While browsing my feeds, I noticed an interesting post over at JohnCow explaining how to make money online with missing pages. The author noticed that a lot of traffic was ending up on his error page (almost 26,000 people to be exact) and felt that there had to be a better way to use this page so there wasn’t so much wasted traffic.

In the authors example, the idea is to redirect all traffic that hits his 404 page to his “make money” page, which contains affiliate links and other ways to get paid. While this example probably wouldn’t apply to most of us, I do think that it might be a good idea to redirect these bloggers to a more important page on your blog, such as your homepage.

In order to do so, you simply need to do a quick edit to your 404.php page (which most themes should have). Before attempting, make sure you have a backup copy of your 404.php page in case something goes wrong. You’ll want to add this code to the top of your 404.php page:

<?php
header ('Location: http://yourhomepageurl/’ );
?>

You’ll of course want to manually enter your homepage URL. If you have a favorite post you’d like to promote, you could instead add the URL to that post.

If you’d prefer not to redirect your 404 page, you can always customize it to help the potential reader to find what they were looking for.

Most themes typically come with a 404.php page that shows up by default whenever an invalid URL is visited on your blog. Depending on how often you change the URL of existing posts or delete old posts, it may or may not be a high traffic page for your blog.

Either way, when a typical web surfer finds your blog and is greeted with the lovely 404 page, they will most commonly just click the “Back” button on their browser and continue browsing through the other search results. If your 404 page is setup correctly, you can often retain that traffic by either offering something funny to grab the readers attention or by offering a variety of methods for them to find the post they are looking for. Over at Theme Playground I ran across a great post about customizing your 404 page, which includes a bunch of suggestions for retaining that traffic.

I personally prefer to provide useful resources on my 404 pages, so I will typically use something like the following code to help search engine traffic hopefully find what they are looking for:

<h1>Not Found, Error 404</h1>
<p>The page you are looking for no longer exists.</p>
<p>Perhaps you can find what you are looking for by searching the site archives!</p>
<b>Search by Page:</b>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
</ul>
<b>Search by Month:</b>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
</ul>
<b>Search by Category:</b>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>
</ul>

I will also sometimes call the search box (usually searchform.php) and the popular posts plugin as well to help retain that traffic, depending on the type of blog the 404 page is being built for. How do you have your 404 page setup?

Today I ran across an interesting discussion happening over at one of my favorite WordPress blogs, WPCandy, that I figured I would mention over here.   

The discussion is regarding trademarking, and the use of “WordPress” in your domain URL.   Obviously this domain uses WordPress in the URL, so I have both a fan interest and a financial interest in the discussion. 

First, here is some information from Michael’s post:

According to WordPress.org, to protect their trademark they ask that if you are going to create a WordPress related site not to use “WordPress” in the domain you choose.

What’s the meaning behind this? Are sites that use WordPress in their name at risk? Is WPCandy at risk?

Although they are not lawyers, WordPress still insists that they must make it clear, “so that we protect our trademark.”

In addition to running this website and Slick Affiliate, I also spend a lot of my spare time as an active “domainer”, meaning that I buy/sell/develop/park domains both to generate extra income and invest in my online future.   One of the things you learn very early when you buy and sell domains is trademarking and what domains are off limits.  When you purchase a domain that includes the name of a trademarked product, the company that owns the trademark can take it from you if they invest the time and resources to. 

Unfortunately, when I originally purchased the domain Hack WordPress, I knew about the risk of trademarked domains, but I didn’t realize the word “WordPress” had been trademarked.  Looking back now, I probably should have done a trademark search, but it is to late now.  When I eventually learned that it was indeed trademarked, I went out and purchased a “wp” domain that I am very happy with, should I ever have to move this website to a new domain. 

Fortunately for those of that have a “WordPress” domain, I find it very unlikely that WordPress would ever invest the time or money involved in “shutting down” domains that use WordPress in the URL unless the sites were somehow trying to harm WordPress in some way, or were making really good money off the WordPress name.   After all, this product is built upon open source and the WordPress community!  I believe that WordPress fan sites do a lot to help the software and the community that supports the software, so it probably would not be in their best interests to remove them.  We promote the WordPress product for free and help generate both interest and support for their product.   

Overall, I believe this statement is more a legal precaution to protect them in situations where they would need to enforce this.  The only thing I worry about is a major corporation such as Google/Yahoo/Microsoft acquiring WordPress, because they have been known to pursue fan sites violating trademarks.

What is your take on this issue?

There are a number of great free WordPress themes out there, but it is often difficult to make a quality 4-column theme. I’ve found that there is definitely a market out there 4-column WordPress themes, however, so when a good one comes along, you know that it will be heavily used.

Today I ran across a new quality 4-column WordPress theme from Blog Oh Blog called Techicon. This theme is widget ready, does a great job of blending the columns so it looks like a three column theme, and takes into account some of the latest trends from around the blogosphere.

As you can see from the screenshot above, this theme has a menu at the top above the header and features some of your blogs content at the top of the page, including popular posts, recent posts, and latest comments for your readers to see. It also displays the RSS feed in a prominent position.

If you’d like to give this theme a try, you can check out the demo and then download it here.

There are a lot of different variables when it comes to making a successful WordPress theme. It’s not always difficult to get people to actually download your theme, but it takes a little extra work to get them to stick with your theme for the long haul.

With that said, there are quite a few things you can do to help make your theme appeal to more people. If you release free WordPress themes, here are a few things I recommend you do to maximize the amount of exposure (downloads and inbound links) from your WordPress theme:

• Make a 2-Column Version and a 3-Column Version - This will allow your theme to appeal to both types of WordPress users.
• Browser Compatibility - Make sure your theme is compatible with IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Opera. If you aren’t sure of the best way to do this, I recommend using BrowserShots.
• Use a white background for the content area - Your average theme user prefers white backgrounds in the content area. I’m not sure of the reason for this, but studies show that the most downloaded themes have a white background in the content aera. I would presume this is because it allows users to easily add images that don’t have transparent backgrounds.
• Offer an attractive subscribe section - Users want to promote their feed, so offering an attractive subscription section will draw more people to download and use your theme.
• Keep it simple - There are a lot of really great themes, but browsing over the most downloaded themes, it looks like the simple themes are used the most often.
• Search Engine Friendly - There are quite a few things a theme designer can do to optimize the theme for search engines. Set up archives to display partial posts, optimize headers, etc.
• Integrate WordPress Plugins - I’ve talked previously about how to prevent WordPress plugins from breaking your blog. That same method can be used by theme designers to set up WordPress plugins to work out of the box. It is easy to do and will go a long way towards keeping people using your theme.
• Validate Code - Having a valid XHTML and CSS compliant theme will go a long way to help your theme impress potential users.
• Widget Ready - I was surprised at just how many people will only download widget ready themes. This ensures people with no coding knowledge can easily use your theme.

Other useful things to consider when creating your theme:

• Does your theme allow users to easily add advertisements? Themes with built-in spots for 125×125 advertisements are being downloaded like crazy right now.
• Is there an options page that will allow users with minimal coding knowledge to make adjustments to the header and other things?
• Do you offer the same theme with different colors?

What do you look for when downloading a WordPress theme?