SEO Wordpress Themes By Courtney Tuttle

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[Snoskred]

Even before I moved over to Wordpress I knew I wanted to use Courtney Tuttle's themes - Courtney goes through and makes sure there is nothing hidden, and optimises the theme for SEO. There are over 40 themes available and here's a post which explains why you want to use these themes rather than a stock standard one -

48 SEO WordPress Themes And Why You Should Use One

And you can see all the themes here -

SEO Wordpress Themes By Courtney Tuttle

Cutline and Freedom Green are two I've been doing a lot of work with.

[Ian]

I'm using one of Courtney's themes, Modern Paper.  I liked its clean look, and have found it very easy to tweak to get what I wanted.

[Lani]

I chose Modern Paper as well, Ian.  It doesn't look much like it now, though.  One thing I noticed with it while I was editing was that although Court changed the sidebar lists to h3, when I activated the widgets, the reverted back to h2.  I had to fix that up.  Did you have that problem?

[StephenCronin]

I don't know the Modern Paper theme, but I'm not surprised. The widgets.php file in the wp-includes folder has h2 hardcoded into it on about line 49:

Code:

'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => "</h2>\n",

I'm not sure if themes can override this or not. I just changed the h2 to h3 manually.

[Lani]

You can do it with the theme files, which is always better (so I've read?) so that you don't lose changes on upgrades.  The file to edit is functions.php.  This is the change I made....

Code:

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebars') )
register_sidebars(2, array(
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h3>',
'after_title' => '</h3>',
));

?>

[StephenCronin]

Yes, it's definitely better to do it in your theme - I didn't realise it was possible. Seems my theme didn't have those lines, but I've added it now. Thanks!

[Lani]

Yay!  Look at me!  I helped someone with a techie thing for the first time!   

I love blogging.

[Ian]

Hi - thanks for that.  I did it to my theme.   Only one question remaining though .... see in the right sidebar I have one heading which is not picking up the h3 colour.  It is an RSS widget which is unique on my blog.  It does pick up the h3 size, so I'm guessing somewhere there is a setting which is overriding the colour for this type of widget.  Any ideas?

[Lani]

I just went to have a look but it's loading a blank page.  Did you edit anything other than your functions file? 

[StephenCronin]

Lani, Thanks!

Ian, your site is just showing a blank page for me too. Maybe you better undo any changes for the moment.

[Ian]

Lani/Stephen - can you see my site now?  I have been able to all along so I don't know what might have happened with you.

I was editing the functions.php file, but I also played around with the h3 definition in the stylesheet file.  Then I've installed the i-frames widgets plugin and have been changing some of my previous text widgets to i-frames ones.

[Snoskred]

I'm getting a blank page too

[Ian]

Hmmmm.... odd, because I've been able to see it all along, plus just checked my stats and have been getting visitors steadily during that time (and comments, so they must have seen something).

[Snoskred]

It is very strange because the page source is utterly blank..

[Lani]

Hmm.  i've just triple checked, cleared and disabled cache, Firefox & windows and I'm still getting blank.

[Ian]

aha ... think I  know what it is.  When I use http://www. it works fine, but without www it is blank.

Now, how would I have achieved this, and how to fix?

[Snoskred]

I think the problems go a little deeper than that.

I got another blank page when I posted my comment instead of going back to any page..

Lucky I backed up all the blogs yesterday, methinks.. I can get the admin to do a restore when he gets home if you want?

[Ian]

Snoskred - I think you'd better do that.

I noticed that when responding to a comment myself.  Also started happening when activating/deactivating plugins.   Seems to be something broken in the indexing?

[StephenCronin]

Ian, a restore is probably the best bet, but to answer your original question:

The reason the News Headline header is black instead of blue is that it is a link. The other headers in your sidebar are not.

To fix this, you could remove the link (which just points to you main site) or you could change the colour of your links in the style.css file.

If you want to change colour of the links, you'll need to edit the

Code:

#r_sidebar ul li a {

section (on about line 350) and change

Code:

color: #000000;

to

Code:

color: #1e90ff;

Note that this will change the colour of all links in the sidebar, so it's probably not what you want to do.

You'd be better to remove the link, but I'm not sure how it's being added, so not sure how to advise you to do this. Out of time now - have to go teach!

[Lani]

If you're restoring, let me know when you're done.  Then I'll check out your CSS and find and easy fix for it. (maybe )

[Snoskred]

The admin isn't feeling too well but after he's had a short nap I'll get him to restore it..

The other titles are h3 tags - I'm wondering if you can make the title of that widget into a h3 tag also..

[StephenCronin]

Hi Snoskred,

It already is h3, but it's a link as well so it's styled differently. Best to remove the link, then it will appear as the others. (or change the style as per my previous post).

[Snoskred]

Ok.. Ian it seems to be fixed now..

It seems that the code you put into functions.php is causing the problem.

We restored the original functions.php and it worked fine. Then we tried the original code plus two different versions of the code and all three were leading to blank pages again. We restored it and gave up..

If you want to make the change you'll probably have to make it in the widgets.php file like Stephen did, however it is possible that changing it there may have the same effect. I guess you can only try it and if it doesn't work just make sure you've saved a copy of the original widgets.php somewhere to upload it if things go wrong..

You had to clear the cache to see the blank pages - which is why some people were still able to access your site - they had it cached.

I don't know if this is caused by a plugin conflict or not.. we can't figure out why it should be doing it but it was generating an absolute shedload of server errors..

Helpful note for all - whenever you are editing a .php or .css file, save another copy - I usually throw an original on the end of the filename of the original file, and then save the edited version as the file name it should be. You can then get the original back if the changes make things go bad..