If there’s a single reason I maintain a website devoted to working with WordPress, it’s this: WordPress is the best tool that currently exists for internet publishing, and my primary goal today is to be an internet author (and by extension publisher). My goal, with all things I create is to make better WordPress tools that help internet publishers to makes better looking, more approachable internet content. Even if no one but me ever finds value in the things I create and share here, the tools and learning I put here will have helped me to become a better internet publisher.

It’s not about making money. It’s not about making the kind of things that get me copious internet traffic. It’s not about getting people to hire me to do things with WordPress for them. It’s about making better, more approachable, and thus more read, internet sites using WordPress. That’s it.

The tool we’re talking about here is 2004 Compaq Presario X1000 laptop that has been my primary computer since that year. It runs Window XP, has 1.6 screaming gigahertz, and can barely stay usable if you try to do two things at once. (Don’t even ask about playing Flash videos smoothly.)

I’m too focused on other monetary goals to purchase a new computer until I really need one. But with regards to programming-type activities, I’ve been letting my computer’s deliberateness serve as my excuse to do nothing about getting better at them. This is due primarily to a fundamental misunderstanding of how real work gets done real workers.

Surely, I’m not completely wrong in the thinking that a faster computer running the Mac OS I’ve been lusting over pretty much as long as I’ve had this computer would increase my ability to do these things. Surely Coda’s a nicer piece of software than one can easily find for web design on Windows (especially when you’re unwilling to spend money because you intend to stop using it… sometime). But that’s not really the reason I’ve not gotten better at this internet creating thing.

To extend the opening idea, a craftsman very dedicated to carving wood will do it with rocks if that’s all he has. A man who insists that he can only make something interesting with $4000 of equipment has no real interest in making things with wood. We may be able to say he’s interested in the idea of making things with wood, but no one should be considered serious about a project he isn’t working on regularly. This is the hard truth that I’m still working on learning fully.

For better or worse, Cascading Style Sheets are meant to cascade. That means if you style an <h1></h1>, all thing elements enclosed in <h1> tags well inherent that h1 style. This is both incredibly useful and incredibly troublesome.

It nice that if you really do want all your <h1>s to look the same. The cascade assures that they do regardless of the <div> they’re under or the classes you’ve given them. It’s a problem because when you absent-mindedly use an <h1> tag without remembering that you’ve styled the attribute, you can get some wonky looking stuff.

There are two basic means to deal with this reality: containment and a laissez-faire “let it cascade” approach. The first has the advantage of meaning that you never accidentally have things cascade, but the disadvantage that your stylesheet may well end up incredibly verbose. The latter has the advantage that when used correctly it can give you surprisingly brief stylesheets, but while composing that sheet you may well fall victim to the aforementioned surprise cascade.

Before we get too far into the analysis of the problem, some basic understanding. A containment strategy will wrap everything in every ancestor class all the way down to the exact element you’re styling. This assures that you never have a single style cascading in an expected way, and will generally yield something like this:

#container #content .post .entry p {
margin: 1em 0;
font-size: 1.2em;
font-face: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

Conversely, a cascaded style you only define what you’re styling in a loose and primarily pragmatic manner. The above might come out simply as:

.entry p {
font size: 1.2em;
}

This obviously assumes that face and margins were defined elsewhere. And though it’s not always going to be true, it’s a realistic possibility with a full-fledged cascade.

From a simple length perspective, there’s reason to assume that the latter method is better. But you never know when you’ll realize that you’ve already styled <p> to include font-size: 5em; or some such nonsense. In this case — and this is a unique problem for those sizing thing in ems — you’ll get a font size of 6ems, or around 60 pixels, certainly not what you wanted.

I’ve got a gut-level aversion to verbosity where it’s not necessary. But I don’t like being surprised by unexpected cascading bits either.

There is, I think, a way to split the difference. A managed cascade can allow for a reasonable number of “presets” while still leaving sufficient room to avoid the accidental cascade. Though I still think that browsers welcome movement away from crude text resizing and toward zoom will eventually render the use of ems for sizing completely obsolete, that day isn’t here yet. (And if it were, not all the issues in the containment versus cascade battle would be resolved.)

So for now, I think it’s best to contain as much styling as you feel is reasonable, while allowing some things to cascade. It’s an unconscious working assumption I’m sure more than a few designers already use, but it’s a conscious one I’m certain I’ll be helped by.

It worth noting that I did this Saturday. Things have changed since. If you’re interested, popularly relevant information about development is at the WordPress Blog. More abbreviated notes, and up-to-the-day changes are tracked here.

Because some of my impressions make little sense without visuals, I’ve included a gallery of the most notable changes that have so far been made in the progress toward 2.7. (Sidenote: first time I’ve used the gallery in WordPress.)

And now my impressions, as originally noted:

I don’t really like how the new version smashes out the horizontal space. Though I doubt the change is nearly as big as it currently seems to me, it’s undeniable that the compose area fits fewer words per line than did previous (2.6-) versions.

The left side navigation has its pluses and minuses. I like that you can get to any page at all from it, but it’s also there even when you aren’t wanting to go to any page.

I think the term Utilities in the sidebar is misguided. “Manage” seemed to make more sense, and still does.

The built-in browse and install feature for plugins is pretty unquestionably cool.

The built-in upgrade to WordPress itself seemed to have failed on my one and only attempt. (It has since worked for me, the failure may have been a fluke.)

I think the ability to drag anything on the write page the sidebar is good, but it’s not as much customizability as I’d like. Will I ever be able to put a custom field on a post, without having to name that field every time? And be able to put that field right under the title field if I so choose? Until then any changes or not to the Write page will seem rather superficial to me.

There appears to have been few or no changes made to the Themes area thus far.

The dashboard has changed, but right now the utility of the “Inbox” and Quick Post sections, both sitting above the news boxes of 2.5+, are open questions.

Clearly there’s no small amount of work left before 2.7 “ships” in November (by current plans). That said, I’m amazed by all the great features slated for inclusion, and I feel so lucky to blog on such a constantly-improving platform.

Good

• A New Look — Though I wouldn’t say that all aesthetic changes made to WordPress redound to the good, I’m satisfied. The new colors are nice, the dashboard’s been improved, and everything feels better.
• Much Better Tag Integration — This is a direct descendant of the above point. Now a list of entries shows the tags. Now we get tag suggestions. And the ability to edit tags as a group. All of these are big improvements over the piecemeal support for tags that felt tagged on to 2.3.
• Better Media Integration — Though I’ve heard — and share — some discontent with the new Flash uploader, it’s nice that it was rethought. The ability to easily upload many pictures, and to easily create galleries are nice changes.
• Crucial or Trivial Bonus: Plays nice with Safari/WebKit — Anyone who tried using Safari with WordPress before will understand what a nice change this is. Anyone who hasn’t tried will think this is a silly point.

Bad

• The Bugs — This may be based solely on the fact that I use custom fields, but I’ve been having terrible trouble with both scheduling posts and the unnecessary creation of extraneous drafts. These sins can be forgiven, but I am getting rather impatient waiting for a fix.
• The New Look — A lot of changes to the Write page are for the better, but the dearth of white space on the right side confounds me. Catergories were there previously, and I think there was a number of good reasons for that. Tags, I think, should go there as well. But neither’s there. As I sidenote: I’m not really a fan of this Lucidia Grande business in the editor either.
• Change is Hard  — This is more a personal problem, but a lot of people (myself included) have been and slow to accept 2.5. This innate resistance to change is both irrational, and a waste of time.

I’m certainly not going back, and am even less likely to change blogging platforms, so all of this is essentially trivial. But now you know.

The epic showdown. Two titans of free internet content-management will meet in this arena. Only one can emerge victorious.

Two things should be made clear at the outset: (1) I was looking to make a link blog, not a typical tumblelog with multiple kinds of posts, all formatted differently; and (2) I eventually chose (self-hosted) WordPress. Yes, I just killed the drama. But this is about a comparison, and not (as I implied in the last paragraph) about winners or losers.

There were, three battles in this war. The first is the one that only matters to the proprietor: the back-end. This focuses primarily on how easy it is to create and edit entries for such a blog. Second, and what was the deciding factor for me, was archiving. That is: how easy it is to find what you want among the old stuff. The final issue is rather nebulous, but we’ll call it flexibility. That being whether each CMS can do the splits.

The Back

This is, without question, the place where WordPress loses a lot of points. And where Tumblr shines, especially if you’re looking for more than a link blog.

Tumblr’s backend is stylish, as the image at right demonstrates. I could go all the way to elegant and perhaps beautiful. Essentially you select the kind of post you’re going to be making, and then you’re taken to a specific page that’s tailored for making that kind of post. If you haven’t played around with Tumblr, it might be worth signing up just to see this.

WordPress, on the other hand, is a hulking CMS which can do lots of things. But it’s not terribly elegant at any of them. The way I create a post for my link blog demonstrates well. On the top the title, post text, and tags are entered. Then the link is added down at the bottom in the “custom fields” area. In which I’ve had to create a custom field called “link,” in which I put URL I want this entry to point to.

The use of custom fields — by definition separate from WordPress’s normal working — also makes it slightly hard to style entries properly, and harder still to make the feed act correctly (a problem I still haven’t fixed on my blog). I don’t need to go into detail, but suffice it say that it’s a headache.

Advantage Tumbler

The Archives

This is where WordPress, comparatively, shines. And the reason that I decided to throw my lot in with the ugly backend of WordPress, rather than the snazzy ease of Tumblr.

Tumblrs archive (see random example) look nearly as fresh and innovative as Tumblr’s backend. When I first saw one I said: “Wow. This is cool!”

And even though all those statements are true, Tumblr’s Archives are troublesome. For one, I’m not a fan of horizontal scrolling, which any reasonably old blog would have. And the only way to search such archives is with a browser’s built-in search fuction — which works, but is hardly elegant. And the ability to navigate with tags, of which I’m becoming an ever bigger fan, is completely out as well.

By contrast, WordPress is built for archives. The archives page I’ve thrown together for my nascent link blog gives you some ideas. There are tags there, as well as categories and monthly archives. Sure there’s a lot less flash than Tumblr’s page, but this has something else that Tumblr doesn’t. The ability to search. Built-in. And search plus all the ways you can view a WordPress archive means a lot to me.

Advantage WordPress

Flexibility

As I mentioned at the start, this a rather nebulous category. It encompasses most everything that I haven’t mentioned but feel the need to.

Both Tumblr and WordPress have a large array of themes. For the purposes of tumbling or linkblogging, Tumblr’s better in this. As for the novice, some seemingly-complex things have to be done to any WordPress theme to make it work at all.

Both tumblr and WordPress can exist at their own domains (though the tumblr default is X.tumblr.com, it can be easily changed). Having said that, all Tumblr backend work happens at tumblr.com.

Also, if one is reasonably skilled, it should noted that WordPress can do much more than Tumblr. But many, not even myself, are reasonably skilled.

So for the novice Tumblr is probably a wise choice (note that I’m not wise), you can’t do many of the things that WordPress allows you — seperate pages, for example — but the ease-of-use is hard to beat.

This is hard to call, so I’ll go ahead and do it the easy way:

Novice: Advantage Tumblr

Level 3 Nerd: Advantage WordPress

Conclusions

This contest is hard to call. Each CMS got 1.5 points out of three. As I suggested, I would decide this based on nerdiness. If you’re comfortable with CSS, HTML, PHP, and WordPress, I think that’s the obvious choice. If the acronyms in the last sentence confused and disoriented you, Tumblr’s probably a wiser bet.

Forced to choose an overall winner, I think I’d choose Tumblr.

The only reason I’m not currently using it is that dislike it’s archiving system. And that I like the possibility for future improvement when I finally get smart and motivated enough.

I hope I clinched the choice for you, affirmed what you were alreay thinking. Neither system’s terrible. Neither systems perfect. It’s just important to choose the best one for your needs and abilities.

Now, I should be clear that this is not an argument that no blog (or other website) should have a sidebar. I think they’re incredibly useful in a lot of cases. When I surf the blogosphere, I tend to favor the sidebar as a way to get around.

But the sidebar’s usefulness gives way to one of it’s biggest flaws: the clutter problem. Bloggers — who tend to be novice designers — tend to dump anything and everything into the sidebar. Most people probably have seen this problem before, but if you doubt me go spend a little time looking though blogspot.com or wordpress.com, you’ll notice what I’m talking about.

The problem starts benignly when a new blogger will say: “I want a little note to be easily visible,” and they’ll dump it into the sidebar. They’ll say “I want a RSS subscription button (or perhaps one for every feedreader known to man)” and that’ll go in the sidebar. They’ll create multiple blogrolls, and then a few images and maybe some links to their own content. And they’ll ad a last.fm widget, and a flickr widget, and a translations widget, and the “awards” they got from other bloggers. And it’ll all go into the sidebar. By the time they’re done no one wants to see, let alone click on the cluttered mess that resides where a simple sidebar used to.

I’ll readily admit that this story is a slight exaggeration. Many sidebars are manageable while they contain all the desired content. But that doesn’t change the fact that sidebars have latent tendency to become ugly and unmanaged clutter magnets.

Another strong argument for banishing the sidebar is that, especially but no exclusively when weighted down with moving widgets, they’re a hideous distraction from your writing. This may not be a concern for some bloggers, but I’d bet that the vast majority of people who blog do it as a way to practice, polish, and improve their writing. You want readers to look at and comment on what you’re writing, not be whisked off to yet another blog.

It not that a sidebar is an unavoidably bad, or that it shouldn’t be used. The issue is primarily that one must consider if they really need a sidebar. If you don’t it’s far better to use a design without a sidebar than to persist in having one that offers no function you desire.

There are risks in eliminating it certainly. But for every visitor that’ll be turned off by your lack of a sidebar, at least one more will be interested enough to try to see why you’ve eliminated it. It’s not that ever site should either have or not have have one, but every person designing for blogs should think about their merits and problems before making more of them.

Having said all of that, the magazine’s website is a little drab. Though I like the simple functionality of the “current issue” page, it’s not exactly a groundbreaking layout. The frontpage is also admirable-but-boring, giving you a quick snapshot of some of the sites freshest and most interesting content while doing a great deal to prevent the overload that comes from many magazines and newspapers.

But I recently ventured into the publication’s rather modest blog section, and I feel confident in saying that I understand why the commenters are so few and far between. The section feels rather like an afterthought.

But the biggest problem The Economist’s blogs seem to have — and this isn’t a problem particular too them — is that they look so darn boring. Their economics blog, Free exchange, does a very admirable job highlighting the problem. Upon loading the page, my first though was: “I’m supposed to read this!?” And remember: I’m an ardent fanboy of this publication.

Now before I lay into The Economist too hard, I will readily admit that I experience this often with blogs, even my own (which any fool could tell you I value much more than those of others). Large blocks of smallish text, especially in a readable-but-slightly-dull face like Verdana or Arial, is a sure way to make me think a little before reading. And as anyone experienced in the use of Digg of StumbleUpon can tell you, that second’s hesitation may well send away over half of those who arrive on the page.

Now I dislike those that to tell you that you should front-load a post with photos and pull-quotes and other eye-catching tricky to convince fools to stick around. But after looking at the blogs of The Economist I know understand the advice in a way I didn’t before. I would never advocate pictures for every blog and entry, but they can certainly make things seem a little less drab.

To avoid giving the canned “use pictures” advice, I’ve thought of a few ideas that I think could help improve the blogs of The Economist and probably could improve yours as well.

• Subtitles for blogs. The first sin Free Exchange commits is that it doesn’t tell me what I’ll find there. If I’m a quick thinker, I may make the inference that the title probably refers to something like commerce, trade, stock markets, or economics. Were I a fool (and we shan’t ever forget that I am) I would probably say “Hmm…” and either leave the site or look down the blog.
• Subtitles for content. If there is a single flaw that almost every blog on the planet (mine included) has, it’s that you don’t have more to go on before diving in than than the few words that make up a post’s title. But even the most pithy title can strongly benefit from an intriguing subtitle, as both Slate and Salon illustrate (in randomly selected articles).
• Too much sidebar. This is harder one to judge, and a much harder one to agree on. Some think that sidebars should be stuffed or exploding, I certainly don’t. One of the strongest arguments against a sizable sidebar is made by Free Exchange: a interesting sidebar easily distracts attention from your boring-looking content. This (too wide) sidebar is distracting with its ads and pictures and colorful tag cloud. All of these things make me more likely to click around (and perhaps away) and less likely to realize how good and useful the blog’s contents are.
• Hard to get around. The Economist seems to be struggling mightily to hide their blog content from outsiders. Not only is it hard to click to the site’s other blogs when you’re in one, but it’s hard to find content within that blog. Other than the distracting tag cloud, there’s the thin-and-nearly-hidden link to their month-by-month archive and a list of recent posts. All of these are rather standards in the blogsphere, but they’re hardly good. The site’s Archives page, when you finally find it, look suspiciously like the default WordPress archive that I’ve worked to correct twice before.

Those four issues certainly aren’t an exhaustive list of the (disputable) flaws in The Economist’s blogs. The clearly-broken look of their American politics blog Democracy in America is perhaps a greater sin than any of the above bullets. But I’m glad to have noticed these sins, and hope they can be instructive in my (and perhaps your) future work.

Perhaps the simplest and most useful analogy for how content matters on the internet is offline publishing. Although both magazines and books have ever-increasing online presences, they still live primarily in an offline world, as any publisher can tell you. And though the analogy isn’t perfect, it demonstrates a few of the essential reasons that content isn’t king.

Publishing Offline

As any publisher can tell you, distribution is the most important component of selling a book. A great book in a well-designed jacket cannot sell if the only place you can buy it is the publisher’s warehouse. Distribution, to brick and mortar stores like your local bookseller, Barnes & Noble, or Walmart is still the best way to make sure a book is visible. Being listed on Amazon.com certainly adds to a book’s visibility as well, but when the majority of books are still purchased offline, it’s not enough to be available there.

Having a visible presence for a book in a brick-and-mortar store is the first step toward selling a book, but it’s not the only one. Once a book is visible, it needs to be looked at. If being visible is analogous to being seen, being visually interesting is the first step toward being looked at. In an offline bookstore, the number of bound pages you see is astronomically larger than the number you actually look at. Being looked at means that, at least, your eyes linger long enough to read the title and author of the book. Perhaps you’ll pick it up and thumb through it, but that’s often a step beyond being looked at.

And as any book publisher or customer are Border’s will tell you, the most important thing in getting looked at is being visually interesting. Imagine a book called Pooh and Eeyore. One version of the book merely says those words and lists the author but is otherwise blank. The second version has a colorful picture of a half-eaten Pooh coming out of Eeyore’s mouth, and the subtitle, “A chilling tale of lies, deceit, and revenge.” There’s little doubt that even if the second book’s cover is a little sensational, it’s also going to be looked at more than three times as much, and bought probably twice as often.

Once a book is seen and looked at, its contents finally matters. Once you’re looking at a book, you’ll read the book jacket and figure out if the topic really interests you, you’ll flip the pages and maybe even read a few. But it is only here that content matters. In the process of determining if a customer buys a book or not, content comes in third, hardly a kingly position.

Some Caveats

Having just told you how “content is jack” is more true, if less elegant, than “content is king,” I’m now obligated to tell you a few of the reasons that my story fails.

The first problems is that a book’s contents determine if a publisher buys a book from its author. That is, publishers — though it may sometimes seem otherwise — usually make content king in the first place. They then make sure that the distribution network, and the visual impact of the book’s jacket, matches the good content inside.

But for the self-published, both in books and blogs, there isn’t a publisher to take care of the distribution and design for you. So they are, again, very important for you in the dual role of “author” and “publisher.”

The other important caveat for the above story is that search engines are meant to negate the seeing→looking at→reading process. Google should — not to say it does — tell you the best article about any given topic, and if you’ve written the best article, you’ll be seen. So ideally, Google would assure that even for the self-published without great distribution or design they get seen.

But this fact underestimates that Google evaluates what is the best by how many links it has. And the number of links that content gets is driven, at least a little, by how easily it moves from being considered “unkown” to “great content,” the essence of our story.

What to do

So you’ve got a blog that you want people to read. You think its content is great but you’re not seeing the type of traffic you’d expect. What to do?

The best answer is that there really is no solution but that pat suggestions you’ll find all over the internet. There is no single thing that will get your blog seen, looked at, and read by the masses of people you desire. But there are many things you can do to help. I’ve listed a few of the more novel ideas below.

1. Have a unique design that highlights your content. This is crucial for moving people from “seeing” to “looking” and onto “reading.” When someone arrives — via Google, Digg, or StumbleUpon — they’re likely to leave if the content looks like “Just another WordPress weblog.” If you blog looks novel and well-designed, they’re much more likely to stick around.
2. Comment on other people’s blogs. When someone sees that you’ve read what they’ve written, they’re more likely to read what you’ve written.
3. Advertise. I say this fully aware that the average blogger loathes the idea and that the average list of “improve your blog” sites thus don’t give it. After all, this list can’t just become a grouping of what I called “warmed-over platitudes” at this article’s outset. But advertising is great way to drive traffic you’re willing to pay, and thus get more eyeball a chance to see your content.
4. Join blog networks. When you join a blog network, either explicitly or implicitly (with a blogroll) you assure that people with interests in similar content as you will see your content.
5. Highlight your best work. I’ve sort-of addressed this before, but the newest-first mentality of blogs can easily mean that your best content is missed by new visitors. It’s useful to have a list of some of your best stuff in an easy-to-find place, perhaps the sidebar or your archives page.

Follow all of that advice and… something might happen. I’m not going to make any hollow guarantees. The fact is that content matters more than my iconoclastic title allowed (even if it also matters less than the conventional wisdom allows). No new publication becomes suddenly popular. It takes time, word of mouth, and in the case of books, magazines, CDs, and movies, millions of dollars worth of advertising. It’s good not to forget that fact.