WordPress Woes? Check Your Theme!

I got my first shot with WordPress (WP) back in December 2005 when I launched the forerunner to this blog, The Article Writer. At that time, WP was a lot harder to use than it is now as a lot of the features we take for granted such as video embedding, custom characters, and various plugins didn’t exist or were woefully inadequate to handle the job.

A Truly Robust Content Management System

WP has gotten through the worst of its growing pains, delivering what I find to be a truly robust content management system platform (CMS). Indeed, that is the reason why I have largely abandoned using HTML pages in favor of WP, because WP saves me time and money. Today, I manage ten sites and blogs built on WP, a few of which are more than three years old.

As always, I like to take a good hard look at the various WP themes out there. Most definitely you can purchase some really good ones, but I still prefer to go to the WP Themes Directory to see what has been uploaded. Yes, I’m cheap — why pay for something if you can get it for free?

Professional Themes Are Looking Good, Though Pricey

Seriously, I have considered purchasing a set of professional themes (licensing) to tweak to look the way I like, but I’m satisfied that the themes I’m currently using are doing the job. In the past I would have swapped themes out more frequently, but if I like the look and layout of a theme, I’ll keep it for the long haul.

When it comes to WP themes you can be certain that some of them are problematic. I guess it boils down to this — is the person who made the theme you’re now using a competent blog theme developer or did they port a theme, tweak it to look like their own and release it to the public?

Who Made The Theme And Are They A Pro?

That isn’t always knowable because not every theme’s owner is readily available. Sure, if there is a link to their own site, I recommend you paying them a visit to see what is up. Usually, if they know what they are doing, they’ll have an article on their site about the theme, with installation tips, FAQs, screen shots and a downloadable link. In addition, you’ll find active conversation in the comments section with the theme’s creator sharing tips and advice.

Recently, one of this blog’s readers asked me a question about a WP plugin which led to me sharing a few comments about his blog’s theme. It turns out that his particular theme was doing a few quirky things including pasting lines of text over a photograph when the page was loaded. After things settled down, the text disappeared, but it was an oddity so I told him so.

It turns out that the theme owner is overseas and isn’t open to communication. Yes, I know that themes are free, but having some sort of way to interact with people is important. After all, if you are a theme developer you’re getting a lot of publicity through the link embedded in the footer — at least have some clear instructions on your site to help people out.

Delete It And Move On

When I download a “new” theme, I immediately check it out by activating it. What looks good on the theme directory, doesn’t always look good on my screen. If I hate how it looks, it doesn’t matter how well it has been constructed.

Even if the theme looks good, it still needs to be something I can work with. I have a “mental list” of requirements for every theme including the following must have items: widgets, easy to swap out header photo, clear php coding, sidebars that are easy to adjust if needed, a workable footer and overall ease of use. If I have to tweak the theme excessively to conform to my needs, I quickly delete the theme from my WP-Contents file and move on. I simply do not have the time (or talent) to rework someone else’s debacle.

Examine What Browsers Your Visitors Use

Next, check your theme via different web browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc. Yes, you can hate Internet Explorer all you want, but chances are more than half of the people who visit your site are still using this unfortunate browser.

You can confirm those numbers via Google Analytics by going to your site’s dashboard, clicking on Visitors Overview ==> Browser Capabilities and then looking under Technical Profile to see the browser breakdown. Right now, Firefox is trumping Internet Explorer by about 47 to 45 percent on this site — woohoo — people are learning!

Lastly, don’t worry about a theme that doesn’t look too great on an 800×600 resolution screen. 1024×768 is the current acceptable default with very few computer screens rendering anything smaller than that.

See Also — WordPress 2.7 & All That Jazz!

WordPress 2.6 Offers Significant Changes

Don’t you hate it when people gush over WordPress? Well, I’m okay with that as it is a very strong and capable blogging platform. I can put up with the accolades as WP is deserving of such praise.

WordPress users jump for joy upon learning about all of the action packed features in recently released v. 2.6.

One thing that users of this free weblog software tool know is that WordPress is updated on a regular basis, usually several times each year. If you manage one blog, that isn’t a problem, but if you manage a bunch of blogs, you can spend plenty of time backing up files, updating to the latest version and making sure that all of your plug-ins are working correctly. I currently manage nine WP blogs, so my work is cut out for me every time a revision is rolled out!

WordPress 2.6 was released yesterday and I’m in the process of making my updates. I’ve completed four blogs today (including this one) and will get to the remaining five over the next two days.

This latest version has some very useful features added, options which can help make blogging easier and your work more professional. As always, before doing any WP update, backup your files first.

What’s Notable:

Theme Previewer — Now an integrated part of WordPress, the new theme previewer allows you to look at your blog before you switch themes. This is tremendously useful for someone like me who has downloaded a theme, switched over to the new one, only to not like how it looked when in use. Undoing what I did doesn’t take long, but those are extra steps I certainly can do without.

Google Gears — Pre-caching pages and speeding up your site is now possible thanks to Google Gears a nifty program that make your WP blog snap into place faster. I have one blog with about one thousand articles on it and an older theme that has been dragging of late. With Google Gears pages load faster — just what your readers want and deserve!

Press This! — I’ll have to take a look at this function closely as it is something that could be used for good or for evil. Specifically, if you are visiting a website and you want to copy the text, a photograph, or something else found on that site, Press This! will let you do that with ease. I just hope that it doesn’t make lifting material off of my sites too much of a temptation for dishonest people.

Compare Post Versions — Have you ever wished you could compare various versions of a post that you wrote? Now you can, with WP’s wiki-style post versioning tool. This is particularly helpful if you collaborate on posts and need to compare revisions. If you decide to go with an earlier copy, you can click on the appropriate link and select that one. It might also be useful if you are running a contest and want to turn that post from an announcement of the contest to announcing the winner of that contest.

Avatar Choices — You get to select different avatar options with WP 2.6 by choosing Gravatars, MonsterID, Identicons, Wavatars, etc.

Improved Plug-In Management — Up until now, I wasn’t too happy with WP’s plug-in management panel. Now, plugins can be activated in one batch, deactivated at the same time, or even deleted en masse. I also like the little number flag that pops up by the Plugins tab alerting me to when an updated copy is ready to download.

Image Captions — I’ve been waiting for this tool to be integrated into WP for some time. I just could never find a plugin that I liked, so being able to put a brief note below a photograph is very helpful. I will say that this feature doesn’t always work well with every theme; one site that I manage forces the text to the left, but I’m sure that this is something that can be remedied with some minor coding work.

Lots of other smaller changes are included with WP 2.6 including full SSL support in the core, reordering of galleries through a drag and drop feature, security updates, and the fixing of almost 200 bugs.

Nope, WordPress isn’t perfect, but as a content management system it is packed with many good functions and can be extended much further with various plugins. Happy updating!

Photo Credit: Sanja Gjenero