When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are several important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

6) Always use unique content for your site

When visitors comes to yours site they do not want to read over and over the same information that most of the site has. Try writing articles by yourself even its annoying and takes time, but visitors and search engines will appreciate that.

Creating a WordPress theme from scratch is not hard. I’ll hold your hand through it.

Tutorials on this topic is being written while you reading this post and the WordPress website also has guides for you to follow. But are those tutorials and guides really helpful to you when you don’t understand the lingo? Even I got lost while reading the WordPress guides.

Tools – Before we get started, you’ll need:

• WordPress installed on your computer. Follow the instructions on Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP. If you can’t install WordPress on your computer for whatever reason, no worries, just make a dummy WordPress install on your website.
• Notepad or other text editors. I use Notepad ++, you can find it at www.downloads.com.
• SmartFTP – If you’ll be testing your theme online, I’d suggest that you download and install SmartFTP or another FTP program to upload your theme files.
• Bookmark XHTML Validator and CSS Validator. You’ll need those tools to validate your theme. They also come in handy when you need to spot and fix errors.

Past few days I see advertisement of new wordpress theme generator, so I decided to full test it and write a review on this one. I had so troubles using yvos lately.

You can visit it here: www.wppal.com

It has 6 premade templates at the moment and there is a possibility to add one of yours templates I am thinking of doing one so they could add it. Though It’s very easy to use, in wppal theme generator just in 5 steps I had a template done.

1. Select a layout from the home page.

2. Change the colors to what you would like them with the color palettes on the left.

3. Click Update after changes to see a preview in real time.

4. Once you have exactly what you want, click save and then click download zip file for download and use.

Besides all the good part of wppal, it needs some more addons, like uploading images for backgrounds, google adsense integration and other. Though I understand that first it needs to be tested as it is now, later we will see what wppal going to bring us.

Keep tracking this post if you want to know what I think about that generator.

I believe that all plugins that I use to Power up WPGeek you can get for free links are included where you can get them.

Here is the list of plugins:

Akismet

This plugin filters spam comments. To install it, you need an API key; and to get the API key, you need a WordPress.com account.

Akismet has protected your site from

Clean Options

Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table.

It’s good for cleaning up your blog after removing unwanted plugins.

Optimal Title
Instead of the default title structure, for example, WPGeek > About, this plugin switches it around to About > WPGeek. It’s good for search engine optimization (SEO) reasons.

runPHP
Allows you to use PHP code within your posts.

Most Commented
Retrieves a list of the posts with the most comments.

Random Quotes
This plugin allows you to embed random quotes into your pages. It also has a spiffy management tool in the administrative console.

DO NOT use this search code in the

search.php
<?php echo $_SERVER [’PHP_SELF’]; ?>

Nobody should be allowed to search your entire server, or?

Use this one instead:

<?php bloginfo (’home’); ?>