If you look at the site you are on now you’ll see there’s validation errors related to the Twitter Updates menu item. This is not part of the Talian theme files, I added it manually and the code doesn’t validate.

So like with my Twitter widget if you run WordPress plugins that generate code that doesn’t validate or you create posts with code that doesn’t validate, the theme will validate, but your pages won’t.

David

i will buy it. can I test it if the theme will be valid?

Thanks!

The landscape image code is generated as a background image (it’s CSS code), so there’s no value in SEOing them, they won’t increase (or decrease) a pages rankings as they aren’t indexed by Google.

You could easily change the code from being a background image using CSS to a standard image (so it would be counted SEO wise), but it wouldn’t be easy to change the name of the image to match the content of the post with WordPress (this is part of the template and something like that would have to be plugin generated and not related to the theme per se), but it would be easy to add an alt attribute using the title of a post etc…

I considered using banner images that are indexable etc… in the theme and adding relevant alt text to those images, but decided against it as it’s going a little greyhat SEO since the landscape images have nothing to do with the content of each post, so it would be adding more SEO because we can and not because we should (if you know what I mean ).

You have to be careful with this type of SEO, it’s easy to get carried away, for example I could have smiles (which can be images in WordPress ) to have relevant alt text, but it’s crossing into that grey area of SEO and though you might get away with a couple of iffy things like this, do too many or get a manual Google reviewer on a bad day or before they’ve had their coffee and you might get a penalty! I’ve had sites penalised where I thought I was 100% whitehat SEO, so better keep one step away from the grey areas.

If you have posts with no images you could add images from a set of images, like a money image for posts about money and give it relevant anchor text (I see this sort of thing on some sites) and there might be plugins to automate this. I tend to shy away from that sort of SEO as it’s a grey area that I could see a Google manual reviewer not seeing it as whitehat SEO: I see it as greyhat SEO and I’ve broken plenty of Google’s guidelines to test SEO ideas to see just how close to the line we can safely go: I’ve found a BIG step from the line is advisable, if it’s iffy don’t do it unless you are happy to have the site banned by Google forever.

David

My husband is asking about SEO value and the image name. He was expecting there to be some php magic that would name the image whatever the H1 is on each page. So, on the page http://www.usemydroid.com/droid-battery-life-video/ he was expecting the image to be named “droid-battery-life-video.jpg”. And likewise on the http://www.usemydroid.com/about/ page he was expecting the image to magically be called “about.jpg”.

He’s currently using a custom CMS at his place of employment that does magically rename images. So he’s pulling from that experience. I have no experience with this kind of magic. Is it even possible within Wordpress?

He also inquired about the alt tag for the image. Not sure if there’s a way to program that, as well. Perhaps in the landscape-images.php file?

Thanks!

With all the time and energy you give your clients…do you have a way we can donate to you? Or should I simply purchase another theme?! =)

I do appreciate that your theme is making meta text more automated. I do love the All in One SEO pack because it allows me to modify the title and menu button. I can live with the title…but any solution for allowing users to create a specific menu name different than the title?

Got a quick fix for the current Talian theme.

Edit the style.css file in a text editor or via the built in WordPress theme editor and add the following code to the bottom of the file.

.content_talia img {
margin: 0 0 24px 0;
max-width: 640px;
}
.alignleft, img.alignleft {
display: inline;
float: left;
margin-right: 24px;
margin-top: 4px;
}
.alignright, img.alignright {
display: inline;
float: right;
margin-left: 24px;
margin-top: 4px;
}
.aligncenter, img.aligncenter {
clear: both;
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
img.alignleft, img.alignright, img.aligncenter {
margin-bottom: 12px;
}
#content_talia .wp-caption {
background: #f1f1f1;
color: #888;
font-size: 12px;
line-height: 18px;
text-align: center;
margin-bottom: 20px;
padding: 4px;
}
#content_talia .wp-caption img {
margin: 5px;
}
#content_talia .wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
margin: 0 0 4px;
}
#content_talia .wp-smiley {
margin:0;
}
#content_talia .gallery {
margin: auto;
}
#content_talia .gallery .gallery-item {
float: left;
margin-top: 10px;
text-align: center;
width: 33%;
}
#content_talia .gallery img {
border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;
}
#content_talia .gallery .gallery-caption {
margin-left: 0;
}
#content_talia .gallery dl {
margin: 0;
}
#content_talia .gallery img {
border: 10px solid #f1f1f1;
}
#content_talia .gallery-caption {
color: #888;
font-size: 12px;
margin:-24px 0 24px 0;
}
#content_talia .gallery br+br {
display: none;
}


Save and upload etc… and it should work right away. I don’t use the built in WordPress image functions, but made a test post on a domain I don’t use anymore : http://www.pro-racing-tickets.com/skegness-so-festival-2010.html

I’ve added two images, one centered and one aligned right and they work fine.

I got the code from the new default WordPress 3 theme called Twenty Ten, so this is the latest features of WordPress 3. I took the gallery code as well since that’s a newish feature (not tried adding a gallery to WordPress though, so untested). I’ll take a look if there’s anything else moved from inline CSS to the main CSS file in WordPress 3 and update accordingly and also any new features I’ve missed. I plan to go through Talian when WordPress 3.0 is released to add any new features etc… there’s quite a few nice updates coming, so expect some major changes.

I’ve tested Talian with the latest WordPress 3 release candidate 1 and it works fine: http://www.glee-tv-show.co.uk/, so updating to WordPress 3.0 when released shouldn’t need an immediate update of Talian, but obviously any new WP3 features won’t be in the code yet.

David