New theme up to speed !

Wow, this was a big work : I moved to a new WordPress theme with 3 columns which is, I hope, much more readable.

I quite enjoy the result, and I learnt a bit about AdSense, SEO, CSS and WordPress on the way so all in all, I would say this was worth all the efforts and the time I’ve put in this.

Let me know what you think about the new theme, and if you see more ways to improve it !

Here are the most important things to remember.

AdSense

You can specify which sections are the most relevant to your page topic by placing them between <!– google_ad_section_start –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –>. You’ll typically want to place such banners around your post content, to make the advertisement specific to your post topic and to make them ignore whatever else is on your page (side bar, rss feeds you display, and so on).

Checkout AdSense help on this topic.

SEO

I’ve implemented a very simple SEO technics which consist in modifying the page title to make it as relevant as possible to the post content. The page title is a very important hint on the topic of the page for most of the search engines bots.

Here is an excellent explanation about dynamic titles.

CSS

If you specify a DIV as being “float”, then you must always specify the width of the DIV. Failing to do this, you might get unexpected results (like overlaping DIVs).

WordPress

The template hierarchy is such that if one file of the template is missing,it will often fall back on the index.php. For example, if you don’t need single post pages to be specially customized, you can simply delete the single.php file. Single post pages will then be rendered by the index.php file (provided that the index.php is able to perform the rendering of single post pages, of course).

See the reference about WordPress Template Hierarchy.