I’m constantly tweaking and changing the back end code to streamline the blog and make it as fast as possible. In addition, I have a nasty habit of redesigning “stuff” without any real need.

I’m getting better at it though.

You may have noticed a number of substantial changes that have occured on ChurchCrunch.com. I’ll list them out and explain a bit:

Bye Bye Category Trees at the Bottom

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that there are no longer the category trees with the last 5 posts and an image at the bottom of the site. I got rid of this for the following reasons:

• Constant styling and CSS issues. I hate when that happens.
• Page weight was increased because the site had to dynamically resize 5 images from the originals and then populate the categories. Getting rid of extra, non-essential images is smart.
• It made the site too long. Scrolling is cool… but not that cool.

The result is a faster loading page with less clutter at the bottom.

More Sidebar Action

Instead of the category trees at the bottom I decided to move the categories to the sidebar. Here’s why:

• Using more of the sidebar will give the user access to the categories more easily and more efficiently. They’ll be able to click into one of them even while reading a single post.
• I had lots of side bar real estate to use. It was being wasted.
• I didn’t use widgets. I hardcoded the categories in for fast loading.
• No images on the categories now. Good stuff.

Here’s the code I used in the sidebar.php file:

<h3><strong>Blogs</strong> – <a href=”http://churchcrunch.com/category/blogs/”>Read More</a></h3>
<ul>
<?php $recent = new WP_Query(“cat=30&showposts=5″); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”>
<?php the_title(); ?>
</a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

If you use this make sure to change the values in the code to reflect what you need. The 30 (in bold) is the numerical call to the category “blogs.”

New Advanced Search

I’ve decided to up the quality of my Search functionality and use Lijit.com‘s robust service. Here’s why:

• Some of the advanced Search plugins I was using have started to “bloat” the system. I don’t like that.
• I wanted to be able to include results from some other places on the web, like my other blog Human3rror.com. Lijit let’s me include additional sites, social networking services, and blogs to my results. It’s like having your own search engine network!
• It keeps you on the same page from where you were reading.
• It’s powered by Google. Google doesn’t do everything right, but their search algorithm is pretty good.
• Lijit has built in metrics and analytics. I can see where people are searching, what keywords they are using, etc. This is helpful to me.
• Their widget code is nice. You’ll see that I’ve dropped the search box on the sidebar 3 times. That might “seem” odd to you, but the bigger your blog gets (with more posts and content) the more people are going to be using the search to find stuff. Be nice to them and not force them to scroll to the top of the page to search. Think about your readers! Apparently this is not a good idea because more than one instance breaks their system… DOH! It’s at the top… *sigh*.
• The current search implementation, from a design perspective, sucked. I will admit.

So, consider checking Lijit out. Chris Brogan uses it too, which is a pretty positive thing!

Header Cleared Out

I deleted categories and the search box at the very top of the blog page. I am really not satisfied with the way my header is right now, but I’ll definitely spend a little more time on it once I get a good logo up there.

Until then, I’ll just hack bits off when I get tired of it, but I do need to redo my header. It just isn’t working for me, and apparently my analytics shows that pretty much no one uses those anyways. That stinks.