According to Google Trends, the search term “wordpress themes” has been increasing in popularity over the past three years. For such a long period of time, you will surely have seen, and will be seeing, many different types and styles of themes.

Even though not all the themes that exist are the same, there are some things all of them should have. I’m not talking about using every single widget and plugin you can find on the internet, but about adding the necessary finishing touches to your theme. Not everyone might agree upon what is necessary and what is not, but I will be mentioning the most popular things that the majority agree on.

Each part of this series will include three steps you can follow to perfect your theme. The series will be three parts to keep it simple and not overwhelm you by too many steps. I won’t be going into too much detail on how to complete the steps, but if you need any help, please do not hesitate to ask.

Favicon

A favicon is the little icon you see in the address bar of your browser whenever you visit a site. It is usually a 16×16 pixel .ico file, but sometimes, different file types and sizes can be used.

Since there are tons of sites online that you can use to create a favicon, all you have to worry about is finding the image you would like to use. After you use a site to make the favicon, all you do is upload the file to the root of your website and it will automatically appear in the browser’s address bar.

It is preferable to use your sites logo for your readers so they can automatically identify your site without the need of looking at the URL.

In case you don’t feeling lazy and don’t want to look for a site to generate the icon, just use this one.

Feedburner

Redirecting your default RSS feed to a custom Feedburner URL will offer a you a lot of extra features. Subscriber count, Google Adsnese integration, and email subscriptions are just some of the cool things you can do with Feedburner.

You will need to change two links in your theme to your custom Feedburner URL. One in the head section, and the other in the sidebar (if you have an RSS icon).

In the head section (found in header.php file), find a line of code similar to the following: <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://blogname.com/feed”>. Change the link after the “href” property to your custom Feedburner URL.

If you have an RSS icon in the sidebar, then you will find something like this in the sidebar.php file: <a href=”http://”><img src=”http://blogname/images/rss.png” /></a>. Now just do the same thing mentioned above (changing the link).

Valid Theme

Future compatability is the one of the main advantage of having a valid them, as for the others, I can’t think of any right now When you validate your theme using the W3C validator, it will show you any bugs or errors in your Wordpress theme. I know some of them are not that big of a deal (like adding a / to the end of your <img> tags) but sometimes the tool can help you discover some really important bugs that you could have missed.

All you need to do to see if your theme is valid or not is visit the official W3C validator homepage, type in your site’s URL, and click validate! If you get hundreds of errors, don’t worry! 99% Of them will probably be because of a tag you forgot to close. Just go over the report slowly and fix each problem at a time.

If you’re finding it too hard to validate your theme, you can use Firebug, the greatest Firefox extension ever.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!