Making own WordPress theme and SEO tweaking
After I upgraded to the last 2.6 WordPress version the time came to make all the rest necessary tweaks to finalise the setup. This should scope the following tasks:
- New better looking theme then the default one.
- SEO related stuff like adding rel=nofollow to links for categories, tags, comments and “read more” links – to all content that is restricted to index by robots.txt or links, that don’t bring value for Google (anchor to comments , “Read the rest of this entry” and feeds.)
- Tweaking meta information for every single page: title, description and keywords.
- Changing heading structure. Post title should be under h1 instead of h2 that is the default thing in the most of all WP themes I saw.
I decided to make my own theme based on the default WP theme. I found it’s quite easy thing that required very few changes to get completely different look. Yes – the theme you are looking is modified Kubrick theme – the default one.
All tasks that are listed above were achieved altering only few theme files and no changes were made to the WP core files.
The first task mainly required some changes in style.css (most changes here), header.php, single.php (adding column for the sidebar), index.php (just deleted some lines) and footer.php.
The second task (adding nofollow) was done by adding a little code to functions.php. Only one line was changed in index.php. I changed only these two theme files and nothing in WP core files.
The third task solved with help of plugin “All in One SEO Pack”. It does it really well.
The fourth task required minor changes in style.css, index.php, single.php and page.php.
I had fun time by creating my own theme. It was easy to achieve the new look for my site as I’m familiar with css. The second task made me find out nice features of WP. It took quite a lot time to find right approach to solve it. Finally I was gladly surprised how simple and easy it is.
More details will be shared in my upcoming posts.