But right now I want to talk briefly about what I’ve added and changed to my site. Not that you would be able to tell because the old one is g o n gone. But I decided to play with a few new plugins and themes, and so far they’re not bad.

Now normally when i build things for other people I build themes, sometimes from scratch, sometimes child themes of say the generic Twenty Eleven WordPress Theme. However, for my own stuff, I tend not to want to put TOO much time into design. It’s not that it isn’t important, but this is a personal blog, so I’m not really expecting such high numbers where a better UX would change my conversion numbers.

Theme. As far as the theme goes, I’m trying the Coraline WordPress theme by Automattic. I wanted a three column theme, and this actually has even more than that, with a feature area, as well as 4 footer widget areas. Gives me lots to play with. I removed the header image which just takes up space, and then I added a sort of white paper texture tile background to the site so it’s not just sheet white. It’s a nice theme, and while I haven’t spent alot of time with it before, I like the options it provides for layouts, and think it should work well.

As far as plugins go, i’ll probably add a few, and I probably forgot a few I’ll remember, but here’s what I started with.

All In One SEO - Makes it easier to do better SEO on blog pages, with titles, descriptions and keywords right in each post.

BWP Google XML Sitemaps - A good sitemap plugin that submits your pages to Google, Bing, and other Search Engines is essential. This one came recommended and I so far have not been disappointed by it’s lightness, speed, and quality.

Digg Digg – This is one of those “new hotness” things. The floating and then fixed social media share buttons that follow the user on the page, next to the content. I think it’s great usability. You never have to search for the tweet button again. It’s always right there.

Google Analytics for WordPress - And of course… I work in analytics and usability, so for me not to actually track my site would be tantamount to heresy. Plus it really is useful of course. It helped me figure out that my old blog was being targeted as a star wars sex site (even though obviously it was not).

Smooth Slider – I wanted a featured posts slider somewhere on the home page, and the Coraline theme let me put it up on the page. I don’t know if I’m going to keep this in place, but we’ll see. I think it could be cool.

UpPrev – This is the thing where when you scroll to the bottom of the page a popup slides in from the right suggesting another thing to read. Like on the New York Times. it’s pretty cool, and I’m a big proponent of giving people things to do when they reach the end of your content. Otherwise they just leave your site.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - Using this with UpPrev so that the post that it recommends comes from YARPP. Also using the YARPP links on the bottom of the page entirely.

So that’s it for now. I’m going to hopefully keep playing with this, and then blogging about more interesting things shortly.

Now if only I can finish my marvel comics avengers movie infographic in the next couple of days…