Interesting question in one of the forums the other day: I’m using Thesis – how do I customize my footer?

The footer is an often-overlooked area of your web page that, if used properly, can help your on-site SEO.

Some of the things you can use it for include: an additional navigation menu (good for SEO if it’s text-based), links to your privacy policy, your copyright statement, and links to other sites of yours (useful if you offer web design services).

I’ve seen many footers that contain ads, category listings, popular articles listings and all sorts of stuff.

I don’t generally like those types of footer – but each to their own!

Customising your footer, then, can add a lot to your site. And here’s how to do it with Thesis.

If you’re comfortable using the custom_functions.php file you can do it there. If not then you should install Thesis OpenHook, which I wrote about here.

Create Your Content

Whichever option you choose, you’ll need to create your content using normal HTML and CSS (and JavaScript if you want to).

You can do this anywhere. I do it in Notepad, save it as an HTML file and then I open the file with my browser (File>Open and locate the file on your PC) to review and adjust it until I’m happy.

To style your footer you should declare some styling in your custom CSS file (I wrote about the custom CSS file here). Just add:

.custom #footer { your styling declarations }

Insert it Using Thesis OpenHook

Then go to your Thesis OpenHook screen and locate the footer hook:

Click the Footer Hook and paste the content you created for your footer into the box that comes up. Check the ‘Execute PHP on This Hook’ check box and hit the ‘Little Save’ button.

You’re all done.

Use the Custom Functions File

If you choose to add your custom footer via the custom_functions.php file you can follow the same process for creating your content and adding styling to the custom stylesheet.

Then, in your custom_functions.php file, you’ll need to create a new function into which you paste the content you created, wrapped in php tags.

Once you’ve done that you’ll need to add the function you’ve just created to the thesis_hook_footer hook:

add_action('thesis_hook_footer','the_new_function_you_just_created');

That’s it – you’re all done.

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. Thesis Tips: Thesis-OpenHook Plugin
2. Open Hook: Dominate Your Thesis Theme
3. Thesis Tips: Custom CSS Stylesheet

I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client for ages – years – and I’ve always been very happy with it.

But last weekend a wave of emails containing the JS/Redir virus starting hitting me (and they’re still hitting me now).

AVG spotted the virus (which was good) but couldn’t get rid of it (not so good).

So I ended up spending a good deal of time over the weekend getting rid of this thing manually. It was quite a tortuous process, too.

I won’t bore you with the details, but it involved disabling the Windows restore point function, tracking down the specific file (thanks to AVG), doing a secure (10 repetition) delete on it (thanks to TuneUp Utilities), installing another virus cleaner (PC Tools) and doing repeated scans with PC Tools, Malwarebytes and AVG.

And I finally got the bugger

But since I was getting hit by a wave of emails with this virus, I had to go through that process each time. Which means my weekend was pretty unproductive!

I’ve often worried about having a fall back plan for my email client. I back everything up, of course, but beyond that I never had a real fall back plan.

What can Gmail do for me?

But this incident pushed me into action. In an attempt to keep that nasty little brat off my machine I suddenly thought: what can Gmail do for me?

I’ve had a Gmail account for years and I know a lot of people who swear by it, but I’d never given it much thought.

But, lo and behold, I found there’s quite a lot it can do for me.

I’ve now set it up as my email client.

It accesses and downloads mails from my email servers, it automatically uses the address to which the incoming email was sent as the ‘from’ address for outgoing replies, and it sends outgoing emails through my servers.

So people exchanging emails with me have no idea I’m using Gmail (unless they read this, of course!).

One downside is that there’s a limit to the number of email addresses it will download mail from (currently 5). As I had 7 email addresses I was using for different things, I had to do some rationalisation – which was probably a good thing!

And I know I’m still getting those nasty emails because Gmail keeps telling me it’s left some mails on my server because they contain a virus.

Which is exactly what I was trying to achieve.

So I’m quite impressed.

It will also make roaming much simpler. With Thunderbird I had to change my outgoing SMTP server settings whenever I roamed outside Hong Kong. No need with Gmail because everything’s through-the-browser.

All-in-all then, that virus did me a favour. Which I’m sure was not the intention of whichever scum-bag started sending it out in the first place.

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. How Not to Do Business Online
2. Why We Trashed a Workshop Agenda
3. How To Start Your Internet Marketing Business

Thesis 1.8, released last week, brings some nice new functionality and a missed opportunity.

Affiliate alert: I’m an affiliate for Thesis, which means that if you buy it by clicking one of the links on this site I get a bit of beer money. See my disclosure for more details.

I discussed Thesis in more detail here, but to summarise the reasons I use it exclusively on my WordPress sites:

1. It’s enabled me to reduce the number of plugins I used on this site by more than 30%
2. It offers very focused and extensive SEO controls
3. It’s speeded up my site load times significantly

All premium themes offer the ability to customize the look and feel of your sites extensively (and Thesis is no exception) but Thesis’ differentiator is its SEO effectiveness and exceptional standard of coding.

So What’s That Missed Opportunity?

Let’s get the downsides out of the way first.

One of the new functions in 1.8 is a header image uploader.

That’s great, and Thesis will re-size it to ensure it fits your site dimensions (a definite plus), but there’s no facility to add an alt tag, a title tag or a link.

Alt and title tags are important on-site SEO elements and making a header clickable is just pretty standard – so it’s difficult to see why these weren’t added to the header image uploader function.

As a result, I’ll continue using the Header hook in the custom functions file to display header images, by inserting the link to the header image, the alt and title tags, and the link url.

Another niggle for me: version 1.7 introduced the excellent facility to download your site and design options to your PC and import them to the same or other Thesis installations.

This facility hugely improved the efficiency with which I could install sites for my clients.

But you can’t import site and design options downloaded from your 1.7 version (prior to upgrading) to your 1.8 version. So you have to go through all your options and check/reset them.

Not disastrous, just a bit of a pain after having got used importing my options with the click of a button.

But Here are the Upsides

Here, then, are the new bits of functionality that I really like:

Revised Page Options for Category and Tag pages.

1.7 introduced the ability to create META title, descriptions and keywords for your category and tag archive pages but, to be honest, I didn’t get it.

In 1.8 the fields for creating and inserting these have been moved to the category and tag pages within WordPress – and all of a sudden it made sense (I’m slow but I get there in the end!).

Now, when you set up a new category, you get the option to define those META tags plus the option to add an introductory header and an introductory paragraph.

So when someone clicks on one of your categories, the page that comes up listing the articles is fully SEO’d and you can introduce it nicely.

I’ve used a headline that says (for example) ‘Articles on Internet Marketing’ and an introductory paragraph that says (again, example) ‘Click the headline to read the full article’.

This is more reader-friendly than the standard WordPress statement that says something like ‘Posts from the category internet marketing’.

And if your creative writing skills are half way decent you can come up with headers and introductory paragraphs that are a lot more engaging that mine!

Full Support for the WordPress 3.0 Menu

The new menu functionality that WordPress 3.0 brought with it was pretty special, but Thesis 1.7 didn’t support it without some hacking.

1.8 fully supports the WordPress 3.0 menu functionality and that gives you an exceptional range of options for creating effective, slick menus that are also SEO effective.

Support for Windows Live Writer

I don’t use Windows Live Writer but I know a lot of people do. If you’re one of those you now have the option to enable support for it.

Support for 28 new fonts from the Google Font Library

The range of web-friendly fonts (fonts which render consistently in the widest range of browsers) has been greatly extended through the addition of 28 new fonts recently released in the Google Font Library, to the font selection menu.

Enhanced Security

You may be aware that the DIYThemes site was hacked recently. The team have used the experience from that to strengthen and improve security within Thesis.

You can never say any site is totally secure, but it’s nice to know that the automated bot hackers (that account for the vast majority of WordPress hackings) are being kept at bay.

Favicon Uploader

Favicons (those little branding images that appear at the left end of your browser task bar) have been a pain for many.

This is because you need to add a bit of code to your HEAD section in order to get them to display in all browsers.

New in 1.8 is a Favicon uploader that takes care of all that.

Most professional sites these days make use of Favicons so this is neat, because it’s an easy way to increase the credibility of your site.

OK, those are the goodies in 1.8 that caught my attention, but it’s not an exhaustive list.

If you’re interested in using Thesis you may be interested in the special offer I’m running – check it out here.

The related articles below include reviews of previous Thesis releases, and 1.8 builds on the functionality offered in those. It’s a good step forward – and would be even better if the ability to add alt and title tags had been included in the header image uploader!

If you have any questions leave them in a comment – I’ll respond as soon as I can.

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. Thesis Tips: Custom CSS Stylesheet
2. Thesis Tips: Post Images and Thumbnails
3. Thesis: The Last WordPress Theme You’ll Ever Need

The site layout controls on the Design Options page in Thesis offer the ability to completely change the layout of your site whenever you want.

You can select the number and positioning of your columns (content and sidebars) and choose your page framework (full-width or page) just by selecting a few options.

When you use these controls along with the Fonts, Colours and More controls that I wrote about here, you can completely change the appearance of your site without having to install a new theme.

Site Layout – HTML Framework

Clicking the ‘ + ‘ sign next to HTML Framework will bring up this screen offering you the choice of page or full-width frameworks:

Here’s the difference between full-width and page frameworks: this site (that you’re reading now!) uses the page framework and this site uses the full-width framework.

The most obvious visual difference is in the header and footer areas, which stretch right across the page when you use the full-width framework.

The main difference you’ll find when planning colours and layout is that with the full width framework you don’t define a site background colour in the Body and Content area.

The full-width framework makes the three primary sections of the page (header area, content area and footer area) extend the full width of the page.

This diagram illustrates the difference between the page and full-width frameworks:

So defining the background colour for the main part of your page with the full-width framework is done in the content_area div, which you’ll need to declare in your custom stylesheet.

You can then define the background colours of your content box and sidebars (where all your content goes) separately, to differentiate them from the main background colour.

And you’ll need to do this in your custom stylesheet too.

Alternatively you can have everything the same colour, as I’ve done here.

The page framework is the default option in Thesis.  Therefore, you can achieve more with the options in the Fonts, Colours and More section when you use the Page framework than you can if you’re using the full-width framework.

Choosing the full-width framework will mean you’ll need to use the custom stylesheet more extensively.

Outer Page Padding

You can only use the Outer Page Padding option if you’re using the page framework.

The Outer Page Padding defines the amount of white space that surrounds your main content box.

I’ve used it on this site to create that white space above the header, below the footer and to each side of the main content box.

If you’re using the page framework the default setting is 1.0, but you can select a different size or de-select it altogether (select 0.0).

Site Layout Columns

The layout columns section allows you to define how many columns you want on your site and the individual width of each.

You have a choice of between 1 and 3.

Only one of them will be a content column but, if you wanted a second column to act as a content column, you could make one of the sidebars equal in width to your content column and use a text widget to create your extra content.

Note, though, that you’d need to define your content in the text widget in HTML and it would static.

The more usual approach is to have your content column the widest and either one or two narrower sidebar columns.

If I’d selected 3 columns from the drop down menu in the image above, I’d be presented with boxes for the Content, Sidebar 1 and Sidebar 2 columns, in which I’d define their individual widths

Being able to select the individual width of each column gives you the flexibility of having one wide sidebar into which you could embed videos, and a narrower one, in addition to your content column.

Remember that if you’re using a header graphic you’ll have to correlate the total width of your content box, which is driven by the widths of the individual columns, with the width of your header graphic.

Column Order

In the Column Order section you can select how you want to position your content and sidebar columns in relation to each other.

Because I only selected 2 columns in the previous section I’m only offered options for a two-column layout in this section.

If I’d selected three columns previously I’d be presented with more options here.

Simply click the radio button against the layout you want.

Custom Stylesheet

The final section in Site Layout is the custom stylesheet section:

This simply activates the custom stylesheet, which you will definitely need to do if you choose the full-width framework!

Checking the check box will activate the custom stylesheet. I covered the custom stylesheet in a separate article here.

OK, that’s it for the site layout options. If you need any clarifications leave me a comment and I’ll clarify

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. Thesis Tips: Design Options – Colours and Fonts
2. Thesis Tips: Custom CSS Stylesheet
3. Thesis Tips: Thesis-OpenHook Plugin

Images add hugely to the visual appeal of a post and help to keep site visitors engaged.

And if you’re using the Teasers option (magazine style layout) for displaying posts on your blog page, Thesis will automatically resize your post image to fit into the Teaser box.

The Post Images and Thumbnails section on the Design Options screen enables you to set the default positioning of images and thumbnails you use as introductions to your posts.

These controls are limited to the image at the beginning of your articles.

So when you insert an image into the body of your articles you’ll still need to use the ‘Add an Image’ control from the WordPress Add New Post screen toolbar.

Accessing the Post Images and Thumbnails Controls

Go to the Design Options screen and locate the Post Images and Thumbnails section:

Post Image Settings

Click the ‘ + ‘ sign next to Default Post Image Settings to view the available settings for post images:

Click on the radio buttons describing the horizontal and vertical position in which you’d like your post images to appear.

Click the check boxes against any of the options you want.

The options are self explanatory except, possibly, the archives pages option: this refers to the pages that are displaid when you click on a Category or Tag link.

Here’s an example of what selecting the Show Images on Archive Pages looks like to a site visitor:

Articles on Hong Kong.

Thumbnail image settings

The thumbnail settings tell Thesis how to position images that you display in your teasers box, if you’re using that option.

To view the Thumbnail settings click the ‘ + ‘ sign next to Default Thumbnail Settings:

You’ll see that Thesis has automatically applied the same settings you selected in your default post images settings, so you don’t need to do anything here unless you want to change the position settings.

You may want to change the default thumbnail size, depending on how wide you’ve made your content column.

The only change I’ve ever made to this is to increase the default size when I’m using a wider than usual content column. Otherwise I just accept the default.

Creating a Post Using The Thesis Post and Thumbnail Settings

Once you’ve set those default settings they will automatically be applied to any post where you define the image URLs in the post write screen (but you can over-ride them on any individual post if you want to).

Below your edit box on the Add New Post screen you’ll find these fields:

Firstly, you’ll need to upload the images you want to use to a folder on your server, outside the WordPress folders.

I create a folder called ‘images’, located in the root, and upload all my images to that.

So when you create a new post and want to add a post image all you need to do, then, is add the full URL of the image you uploaded to your images folder, to the box under Post Image (circled above).

To improve the SEO of your article you should also enter a description in the second box – the post image ‘alt’ text.

Thesis will then automatically insert your image in the location you specified in the default settings, or the settings on the post page (below the image alt text box) if you’re over-riding the defaults.

And here’s the really neat part: If you’re using the Teasers option Thesis will automatically resize your image and display it in the teasers box.

You don’t need to specify the URL (unless you want to use a different image). You don’t need to do anything at all. Just leave the fields in the Thumbnail Image area empty.

Here’s an example of a post image added by Thesis (you can make the post image any size you want):

Article on Boracay.

And here’s how that article and image appear on the blog page when you’re using Teasers:

Blog page.

OK, that’s it for Post Images and Thumbnails. If you need clarification on anything leave a comment and I’ll clarify!

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. Thesis Tips: Custom CSS Stylesheet
2. Thesis Tips: Design Options – Colours and Fonts
3. Thesis Tips: Thesis-OpenHook Plugin

The Thesis Custom CSS Stylesheet is the tool you use to build on the colours and fonts you set up in the Design Options screen, to make your WordPress site uniquely yours.

Keep in mind the point I made in the article on design options: in order to keep your site coding as efficient as possible (which speeds up site load times) you should keep your custom stylesheet as small as possible.

That means making sure that you only use it for tweaks that you can’t accomplish through the Design Options screen.

Why use a custom stylesheet instead of the theme’s primary stylesheet to make changes?

Because if you use the primary stylesheet you’ll lose all your customisations whenever you upgrade to the newest version of Thesis.

Using the Custom Stylesheet enables you to preserve your customisations.

Activate the Custom Stylesheet

The first thing you need to do is visit the Design Options screen and make sure that the custom stylesheet is activated:

Check the ‘Use Custom Stylesheet’ check box and hit the Big Ass Save button.

Access the Custom Stylesheet

To access your custom stylesheet click the ‘Custom File Editor’ link in your Thesis sub-menu:

There are 3 files available for you to edit and the default is the custom.css file. Ignore the other two for now, as they’ll be covered in separate articles.

The beauty of making style changes through the custom.css file is that if you get it all wrong you can just delete everything you’ve done and start again.

Your site styling will simply revert to the default layout, or the layout, colours and fonts that you’ve set up in the Design Options screen.

In other words you can’t screw up your site (At least, not by doing something in the custom stylesheet!)

Using the Custom CSS Stylesheet

Because of the way Thesis has been built everything you define in your custom stylesheet must be assigned to the .custom class.

The one exception to this is the BODY tag.

Apart from that one, all style declarations in the custom stylesheet must start with the .custom class.

So, for example, if you want to define some styling for the header div, your style declaration would start like this:

.custom #header { first-property: value; }

If you’re defining some styling for the sidebar class your declaration would be:

.custom .sidebar { first-property: value; }

A link would be:

.custom a, a:active { first-property: value; }

And so on.

In the article on the Design Options screen I described how to define the font size, family and colour for your headlines (H1 tag) by clicking/selecting the attributes you want on that screen.

But you cannot make those tags bold in the Design Options screen. You have to do that from the custom stylesheet.

I also said in that article that you should only use the custom stylesheet for items you cannot define in the Design Options screen.

Therefore, if you want to make your headlines bold, in addition to your preferred font family, font size and font colour, you would simply select those font settings in the Design Options screen and add the bold declaration to your custom stylesheet:

.custom H1 { font-weight: bold; }

Finding the correct selector to edit

One of the most frustrating things about working on the styling of a site that someone else has built is finding the correct selector to edit.

Some of the selectors (e.g. the header div) are obvious. Many are not.

There are two ways you can save yourself hours of frustration here:

1. If you’re using Firefox, install the Firebug addon
2. Go to the Thesis main stylesheet and locate the appropriate selector there

The Firebug addon is by far the best way of identifying the selector you need.

Once you’ve installed it you can simply activate it, select the ‘inspect’ tool (second item from the left on the toolbar), hold your cursor over the bit of the page you want to change and Firebug will give you the exact selector name.

If you’re using a browser that doesn’t support Firebug then you can go to the main Thesis stylesheet and read through it until you find the selector you’re looking for.

Often there will only be a minor difference from what you would expect (for example sidebar vs. sidebars).

Before discovering Firebug, I used to copy the code I needed from the main stylesheet, paste it into the custom stylesheet, delete all the stuff I didn’t need and edit the selector I did need.

As I said, Firebug is an infinitely better solution, but the second option will work if you can’t use Firebug for any reason.

OK, that’s it for the custom stylesheet. If you need any clarifications leave a comment and I’ll clarify

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. Thesis Tips: Design Options – Colours and Fonts
2. Thesis Tips: Thesis-OpenHook Plugin
3. Thesis Tips: Design Options Site Layout

Although I’m focusing primarily on the Design Options screen in this article I do have to refer to the Site Options screen occasionally.

Please read carefully in those parts as the names of different sections are quite similar and can be confusing

The Design Options screen gives you point and click control over a wide range of visual and style features on your site.

For further control, and to really put your personal stamp onto a site, you also have a custom CSS stylesheet, which is covered in a separate article.

Here we’ll look at the fonts, colours and other style controls in the Design Options screen.

In the interests of efficient coding you should achieve as much of your styling as you can through this screen. Only use the custom CSS stylesheet for those extra tweeks that you can’t achieve here.

So, you access your Design Options screen through the Thesis sub-menu:

Clicking that link brings up a screen on which the first section is ‘Fonts, Colours and More’.

Each sub-section has a ‘ + ‘ to the right, and clicking this will expand the menu of options.

Body and Content

The first option sets the default font for the site and the top 8 fonts in the list (marked with ‘ * ‘) are web-friendly, meaning that they’ll display consistently in the widest range of browsers.

Below that are the basic, site-wide colour settings for the site background, page background, text and links.

When you click on one of the small panels a colour palette opens up (see above), so you can select your colour visually.

Alternatively (and this is my preferred method) you can use a colour schemer (there are lots of free ones available online) to choose a primary site colour and let the colour schemer come up with complementary colours.

From the colour schemer you can capture the colour hex codes, and type them into the small panels above (without the preceding ‘ # ‘) to define the colours for the site.

The last two check boxes in this section enable you to insert dividing lines between the different sections on the page and add a shadow effect to each side of the main content area.

Content Area

This section enables you to select the primary font size for your site. This is the font size that will be used for the content of your posts and pages.

One of the really neat things about Thesis’ coding is that once you’ve selected the primary font size all other font size variations are defined in relation to this through the ‘em’ unit.

The starting point is 1.0em and a smaller font size is defined as, for example, 0.9em.

Because font sizes are defined in relation to the primary font size, this ensures that they remain in the correct proportions across the widest range of browsers.

‘Hard coding’ font sizes (e.g. 16px) can lead to distortions in the relative size of fonts in different browsers.

Navigation menu

Here you can select the font and colours for the various attributes in your navigation menu.

Most of the options are self-explanatory, but a couple may need clarifying: the options called ‘parent’ refer to the parent page (link) in cases where you’ve used a drop-down menu.

Similarly, the item called sub-menu width refers to the width of the tabs that drop down.

Just a note here: although the font size is defined as a fixed size (12pt on this screen) it’s converted to the ‘em’ unit I referred to above when you select a size and save.

Header area

I have to refer to the Site Options screen in this section – read carefully!

You only need to define settings in this section if you’re not using a header image or graphic.

If you’re using one of those then you need to go to the Display Options section on the Site Options page and uncheck both check boxes in the Header sub-section.

If you’re not using a header graphic then you can set the font type, colour and size for your site title and tagline here.

Headlines and sub-headers

The headline is the title of your post or page (usually H1) and the sub-headlines are the H2 and H3 titles.

Here you can select the fonts and colours of each, and the primary size for your main title.

Bylines and Post Meta data

Again, I have to refer the the Site Options screen in this section.

The post meta data includes the author name, date of the article, the category it’s in and other information that’s displaid under the title of each article.

You can select all, some or none of this data to be displaid in the Bylines section under Display Options on the Site Options screen.

Many people prefer not to display the date on which an article was published. If this is you, then you can turn off the display of the published date in the Bylines section on the Site Options screen.

If you choose to display any of the Byline data then you can select the font, font size and font colour in the Bylines and Post Meta Data section on this screen (Design Options).

The last 4 items under the Fonts, Colours and More section (Code, Multi Media Box, Sidebars and Footer) all offer the same 3 controls: the font type, colour and size to be used in each area.

OK, that covers the settings under this section.

Again, in order to achieve the most efficient site coding possible you should do as much of the colouring and sizing as you can in this section.

There are, however, some occasions where you’ll need to use the custom CSS stylesheet – for example if you want to make your post titles bold.

But be sure to only define attributes in the custom stylesheet that you can’t define here.

Also note that if you do define something in the custom CSS file that can be defined on the Design Options screen (for example font size), then the setting in the custom CSS file will take precedence.

This means that if you subsequently attempt to make a change in the Design Options screen (change the font size) it won’t have any effect unless you first delete the font size entry in the custom CSS file.

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. Thesis Tips: Design Options Site Layout
2. Thesis Tips: Custom CSS Stylesheet
3. Review of Thesis 1.6 for WordPress

The first thing I do when I create a new installation of Thesis is install the Thesis-OpenHook plugin.

One of the most powerful features of Thesis is the custom-functions.php file. It enables you to move different elements of your page around and add bits and pieces wherever you want.

But if you’re not a PHP coder you’re a bit stuck. Enter Thesis-OpenHook.

You can add Thesis-OpenHook through the ‘Add New’ button on your plugins page, (just search for ‘thesis-openhook’) or download and install it manually from here.

Once it’s installed and activated it will appear in your ‘Appearance’ sub-menu:

What Does Thesis-OpenHook Do?

It enables you to make use of Thesis hooks without needing to know how to write PHP.

As long as you know HTML, CSS or JavaScript you can add any kind of content or function to any of the Thesis hooks and two of the WordPress hooks.

For example you can add personalised content to the footer of your site and style it however you want. Here’s an example of adding a customised footer (sorry the pic is so small – I’ve described what I did below):

All I’ve done is add the content I want to display, and a bit of in-line CSS to style it, to the box against the Footer hook. Just as if I was writing a normal HTML page.

Always be sure to check the ‘Execute PHP on this hook’ check-box if you have any code that needs executing. The plugin will then apply the necessary PHP to the code you’ve entered and you’re all done.

Thesis-OpenHook gives you access to 55 hooks altogether, which include the WP-Header and WP-Footer hooks – parts of the page that aren’t displaid to viewers, but contain the META tags and other scripts that the search engines or browsers use.

How do I Use It?

Clicking on the Thesis OpenHook link in your Appearance sub-menu will bring up this screen:

Use the drop-down menu in the box that floats at the bottom right to find the hook you want to edit and click on it to go directly there:

The names of the hooks are pretty self explanatory. They all start with ‘thesis_hook_’ and the words that follow indicate which hook it is.

When you’ve found the hook you want to edit just add your content and any styling, check the ‘Execute PHP on this hook’ check-box and click the ‘Little Save Button’.

Tip: If you’re not sure which hook you want to edit pick the one that you think you need, do your stuff, save and then view your page.

If what you just did isn’t positioned where you want it, return to Thesis-OpenHook, go to the hook you just edited, cut everything in the box (so that it’s added to your clip-board), uncheck the Execute PHP check-box, and paste your code into the hook immediately before or immediately after.

Check the Execute PHP check-box, hit Little Save and view your page.

You can repeat that process as many times as you need until you have your stuff in the position you want it.

What’s a Typical Use for Thesis-OpenHook?

I use it on most Thesis sites I build to move the main navigation menu from above the header (the default location) to below the header.

Simply paste the navigation menu PHP call (which you can copy from the instructions below the ‘Before Header’ hook) into the ‘After Header’ box, check the ‘Execute PHP on this hook’ check-box, check the ‘Remove Thesis nav menu’ check-box in the ‘Before Header’ hook, and hit Little Save.

Important note: Thesis-OpenHook doesn’t actually write to your custom-functions.php file, so if you deactivate the plugin the edits that you’ve made will all disappear.

So be sure to keep the plugin activated once you’ve done any editing!

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. How to Customise Your Footer with Thesis
2. Open Hook: Dominate Your Thesis Theme
3. Thesis Tips: Design Options Site Layout

A while ago I wrote an article in which I said that you almost certainly know more than you think you do about working online.

And that once you realise that, you’ll suddenly find a whole bunch of business opportunities opening up. I described one in the article.

So this week I saw another example of just how many opportunities there are out there.

I found a website that belongs to the industry leader in its sector here in Hong Kong. A household name company.

No names, not even any hints, to protect the innocent and prevent me from getting sued.

However, this website (which looks great to the viewer, by the way) was constructed entirely of images (without any alt tags) and JavaScript. The only actual text was the copyright notice at the bottom.

So the search engines wouldn’t have the first clue what it was about. (Meaning no natural search traffic. None)

The reason I mention this is because we who are concerned about SEO, site coding and site structure tend to hang around others who care about the same things.

Because everyone in our little online world cares about these things we think that everyone generally cares about them.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is there are thousands of sites out there that are so un-optimised for the search engines the only traffic they’ll be getting is traffic they pay for.

Not all of them will care, of course. But those that do represent a huge business opportunity for anyone who knows even the basics about SEO and site structure.

So do yourself a favour: look at the source code of sites outside the circle of sites you normally visit. Look at sites in different industries (not related to online work) and sites that are not built on platforms like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

I think you’ll find that a huge proportion of them are poorly coded. And that should make you realise that you know a lot more than a lot of people about building and optimising websites.

Then use that knowledge to create yourself a new stream of income. If you want to, of course.

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. 5 Ways to Turn Recessions into Opportunities
2. How To Create an Additional Income Stream
3. What’s All This SEO Stuff?

I saw a question today asking how to syndicate blog posts most effectively, so here’s how I do it:

Very simply, I set up a TwitterFeed account a while ago. This takes the RSS feed from my site.

Within my TwitterFeed account I set up services to Facebook and Twitter (both require verification).

TwitterFeed takes the first 140 characters of each post from my RSS feed, including the link (which it shortens), and posts my articles to both Facebook and Twitter.

I then added my Twitter account to all of my other social sites, so they now automatically publish my tweeted articles (including the link) as status updates.

Hey presto, my articles are syndicated far and wide, and all without using a plugin.

Cheers,

Related Posts:

1. 4 Ways to Drive Free Traffic to Your Website
2. How To Get Traffic To Your Blog
3. I’m Switching From Twitter to Facebook