WordPress has many features that make it ideal for building traffic and your business.
One of the biggest overlooked problems with Word Press really isn’t a fault of WordPress: bad themes.
Because it is so easy to modify a theme, to customize the look, many people do- and then post their theme for others to download. Doing this can be an act of kindness- or have some ulterior motives- such as including a link back to the theme builders site- or even semi evil- by including code that delivers ad words proceeds to the theme builder.
In general, people who post themes have good intentions and there are a lot of very good themes out there. But- what are the deciding factors that make a theme good or bad? (more…)
On her “How to blog” site Emily Robbins goes to great length to compare WordPress to TypePad and comes down pretty strongly on the side of WordPress. What she fails to mention is the fundamental difference between the two.
While both store your data in a MySQL database, how they display the data is different. This is a very important difference.
Blogger, Moveable Type and Radio UserLand all generate static pages once you hit publish. The database takes your entry- and builds a static page that sits on your site just like a traditional HTML page. Every comment rebuilds the static page. If you change your theme, the server then has to regenerate the entire blog/site.
WordPress, TextPattern and LiveJournal all generate each page on the fly. You enter the data and when someone comes to your site, the page is pulled from the database using whichever theme you have selected.
While I could go into the pro’s and con’s of each system, in the on-demand, fast paced world of the Internet, I prefer the build on the fly scenario. It’s fast, it’s elegant, and it’s always fresh- it also allows for much more customization and change options since each change doesn’t require a complete regeneration of your site.
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.