SidekickBlog

Introduction

I love blogs with interesting footers.  In a typical blog, the footer describes the bottom of the website below the dynamic content and sidebars.  This area often does not receive the attention it deserves and is often used only for copyright information or some navigation links.  

I believe that a well designed footer can greatly increase a blog’s functionality and visual appeal.  Consequently when rating Wordpress themes, I give more importance to those that allow you to customize footers easily by using footer widgets.  Footers can be used in a variety of ways.

Some of the ways footers can be used

Links to important posts, pages:  This will help expose sections of your blog that need more visitors.  I have read that this also helps in SEO (although how much is debatable).  Take a look at the footer of mint.com.  I am sure that all those key words and phrases have to be adding positive SEO value to their website.

Guide your visitors to their next destination: Users reaching the end of the content on a particular page are usually itching to find something else to browse.  Unless you provide them fresh content they might just jump to another website.  If nothing else, just put a PPC ad over there.  Google link units are another option but they can look ugly. 

Affiliate links & advertisements to your own products (and other blogs): It can be argued that a high percentage of viewers who have read your blog till the bottom of the page are interested in what you have to say and would be easiser to sell to.  Take a look at the above footer snapshot from Problogger.com.  Renowned blogger Darren Rowse uses his footer to list his ‘Recommended Money Makers’ which probably contain affiliate links.  Since he blogs about blogging and has a popular ‘making money through blogging’ section, these links are a perfect fit for his website.  

Visitors that like the look of your website often look in the footer for theme attributions.  If you use a premium theme that has an affiliate program, you should definately enroll and include an affiliate link to the theme in the footer.  A short positive review of the premium theme is also recommended.

Stash content that you need on every page but does not have to be immediately visible:  This may include reciprocal links to blog directories and other links that help to promote your own blog.  Also, a contact form can be included here as visitors that want to contact you will usually make an effort to look around for the form. 

Improve your blog’s looks: Most blog footers load last and so do not interfere with the accessibility with the rest of the blog’s content.  This means that all that cool art and images that you have been hesitating to put on your blog because you fear increased load times can go in the footer (Ofcourse this does not mean you do not web optimize the images.)  If done in the right way, this can do wonders in adding personality to your blog. 

Conclusion

I am really glad the theme I am using currently for this blog came with footer widgets.  This helped me get started with using the footer effectively before I learned how to customize footers myself.  Unfortunately, the Mimbo 3.0 theme I recently switched Recipe Mobile to did not come with footer widgets.  I will try to add these myself over the weekend and will post details on this blog.  Eventually, I would also love to add some image elements there (if somebody would only help me with the art!)

Have you used footer on your blog in interesting ways or have seen it done on any other blog?  Do you believe that footers should get the same attention as sidebars and mastheads?  

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If you usually post across multiple topics and sort them by category, you might want to highlight a few categories so that your readers can easily find them.  One way of doing this is to create page tabs (like the ones saying ‘Home’, ‘About’ towards the top of your Wordpress blog) that link directly to the category page. Wordpress makes this extremely easy.  

All the categories pages are automatically built.  You can access these category pages by clicking on the category name on your blog (if you have the category widget displayed) or from your Wordpress dashboard.  Copy the URL of the particular category page you want.

Once you have the URL to the category, create a new page in Wordpress and add a link tag in the title.  The syntax will be <a href’=”URL”>Page Title</a>, where URL is the url of the category page and Page Title is the text you wish to appear on the tab.  Save the page.  Refresh your blog and you should see the new tab.

Categories like ‘how-to’, ‘tips’, ‘news’ particularly can benefit from this.

In my previous post, I mentioned that while switching Recipe Mobile to the Mimbo 3.0 theme, I will also implement a child theme right from the beginning.  This process has been going well and I have already realized many of the benefits of using child themes. (continue reading…)

The decision has been made!  The new Recipe Mobile blog will be powered by the Mimbo 3.0 theme.  These are the reasons: (continue reading…)

I have reached the limit of the Cutting Board Wordpress theme that we launched Recipe Mobile with.  It was a good theme to start with as it was my first experience with Wordpress and the theme came customized to use on food and recipe websites.  However, the theme seemed to have issues with Internet Explorer right from the start and these issues were only compounded as I continued to customize it and add plugins.  The final straw was when the category pages started going out of whack when viewed in IE or Chrome.  There also does not seem to be any forum, documentation or support to help solve problems with this particular theme. (continue reading…)

Last week, I moved Recipe Mobile from its free hosting at ByetHost to Hostgator.  After considerable research on the best hosting providers, I had narrowed down my list to Bluehost and Hostgator.  Both seem to have glowing reviews and have similarly competitive hosting plans with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited add on domains.  Finally I decided to go with Hostgator (as opposed to Bluehost) for the following reasons: (continue reading…)

Lifehacker: Want to know how to unblock a sink?  Or make firefox faster?  One of the most popular websites on the web, this is a must to help you make life a little bit easier.

Seth’s Blog: Mr. Seth Godin.  Master of marketing.  Make sure you read his books.

Engadget: My most frequented website to keep track of product launches and reviews.

Duct Tape Marketing: The simple and easy to follow advice offered by these guys keep me hooked.

xkcd: The funniest (& smartest) comics on the web!

A few days ago, I wrote about a huge change in policy by Entrecard.

Today, new updates have been announced by Entrecard.  Looks like there was a lot of negative feedback by publishers over some of their policy changes.  The Entrecard team has listened and made some adjustments to their plans.

1) Entrecard earlier had announced that all publishers would have to move the Entrecard widget above the fold on their websites or be disqualified.  Now they have changed this rule to a 1 page down rule.  Although some publishers will still find this hard to do on their already packed sidebars, I think it is a fair policy

2) They have dropped the fee to reject paid ads.  Earlier this was one of my biggest issues with the new policy and I am glad this has been changed.  However, I am not sure what is going to stop publishers from rejecting each and every paid ad as they do not get anything out of it directly (as opposed to ads by the Entrecard community which result in credits being earned directly by the publisher.)

All in all, I am glad that Entrecard has chosen to listen to the community’s concerns.  These adjustments mean that I will continue to give Entrecard a chance and keep it active on Recipe Mobile.

I received an email from Entrecard today mentioning changes that many members of the blogger community were expecting sooner or later.  Entrecard has always been criticized as it never had a robust revenue model and there was no official way to convert the credits earned from Entrecard to actual money.  This has led to many bloggers moving away from Entrecard to competing ad networks.  Entrecard has been struggling to come up with a solution that addresses publisher concerns while still maintaining their particular advertising exchange model. (continue reading…)

Returning visitors will notice a new interactive ad box to the right of my blog (below my twitter updates).  This ad is powered by the new ad network WidgetBucks.  I was introduced to Widgetbucks when Robert Scoble of Fast Company TV tweeted about his video review of the company. 

  (continue reading…)