Foliovision » web design

Current Wordpress 2.4 Admin Theme a Disappointment

alec — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:27:53 +0000

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

Current Wordpress 2.4 Admin Theme a Disappointment

Post from: Foliovision

Xray Eyes for CSS

alec — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:42:08 +0000

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.

XRAY

That's the bookmarklet. (I've installed the Xray bookmarklet here as both an archive and an experiment to see if it will stand up to our new WordPress WYSIWYG Images code - frankly I recommend you get the latest version from the WestCiv site.) Here's what Xray looks like in action:

WestCiv's Xray in action: very transparent, very attractive The red outline is actually a mod to my Firefox to show all no followed links or no indexed links all the time

Previously I used two Mac OS X desktop applications to help with this. Xylescope and CSSEdit. Cultured Code's Xylescope does pretty much the same thing as Xray but is a separate application. When it came down the pipeline Xylescope was a godsend. It saved me hours of CSS debugging each time I used it. You can use it to change your styles live on a webpage and see exactly what you want. The limitation of Xylescope is that you can't add attributes, you can only change the existing ones. So it's really for analyzing and tweaking and not building. Here's what Xylescope looks like in action:

Cultured Code's Xylescope, also a great looking application Xylescope is the one which looks most like a 747 dashboard Xylescope makes a strong case for 30" monitors

CSSEdit on the other hand is good for building. You can add elements and attributes and comments and build up a stylesheet very quickly. I believe Macrabbit must have seen Xylescope and been impressed as he now as an X-ray solution of his own. It's much more basic than Xray or Xylescope but it's a good start. Here's what CSS edit looks like in action:

MacRabbit's CSSEdit: simple Cocoa While CSSEdit has a more straighforward Cocoa look, it's the only one in this group which will allow you to write stylesheets Right now I am opening up my stylesheets in BBEdit but I should change that

At least one of the above applications is essential to a web designer or developer's toolkit. Frankly I'd recommend owning all three of them (I do).

Prices:

Xray- free Xylescope - $20 CSS Edit - $30 The old free fallback for CSS analysis is Chris Pederick's Web Developers toolbar for Firefox, but while the Web Developers toolbar was a breath of moutnain air when it first came out and can help in a pinch, it's not a lot of use for fine tweaking and requires a lot of guesswork and typing.

Chris Pederick's Web Developer's toolkit - the original CSS design tool Straightforward and essential but less flash than the other three

A bit of free SEO advice for Western Civilization: they should have called their bookmarklet CSS Xray or Xray CSS as the bookmarklet is basically outstanding linkbait. If they had done that they would have had all their incoming links with CSS in the anchor text. I don't think the term Xray on its own will help them much. On the other hand, WestCiv are garnering a huge number of designcentric weblog links. I hope they write an article on how Xray has affected their rankings for their targeted terms.

By Alec

Xray Eyes for CSS

Post from: Foliovision

How to Sponsor a WordPress Theme Successfully | How to audit a theme sponsorship

alec — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 01:59:32 +0000

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.

The only thing which counts is the number of site owners who use the theme and leave in the sponsored links. The quality of theme is exponentially important to the success of a theme sponsorship. Sponsoring a mediocre or me-too theme has absolutely no value.

And there are a lot of of second-rate commercial theme developers out there. The first indication of quality issues is an absence of cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. I.e. the theme works in Internet Explorer but the header isn't positioned correctly.

So first of all you have to make an informed decision about the likely success of the theme with the wider public.

How to choose a theme to Sponsor

aesthetic appeal
functionality
cross-browser compatibility
discreet sponsored links
past promotion track record of the designer

Alright that's how you make the decision on a new sponsorship. But how can you do an effective audit on the results of your campaign. Going through one's own backlinks would be a long and tedious process.

How to an audit on a sponsored theme's success

Find some past sponsored themes from the same developer.
Find the sponsored links on any given theme.
Copy the sponsored links out one by one and feed them back into Google together with each individual sponsored link in quotation markets.
See how many results come back.

Those are all the results you are going to get.

Keep in mind people who find, download and change their WordPress theme are likely to change it again, so these can't be considered permanent links, but medium terms links in most cases.

Let's work through a specific example. Let's start with the rather attractive and well-named 1984 theme from Linkrain who is one of the better and more active commercial WordPress theme developers:

1984

1984 has had 757 downloads as of today from themes.wordpress.net, a very respectable number for a relatively new theme.

The sponsored links are

SEO Friendly Web Directory
Software
Electronics and Appliance Stores
7CD Directory

Here's the Google query you run "SEO Friendly Web Directory" "Software" "Electronics and Appliance Stores" "7CD Directory". Here are the results: 1 to 5 sites. Not what we were hoping to see. Two from LinkRain's own weblog. Was that the result we were hoping to see? Not at all.

Google-Results

From the same designer, the rather more original Burned Page with only 361 downloads from WordPress.com yields 74 results in Google - some of them quite good PR 3 and 4 sites. A rather better return on investment for your $100.

Burnedpage

By the way, it is necessary to do a sight check on a number of the results to make sure that the sites are really using the theme and it's not some weird coincidence or a grouped theme buy (5 themes sponsored by the same group).

Alternatively if one wanted to do a check on the backlinks - which at this point can only be usefully don using Yahoo - the following query works Yahoo Search with the following query works linkdomain:www.mobiles.co.uk/ "We Buy Houses" "SEO Friendly Web Directory". In the case of the Burned Page, Yahoo yields 14 confirmed backlinks along with 186 hidden results. Not great.

Burned Page is a good example of an ordinary but visually original theme.

So is theme sponsorship a total waste of time?

Not entirely. The kind of gem you want to unearth is the Tiga theme which dates from May 2006. 15604 downloads. 543,000 results in Google. Unfortunately for sponsers none of the links are sponsored. The two links I used to audit Tiga distribution are designer links.

Tiga-Ozh

Just goes to show that the best things in life money can't buy (love, friendship). In general the quality and originality among sponsored themes is extremely mediocre. What you are looking for as a buyer is an amazing theme - it might even be worth setting up a great graphic designer to do one according to your own specs and add the quality coder after the fact. A single amazing theme could be worth thousands of dollars of incoming links.

On the other hand, no one can predict if a theme will get 1500 downloads and two hundred results or 15000 downloads and 500,000 results. There is a bit of a roll of the dice.

Now that the WordPress theme market is so saturated, it is even harder to gain traction for anything but a top notch theme.

My own belief is that any theme with more than two sponsored links (including designer) will have a lot more trouble taking off. Or users will just use the theme and rip out the links. People are more and more aware of things like footer links.

One golden theme could bring you 500,000 incoming links!

In general, I would avoid the theme auctions at DigitalPoint.com. The quality of themes is quite mediocre, mainly driven by a commercial mindset and quantity not quality. Most of the designers are from places like the Philipines or India. For the most part, their work does not measure up to the best independents in the North America and Europe. For the moment, their work is mostly cheap knockoffs.

The other issue is the theme links are auctioned off which is a terrible waste of time (I lost a sponsorship after 3 days when the designer extended the auction an extra hour). When I first started sponsoring themes the buy it now was low enough, that I would just buy the sponsorship and forget about it. Now they've jacked the buy it now prices up high enough ($150/link) that you have to be in their with a bid in the $75 to $90 range to get a fair deal.

My own vote is for commissioning a theme from a designer with a great track record. Finding that designer is however the subject of another post another day.

WordPress themes, link audit, DigitalPoint.com, web design, buying links, sponsored themes, site promotion

By Alec

How to Sponsor a WordPress Theme Successfully | How to audit a theme sponsorship

Post from: Foliovision