This is what I did to my nice rankings… it seemed time to find a new theme that I could experiment with, but FIRST, I needed to upgrade to Ella (I was running v. 1.5).

The upgrade went just fine, as I followed the very explicit instructions found at WP. After that, I went a little wild with Themes. There was one in particular which I customized and tried for about two weeks to get working for me. Finally gave it up and went back to customizing my original theme.

In checking Google rankings today, I had a “my bad” moment. Then I started thinking about it.

• The new theme didn’t have links built in, so for days my existing pages couldn’t be found.
• The index.php and sidebar.php files need to be modified before you can expect some of your important content to display, but who modifies those files until looking at what the theme looks like when activated? Well, you should and I didn’t.
• After I found problems with the newly selected theme, I corresponded with the developer to see what might be causing certain pages to disappear alltogether from my site’s navigation. Bad news, again, for anyone who had links to those pages.

When testing new web pages, I always use a test file. I guess that’s the route to go next time I go theme-hunting. Meanwhile, other suggestions and tips are welcome!!