Why Your WordPress Blog Might Be Screwed Up
You just made a WordPress post, or maybe you tried to customize your WordPress theme and now it looks terrible. Here are a few things to consider when making a WordPress post or messing around with your WordPress themes files to eliminate any problems
Here is another post from the past that once again is very much relevant today…
I will get an occasional email from a client I have done some WordPress work for or will come across a WordPress blog that looks terrible. Almost on a daily basis on some blogging forum there is a thread like this: “My WordPress blog is broken and I don’t know what to do!”
The most common problem is the sidebar is pushed down below the posts on the main blog page. This is usually a result of bad HTML code, an open HTML tag or formatting from a website or MS Word within a post. Just how does this bad code get into a post you ask? Well usually it comes from copying something from an existing website and pasting it into the Visual editor when creating a new WordPress post. It can also happen if you write your post in a program like MS Word and paste it into the visual editor when creating a post. Pasting from a website or MS Word will retain the formatting of the page and also bring in all the other HTML elements and even scripts that you can’t see. To check for unwanted HTML and scripts in a WordPress blog post, click the HTML or Code editor on the top of the edit post box and look for any unwanted HTML or formatting.
To eliminate this possibility all together, paste any copied text into the HTML or Code editor instead of the Visual editor. Then you can click back to the Visual editor to format the post to your liking. This will not bring in any HTML, scripts or formatting into your new blog post.
One very important thing to consider when using HTML or scripts within a post or editing or customizing the themes templates files is to make sure you close all HTML or PHP tags. Open code tags will wreak havoc on a WordPress blog, or any website for that matter. The most common problem I see is people placing scrips like AdSense, or banner ads into a new sidebar text widget. The ads can be too big, or again code tags are not closed, causing everything under the bad code to become misaligned or pushed off the themes border.
Another cause for issues is placing autoresponder opt-in code on the sidebar. This can be tricky to get it to fit. If you are going to do this be sure to check your blog in as many different browsers as possible. If it is too wide for the sidebar or if you leave a tag open it can really screw up your blog.
Remember when making any new posts view your blog to make sure there are no errors or problems. Also if you are going to customize WordPress by editing the themes files create a backup of the file first and check the site with each change.
Similar Posts:
- My WordPress Blog is Broken and I Don’t Know What to Do
- WordPress Visual And HTML Editors Difference
- Change Static HTML Page Into A WordPress Page
- WordPress Guide To Writing A WordPress Post
- Links List In A WordPress Sidebar Text Widget
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Comments
My WP was going haywire the other day. For some reason it decided to not display the post tags anymore. I had to deactivate each plug-in to see which was causing the problem. None of the plug-ins were so I had to reinstall WP. I still do not know what the problem was. Was a pain. Regards!
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All information is incredible and I am sure people must have got valuable and effective knowledge from this post.
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I had seen many bloggers who had that problem with their blogs, their WP was screwed up! If those bloggers only knew your blog it would greatly help them fix up and then problem solved. I would probably recommend your blog to help them out.
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My wordpress problem is that after around 70 posts and 140 site entries in Google, I still have PR 0. Whatever I did to piss off Google, they never forgave me.
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I’ve had that problem before. It’s nice to read your warning.
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I’ve had this kind of problem when using wordpress. Too bad i’m not very good with HTML. I hope you have more practical solution for this kind of problem.
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Very interesting. I’m currently having a similar problem with ordering of posts on my personal blog. One post is not obeying the ordering rules and stays at the top no matter what. So weird.
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New Yorker, PR isn’t about posts, or pages in the index, its about inbound links. The only thing that will raise your PR is inbound links.
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@Peter
and of course the quality of those inbound links matters greatly
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I’ve had that problem before. It’s nice to read your warning
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Another cause for issues is placing autoresponder opt-in code on the sidebar. this is very useful for me
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Excellent post, this was what I needed to know. My sidebar was too low and to the right, and sure enough, I had pasted in html that over-rode the design of the template. Wouldn’t have thought to look here had it not been for this article. Thank you.
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I hate when you make a modification to the wordpress theme templates, save it, and when you preview it you realized you messed it up. So when you go back to fix it, you remember you deleted the code and there is no way to get it back lol.
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That was very usefull. I wish you had posted it about a month ago. I noticed when I pasted something from WORD I would get all these funny characters…then I figured out to paste in HTML source instead.
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This is really helpful in minimizing the erroneous codes that can come up when posting on our WP blogs. I’ll definitely keep this in mind, and try to keep from posting from Word! Thanks so much!
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I have also experienced this kind of problem. I copied a text from word format and then pasted it to the wp insert from word icon. My page was then messed up so I edited it. Since then, I always paste the text I copied from word or from other site to notepad before pasting it to the wp text area.This is to clear the tags that we also copied from other media that causes errors on our wp pages.
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This applies not only to Wordpress but also to Blogspot
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Thank you for your post. I have had problem last night with my post. When I switched from html to visual, it looks all screwed up. I tried to stop auto formatting and separted paragraphs manually. It went blank?? I then deactivated “stop aut formatting” and activated it again. Nothing helps. I am here to search for answer, I think I can try to stop inserting Adsense and see if it will help. Thank you for the valuable info.
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I experience this before but i am glad that i was able to fixed it asap. Anyway, nice to know this.
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Drive-By comments will be deleted! Like "Thanks for sharing", "Nice post", or any other text that doesn't contribute to the discussion. If you ask a very specific question about your particular WordPress theme, it will probably be deleted. I can fix your WordPress site but for a price. If you ask a question like "Why don't my blog work right", it will be deleted. If you ask a question about your WordPress site without a leaving a link to it, it will be deleted. The point is to ask questions and or comment on the the actual content of the post, and to please use some common sense. All comments are moderated and will appear when approved. Thank you.