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This is a guest post from Claudia Sommerfield see here bio at the bottom of the post.

While creating web pages on WordPress, the assortment of capabilities can make you a proud owner of one of the best designed websites on the Internet. However, if you forget to look into some simple basics, you may find yourself on the receiving end. This makes it extremely vital to remember some vital points while designing a web page on the WordPress platform.

Listed here are certain principles to follow before you design an awesome WordPress theme:

1. Validate your code properly

This is one of the basic principles to follow before designing a WordPress theme. You need to validate your work and ensure proper validation of the code too. HTML, CSS is the other areas to pay attention to where proper validation is concerned. This will be definitely appreciated by a knowledgeable surfer who is on the lookout for great and systematic validation of the WordPress themes.

2. Make your design work across browsers

It is always wise to make your WordPress theme work well in any of the popular browsers. You need to keep in mind the important browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera while preparing your WordPress theme. It is a well known fact that compatibility with popular browsers will fetch you an increasing number of visits across various browser platforms.

3. Comment your code regularly

This is a healthy practice in WordPress theme especially if you have made major modifications to your basic WP theme. This is akin to regularly servicing your code, so that you know what changes you have made along the way from the initial designing of the WordPress theme.

4. Be original

It is always wise to come up with something original if you want to attract visitors to your web pages. Internet surfers are more intelligent than you think and can easily identify a basic WordPress theme that is simply modified to the basics. This makes it unimpressive and the net savvy users may simply ignore your website. With thousands of websites built on the WordPress platform, you cannot expect web surfers to visit your page unless there is something eye catching or unique about your theme.

5. Be prepared for a test run

While formatting your content code, make sure it can handle all the default content of the Wordpress theme without any hassles. This can be achieved by a Test Run that will give an accurate feedback of your newly designed WP theme. If you feel that your design looks awkward in the Test Run then it definitely needs to be given a second look.

6. Make content a top priority

A beautifully designed WordPress theme with no quality content is like an empty vessel that makes more noise. Therefore, it is extremely important to put in some valuable content and quality stuff on your WordPress theme, if you want to run a long race. It is pointless having too many images with hardly any content to match it. Give top priority to the content on your WP.

The latest trend is to make your WP theme widget ready to keep up with the stiff competition amongst good websites. Most of the techno savvy web users love to use widgets and are impressed if you provide them with the same. Widgets have become an important means of cross communication and reference on the Internet and need to be given their place.

8. Customize the 404 page

This is one of the most vital principles to be followed since any bad experience by the user will keep him or her away from further ventures to your website. You should make it a point to always customize the 404 page to improve the user experience. Remember, once bitten, twice shy!

9. Provide Support and quick response

It makes sense to follow user response in order to keep upgrading your themes. For this, you need to provide the user with a quick user response and adequate support. If you respond quickly, chances are that the ser will keep coming back to your page and remain there for a longer time. You can do this by constantly administering your web pages and regularly reviewing them.

10. Customize unimportant pages

To have a good WP theme, you need to customize all the easy pages such as main index templates, search result page, attachment template etc. Make a detailed check list and customize all the easy to forget and unimportant pages for a better user experience. All these pages are always required but remain in the background. However, lack of customizing these pages may result in shoddy work and keep visitors away from your website.

11. Like it yourself

Before finalizing your theme, make a trial run and visit it yourself through any browser to check whether you like it or not. Simply put, unless you like what you have designed, chances are that other users may not like it too. This will give you positive feedback and you can make the necessary changes that are required. Following this principle will definitely help you in bringing out the best in you and give way to an increased web viewership to your WordPress themes.

To design a great and outstanding WordPress theme requires you to follow certain guidelines before you come up with the final theme. This will not only bring out the best in your creativity and innovation, but it will also help in attracting the choosy customers.

About the author: Claudia is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on luxury and technology. She recently read an article on nautical theme that attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on facebook themes.

Did you know that when Google indexes your site and copies your content for the index, it also checks your site for malware?

If you are marked as suspect,  you get a suspect site tag, and it will affect your sites rankings.

A common side effect of a WordPress hack is malware being inserted into your site to download viruses or redirect your innocent site visitors to a nefarious site.

Chaka Khan Let Me Rock You

Singer Chaka Kkan’s site was hacked and marked as suspect, when this happens, you will see this additional line added to your search results

Browsers

Certain browsers like Google chrome and Firefox are keyed into this suspect site system and if you click through to a site marked with malware a huge red screen appears warning you that malware may infect your machine.

Imagine if your clients or site visitors see that?  It only takes seconds to ruin your reputation and that definitely would ruin you.

Check To See If You Are Marked As Suspect

There is a very simple way to see if Google has marked you as suspect, and that is to use the following URL, replacing the red text with your own domain.

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://neilm.wpengine.com/

What Do You Need To Do

You need to clean the malware from your site and then ask Google to reconsider your site and remove the malware stigma.

If you open a Google webmasters account from google.com/webmasters, under the diagnostics->malware tab is a reconsideration request form.

Hack Recovery Course

I cover this topic in much more depth in module nine of my hack recovery course.  Check out this page for full details WordPress Hack Recovery Course

Overview

This is a protected post for members of the WP Owners Club.

In this session I will show you how to integrate your email service such as Aweber or Mailchimp with WordPress.

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Here’s the scenario,you’ve coded up a change in a plugin.  Three months later you are doing your regular plugin maintenance (you are keeping your plugins up to date aren’t you?  Security reasons you know) and you overwrite the customised plugin ARRGHHHH!!

All your hard work is gone, you will have to recode the changes and I bet you have no documentation or memory of how you did it.

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This is a guest post by Tommy Bussey The SEO Coach

Social media is truly changing the way things are done online. Companies are beginning to truly wake up to the idea that it’s not enough anymore to just broadcast a message to an audience, and today, being successful on the web is all about how well you engage people in dynamic dialogue, which is driven by contributing to conversations, participating, and influencing the buzz that is going around for merging trends. So what makes for great share worthy content?

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What is RSS and why is is important to a WordPress Site?

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