These are some of the questions bothering web masters and site owners all the time,
here are some tools and readme’s that will:

• test your site
• find bottle necks
• measure performance from the outside
• get tips for fixing the problem areas in your site
• and knows list of issues every site is suffering from

so lets start with online freeware tools and external web site test tools.

Check if your Google Analytics is working well in your site

Who is watching the watchman?

first thing to check – are you getting the accurate statistics from your site?
is your Analytics account configured well?
are you even really using one?

SiteScan™ is a diagnostic tool from EpikOne that verifies if your Google Analytics (GA)
Tracking Code is installed properly on your website.

This scan will go over each page and verify that the Google Analytics code is embedded correctly to each of your page, this can help you diagnose if your bounce rate is high because the Analytics cant see their next click,
or maybe you should really work on your site design.

How does my code looks like from the browser?

From the firebug download page:

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page..

This is the basic tool to verify your code as it seen from the browser side,
you can click a specific element on your page, and get a list on the right pane window of firebug,
of all the css code that is effecting this element, even if the code span multiple css files.

Why is my page so slow?

the yslow tool from yahoo will go through the elements of your page,
and by using a preset list of rules, it will tell you which parts of the website you should fix,
and what to fix.

The yslow firefox plugin needs the firefox firebug installed first.

If you want to learn more deeply on the reasons behind each of the testing rules yahoo though about you can read the very informative document from yahoo about “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site”

Feed Validator

Get your rss feed validated

AOL webpagetest

from the AOL web page test:

Pagetest allows you to provide the URL of a webpage to be tested. The test will be conducted from the location specified and you will be provided a waterfall of your page load performance as well as a comparison against an optimization checklist.

Technorati Tags: apache, google, php, wordpress

After you have played with the main look you can generate the files and download a zip file which contains these files:

• style.css
• reset-fonts-grids-tabs.css
• index.php
• header.php
• footer.php
• sidebar.php
• comments.php
• searchform.php
• search.php
• archive.php
• page.php
• functions.php
• screenshot.png
• images/bg_overlay.png
• images/bg_gradient.png

Or you can download each file seperatly.

This gives you the basic structure for a working wordpress theme, from here you only have left to customize as you wish.

Technorati Tags: theme, wordpress

Well finaly I joust found this great intro to wordpress theme writing,
it’s simple, written for beginners, and explains the basics of what blog template writing is all about.

Matt’s post explains what the loop is – which from what i gather – a simple query that collects all the relevant posts to show,after first calling it with the first line:

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

now you start dropping the other wp blocks into place just like lego:

the title,
the date,
the content

and thats it – now the loop will just drop these 3 again for the next post, until it runs out of posts.

From matt’s post:

There have many concerns and question about the template system used in WordPress. Mostly the concerns are with n00bs and the complications of PHP. “I want to change this and that, but don’t know PHP”. I hear this a lot. But the thing is, you don’t need to know PHP to change the Templates in WordPress.

so thanks Matt for helping me to finally understand what its all about