Since building web brands in early 2010, I’ve realized that consistency and simplicity are the keys to any design. It didn’t matter if you sell shoes or party favors, a consistent theme or “Lingo” will help you stand out from the rest of crowd.
This year has been amazing so far! I’ve really enjoyed working with DJetc and Snippet&Ink in helping them brand themselves online better. Once I finished with their projects though, it was time to take a look at my “brand”. Going over and developing their websites really helped me see the flaws in my design and message.
Taking Stock
When I started working on my site in early August, everything was out of order. H1-H6 fonts were not consistant across the site, page layouts were a mess and on top of everything else, the color scheme was not what I wanted or liked at all. It was time for a massive overhaul!
Building from Scratch
This had to be the most difficult choice I had to make. Even though it was hard to get rid of the aspects I liked, it was time to develop something better from a coding and design perspective.
New technology
Once I reloaded my site from scratch, it was time to determine how my site would look from a code perspective. After developing with HTML5 for DJetc and several other side projects, this seemed to be the safest starting point. Then I hit a big break. Nathan Smith, the genius behind 960.gs, released a “beta” version of 960.gs that was both responsive and based in javascript. It was, and is, amazingly simple to implement!
Colour Schemes and other things
Once the code was laid down, it was time to develop the colour scheme. I went back and forth between dark and light colour schemes, until I saw the newly designed Things that are Brown website. It was amazingly simple, clean and modern! Taking that design in mind I was able to build this scheme.
Putting it all together
What does all of this mean? It means that I’m putting what I preach into practice! Even though I could make a design and brand “sing” online, my personal site didn’t reflect my current values, vision or goals. Now that my site is re-designed I am accepting project offers! Looking forward to working with those in the Nashville area and elsewhere throughout the rest of this year and the next.
What the heck is WordPress?
Whether or not you’re using it now, you’ve probably heard of WordPress. According to the wikipedia site for WordPress, the CMS (Content Management System) is powering 22% of all new websites starting August 2011. This is amazing! Given it’s popularity over other platforms such as Drupal, TypePad, and Joomla it’s important to fully utilize the platform for your content.
Content Structure
For those of you that utilize WordPress already, picking that initial permalink structure is/was a crucial decision. The default permalink setup is /?p=%post_id% which is fine for testing, but not good for your visitors! With the number of permalink configurations, which is the best setup?
Permalink Perfection
After much trial and error, and with the help of the Using Permalinks website, I would highly recommend one of the following configurations: /posts/%postname%/ or /%post_ID%/%postname%/. I find these configurations help keep a blog fast and responsive while giving the best SEO performance possible*. *This assumes you’ve optimized your blog posts with keywords in both the Title and Post Content sections.
Why not %postname%?
The big question indeed. I’ve seen blogs setup with /%author%/%postname%/, /%postname%.html/ or just plain /%postname%/. While these are OK for smaller blogs of >50 posts, they become problematic in larger blogs like css-trick.com or snippetandink.com. In the case of CSS Tricks, as noted here, using only %postname% resulted in slow performance and several pages not loading correctly. Once the structure was adjusted to /%post_id%-%postname%/ fixed the issue immediately.
Starting with text-based entries vs number/static-based entries: This is the problem.
Based on The Codex,
For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties).
Well there ya go! Simply put, more and more information gets stored in the database and re-write rules when the permalink structure starts with /%postname%/, /%category%/, /%tag%/ or /%author%/. This is so that WordPress can easily distinguish between your posts and pages.
What about me? I use %postname% for my blog!
First: Relax! According to Andrew Nacin, anything over 50-100 becomes problematic with this setup. Think you are about to go over this limit anytime soon? Might want to consider changing your structure for one of the above configurations.
SEO performance
How does this affect SEO performance? Since Google has begun revamping their SEO rankings, overall performance is crucial. Utilizing a static entry like /%post_ID%/ or /posts/ makes it easier or your blog to find and display your content to the world!
I’ve changed my permalink structure… How do I keep my Google Ranking?
This is definitely a something to consider while changing your structure. Even though WordPress SHOULD automatically handle permalink structure changes, I’ve seen that this doesn’t always work. After digging around through several sites, this plugin caught my attention. It allows you to put in your old permalink structure, update the sites permalink structure and have the old links work redirect successfully*. Awesome!*You need to have the old permalink structure saved FIRST while you update the plugin with this information, otherwise it won’t update the re-write rules correctly. In the case with Snippet & Ink, it’s been almost a full four months since the site’s permalink structure was updated. So far no issues with old links or Page Ranking. Awesome!