Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

Have you considered how you are representing your firm through this medium? May you be hurting your connections?

Let me ask you a question: if we are talking at each other, can you call it social? I noticed that more often than not social media is not really social. It is not a problem with the medium, but with the users. Most people who want to connect with you are more interested in you hearing their message than listening to you. If you are a small business, you will want to monitor what might be said about your business, but you may want to consider how you build your business through sites like Twitter, Facebook, or any other social site.
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The look of your website could effect user involvement, but so can the sound of your website. Consider when the website will be used to make decisions about design.

When I began my first website, I did not consider ease of use, nor did I think much about when people might be looking at my site. I wanted to get information up on the site; I wanted the information to be impressive; and I wanted the information to lead to a conversion. I kept working on improvements which I thought would help to this end. When I began a second site, I became more concerned with how to make the site a success through posting frequency and other factors. With both of these sites, I did not pay much attention to the user, or when they would be viewing the site, and how that could effect their interaction with the site.
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I witnessed a spectacular bit of customer service this past weekend, which made me appreciate the concept of following up as a customer service tool.

I wanted to share this story, because it impressed me. Firstly, I am a data junkie. I have learned to love reports, but I know that I can be flooded with information which is useless. Sometimes finding that nugget of information and its importance can be hard. For example, I have an ad running on one website, and the click through rate is not all that great, but I noticed that searches for my name and phrasing in the ad has increased since the ad has been running. There may or may not be a correlation; more data is needed. And there is my problem ladies and gentlemen: more data. This causes me to search out ways of obtaining more data.
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With WordPress, you can choose when your post goes live. With planning, you can make the most of bringing users into your site.

Most of my posts publish when I am out of the office. This fact was noticed by a friend who wondered how I accomplished such a feat, but I think the reason why I scheduled a post to publish at a certain time is more interesting. This is one of those “do you know your audience” posts. You see I could post my article after writing it, but I may not obtain all of the readers that I could by that means.
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Consultants who blog may wish to go further from their topic to help brand themselves

A golden rule in blogging is try to have a focus for your content; do not stray to far from it. Every blogger has the odd post that does not fit the true purpose of the site though, but what if that content becomes half of the site? I was analyzing some popular blogs in specific industries, and found that they go against the focus rule; however, they do engage their audience, which is the ultimate goal of the site, but does this lead to conversions?
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Site optimization can be wonderful and frustrating, but it could lead to a better user experience.

I was fairly satisfied with the load times on my main business site, so I never considered some optimization steps beyond what I had already accomplished. I decided to download Google’s Page Speed, and take another look at Yahoo’s Yslow to see what I could do for my site. This led me on an adventure that I thought would be good to share.

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What if you need a slightly different header or sidebar in your posts from your pages?

I have been going through various reports to see how I could improve one of my sites. My goal is to improve user experience, and related to that goal is to improve navigation in the hopes that users will explore more pages. I like the idea of using css to change different parts of a website, but you may want to keep the basic look of your pages the same for branding purposes, and you may want only one element to be different. Creating a unique php file for your header, sidebar, footer, or post may be what you need.
    Here is a scenario: you have Google AdSense on your site, but you do not want every visitor to see it. A visitor who comes to your site through search is more likely to click on the ad, so you only want them to see it. Also, visitors hardly ever click on ads on your pages, but they do click on them when they are reading a post, so let’s elimanate them from the pages. You did find that ads in the header work best, so you want to keep it in the header. You also want the pages and the posts to maintain the same feeling.
    Here is the problem: WordPress uses the same php file (header.php) to create the header for a page or a post.
    The solution:
Step1: create a new header.php file
You will need a copy of the exisiting header.php file. You can either transfer from your site to your computer, or you can copy it from the editor box under Appearance>Editor from your WordPress dashboard. You will need a text editor, like Notepad++.
    Leave the exisitng header.php file for the pages. We will use this one for the posts. If you already have your Google AdSense code in the place that you want, you will only have to save this file as header1.php. To limit who sees these ads, you could use a plugin, but there is a wonderful function that will help (why add a plugin, when all you need is a bit of javascript). The site Scratch99 will explain this from a search engine code (the site has a good deal of information for you), so follow the instructions there (he goes over different methods). If you do not have the code in place, you could experiment to see where it works best, then add the javascript from the previously mentioned site. Make sure to save your changes.
Step 2: upload your changes
Use your FTP client to upload the header1.php file into your theme’s folder.
Step 3: edit the existing header.php
If you have the AdSense code here, the ads will be seen by visitors on the pages, so you can remove it, then save your changes by updating the file.
Step 4: update your single post file (usually single.php)
This file contains the elements which are displayed when a visitor is looking at a post. You will find the command <?php get_header(); ?>; this pulls up the header.php. What you want is the header1.php file, so you will need the following command   <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/header1.php’); ?> to replace the old command. This brings up your new header file. Save your work.

That is it. Now a visitor looking at an individual post will see the ad, but no one else. How else may you use this? You could have different headers,sidebars, or footers for the various categories, or maybe you want the sidebar to contain certain information when a visitor is on a page from when they are on a post, such as a blogroll. There is a function in your WordPress admin panel that lets you choose which php file will determine the look of a post or page, so you could create new page.php and single.php files for different aspects of your site. Hope this gives you ideas.

What do your post tags say about your site, and do they help the visitor find what they are seeking?

Using a related posts feature can help with internal link building; however, many WordPress users complain that no articles are being shown. When one person was griping about this fact, I went to her site to see what was happening. I noticed a few things about the posts, and I tried to help her, but she decided not to listen. When going to some other blogs, I found the same issues cropping up yet again. I decided to compare sites that were successful in guiding users to other posts, and sites which do not do so well. A main problem that I found involved how the articles were tagged.
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A theme for real estate professionals who want to blog.

When you work in real estate, and you are on the net for work, you find yourself encountering the same people in different places. Rich Danserau, over at Postive Real Estate Professionals, told me that I should check out the work of a lady named Rebecca Levinson. Since I trust Rich’s advice, I headed over to her ActiveRain blog. Needless to say, I was impressed. When we connected on Facebook, I did pay more attention to a program that she had developed to assist other real estate professionals become top bloggers called Blogging Tune Up. She works with only one real estate professional in a market with their blogging skills to help them succeed. She has many happy clients.
    I told Rebecca that I would love to create a WordPress theme for her to give away to her clients, so she gave me a few specifications, and the Real Skillz theme was born. The theme is in blue tones. The header comes first with the blog title and slogan centered to make the first impact for your brand. After the header you have a menu bar. The categories are left in the sidebar of this theme. If you choose your categories and sub-categories carefully, you can make a greater impact by having them displayed here. Rebecca had suggested having an about me section in the sidebar (a place to write about yourself to help build your brand). Add the “About Me” widget to your sidebar, and I would have this as your first sidebar item.
    The theme has two columns: one area for the posts; and one for the sidebar. This allows your blog posts to command more attention. Since real estate professionals rely on many visuals to help their clients, the theme was designed with the idea of making images pop. The blue background helps images of the home stand out. There is also a black border around the images to help emphasize them. Most photographer sites use black backgrounds to help make the images stand out, but Rebecca’s choice of blue is clever. You can still write content that will be a focus and have the images noticed. To help make content important, a “related posts” feature is built into the theme (no plugin needed). To have the sidebar content be noticed, a lighter blue was used for the backgrounds there. Currently, the search feature is the top element in the sidebar. The next element is quite nice to encourage site exploration: a tag cloud. The post headers emphasize the title, while the post footers have the post meta data in a light blue bar. This is where your tags will be displayed.
    Lastly, most of my themes, I leave the RSS button down in the footer, so you can place the RSS where you would like. In this theme, the RSS button is located below the post title, where the other meta data like the name of the author is located. As with all of my themes geared towards businesses, I have a reminder to include a Terms of Service and a Privacy pages. If you do not need them, you can remove them.
    If you need help having your blogging career start off on the right foot, then you should head over to Ms. Levinson’s site. She may be able to help you.  Download the Real Skillz theme.

With a new emphasis on your site’s page loading time, you may find that your WordPress theme does not meet the standard.

The time taken to load a page into a browser is page speed, and the page speed value can differ depending upon the browser and the service being used to connect to the web. As WordPress is being used by more businesses as a content management system (CMS), I thought that discovering a means to improve page speed in their themes without the knowledge of coding may be helpful.
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