Tuesday, August 9, 2011

7 Tips for Enhancing WordPress Templates

That's not a secret that millions of blogs owners use WordPress solution and generally base their sites on WordPress themes. Whether WordPress templates are free or commercial you can always improve them, boosting with some plug-ins, additional setting and pieces of code.

The following ways of templates improvement don't require any knowledge of code or other specific skills:

Optimize template pictures

Images used by WordPress templates developers are sometimes not optimized. You may optimize them easily using reduce their size which is possible with "Save for Web" feature you will find in the Adobe Photoshop toolkit. Besides, you may use the special Smush.it tool that allows to optimize the images without loss of quality.

The images you may optimize are the logo, stock images, icons, headings, CSS background images etc. What do you need the images optimization for? This can significantly improve the valuable for your readers page response times.

Reduce the WordPress theme files size.

Some WP templates include not minified CSS or JavaScript files and you may enhance the template by reducing their file sizes. This process is called minification and gets rid of the extra characters such as spaces and tabs. Speaking about JavaScript, you are free to minify it with the special free JavaScript Compressor. As for HTML there are plugins like W3 Total Cache that will minify the front-end HTML code to improve the blog speed.

Apply a custom favicon.

You may have noticed the tiny icon representing a website in browser tabs address bars. This is the favicon that should also represent your brand and look professional.

To include this favicon you may simply place the following code inside the header.php in your template directory:

The location of your favicon file can be pointed in place of the href attribute value.

Use custom styles to make image captions stand out.

The WordPress image captions serve to describe images. WordPress themes usually include the default styles for these captions. And you may change the.wp-caption class in your template styles.css to pally the certain unique style for all image captions.
Make the template code secure

This can be achieved by removing the generic WordPress code you will find inside tags of your template. This action will prevent the other users from knowing our WordPress version that could help them to attack your website using some weak points of the definite versions.

Use the third-party search feature instead of the default search bar

Many users don't even know that they can easily replace the core search function with another search service that is more accurate and fast like Google Custom Search or Yahoo! Search BOSS. Using the authoritative third-party search option will reduce your server load for searches.

Use WordPress Internet marketing tools

To bring more traffic to your WordPress blog you may use the following market tools:

All in One SEO Pack
XML Sitemap Generator
digg digg
Onlywire autosubmit plugi
Twitter tools

All the aforementioned steps will improve your WordPress themes, enhance promotion and bring more dedicated visitors to your blog.

Stan Lem is not a newbie in writing for the web - he started about 5 years ago and took special involvement in the area of website development and website templates - more specifically WordPress Themes


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