Wigetizing WordPress Themes and the Blog Information Hierarchy

For a whole lot of time yesterday, I was fiddling around with the themes of some of my other blogs, and learning how to “wigetize” my sidebar - with HTML H4 headers instead of the default H2.

It turned out that it was pretty easy, especially with the FAQ provided by Automattic and team. Heck, I even made my own widget!

So over the next few days there will be less blogging and more tweaking I intend to roll out the changes to this blog after I’ve got some minor issues fixed!

Meanwhile, Chris at Pearsonified has written a great guide semantic web markup for blogs - so do check it out. I wrote about the same issue earlier, highlighting a possible information hierarchy for blogs and using the HTML header tags to reflect that to search engines, albeit in a less colourful way. (Well that is why I had to tweak the dynamic sidebar widgets to have H4 headers, instead of H2.)

I probably have to tweak my hierarchy a little, after reading Chris’s thoughts - and that might mean I have to go back to all my posts and change the subheads to H3 instead of the H5 which I use now. Good thing this blog is only half a year old.

Now you see the importance of getting an optimized theme from the start.

Tags: document_hierarchy, html-headers, widget, wordpress