Seven wordpress theme modification tips. If you want to hire a wordpress theme designer in the uk, please contact us. http://www.neogain.com/

1. Seven WordPress Theme Modification Tips
An extra large jam-packed article for Neogain blog readers. Below you will find seven fantastic WordPress
theme modification tips, that hopefully has something for everyone. Please don’t forget to subscribe to our
blog.
If you need a UK WordPress Theme Designer, please get in touch.
Add Geo meta tags to your theme.
Geo meta tags are is meta tag geographical data that is perfect for websites that are location based, such
as websites for a restaurant, shop or a venue. It is believed Google doesn’t currently pay any attention to
geographical meta tags, but apparently Bing does. So for the effort of placing a few extra lines of code in
your theme, it could help you improve your search engine ranking, though probably not with Google.
To make life easier there is a free tool to create your Geo meta tags here: http://geo-
tag.de/generator/en.html
Once you’ve got your code, you then need to do the following:
1. Make sure your theme’s header.php file is writable.
2. From the WordPress dashboard select ‘Editor’ from the ‘Appearance’ section.
3. Select ‘Header’ from the right hand side menu.
4. Place your meta tags under your current meta tags, which should be located above the link data.
5. Once saved make the header.php file read only again.
Add Google Analytics to your Theme.
If you are running a WordPress plugin to place your Google Analytics, you should consider placing the
code manually into your WordPress theme directly. This would result in one less plugin to manage and
reduce your website overheads, as well as administration time.
How to add the code:
1. Make sure your theme’s footer.php file is writable.
2. From the WordPress dashboard select ‘Editor’ from the ‘Appearance’ section.
3. Select ‘Footer’ from the right-hand side menu.
4. Place your Google Analytics code above the </body> div.
5. Save and then make sure your footer.php file is only readable.

2. Convert any graphic files.
Often you can convert PNG images to JPG without losing quality, plus some JPG images to GIF format. If
an image is greyscale or using under 256 colours it could be perfect for conversion to GIF. You might be
surprised by the amount you can reduce your WordPress theme size by, just by optimising the graphics.
One of the easiest ways to convert files between formats is to use the free GIMP software, available for
different platforms including Linux and Microsoft Windows.
Manually add a link or copyright notice to your theme footer.
Often WordPress themes don’t have any copyright notices included. Having a copyright notice for your
theme content is important. Taking the time to manually edit your footer file and add a copyright notice, is
time well spent.
How to add the extra code:
1. Make sure your theme’s footer.php file is writable.
2. Make a backup of your footer.php file.
3. From the WordPress dashboard select ‘Editor’ from the ‘Appearance’ section.
4. Select ‘Footer’ from the right-hand side menu.
5. Now place your additional code.
6. Afterwards make sure your footer.php file is read-only.
Example code:
&copy; 2011 copyrightowner All rights reserved.
<a href="http://www.website.com/pagedetails">Link Name</a>
Turn the logo into a link.
If you have a logo at the top of your WordPress theme, you should check whether it is a link. Often people
will expect to be able to click on a logo, to then take them back to the home page. This can be more tricky
if your logo is actually part of your CSS file, but with a bit of Theme editing, you can make the logo a link.
How to modify an image referenced in the header.php file:
1. Make a backup of your theme’s header.php file.
2. Make the header.php file writable.
3. From the WordPress dashboard select ‘Editor’ from the ‘Appearance’ section.
4. Select ‘header’ from the right-hand side menu.

3. 5. If the image code is in the header area, then you can easily modify.
6. Make sure you make your header.php file read-only again afterwards.
Example code:
<a href="http://www.website.com/home"><img src="logo.jpg" border="0"></a>
Edit the theme footer.
Some WordPress theme footers take up to much screen space, often made worse by having numerous
links, with some being redundant to your requirements. This redundant links could be impacting your
internal SEOwebsite linking strategy.
How to modify the theme footer:
1. Make sure your theme’s footer.php file is writable.
2. Make a backup of your footer.php file.
3. From the WordPress dashboard select ‘Editor’ from the ‘Appearance’ section.
4. Select ‘Footer’ from the right-hand side menu.
5. Remove the necessary div layers.
6. Save and make sure your footer.php file is read-only again.
Squash your CSS file.
Often a WordPress theme style.css is too large and can be modified to reduce the file size. The end
result though can be a style.css file that is harder to work with and adapt in the future. i.e. removing
spacing, merging code, changing colour codes etc. If you make a backup of the original, then perhaps
you will be okay with using a compressed style.css file, that will load faster.
There are quite a few good CSS compressors, but here is one you might want to
consider:http://www.csscompressor.com/
How to modify the style.css file:
1. Make sure you have a backup of your theme’s style.css file.
2. Make the style.css file writable.
3. From the WordPress dashboard select ‘Editor’ from the ‘Appearance’ section.
4. Select style.css from the right-hand menu.
5. Copy the code, run through the compressor and then replace old code with new optimised css code.
6. Save and make sure you make the style.css file read-only again.

4. Conclusion
These seven tips hopefully offered something for everyone, but it is only the tip of the ice-berg for
WordPress theme modification. If you are not following our blog already, please take this opportunity to
do so.
If you want to hire a WordPress Theme Designer in the UK, please contact Neogain.