Michael Morgan

Over the last couple of days and hopefully over the next couple of weeks I’ll be tweaking this site to make it that little bit better. This ranges from perfecting my permalink structure to dropping in some features and extras to help make browsing this site more enjoyable. One of the things which I done very early on when I was developing the theme to this site was to remove the WordPress calendar. I think you should do the same!

As long as your blog posts are not strictly tied to specific dates then ask yourself, do you actually need the WordPress calendar in your sidebar? To begin with, it usually looks terrible (it can be tricky to style) but it also serves no real purpose to your readers. Look at it from the readers perspective and ask yourself how many times have you ever used the calendar on someone else’s site to find what you’re looking for. Whilst some of you may be able to say ‘once or twice’ it really isn’t worth taking up all that space in your side bar when only a handful of people use it.

If people want something they will most likely make use of the search feature so I really don’t see why the calendar should be there. Keep your theme uncluttered and free from unnecessary bits like this.

You may or may not know that when accessing a web site you usually have the choice of typing in http://www.domain.com or just http://domain.com -the difference is of course whether or not you include the www. Both of these will normally bring you to the exact same web site with no cosmetic differences what so ever.

The truth is that although including or excluding the www in a url makes absolutely no difference to the end user it can have a huge impact when it comes to search engines. For example, Google and Yahoo will treat both the http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com addresses as two completely different sites. So what does this mean? Well it means several things one of which is duplicate content. The search engines will see that both sites (although its the same site) have the same content and will therefore most likely exclude one from the search engines. With regards to Google PageRank your site will also be trated as two different sites each one having its own pagerank values assigned to it.

The fix is easy! Firstly decide whether you want to use the www version or the non-www version. To be honest it doesn’t really matter which one you use as long as you use just one of them. Then, you can either use some sort of 301 redirection or add one of these snippets of code into your .htaccess file.

Removing the www

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RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Forcing the www

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RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Of course in the examples above make sure you replace “domain.com” with whatever your actual domain is. This topic has been further explained – read Remove the “www” from your URLs for more information.