What is a WordPress Permalink Structure?
It is the structure you decide on for the URL’s of your individual blog posts. WordPress’s default structure includes a question mark and the Post ID, which would look like this:

http://wordpresssavvy.com/?p=124

By customizing your permalinks, you can make the URL or link to the same blog post look like this instead:

http://wordpresssavvy.com/124/best-wordpress-permalink-structure/

You can customise your Permalink Structure by clicking Options > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard or admin panel.

Why is it Important?

Choosing the best WordPress Permalink structure helps your page get found in Google and if you have considered your URL carefully might increase the number of visitors who find your page.

Most SEO experts consider the having the keyword phrase that you are trying to get your page to rank for in the URL of the page is an important factor in Google’s method of ranking the search results for a given page.  Therefore you are helping yourself in getting found if you include your keyword in the URL.

So what is the Best WordPress Permalink Structure?
When you go to Options > Permalinks, you will notice there are several options for setting up your Permalink Structure. The default choices are default, date and name based, numeric or custom which show as:

default: http://wordpresssavvy.com/?p=124
date & name: http://wordpresssavvy.com/2010/06/16/best-wordpress-permalink-structure/
numeric: http://wordpresssavvyz.com/archives/124

Here on WordPress Savvy I use a custom Permalink Structure that is coded like this:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

What that structure does is create URLs to individual blog posts that contain the Post ID and the Post Name. Here is an example of a permalink created using this structure:

http://wordpresssavvy.com/124/best-wordpress-permalink-structure/

As I do not want my posts organised by date then this structure makes the most sense to me because

a) it contains the keyword phrase of my post

b) it has the hidden benefit of giving me an automatic short form method of calling the page i.e.  http://wordpresssavvy.com/124/  By simply using this URL I will get to the same post.  I can use this in Twitter for example as my own shortened URL.

What WordPress Permalink structure do you prefer and why?

I’ve decided to create a post on sites that use WordPress and Thesis that are in the business-to-business space.  We are great fans of WordPress and use it for our own business site.  Here are some great examples of sites that we have come across where the blogging features of WordPress are very much in the background.

On May 30 2009 the head of the Google anti Spam squad Matt Cutts gave a valuable and definitive presentation on the right ways to use WordPress. You might want to take notes. Trust me it will be worth you time.

You can browse the slides at

You can also download the talk in PowerPoint format.

I had to add a header graphic to a site using the Thesis the other day.  I found this blog post on how to do it and it worked really well.  However, there were a few additional tips which helped me along the way.

1. Initially I put the image in the wrong folder.  My mistake. The header graphic should be uploaded to the “custom/images” directory of your Thesis theme installation.

2. In following the tutorial I copied the CSS from the tutorial however, it took some fiddling to get my image to position correctly.  In the end it was simply a case of reducing the height of the .custom #header #logo thus:

     a { display: block; height: 100px;

I also had to move my logo image down a bit for it to look right using the css code change:

     .custom #header { padding: 20px 0px 0px 0px; }

What this is tell the image to add a 20px padding to the top.  It is using the shortened form of padding property.  The padding property can have from one to four values for example:

padding:25px 50px 75px 100px;

• top padding is 25px
• right padding is 50px
• bottom padding is 75px
• left padding is 100px

Hope that helps.

Technorati Tags: thesis css, Thesis Theme, Thesis theme header graphic

I have been recently getting to grips with the importance of sticking to a single domain for your blog site. Mainly via three  leading SEO experts  (Dan Thies, Matt Cutts of Google and Jerry West) who are all currently saying the same thing about this, so I thought I would do a brief post about this SEO issue.

Choose your root domain and stick to it.  Use it consistently in all of your linkning both on and off site.  It does not matter if you choose www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com (without the www) you must just be consistent.  Search engines treat the two sites as different sites and therefore you have various issues when trying to rank your site for a keyword phrase.  If you think about it each version of a site is in effect competing with the other.  I made this mistake on a site some time ago and whilst I had told Google via the webmaster tools that I wanted the site to be indexed as mydomain.com I had not told Yahoo and as a result I had a result in Yahoo for both www.mydomain and mydomain and they were different rankings.  Very irritating.

This rule extends to all inbound or on-site links.  They must always link to your preferred domain.  Earlier this year the major search engines agreed to follow a canonical tag which allows you to sort out those sites that do not link to you correctly.  You can use this simply by adding

<link rel="canonical" href="http://yourdomain.com/" />

to your site. In fact if you are using the All in One SEO Pack plug-in for WordPress, as soon as you activate it, this link tag is added to your pages.

Technorati Tags: canonical link tag, use one domain, www or not

Since R5 Ltd took full ownership of WPRemix back in April, they have been working hard on what has now been released as version 3.0  WPRemix is a premium theme for WordPress. This launch coincides with the release of WordPress 2.8.

With over 50 page templates, drop down menu’s and colour schemes, this theme looks very interesting as an alternative to Thesis for people who want less flexibility and interaction with CSS.  You can see an interactive demo at http://wpremix.com/demo/

We have a full review of the WPRemix theme scheduled over the summer.  If you have any specific questions or points you’d like reviewed in detail, please leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: premium theme, premium wordpress theme, Wordpress 2.8, WPRemix

On Wednesday, June 10, WordPress released another top-notch update with version 2.8. I’m running it on WorpressSavvy.com and I can assure you that you’ll want to upgrade as soon as possible for AT LEAST two reasons:

1. The WordPress team has radically improved the code that runs the administration panel, and this means faster admin page loads, smoother interface behaviour, and even faster page loads on your live site (due to some database query improvements).

2. The new Widgets panel is flat out awesome. From the design to the controlling JavaScript, the WordPress team has really outdone itself here. I think this is the highlight of the 2.8 release.

When I did my upgrade I choose the the automatic upgrade link.  I have read some negative feedback about the automatic upgrade but all went very smoothly.

If you are using Thesis theme then there is a complementary upgrade to version 1.5.1 which resolves some JavaScript conflicts.  You can download Thesis 1.5.1 here:

http://diythemes.com/thesis/downloads/

Technorati Tags: Thesis theme upgrade, Wordpress upgrade

In order to hide a page from showing in the navigation menu of a theme created in Artisteer it is simply a case of editing the correct part of the functions.php file in the root of the themes folder. You can access this either through the built in WordPress theme editor or via a text editor like EditPlus.

To hide the page from the Artisteer menu first you will need to get the page number. Then edit the function art_menu_items() in functions.php.  You can see below that all I have done is add the text ‘&exclude=12,3′ to line 527.

Edit the art_menu_items function in functions.php

Before I edited it line 527 read:

wp_list_pages('title_li=');

After I edited it it read:

wp_list_pages('title_li=&exclude=12,3');

Please do give me your feedback below if you find this technique useful and I will write more like this.

Technorati Tags: Artisteer, Navigation Menu, Page management, Theme Editor

1. Editing files directly on my server.

To edit .css files or other code files directly on a server, I use 2 programs, one for PC and one for Mac

On the Mac I use TextWrangler to change my code in real time. On the PC I use Edit Plus.

2. Working on my site offline

Download MAMP and turn you Mac into your own personal server.  This is how I work on stuff before I take it live.

3. Selecting a colour pallette

Being colour blind, to pick colours that go well together I use a Hex Colour Code  tool to speed things up.

4. To add gradients and rounded edges

They can be a little slow to load but if you wanted rounded corners or gradients go here.  Alist apart is also a great design reference if you really want to get into it.

5. Using other people’s photos from flickr

Flickr has a page that explains the rules for using a picture you found on flickr, make sure it has a Creative Commons license and give them credit with a name and link on your blog post.

Technorati Tags: Creative Commons License, Css Files, Edit Plus 2, Flickr, Gradients, Hex Colour Code, Mamp, People, rounded corners

When I set up a WordPress site that uses the Thesis Theme, I want to remove the Thesis attribution and put my own in instead.  If you have purchased the developer’s edition of the Thesis theme for WordPress, you can use a Thesis hook to remove it.  The savvy developers at Thesis extended the WordPress hook system with a host of their own hooks  (documented at the rtfm section of the Thesis theme’s blog). This makes it simple to both add and remove html with the hooks. There is actually a simple one line statement that you can add to your custom_functions.php file to remove the attribution link.

remove_action('thesis_hook_footer', 'thesis_attribution');

You can use this method to remove other html in a similar way.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress setup