For wordmimic I have aimed to try and take the outlay of wordpress.org and try to implement that onto the wordpress framework. It’s certainly not been an easy task but after lots of thinking I hope you like the look of the almost finalised project.

How Does It Look?

Ok lets get straight to the point. Here are a few screen shots so you can hang of how the theme will look:

What Do You Think?

So now its your turn to give me some feedback on the theme.

But just before you do there are a few things you should know:

1. The main image on the index can be any size and any image easyily changed by using the custom field “image” and placing the image url in the value box.
2. All the middle and right index columns are widgetised.

Now fire away!

Thanks!

Are there any specific objects you would like me to design so your can use them on your site? (eg images)

What Graphics Would You Like To See?

If you are looking for any kind of image and are struggling or you just want to go for something more visually appealing then please let me know so I can crack on with some new content.

Hope you are all well!

B2L

On top of that I am in a committee for my course and will be busy over the coming week with enrolment and with lectures. So the forecast for the next week is busy too.. but I do have a few great posts lined up on how to make you blog look that little bit better, along with that blog2life will be changing focus slightly (to be announced).

Boxy Feedback

Firstly thanks a huge amount for all those that give their feedback on Boxy (feedback still welcome). Some great ideas about where I can go on to take this theme have been put forward and many many of the ideas will be included.

I will be looking into the possibility of different variations of boxy related to the index layout but we shall see in time.

Pagerank

Great news!.. Satish just informed me that Blog2Life has had a huge jump in its pagerank. We jumped from PR1 to PR4! This is a huge jump.. thanks to all those that are linking to blog2life and those using our themes, we could not have done it without you!

Thanks again!

What I can show you though is an almost complete mock up of the front page (or index)..

Boxy

Ok, let’s not delay any longer, here is what the new theme will look like:

So there it is.. But before you go there are a few things I’d really appreciate you giving some feedback one. But feel free to add extra if I’ve missed anything..

Thing’s You Should Know

Ok a few points to know before you grill me

• The quick links box on the side will be transparent and will become completely opaque on hovering (I hope) and this box is only visible to the Admin (id=1)
• The sidebar will break into 2 after the large blocks, these will be widgetised. I have not shown this on this release.
• The top advert can be reduced to a smaller size or removed.
• The 6 smaller boxes are different because I want to know which you prefer.
• The font is just tahoma (It will be a nice font on the real theme). Thanks desu

What Do You Think?

Ok here are a few short questions about the theme:

1. Do you like the new theme?
2. Are there any area’s you don’t like?
3. Of the 6 smaller boxes which display do you prefer? (They are numbered 1 - 6, top row left to right 1, 2, 3 and bottom 4, 5, 6)
4. Would you prefer categories or tags to be shown on the theme?
5. Do you like the items that are shown in the footer?
6. Would the quick links box be useful to you?
7. Any other things you would like to add?

Thanks a huge bunch to all those that leave a comment and as a thanks I will try to give all those that do comment 30 Entrecard Credits (Sorry its not more but I need enough to go around for everyone!)

So if you leave a comment leave me the relevent entrecard details and I shall transfer the credits as soon as I can.

Prize winners

One last thing I’d just like to announce that the winners of 100 Entrecard credits each in reward for commenting on our last post.

The winners of this are Arun and Sunil, could you please drop me your entrecard details.

Thanks for all the great idea’s everyone. They will go a long way to help making this theme.

Instead of just designing into the theme what I personally find useful (on that note, I have got a few great features planned already) I want your feedback on features you found very useful in other themes you may have used. I am also open to the idea of new features you’d like to see in a theme that you would find incredibly useful and that could mean a reduction in plugins.

Market Research

As all good writers know, market research is a key factor in getting all the information to assemble a great in-depth post.. so why is this different for layout design? I can only assume its not..

In response to this post I’d love to get some feedback on what you look for in a website theme on all levels as a way of trying to establish some of the key features looked for in a Wordpress theme. This includes frontend and backend features built into the theme.

For example..

I find “Edit” links present on post very useful in case I quickly want to edit some dodgy wording or fix a link.

Boxy: The Theme So Far

In order to meet the high standards set in today current mine-field of quality (and poor) Wordpress themes I need to know exactly what you look for in a theme. With the help of you I hope to turn an almost finished design into a highly powerful, easy to use, great looking theme.

The vast majority of the design is complete but Im looking for any areas I can further improve and customise to fit in perfectly with current web standards and make to make your blogging experience as simple and as quick as possible.

As a thanks the two best idea’s put forward will each receive 100 entrecard credits.

Now get those gears grinding!..

Thanks for the help

The holiday was great.. and for the record whoever tells you disney world is for kids has never been.. there are some many great rides and shows to see there is never enough time to see them all!

To Do’s

I promised a long array of new things to come on my return and I will start working away at those ideas over the next few weeks but I need about a week to set myself back up and get myself focused on some new jobs.

For those interested I have started working on a new design (well I started the morning or my return on Saturday). The new theme is called “boxy”.. and I will release a few screenshot of the new working design as I complete the design process. For now the theme is almost finished on the design stage and soon it will be time to start coding the theme into something nice.

Your Opinions Required

Another thing that recently popped up that I’d love to get some feedback on is about the post topics on blog2life. After talking to a fellow friend and subscriber to blog2life it came to light that maybe blog2life should narrow its horizons and focus its efforts on Webdesign and Graphic Design and shy away from the Blog Development Side.. I’d like to know what you think blog2life should do? Do you think we should continue as before or begin to focus our efforts else where? If so where whould we focus our efforts?

I am heading to florida with the samily for the holiday and I hope the weather is going to be nice when we get there. The current state of affairs shows a huge hurricaine right over where we are going to be staying but with a bit of luck this will have cleared in the next few days.

Why I’m In Need Of A Vacation

Working full time in a 9-6 job and trying to blog and design websites has been exhausting over the last 2 months. Little sleep.. long hours working and then about the same hours blogging designing and socialising have slowly got the better of me and it’s starting to effect all my work and I have been rapidly burning out.

I’ve been working almost 18hour days over the last month or so with just 6hrs sleep or less on average. So now it is time for a rest to recharge my batteries and have some time for myself.

What Going To Happen To Blog2Life?

Nothing! We will still remain live and will be back up and running as soon as I return in 2 weeks so don’t go anywhere..

What Will We Expect To See When I Return?

I hope that my holiday will give me the chance to come up with more interesting content and give me some tmie to reflect on new idea’s I’ve got in store for B2L

Here’s a short run down of things I hope to start after the holiday:

• New Wordpress Themes
• “Top Tips To A better Looking Blog” Series
• More “Post Styling” Articles
• More Free Icons
• “Ask The Admin” Launch
• Competitions
• and much more..

Until then stay well and we shall see you very soon!..

Blog2Life

All we ask is that you do not distribute them from your own site and where relevant you direct visitors to this page. Thanks for supporting B2L…

Feather Quill

Here is a free icon of a feather quill. The left has a white border while the right is transparent. Hover image for an example.

Download

Download Left (15.1kb)

Download Right (10.7kb)

Feather Quill And Ink Bottle

Here is a free icon of a feather quill with an ink bottle along with a little ink trail. The left has a white border while the right is transparent. Hover image for an example.

Download

Download Left (13.8kb)

Download Right (10.7kb)

Feather Quill Writing

Here is a free icon of a feather quill writing on paper. For best results this image should be reduced in size as the text begins to fit the image better when it is smaller. The left has a white border while the right is transparent. Hover image for an example.

Download

Download Left (32.8kb)

Download Right (29.8kb)

Enjoy.. And thanks again for supporting B2L!

Their software enables you to see what links your visitors are clicking on and can help you optimise your website by showing which features on your site are more popular and which are not worth the webspace they appear on. It can also go some way to optimise adverts on your website.

What is Crazy Egg?

Crazy Egg is a free website analytic tool that is dedicated to showing where your visitors are clicking rather than overall website statistics and personally I think they do it brilliantly!

What Features Do They Offer?

Crazy Egg offer 4 great features allowing you to identify and track all the clicks on a specific web page:

• Single Link Click Tracking
• List Of Clicked Links By Popularity
• Web Page Heatmap
• Web Page Confetti (Shows individual clicks)

1. Single Link Click Tracking

This feature allows you to views a breakdown of all the links on your website individually. Each link is highlighted by a small box which on clicking expands to show the percentage of your page clicks that go through that link.

The expanded option can also be expanded a little further to allow you to see a breakdown of referral links. So you can see the site that clicker arrived from. For example those Wordpress theme websites sending traffic to B2L had a huge proportion of visitors clicking on the “Themes” link in the header .. etc

2. List Of Clicked Links By Popularity

This option allows you to view a list of your highest clicked website links in order. This can be helpful to see what area’s your visitors are most interested in and displays information on the total number of clicks a link has received and the percentage of total clicks those links have received.

This list also shows you the type of link that your visitors have been clicking on, for example whether the link was and <img>, <a></a> or objects such as <span></span>.

Here is a screenshot showing an example of what data this option allows you to see.

3. Web Page Heatmap

One of my favourite and one of the most useful features is the visual heatmap option. This allows you to see area’s that receive a large amount of clicks on your site as an average. The brighter the region the larger number of clicks that link is receiving.

The screenshot below highlights what this option show and as you shall see one of my most popular links is the “Themes” link present in my header. A huge amount of the traffic landing on my homepage click through this link and less clickers through other links. You can see that my “Themes” link is yellow while other links as varying shades of blue at the moment.

4.Web Page Confetti

Another of my favourite feature is confetti. This is a great little feature that allows you to see every single click you page has received as an individual dot. While the heatmap shows you rough area’s where you are receiving clicks this option allows you to see everything in much more detail.

Confetti uses a colour system to allow you to view all your clicks in relation to several different quota:

• Top 15 Referrers
• Top 15 Search Terms
• Operating Systems
• Browsers
• Screen Resolution
• And Time To Click

Here are some screenshots of the more important of those:

Referrers

Browsers

Operating Systems

Confetti is also brilliant because you can see all the information for a single click by clicking on an individual link, as follows..

How Do I Get Crazy Egg?

Crazy Egg do offer a free package and I would recommend anyone to take the offer up. Although you are limited to only a few pages they do allow you to track quite a heft 5000 clicks each month on 4 pages of your choice.

If you require more stats they do offer extra paid services at a very good price.

Here is the link Crazy Egg so you can get started and give this app a test run.

How Do I Install And Use Crazy Egg?

One of the best features about Crazy Egg is its simplicity, easy installation and quick loading framework.

Crazy Egg could not be more simple to install and use.

1. Sign Up
2. Get your code
3. Go to your WP Admin > Design (Presentation <2.5) > Theme Editor > Footer (footer.php)
4. Add your code just above the “</body>” line
5. Go to your Crazy Egg dashboard
6. Now add any page link you want to track by pressing the “Add New Page” button
7. Create a name and paste the page url into the box and your away.
8. To view your clicks go to your dashboard and click “View Results” next to your campaign

Tip: Don’t forget to exclude your own IP from the tracker or you’ll be tracking your own clicks too! Edit this through the “Options > Blocking”.

We hope you enjoyed the post!

Blog2Life

The 2 techniques we are about to explore all hang on one principle.. reward. The best way to promote and encourage the development of an active community is to reward those users that visit or participate the most.

So how do we go about this..

There are 2 techniques that you could implement on your own weblog or website to help increase the number of people dropping their card by offering them a way promote their own website at the same time. Both techniques involve the use of clever RSS feeds from your Entrecard dashboard to show the link of those Entrecard droppers in your sidebar.

Method 1: Show Your Recent Droppers

The first of the 2 techniques involves making use of the Latest Droppers RSS feed found on the Entrecard Dashboard. All those that drop on your site will have their direct website link shown in your sidebar as a reward from dropping which can take users no more than a few seconds to do (Note that a maximum of the 10 latest droppers will be shown). A link will remain in the sidebar until it is replaced by a succession of 10 other droppers (make sense?).

How Do I Implement This On My Wordpress Blog?

Implementing this feature into your sites sidebar is very simple and took me only a couple of minutes.

Firstly you need go to your Entrecard Dashboard

Now you need to locate your “latest droppers” RSS feed. Click the link and follow it to the RSS page.

This image illustrates where the RSS icon can be found to run this feature on your site.

At this point you need to copy the URL of this feed, which should look something like this..

http://entrecard.com/feeds/inbox/XFGXNPKZKY/rss2.0

Now head to your Worpress Admin > Design (Presentation for <2.5) > Widgets > Add RSS feed.

Paste the relevant code for your RSS feed into the link box and a title for this.

Hit the “Save Changes Button” and your done.

The Pro’s And Con’s

As with all things their are always pro’s and con’s and this again is no exception those rules.

Pro’s

The best thing about this technique is that no matter how many droppers you have on your website they will always get their link shown, so all of those dropping their card on your website will benefit. And for those sites receiving very few drops they may even get their link shown twice.

Con’s

The downside to this is that the more droppers you have each day the less time a single droppers link would be shown for. The length of time the link is featured on your site all depends on how many droppers you are receiving each day.

Those receiving over 100-150 drops a day would start to lose the benefits of this method as the links would be shown for such a small length of time it would hardly be worth the effort for that dropper to come back and drop their card each day.

At this point it may be worth looking into the second technique..

Method 2: Show Your Top Droppers (Recommended)

This technique aims at offering a more long-term reward system on your site and I feel is more of an incentive for droppers to keep dropping to stay featured for an unlimited length of time. When you feel that it’s time to advance from the first technique due to the number of drops increasing this is the next step I would recommend.

In this method you will only feature those that have dropped the most Entrecards on your blog. I feel this is better because those that are visiting your website regularly are receiving the greatest benefits for doing so while those that only drop occasional will not featured as much.

The top dropper to your website will find their link at the top of the list in the sidebar while the 10th best dropper will find their link at the bottom and will need to take care as to not be replaced by a newcomer.

With this technique droppers featured in your list will have to continue dropping to ensure that thier link remains on your website which means that you will almost be getting a guaranteed 15-20 drops a day on top of what other traffic you are receiving for those competing to keep thier positions.

How Do I Implement This On My Site

This is implemented in exactly the same way as Method 1 as the first method only this time you need to use the “Top Droppers RSS” which can be found by going to your Entrecard Dashboard

Then following the “more stats..” link and scroll to just above the bottom.

You will see a Feed Icon. Click on this and use that code to feature your top droppers through the RSS sidebar widget.

It should look something like this..

http://entrecard.com/feeds/top_droppers/XFGXNPKZKY/rss2.0

And your ready to go.

Pro’s

This method installs a much more long-term benefit to those that are featured. They will remain featured for as long as they drop their card every day while those that miss a day or more will slowly find themselves moving further down the list. This encourages everyone to drop as often as possible to get themselves featured on your site or to keep their current position.

Those currently featured may find themselves receiving traffic from you and knowing that they are benefiting from this may further encourage them to drop more often to keep that flow of ‘free’ and possibly targeted traffic coming.

Bad

Only those that reach the top 10 will be shown in your list. But as the number of drops from your lowest featured dropper goes up (The 10th best dropper) the chances of getting featured on such a site becomes harder and harder and takes longer to achieve.

Summary

It’s swings and roundabouts for both of the methods highlighted in this post and you may find that one method works better for you than the other. It is all simply a matter of trying each method and seeing which showed the best results on your pwn blog.

I feel that method 2 would be perfect if there was a way to reset your top droppers box to level the playing field after a set time period, say every month or two. This way others that may be struggling to get featured could have their chance to shine.

Promote What Your Doing!

On a final pointer to making both of these techniques work its always important to let your readers know what you are up to.. If they don’t know they have a chance of being featured they won’t bother to come back on a regular basis to take part!

Informing your readers that they have the chance to get their blog featured on your website is very important to getting the ball rolling with new features like this. And the more members that know about what you are doing the more activity it will generate. People love free back-links and through Entrecard it will take just a few seconds of their daily lives to do, “What do they have to lose?”.. I mean they are also gaining credits for dropping.

A post informing your readers of this does not need to be long, it could be just a short post highlighting what method you are using, and where they will be featured (eg. the sidebar). The more prominent the feature the more competitive your readers will be.

B2L Experiences

Here at B2L we are using the second of the 2 methods and featuring our top droppers. (Note: this was at time of posting and may have changed)

Along with our new blog theme we implemented this feature into our sidebar and have seen some great results from it over just a few days. Our average drop count went from, on average, around 5 up to and average of about 17 with a peak of 25. And that was just over a week ago (Date: 4th Aug).

Let the results speak for themselves.

At this point I hope you can now go forth and implement this on your own blog and get improved results from Entrecard.

Let me know if you did get positive results from either of these methods.

Blog2Life