I did a quick site review of Charlie’s website. These are my main recommendations.
- Use a storyboard theme or company theme to lay out your wares. Such as
If you want to try one of ours take a look at the Genesis Club Themes. They come with full step by step instructions to allow you to re-create the site like the demo.
- Add hand crafted title tags and meta description tags
- Create several niche related categories plus the blog category and put all posts into a single appropriate category. Put general, opinion blog posts into the blog category.
- Use permalink structure as described in the Genesis Apprentice course (postid)
- Use Siteliner to identify any actual duplicate content and remove that
- Use the Genesis Club Pro plugin to enhance your footer – it includes many other functions.
- Lose the visual editor and use the text edit – write clan and simple HTML on your pages.
- Set up the colours and sizes of your headings like H3 headings in a CSS stylesheet and avoid having to select a colour for them each time as when you use a stylesheet the styling will be applied automatically to all H3s (as well as to any other tags you set up in your stylesheet)
- Break up your paragraphs – make them each one sentence long.
- Put in meaningful sub-headings (H2s and H3s) to allow readers to scan a page and decide that it’s all about without having to read it all first.
- Create larger images that fill the entire horizontal width of the available space on the page.
- Build a list if you are going to write regularly.
- Use the Genesis Club Pro plugin to help you create better sidebars that are tailored to the main content.
- Set up a proper contact form with Gravity forms or some other forms plugins
- Create an events blog category and post events into that. Then just link to that from the About page or anywhere else so you don’t end up with lots of content that is out of date.
We’re thinking of adding some functionality to the Genesis Club Pro plugin to better address the case where you want date control on some posts but not on others.