Getting this blog off the ground began in 2007 (essentially) and continues toward 2008. Most of my articles have something to do with web accessibility, or web design, or the WordPress content management system. Sometimes I toss in an article about a charitable organization that I find worthy or about something that has nothing to do anything I have already mentioned.

That being said, here are the most popular (hey, give me a break, “popular” is a relative term!) articles that I wrote in 2007.

• Adsense: Cents or No Sense?
• Custom WordPress Smiley Icons
• Optimize WordPress Page Headings
• Using WordPress as a CMS
• WordPress Category Navigation

Thanks for taking the time to stop by my little corner of the inter web. May you and your family have Happy Holidays and Joyous New Year!

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One project I completed earlier this year featured optimizing the placement of Google Adsense code. Many blogs, including several that I control, use Google Adsense to help monetize their operation. Do you use Adsense on your blog? If so, are you all warm and fuzzy about Google Adsense? Is it worth the time and the aggravation?

There seems to be a love/hate relationship with Adsense. Some site owners swear by it, while others find the limitations imposed by Google to be difficult to deal with. Another camp feels that Adsense ads ruin a blog and cheapen it in the process.

I maintain several blogs that utilzie Adsense to try and recover some of the expense of the server costs, maintenance fess, etc. It’s nice to get that check from Google – even though it’s not very often!

• www.RecycledBugs.com
• www.SaveOurPolice.com
• www.RochesterMich.com
• www.TicketQuota.com

I Really Should Work Harder

I really don’t put much time into any of these blogs. I have not done much in the way of stydying ad placement or tweaking the Adsense code or placement. For the most part, I break even and cover most of the cost of rleasing my server and other hosting fees. Hardly the stuff dreams are made of in terms of adverstisng or click-for-pay dollars. Needless to say, much of this is a function of the realtively low traffic that these blogs attract.

Tell Me About Your Adsense Experience

What is your experience with Adsense? Are you making enough money to pay any other bills other than hosting, etc? What advice do you have for others on how to improve their Google ad revenue? What ad placement have you found to be successful? What colors scheme and what ad layout have worked the best for you? I’d love to hear everyone’s experience with Adsense.

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One of the basic features of most websites is some type of navigation indicator to identify what page you are currently browsing. Although this can take the form of a fairly complicated breadcrumb indicator, the most frequent implementation of this feature is simply to draw attention to the navigation link by highlighting it differently with your CSS file.

Don’t you think it’s time to extend this same feature to the WordPress category navigation links? Read on to find out how!

The Typical WordPress Theme Navigation Structure

Most websites that use WordPress for the backend have a sidebar or other area of the site which displays a series of navigation links for each of the blog categories. This link list is displayed by use of the wp_list_categories() function. When the visitor chooses one of these links, they are taken to an archive of blog posts that have been tagged under a particular category. Most blogs have quite a few category assignments, and as a rule these category links make up a significant portion of the overall navigation.

An example of this can be seen right here at 1955 Design. Follow this link to articles written in my portfolio category. Notice that in the right sidebar, under the Categories tab, you will see that the title for this category is now colored a shade of orange and is italicized as well. Neat feature, at least to me.

How to Highlight the Category Navigation Link

Wouldn’t it be nice if the rather lengthy list of category navigation links could be highlighted so that the visitor can see that they are visting a category archive and are not on the main blog index or a static blog Page? It can be done!. WordPress adds the CSS class named current-cat to the list markup which surrounds the active category link. By controlling the styling of that class in your CSS file, it is possible to visually indicate to your site visitor that they are currently browsing a category archive.

Here’s my CSS:

#sidebar ul.li_smaller li.current-cat a {
	padding:0px 5px 0px 0;
	font-variant:normal;
	background-image:url(i/nav_current.jpg);
	background-repeat:no-repeat;
	background-position:left center;
	background-color:#5B5C9D;
}

The image shown at the top of this post indicates how 1955 Design implements this feature. As you can see, the current category link takes on a different background color to serve as an indicator to the visitor. If you actually scroll down the left sidebar and choose the Accessiblity category link, you will see how this indicator actually changes that link to the highlighted color when you are viewing the Accessiblity category archive list.

Is this the Eighth Wonder of the World?

Hardly. It’s just one in a series of WordPress enhancements that I have learned of recently. I think it’s a neat feature that is very often overlooked by theme developers. In fact, of the thousands of WordPress blogs that I have visited, I have only seen this feature implemented one time – by Mike Cherim over at GreenMethods.com. I discovered this WordPress feature while studying Mike’s new webiste. As usual, Mike is on the cutting edge of WordPress design. Thanks Mike!

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Although WordPress is best known as a blogging platform, it’s ability to function as a standard Content Management System (CMS) has been recognized and implemented by tens-of-thousands of web developers world wide.

If you are wondering why professionally designed websites are being developed around a FREE blogging platform, read on!

The Short Answer

When WordPress is used as the backend CMS for a website, the site administrator has the ability to manage the content of the site. If properly developed, virtually all the text content of tne website can be managed through an intuitive, web based user interface. A dynamic, database driven website is available to virtually everyone.

Five Minute Installation

WordPress claims that if you use their famous “Five Minute Installation” procedure, you can have your new blog up and running quickly. In my experience it takes less than five minutes to do a basic install, but it’s a great tag line nonetheless!

Going Beyond Blog Posts

I think most people know that WordPress can be easily implemented as a blog. The ability to add blog posts, in a forward rolling chronology, is one of the strengths of WordPress. However, WordPress also gives you the ability to write Pages. A WordPress Page is designed to handle more static site content, and falls outside the chronology of the blog posts. Within minutes of installation, you can be writing multiple Pages of content and publishing them live to your new website. Most traditional blogs use static pages such as:

• About Me
• Contact Me
• Frequently Asked Questions

Earlier this year I completed a web design project for the LifePlan Financial Advisory Group. I used WordPress as a CMS for this project even though the client had no particular use for the blog features of the software. After further discussion with the client regarding fresh content and search engine placement, they did decide to add a blog area to the site where they intend to do a series of book reviews for their clients.

Easy to Use Administration Interface

The admin panel is simple, clean, user friendly and designed to get maximum productivity from a simply designed interface.

WordPress comes with a simply designed and intuitive admin panel. Within this interface, the site administrator can control most aspects of development. Want to write a new post? No problem, the admin panel is the place to go. Want to design and publish a new Page? Yup – head to the admin panel and start writing. The admin panel is simple, clean, user friendly and designed to get maximum productivity from a simply designed interface. There is a WYSIWYG editor included with WordPress which allows you control most of your site content without ever seeing any of the design code.

Custom Designed WordPress Themes

WordPress gives you the ability to change the theme of your website. Since the site content and appearance are separated, and CSS is used to control the layout and appearance, all the site adminsitrator needs to do is choose a new “theme” for their site to give it a completely different appearance. You guessed it – the theme can be changed from with the admin panel!

There are literally thousands of free WordPress themes available for your use. Tens of thousands of them, in fact. With a basic knowledge of CSS, you can modify your theme in any way you choose, or hire a web developer do design a custom theme for you.

In addtion to custom themes, there are thousands of free plugins available that enhance the usability of WordPress, as well as custom features that can make your website more search engine accessible.

Sparkling Clean Code

Another great feature of the WordPress platform is that the code produced by the system is standards compliant. This doesn’t mean much to many people, but in reality WordPress produces code that meets the standards set by the W3C, which is the most widely recognized source of site standards. By following standard coding practices, your WordPress website will be available to the widest range of web browsers and devices.

In fact, this post you are reading was generated by WordPress and the code is Valid XHTML to the Strict Level as determined by the W3C.

In Conclusion

I think WordPress is a terrific piece of software. Out-of-the-box, WordPress can handle the needs of most straightforward websites. But the real magic behind WordPress is the ability to extend it to handle larger, more complicated and more involved websites. With the help of a web developer, WordPress can accomplish most tasks for most projects. Consider it for your next website project and see if it’s for you.

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Who wouldn’t want their own custom WordPress smiley icon?

I often visit at Mike Cherim’s Beast-Blog. Mike is a genius withto WordPress, and I always learn something new when Mike writes about tweaking WordPress. Adding Your Own WordPress Smilies explains how to make your own personal smilies / emoticons for use with WordPress. Following Mike’s instructions, I was able to make a personal 1955 Design smiley in a matter of minutes. :1955:

Using a text editor, open the functions.php file in the wp-include directory. Look for an array that contains the following code:

     ';)' => 'icon_wink.gif',
    ':!:' => 'icon_exclaim.gif',
    ':?:' => 'icon_question.gif',
    ':1955:' => 'icon_1955.gif',

I added the last line of code and created a small icon in Photoshop and named it icon_1955.gif. Save your icon in the /wp-includes/images/smilies directory. That’s all there is to it. Any time I type the text :1955: into a line of text, the graphic smiley icon is inserted in its place. Pretty cool.

Custom Formatting with CSS Markup

The one tip I can add is that you might have to make some adjustments to your CSS file to make the smilies work correctly. On this website my CSS floats images and adds a border by default. So I needed to write some CSS markup to keep the smilies inline and borderless. No problem. WordPress automatically adds the class wp-smiley to code that it generates for all smiley icons. You simply need to write some CSS markup to handle that class. In my case, I had to make certain that the smiley icons did not float and remained as inline images with no padding and no borders.

.wp-smiley {
    padding:0 0 0 0;
    margin:0 0 0 0;
    float:none;
    display:inline;
}

That’s all there is to it. Now the smiley image appears in the text as if it was another text character.

In fact, the little graphic at the end of this paragraph is another WordPress smiley! Many thanks again, Mike, for helping the world become more proficient with WordPress.

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Note: This post has been republished due to new interest in it. In addition, more detailed information and instruction has been included with the post.

I have always thought that one of the main flaws of many WordPress themes is that the main page navigation, when called by using the wp_list_pages() function, applies a title to each of the navigation links with whatever value is used in the the_title() of that particular page.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a good idea, but because of the way most navigation links are designed, the page titles need to be quite short and not very descriptive. Similarly, these themes tend to also use the_title() as the main H1 or H2 tag for the page display itself. In other words, if the navigation link says “Home”, the page title for that page usually displays as “Home” as well. This may be the way a designer wants it, but often it seems that a more descriptive page title is what’s really needed.

… it also allows for keyword insertion into these page titles – something that can only increase page rankings in the search engines.

By applying a nice bit of coding and sharing it with the world, Mike Cherim gave me the idea about how to solve this problem. I adapted the code he uses to display WordPress pull quotes, and now use it to afford the WordPress user the option to add their own, more descriptive page title rather than relying on the_title() alone. By using Mike’s technique, along with the built in custom fields feature of WordPress, the user is not required to to add a more descriptive page title, and if they don’t, the code defaults to using the_title() as normal. However, it does afford the user the option to be more descriptive in their page titles. Not only is this a neat feature that allows for more descriptive titles, but it also allows for keyword insertion into these page titles – something that can only increase page rankings in the search engines. After all, which H1 page heading is more SEO friendly, “Home” or “Welcome to LifePlan Financial“?

The code below shows how I implement the page titles in the PHP code. (Sorry, I could not get the actual PHP code to display correctly in this post, so what you see below is an image.)

Essentially, the code above says the following: If the custom field named main_title is NOT empty, display the text contained in that field as the H1 title. If the custom field named main_title IS empty, display the standard WordPress the_title() tag as the H1 title.

Putting the Code to Work for You

Based upon our example above, let’s put this into action. We’ll add one custom field called “main_title”. The following instructions will demonstrate how to add this information to a post using Custom Fields.

1. From the Write Post panel, choose Advanced Editing. If you are using the Simple Editing screen, look for a button with Advanced Editing » next to the Publish button. Click the button to go to the advanced editing screen.
2. After you have written your post, scroll down to the bottom of the Advanced Editing screen and look for an area titled Custom Fields.
3. To create a new Custom Field called “main_title”, enter the text “main_title” (without the quotes) in the text entry field titled Key.
4. The newly created Key should now be assigned a Value, which in our case is the name of H1 title you would like displayed on your page. Type this text in the Value field, again without the quotes.
5. All done. If I explained this correctly, and you followed the directions, your WordPress pages will now display the custom page title field!

You can add a page title to each of your WordPress pages meta-data. In the Custom Fields section, the Key will now feature a pull down list with the previously entered Custom Fields. Choose “main_title” and then enter the new page title in the value. Click Add Custom Field.

You only need to create a new “KEY” once, after which you can assign a value to that key for every post, if you so desire. If you do not enter any value in the main_title key, the code I wrote will default to using the standard WordPress page title contained in the_title() function

You can see this technique in action right here at 1955 Design. Just navigate the menu and see what titles I have chosen to add to the pages, rather than just the default navigation text. I think it’s a great idea, and thank Mike for both the code and the concept.

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