Elements of SEO Update

July 30, 2008 // Drew Stauffer

***UPDATE: Elements of SEO version 1.3 is now available. Get it while its hot!

After submitting my theme to the new Wordpress Theme Directory, I was required to make a few tweaks. Elements of SEO 1.1 now has some exciting new features, including:

Gravatar support
Tag support

While I was making these edits I also decided to fix the widget bullets that were appearing. Ordinarily, if you downloaded the theme, uploaded it and didn’t activate any widgets then you would have the exact same setup in the sidebars as the demo site.

After reviewing a few sites that were using the theme, I noticed that a lot of people were implementing widgets. The problem that I was seeing was on the widget sections, there was a random bullet being added to the heading.

I didn’t really like how that looked since nothing else in the design had bullets styled like that, so I decided to remove them. Now you can add widgets all day long and it will look exactly the same as the demo site.

Download Elements of SEO 1.4 to get the new features and fix the widget heading bug.

Technorati Tags: Elements of SEO, Wordpress Themes, Wordpress development

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Speak your mind

33 responses so far ↓

5 Nick // Aug 8, 2008 at 7:18 pm

Hey there, love the theme so much, but am having a problem where the Home page doesn’t display any of the widgets or the sidebar at all, while all the other pages do. Is this how it is supposed to be, or am I missing something?
6 Drew Stauffer // Aug 8, 2008 at 9:42 pm

@Nick

The tag support feature is only compatible with WP 2.6. I noticed that your using WP 2.0.1.

That’s what’s causing the error on your homepage.

You’ll need to upgrade to 2.6 if you want to use this theme. There are a lot of cool features in 2.6 so I would suggest it

http://wordpress.org/download/
7 Makasha Dorsey // Aug 10, 2008 at 7:56 pm

I am using Elements of SEO for my site http://www.dorseypublications.com. I am trying to change the header image. I uploaded images in place of the ones you have but only one changed. Help please.
8 Drew Stauffer // Aug 11, 2008 at 2:01 am

@Makasha

You might want to double check the images that you uploaded for your banners. I looked at them and they all looked the same.

I would guess that’s why your not seeing any difference.
9 Heather // Aug 17, 2008 at 12:31 am

Hi Drew,
I’m just now working on the theme, which I love, though I’ve been tweaking a bit. I stretched it wider so that I can put comics into the body and I think it looks marvelous. I haven’t started adding widgets or anything yet, but wanted to show you the beginnings.
Also, I think in widening it, I did something to the page template, now my page’s masthead lists to the right http://www.thecowgoddess.com/mamablog/about/
I’m not sure where to find the code to fix it, do you have any ideas?
10 Drew Stauffer // Aug 19, 2008 at 12:34 am

@Heather

Thanks for checking out my theme. I’m glad you like it

I see that you widened the content area to 1050px, but you’ll also need to widen the header, nav and footer as well to make everything look right.

Take note of everywhere you see a width (960px) in the css and make your adjustments accordingly.

Hope that helps. Let me know.
11 vishnu // Aug 19, 2008 at 5:33 am

am having serious issues here..:( The sidebars went down my dear.. they are at the bottom of the pages.!
12 Drew Stauffer // Aug 19, 2008 at 12:47 pm

@vishnu

Hey vishnu, i looked at your CSS file for the theme and there is a lot of stuff missing. You might want to go back and re-upload the CSS file.

Both sidebars, footer, comments, search forms….all that is missing in the CSS.
14 Belleza + Moda // Sep 1, 2008 at 2:08 pm

Looks good but should looks better if you use a typhography like the one that you use in this blog
15 Drew Stauffer // Sep 2, 2008 at 1:39 pm

@Belleza + Moda

Thanks for the props. I can’t give all my styling secrets away on the free themes

I’m thinking about doing a few other variations of the Elements theme, so maybe I will play with the typography on them.
16 jenn // Sep 19, 2008 at 6:54 am

Hello,I am using your theme on beforeiamfamous.com (sorry I have nothing to do with seo but your theme is what I have been searching for) I am having some trouble with comments appearing on pages. None of the comments appear on pages. I have comments and trackbacks enabled and the comments are in my comment section but don’t appear on the pages. I made a new page and a comment section doesn’t appear. Is there something I am doing wrong? Thanks
17 Drew Stauffer // Sep 19, 2008 at 12:59 pm

@jenn

Hey there jenn. To get comments on pages you’ll need to add one line of code.

Check out this support post
18 Web Development India // Oct 2, 2008 at 5:52 am

I had simillar problem with another theme where comments went to akismet, i really don;t understand what was happening there. But after that i come to know i should discard Akismet as my blog lovers taking their precious time to stay on my blog and i should reward them with the link.
19 Steve // Oct 27, 2008 at 5:29 pm

Hello Sir,

Thank you for a sleek, elegant design, which I am still populating with stuff.

My question today is; the left edge of my blog looks like there is no margin, no cushion, so that the text is smacked up against the edge. Did I do that? Or was that your original intention, and I didn’t realize it when I uploaded the theme.

Can you tell me how I can put in a little white space between the left edge and the text?

Thanks and all the best
Steve
20 Jennifer // Nov 10, 2008 at 12:52 am

Hello,
I searched a long time to find a theme that i thought would accomodate a lot of content and was very happy to find yours especially since it had an easily customizable header. I wanted to change the header image to make it a little more feiminine so I uploaded a new image to the image file with the exact dimensions of the current banner images. I left the old images in place and just added “newbanner.jpeg”.
It looked to me like the only thing I needed to do was change one line of code in the style sheet here:
#banner2 {background:url(”images/banner2.jpeg”) no-repeat; height:134px;}
substituting “newbanner.jpeg” for banner2.jpeg but all i succeeded in doing was erasing the banner entirely.
Help!
Do I need to change something else as well?
21 Drew Stauffer // Nov 10, 2008 at 1:52 pm

@Jennifer

You are doing it exactly right but are you really using “.jpeg” for your extension? You need to use “.jpg” for a jpeg file.

I would guess that’s why it’s not showing up, but when I went to your site, I still saw my banner code in the CSS file.

Let me know if you still have problems.
22 Jennifer // Nov 18, 2008 at 8:10 pm

Hi Drew,
thanks to your help I was able to put a new graphic banner on my site that reflects the content and title much better. However when I did that it resulted in a much larger white space between the title and the tagline. I dont know what I did.
the new graphic is 964×165 but i have changed the dimensions in the masthead line and also in the banner line to reflect the bigger size. I am not sure if this is the problem though because when i resize the picture to the smaller original dimensions of 960×134 I still have the same problem of much more white space between the tagline and title than the original.
Is there some other place in the stylesheet or code to narrow the height of the area between the tagline and the title?
It seems so trivial but it really alters the way it looks- the original space was much better- the way it was designed!
23 Drew Stauffer // Nov 19, 2008 at 3:01 pm

@ Jennifer

I think you need to comment out this line in your CSS. That’s the only thing that I see different from your CSS and my CSS.

look for this set in your CSS file:

#masthead a { display:block; height:170px; width:960px; }

add (/*) before the # sign in masthead and (*/) after the whole set…so it looks like this:

/* #masthead a { display: block; width: 960px; height: 170px; } */

That should take care of your extra spacing.
24 Gasper // Feb 14, 2009 at 11:58 am

Hi, Drew!

Great theme, I’m learning by testing it off line. It really looks nice, but I have the problem with sidebars - somehow they went down?

I am trying to build the theme with “featured” posts; any advice how can I select which posts will appear on the page when the site opens?

Thanks! G.
25 Henry Hutton // Feb 26, 2009 at 12:48 am

There’s probably an easy solution to this, but I’ve removed the “meta” widget from sidebar 1, but now there’s no “add” option for me to add it to sidebar 2. Any suggestions on what I’m doing wrong?

Thanks for your help.

Henry
26 foodiebuddha.com // Mar 3, 2009 at 5:49 am

I was interested in trying this out on my site; however, when I go to the appearance page of my admin section - all i see is a bunch of code for this. I am running the latest WP. Any thoughts?
27 Drew Stauffer // Mar 3, 2009 at 2:30 pm

@foodiebuddha
I know the problem that your referring to. I saw that some of the download links weren’t the most up to date version.

Go to the download page and make sure you get the 1.4 version. That should take care of your problem.
28 James // Apr 27, 2009 at 11:52 pm

Congrats on the theme, which I like very much. But although it runs beautifully in Safari, in Firefox the right hand columns both disappear to the bottom of the page. The version I’ve uploaded is 1.4, and the CSS must be there, since it works in Safari, but something’s obviously going wrong with other browsers. DO you have any advice?
29 Data Recovery // May 2, 2009 at 4:11 am

Good Post and every SEO Should read these type of content to gain knowledge
30 KattyBlackyard // Jun 15, 2009 at 2:51 am

The article is usefull for me. I’ll be coming back to your blog.
31 PEI real estate // Jun 16, 2009 at 4:26 am

i want know about seo optimization wat process we can do it?how they do?if any services will be ter?how to optimized in google top ranking
32 deborah // Jun 30, 2009 at 11:18 am

Hello,

http://powerfulwork.com/blog/

At the site above, the header leaves a lot of white space at the top. How do I get rid of the extra white space?

I love your theme!
33 Drew Stauffer // Jun 30, 2009 at 12:55 pm

@deborah,

There’s a little padding/margin for the banner image and a little from the nav on the far right. Adjust those two and you should be able to eliminate some of the white space.