Problem:
Seen the dreads of recent Google updates? Your website might look like this, this, or this. Who's not tired of that? Google surely is because they just said "Improve quality and usability". With that in mind, you can hire a designer to clean up for $900, or apply the following solutions which are dirt-cheap fixes.
So here are my tips:
1. Follow the 960 grid system. http://960.gs/
2. Don't use justified text. Looks like crap on the web. Go with left-aligned text, it's way better.
3. Use consistent padding. If you have text in a box, and the text sticks to the box's inner margin it's bad. Give it 10-15 pixels to breath; in CSS it is like this <div style="padding:15px; border:solid 1px #ccc">Some text</div>
4. Plagiarize designs from TemplateMonster. Use Kuler to color your site.
5. Don't name your divs <div class='adwords'></div> because your visitors have AdBlock which makes those divs invisible.
6. Use fashionable 25px-sized headings, and 12px-sized body text, and 11px footer text.
7. Reason everything in your site and don't add shit unless you really need it
8. Those pop-up, pop-unders, pop-ins, pop-out, animated, flashing banners won't quadruple your income as expected and what you gain you loose anyway along with stupid traffic. Focus on building traffic, and rotate ads.
9. Instead of clogging up ads everywhere, steal Facebook's idea and kinda slap those ads to the right of the page. On the 960 grid system you can allocate a 250px right column and only use banners that fit that size. If one ad is too small, simply center that ad in a div and color its background or enclose in border.
10. Finally use the new HTML5 tags <header><footer><article><nav> and role="navigation" etc. They are in the default wordpress theme twentyeleven and you can simply steal them from there
Pro coding tips:
1. Get rid of W3C Validation errors
2. Follow some WCAG guidelines
3. Install PageSpeed and follow the recommendations
Feel free to add your own tips.
Seen the dreads of recent Google updates? Your website might look like this, this, or this. Who's not tired of that? Google surely is because they just said "Improve quality and usability". With that in mind, you can hire a designer to clean up for $900, or apply the following solutions which are dirt-cheap fixes.
So here are my tips:
1. Follow the 960 grid system. http://960.gs/
2. Don't use justified text. Looks like crap on the web. Go with left-aligned text, it's way better.
3. Use consistent padding. If you have text in a box, and the text sticks to the box's inner margin it's bad. Give it 10-15 pixels to breath; in CSS it is like this <div style="padding:15px; border:solid 1px #ccc">Some text</div>
4. Plagiarize designs from TemplateMonster. Use Kuler to color your site.
5. Don't name your divs <div class='adwords'></div> because your visitors have AdBlock which makes those divs invisible.
6. Use fashionable 25px-sized headings, and 12px-sized body text, and 11px footer text.
7. Reason everything in your site and don't add shit unless you really need it
8. Those pop-up, pop-unders, pop-ins, pop-out, animated, flashing banners won't quadruple your income as expected and what you gain you loose anyway along with stupid traffic. Focus on building traffic, and rotate ads.
9. Instead of clogging up ads everywhere, steal Facebook's idea and kinda slap those ads to the right of the page. On the 960 grid system you can allocate a 250px right column and only use banners that fit that size. If one ad is too small, simply center that ad in a div and color its background or enclose in border.
10. Finally use the new HTML5 tags <header><footer><article><nav> and role="navigation" etc. They are in the default wordpress theme twentyeleven and you can simply steal them from there
Pro coding tips:
1. Get rid of W3C Validation errors
2. Follow some WCAG guidelines
3. Install PageSpeed and follow the recommendations
Feel free to add your own tips.
