Reinventing my Blog
ADVERTISEMENTSFor the past few days, I have been spending my time fixing and optimizing my blog. The first thing I had to do was to fix the header which had display problems in Mac, Linux and some other Operating Systems. The tough part here was to confirm that I had fixed the problem because I only had Windows XP. Thanks to LiewCF for the confirmation and screenshot in Firefox on his Mac.
Secondly I thought of optimizing my blog for Search Engines by putting unique meta description tag to all of my pages. For this I used the head meta description WordPress plugin. I also tried to validate my XHTML. Within an hour I reduced 200 errors to 34. I hope this helps bots in crawling my pages more easily. I have noticed an improvement in the number of indexed pages by Google from 14,900 to 15,700. This does not have to be because of the fixed errors, but I hope it helps.
I made a few changes to the Header and redesigned my Comments Template.
I tried to Speed up my site by using shorthand CSS properties, removing unnecessary META tags, putting CSS and JavaScript into external documents, removing the unwanted codes to plugins I don’t use for example Flickr and Del.icio.us. Then removed the comments and white spaces with the help of CSS Tweak. I also removed a few unneccesary images and uninstalled a few WordPress Plugins that I don’t use frequently to reduce database calls. I also removed the Adsense Ads from footer.
Now I have to combine my contentwise.css and style.css after removing the unneccesary codes. Many more things to do…
I recommend that you also reinvent your blog with a few tweaks or a complete redesign of your blog theme. It can help you stimulate new interest in old readers and also draw in new readers 
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Posted on August 8th, 2006 | Category: General |
Mohib
August 9, 2006 at 2:16 pm
Hi,
Header looks better now and so does other changes. I am still waiting for you to share the technique for designing such headers.
Thanks,
Mohib
Shivaranjan
August 9, 2006 at 7:38 pm
You icons in the header looks real good and appealing. The comments section has changed a lot and looks good.
Shivaranjan
August 9, 2006 at 7:50 pm
John why don’t you consider e-mail subscribtion for you blog?
John T P
August 9, 2006 at 9:34 pm
Mohib- I had some problems with the header previously and could not fix it because I was on Break. Now the problem seems to be fixed.
So you can expect the 5th part of my How to create a custom K2 Scheme series explaining on how to do it soon
I also started designing a new K2 Mod implementing this method. I hope you all will like it
But I am also confused to whether the new K2 Mod should be a 2 or 3 column. What’s your opinion?
Shivaranjan- I am glad you liked my new header and comment template design. About the email subscription, I had that on my previous K2 Mod- TechnoBlue. Now there isn’t much space on my current Theme’s sidebar. Besides my blog is already slow in loading.
That is why I put the email subscription option in the form of a link after every post. I guess you did not notice it. Anyway here’s the