I recently had the urge to create a much simpler template for this site. I also wanted to somehow link together the spaces I occupy on the net. I created a homepage that links to those places; my blog, photoblog and deviantART page. Those pages also now link to each other. The homepage has the same theme as the new blog template; white on red tree, which was just a drawing I did and liked.
For redesigning this template I found the Copyblogger theme to be invaluable. Before I found Copyblogger I had almost completely restyled the Sandbox theme, which I think I was initially attracted to for the competition they’re having. When I found Copyblogger it was similar to what I had made and I wasn’t sure whether to switch my efforts. One look at the code and I was sold – it is a very simple, yet elegant piece of coding and design. It’s widget ready – I had practically no idea what widgets were available for WordPress until I started on the endeavour. Now my sidebar is made of handy-dandy widgets.
Chris Pearson, who designed Copyblogger also has some great articles on: future-proofing your CSS, which luckily for me is implemented in Copyblogger; Search Engine Optomisation (SEO), which includes having descriptive titles for each page of your blog – you know the thing that shows up at the very top of your browser? Google can read those!; formatting images for RSS, which should be handy because mine always look silly.
I also liked Ben Bleikamp’s posts on blog architecture and SEO.
I’ve changed my permalink structure for this blog so that the permanent links for posts make more sense. They’re by date and post name rather than post ID. The great thing about doing that is that now the links are prettier, but the old links still seem to work. I wasn’t sure whether they would so I checked my site statistics to see where the incoming links were from and it seemed that most of them were coming to the main blog page, not to individual posts. On that information I risked ruining any old links that were made, but they’re not ruined!
Now all I need to do (apart from trying to write about interesting things) is figure out why my navigation links at the bottom of the posts aren’t working. At the moment it’s rather difficult to get to last week’s posts because the link that should say “previous posts” isn’t showing up. If you have solutions let me know!
