Today, after a long time I decided that my blog needed a revamp. Hope you guys like what I have tried with it. The goals at the start of this exercise were as follows:
- Neat looking template reflecting my minimalist style
- Good quality SEO, and clean permanent URLs (same as before)
- Move from the last host (as they are shutting down)
- Feel fresh and upgrade all the moving parts of the blog
The shift of my earlier posts were pretty easy, using the sophisticated export tool already provided by wordpress I managed to extract all the content out of my earlier blog installation. After that, I pointed my DNS to the new host and imported the content with minimal fuss. The idea of this post is to have a look at what I did to make my blog externals and internals feel good (well for my personal pleasure 
).
Looks (30 min)
I wanted a 3-column layout (on white with clean lines and typography), this was easy to find.
http://rockinthemes.com/rockinminimal-3-column-wordpress-theme-released/
http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tools/20-free-3-column-wordpress-themes/
I settled for Grid focus, which is this awesome theme as you can see – http://5thirtyone.com/grid-focus
So this settles the theme, I did modify the footer and widget layout to my tastes. You should do the same.
Plugins(30 min)
According to me, the real deal in an wordpress installation are the plugins that one installs. The must have according to me are:
- Akismet – Comes pre-installed so no worries
- Subscribe to comments – A very good plugin to make sure your readers keep coming back
- All in one SEO pack – Awesome SEO plugin which allows great control over posts and pages SEO.
- Kwippy poster – Biased, but a really easy and neat way to post on kwippy when you publish a new post
- tweetmeme – Cool widget to help people do an easy RT (re tweet) of your post
- delicious – Share the bookmarking love
- notifixious – Help people get instant updates about your post on email and IM
- feedburner – Good integration with feedburner allowing you to track how many subscribers to your feeds
- share this – Social bookmarking plugin which makes sure you are all over the social internet
- twitter tools – Awesome integration with twitter, must try
- Google sitemap generator – This is a sitemap generator which pings and ensures that the search engines have your sitemap
- Smart youtube – If you are a video guy, this will help you integrate your rich media nicely into the posts
- Stats – From the wordpress stable this is an extremely useful analytical tool.
These are all easy to locate on the internet, just search for the plugin name with “wordpress plugin” along with it. Will try to put up the links next time I look at this post. Too lazy and sleepy to do that now.
Have fun pimping your wordpress !!!! Let me know how it went ….
