Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

With the new 2.4.0.25435 version of Artisteer WordPress themes are rendered with a new css format.  Its a small change and one that slims down the css file, however it is currently stumping me just a bit when it comes to rendering a site with 3 sidebars on one side with one sidebar floating above two smaller ones.

I’ve discovered enough of the code to make it this far, which would be great and exactly what I’m looking for, but it only works right now in Firefox, safari, and Chrome, but not in IE8.

Here are the elements in the css code that I have changed to achieve this result.

/* begin LayoutCell, content */
.art-content-layout .art-content
{
width: 50%;
}
.art-content-layout .art-content-sidebar1
{
width: 100%;
}
.art-content-layout .art-content-sidebar2
{
width: 79%;
}
.art-content-layout .art-content-sidebar3
{
width: 71%;
}
.art-content-layout .art-content-wide
{
width: 100%;
}
/* end LayoutCell, content */

/* begin LayoutCell, sidebar1 */
.art-content-layout .art-sidebar1
{
background-color: #D4CCAA;
width: 50%;
overflow:hidden;
position: relative;
float: left;
}
/* end LayoutCell, sidebar1 */

/* begin LayoutCell, sidebar2 */
.art-content-layout .art-sidebar2
{
background-color: #D4CCAA;
width: 29%;
overflow:hidden;
position: relative;
float: left;
}
/* end LayoutCell, sidebar2 */

/* begin LayoutCell, sidebar3 */
.art-content-layout .art-sidebar3
{
background-color: #D4CCAA;
width: 21%;
overflow:hidden;
position: relative;
float: left;
}
/* end LayoutCell, sidebar3 */

And another section in formatting that looks like this after my changes, the items in bold represent items I added.

/* begin Layout – change css */
.art-content-layout
{
display: table;
padding: 0;
border: none;
width: 994px;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

.art-content-layout .art-content-layout
{
width: auto;
margin:0;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

div.art-content-layout div.art-layout-cell, div.art-content-layout div.art-layout-cell div.art-content-layout div.art-layout-cell
{
display: table-cell;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

div.art-layout-cell div.art-layout-cell
{
display: block;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

div.art-content-layout-row
{
display: table-row;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

.art-content-layout
{
table-layout: fixed;
border-collapse: collapse;
background-color: Transparent;
border: none !important;
padding:0 !important;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

.art-layout-cell, .art-content-layout-row
{
background-color: Transparent;
vertical-align: top;
text-align: left;
border: none !important;
margin:0 !important;
padding:0 !important;
position: relative;
float: left;
}
/* end Layout */

Copywriting, Content Optimization, and SEO Optimization may be tedious, but they do not have to be time consuming nor arcane with the new Scribe SEO for WP Plugin & the upcoming Scribe for the general Web service, which methodically guides writers through the SEO copywriting and content optimization process boosting Search Engine Optimization Results as well as Click through from SERPs!

SEO Copywriting & Content Optimization – Automated by Copyblogger himself!

The Scribe service is the brain child of Brian Clark, aka Copyblogger, and he had great reason to create this tool, helping people achieve better results with Google’s Search Algorithm.

I successfully tested this content optimization plugin myself on an Artisteer generated theme, its already been proven to work with Thesis themes and StudioPress among others as well.

Why SEO Copywriting is Important

If you want your content, your web page, web site, blog article, news article, product page, service, etc to be found on the net, it needs to be written and published in a way that search engines can understand.  You not only have to write the write (key) words, the right number of times but you have to get them placed in the right spot too – SEO Copywriting in a nut shell. Its not the end all to getting a number one position in the SERPs, but it can be a solid starting point, one that should be skipped.  Yet up until now, content optimization is something that is typically a time consuming process with a learning curve as steep as the boredom curve of using it!

Any writer, professional or amateur, publisher large or small, business hoping to gain traction on the internet and maintain their position there in a world where location is definitely everything, all of those groups need to make sure that their website is search engine optimized for copywriting and that includes every page of importance in that website too.

Is it necessary to optimize every silly little blog article?  No.  But if you have an important blog article or three, you should definitely consider it.

Scribe SEO Copywriting in WordPress Video Tutorial and Walk through

Wow, that title is a mouthful.    Anyway, enough of the optimized mumbo jumbo.  Odds are if you have read this far, then this might actually be something useful for you to consider.  The 2 videos walk through the plugin for wordpress from Scribe, the brain child of Brian Clark, aka Copyblogger.  I wanted to take a look at the first incarnation of this service, to get a feel for what it can do.  The video gives the overview in the first part, and in the second part I delve into what it actually does, and where the pricing sweet spots are.

Yes this does cost money.  That’s why I put the video together.  You can download the plugin for yourself and use a 10 page analysis free trial yourself, but that’s a big time commitment up front.  So check out the second video at least (if not both) and see if you think this plugin would be useful for you.  After the videos, I ‘ll share some of my own insights on how you might want to use it.

Part 1 Scribe SEO Copywriting w WordPress Review

Part 2 Scribe SEO Copywriting for WP Review – What it Analyzes, How it Helps and Where the Bargain is

As a former accountant and financial analyst I don’t generally step up to the plate and shell out money for something I can do myself.  I’m cheap, I know it and there are times when that is a character flaw. 

All that said, when I look at this plugin I can see that there would be times when you would want to optimize some but not all of your content.

Sure, altruistically, we might think that every single thing we ever write is very important and should get the maximum amount of attention.  In reality that is not the case.  Sometimes on the web, some pages just communicate timely little pieces of communication, like a happy birthday in 2005 or a ‘I had a bad day in 2006 and noticed XYZ’.  Some of these article might help a writer or business connect better with parts of their audience or customer base, but the shelf life on these articles is probably pretty short.  So imho don’t spend money optimizing it.

But if you have content that is important, that is generating some traffic or incoming backlinks all on their own, take some effort to optimize those articles first.  Get some more bang for your buck out of your high performing articles.

Then start looking through your content for those elements that are under performing for no apparent reason.  See if there is a SEO copywriting optimization opportunity to increase those articles or product pages in the SERPs(not to be confused with SERPS) through some crafty SEO suggestions from this great plugin.

After that if you have time and money, and you want to boost some other things knock yourself out.  As you write new content, if you want those articles to have the opportunity to reach their full potential, then optimize them also.  But don’t neglect your big rocks, get them in your jar first before you put the smaller rocks in if you want your site to fill up with traffic.

Prioritizing Long Tail Copywriting Optimization

1. Identify your highest trafficked Pages or Posts (Check your stats, google analytics, shortstat or a popularity tool if you are running one)
2. Analyze & Optimize these first!
3. Then go back and focus on good articles that are low performers
4. Finally, Optimize new articles as you see fit

UPDATE

Just to give some additional static visual references, I went through the process of analyzing and optimizing this very article.

First, I go to my post to edit.

I noticed right away that my All in One SEO tags, description and title had not been uploaded correctly to WordPress from WindowsLiveWriter where I’m running the All in One SEO Bridge and All in One SEO in WP.  So I next copied and pasted that information into wordpress and updated my wordPress page because something wasn’t working with my add on.

Everything is all green now for Scribe SEO, so I’m ready to hit analyze.  (I’m still working through my own free trial as of 3-19-2010)

It processes . . .

I scored an 89%, which isn’t too bad, or at least feels a little gratifying.

The 3 yellow areas indicate that my title is too long, so is my description and I only have 7 external links when I should have about 8 external links.  So I did a quick Google search on the keyword ‘copywriting optimization’ thinking I might find some additional resources or further background information.  Had to chuckle when I saw that this article, published 5 minutes ago was already in the Google top 10.

I was already pretty generous with some links to other blogs, so I simply added a Wikipedia link to SEO Copywriting.

I next reviewed the Keyword analysis in Scribe’s tab.

I was happy with the results of the copywriting optimization on this front so moved on.

The next tab gave me some suggestions about ways to adjust the primary keywords as viewed by a search engine.

The Tags and Serp Tabs were self explanatory.  (I do like the SERP Tab for a preview of your article listed in Google)

The SEO best practices tab, is just general SEO information as far as I can tell and not specific to this article

I wrapped things up, by shortening my description, removing the original blog title and replacing it with a shorter version for optimization reasons, and copied the old title (which the stupid writer in me thought had a nice hook and made it an H3 level header.

Finally, re-ran the analysis (each re-run of the analysis deducts from your account, so I don’t recommend too many redos, I had a 95% score on this article.

Basically that boils down to about $0.32 – $0.40 to optimize my article and make sure it is delivering the results I want it to deliver!

After catching up on my sleep after traveling back all night from Boston from one of the largest wordcamps that I have attended to date, I finally got around to editing and uploading some basic video I took.  The first video is a quick presentation i gave during an unconference session, showing people how to design their first wordpress theme using the software that makes it easy, Artisteer.

Videos of the WP theme design presentation in 3 parts

Update – Part 3 is now fixed and working

Getting setup and going with the presentation was a little haphazard so the presentation wasn’t as polished as similar versions I delivered in Birmingham, Las Vegas and Savannah, but the audience had a lot of good questions, and I didn’t mind the change up.  It actually helped me quite a bit get a better feeling for those areas of the presentation that are probably more important for people learning to design WP themes for the first time.

I’m heading to the WordCamp Boston this weekend.  I will be working a shift in the WordPress Genius Bar helping people learn how to design WordPress themes for the first time.  I’m also looking forward to comparing notes with the presenters at Boston WordCamp covering advanced wordpress theme design.  I’m always looking to benchmark best practices to improve functionality, decrease load time and speed up the design process which makes wordpress as a cms theme design more affordable for my clients.

I am also going to see first hand how the Boston WordCamp was organized.  From an online perspective, this show looks tight.  The wordpress community in WordPress is very strong and I’m looking forward to some high level discussions. 

Its also been about 10 years since I visited Boston.  I haven’t been back since my brother in law graduated from MIT.  I lived just outside of Boston in the early 90’s and I do miss seeing one of my favorite cities in the US.

For those of you catching up with me at WordCamp Boston, I design wordpress themes using a combination of the following 3 software programs listed in order of importance based on total usage in the design process:

• Artisteer
• Dreamweaver (Adobe Product)
• Fireworks (Adobe product)
• ThemeDreamer (Dreamweaver addon)
• Firebug (Firefox addon)
• Google Adwords (keyword analysis)

* Note I bought Fireworks and Dreamweaver together a few years ago in a bundle called Studio 8, Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium CS4 is about the equivalent these days.  Its expensive but effective.  If you are a student, but it now while it is still cheap!

In general, I only recommend working on 2 hosting services, Inmotion Hosting and HostGator due to their great support and WordPress friendly atmosphere.  They make installation a breeze.  I do NOT recommend Godaddy, 1&1, nor IPower, which have made my life difficult.

Last weekend I ventured back to BlogWorld & the New Media Expo and Las Vegas WordCamp.  The great thing is that all three conferences were consolidated in the Las Vegas Convention Center.  I closed out WordCamp with a Session on How to Design a WordPress Theme in Minutes.  The video from the event is not yet available, but the slides are below:

This was an expanded version of the ‘Intro’ level presentation that I provided a few weeks ago at WordCamp Birmingham. 

The big difference is that I demonstrated how to use multiple themes in a single WordPress configuration.  Multiple themes that anyone could design and later iterate modifications themselves.  I also highlighted a few of the techniques that I utilized to build our strategic partner’s site at Grass Shack Events & Media.

Here is the basic code that I utilized to create and call a default header as well as alternate headers based on an if then else selection:

<?php
//
// example of using header file based on pages
// note that you can either use page ID, Page Name or Page Slug
//
// this one uses page title

if (is_page()){
    include(TEMPLATEPATH.’/header-business.php’);
}
else {
    include(TEMPLATEPATH.’/header-default.php’);
}
?>

 

This month I will also create additional step by step video tutorials to share with people that were unable to attend this session.  Alternately, if you would like me to speak at a conference or event in your area, please contact me to discuss availability.