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.

Even if iPhone and iPod Touch are very good for displaying web pages, zooming again and again can be a little boring sometimes. Happilly, IWPhone plugin is here to help by allowing you to automatically detect iPhone and iPod user agent and display an optimized theme.

Why optimizing your blog for iPhone

Why should I optimize my theme for the iPhone? My current theme renders very good. This sentence was probably what you thought first when you saw my post title. iPhone uses Safari, so, if your theme looks good on your Mac’s Safari, it will look good through the iPhone.

But there’s a quite boring thing: Having to zoom over and over is a bit boring, especially when text width is wider than iPhone screen. Also, it could be a good idea to use a more minimalistic theme, with no or less Javascript, to enhance browsing speed.

I just purchased an iPod Touch and i use it often to read webpages. A comfortable navigation through my mobile device became a criteria of quality for me. And I’m quite sure that some of your readers thinks the same.

How does it work?

Once you downloaded and unzipped the IWPhone plugin, you’ll see a file named iwphone.php and a iwphone-by-contentrobot directory.
The iwphone.php file is the plugin itself, while the iwphone-by-contentrobot directory is the theme that will be displayed only when the plugin will detect iPhone or iPod Touch user agent.

To install IWPhone, simply upload the iwphone.php file to your wp-content/plugins directory and the iwphone-by-contentrobot directory to your wp-content/themes.
Then, simply activate the IWPhone plugin in your Wordpress admin panel.

That’s all. Now, when someone will visit your blog through an iPhone, the IWPhone theme will automaticly be displayed. If you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you should test it now and see how easy to read your blog is.

If you’re interested about customizing the IWPhone theme, you should read what I just posted on my blog.

If you’ve downloaded a bunch of WordPress themes to try them out, you have probably noticed that some themes come with an Options menu, while a majority of themes do not. The function of the Options panel allows users to control certain theme functions from their dashboard without actually altering any of the code.

Having an Options panel is definitely not crucial to the success of a WordPress theme, but it will help your theme to appeal to a lot of additional users. If you are a theme designer, you may have wondered whether it is difficult or not and how exactly to set this up. It actually involves the creation/altering of four files: functions.php, header.php, style.php, style.css. If you’d like to set this up for one of your themes, The Undersigned has made a great post detailed how to add options to your WordPress theme, where you are walked through the steps it takes to add an options panel. I recommend giving it a shot if you offer a WordPress theme. It could help double the number of users.