visnum

I am very upset about this sad realization. For the last couple of days, I was working on the design & development of a new blog. I will not name it now, it is still full of test posts and therefore it would be really meaningless to link to it right now. Anyway, I had a couple of options. To look for a nice wp-theme and fiddle it, to play with the default or classic themes and create a new look and functionality out of them or, finally, write one from scratch. The last option is the wisest option however it has been nearly 1 year that I haven’t been interested in any piece of wordpress code. So, I was also not familiar with versions newer than 2.0.x. Therefore I first opted for the second solution and started tweaking the default theme.

The default wordpress theme is a great failure. It is of course very famous because it is the default wordpress theme. First off all, it is not standards compliant. Especially the order and usage of CSS selectors are catastrophic. I will only name one for now. There is this header part, then there is this blog name section which correctly marked as h1. But then there is this description section marked as a div. This is the most common failure among amateur “web masters” who are just introduced to web standards. The description section should have been coded as a p class=”description” or p id=”description”. There is no need for a div. This is a big error but this is maybe the smallest semantic error in the whole wordpress default theme.

The CSS file is exactly a turmoil. There are many classes identified more than once and that makes it very confusing to work with them. The use of ems are a complete failure. So much that when you change an h2’s em value, it shows up in different sizes gradually. No, of course I am talking about the same class of h2! It is in the commentlist section. Go see it for yourself. Change the em value there, for instance change the em of h2 from 1.2em into 1.6em, it ends up showing growing sizes as comments continue.

And no, I am not using Internet Explorer. I am testing everything on Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, Konqueror (Safari), Internet Explorer 6, respectively. I can’t waste my time to tell all the errors in this default themes CSS file. I want to go into some other catastrophe that the web suffers because of those default and classic wordpress themes.

Many advanced wordpress themes are built by tweaking the default one or the classic one. And that’s a good thing, because once they put those two templates into wordpress core and ship them together, there is no reason as not to be sure about they are the right thing to go from. However, unless you strip all the CSS at once and start writing CSS from scratch by using selectors and classes from the template source, it is impossible to produce a coherent design. It’s awful. Look at the CSS file of the theme “White as Milk”. The author clearly state it in the CSS file as a comment:

THE FOLLOWING CODE IS DERIVED FROM THE DEFAULT “KUBRICK” THEME.

THE STRUCTURE AND LAYOUT IS IN MY OPINION, NOT THE WAY CSS SHOULD

BE ORGANIZED, BUT FOR NOW I AM LEAVING IT THE WAY IT IS TO KEEP

IT CONSISTENT.

As a matter of fact, since almost all themes are derived from the classic or default layouts, it is almost impossible to change and tweak them for the majority. It’s not sufficient to know CSS, you have to master it to a degree where you can find some other people’s errors in it and fix them.

The classic template is not as faulty as the default template but it is also very deceiving. For instance, it doesn’t have a real footer where stands below all the content and sidebar. Instead, the footer stands just under the content. It is not compatible with the widget functionality of a standard wordpress installation. Even not with the latest version shipped!

Briefly, this is a shame. Many wordpress users just think that they don’t know enough CSS. They are wrong. CSS is in fact quite easy but it depends on good mark-up on the template side, and clearly written CSS files. The beauty of CSS and web standards is in their usability, easiness, practicality.

I don’t think that those faulty history of the default and classic templates of wordpress is going to end here. They couldn’t fix it for years right now. It looks like they are even not aware of what is wrong. The turmoil still continues with K2.

I had to heavily tweak the default template files on a very detailed level. This was meaningless. This can be a whole lot better.

I hope somebody pays attention to work on a such important issue.

This is a remaining question and there aren’t any detailed views on that when I make a search on Google. Why not to use Blogspot or Blogger? Is it okay to use blogspot for a money-making blog? Does Blogger eat my share over adsense? What are the disadvantages of using blogspot as a free blogging service?

Well, those are the questions that remained unanswered. There has been a couple of weeks now that I host one or two blogs on blogspot and there is also adsense installed. As with the adsense share, I can clearly say that Blogger doesn’t have a share on your adsense income. You can see this in your adsense control panel too.

For any web site or blog, whether it is intended for making money or not, navigation is an utmost important issue. I can clearly say that blogspot is weak on navigation. Of course there may be third party templates for blogspot that provide a decent navigation but not everybody has the reach and technical knowledge to use them. The most ugly thing with any Blogger blog’s navigation regardless of which template it uses is the “older posts”, “newer posts” navigation. The url you get to when you click those navigation links are pretty ugly. They are neither user friendly nor search engine friendly.

On one hand, it is a fact that there are no use in such navigation in terms of search engine optimization because they are not time-less. Every second or third page of a blog is being changed constantly and there is no meaning in indexing them as page 2, page 3, etc. On the other hand, for the sake of usability, every url at this time should be readable by naked human eye. And this is a problem with blogspot.

Moreover, blogspot forbids to index labels for search engines by its robots.txt file. Look at any blog on *.blogspot.com/robots.txt and you’ll see that access is denied. What I told in the above paragraph is also valid for labels though.

Apart from those navigational issues, I can say that any blog on blogspot doesn’t have less chance than any blog hosted elsewhere. Blogspot itself is a competitive domain and so are blogs hosted on it. Fear not, you will be indexed quite normally when you blog on Blogspot.

As with the monetization part, it is extremely easy to put adsense on any blog on blogspot. However that doesn’t mean they are optimally placed. For instance, it is a huge trouble for an html/javascript illiterate person (who consists the majority of blog users) to place adsense within the blogpost, for instance under the title or under the post body. You have to use escape characters and there is a big chance that you end up with messing adsense code which is against the TOS.

Having said that, for people who can optimize adsense placements and are html/javascript literate, there is no reason not to suggest blogspot for a profitable money making blog on the web. At least it is a whole lot better than wordpress.com at this time where you cannot put ads on your blog in wordpress.com.

Hence, 6% percent of the Technorati top 100 blogs are on blogspot. Advantages are you are always ready to get dug, you are at the hands of Google.

Moreover, Blogger team is constantly making improvements in the overall quality of Blogger. You can see some of them in the Blogger Draft. On nice example of this is the comment box embedded below the post.

In the final analysis, there is no significant difference in terms of pro-blogging between blogspot and a blog hosted elsewhere.

21st century started with contextual advertising and since, many people are trying to gain an income from that. Sometimes it looks like snake oil business, sometimes it looks like treasure hunting. Some people / companies made great money from it while the majority of people could not pass a certain level of income.

If you dream about having some extra dollars or finally go solo with the help of your website / blog then you have to know and understand a couple of things and you have to be patient. So what are those key points?

When it comes to programs like Google Adsense, blogs look like very successful and people usually think that they should have a blog to achieve the material success from such programs. That’s irrelevant. The success of blogs come from sustainability. Successful blogs keep themselves updated several times in a day and this brings search engine visibility. Why? Is it because they update regularly? Not only that. If you update any website regularly and add meaningful articles to it that doesn’t only mean that you are updated but also means that you are growing in quantity of articles. The more pages you have, the more search engine visibility you will gain. This is simple to understand. If I have one page on a certain topic and it is usually found from search engines with certain keywords than this means I can have a decent traffic. If I have a couple of good pages than I would have several decent traffic. If I have thousands of pages in my website, than it is near sure if not hundred percent, that I will have at least tens of pages which would get quite well amount of visitors from search engines.

However, I am not talking about a random success. I am just telling that you don’t know exactly what will attract your visitors and you have to be willing to track your successful pages about why they have attracted so many people. Is it the topic? Is it the advantage of low search engine competition in that area? Is it because you have used good keywords in an optimum level of quantity? You have to look and think about those factors.

And what about page rank? I have a blog post that is #1 in the search results among 4.810.000 results. The page rank of the blog is 3 and this single page’s page rank is 1. What about that? The moral of the story is, don’t get obsessed with page ranks. This is not the only example that I can give you. I have many single pages that rank within the top ten results on Google and most of them have a page rank of 1 and others do not have any page rank assigned at all.

Moreover, what do you imagine when you hear the word page-rank? There are tens of Google search pages in tens of different countries with domains accordingly. This is one factor, a variable. Another variable is that any web page can be found in search results via very different keywords. Example: you reach this page on Google while looking for successful blogging and you are in France, using Google.fr and somebody else is searching for page rank effect on contextual advertising income and finds this page and she is in China. Another reader does a search for “success” and don’t come up with this page because it will be the 18th million result.

So, can you get that? Imagine a web page with a page rank of ten and that doesn’t mean it will show up in search results in every search related with that page. Therefore, don’t get obsessed by page-rank.

Let’s go back to income / search results relation. The page that comes first among 4.810.000 results do not have any effect on my adsense income (I didn’t create a channel for this single page, maybe I should create and check but I know this because said blog is not very profitable either. This is because of the low traffic). Because there aren’t any related adwords client to evaluate this page. Thus, people come and go to the web page and they don’t really see a hundred percent related ad on the page. If they would see, they would most probably click on them.

So, success comes when:

1. You have a meaningful article on your page.
2. You can be found among search results and you are in a relatively decent position, let’s say your page comes up between #1 and #50.
3. The search terms are related with your topic of your article.
4. There are enough adwords clients that need to show their ads on such a page when it is found with such keywords.

The above scenario is the most profitable scenario for keyword advertising, in my humble opinion. Of course, you would also make money when a user comes to your page via some different way (that is not with the help of a search engine) and clicks on your ads. The more ads and the page are relevant in context the more you will earn.

Other scenarios would include that there are several web sites linking you properly on the subject of your page and people come from those links. At this time, it is also important how they link and what the linking page is about. If your page is about flowers and it is linked from a web page which is about bees then this would not be as profitable as a related search engine result.

Then how do I go about creating profitable pages on the web? Find something that would help people doing their job in hand. You can write how-to articles about anything you can be sure of yourself. If this helps people than you will gain visibility.

So, keep in mind that what I tell you here is not about being a famous blogger or web author or content creator. This is about being found via search engines and thus getting clicks on your ads because everything is in harmony: search terms, the subject of your article and the advertisers subject. So, being Robert Scoble is something else, it would create a benefit, an added value when somebody reads Scoble writing about a web conference and while reading he or she finds an advertising about what she needs and clicks on it. Because in this scenario, there is fame included. The advertiser know that quite a few people with a need and want to buy a geeky product would read Scoble. See that this is also something contextual but in that case, Scoble does not need search engine visibility. He can also gain page impressions via direct traffic (that is somebody opens her browser and types in his blog’s address). Also, be sure that Scoble made this fame by working hard about blogging. His blog is full of useful information if not knowledge.

These are some key factors that you have to understand if you feel like trying problogging.