I was playing with the thought of moving Hummerbie.com from Joomla! to WordPress for a while now.
The new Google update gives me a good reason to finally move the site to the WordPress platform.
So I went from the old Hummerbie.com layout to this new version.
Note: The very old Hummerbie website was still on a Joomla! 1.0.x version and also needed to be moved to a new server to get an update.
This was the layout of the old Joomla based website:
As you can see, the new one was not that much cleaner, but it's was the final layout I had in mind.
That would be more like the screenshot below:
But before I can do that, this site needs to be moved to a new up-to-date server.
It will take me at least a week to get this done, but once its moved, you will see new changes and articles.
Update: The site has moved to a new server and now I can use my new WordPress Theme, Executive. This theme is a Child Theme for the Genesis Framework by StudioPress.com
Update: I think the new Generate theme does a better job showing you as a visitor more options than the Executive theme.
Update 2016 – Moving Providers, Content and Theme
2016 is a very busy year for me as I am moving and consolidating websites and hosting providers.
Hummerbie.com is now moved to Siteground hosting with a Let's encrypt security certificate.
One of the new factors in Google rankings is this https option I now got with a free certificate that is part of Siteground hosting. The Let's encrypt is not a full SSL certificate, but it should help get some extra points into Google.
A New WordPress Theme
Doing this much work on the Hummerbie.com website is not complete without change the look and feel of the site.
So I choose the No Sidebar Theme from StudioPress. As it's a Genesis child theme so it did not need much extra work to get it set up.
I just love the simplicity and minimalism of the layout. It also works very well on mobile devices.
One other thing I am testing on Hummerbie.com is trying to lose any banners and ads in favor of text links for my affiliate links.
To do that I use the Pretty Link Pro plugin in combination with the free Advanced Ads Plugin. If you want to start with Pretty links, you can start with the free version on WordPress.org.
I have found the Pretty Link Pro version to have the better options that I needed and liked a lot. Options like automatic keyword replacement and replacement limits. The keyword replacement limit works so you don't look like spamming your visitors and Google.
I hope you will like the changes as well as I do. Please let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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