Revolution 2 Theme: H1 Permalinks

I’ve been using version 2 of the Revolution theme (link in my page footer) on a couple of new sites and spotted an issue. When viewing archives the heading of the individual posts is not acting as a permalink to that post – not an issue in version 1 by the way.

Because I’m no wordpress expert it took me some time to find the solution in the Revolution support forum. The solution is to edit the archive.php page and replace the line referring to <h1> with this:

<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

I’m finding that copy & paste of php code into wordpress doesn’t always work correctly – anyone know why that is? I suspect some truncation is occuring.

As always, test your changes!

Finance Affiliate Buys sport.co.uk For £135K

Media Corp announce today the purchase of premium, generic domain name, sport.co.uk for ?135,000

What’s interesting is that Media Corp run, amongst other topics, affiliate sites promoting credit cards and HD TVs (using the premium Revolution Tech theme I see).

They obviously have develop and resell plans for their new purchase. Justin Drummond, Chief Executive of Media Corporation plc, commented:

The value of a top-tier domain name combined with a profitable advertising-driven business model was recently illustrated by the Group?s successful sale of Casino.co.uk for up to ?3.625 million. We are aiming to replicate this success with Sport.co.uk as we continue to increase the scale and diversity of the Group?s Web Publishing business.

Along similar lines, another company I spotted before Christmas is AIM listed Hecta Media. This company intends to identify and purchase sites and domains and

..consolidate a number of such websites across a few content genres, with the purpose of creating advantages of scale in each vertical market.

I’m waiting for news on what they purchase – I’ll let you know.

Bottoms Up!

Thanks to both Affiliate Window and Waitrose Wines for the 6 bottles of Champagne that we received in the recent Christmas Coins promotion.

The gift arrived late last week and I’ve just got around to uploading some photos.

Cheers!

How To Backup Wordpress

If you’re using self hosted wordpress you should be backing up your data (posts, comments,etc).

One easy way to do it is to use this plugin and setup an automatic backup schedule that fits in with your blog update frequency. Setting the backup manager to email you the backup is an easy way to keep chronological copies of your backups.

Another Premium News Theme

As wordpress continues to grow in popularity amongst the search marketing community more and more premium themes are becoming available. Don’t forget that premium often means pay-for.

This very site uses a premium theme and I’ve been posting about how to tweak it here for example. Fellow marketer Stephen Pratley mentions a few places that offer premium themes and I’ve just come across this new premium theme.

For other news on premium and quality free themes take a look at:

• Premium News Themes
• Justin Tadlock (free themes available)
• Premium Press (free themes available)
• Small Potato (some great free themes)

Please do comment on any other quality premium style themes that you’re aware of.

Revolution Theme Optimisation: Recent Posts Count

On your homepage you’ll have a righthand sidebar containing your recent blog posts. Once you have several posts you may find that your list of recent posts is longer than you want it to be – you don’t really want the list to be greater than the height of the main image.

You can modify how many entries the recent posts list will display. After a couple of attempts six entries seems to work for my own homepage. To modify the number of displayed posts edit the file home.php and look for this bit of code and change the default setting to your preference (I’ve bolded my setting of 6):

<div id=”homepageright”>

<h3>Recent Blog Posts</h3>
<ul>
<?php get_archives(‘postbypost’, 6); ?>
</ul>

</div>

Thanks to Melbourne, Australia, internet services company fatdog for prompting this useful post.

Credit Crunch Hitting Affiliates?

Last September I blogged over on our personal finances site about Barclaycard rejecting over half of all new credit card applications.

Well, an article in yesterdays Telegraph covering Provident Finance included an interesting little snippet. Provident offer the Vanquis card and the report indicated that approx 75% of card applications are rejected.

With numerous reports of increases in rejections for mortgages and personal loans it’s obvious that the credit crunch must be having an adverse knock-on effect within our industry too. Pundits predict that there’s more nasty medicine to come.

Revolution Theme Optimisation: Removing The Logo

Following on from my first post about optimising the Revolution theme, here’s how to remove the default Revolution logo from the top of each page and replace it with text instead. I can never remember how to do this, so this is as much for my own benefit as anyone elses!

1. Within your wordpress dashboard edit the theme
2. Edit style.css and look for #headerleft
3. Change the padding to 30px 0px 0px 0px;
4. Save
5. Edit header.php and find the div id=”headerleft”
6. Replace the existing code in that div with this (copy and paste might cause a problem for some reason I haven’t yet worked out, so test that the link works on your text after saving the change):
   <a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a><br />
   <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>
7. Save and test.

December Sales Rocket at Play.com

Not talking about ours here as we tend to work closely with amazon and we’ve only had a low number of sales with play.com.

One of my tips for anyone involved in search marketing is to read a newspaper, especially one that reports upon business news because you’ll often get really useful stats about businesses. Wouldn’t you like to know how major retailers that you are working with are performing?

For example, The Telegraph reports that play.com saw sales rise by 24% in the 4th quarter of 2007. It’s peak trading period was on 3rd December when play.com processed an average of 700 orders a minute, up from 422 orders a minute in 2006. The best selling DVD over Christmas was Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Leona Lewis was the best selling CD. Russell Brand’s My Booky Wooky was the top selling book – this grates with me a little because it was one of my few poor performers last month.

Did you know that Play.com has a 5% share of the UK music market and a 7% share of the UK DVD market? Stuart Rowe, CEO, has indicated that play will start to offer digital downloads in the coming months too (which reminds me that I should either sell or do something with my parked DRMfree.co.uk).

So, congratulations to play.com and here’s wishing them and everyone else a successful 2008!