I installed Google Analytics a while back. When I launched my new blog theme a few days ago, I've since realised that I overwrote all the files for my theme and therefore replaced the Google Analytics code. I don't know if many people have made this mistake before, but it took me a few days to pick up on what I'd done. My Google Analytic stats weren't rising and I knew there was something wrong as I was checking my AWS stats that I installed as part of my hosting plan and this blog actually had it's best day of traffic since I started out. So this is just something to be aware of, if you're updating your WordPress theme. Yeah I know I'm spending lots of time looking at stats but I'll be making more of an effort to boost traffic very soon so it's something I need to be looking at.

photo credit: richardmasoner

It's easiest just to place the Google Analytics code in footer.php as the footer shows up on every page and therefore this tracks all hits on your website. There's a nice article on exactly what to do over at ThemePlayground.com. It cleared things up for me as I previously thought I needed to put the Google Analytics code in a few different files, but it turns out that footer.php is the only place it needs to go! If you're using WordPress, there's lots of other nice tips on ThemePlayground and I'll be checking back there for a few tips and tricks as I continue to update this site.

My custom theme design is near completion, and to compliment it I want to add as much interactivity and tools to increase traffic to this site as possible. The first thing I wanted to do was to add some social bookmarking links to the bottom of my posts. I had a look around and the plugin that I liked best was SocioFluid. Have a look at it in action below this post, I like how the images increase/decrease in size when you hover over them. It's easy to configure that way and you can select from a choice of 4 different image sizes when you configure the sociofluid plugin in the WordPress dashboard.

photo credit: aqhong

SocioFluid allows your site users to save bookmarks to the following sites: Digg, Reddit, DZone, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, BlinkList, BlogMarks, Furl, NewsVine, Technorati, Magnolia, Google, Myspace, Facebook, Yahoo Buzz, Sphinn, Mixx, TwitThis, Jamespot and Meneame. You can configure the plugin to select any combination of bookmarking sites to add to the bottom of your posts. I think I'll be adding all of them, or at least as many of the more popular one's that I can fit into my new theme design...

This is only the first step, I plan on adding a lot more plugins to this site to increase my chances of getting some traffic and to encourage user activity. Next on the list will be TwitterCounter and Feedburner stat tools and I'll also be upgrading to a new comments plugin to further increase interaction with social networking sites. Admittedly, I'm not a member on all of these sites yet either so that'll be another step in working towards increases my blogs through awareness of these sites. I'll also be upgrading to WordPress 2.8 in the next few days and I'm hoping everything goes smoothly with that and the transition to my new theme..