Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
Wordpress are finally getting around to updating the Admin theme.
This is a great idea. From the beginning Wordpress has generally looked great when going out with visitors but she dresses awfully sloppily around the house.
The front end just keeps getting better as the backend stagnates.
Unfortunately, current previews of the updated Wordpress 2.4 Admin interface show a getup which looks worse if anything, than what's there now.
I'm having visions of Mambo circa 2004. What's with the dreadful new brown and orange? The blue on blue colour scheme is about all the Wordpress Admin Panel has going for it aesthetically.
The only good looking Admin interface for Wordpress has been Steve Smith's Wordpress Tiger Administration, which first saw the light of day in June 2005.
Tiger Admin Page Management
Tiger Admin Dashboard
I gleefully ran Wordpress Tiger Administration for about six months back in 2005. Sadly, Wordpress Tiger Administration doesn't run on Internet Explorer - there's some very fancy CSS involved, which Steve didn't feel like bending to Internet Explorer. As Wordpress Tiger Administration is free, who can blame him?
The end result though as the clients started to edit the sites themselves, I didn't want to be using an interface that was in any way different than theirs. Otherwise, I just might now know if a site was working properly.
John and I talked about doing an Admin panel redesign but John talked me out of it for compatibility reasons. Had I known just how long the stagnation would go on, he might not have dissuaded me so easily.
In the end we did create Foliovision Edit Templates, now part of the full Foliopress CMS suite with Foliopress WYSIWYG, Foliopress SEO Images and Foliopress Advanced Page Manager and Foliopress Dashboard.
foliopress edit templates
foliopress advanced page management
foliopress dashboard
Frankly, Foliopress Edit Templates and Foliopress Advanced Page Manager look better to my eye than what's coming Wordpress 2.4. I'd still like to see a first rate designer have a go at the CSS.
As soon as John gets our registration and download system setup, I will release them for download for free non-commercial use. All of the Foliopress Admin enhancements are easily installed plugins which are fully compatible with all Wordpress versions between 2.1 and 2.2 so switching over is not difficult.
By Alec
WordPress |
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
Just discovered an amazing bookmarklet from Aussie company Western Civilization, one of the original creators of CSS editing software.
StyleMaster was always a little bit buggy processor intensive, expensive and complicated for me so I learned how to code CSS from scratch. I still think that's the best way to write CSS.
But the modern web is getting so complicated that we really need a better way to look at web pages to be able to figure out how they are put together.
Well WestCiv has really hit the ball out of the park with this one. They have a cross browser compatible javascript bookmarklet that will let you click and see all the CSS and structure for any element on a page. The bookmarklet, appropriately enough, is called
Xray.
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By Alec
WordPress |
Thursday, June 21st, 2007
There are lots of ways to build incoming links.
For a small window of time (about six months until April of this year) sponsoring WordPress themes was a great way to get varied links from lots of different independent websites.
Of course these links wouldn't be going on top PR sites generally (custom themes) and you don't have control of the theme of the site.
On the other hand, you do have control over the anchor text, which is already not bad.
And previously it was quite inexpensive - you would pay about $40 or $50/link on a two sponsored link theme and around $70 to $100 for a single sponsored link theme.
Things have changed - most theme developers are pushing three sponsored links and are trying to get $100 or more per link.
With the inflation and feeding frenzy, a lot more lousy developers have thrown their hats into the ring, so there is an oversaturation of themes.
The developers all talk a good game of how they promote the theme on sites such as:
Unfortunately on all or most of these high PR authority sites, your sponsored link will be nowhere to seen. Just a link to download the theme and some jpegs of the theme.
The developers will also try to shout and scream about 450 downloads, 1037 downloads for past themes. But for link building number of downloads accomplishes nothing for you.
What you are interested in is the number of sites which use the theme and include the sponsored links. For the purposes of sponsored links, a single is much better as the end user is less likely to rip out the links. By the same token it would also be better if the links were discreetly nested and not in electric green (where they are likely to attract the attention of the site owner and his visitors and finally get ripped out). An exception could be made if your site is likely to go viral and has a very wide appeal. In that case, clicks from sponsored links might actually contribute to your business. For my regional websites, we are not looking for random clicks. It will never generate any business for my clients and the more discreet the sponsored links the better.
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By Alec
SEO, WordPress |
