Problem
Most Wordpress developers will develop their theme locally and then move it to a production server once it’s ready to launch the site. A problem can arise when you want to generate links to your blogs homepage on the dev site and then when you move to the production server, your links all break. Also, if you move your blog into another directory or subdomain for some reason, your links can also break.
Solution
Rather than hard coding your home page url into your theme pages, you can use the bloginfo() function to instead load the blog url that you entered into the Wordpress Admin section, that way you’ll always load the correct link.
The wordpress url is where you installed wordpress to on your server
So wherever you want to load your blog’s home page url, instead of hard coding the url, use this piece of PHP code:
<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>This should hopefully help prevent some headaches when developing a theme that will eventually be located at different domains.
I’m not particularly concerned with the amount of people that read this site; I’m not trying to make any money off of this site and I’m not even really looking to build up any sort of reputation from it. It’s just a creative outlet.
That being said, I, like all people, have an ego. And seeing my traffic numbers increase is always a pleasant surprise. Since starting my “Make Wordpress Do What You Want” series, I have seen my traffic increase to about 10-25 visitors per day on average. Nearly all of that traffic comes from organic search. Here’s what my traffic looks like for about the last two weeks:
Averaging 10-25 visitors a day organically
This is by no means a lot of traffic. But it is encouraging for two reasons: 1) I plan on adding at least another dozen Wordpress tricks to the site, which should boost the traffic another 20-30 visitors a day and 2) I have plans to experiment with ad revenue generating micro niche sites for some nice recurring income.
That second item is potentially a great thing. I’m hoping to have half of my income come from micro niche sites by the new year (obviously if I can get more than that’s even better). I’ve learned the right tools I need to find the niches, I have a list of really powerful link building resources to use, and I have all of the technical know how to make it happen.
We’ll see how it goes.
