This post will give an overview of each step I took in the process, with pictures, while trying not to go too in depth on any one section. Some larger topics, such as the character illustration process or some of my custom WordPress stuff, will eventually get their own posts.

Here’s the design to development process of the Monsta WordPress Theme:

• Brainstorm
• Sketching
• Wireframe/Design
• HTML
• Character Design
• WordPress

Brainstorm

The first step when building anything is taking time to decide what you’d like to accomplish. After already doing one theme for this blog I had a good idea about what elements I  wanted preserved and ones I didn’t.

Here’s a high level view of what I wanted:

Clean design

A muted color palette with the content being displayed in greyscale with hints of red to guide the eye. I also wanted to use some larger fonts  to give it a polished look.

Ability to display multiple skills or interests

I tend to switch my creative interests frequently. Call it creative restlessness if you will. I simply get bored doing any one thing for too long and love learning new things. I needed a theme that could expand and contract as I go through these spurts of restless creativity.

For design, I wanted a theme that would let me emulate what Jason Santa Maria does with his themed posts. This way if I get really passionate about design/css stuff I won’t have to make another theme for it.

For photography, I have a flickr stream that I can easily switch into prominence. I can also display a photograph in the Social Networks box if this interest takes over.

For illustration, I made the large homepage character that I can switch as I design more characters.

For development, this theme was a good challenge for me as a developer with some jQuery being added to the sidebar sections and with some WordPress trickery going on in the background. If I feel like I need to develop something anytime soon I have a few tweaks I’d like to make to the theme.

Show personality

I wanted a theme that was a little more light hearted than before and one that I wouldn’t out feel is out of place by posting on a broader range of topics.

Promote social networks

I need more friends in EVERYTHING, i.e., Follow Me on Twitter

Seriously, Follow Me

Show beginnings of a portfolio

Although I don’t have much of anything to go towards a legitimate portfolio, I’d like to eventually become a freelancer so I needed to ease into displaying my stuff. I can add stuff easily so I won’t have to redo anything as I get more pieces.

Easy to maintain

The main problem with my last blog design was that I developed too many things that needed to be maintained. Each post needed to have a large and small image added in the WordPress custom fields to show correctly. I had a section with post suggestions that too had to be updated or else the same three articles would sit there for months.

My old designed prohibited me from writing sometimes because I didn’t feel like doing the extra work to maintain it.

Your blog design should never prohibit you from blogging.

Unique homepage

I really believe this is something that most blog designs drop the ball on. I’ll try to elaborate on this is a separate post, but I wanted my subpages to have a design that was different from my homepage’s design.

Site provides context based off what user is viewing

This is also something I think more blogs should do. If a reader is on a single post, the sidebar items Popular Posts and Recent Posts display posts in the same category as the one that’s currently being read.

If you were reading my What I Hate About Becoming a Designer post, which is in the Design category, then I show you the most popular and recent posts from the Design category. It makes sense to do this, but I don’t see anyone else doing.

Also, if someone viewing the homepage might not necessarily be interested in my blog, so I don’t display all the other blog type things there by default. Instead, the homepage is a more visual experience with portfolio pieces showing. But I also make it easy for them to click to the blog stuff if they do want to view categories and such.

Sketching

I begin to sketch out some rough layouts for the blog. I usually get a general layout with the different content area’s in their place first, then I start to get more granular with exactly how each content area is laid out.

Here was the list for what items I wanted on my site:

• Header (large one for homepage and a small one for subpages)
  • Logo
  • Large welcome/ overview of what I do (homepage only)
  • Links to About, Portfolio and Contact page
• Main Content (blog posts)
• Social Networks section
• Mini Portfolio View
• Blog sidebar stuff like categories and tags
• Flickr stream
• Lifestream(optional)
• Footer

Original idea’s played with a super large intro with links to About and Contact highlighted throughout the sentences. Most of the inspiration for it came from Matt Dempsey site.

I hit a layout I liked and played with it bit, doing a few different sketches.

After being reasonable happy with the homepage I did a subpage sketch also.

I refined the homepage header a bit later on since that will be such an eye-catching area.

I also did a rough layout of how I wanted my portfolio page to look.

I’m pretty happy with my sketches now and am eager to start seeing a more perfected looking page so I jump into wireframing.

Wireframe/Mock/PSD

Wireframe is one of those touchy feeling words that different people have different definitions for. The truest definition is a document used to help establish if the functional elements of a page are accounted for. Some expand on it more and make it an example of layout. Others associate a wireframe with a complete website mockup, meaning the site is finished in PSD form and is waiting for markup.

For this project I’m using it to mean an almost complete version of what I’d like my final site to look like. I start out doing more of the true wireframe layout kind of things and then later I add more of the design work. The size of the project should really determine how detailed you should be with each phase. Since I’m my own client I can get away with the all-in-one method.

Here’s a couple of more “wireframe-ish” ones.

I throw a couple of different patterns in the background. This is one of the type of things that will change on the posts I do separate designs for.

I decided to stick with a red one for now and the proceeded to design the different sidebar area – Blog, Flickr and Lifestream.

Finally, I do the subpage design.

HTML

My next step is to take the PSD and begin translating it into HTML, CSS and javascript.

Slicing images

I start taking all the images and cutting them up into manageable pieces to use in the HTML. I use to do most of the the HTML/CSS first without the images, but found that it takes more time to redo markup with the images than just using them from the beginning.

For certain images, like the subpage links at the top, I make sprites out of them to help lessen the HTTP requests. I won’t go into detail here but here’s a good tutorial on using sprites.

Markup

I like to markup my entire document first, instead of doing small portions of HTML then styling it. When I lay the entire HTML document out first it helps me think about the structure of my HTML and making sure that the code is as semantic as possible without relying on CSS trickery to position elements. This also helps with my CSS naming conventions by seeing the big picture in my HTML structure.

CSS

Now I make my site look like my wireframe/psd through the magic that is CSS. I test in firefox only as I code. This typically means it works well in the other standard compliant browsers like Safari and Chrome.

IE7 usually works well after this stage also. I use to have more problems with my designs becoming mangled in IE7, but now I have a rule of thumb when I do my CSS that seems to eliminate most of my IE7 woes. Don’t use padding. If I need something with space between it, instead of giving the outside containing element padding, I give the inside elements margins.

I don’t bother with IE6 in this blog’s design. Without getting onto too much of a soapbox, my general feeling about this is that if the person viewing my site can’t take the 20 seconds to download a better browser I can’t take the 5 hours to make my site look halfway decent in IE6. I understand that I have the ability to make this decision since it’s a personal site and since my content caters to designers who don’t use IE6 so the amount of traffic lost is minuscule.

Javascript

My javascript library of choice is jQuery. I’ve never done any real javascripting so I am very appreciative of what the jQuery guys have done by harnessing the power of DOM manipulation in such an easy to use library.

I debating about not doing the jQuery stuff until after I got the site converted over to WordPress, but I decided to get the site as close to functionally ready as possible before converting. Doing this made the conversion super easy and this method is also helpful in debugging.

By doing the jQuery stuff in HTML land I knew that if something didn’t work is was obviously jQuery’s fault. If I had tried to do jQuery and WordPress stuff simultaneously then I wouldn’t be sure which one was broken.

Character Illustration

With the HTML/CSS/javascript complete, I moved on to the character illustration. I drug my feet on this since I’ve never done any of this before. I’m a horrible artist if you couldn’t tell by my sketches so this phase intimidated me. But it’s a skill I’d desperately want to have so I eventually got to it and was proud of my end result.

Inspiration

I have a general idea of what I want my monster to look like. I want something that was obviously a monster, but of a kinder, gentler variety. I just wanted a loveable mascot at the top to greet visitors.

I do some Google searching for monster illustrations and find this fantastic one by Matt Inman which is almost exactly the type of character I was imagining. He’s cute and loveable and brings a little smile to your face.

Sketches

I sketch a ridiculous number of monsters, especially considering how simplistic the design really is. I’m sure most character designers could produce a far superior version in 10 minutes, but drawing is going to have a steep learning curve for me and I’m standing at the bottom of the hill.

Here’s some of my sketches:

I use the sketch on the right for making the monster a vector image.

Vectorize

After the sketch is complete, it’s time give the character more life through making it a vector.

If you’re unsure of what I mean by making the image a vector, find out more about vector graphics.

I import my monster sketch into Adobe Illustrator. Now I begin the arduous task of learning Illustrator and figuring out how to get the pen tool to do what I tell it.

After working on inking my monster for a few hours I come up with this:

The next process will be to give the monster some color. I did all of my coloring in Illustrator. I believe that most people will take the inked character and import it into Photoshop at this stage to do the coloring, but I wanted to learn Illustrator more so I did everything in it. If any of you have your own methods or suggestions for what to do I’d love to hear them.

The general technique I used for the coloring comes from the comic book industry, I believe. I first applied what are called flat colors. Essentially you are just filling each area with one dominate color, no gradients. After you’re happy with your base colors, you then apply the shadows and highlights through gradients and other tools.

After a few more hours of work I came up with this:

There’s my guy, who I decided to name Eerb.

WordPress

Now I head back to my finished HTML, drop Eerb in there, reposition some stuff since he is taller than the previous monster and I’m off to the WordPress conversion.

The conversion goes extremely smoothly since the HTML is done, so I just start dropping pieces of code into the appropriate template files.

I was able to most of the design converting from HTML to WordPress in under two hours. The site had a complete feel about it, but there were still those little details that don’t take up much space, but require lots of time to get working correctly.

Here’s a few of the final details that took some time:

Plugins

I had find which plugins I needed and learn how to use them. A few I used are Tweet This, Popularity Contest, and YARPP.

Custom Taxonomies

I had to learn how to make custom taxonomies. Taxonomies are things like Categories and Tags in WordPress.  My theme has a custom taxonomy for my portfolio tags so that when I tag a portfolio item with ‘blog’ it does not get intermingled with my posts that are also tagged with ‘blog’. Here’s a few good posts on custom taxonomies: Custom Taxonomies in WordPress 2.8 Using Custom Taxonomies

Threaded Comments

Another hurdle was getting comments to thread properly. Here’s how to get threaded comments in WordPress.

Post Image Trickiness

When you view lists of posts like on the index page or by categories /tags the image displayed above the post meta information is pulled in an intelligent way.

Since I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of making images and using WordPress custom fields for every post, I developed this method to avoid that yet still get an image there for most posts.

First, if I actually do take the time to make an image for the specific post the theme will pull the image from a custom field.

Secondly, if I didn’t use a custom field but the post contains images in it, then I pull the first image from the post and use it for the post image spot. Also, I remove that first image used from the post content when viewing it in list form so that you don’t see duplicate images for the same post blurb.

Finally, if I don’t have either then the post displays without a post image. Although, I could just as easily give those posts a random default image to display. Maybe I’ll add that later, but since most of my posts use images I don’t think it will be necessary.

Conclusion

If you made it all the way down here I appreciate giving me your time to read this long post. I hope the content can help you if you are planning to take on the task of developing a theme from scratch.

This is the first time I’ve used this exact process, but I’m happy with its results. Although it is annoying to take so much time in the beginning planning stages, by doing so you make the end stages go more quickly. You also have a better final design since you take the time to fully think things through.

If I were to change some things I probably would have spent more time in the Wireframe/PSD phase. There were a few things I changed late into the WordPress conversion that took a bit of time to undo that I could have avoided if I would have found the problems while looking at a more completed mock in Photoshop.

There are only a few places that I’m not happy with, mainly the comments section. I wanted something simple, but feel that it’s far too plain and boring. When I get the developer’s itch again it will be top on my list to update.

I would also like to update the Social Networks box to draw a bit more attention to it, especially my Twitter.

Again, thanks for reading I hope you enjoyed. I’d love to hear your comments on what you think of my process and if you’ve got any tips of your own to share.

If you haven’t been keeping up with my Wiii Fit project, read the previous project posts.

Analytics for 2008

Here’s my take on why the analytics look like they do.

April – June

Since the game hasn’t been released, there wasn’t much competition for the search results. I was one of a few other sites tracking Wii Fit news so I got a decent amount of traffic.

The spike that happened in mid June was the week the game was released so a mass number of people started searching for it and gave me a nice spike in traffic.

June – October

More and more competition grew for the search results so my site was stagnant because it didn’t have the link juice to rank high enough.

October – December

Christmas was coming and Wii Fit just happened to be one of the hottest items for the 2008 season. So people’s searching went up and I got a nice curve in traffic.

Google Adsense for 2008

Almost 30,000 impressions yielding a bit over $100 bucks.

Here’s a chart of how the earnings looked.

Amazon?

When building the site I did a “Why Not” move and used an Amazon Associates widget to make a Purchase Wii Fit page. It took all of 3 minutes to complete with the super easy to use widget maker.

Although I didn’t expect it to make anything because my understanding is that Amazon referrals don’t convert well, I didn’t have much to lose other than about 5 minutes of my time.

Here’s how it performed.

Not too shabby, especially for practically zero work.

Things to Consider

Here’s a few tips I learned from doing my site that might help you if you’re doing something similar.

Links are Crucial

I believe that the number one thing that didn’t make this project an overwhelming success was the lack of links to the site. I did my best to get optimize all the SEO stuff I could, but I never had enough links to my site to boost it to great traffic levels.

Don’t underestimate the value of Google Images.

A majority of  my visitors game to the site via Google Images. I developed a nice picture page and it paid off.

Build questions into your SEO strategy.

Yahoo Answers tends to get picked on for producing lots of crap content. Call it a signal/noise problem if you will. But what makes there service such an awesome product for Yahoo is that they are now getting SEO results for questions being asked. People like to type questions into their Google searches, use it to your advantage.

Think about how people will search for your site. Develop your SEO strategy to include answers to your user’s questions.

At Christmas-time, get people to Amazon anyway you can.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this advice from Darren Rowse, and he’s 100% correct. If you can get people directed to Amazon via your associate link there’s a good chance you’ll profit. Those Amazon profits I showed you weren’t all from Wii Fit sales. There were a few odds and ends in there that people just happened to finish their Christmas shopping on Amazon after being directed to the site through mine.

Produce some killer, unique content.

Another potential fatal blow to the site’s success was that I didn’t take the time to produce some nice articles that would have been completely unique to my site. By simple becoming an aggregate of content that showed up in my inbox form Google Alerts, I was merely diluting the search results. Instead of there being only one piece of content somewhere I produced a second similar one that inflated the density of the search terms.

Thanks for taking the time to follow the project. All in all it was a decent project. It paid for my hosting, which was my only real stipulation for considering the site a success. It also got me my first Adsense check! I will probably won’t touch the site again until October to get a few updates in before the Christmas season. After the Christmas season I will probably see if it’s worth putting the site up on auction and getting a few more bucks for it.

I hope the project has been as good of a learning experience for you as it has been for me. If all goes well, I plan to have get another project similar to this one, but bigger, starting in July.  Stay tuned.

"I think all great innovations are built on rejections.”
Louise Nevelson

Over the past two weeks I’ve spent several hours of preparing, coding, testing and documenting a WordPress theme that I submitted to the web templates marketplace Theme Forest. I spent most of last night doing all the prep work for submitting the theme and its required documentation. Around 2am I finally got the theme submitted. And by the time I got back from lunch the same day, it was rejected.

After reading the e-mail I had a few different emotions running through. I was disappointed, naturally. I felt like my past few weeks of work were a complete waste and I should have just gone to sleep earlier and saved myself the trouble.

I was a bit confused by the rejection. I examined other WordPress themes for sale before I even began working on mine to see the quality of themes that were approved. While I knew my theme wasn’t earth shattering by any means, I felt that it added a few nice things that the others were lacking.  Some of the approved themes had spelling errors and a few looked like something I could reproduce in under 5 hours. So I began working with confidence that my theme would at least get approved, it might not be an all-time best seller, but approval was my goal.

As the initial negative feelings started to subside I recalled of a portion of a book I’m currently reading. In Stephen King’s On Writing he recalls submitting his fiction stories to various publications as he was growing up. An overwhelming majority of his earlier submission were returned with rejection slips attached. He would take each slip and punch it through a nail that hung over his bed. The stack of slips got so large that he eventually had to move them to a bigger nail to hold them all. Of course now he is know as one of the most successful fiction writers ever.

Although it seems easy to just give up after the rejection and forgo trying to submit anything again, I’ve learned it’s best to reflect on what I learned from the process. Cup half full kind of thinking.

• I have my first slip to go on the nail.
• I learned that the polish of a theme takes FOREVER. I had about 99% of the theme finished within the first weekend of work. That remaining 1% took about ten times longer than the 99%.
• I learning some tricks for getting IE6 to work. This is what a majority of my hold-up was. Now I can hopefully churn through IE6 issues much quicker in the future.
• I learned how to code a custom options panel in WordPress. This is the best thing I learned from submitting a theme that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. By submitting the theme I had to try to make this theme easy for people who don’t know how to hack their php to get advanced features. So I took the time to learn this technique and I must say it’s a powerful tool to use. Although some of his code needs correcting, this tutorial is a great place to learn how to make your own.
• I now have a very polished theme framework from which to code future themes. I designed the theme with multiple css files. One controls the entire layout and others control the colors. I can now use that polished layout css and can just include a different color css file to get drastic results in the blog’s presentation.

Although the experience wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for, I do plan on submitting more themes and eventually getting an accepted e-mail. I appreciate the opportunity Theme Forest provides and especially Kailoon for taking the time to review the theme, even if it wasn’t up to aesthetic standards.

If you would like to check out my Circularize’d Wordpress theme and offer suggestions in the comments on what I could do improve to get it past the approval process it would be greatly appreciated. This page lists all of the theme’s features.

So apparently I lied about updating this series every 2 weeks. Every two months would have been more accurate. There isn’t anything else I want to add to the site and so bi-weekly content updates are about all that is different. Plus the earnings are nothing impressive so I didn’t want to keep posting each week how I make 5 cents and bore you.

Here’s the final recap on how the site did.

Google Keyword Rankings

Went down in ranking for all the keywords. Perhaps not posting as frequently caused the site to lose credibility or either so many other Wii Fit sites created content and flooded the search terms, diluting my efforts.

Adsense Earnings

Remainder of May

Month of June

So Far in July

The last half of May did well most likely because the game had just recently come out and people were researching it. The first week of June also did well because of the same reason. It drops off pretty quickly from there on out. I would expect the same for the rest of the year with slight pickup around Christmas.

Analytics

Analytics show exactly what was to be expected. A steady decline from the game’s release. The weird spike on July 2nd is from when my post What I Hate About Becoming a Designer made the front page of Digg and some of the visitors continued to explore this blog and found the Wiii Fit site through it.

Final Thoughts

If you are one of the few that stuck with this projects thanks for reading. It was enjoyable to track although at times a bit dull. The main problem with the site was that I could never get the traffic going.

The site converted extremely well.

But without the traffic, the earnings were dismal. If I could have gotten the traffic to be 10,000 impressions a week (not outrageous traffic numbers) the site would have made upwards of $250.

If I could go back one thing I might try to get more traffic would be to create some form of linkbait and get the content to go viral through some social networks. Although the visitors from the social networks wouldn’t make the site money the links would help boost the site’s ranking for it’s keywords.

Site’s Summary

Adsense: $25.63

Analytics: 1,169 visitors. 3,451 pageviews, 40% bounce rate

What’s next

I have another similar site idea that I would like to try out. It will still have a niche but it won’t be as narrow as this one was. Meaning it will have a wider range of possible visitors, but also more content to add.

Thanks for sticking around.

This grass effects Photoshop tutorial popped up the other day and I absolutely love the results so I decided to do my own version.

The text needed to be something earthy or organic and the only thing that popped to mind was an organic pest control service a local exterminating company was promoting.

All-in-all it wasn’t as hard as it might seem. I have to give a big thanks to Collis for making a tutorial that is awesome and easy to replicate.

I will only be doing these posts every two weeks from now on because there isn’t much more that I plan to add so the only updates will be on the analytics and earnings type of stuff.

I did most everything I said I would do at the end of last post. Added <strong> to the pictures page and made a video page that has some youtube clips of demonstrations and game footage.

While the number of visitors remained around a consistent 15-20 a day my SEO rankings are really starting to improve.

Here’s the last two weeks results.

Google Keyword Rankings

Not really sure what clicked but week 5 saw an explosion in how well the site got ranked. Maybe Google finally indexed all the pages.

Adsense Earnings for Past Weeks

Week 4

Week 5

A good week 4 and a pathetic week 5.

Analytics for the Past Weeks

Week 4

Week 5

Things To Do for the Week

Since the US release of the game is this week and it has experienced shortages in its other release areas, I will make a page that will answer the question, “Where to find Wii Fit”. I’m hoping that this is going be a popular search term.

Apart from that just regular updates.

See you at Chapter 5.

Here we are again so lets get to it.

Google finally came this week, and it actually paid a visit twice. So Google appears to recognized that the site is updated frequently. Yeah for me.

I added a robots.txt. It is the most basic one that just lets any robots in and disallows none. I doubt it affects the SEO in any way, but I just felt like it needed to be added.

Only a few more posts went up because most of the Wii Fit news related to it’s success in the UK this week, which really wasn’t anything I wanted to write about and most was the same info.

Here is how the site fared for the week.

Google Keyword Rankings for the Week

Doing a little better in some, and fell off the charts for one. Still nothing earth shattering.

Adsense Earning for the Week

I made $0.17 this week, making the all-time total $2.16.

Analytics for the Week

A few more visitors but worse results for the other metrics.

Things To Do for the Week

Well the site is still performing at a dismal rate. I think I am going to go through and pick out one keyword and add the <strong> tag to it to see how much influence that will have.

The pictures page is the second most viewed page, with the homepage being number 1. I think I will add a caption below each image to do boost the density for the site. Also since Wii Fit Pictures are so popular, if I have time I will see if I can get some Wii Fit Videos to put on the site.

I think a big hindrance to the site now is that their aren’t very many incoming links. Doing a Google search for link:www.wiiifit.com yields only 4 pages and 2 of them are from this blog. I’m not sure what I can do to get more incoming links, so that will be my homework for the week I guess. The only thing I can think of offhand is to add more technorati type sites to the ping list. This should be a breeze with just a simple copy/paste from this blogs list to wiiifit’s list.

If anybody has any ideas on some good ways to improve my rankings, please chime in.

See you at Chapter 4.

So another week has gone by, but unfortunately not many results to show for it.

I did everything I mentioned I was going to do in Chapter 2, but googlebot didn’t come by and index any of the new changes so unfortunately there wasn’t much improvement.

I noticed that Google Webmaster tools told me there was an error with one of the pages in my sitemap. I deleted the sitemap and generated another one, so hopefully there won’t be any more problems. I’m not sure if googlebot decided not to visit because there was an error in the sitemap or because it had more important people to attend to.

The only improvements in the SERP is most likely from this blog being indexed and giving some link juice back to the Wiii Fit site.

Here are the weekly results.

Google Keyword Rankings for the Week

Adsense Earnings for the Week

I made $0.74 this week, bringing the grand total to $1.15.

Analytics for the Week

Again, the site is doing a good job of keeping people there and they are looking around at different pages, but I need to get more visits to really get some monetization going.

Things To Do for this Week

I don’t feel like there is much that needs to be done to the site. I want to wait until Google starts to index more pages before I think about adjusting much. So far I get an e-mail from Google Alerts with all the Wii Fit headlines. I go through them and put a post up for the ones I think are relevant. Apart from keeping up with those post the only element I will add this week is uploading a robots.txt file to the site.

Here’s hoping Google decides to pay a visit this week.

See ya at Chapter 3.

Ok, I’m ready to get down to business.

If you haven’t already be sure to read the Introduction post to see what my plans are and what tools I will be using to manage my SEO efforts.

Google Keyword Rankings for the Week

I’ve chosen 25 keywords to monitor. Here’s a quick breakdown of the keywords.

There are

• 2 one-word phrases
• 7 two-word phrases
• 11 three-word phrases
• 5 four-word phrases

Here’s where I currently rank for them.

Adsense Earnings for the Week

I have currently raked in a whopping $0.41

Here’s the full breakdown.

Analytics for the Week

Here are the starting numbers for the sites analytics.

A good low bounce rate, long average time on site and pages/visit, but I need some work on visitors.

Things To Do for this Week

I’m going to focus on getting better rankings on the 3 and 4-word phrases first. They should be the easiest to get and increasing them will have a reciprocal effect on the 1 and 2-word phrases.

So here’s the play by play

• Rework my meta keywords and descriptions for each page.
• Make sure I have proper header tags around some keywords.
• Bold some keywords in the copy.
• Clean up the Wii Fit News and Wii Fit Reviews page and link the article titles to a single post page.
• Add more copy to all of the pages to get a higher keyword density for those pages.

That’s All Folks.

If you have suggestions and recommendations please let me know. I’m very new at all things SEO and any advise would be greatly appreciated.

See you next week at Chapter 2.

About 8 months ago I purchased the domain www.wiiifit.com (3 i’s). I didn’t have any real goals for it. I bought it just because I knew someone was going to do it so why not me. If you aren’t sure what Wii Fit is, it’s supposed to be the next big Nintendo Wii video game involving fitness and exercise games. More info can be found on my Wii Fit News site or on the official Wii Fit site.

Anyways, I decided to actually do something with the domain last week. I thought it would be a good test site to play with SEO and see if I can get some decent traffic (read: Adsense Earnings) to the domain. So once a week I will discuss any changes to the site and show the earnings and traffic reports.

Here’s the basic setup.

I put the site on Wordpress because

• it gives me very useful plugins to help with SEO and images
• I get a nice design for zero work
• I have a few elements that are updated and WP just makes it easier with no FTPing
• I’m working on my Wordpress as a CMS skills. Along with general WP skills.

The basic setup took about 5 hours from start to finish.

I used Nick La’s iTheme for the basic setup and modified it heavily. I used the Featured Content Plugin from WPelements for the large rotating images on the homepage. I also used WPelement’s Fancy Zoom Plugin for the Wii Fit Pictures gallery. That’s about it for design.

Then I littered the design with Adsense. I need to spend more time learning Adsense administration because I want to be able to see which sections are generating the most click-thrus. I also used Amazon Associates on the Wii Fit Purchase page. I hear Amazon doesn’t convert well, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

That’s about it for the initial setup.

I set up a Google Alert for the term “Wii Fit” so whenever I get news about Wii Fit I will post it on the site. That’s about the only updating that will happen. Maybe a few more pictures.

I have 20 keywords that I will see how I rank for in Google. This is super easy thanks to SEO Book’s Rank Checker Tool.

I also just learned about the SEO Quake Firefox plugin and will run it on the site to track keyword density and page rank.

That is all for now. See you next at A Wiii Fit Story: Chapter 1.