Three Steps To Perfecting Your Theme - Part Two

With all the different themes being designed everyday, it’s getting harder for bloggers to continuously keep learning about all the different types of styles used. Even though you will come across many different themes during your time as a blogger, always remember that each of them must have some basic essentials.

In the last part of this series, you read that favicons, a custom Feedburner URL, and a valid theme are all essential steps to perfecting your theme. If you haven’t completed those steps, stop what you’re doing and go do them right now

Back already? Alright then, time for some fresh new tips!

Titles

When I wrote “Search Engine Friendly Titles In Less Than 60 Seconds“, SEO was the only thing on my mind, now I’m focusing more on improving your website’s usability. Whenever you use the titles described in the previous post, not only will you be improving your website’s rankings, but you will also make the titles look much better.

One of the most annoying things ever is having to rename a bookmark just to know what the hell I bookmarked. For example, when I bookmark something like “Wordpress Mania - themes, tips, tricks, guides, and so much more - How to create your own Wordpress theme” I will usually change the name to “How to create your own Wordpress themes”. There is no point in having your site’s title and keywords/description before or after every single post title on your post pages. If you look at all the popular blogs, you will see that they only use post titles on their post pages, learn from the best!

Sitemap

If you have ever signed up to Google Webmaster Tools, then you should know that a sitemap can help index your site much faster and more efficiently. Using the Google XML Sitemap generator (a Wordpress plugin), all you have to do is follow a couple of instructions provided in the readme file and you’ll have your XML sitemap ready in no time!

Contact Form

Unless you have a specific reason as to why you don’t want people to contact you, then a contact form is essential for your site. You might think that mentioning your email address on your contact page would be enough, but I’m sure that you have the slightest clue of how lazy people are nowadays…

If you need a contact form, you can use cformsII (Wordpress plugin), it has really impressed me ever since I began using it. All you do is upload the plugin, choose a style for your form (it has a lot of great ones), insert a small piece of code on your contact page where you want the form to appear, and you’re all set!

I hope these tips have been helping you out so far, and remember, if you need any help don’t be afraid to ask me in a comment below. I promise that I will try my best to help you out

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