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?

The post 5 Things I Look for in a WordPress Theme appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

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 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.

The post How I Improved My LinkedIn Search Ranking with Help from Lewis Howes appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

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Today I’m looking at the question of whether hyphens or dashes in URLs are better than underscores. As the title of this post declares, it seems that the verdict is no contest in favor of hyphens.

Why would this question concern me?

Well, having spent about half an hour today trying to find a good domain name for a new project and discovering the top level, dot com version of each name I picked was not available, I got to thinking about using a hyphenated (i.e. with a dash or dashes) domain name, just as an SEO expert colleague of mine does regularly. In the particular instance this would make quite good sense, because each of the dot com names I looked at was parked, that is it was not being used for a “real live” website or blog. So I would not, on the face of it, be competing with someone active in the same market space with a live site and the same site name.

And indeed the dot com domain version of the ideal name I wanted for the new site proved to be available in the hyphenated version.

Maybe it was time to get over my prejudice in favor of “continuous” domain names and get into the hyphenated variety?

Then, no doubt because I was thinking about all this, I noticed in my FriendFeed stream a video by Google searchmeister Matt Cutts about hyphenated versus underscored URLs. Not that I’d been thinking about using underscores, but the video was brief and I found it very interesting for the implicit insight it gave into how the people behind the scenes at Google think and work.

Verdict on the particular question? Google’s machines read hyphens in URLs as separators, i.e. indicating separate words and thus, Matt indicates, hyphens are better than underscores. At least, better for now. He acknowledges that they might change the algorithm one day.

The next question is: given the choice between a hyphenated  dot com name and a non-hyphenated, “wholeword” dot net, or dot org or other alternative to dot com, which is better?

I’ve done a bit of searching online but don’t know what the “right” answer is to that, although there does appear to be a consensus of “one hyphen good, two or more hyphens bad”.

Advice and comments welcome.

The post SEO Saturday: Hyphens in URLs Beat Underscores appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

I understand that knowing more about my backlinks and their quality is an important part of any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

But I know also that I don’t know nearly as much as I should. And what is more problematic is that I don’t know what I don’t know.

Which says to me that my sites might be missing out on an improved ranking, just because I’m not paying attention and taking appropriate action.

One reason I know that understanding the whole backlink thing is that my China-based friend and colleague, Lonnie B. Hodge, who is a search specialist, refers often to backlinks and their importance.

And as I’m scheduled to record a conversation with Lonnie this afternoon, I thought it would be timely to do some checking in my own backyard, starting with my Des Walsh dot Com site on WordPress.

I discovered some interesting information and had a couple of surprises.

My checking used three types of tools:

• the list of backlinks you see when you log in to the admin section of your WordPress site
• the list provided by Technorati on your page there
• various automatic backlink checkers you can find with a Google search.

In this post I’m focusing on what I learned from the WordPress site.

When you go log in to the admin section of your WordPress site, it should open at the Dashboard. You see a column of recent comments on the left and a column of Incoming Links on the right as in the screenshot below.

What I found today, as the screenshot shows, were:

• a link from the Disaboom site where my friend Glenda Watson Hyatt, a.k.a. The Left Thumb Blogger mentions me – and links to Des Walsh dot Com – in the context of talking about going to Las Vegas for BlogWorld & New Media Expo
• a link from my partner Suzie’s Abundance Highway site, where she is recounting a conversation she and I had and linking to the Des Walsh dot Com site
• a link from a site which has evidently copied, without attribution, a post which Suzie had sent to our colleague Liz Strauss for her Successful Blog site and which had a link in it to Des Walsh dot Com
• a link from the typepad Hacks site of John T. Unger who posted about speaking at BlogWorld & New Media Expo and specifically about the panel he and I are on
• a link from the mybloglog page of “Tangos”, who had left a comment on Des Walsh dot Com

How have I used this information today?

• I left a comment on Glenda’s post: this was a good thing to do, first because I wanted to publicly acknowledge my friend’s mention of me and secondly because it is about conversation and I coach people to spend time commenting on other’s posts so as to be part of the conversation
• I mentioned the apparently unauthorized copying discovery to Suzie, who sent a message to Liz Strauss: interestingly, the person who owned the site had left an easy trail back to his Facebook page!
• I decided to check out my backlinks on Technorati – with somewhat more startling and disturbing links. To be revealed in the next post in this series!
• also I used a few of the freely available online backlink checkers – that will be a third post.

What’s your strategy or practice with managing your backlinks?

What am I missing that would make me more effective in this department, if you wouldn’t mind sharing?

The post Checking Backlinks I: Using Your WordPress Dashboard List appeared first on Thinking Home Business.