Today I was checking out some themes on the Wordpress theme viewer, and I kept noticing some interesting design elements on different pages: super headers and fat footers.

Both can be viable tools to enhance your user interface, but both have pitfalls to consider. I started to think about the possible applications of these elements from a design and marketing standpoint, and I came up with a few pros and cons for each.

Super Headers

Traditional page layouts include a header, a main body, one or two sub columns, and a footer. A super header is an extra strip of information, advertisements, or navigation above the header. Examples include FeedBurner, Technorati, and Daily Kos.

Pros:
1. Prime Real Estate. This is the very top of your page. The first place a lot of people look when they’re discovering your site and trying to figure out what it’s all about. As such, it can be a great place to put ads, like Daily Kos has done. There’s a wide banner ad above the header on their front page. It’s also a good place to put your “About” and “Contact” links.

2. Super headers are unobtrusive. If you’ve got some links that you need to publish like terms of service or affiliate information, you’ll want them to be out of the way yet accessible. A super header is a great tool for accomplishing this. Mashable uses their super header for this purpose.

3. Meta navigation. A super header is a great place to put links for logging in to a service or managing user accounts. Google has been using their super header in this way for quite a while. Between the super header on all Blogspot blogs and their placement of their login links, I actually think Google is responsible for the growing use of this design element.

Cons:
1. Easy to ignore. The only real problem I have with super headers is that they have a tendency to blend in with my browser’s toolbars. For example, when I signed up to use Feedburner to publish my RSS feed, I had very little trouble navigating their site. But when I returned to check my stats a few days later, it took me a good minute or two to find the very tiny, very gray super header with the login link. I passed right over it because it blended in with my browser. A good rule of thumb for super header backgrounds is to go bright or go white. Avoid patterns and muted colors.

Fat Footers

While I don’t have any plans to add a super header to One Thing New any time soon, I am strongly considering developing a fat footer. I’ve seen these used on sites like lifehack.org, Bokardo, digg and others to add lists of links, tag clouds, and other data to the bottom of their pages.

Pros:
1. Where am I, again? If your blog front page is super long, having a fat footer with your logo repeated and some basic navigational links makes sense. By the time someone gets to the end of your 10th post, it’s nice to remind them where they are and reinforce your brand.

2. Come back again. Your fat footer is an excellent place to put subscription options for your readers. Besides having a big RSS link at the top of your sidebar or somewhere equally prominent, you can add a ton of subscription chicklets to other services in your footer. That way, your sidebar stays uncluttered, but you’re still offering the option to your readers.

3. Recommended surfing. Let’s say your blog isn’t the only Web site you are affiliated with. Your fat footer is the perfect place to promote your other ventures. If someone has read your blog to the end, they’ll see your links to other offerings and might continue their infatuation with your content.

Cons:
1. No really, where am I? If you don’t reiterate your brand in your footer, your readers won’t know or care what they’re looking at, and they’ll gloss right over it. Also, using your footer to display ads is a bad idea. That’s not the last image you want your readers to take away from your site.

2. Location, location, location. In case you’ve forgotten, the footer is at the dead bottom of your page. Eight times in 10 your readers won’t scroll that far down — especially if you have your blog set up to post multiple stories on the front page. So, make sure you don’t put any vital information in your fat footer. Things you put down there should be semi-redundant, meaning the things you link to in your footer can be found in more prominent places on your page. Or as I mentioned with the subscription links, offer one option up top and put add ons in the footer.

Again, both super headers and fat footers can be beneficial if used properly. Keep your eyes peeled for a fatter footer on this site in the next couple of weeks.

It appears I need to revisit some things from Saturday’s Weekend Web Developer post about Wordpress. The intention of my article was to provide some tips for making the Wordpress posting experience easier for bloggers new to Wordpress.com. As it turns out, two of my tips aren’t viable for Wordpress.com for a couple of reasons.

First, the version of Wordpress available on Wordpress.com isn’t a fully functional implementation of the platform (I still think the tips are worthwhile for folks using the fully functional Wordpress platform). Wordpress.com doesn’t allow plugins or themes created from scratch. I’m sure it’s because of the potential security issues that could arise from users uploading Javascript and PHP files to their servers. This is totally understandable from their standpoint, but in my opinion, it takes away the most alluring aspect of Wordpress: it’s ability to be customized. So, my tip about adding plugins to increase the platform’s functionality is totally wrong when it comes to Wordpress.com.

Secondly, Wordpress.com doesn’t include the theme editor, so my tip about adding a couple of CSS classes to your stylesheet won’t work. There is an option to pay $15/yr for the ability to customize your stylesheet, but this just seems ridiculous. I’m going to do some more research, but based on this, I’m starting to think that Blogger is actually more customizable than Wordpress.com. I’m going to start playing with Blogger some more to see if that’s true.

In conclusion, my tune has officially been changed when it comes to Wordpress.com. (Not Wordpress.org, which is the homepage of the open source community developing the platform. I still love the fully functional platform.) I just assumed that Wordpress.com would be a full implementation of the platform, but it’s not. I tried all Friday evening and all day Saturday to sign up at Wordpress.com, but I was unable to access the site. I should have waited until I had researched the site more before I wrote about it. Lesson learned: always do your homework!

I still believe that the Wordpress platform is the best blogging engine, but Wordpress.com is a bastardized version of it. So, to all you casual, part-time, weekend bloggers, I say stick with Blogger! Wordpress.com just isn’t there yet.

A friend of mine who has been using Blogger for a few years gave Wordpress a try last week. He set up a free blog on Wordpress.com and after a few days of playing with it, decided he prefers Blogger because the posting interface is much more user-friendly than Wordpress.

My friend is extremely computer-savvy, but he’s not an html/css geek like I am. He doesn’t have the time or the patience to mess with the guts of his blog when all he wants to do is produce content. So in the interest of helping new Wordpress users create content that matches their vision, I’ve got five tips to make your posting experience easier.

1. Create your content locally.
I think most Wordpress users will agree that the default WYSIWYG editor is at best sub par. I have actually gone to great lengths to turn mine off completely to write my code from scratch. But that isn’t an option for most everyday bloggers. After playing around with a few plugins that claim to increase the default editor’s functionality, I’m unimpressed with that option. So I started doing some research about desktop applications that are basically blog-centric, fully functional WYSIWYG Web editors. There was a great article over at ProBlogger last year about the advantages of using a desktop blogging client with links to some of the more popular ones.

Unfortunately, I don’t have one to recommend, but in my research, I’ve come across tons of bloggers who vouch for them.

2. Make a plan for using images.
Since Wordpress doesn’t have a native feature to manipulate images, it can be frustrating to upload an image multiple times to get it the proper size. If you know what size your image should be before you start editing it, then this will stop being a problem. For example, my larger graphics within posts are most often 250px wide, and my smaller graphics are 115px wide. But those are just the two examples that One Thing New needs. At the very least, I would suggest determining a set width for horizontal and vertical pictures. Not only will that eliminate the need for uploading your images multiple times, but it will help your blog’s design by giving your images a uniform feel.

3. Learn a little CSS.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It’s a type of code that tells your Web browser how to display the content on your site. And one thing that Wordpress gets right is giving you the ability to edit this code very easily. I’ll give you a couple of very useful snippets of code that can help your posts do what you want them to.

Go to Presentation > Theme Editor, and your stylesheet should be the default file that pops up. Scroll to the very bottom and add this:

.image_left { float: left; }
.image_right { float: right; }

Click to update the file. What you have done is add two “classes” that can be used to position images within your post and have the post text wrap around them. To make these work properly, you’ll have to place them properly. For example, if you want the image to be at the top right of your first paragraph like the Weekend Web Developer image is in this post you would write in the Wordpress post box:

<p><img src="yourimagename.jpg" class="image_right" />Your post text here...

This is probably a little more code monkey stuff than you were prepared for. But once you’ve created those classes, they can be used in as many posts as you want.

4. Check out Wordpress plugins.
I mentioned that I wasn’t impressed with the plugins I tried to beef up the Wordpress editor, but my search wasn’t extremely thorough. And it was by no means exhaustive. There is a vast network of developers creating free plugins to enhance the functionality of Wordpress. And with a little searching, you should be able to find some that make your life easier.

The first place to start looking is the Wordpress plugin page. There are also lists of plugins at WPPlugins.org and wp-plugins.org. Once you’ve downloaded your plugins, it’s super easy to activate them. Just upload the plugin file to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ folder. Then go to the Plugins tab from your Wordpress dashboard, and there should be a list of plugins with the option to activate or deactivate them. Simple.

5. Pick a new theme.
One of the best things about Wordpress is its ability to be customized (something that seems to be a bit more difficult at Blogspot). If you don’t like the default behavior of your blog, the problem might be in your theme’s stylesheet. Check out Wordpress Theme Viewer for a massive amount of themes that have all kinds of default functionality. Chances are there will be a theme out there with the exact set of features you want.

I hope this article has given you some helpful tips about improving your experience with Wordpress. Familiarity and ease of use are strong factors when considering what blogging platform to use, and I understand sticking with what you know. But I encourage all you burgeoning bloggers to give Wordpress a try.

As you know if you’ve been reading One Thing New, yesterday was my birthday, and while I intended to take the weekend off, I wanted to post this quick suggestion for the Wordpress team. With the next release, lets have an easy option for disabling the auto-formatting within posts.

I realize there is a plugin that can disable the wpautop filter for posts, and I have it installed on all of my Wordpress sites. But some unwanted paragraph tags still get through from time to time. I haven’t poked around Wordpress’s guts very much, and I’m not sure how difficult it would be to disable this feature myself. But based on some searches I’ve done in the WP support forums, I know I’m not alone in wanting it done.

Now, before the open source police come to berate me for criticizing a free application, I can assure you that is not what I’m doing. I’m merely suggesting this feature be included in a future release of the platform. I love Wordpress and have started using it on all of my sites. But as a developer who likes to code everything by hand, I would like to see this feature added so that I can have total control over my content.

Having just upgraded my Wordpress installation because of a security flaw discovered last week, I’ve got Wordpress on the brain. And, while I’m still relatively new to the platform, I thought it would be fun to share with you the Wordpress plugins I’ve found useful so far.

When I decided to start a blog, one of the main features of Wordpress that convinced me to choose it over Blogger was its extensibility. Because Wordpress is an open source project, there is an immense community of developers tweaking and adding features and functionality to the platform. Here are the eight that I have installed right now.

1. Akismet - This is a plugin that comes bundled with a basic Wordpress installation. It’s function is to catch spammers who try to leave crap in your comments section. To date, Akismet has caught the only spam comment that’s made it through. My site is still small, but Akismet is batting .1000 so far.
2. Bad Behavior - One of the reasons that Akismet has only caught one spammer so far might be because Bad Behavior is turning a lot more away at the door before they have a chance to comment. Most of the time, spammers use programs or scripts that automate the spamming process. Bad Behavior analyzes the methods that spammers use to deliver their junk, and stops these robots from ever having access to your site. Just in the last week, BB has stopped 47 spambots from accessing my site. Good stuff!
3. Custom String Query - This one sounds scary, doesn’t it? All it does is let you control the number of posts displayed on your archive pages. I installed it when I thought I only wanted one post per day displayed on the main page. I’ve since changed my mind about that, but I still use CSQ to manage my archive pages.
4. Disable wpautop - In the interest of having full control over my code, I installed this plugin to disable Wordpress’s automatic formatting in their post editor. Also, I’ve never used a WYSIWYG editor before, so it’s easier for me to manually add HTML and CSS where I want it. I would assume that most folks wouldn’t care about this, but for me it was a necessity.
5. FD Feedburner Plugin - All this does is redirect users who type in onethingnew.com/feed/ to my Feedburner feed. This way, if I ever leave Feedburner, I won’t have to change the address of my syndication feed.
6. Obfuscate Email - I have no idea if this works because I’m not a spambot. But I have my email address in the sidebar, and this program is supposed to hide my address in the “mailto:” link from anyone who would automatically harvest it and add it to their annoying lists. I haven’t gotten and spam mail in my inbox, so I assume it works.
7. Social Bookmark Creator - Social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and reddit seem to be all the rage these days. So this plugin generates link codes for easily submitting my articles to those sites. No one has used them so far, but I’m always hopeful.
8. Subscribe Me - Another plugin for easy syndication, Subscribe Me adds those little chicklet links to my sidebar. Click on those, and you’ll subscribe to my syndication feed in whichever service you click on. Easy as pie!

What’s so great about Wordpress is it’s a fluid platform with lots of room to play around. I still need to look into plugins for audio and video, but that’s down the road. I hope these plugins give you and idea of just how powerful Wordpress can be.