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Bill MurrayMember
To rename a child theme, you don't need to change the lines in functions.php. For the Freelance theme, there are no lines to change. Since you changed PHP code, that's likely the source of your syntax errors.
For background on this, the lines in functions.php from that tutorial in your link are defines, which set a value. The values don't have any impact on renaming the theme. What they impact is using shortcodes. In Freelance, since these defines do not exist, certain shortcodes don't work. For example, the shortcode [ footer_childtheme_link ] (note I'm putting spaces after after the opening and before the closing bracket so the shortcode isn't processed here) won't work on Freelance, since no child theme is defined. But the lack of the define won't impact your goal of renaming a theme.
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Bill MurrayMemberThe tried and true approach is to create your logo in different sizes to match the media queries you are supporting at the bottom of your child theme's stylesheet and adjust those media queries accordingly. Right now, your logo breaks the look on most tablets and some phones.
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Bill MurrayMemberWhat did you do to rename the child theme? What specific errors are you receiving?
You need to change the "Theme Name" at the top of your child theme stylesheet, taking care NOT to change or remove the line that says "Template: genesis". For Freelance, there's nothing in functions.php that needs to be changed. You can change the folder to a name of your liking, as long as it's in your WP themes folder.
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Bill MurrayMemberIs "knowledge" a category? Do you have any posts in that category or are they only in the subcategory? Are you using any special category templates?
See http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/in_category
For queries based on query_posts() or get_posts(), WP retrieves posts from the parent and child categories. If in_category() is used, only results from the parent category are returned. Try looking at a post that comes up for a subcategory of "knowledge" and see what is checked for categories in the edit post screen. If only the subcategory is checked, that means your category template is using in_category(). Try assigning the post to both its child subcategory and its parent.
Another possibility is that recent site changes require you to re-save your permalinks. Visit Settings->Permalinks and without making any permalink changes, hit save and test again.
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Bill MurrayMember@Brian - What's the advantage of adding a custom body class? Just as a reminder that the footer widgets aren't there by design?
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Bill MurrayMemberSteve - You'd be better off keeping the discussion here, where more eyes will have a chance to address your issue.
If you have the Balance theme, that's NOT what Brian is discussing in that post. The Balance & Minimum approaches to the Portfolio are totally different. From the earlier discussion in this thread, you want the Minimum approach applied to your Balance theme, which involves stripping out the Balance approach and adding the Minimum approach, or at least changing the terms for the Minimum approach.
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Bill MurrayMemberWe've all done silly, stupid things, so no need to feel like an idiot. Actually, as long as the search functionality still worked and the links to threads/posts weren't broken, I don't think collapsing would be that big of a deal. Unless your issue just happened to match an issue very recently described by another poster who happened to use a good topic title, browsing the individual forums to find answers is much slower than searching.
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Bill MurrayMemberYour menu contains too many elements, which pushes the last item down to a new line. Then, since your background is white, you'll want to use slider images that don't have a white background, or at least not just below the menu. Beyond that, you can control the stacking with the z-index property.
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Bill MurrayMemberStudioPress does its share of silly things, but I don't think they've done what you've described. The old forum structure is the way it was when it was closed. Perhaps your login cookie expired so you need to log in again to see the forums that are there?
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Bill MurrayMemberThe domain "YourOakvilleRealtor.com" doesn't really work to brand your personal name. It could be your general site, but which is the best comes back to the analysis you were doing.
You've mentioned several times about pointing 1 domain to another. That is a bad idea. Do you have a site at DarleneDarragh.com? Does it have a lot of incoming links and traffic? If so, you should keep it and build from there. If you simply own the domain but don't have a live site at that address or have a site with little or no traffic, it's still your name and therefore a decent spot for your personal brand site.
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Bill MurrayMember@Steve, There's a learning curve with everything. To me, having struggled with WP over the years, the work needed to do what you want is straightforward. I'd be slower out of the gate with ExpressionEngine. The benefit of Genesis is that it is easy to implement your customizations across a range of child themes, which saves you from starting at ground zero with every project. To customize Genesis themes & WP generally, it does take some understanding of PHP, but with that in hand, you can find the code that is fairly close to what you need in several Genesis child themes. There are also WP repo plugins that allow you to set up and manage custom post types and taxonomies, which means that all you need to do is write a template to display that info the way you want. It may be a challenge the first time, but it will get easier and the templates and techniques you develop can be re-used on a variety of projects.
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Bill MurrayMemberSimple:Press is more robust than the forum you are on now. If it didn't appear that way, blame that on the site that implemented it, not Simple:Press. The complaints about Simple:Press in the past were not related to lack of robustness; in fact, the concern was that all the powerful features made it slow. They re-wrote quite a bit for version 5.0 to make it modular and get a big speed boost. They're now up to version 5.2.2, so it's fast and pretty stable.
The forum you are on is bbPress.
For feature differences, please send me a private message on this forum. Oh, wait, you can't do that purely in bbPress because there's not a PM plugin for bbPress. Maybe one comes out eventually. There's been 1 out for Simple:Press for as long as I can remember. Both plugins have their merits, but if you made a checklist of forum features from phpBB, vBulletin, bbPress, and Simple:Press, you'd find that Simple:Press has a feature set more similar to phpBB and vBulletin. Hopefully, bbPress gets there in time.
Making an integrated look is CSS and creating a forum theme that matches your site theme. That will be true for all of the theme choices. Again, if you see a forum that isn't like the theme that surrounds it, blame the site owner, not the forum software.
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Bill MurrayMemberI think you are better off sticking with the .com and just hold the .ca for now without redirecting it. I haven't seen any studies that show a big benefit to targeting Canada with a .ca.
On the location of your server, it comes down to the impact on speed, since speed impacts where you rank on a SERP. There is a fair bit of cross-continent latency but I haven't seen data on latency within North America. I did some quick tests on this; see results below. Europe to US or vice versa adds too much time, so if you are in Europe, you really need to have your server in Europe. The speed testing service webpagetest.org does support doing tests from Canadian locations. So you could test any site that's on your server from 1 of the supported Canadian locations or your market area and then re-test from US locations on the same side of the Mississippi River as your server location. Then compare the times on a # of repeated tests. If you find a lot of latency for Canadian visitors to a US server, you'd be best served by hosting in Canada. If latency is not a problem, you can host where you like in North America.
For reference, I run a managed WP hosting service. I ran 10 speed tests from Toronto and Dulles , VA using settings of IE8 and FIOS to our AgentPress demo site which has a page weight of about 570k. The 10 tests from Toronto had a median of 918 ms (a little over 9/10 of a second) and the 10 tests from Dulles had a median of 336 ms (a little more than 3/10 of 1 second). I also tested the StudioPress AgentPress demo site (essentially the same content as our demo) and got median results for Toronto and Dulles of 1407 ms and 548 ms respectively. Our hosting service is in Newark, NJ; the StudioPress demo lands at MediaTemple near Ashburn, VA which is next to Dulles, VA.
Those hardly conclusive results suggest 2 things: 1) there is some evidence of latency between US and Canada, which here was about 600 ms, or 6/10 of a second, for us and more for the StudioPress demo and 2) if the StudioPress demo runs on Synthesis (their hosting platform), then we were over 34% faster to Canada and 38% faster to the US. I like being faster 🙂
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Bill MurrayMemberAre those exact match results? You always want to be sure to only look at exact match results when using that tool for this purpose. Short domain names are better because they are easier to remember and type. However, that declines in importance when thinking about organic search traffic since no one will remember or type the domain - they'll just click through a search engine link.
I'd have a slight preference for MLSOakvilleListings because "in" is probably a stop word (you can Google stop words if you're not familiar with the term) and because that is slightly shorter. I'd also see if you can get data on the trends for those terms over time; one term might be growing in importance while another can be on decline. Your approach to snapping up those domains isn't crazy if you did it defensively, ie, to block someone else from piggybacking on your approach by using a similar name. You should pick 1 of those domains with the goal of having a short name, no hyphens, and the one with the best traffic pattern; hold the others.
Then, ask yourself the all important question: what is it worth to me to get a big chunk of the visitors searching for the keyword phrases you researched? Keep in mind, these leads might be of very little value initially, because someone typing in "MLS Oakville Listings" in a search engine is likely to be either a) very early in the search process, b) have no desire to use a buyers agent, or c) another agent too lazy to get on the MLS. One agent that I worked with gets about 20 calls from agents each week that found info on a search engine and assume he is the listing agent because of an lDX link that shows up when they could have gotten MLS info directly (assuming their subscription was current). Also, your site will get a lot more traffic than just the traffic for the terms you are identifying if you set up an IDX properly. Many searches are address specific, where a buyer drives by a house and later searches for the street or the address. Those aren't really measurable using the keyword tool because of the changing mix of listings. The keyword rich traffic that drove your domain name purchase will probably end up being around 10% of your overall site traffic.
That's how you'll determine how to move forward.
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Bill MurrayMemberThere's no integration between WP's user data and PHPBB3. You can just set up the forum as you normally would (it will have its own folders and DB tables) and put links on your WP site to get to it, and links on the forum to get back to your main site. You'd style the forum like your site, so it would appear to be 2 parts of 1 whole.
You can also use bbPress or Simple:Press. Both are WP plugins. I've made other posts on this forum with the links, so a search should bring those up. Simple:Press is far more full featured, but it is what one might call a semi-premium plugin (downloads are free, support costs $). Support for Simple:Press if you pay is great; it's relatively non-existent if you don't pay and don't connect with someone who knows how to use it. I happen to know, but only support people on our hosting network. bbPress (what StudioPress uses here) is maturing, but still has a long way to go to even attempt to catch Simple:Press on features. One might argue that because Automattic puts its weight behind bbPress, it has a better chance of being around for the very long haul, so if that's a concern, bbPress might have the edge. If you look at the forum here on forum bugs, most of those are due to issues where bbPress is immature. A Simple:Press forum would have been far less likely to have those problems. But the Simple:Press guys are more outside the inner WP circle (eg, they don't put their plugin in the WP repo but keep it on their own website even though it's GPL). Whether you choose to go the plugin route and which one you choose somewhat depends on which team you want to hang out with.
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Bill MurrayMemberOne thing that you can do is to use Google's keyword tool to check the search volumes for terms. See Google Adwords top menu Tools & Analysis->Keyword Tool. Be sure to use exact matches (see Match Type in the left sidebar) and only data from your local area (configurable under Advanced Options), because your terms could exist in many English speaking countries. The more common your term is, the more narrow you have to be in defining "local". This is especially true of RE where town names are not unique and most searches for RE agents are very local. Rank the list from highest search traffic to lowest. Ask yourself if having a better shot (not a guarantee, just a better shot) at winning more of this traffic is worth the effort of setting up multiple domains. If the volume of even the top terms is too small to justify the work, stop at this step and focus on your personal brand domain. Don't count on the web delivering a big share of your business early on.
If the traffic is large enough to go onto the next step, look at your domains and evaluate where you have an EMD. If you have an exact match on the #1 term, great. It's more likely your EMD is a match on lower-ranked terms in the list. In that case, you'll have to loop back to the first step now that you know the potential benefit of your EMD's, and ask yourself if the effort is worth it.
Always keep in mind that this about winning a bigger share of the traffic for those terms and winning that share more quickly. Having a great EMD name is not the only thing you need to do to win a bigger share, and it's not even the most important thing (having great content is the most important). It's just an advantage to help you win that bigger traffic share. All of this leads to an even bigger problem, which is how to turn a big traffic share into revenue. For 1 IDX setup that I did (largely using this approach), the IDX site very quickly got a lot of traffic and dominated a lot of local searches. However, the agent found that a lot of those IDX leads weren't worth much, because they were either a) renters or b) using online tools to avoid working with an agent. So his sites have made him rich in leads, just not rich in $.
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Bill MurrayMember1. As I said, with enough resources and commitment to do it right, I would set up both the domain with your name and the keyword rich domain at the same time.
2. I would not point 1 domain to the other. I would create helpful links between the 2 websites.
3. The domains that you described as "already gone" are already gone for a reason: those are the good ones.
4. Yes, I think the best approach is to set up both sites at the same time - if you're prepared for the commitment of time & resources and you do the keyword research. In the long run (5+ years is probably as soon as it can happen in RE), you'd like your personal site to be the source of most of your leads. When you start out, your keyword rich domain will probably represent the bulk of your leads, and your goal is to reduce that steadily. Of course, all of this is based on doing the research and determining if the exact match domains (EMDs) that you own apply to a lot of exact match searches in your local area. If there are few local searches for the keywords in the domains you own, then I'd scrap the multiple website strategy because it won't help. It takes a combination of good EMDs + meaningful search traffic for those terms for this approach to be worth the trouble.
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Bill MurrayMemberSee my reply in this thread.
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Bill MurrayMemberMake $post global and use the function genesis_get_custom_field(), as in genesis_get_custom_field( 'myfield' )
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Bill MurrayMember@Darlene - To judge whether those are good keyword rich domains, you first have to look at the organic search traffic. My guess is that "iloveoakvillehomes" is weak. The other 2 might have decent traffic. The other 2 names aren't bad as far as keywords rich domains go, but they are by no means great. They're on the long side, and from an "exact match" perspective, they are at best exact matches for terms that aren't at the top of the list. That should be a factor in how much you invest in 1 of them and the returns you expect to get.
Mark's comment about the "decreasing search marketing value of having keywords in a domain name" ignores 2 points: 1) yes, the value is decreasing, but it is still significant and still positive, and 2) life is different if you are a new RE agent.
I have set up a number of sites for RE agents, and one challenge for newcomers is that few RE prospects search for their names. That's understandable, since they're new to the profession. For them to get any meaningful traffic from organic search, they can't rely on just using their name as their brand when they're starting out. New RE agents (and probably newcomers in any profession) have to build their personal brands from nothing by capturing a growing amount of business that comes in through more general sources, such as looking for a real estate agent in Oakville. For example, you may find that your domain "realestateagentinoakville" gets better ranking for a generic search phrase more quickly than your personal brand domain. Your goal over time is to make that generic site a decreasing share of your business and your personal brand site a growing share. But if you are a newcomer and focus exclusively on your personal brand, expect to stare at a lot of zeros for a while. That advice would change if you're the leading RE agent in your metro area with a well-recognized name. My guess is that's not likely, because the leading agents in most markets whose names are recognizable as brands already have websites supporting their brands. And that advice would change if...
* you have limited resources and can't develop both your brand and a generic site at the same time or
* you aren't prepared to put great, unique content on both sites (which is a lot of work).If you just stick an IDX service on your domain "realestateagentinoakville", you probably won't see a positive financial return from it.
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