How often do you change the layout of your blog? Between my 2 blogs I have changed layouts about 6  times in the past year. Jonzee.com is a Dotnetnuke website so the things you have to do to change the layout is a little different than with a Wordpress blog.

With DNN, most of the time all you have to do is change the skin, everything else transfers over without any other work that needs to be done. Of coarse if the column setup is different, you’d have to move things around, but most of the code and modules that you have added will still be there.

With Wordpress, its still pretty easy, you change the template, and most of the layout is still there. The only problem is any code you have added to your previous template is going to have to be re-added to the new template. Sometimes, when you create a blog and get everything set up the way you like, you may forget about little changes you made to the code when you decide to change templates.

I had a problem.

Recently I changed the template of this blog. I was pretty careful to try to get everything set up the way I wanted it. Adding the things from the old template that I wanted to keep, and leaving out things that I wanted to let go. I was looking through my stats and notice people visiting this blog using a keyword that I had never seen before. So I went to Google and typed in the Keyword and looked to see where my blog was in the listing. I noticed that the blog post listed showed up in Google with a title that simply said "Jonespc.com". Thats not what I want to be listed as a title when people find my blog by doing a search in Google. The reason, if you do a search for something…lets say "bittorrent"… and you see a list of results with titles like

  • "what is Bittorrent"
  • "How to use Bittorrent"
  • "Download Bittorrent files here"
  • "JonesPC.com"

Which one will most likely NOT get clicked on? "JonesPC.com" doesn’t tell you anything about the blog post that is listed. Of coarse if you read the description it will still say the same, but when people are doing quick searches, they first look at the tittle, then read the description. If the tittle doesn’t grab them, then the description will never be read.

When I first created this blog I installed a little Wordpress Plug-in called Wordpress 2 SEO plugin (formerly known as Marketingop.us SEO plugin). What this plugin does is switch it so that the tittle of the blogpost tittle shows before the website title. When you install this plugin, you have to add code to the <head> section of your template. I had forgot all about that when I changed templates. My blog was set to show the website tittle instead of the blog post tittle. This is why my Google search result was showing just "JonesPC.com" and not the tittle of the blog post.

I noticed it yesterday, and I spent a good amount of time searching through the menu’s in my admin section before I remembered that I had to add that bit of code to the template.

Just something to keep in mind when you are switching up templates