When looking for WordPress themes- it’s not enough to just look at the “look” or pretty pictures. There is a lot more to a theme than the css. While the basic 2 themes in WordPress work- and are guaranteed to do the job in any browser- almost everyone want’s to be different, to have their own little image in the world of the web- and because it’s pretty easy to tinker with the theme- people do- some that know what they are doing- and others that have no clue. Some tinkers shouldn’t put their themes out for public consumption.
As WordPress gets more features there are more opportunities to miss something in creating a theme. One of the “Favorite” themes these days is “Connections”- which doesn’t include categories for links. This can be a real bummer for those who have a lot of links in different categories. Many themes don’t include the next and previous post once you click the permalink headline and end up at the posts hard link location- where you can comment- this is a nice navigation aid that should be included to avoid back navigation but isn’t in many themes.
The Theme browser I like best right now is the one at www.themes.wordpress.net in Filmstrip mode. It gives you a chance to see how the theme handles a lot of formatting issues including the “More” tag and the above mentioned “categories” in links. It also shows ordered and unordered lists, blockquotes within blockquotes and subcategories.
The only thing missing is the ability to search by theme name, so you can review a theme quickly. Granted if you know the name you can search elsewhere to take a look, but it would be handy to have that ability built in.
One day someone will build a theme browser that also allows for reviews, comments, feature list searches- complete with plug-in links for the themes that you need- but for now, this is the bomb.
Social Network Mapping with Kartoo at D’Arcy Norman Dot Net
I read a lot of Blogs to learn about the Internet and marketing. A system administrator at the University of Calgary wrote about Kartoo– a social networking search application. It generates a very cool bunch of maps on relationships on the web- an interesting look at search. Of course I did an ego search just like he did- and saw how my sphere of influence is represented on the web. While Google is the by far the leader in Search- there are other ways to look at the web – this is why sites built with web standard code are so important- and why WordPress is such a good tool for managing at least part of your site.
The Internet Marketing Institute
Well- they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery- so I love that Wright State Professor, Dr. Jerry R. Perrich is teaching a 3.5 hr seminar that will “Cover how the internet and search engines work, successful online business models, how to generate site traffic and measure web performance”- which is just some of what we cover in a Blogosopher seminar.
Of course if you go to his site- there is no RSS, no community building features of the live web, and- sadly- a broken link to his “training course.”
(I’ve included screen shot so once he fixes the link there is still proof- click for enlarged view in a new window – remember- it will say “page not found”- because that’s what his page says- not because you are getting to the wrong place)
If you want a “class about using the web for your work” as the Dayton Daily News headline described this course- you should consider our Blogosopher seminar. Not only do we teach the latest technology, we use it daily- not just for this site, but for our client’s sites. We will get you to the top of the search engines like we helped Charles Halton and continue to provide you valuable tips and tricks via this site on how to get the most out of your site.
You can sign up right on our site and pay online- unlike Dr. Perrich’s course “How To Drive Traffic To Your Website…
and What To Do When It Gets There”
The workshop that shows how to make the Internet work for you.” If you live in or around Dayton, you also have 2 opportunities to take our course before his: Jan 19th and Feb 4th. I plan on taking his course on the 9th and incorporating anything I might want to add to blogosopher. One other note- with our seminar- you get one free return refresher course- because there is so much information presented.
As one last piece of proof of knowing how to work the search engines, here is our google tip in action: if you want to know how many pages of your site google has indexed and how they appear go to google and type in: site:yourdomainname.com and you will see the number of results.
For site:blogosopher.com Results 1 – 30 of about 42 from blogosopher.com for . (0.15 seconds)
for site:websmartbusiness.com Results 1 – 6 of about 7 from websmartbusiness.com for . (0.21 seconds)
That’s 36 more reasons to take a Blogosopher seminar.
Hopefully, I’ll see you in a Blogosopher seminar soon. Thanks.
Post note: to add insult to injury- I tried to register on their form- it wouldn’t work. So I sent them an e-mail- and it bounced:
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [email protected] SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:: host mx.websmartbusiness.com [65.254.254.50]: 550 mail08: Host XX.XXX.XX.XX, error: R5.1