page download speed
• SubmitExpress metatag analyzer to check the meta tags

Good luck with your theme development and customization. If you need any free consulting help (as time permits), please feel free to contact me via the contact form.

Buy a 125x125 Ad slot on DollarShower.com for just $10 per month!

Link to this Post: Build your own (well, almost) WordPress theme!