Hiding your board stats does influences first time users to navigate deeper.

Hiding posts, topic and member count does influences first time visitors to actually navigate. For one it takes their eyes off the number and to the actual content which is nice.

For example like alltopix they hid their post and topics stats. But limited the user activity. Which is quite an effective way of telling users limited detail but still influencing them.

When you do visit that site it just makes you feel to go view it and actually read something. This feeling of exploration should be on every website that want to succeed.
how to do it?

Well depending which software you have you would need to locate the template section holding the html for each forum row and edit out the statistical information. If they are <td.. tags we might need to add colspan into the td tags so that it doesn’t break, it all depends on the design though…

Read the rest of this entry »

We should stop forcing or tricking search engines to read un-useful content

The main reason why I think we should try prevent search engines to read unuseful content would be because that isn’t going to help the search engine helping the searches who are looking for something. Instead of focusing our effort on making pages ranked up over some small tutorial we should be improving the quality of our content. We should be writing content which is useful to users who are looking for something.

Wouldn’t you want to find something which is relevant to your search query on the first result everytime? This is what google and other search engines are trying to do, present the most relevant content to the user. It’s all about content being displayed and understandable to both bots and users.

So whenever you want to increase SEO on a tutorial or content you made, ask yourself this question “Is it useful and relevant enough and could it help other users?” then you may think about optimising your pages to make search engines more aware of your content and keywords about your website.

So you should always think about the users first and google gods may recognise your content and rank it highest on your keywords.

This guide is an extension to my guide on how to make a skin for ipb 2.2.x .

In this guide you will learn how to work with css in two ways. The fast way and the normal way. The fast way is for people who got a local development board on their own machine or one on their network. The normal way is for people who do not understand much about css and just want to change text color or background color.

Read the rest of this entry »

After recent replies on my guide on how to edit skin template for IPB here is a section that I felt I missed out for new comers who wants to edit their logo.

There are 2 ways, the easy way and the hard way. Both are useful at their own circumstances.

Read the rest of this entry »

This small guide will tell you how to increase search engine ranking and keyword phrases with minor changes to WordPress. This actually worked for me and i increased my organic compaigns (meaning referrers from search engine ) by 118% over 1-2 months period. Where it was only around 16 hits a month ago compared to around 160 hits now just from organic.

The first thing I was to add some social bookmarks on my own with just some simple html and the how to from the social network site. I just choose the 2 most common one. I think that is enough because I use them and they are useful. But if you like to add more be my guests. Here is what I have on mine:

<a href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” title=”Submit To Digg” target=”_blank”><img style=”width: 16px; height: 16px;” src=”http://blog.icelabz.net/digg_guy.gif” alt=”Digg” border=”0″ align=”middle”/></a> <a title=”Add ‘<?php the_title(); ?>’ to Del.icio.us” href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” target=”_blank”>
<img align=”middle” alt=”Submit to del.icio.us” src=”http://blog.icelabz.net/delicious.png” border=”0″ /></a>

I just added that in just under the post box. Oh btw the way the posts are being displayed is totally different from wordpress default.

Next I added a google sitemap generator, it’s a bit old but works. http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final

Another plugin that I used is acronymer this is a pretty cool tool which allows you to automatically convert acronyms with abbr tags around them and giving them explanation.

The next thing I did was to add a meta description only to the header. Even though google doesn’t use them for different parts of your site as it generates them automatically. I added it so that people know what the site is about if there are looking up my site. I also think google doesn’t like when people dictate what keywords would be good for the page that is why I didn’t add it.

One of the most dramatical change was the format of my title. The tutorial for that can be found here. I wrote it a few weeks ago. And it worked.

The most important thing I did is to continuously add content, really good content related to what I like the blog to be about. Like this tutorial on SEO and WordPress. I wrote it because it worked for me. And google likes good content which helps users and not copied content. And one more thing that google likes is emphasis words that are relevant. I normally bold up 1-2 keywords or phrases per paragraph. Google likes it

If this little guide was helpful and successful tell me about it by replying to this blog here. No registration required.

A lot of peopl find it hard in choosing colors (colours) to start designing their own forum theme/skin/template *whatever you guys call it these days*. One of the best way to do it is to find pictures that relates to your site. To do so find some pictures on flickr and then you can start picking some colors out of that 1 image to help make a color strip for you to use.

Here is one that I choose for a site about teddies, kids toys or one about children’s. But let just say its for a site that sells teddies. So I went on Flickr and search teddies and pick the first one that I saw.

Now that we have a picture that relates to our site we can now start picking colors out of it. I am going to use my usual image editor to pick colors out of it. Be sure that we take quite a fierce amount of colors to our pallete to build out color strip.

Below is what I got from picking colors that I thought defined the shape of the parts of the teddy bear and just the ones that stood out from my perspective.

And from there I would just add some more colors to it if I wanted to and tweak it here and there to make it suitable for display. Now with the colors sorted you would need to play around with these colors to see which one you would prefer to use as text, content, or background. Remember that you will need to make the page attractive and readable with the colors you chose.