If you’ve ever browsed to a website on your smartphone, you were probably horrified by what you saw and thought you’d never browse a website on your phone again.

You can certainly zoom in and out, if your phone provides that feature, when you want to check a movie time or a phone number for a restaurant, but to present your WordPress blog or website to visitors as is on a smartphone, just doesn’t fit the bill.

Mobile WordPress Themes

When making your WordPress site mobile-ready, there are a few alternatives out there, however, I decided to use a plugin called WPtouch on some of my sites and WPtouch Pro on this site, billbolmeier.com.

You can download the free version at the WordPress Plugin Directory and give it a whirl.  The free version is packed with plenty of settings you experiment with on your site.

Displaying a clean iPhone looking theme by default, WPtouch lists your blog posts in a readable font size without zooming in.  For blog posts, each post is listed by default with title, auther, post date, category and tags.

(affiliate link)

You can tweak these settings to configure how your posts list displays.  Each individual post and page has a font size by default that is readable without zooming.  Again, your results may vary depending on what phone is being used to display your site.

WPtouch and WPtouch Pro

So what’s the difference between the free version and paid version?  While the free version has quite a few settings the paid version has over 200 more settings and features, including support for tablets like the iPad.

Other settings you’ll be able to take advantage of are advertising settings that allow you to control how you want Adsense and other ad networks to display, and whether you want ads to display or not.

You can select a customizable WPtouch theme that allows you to tweak the theme to your liking.  You can set how your website’s menu structure displays and the icons that are used throughout the theme.

You can provide styling settings and enter style elements on the theme’s design configuration page.

Don’t worry about losing your tracking statistics for your site when mobile visitors show up, WPtouch is a separate theme from your desktop, which means you can provide your stats tracking code and keep track of all your site’s visitors.

Both versions allow a visitor to switch between your normal desktop looking theme and the mobile rendered theme by clicking link buttons at the bottom of your site when visited by a mobile or tablet device.  Very handy for your visitors.

Those are just a few of the highlights.

What’s are the problems with WPtouch Pro?  The only thing I experienced was multiple tries to activate the product via their own activation screens in WordPress.  They must have recurring issues with this since they’ve written warning messages about trying again if your activation doesn’t work right the first time.

I just waited for a while between each try and eventually my Pro version was activated.  All said and done, my billbolmeier.com site was mobile-ready with WPtouch Pro in about 30 minutes.  Even though my site was mobile-ready to a certain degree prior to WPtouch, it’s much better and easier to read with WPtouch Pro (affiliate link).

Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips has written a free eBook titled Make Money Blogging.

For those of you who don’t know Daniel or his blog, he’s been around for a few years providing valuable blog tips that include a wide range of topics; everything from blog content to blogging with WordPress to making money blogging to blog traffic to blog SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and tons more.

I started reading Daily Blog Tips in 2007 and still do.  The range of blogging topics that Daniel writes about makes you feel like you’ve struck gold in each blog post.  Check out his archives.

One of the things that sets Daniel apart from a lot of the top bloggers is his explanation of why and how things work with your blog.  Not only does he provide the ‘how to’ information but also the ‘why’ side of blogging that answer the many questions bloggers face during their blog’s journey.

When you start blogging, you have lots of questions, including naming your blog, technical aspects of your blog, gaining an audience, and how to make money with your blog.  Well, Daniel has written an eBook that guides you through many of these topics.

The eBook is chock full of gold nuggets that span 5 chapters including:

• Picking a domain name
• Hosting your blog
• Blogging software
• Types of blogs
• The truth about making money blogging
• 3 blogging mistakes to avoid
• Blog content: types of content, examples, and ideas
• Blog design
• Networking with fellow bloggers
• Commenting, Linking, and Guest Posts
• Social Bookmarking and Social Networks
• Monetizing your blog: Choices, Explanations, and Definitions
• …and tons of links to valuable resources

Overall, a concise and informative eBook from an excellent blogger.

This is not a beginners, hold your hand and I’ll explain every detail eBook.  You’ll need a bit of knowledge about blogging and blogging terms to better understand some of the concepts in the eBook.  But guess what?  If you’re an absolute newbie to blogging, you can find most of your answers in the archives of Daily Blog Tips as well as using the search box to find the information you’re looking for.  Download Make Money Blogging and Get Readin’!!  

Darren Rowse from Problogger has a nice bundle of his 31 Days to Build a Better Blog program in addition to interviews with Leo Babauta from Zen Habits, Neil Patel from Quick Sprout, as well as additional PDFs that will help you with your blogging endeavors.  Here are 35 questions and the type of information you’ll learn.

This post is part 2 of the Inside a WordPress Theme Guide. You might want to bookmark this guide at Delicious as a way to access it easier in the future and share with others.

What’s a 404 page? It’s when you browse to a website and you’re presented with something like this:

The screenshot above is an older and more common 404 page that a lot of folks saw with Internet Explorer.  It means that the server you browsed to couldn’t find the page you were looking for.

Handling 404

There are many ways you can handle this on your blog or website.  Whether a visitor shows up from a bad link to your website or types in a wrong URL, it’s up to you to keep them there even though they haven’t found what they’re looking for.

Sticking with our mnmlist WordPress Theme, let’s take a look at the default 404 code that the theme contains.

If you’re using WordPress, you can use the theme editor to view the contents of the files for your theme.  The screenshot below displays the 404.php file in the WordPress theme editor.

Click image for larger view

The resulting 404 page message using the mnmlist theme will look like this:

Notice the last sentence, “Time to go home.”  The “go home” is a hyperlink to the home page of the blog.

So if you want to change this message you can certainly do so using the WordPress editor.  Note: Some premium themes might have you change it a different way.

There are many ways to provide a message regarding a 404 message and you can get as creative as your blog allows you.

Testing and Resources

Type in your browser’s address box a bad link to my site: http://billbolmeier.com/testing123 and you’ll see my 404 page.  I provide my visitors with a short explanation, a link to my archives pages, a way to search this blog, and a link to my contact form.

Here are some links I’ve included so you can get a better idea of the many ways you can provide a 404 page to your visitors.

1. 404 Best Practices by CSS-Tricks
2. 404 Error Pages, One More Time – Smashing Magazine
3. 60 Really Cool and Creative Error 404 Pages – HongKiat.com

Don’t forget to check out the comments of the above articles.  They also include great ideas and resources for 404 pages.

This post is part 1 of the Inside a WordPress Theme Guide. You might want to bookmark this guide at Delicious as a way to access it easier in the future and share with others.

What makes up a WordPress Theme?  How do you create a WordPress Theme?

I’ve always been intrigued by software and how it’s created.  I’ve been a programmer for many years and it’s still fun to create software that other people use in their daily lives.

Although we won’t be delving into actual programming in this article, future articles in this series will include program code.  So don’t be afraid.  It’s just like learning a different language.

I’ll be turning this into a series since there’s quite a bit of ground to cover.  Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a thing.

What is WordPress – Briefly

WordPress is extremely flexible when it comes to creating websites.  It’s not only used for blogging, which is a type of website, but other types of websites like image galleries, static information type websites, and sales pages to sell a product or service.

The list of what you can use WordPress for is as long as your imagination.  Of course, it might be the best solution sometimes but it is rather robust.

What Makes Up a Word Press Theme?

There are many attributes that make up a theme but I’ll start with the files you need to create a minimal WordPress Theme.  In fact, I’ll use Leo Babauta’s free mnmlist WordPress Theme as an example.

Here is a list of files that make up the mnmlist theme:

404.php – The 404.php file will help direct our visitors to a page that might be missing.  In other words, if a visitor browses to a misspelled page like ourblog.com/this-cool-articlee (notice the double “ee” on the end of the word “articlee”.  The 404 page will display a page to the user to help them find what they were looking for.

footer.php – The footer.php file will display a footer at the bottom of our theme with whatever we want to display or track in the footer.

header.php – The header.php file will display a header at the top of our theme along with other important information.

index.php – This is the main and first file that gets read by the browser when a visitor visits our site.  The index.php file will pull a lot of the elements together that make up a WordPress Theme.

page.php – WordPress is made up of posts and pages.  Posts are typically the dated content that displays on a blog and pages are more static type information like a contact page.  A visitor to your site typically can reach a page by a menu choice.

sidebar.php – The sidebar.php file will display a sidebar in our theme.  This is where you typically see RSS buttons, FeedBurner count, popular posts, etc.

single.php – This is the file that will display our blog posts on a single page after a visitor has clicked on one of our blog post titles from the blog’s index page (index.php).

style.css – The style.css is the file that contains CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) code that renders what our blog looks like – aesthetically.

And that’s it for now.  The above files are used with the mnmlist WordPress Theme.  Some of the files are required for all themes and others are not required.  There are even more files you can create to enhance your blog.

Next time, we’ll start digging inside of these files.

Photo Credit: fdecomite

Recently an interviewer was asking someone, “How do I know, what it is I should be doing?”  The interviewee answered succinctly, “Two things: it’s fulling and it’s fruitful.”

This question was posed in the context of “How do I know what I should be doing with my life?”  Some people don’t know the answer to that question or how to even approach it.  Some folks will find the answer in multiple ways.  Searching for that one thing that they “should be doing with their life.”

Well, as Bloggers approaching a new blog and hoping to make money blogging, the same two “things” apply when selecting a blog topic: “Is it fulfilling and is it fruitful?”  Now, that’s easy to say but much harder to answer.  However, there are some guidelines you can follow to start heading down the path.

Is it fulfilling?

This means you want to do something, you like to do “that something” that makes you lose time and makes you feel energized.  You actually wake up on time or early because “that something” is so motivating you lose track of all time.  In fact, you don’t even watch the time.  The next thing you know, it’s two o’clock in the morning and you’re still not tired from doing “that something”.

Is it fruitful?

Does “that something” provide the where-with-all for you to make a living?  There are many things we’d love to do and that wakes us up early and fall asleep late, like TV, playing video games, or hanging out.  And, maybe you can find your niche in one of those things in life that will provide a living.

Maybe you want to save the world or at least the neighborhood.  Can you really do that and make a living at it.  Is it something that is fulfilling and fruitful for you and any loved ones who might be dependent on you?

I want to be a Jazz Musician

The Jazz pianist Bill Evans was being interviewed by his brother Harry Evans and in a statement about Jazz he reveals the following (paraphrased):

“It’s obvious now that Jazz is the central, most important thing in my life, yet, I never knew that.”

“You ask a kid what they want to do when they grow up and I would have said anything and I don’t think many children do know.”

“I’ve always excepted the fact that Guy Lombardo was a millionaire, it never bothered me as long as there was a little niche I could find for what I wanted to do.”

“It’s a funny thing about Jazz, it’s a creative thing you can turn on by throwing a switch after disciplining yourself to this particular thing for years.  You go up on the band stand and go, ugh, I can’t play anymore, but BANG the switch is thrown and that creative process does work because it’s been disciplined to work.”

No matter what you think you love to do, there will be times where you’ll feel the “ugh”.  But that process that you’ve “accidentally” created over time by doing something you love will be turned on because it’s been disciplined to do so, whether you know it or not.

Recently while combing through some blogs I was reading an article by Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips.  A reader was asking, “What’s Your Secret Weapon for Success?“  Daniel answered, “hard work and persistence.”

In another article over at Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog there was a guest article titled From Blog to Small Business: Tips for Taking Your Blog to a Whole New Level where the author steps through what made her business successful.

Those are some of the guides you can use to measure what you’re wired to do and what it is you want to blog about or pursue on the web.

Bill Evans two-minute interview with his brother is on Bill’s Paris Concert, Edition Two album.

There are quite a few ways you can use Google Adsense.  Here are a three ways to help you get started with Google Adsense.

1. Don’t Use Google Adsense

Google Adsense is great if you’re trying to make money from a website that has tons of traffic.  Don’t forget that people need to click on those ads which will take readers away from your website.

However, one way to take advantage of Google Adsense is to view the ads that show up on other websites that are in a similar niche as your website (blog).  Then, don’t put Google Adsense on your website if you don’t want your readers clicking through the ads and leaving your site.

Take notice of the URLs of the Google ads on the other websites in your niche and visit those sites.  Reminder: If you have adsense ads on your site, DON’T CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADSENSE ADS, you could get penalized by Google.

If any of the Google ads are in your niche and look like something you would like advertise on your website, contact that site directly to see if they would be interested in promoting their product or service on your site.

This tip will pay out a lot more than Google Adsense will.  Now, you still need traffic in order for other sites to be interested in advertising directly on your site.

However, if a site isn’t interested in advertising on your site, you just might discover what it takes to get your site to the level that others would want to advertise.

2. Use Channels

If you do use Google Adsense, make sure you use channels to distinguish which ad blocks on your blog are being clicked on.

When you walk through the steps to create an ad block, you’ll be prompted to add it to a channel or not.  Make sure you give each ad block a name that represents where it’s at on your site.

It will make it easier to see which ad blocks perform better than others when it comes time to check your Adsense reports.  There will be detailed information about each ad block that will help you determine which ad blocks you should keep on your site and which you should remove or experiment with placement.

Example: If you have a sidebar ad block that is a “Leaderboard type ad, name the channel “Sidebar Leaderboard.”

3. Horizontal Menus

One trick some folks use with Google Adsense is to place a horizontal Link Unit ad block at the top of their website to make it look like a horizontal menu.

Since we’re all used to seeing horizontal menus, the hope is that readers might click on the ads as if they were menu choices.  This might work better in some niches than others.

For future tutorials on how to get started with Google Adsense, subscribe to my newsletter.

Question: How do I create a twitter icon/link that readers can use to promote my blog posts, scrunch up the URL of the blog post so it fits appropriately within the 140 character limitation of twitter, and send it to twitter when someone click on the icon/link?

Answer: Use a TweetMeme button plugin by installing the WordPress plugin.

Well, that’s one way.  Another way is to use a couple WordPress plugins (assuming you’re using WordPress as your blog platform) to customize how you want to tweet blog posts to twitter.

The purpose of this article then is to show you how to shrink a URL using a URL shortener before sending it to twitter.  If you don’t shrink a URL, it could very well go over the 140 characters per tweet limit.

What you’ll need:

1. Browse over to the WordPress Plugin Directory and download the Simple Twitter Link plugin.
2. While there, you’ll need to download the Simple URL Shortener plugin.
3. Both plugin folders need to be uploaded to your wp-content/plugins folder.
4. Make sure the settings for the cache folder under the Simple URL Shortener folder is set to 0777.  You can do this using your FTP client software.
5. Activate both plugins using the WordPress plugins screen.

Note: There are no options screen for these plugins.  You’ll use them via code.  Even though this example shows the use of the Simple Twitter Link plugin, that plugin calls the Simple URL Shortener.

Here’s the code:

<a href=”<?php simple_twitter_link(‘%bit.ly%Reading “%title%” – %url%’); ?”>Send to Twitter</a>

The above code is used in the Thesis Theme custom_functions.php file.  It is something like the code I use for the twitter button at the end of this post.

There are other ways to use these two plugins.  Check out the links above and discover how you can format them.

Also, you don’t have to just use bit.ly as your URL shortener.  Many other URL shorteners are available for you to use.  See the Simple URL Shortener plugins descripition page for more URL shorteners.

If everything is aligned after you install the plugins, then the above code should work for you.

However, if you’re using PHP in your blog posts, blog pages and text widgets, you’ll need to download and install one extra plugin called Exec-PHP.  Exec-PHP allows you to run PHP syntax in your posts, pages and text widgets.

If you like this article, please try tweeting this blog post using the twitter button below to try out what this article is about.  Also, if you’d like a couple ways I’m using twitter, please subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll receive that free right away.