The Blog Design
Sun, 11 March, 2007 – 12:22 am
So I figured I'd write a little about what I've been up to on this domain, the new design and what I've added into it.
The original template is available free from WordPress Themes. After look through the newest ones I settled on the theme and then set to work. For a start, the coding was (and still is a bit) diabolical!
Headers
The post title had a H2, which is fine, the date of the post was a H3, the post was contained within a H4 and the bottom footer with the comments, category and social bookmarks was contained within a H5. I know headers are important for SEO, but this was taking it too far! So first things first, strip the headers out besides the post title, left as a H2.
Now by default, headers displayed by the built in functions for listing the categories and links, use a H2. For SEO purposes this isn't good in my book. The post titles are H2 material, the words 'Categories', 'Blogs' etc are not. Luckily it's easy enough to change these by either telling the function not to print the section title eg.
wp_list_categories('title_li=');
or by setting the before and after code of the header eg.
wp_list_bookmarks('title_before=<h3>&title_after=</h3>');
The Look
Most of the design is still the same as the original. I altered some of the colours used in the text in the menu to make them a little more readable and centred the whole site as it's fixed width and looked lost on my 1600*1200 screen res. Thanks to Dave as well for creating the gradient for the background and also adding the PHP code to the header image.
Additions
There are a couple of additions to the original look in the menu bar. First up is Recent Comments, a handy little plugin which allows you to display the last X comments. Then I've added Recent Posts, mainly so that people hitting the site via a single post page can see what else has been posted. This has been done using the following code:
<?php $myposts = get_posts('numberposts=5');
foreach ($myposts AS $post):
?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title() ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
And finally there's the MyBlogLog recent visitors widget.
Internal Pages
On the single post pages I've used the Gravatar plugin to give my commentors a face (if they have a Gravatar that is). On the category pages I've also altered the the way the posts are displayed. Due to the way WordPress works, theoretically you could have a post displayed on up to 4 pages at one time, and usually at least 3. These pages are of course, the front page (when the post is recent), the category page, the date archive page and the single post page. Of course you could use excerpts on all pages besides the single post page however I don't really like excerpts. So instead, I've set each category page to simply list all posts with their date and comment count. Getting all posts onto one page is easy with the Custom Query String Plugin.
Finally, I've set up a Google Sitemaps XML Sitemap using the Sitemaps Plugin. Whether my site needs it or not is another matter but at least it's there for Google to look over 
And that's about it. I took the same design and put it on the front page, which is custom built, and my AIS Blog too. This way the whole domain appears the same and keeps a consistency throughout. I tell my clients enough times that their site should keep a consistent look to let their visitors realise they are still on the same site/domain and so I figured so should I!
So that's what's been done. For now 
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