A Few Site Updates

In addition to working on WordPress theme reviews, and adding themes from new theme designers to the site, I’ve been working on making some small improvements to the site.

Some of the recent changes to this site include:

-Breadcrumb Navigation on all theme review pages (as well as a different category-based permalink structure), which, put simply, will hopefully will make it easier to navigate back to previous pages your were on.

-Live Search. I used the WordPress Instant Search Plugin designed by iDesignEco for this. I played around with several different live search plugins (many of which try to do too much) before deciding on this one. The catch with it is it makes search suggestions based on previously searched words on the site (as opposed to nearly any word in the dictionary as some other plugins do), so it will take some time for it to build up its list of search suggestions.

-New default theme sorting. Previously, the Themespotter homepage listed the most recently added WordPress themes, and category pages were set to display the most recently reviewed themes chronologically. While the homepage will continue to display new WordPress themes (basically blog-style), the results under each category will display themes in order of our ranking, with the highest ranked themes on top. Search results will display in the same way; so if you search for ‘WordPress eCommerce themes’, the top ranked themes will display first. The logic behind this is people tend to look for the best WordPress themes (and more specifically, the best WordPress business themes), rather than searching for all available themes, for example. Being that our ranking is obviously arbitrary, and people can easily have different opinions, we still want to feature as many WordPress business themes as possible on this site.

-Switched to using the AddThis WordPress social network sharing plugin, as well as a seperate Google + sharing button.

As always, other suggestions are always more than welcome.

Cheers,

Dustin