SEO :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

Large blue WordPress logo One of the best things about the WordPress website and blogging platform is that there are so many different themes to choose from.

But for someone new to this way of building a website or establishing a blog that very abundance of choices can be mind-bogglingly confusing.

So I thought it might be helpful to share briefly some of what I have learnt in years of using various different themes.

By the way, these are just my non-expert opinions (but learned through often frustrating experience). As regular readers will know, I am not a techie. I have taught myself some basics about site coding along the way – mainly HTML, a little about PHP and CSS (but not enough to impress anyone who really knows that stuff).

A little background on WordPress

Because of its origins, WordPress is commonly thought of as a blogging platform, which it is, but it is much more.

WordPress is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) which happens to have evolved from a blogging platform.

An important distinction to make is in terms of site hosting. You can have your site hosted, at no charge, with WordPress.com or you can “self-host” with the same software, from WordPress.org , on your own web server. For most of us, “self-hosted” means we choose and pay for a hosting service, as I do with HostGator.

In a post last year I wrote about why I recommend that businesses choose the self-hosted option from WordPress.org, rather than using a WordPress.com (or Blogger – hosted by Google) site.

To get an overview of some of the possibilities in using WordPress.org, check out the official Showcase.

There are thousands of WordPress themes and plugins available: many themes are free, some are “premium”, with either a one-off payment or requiring an annual subscription. I have used many free themes and eventually realized the truth of the saying about the support you can expect for a free product – “you get what you paid for”. So now I use premium services. But there is something to be said for using some free themes to start off, so that you get an idea of how it all works.

What I look for in choosing a WordPress theme

The five things I look for are:

Architectural Design
Graphic Design
Usability for a non-technical person
Support
Currency

1. Architectural Design

I have learned the hard way that there are many themes that look nice enough but ultimately don’t deliver in business terms because they lack a well-articulated architectural design. There is of course an underlying architecture for the WordPress platform, which is the same for everyone. I’m referring here to the architectural design of the theme itself.

It’s been immensely frustrating to find, on more than one occasion, that a theme which looked like seemed to need a lot more coding and tweaking to be able to serve my purposes. Nowadays I am more interested in finding out, as best I can, how good the theme developers are at coding than how good they are at graphic design.

A claim to incorporate an effective structure for SEO is increasingly, and importantly, a feature offered by theme developers – something to look for (and preferably not just have to take the developers’ word for it but get some third party validation if possible).

I prefer to have excellent architecture and excellent graphic design, but in a pinch I would go for architecture over elegant graphics.

2. Graphic design

The counterpoise to the previous point is that I look for graphic design which will work for my business. I see many WordPress sites that are a riot of color and drama, which is enjoyable enough to look at and may work for the relevant audience but which I see as not working for the audience I want most to attract.

One of the best ways I know to get ideas about what will work for you is to check out the sites of your competitors, especially the ones who seem to be doing well and where the site looks as if it was designed some time no longer than a couple of years ago.

Elements of graphic design I look at particularly are:

layout
ease of navigation
style – I want it to look business-like in a corporate but non-stuffy sense
typeface – elegant, appropriate to my target audience, and easily readable

3. Usability for non-technical person

This is very important for me. I don’t really enjoy getting under the hood and fiddling with layout, style, fonts and such, but I like to be able to do it when I want to and not find the process too much of an ordeal.

Understandably, you are more likely to find the premium services delivering consistently on this than do the free ones: the financial imperative is wonderfully motivating, although not all WordPress designers are good at explaining how to use their themes.

Some themes require more coding skill than others do if you want to modify them beyond the “don’t have to know code” options provided.

4. Support

As I indicated above, getting good support for free themes is not something you can expect to happen. My experience has been that even with those developers who do endeavour to provide some support for their themes, the support is more likely to be useful to other techies – people who know their PHP and CSS especially – than for the rest of us mere mortals.

And I think some developers get a bit bored with the whole idea of support. They are developers, after all.

In practice, I find that I get better support with premium themes than I have ever had with free ones. Stands to reason, but probably worth stating.

But even with a premium theme, it is not to be assumed that you will get quality support. It’s worth asking around, if you know people who use WordPress themes, about which providers offer and deliver quality support, consistently, over the long haul. And read the providers’ own blogs to get a feel for how well or otherwise they communicate – especially if you want someone technically skilled who can communicate in non-techie language.

The lack of an active support forum is a warning signal.

Another warning signal is that if there seems to be a long-standing but unfulfilled promise for a new release of the theme. That can mean it’s proved too difficult to update the theme, or maybe that the developer is not that interested any more in improving the product.

Instructional videos on site are a good sign of a company committed to support – as long as the videos are up to date: there are few things in this department more frustrating than trying to follow the steps in a video, then discovering it is out of date.

A well-frequented, busy support forum is a good sign that there is real interaction going on between the theme company and its userbase. If members of the forum are voluntarily providing help for one another, that is another good sign. Of course, you may have to become a paid customer before you get access to the forum.

5. Currency

I always want to have a theme which is to a degree timeless in terms of having a practical user interface and up to date in its look and feel.

I want to know that the theme is well supported and I am impressed when it is being used by leaders in the blogging/social media world.

If you have not followed the story of how various themes have come on the market, one way to get a sense of which ones are current and delivering good results is to do some searching for blog posts offering reviews (bearing in mind that some of these “reviews” are fairly uninformative promos for a particular theme for which the blogger is an affiliate). My experience is that blog posts comparing two or three industry-leading themes tend to be more informative than single-theme reviews.

An example of an informative blog post comparing themes is this one which compares Thesis and Genesis and has, at this writing, 160 comments in which you will find some gems of information and insight. Another example of an article which is informative and non-boosterish is this comparison between Genesis and iThemes Builder.

Recommendations?

Everyone has their own needs, skill sets, preferences for how much or how little time they want to spend or not on learning some CSS, or generally on tweaking their site.

That said, there are three main providers which I can confidently say meet the 5 criteria listed above. (These are affiliate links but I am recommending them because I know they work and meet my criteria).

Thesis from DIY Themes (I have used this on a number of sites)
Builder from iThemes (the theme currently used on this site)
Genesis Framework with Enterprise Child Theme (which, after a lot of checking, I have purchased but not yet installed)

Do you have any other criteria for choosing a WordPress theme/provider?

Yesterday, in the course of a presentation to a local group on using the business professional networking platform LinkedIn to help grow a business or career, I showed some figures for how my LinkedIn search ranking for some key terms had improved rather dramatically over the previous five days and a little of how I had achieved that.

It’s been suggested to me I should share that a bit more widely. So here goes, not in the interests so much of showing my current rankings in LinkedIn on specific search terms, but more to illustrate how some quiet work on our profiles can improve our “findability” on LinkedIn.

Basically what I had done was to apply some of the lessons in an online course from Lewis Howes, author of two books on LinkedIn.

Lewis’ course, LinkedIn Strategies, is delivered via four modules. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have myself co-authored a book on LinkedIn and am founding moderator/manager of the LinkedIn Bloggers group: so while I knew perfectly well that I did not know everything about LinkedIn, to be honest I wondered whether I was going to learn much that was new or at least newly enough explained to hold my attention.

I put that to the test on Saturday last and over subsequent days. Having worked through the first module, I set to work applying what I had learned. I am happy to say I was, and am, impressed.

All I did then and in the few days following was to work on improving my LinkedIn profile page, first in terms of its search optimization, i.e. how well or easily people could be expected to find me when searching for people in my line of business and secondly, once they had found me, how effective or otherwise my profile might be in providing key information and encouraging business engagement with me.

I intend to make a video showing in more detail what I did and how.

In the meantime, the summary of the “before and after” search results is as follows:

I used five key search terms: Social Media Strategist, Social Media Strategy, Business Coach, Business Coaching, and PitchEngine. As I applied Lewis’ recommendations for layout and wording, I kept checking in. Movements in the order of my name in the search as a result of even adding a key phrase once or twice in a new place were quite instantaneous. I was amazed. I charted the changes over those five days.

So here are the numbers.

LinkedIn search results for Des Walsh March 18-23, 2011

LinkedIn search results on some key terms for Des Walsh March 18-23, 2011

Note that in the “before” searches and a couple of “after” searches I did not include the terms Business Coaching and PitchEngine.

The one I was most challenged by at first glance was being at the bottom of Page 5 for “Social Media Strategist”- 50th! With some attentive tweaking to profile details, that jumped to 17 on the same day. With a bit more work I have been able to move it up to 11. On that basis, one more jump and it will be on Page 1.

On those results, one more position jump would also take “Social Media Strategy”, which is similarly at position 11 on the chart here, to the front page. In fact, for that term my profile is today in 12th position – still better than 50th just a few days ago.

The right hand column above shows the positions when I used Advanced Search and specified results for Australia only. Those results were pretty satisfying – although if you check you’ll probably notice as I did that my PitchEngine ranking for Australia is as 1st of a group of 1 only!

By the way, the results I got are from searching from within Australia. People elsewhere may well get different results on the same terms. Believe it or not, I am not so much interested in where I stand in the pecking order as in the fact that we all have the capacity to improve our ranking in relative terms, just by a bit of focused work on our profiles.

Was all this easy? No, not really. And it was time consuming. I figured out later I may have spent somewhere between six and eight hours in all, working on this. Then again, it was not unduly complicated. As well as studying Lewis’ approach I had to do some thoughtful editing of my profile and some compression and re-adjustment of information: for example, there is a limit on the number of characters you can have in your Summary section. The content and layout of my Profile Summary and some other items have been very well worked over since last Friday.

I’ve also been through the other modules in the training program, although I haven’t really started on applying the lessons there yet. There are many insights and clues provided to help leverage any LinkedIn account, including some quite fascinating information about LinkedIn Groups and how to use those to good effect.

I have to say I have a more conservative policy towards inviting and accepting invitations to connect than Lewis does. If you also are conservative about that you might find Lewis’ approach a bit confronting. I did – then, thinking about all the stuff I liked and can see myself applying, I got over it. I’ve been a tad more flexible about the invitation side of things in the past few days as a result partly of what I’ve been learning, but I believe we all have to sift the advice we get and identify what’s right for us.

One extra little caveat. From a discussion thread I’ve been on I know that some people have found the promotional video a tad too enthusiastic. I didn’t. Lewis is an enthusiastic guy and he’s achieved a lot and helped a lot of people. Speaking personally I think he’s entitled to be enthusiastic.

Happy to answer to the best of my ability any questions you may have on this.