Last week I announced the Hack WordPress anniversary contest, and with the announcement, also mentioned a redesign of Hack WordPress.  The thing that I think made this redesign unique and interesting is that it was built upon the old design, with only some stylesheet changes, different images, and a bunch of added functionality.

So, why did I decide to go with a redesign instead of a completely custom new design?   In a recent post over at Pro Blog Design I think Michael pretty much summed it up best when he explained how to redesign and still win.

When a reader visits a blog day after day, they get used to it. They know how the home page is going to look, they know what they will find in the sidebar and they know what decorations to expect around their comments.

The familiarity does wonders in helping them get around your site quickly, but there are no surprises for them. There’s none of the spark and interest you get when you come across a great looking new site.

It only takes one change to break the monotonous familiarity.

Though Michael’s example is focusing on changing one part of your blog (only the sidebar, header section, comment section, etc.), I think the general idea holds true to our situation.  At some point your blogs growth stalls, and sometimes changes need to take place in order to spark interest and hopefully see that growth continue.

If you find that your blog has stalled a little bit, why not make a change to your design (no matter how small)?  Even something as simple as redoing your logo, revamping your website’s header section, or making some changes to the sidebar can go a long way.

This guest post was written by John Pratt who blogs about blogging, WordPress, and his life as a webmaster. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Improving the navigation in your blog means visitors will find MORE of your content, and return MORE often. Even with the best content and lots of traffic - the most important thing is that people can QUICKLY find what they were looking for from the first moment they enter your blog!

I’m going to give you 10 different ways you can improve the navigation in your blog that anyone can (and should) implement for better usability when you have a WordPress powered blog. You will be surprised how much easier it will be to find content by using these techniques.

10 Steps to Improved Wordpress Navigation

1. Add Breadcrumbs: This is a very easy fix, and one I don’t see on many blogs. Breadcrumbs are the simple link trail on the top of a web page like this: “Home -> Page -> SubPage”. It’s easy to add breadcrumbs, just use a 2.6+ compatible plugin like “Breadcrumb NavXT.
2. Get rid of Ugly Next and Previous Links: Every Wordpress homepage, and any page that has lists of blog posts (search, archive), has simple “next” and “previous” links to navigate older posts. I have witnessed (countless times) visitors thinking that all the posts you had to offer were listed on the homepage and that was it (mainly people not familiar with Wordpress). You should have a linked list of pages (like google) that says “this is page 1 of…” and links to “2, 3, 4, 5, etc”. It’s easy to fix this with plugins like WP-PageNavi or WP-Page Numbers.
3. Bold Pagination on Single Pages: You can’t use the last trick on single pages, but every single (post) page has links at the bottom to view the next and previous page as well. I edit my “single.php” file to change that text to something like “Post before this one” and “Post after this one”, and align them left and right (bolded). You can style them any way you want - the point is to make them stand out. Visitors often come from SERP’s to a single post page, make it easy for them to view other ones as well.
4. More Links and Excerpts: This is personal preference really, but I prefer to have post excerpts on pages instead of the entire post, because I feel it clutters up pages and makes everything run together (on most blogs). I like to encourage people to visit the single post page to read the entire thing. There are a couple ways to change a running post page (like search results, archives, index.php) to show excerpts. On your homepage, you can use the Homepage excerpts plugin to achieve this. On all other pages, just the “the loop” and change the_content to the_excerpt.
5. Multi-Paged Navigation: If you ramble on like I do, some of your posts can be dreadfully long. Break them up into multi-pages posts using a plugin like Multi-Page Toolkit. It’s not only better usability, but it creates multiple post pages so you can get more indexed in the search engines.
6. Related Posts: What better way to get people to stay on your blog than by recommending to them “related posts” that you’ve written?! All it takes is a plugin like Related Posts.
7. Most Viewed Posts: Like an MVP of the game - you should be showing your visitors your most valuable content! Lester Chan has a great plugin called WP Post Views that has a sidebar widget than can display your most viewed posts! This is a great way to showcase your best posts and keep people on your blog.
8. Most Popular Posts: Alex King has a plugin called Popularity Contest that displays how popular posts are.
9. Category Images: Having your categories a post is assigned to listed and linked is a great way to get visitors to view everything else you have posted in that category, but sometimes (like “ad blindness) readers are blinded to post meta info. Solve that by assigning images to your categories, so that they stand out prominently! All you need is the Category Icons plugin.
10. Sidebar Navigation: There are a bazillion options for pimping out your sidebar, and most bloggers seem to just liste categories, archives, and a blogroll. Check out all of the Wordpress Widgets available, the Wordpress Codex page for “Customizing Your Sidebar”, the List Authors widget, Parent Pages widget, and especially the Wordpress plugin iFrameWidgets. The iframe widgets one is great if you use myBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Entrecard, or other third party widgets that may slow the load time of your blog.

By following these 10 steps to better navigation, your visitors will STAY LONGER and READ MORE each and every time they visit your blog. This article was a synopsis of my in depth article Wordpress Hack #5: 10 Ways to Improve Navigation. Happy Hacking!

I think there are a number of things we bloggers all have in common, and for the readers of this website, I hope that a love for WordPress is probably the biggest one. Have you ever wondered what you can do to help WordPress grow?

Here are a few ideas of things that just about anyone can do to help:

1. WordPress Plugin - This one requires you to be pretty fluent with PHP.   If you know coding well, though, this is probably the best thing you can do to improve WordPress.
2. WordPress Theme - Releasing a theme for the WordPress community to use is another great thing most people can do for WordPress.   If you look around, many of the more popular themes are fairly simplistic and don’t require an advanced design or a lot of features to be popular.
3. WordPress Blog - Building a WordPress niche blog seems to be the popular thing to do these days.   It is a lot of hard work, but if your passion runs deep the interaction with the WordPress community can be very rewarding.
4. WordPress Forums - Lorelle recently wrote a great post over at Blog Herald about helping out at the WordPress forums and how rewarding this can be.   If you don’t want to do any of the three above, give this one a shot.   I can quickly become addictive!

Anything else you would add to the list?

I talked a couple of weeks ago about the importance of always upgrading your WordPress install, as old WordPress installations are often vulnerable.  One thing I don’t think people realize is that a hacker can easily find vulnerable WordPress blogs because most standard WordPress themes will actually tell them what version you are using.

If you open up the header.php file of your theme, you should notice some code that looks something like this:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /><!-- leave this for stats -->

In order to protect your WordPress installation, I recommend people completely remove this code from their header.php file for all of their WordPress blogs.

Now, this obviously isn’t going to make your WordPress blog hack proof, but what it will do is make it so hackers can’t easily locate your blog if it is using a vulnerable WordPress installation.

Update: Thanks to a tip from Leland, it looks like WordPress 2.5+ now generates the meta link anyway via the wp_head hook, which is something you can’t remove.  With that said, if you care about your security, you can still remove the meta generator.  It looks like Ian of ThemeShaper has provided a couple methods, including a WordPress plugin to remove the meta generator information from your WordPress blog.

If you follow the underground world of domain names, you’ve probably noticed that this past week, a lot of coverage has been focusing on hackers who managed to take over a few domains owned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the company who regulates the world’s domain names.     What you may not have heard about, however, is that in what appears to be an unrelated incident, ICANN also had their WordPress blog hacked about the same time.

In another unrelated incident, ICANN’s official blog was attacked using a recent exploit in the blogging software Wordpress. This attack is believed to have been automated and not done with any motivation regarding ICANN itself. The effects were limited to the blog being taken offline for a short while while updates and repairs took place.

ICANN getting their blog hacked was a direct result of failing to upgrade their WordPress installation.  Now obviously ICANN has a fairly high profile blog, but this appeared to be a random attack and can truly happen to anyone.

I’ve actually written in the past a few times about the importance of always upgrading your WordPress installation, but what most of you probably don’t know is that I preach this out of personal experience.  About a year and a half ago my original WordPress blog was hacked simply because I hadn’t upgraded my WordPress installation.  WordPress had released a fix and I didn’t upgrade right away.

I was actually very fortunate that the person who gained access to my site seemed to have good intentions, as he simply warned me to upgrade my WordPress installation.   Unfortunately, though, it is something I will never forget.  Not only do you feel personally violated when this happens, but I was dumb and used similar passwords for many of my other accounts.  Someone with bad intentions could have easily guessed my similar password I used for my email account, then had access to all my accounts and other personal information.

Since that time, I have always upgraded my websites/blogs that use WordPress the day the upgrade is available, and I have always been outspoken to others about upgrading their WordPress installations.  The WordPress team has really been doing a great job of lately of testing their software, so we aren’t usually seeing more than 3-4 upgrades within each WordPress branch (2.3.x, 2.5.x, etc.).   For those new to WordPress, I remember it often going up to 7 or sometimes more in the WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0 days.

In case you weren’t aware, you have a number of options when upgrading your WordPress installation.  Obviously there is the manual upgrade, which many people dread.  Other upgrade options include upgrading via Fantastico, or upgrading using a WordPress plugin such as WordPress Automatic Upgrade.

Would you say that you usually upgrade your WordPress installation right away?