At last - my blog!

Hacker

Hacker

TPer Emeritus
Messages
7,625
Name
Colin
Edit My Images
Yes
I've been threatening to do this for a while and I had signed up with a company so they could make an SEO friendly splash/landing page for my BluDomain site and everything was going fine for a while until about three weeks ago when they dropped off the face of the earth :bat:, unfortunately they are in the States which makes it a bit more difficult to resolve but I'm getting there.

Anyway, I have now gone for a ProPhoto blog and spent a few hours yesterday afternoon trying to work it out :D although I must stress this is still a work in development but I'd appreciate your thoughts anyway:

http://greenlees-photography.com/blog/

I ran the URL through Web Site Grader yesterday afternoon and my BluDomain site has always had a ranking of around 49 but after just an hour of the blog going live it was at 67, this evening it is at 70 and once I do a bit more research into SEO it will hopefully climb higher.
 
Its brill, but the photographs seem to be allover the place, i'd prefer to see some sort of grouping and possible a smaller version of the photograph possible 720px on the larger side and then an option to have it larger if clicked..

thats my 2 pence worth. other than that its a pretty design! wish you all the best.
 
I'm going to be checking that out then Colin... :D


Congratulations on getting it sorted... :thumbs:


Safari finally turned up btb... :D





:p
 
six6six said:
Its brill, but the photographs seem to be allover the place, i'd prefer to see some sort of grouping and possible a smaller version of the photograph possible 720px on the larger side and then an option to have it larger if clicked..

thats my 2 pence worth. other than that its a pretty design! wish you all the best.
Click to expand...

Thanks Sammy, I appreciate your input. I'm not sure what you mean when you say the images are all over the place as they should be underneath each other, can I ask what browser you are using? As it is a new blog I have just populated it with a few weddings which unfortunately all go on the same page so obviously it does look a bit busy at the moment but that should calm down! :D

artona said:
Looks nice, well done

stew
Click to expand...

Cheers Stew! :thumbs:

Venomator said:
I'm going to be checking that out then Colin... :D


Congratulations on getting it sorted... :thumbs:


Safari finally turned up btb... :D





:p
Click to expand...

Thanks Rog, I got your 'blog love' messages :D and with regards to the the e-mail notification I haven't worked out how to turn on/integrate the Feedburner required for this and it is doing my nut in!

Congrats on the Safari, I used the Leica in anger last week for the first time when I was in Italy.
 
Really nice, like it alot! Although I'd be tempted to use excerpts on the blog home page so that you just get a paragraph or two and one picture for each new post, with a 'read more' link for the full content...there is a LOT on that first page and requires lots of scrolling. Not everyone will want to see all of the content for each entry and forcing them to have to scroll past it all to find what they really want could get annoying. Overall though, really nice looking blog :D

Thanks for the tip on that Web Site Grader too, just had a play with that myself...makes for interesting reading!
 
I like it, it's nice and professional looking. Good colour scheme and large images. It's a bit slow to load at the start but I think that's because of all the images, perhaps limit the number of entries per page? Is it a custom theme?

Good to see you're using Wordpress with the SEO plugin. I'm using that too and normally when I post a Wordpress article it goes pretty high up in Google.
 
Cool :thumbs:
The only slight comment / crit that I have Colin,
The top bar with the changing images
The flower one with people but no heads
I find it a little odd TBH they ( the people) are enough in focus to be noticed
behind the flowers.
I would preferred them much further OoF or the heads in there as well

just my opinion of course
 
Richard Peters said:
Really nice, like it alot! Although I'd be tempted to use excerpts on the blog home page so that you just get a paragraph or two and one picture for each new post, with a 'read more' link for the full content...there is a LOT on that first page and requires lots of scrolling. Not everyone will want to see all of the content for each entry and forcing them to have to scroll past it all to find what they really want could get annoying. Overall though, really nice looking blog :D

Thanks for the tip on that Web Site Grader too, just had a play with that myself...makes for interesting reading!
Click to expand...

Thanks Richard, I'll look into using excerpts, I presume it is easy enough to set up even for a computing numpty like me!

Web Site Grader is a handy little tool I came across a few weeks ago.

KayJay said:
I like it, it's nice and professional looking. Good colour scheme and large images. It's a bit slow to load at the start but I think that's because of all the images, perhaps limit the number of entries per page? Is it a custom theme?

Good to see you're using Wordpress with the SEO plugin. I'm using that too and normally when I post a Wordpress article it goes pretty high up in Google.
Click to expand...

Thanks KayJay, I've just got work out how to use the SEO plugin properly as this is all new to me and causing major headaches! I know I'm going to regret asking this :D but how did you know I was using it?

Cobra said:
Cool :thumbs:
The only slight comment / crit that I have Colin,
The top bar with the changing images
The flower one with people but no heads
I find it a little odd TBH they ( the people) are enough in focus to be noticed
behind the flowers.
I would preferred them much further OoF or the heads in there as well

just my opinion of course
Click to expand...

Cheers Chris, I'd never noticed that before!

:thumbs:
 
Hacker said:
Thanks Richard, I'll look into using excerpts, I presume it is easy enough to set up even for a computing numpty like me!
Click to expand...

Add this code where you want the break to be...(make sure you insert it in to your post in the HTML mode)

<p style="text-align:right;"><!--more Read the full story--></p>

Replace the text that I have highlighted in italic with whatever you want the link to say :) So if you want the link to say READ MORE you would put: <p style="text-align:right;"><!--more READ MORE--></p>

The first lowercase 'more' needs to be there, so don't delete that. You just place the text you want the for the link after it.

I used these all the time on my old theme but my new one does auto excerpts.
 
Just found the "Insert More" Tag :banana:

I presume that is similar to excerpts - thanks for the tips and advice, it looks much better now!
 
Richard Peters said:
Add this code where you want the break to be...(make sure you insert it in to your post in the HTML mode)

<p style="text-align:right;"><!--more Read the full story--></p>

Replace the text that I have highlighted in italic with whatever you want the link to say :) So if you want the link to say READ MORE you would put: <p style="text-align:right;"><!--more READ MORE--></p>

The first lowercase 'more' needs to be there, so don't delete that. You just place the text you want the for the link after it.

I used these all the time on my old theme but my new one does auto excerpts.
Click to expand...

HTML. Gulp! :D

Thanks Richard, I'll give that a go!
 
Hacker said:
Thanks Richard, I'll look into using excerpts, I presume it is easy enough to set up even for a computing numpty like me!

Web Site Grader is a handy little tool I came across a few weeks ago.



Thanks KayJay, I've just got work out how to use the SEO plugin properly as this is all new to me and causing major headaches! I know I'm going to regret asking this :D but how did you know I was using it?



Cheers Chris, I'd never noticed that before!

:thumbs:
Click to expand...

I looked at your source code. I always look at peoples source code to see how good or bad it is as part of my critique. :D

A lot of plugins for Wordpress insert a HTML comment into the source code so that people know what plugins are being used. The SEO plugin is one such plugin.
 
Richard Peters said:
Add this code where you want the break to be...(make sure you insert it in to your post in the HTML mode)

<p style="text-align:right;"><!--more Read the full story--></p>

Replace the text that I have highlighted in italic with whatever you want the link to say :) So if you want the link to say READ MORE you would put: <p style="text-align:right;"><!--more READ MORE--></p>

The first lowercase 'more' needs to be there, so don't delete that. You just place the text you want the for the link after it.

I used these all the time on my old theme but my new one does auto excerpts.
Click to expand...

Yeah, problem with this is you need to remember it all the time. Although you could just click the insert more link button when editing the post and stick with the default wording, or get into the template and add it in there.

Handy link that details the method mentioned by Richard Peters and myself.
 
Cheers KayJay. Whoosh!

Any other plugins you would recommend?
 
There are a few that come in handy when you're building your own custom theme. You should set up a test blog and try building a new custom theme if you haven't already. You'll learn a lot about the flexibility of Wordpress. I'm using it on my site in my signature.

A couple I use on my site...

More Fields - A great way to add custom fields to your edit pages. I use this to add extra information to my web dev posts such as client name, client url, studio name, stuio url, technologies used. You can then spit that info out into your template.

Twitter for Wordpress - Really simple way of displaying your latest tweet on your blog. I have this running and it spits out my latest tweet just below the footer. A nice touch.

Post Templates by Category - Lets you create a custom theme template for a category. I use this to display web projects differently to photography projects.

Contact Form ][ - A no frills contact form. There are others that help prevent spam and are more complex but I like this one because it's simple and straight forward and gmail does a great job for me of stopping spam.

I like keeping the number of plugins to a minimum to keep the site responsive. My hosting is pretty **** just now so I need to keep overhead down. But I've used some other really good plugins on other web projects...

WordPress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

WP-Database Manager - Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Super Cache - This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
 
KayJay said:
Yeah, problem with this is you need to remember it all the time. Although you could just click the insert more link button when editing the post and stick with the default wording, or get into the template and add it in there.

Handy link that details the method mentioned by Richard Peters and myself.
Click to expand...
Good point! Didn't think of that because I used to change the text used for the link on a post by post basis depending on what type of content it was :)

EDIT: Hacker, blog looks much better now :)
 
In your wordpress admin panel go to settings -> permalinks

I use day and name option. But you can choose any you want, or even make a custom permalink structure. Make sure the .htaccess file on your hosting is writable. That page will tell you if it is or not.
 
Looks good Colin - Lake Como looks wonderful - might have to check that out asap!!
 
KayJay said:
In your wordpress admin panel go to settings -> permalinks

I use day and name option. But you can choose any you want, or even make a custom permalink structure. Make sure the .htaccess file on your hosting is writable. That page will tell you if it is or not.
Click to expand...

Thanks KayJay, I'll check that out.

pablob said:
Looks good Colin - Lake Como looks wonderful - might have to check that out asap!!
Click to expand...

Hey Paul, I'm editing your weddings pics right now! I take it you are still on honeymoon so what on earth are you doing on TP! :D Give my regards to Anna and speak soon.
 
Hacker said:
Hey Paul, I'm editing your weddings pics right now! I take it you are still on honeymoon so what on earth are you doing on TP! :D Give my regards to Anna and speak soon.
Click to expand...

Sadly we have returned - we got back from Mauritius and Dubai y'day! Back to work tomorrow!

Back to reality now mate ............... Look forward to pictures I say no pressure as you've been away and all but the Mrs will probably say get a move on... (Joke!!)
 
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