Front Page Focus

The most common change bloggers want to make personalize their blog themes is to change fonts.

There are two ways to change font styles and sizes in wordpress.com blogs.

(1) With the purchase of a css editing upgrade you change fonts throughout the blog.

(2) Without the upgrade you can change it paragraph by paragraph (loosely speaking).

Font styles are somewhat limited for web pages. Some people want their site to look really good with fonts like you can use in word processing packages. So how do you do that?

You can make it in Adobe PhotoShop or another graphic package and save out your text as images. This works really well as far as looking good, however, because images are naturally larger than text, the pages will load slower. But, the biggest drawback is not size, it’s that you have your text, which tells what your site is about, locked up in images.

It’s not accessible to search engines that crawl web sites. What does that mean? It means that if you’re relying on traffic to your site from search engines, you want real text, not images of text that only humans can read. If your site is not dependent on search engine traffic, then this may not matter other than the slower load time for the image laden pages.

Be sure sure you also avoid these pitfalls:
1. Too many posts on the front page (too slow to load)
2. Too many images (too slow to load)
3. Too many animated icons, embeds, etc.
4. Broken links

Tip 1: Reduce the number of posts on the front page.

• Sign into your wordpress blog and proceed to this page
• -> Settings  -> Reading
• Continue to scroll down until you find:

Blog Pages Show at most: _____ posts

• Change the setting to a lower number and click “Update Options” to save.
• Generally speaking if your posts are under 350 words and consist primarily of text then seven (7) short posts may be a suitable choice.
• If your posts tend to be more lengthy and also contain many images, large images, animations and/ or embeds then a lower number may be a more suitable choice.

Tip 2: Website Speed Test
Optimizing your web page loading time is essential for keeping your visitors. If your pages load time is too long due to un-optimized images, people simply leave your site before it is loaded!

Tip 3: Web Page Analyzer – 0.964 – from Website Optimization – Free Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis

This is a free web site speed test to improve website performance. Enter a URL to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates best practices from HCI research and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.

Tip 4: Do Broken Links Checks

blogging tips, blogging tools, css upgrade, How to, pages and posts, search engines, wordpress