Three Steps To Perfecting Your Theme – Part Three
This is the third and final part of the “Three Steps To Perfecting Your Theme” series. So far we have covered the following topics and steps that you can follow to perfect your theme:
Part One
1. Use a favicon
2. Custom Feedburner URL
3. Validating your theme
Part Two
1. User friendly titles
2. XML sitemap
3. Contact form on the contact page
Remove The Author Link
Unless you have multiple authors on your blog, then there is absolutely no point whatsoever in having the author’s name listed after each post. So hurry up and go remove it, if you don’t know how, leave a comment below, I’d be pleased to do it for you 
Bookmarking Icons Or Links
Social bookmarking websites can be a great place to get a huge amount of traffic within really short times. Some people argue that traffic from StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. is useless since less than 1% of the traffic converts into regular readers, however, that is not our topic for right now 
If you would like to get your content submitted to social bookmarking sites, you must make it as easy as possible for your readers to do that. There are a variety of plugins that show small bookmarking icons below each post that enable your readers to submit your content to a number of sites. I would using recommend Sociable since it is the most widely known and used plugin used by bloggers.
In case icons don’t fit in with your theme, you might want to add regular text links that will achieve the same exact job. In that case, I would recommend “Social Bookmark Creator” which will offer you a lot of options and is very simple to use.
Archives and Categories
You have two options here: a) create an archives page that lists all your posts by date and category b) list you categories and archives in your sidebar. I would recommend listing them within your sidebar since it will save your users a few extra clicks, and remember, every click counts (Fine, I just made that up)
12 Responses to “Three Steps To Perfecting Your Theme – Part Three”
Social bookmark is important to get huge traffic
@super blogger, I agree with you! The previous part of this series got a a nice amount of traffic but sadly it has a huge bounce rate
why you suggest to remove Remove The Author Link?!
@ narendra.s.v
Since I think he believed that i will just point to a duplicate content
I think I qualified for all!
You’re right about sociable, it’s how you make it easy for your readers… 
nice series… makes things clear for those that are starting now..
Great Tips, Rajaie. I wanted to ask whether you coded this theme yourself or not. It is the only blog till now that I know has passed validation for XHTML 1.0 Transitional. How did you do that? I’ve tried to do so for my blog, but I always get an error or two.
nice post, i agree with you on removing the author link only if there are one author for the blog
@narendra.s.v, since their is pretty much no point in having it
@Dexter, although that is another reason, it can easily be fixed using a robots.txt file
@Melvin, that means you’re on the right track, nice job!
@stratosg, glad you liked it
@Ganesh, yes, I fully designed and coded this theme
It just needs a bit of time and patience to get it validated. I might be posting something on how to do it step-by-step.
@Jim, thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed it
This is quite a good series you have going there, but I’d be against removing the author link unless you don’t care about branding your name. I personally want my blog to show up near first when you Google my name and I want people to know my name. At the moment, I’m using my blog mainly as a portfolio builder so adding my name wherever in unobtrusive places is good for that.
@Max Miroff, I understand your point of view, but I believe that your name on the “About” page is enough. Anyway, it’s actually quite controversial since you see many popular blogs that have their name listed under each post, and others that don’t.