Choosing A Web Theme And Features
When you use a web theme some are more optimized for search engine optimization (SEO) than others. You may not notice this but the search engines will. The main thing to pay attention to is how titles, descriptions and header tags are used across templates. This will help you to tailor how your results will show up. Use permanent links for categories as this improves your URLs for search engines by using more meaningful words. Put posts in one category to avoid duplicate content from the search engines perspective. Only display parts of every post when browsing categories to avoid duplicate content.
Features to look for in blog themes are title and purpose. Your about page should clarify and set the expectations of your blog. Categories will help your users browse and post in key themes as well as clarigying what your blog is about.
If your blog you should include a search feature even if you don’t have many posts. Users like to use the search tools. Be sure to place it in an easy to see, convenient area.
What are tag clouds? Well they provide a nice way for topical browsing of your blog. There are two types – external and internal. External include Technorati tags and helps to showcase your posts in social circles. Internal tags include WordPress 2.2 support will slice up your posts in fine-grained ways.
An effective way to enhance your user’s experience at your site is to include recent posts and comments. This will allow them to discover other posts as well. Viewers generally browse posts by category, tag cloud, related posts or searches. Other entry points include Recent Posts and Recent Comments as well as creating pages to organize your posts in different ways.
If a user enjoys your blog make it easy for them to subscribe by adding Subscribe by RSS. This is easy to add, just put it in an obvious place.
Many themes and templates do not have a default subscribe by email option. This is easy to forget but an important thing to remember.
Where are you allowing comments? Most users prefer that comments are beneath the post titles instead of at the end. Different themes do better jobs with managing comments than other. Decide whether you will show links above the post or at the end. You have the option to change the color and font.
There are so many themes available it is a difficult decision in choosing which one to go with. There are free ones, ones you pay for and others you can have custom designed. It is really dependent on how much money and time you have in choosing which way to go.
If you are just beginning to start a blog or website and don’t really have a clear idea as to what you really want you might want to begin with some free templates to get your feet wet. After you work with a theme for a while you will begin to look at web sites with a different eye. Soon you will know what you do and do not want your site to look like.
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