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My BayCon Schedule 2016

May 10, 2016 by deirdre Leave a Comment

BayCon - San Francisco Bay Area science fiction & fantasy convention
I have two panels at BayCon this year, which will be held from May 27-30 at the San Mateo Marriott San Francisco Airport (this is a change of hotel from the previous years).

BayCon Guests of Honor

Writer Guest of Honor: David Gerrold
Artist Guest of Honor: Chris Butler, F.R.A.S
Fan Guest of Honor: Anastasia Hunter
Toastmasters: Library Bards

BayCon Charity

BayCon’s charity this year is SETI Institute.

My BayCon Schedule

I’m on two panels, one on Saturday and one on Sunday.
The good, The Bad, And The WTF of Cover Art
Saturday, May 28 2:30 pm, Connect 1
Forget judging the book by its cover, sometimes you can’t even identify it. Our panelists discuss highs and lows and just plain weird in the world of cover art.
WordPress
Sunday, May 29 11:30 am, Connect 1
Methods for making the most creative and effective use of WordPress.

Programming Schedule

The full programming schedule is available here.

Filed Under: Conventions, Graphic Design, WordPress, Writing Tagged With: baycon, conventions, fantasy, science-fiction

Google Changes: Five Free Responsive WordPress Themes

April 16, 2015 by deirdre 2 Comments

responsive-wordpress-themes
Google’s making huge changes in how they’ll rank web sites, and those changes take effect next week on April 21. Google has warned that sites that are not responsive will be penalized in rankings. If you run WordPress sites, then switching to responsive WordPress themes will prevent you from losing your Google juice.
You may be saying: ZOMG! What do I do?
(At the end, I’ll have a new thingy for you author types.)

Five Free Responsive WordPress Themes

If you have a self-hosted WordPress site and haven’t done a ton of customization to your theme, here are some themes that will at least get you over that hump.

  1. TwentyFifteen. It comes with WordPress, it’s boring (I mean: content-focused) as all get out, but it’ll get you there. In particular, you know it’ll support just about any WordPress feature since it’s a core theme. One downside: there are only two child themes currently (and I don’t care for either of them), but you can design your own.

  2. Pinboard. As I’ve mentioned before, I use this one for ryanjohnsonactor.info. There are no child themes that I know of, but it’s a solid theme.

  3. Virtue. Not only is it free, not only is it responsive, but it’s also designed for Woocommerce if you happen to want a store with your site. There are no child themes. I haven’t used this one.

  4. Vantage. This is a free theme that wraps around a plugin, PageBuilder. I haven’t tried it, but it appears that it would permit easier customization for most people than child themes would, without the expense of costly solutions like Headway or Dynamik (which I use on some sites).

  5. Omega. This is a wonderful free theme that has inspired quite a few other free child themes. Here are three of them: Composer, Hotel, and Church. You can find even more with this search.

Note that I’ve only added responsive WordPress themes that are free, not “lite” versions of commercial themes that are often omitting really basic features so that you’ll pay for it. One of those features often missing? Responsive.

A Child Theme Primer

For those of who who’ve never used WordPress child themes, they are a spectacular feature.

  1. A child theme, at its most basic form, is a new folder in the WordPress theme directory that contains a stylesheet (named style.css).

  2. A child theme can also contain new WordPress functions that may alter the parent’s theme, which I do in Ryan’s site. (And deirdre.net, also, as I have changed the way the header looks—substantially—from the StudioPress Metro Pro theme it started out as.

  3. A child theme can also contain any other resource a theme can, including graphics, fonts, and JavaScript.

Essentially, it’s installed just like any other WordPress theme, it’s just that you need both the child and the parent theme installed for it to work.

Once You’ve Changed Your Theme, Now What?

  1. Log into Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t verified your site, go through the steps to do that. Read carefully about any issues Google says your site has, then fix them.

  2. For the love of your readers, please use permalinks. You’re not going to remember, and neither will I, that this post is deirdre.net?p=5024 a day from now. From the WordPress admin interface, go to Settings -> Permalinks. Click on “post name” (or anything other than “default”), then click Save Changes. This will help your site rank better.

  3. Install an SEO plugin. There are two that are particularly well-regarded: All-in-one SEO Pack and Yoast’s WordPress SEO. I use the latter. Both will coach you on how to improve your page ranking. It’s like having your own copywriting coach.

Here are two screencaps taken while I was drafting this article:
yoast-seo-1
yoast-seo-2

Is it Really Worth All That Effort?

As a marketing coach I know phrased it: “No one ever complained about having three times as much Google traffic. For free.” And that’s true. All you’re doing in changing to responsive WordPress themes is making it easier for people to find your site.
I don’t know why Google’s pushing this change specifically, but I’ve been really frustrated with horrible mobile experiences. Bad mobile sites cause a higher bounce rate. Reducing bounce rate is also critical to ranking, so you may find that you get a lift in traffic. I mention in that link that I was testing something, and that test has been successful. I’ll write about it next week.

StudioPress’s New Author Theme

Less than ten minutes before I planned to post this, I found out about a new paid theme I’m super excited about.
One of the huge problems of author-friendly themes out there is that most are designed for one book. They’re inevitably badly designed for the face that book covers are (not universally, but nearly so) tall rather than wide or square, and almost all WordPress themes use landscape or square images.
That kind of thing? Will drive you crazy over time.
I was in the middle of fussing with some theme constraints, and now I’m packing in that project because StudioPress, author of the Genesis themes family, has a new Author theme.
Further, even if you don’t want that particular Genesis theme, there’s a free Genesis Author Pro plugin that’ll work with any Genesis theme.
StudioPress themes are lean, optimized for speed and search engine optimization. I’m really glad I switched last year. I was in the middle of making some changes, so I may well switch to the Author Pro theme myself.

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: mobile websites, responsive wordpress themes, wordpress

WordPress Themes: The StudioPress Sale

February 18, 2015 by deirdre Leave a Comment

WordPress Themes blog post header graphic
tl;dr: StudioPress’s amazing WordPress theme bundle is on sale this week only.
I want to tell you a tale about WordPress themes, because I’ve run this blog on quite a few over the last ten (eep!) years.
There are the early days where there weren’t really “themes,” more like CSS stylesheets, and I played with them and changed them every 6-12 months, but I didn’t really love them.
Then the new WordPress theme system came along, and I loved it. You could to truly cool things with themes. You could also muck everything up. So the better got much better—and the worse got much worse.
I lived with a mostly-white site for a long time when I used the free version of Pagelines. All I have good to say about that is that the free version annoyed me with its arbitrary stupidity, and eventually I took my toys and went home.
With some bundle or other, I’d gotten four premium themes from ThemeTrust. I found them a) far, far less pretty than they look on the site; b) amazingly opaque to set up. I’ve never kept any of them deployed.
I also paid for Elegant Themes for a year, but you have to renew annually. While they have a lot of themes, they are once again not as easy to set up nor as pretty out of the box. I found the map theme, which I’d hoped to use, not well thought out in terms of usability. A friend and I had bought bought it with the hope of deploying for our respective travel blogs, then we both gave up.
After all that white and all that unhappiness, I found MySiteMyWay, and was generally happy with their WordPress themes for the next three years. (phew) It was, however, built around an inner core that didn’t zig when WordPress’s repository zagged, so several new features weren’t usable. And I found that frustrating. Still, they have an amazing skinning system, and I like them a bunch.
When looking for really great free WordPress themes for ryanjohnsonactor.info, I found Pinboard, which remains my favorite free WordPress theme. It was like a breath of fresh air after every other theme I’d used, and I truly love it. [(demo here)[http://demo.onedesigns.com/pinboard/] I get quite a few visitors on this blog looking for extra header icons that I made for Ryan Johnson’s site.
But…Pinboard wasn’t what I was looking for for my own site, either.
Then I went through a disastrous deploy of Shutter, which is a beautiful photo portfolio theme that was never designed for a mostly-text site. It’s still pretty awesome. Just: not for me.
Around about now, I feel like someone explaining away eight divorces, but here goes….

Why I Switched to StudioPress’s Genesis-Based WordPress Themes

I joined a group that had a lot of writers, and many of them used Genesis. I’d always avoided it because of the cost. But, you know what? They have good, solid themes.
They are lightweight, and they’re made by CopyBlogger, who designs tools for people who write blog copy for their day jobs—even, maybe especially, those working for themselves running their own domains. These themes are designed to take everything you can throw at them. They’re stable, stay out of your way, and work. Whether or not you recognize their skeletal signs, they power sites you see on a regular basis.
The WordPress theme I use on deirdre.net is StudioPress’s Metro Pro WordPress Theme. (Heavily modded and, yes, even renamed so I don’t blast it away by accident.)
Desamo.graphics uses a lightly modded version of StudioPress’s Agency Pro WordPress Theme.
I avoided buying all the themes because who’d ever need them? Right, you got it. Me.
But, unlike other companies, once you buy in, that’s all you pay for life including any themes StudioPress releases in the future. Want StudioPress’s amazing WordPress theme bundle? Click on that link, then the “Get All Our Themes” banner. Sale ends Friday the 20th of Feb.
These themes have been designed to keep readers on your page by not being annoying. They’re the best WordPress themes for highlighting your content.
If those don’t quite float your boat, but you like the Genesis idea, I’ll write more about other themes later. Or, you can ask in comments or email too.

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: around-the-blog, software

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