Awesome Twenty Ten Weaver

I have been quite busy with doing a few new builds and recently was turned on to the Twenty Ten Weaver Wordpress themes. Everyone has seen the new default Wordpress theme, Twenty Ten, well the Weaver child themes makes easier than ever to customize. The theme extends the Twenty Ten theme by offering much more functionality such as customizing design colors and inserting code into the head area of your site as well as other areas. The best thing many of you will like is that it is easy to use and free. The video below does not do it justice, but the Weaver system is great for a newbie or advance webmaster. I have always liked themes with easy to add headers and this theme will let adjust sizes very easily. You need to play with this as it includes several child themes that look great and are easy to change colors on as well. Try it, you will love it too.

Guideline To Finding The Perfect Wordpress Theme

Someone emailed yesterday and asked what makes a perfect Wordpress theme. I think that is a broad question, but I do know what to look for in a theme as far as functionality thanks to this older post by Joost de Valk. Yoast walks you through 10 of the most important things in his eyes for a Wordpress theme to have. Most themes usually abide by these, but you will run into some that don't and often times you can fix it yourself. As far as looks and layout goes, there is more than one type of layout and color scheme that works. As usual, I always say the less cluttered and the cleaner the better. If you are not good with graphics, do not pretend to be. All text themes can be just as good as those with top notch graphics or logos. The key is good SEO and great content.

But What About Unique Wordpress Themes?

After posting the my top 40 Wordpress plugins yesterday, there was a comment about buying or using a uniquely coded Wordpress template. There are so many sites out there that are both good and spammy that use the same templates, I find it hard to see Google punish a site merely because it uses a certain template. Am I ruling it out on ALL templates though? Absolutely not as I too have see certain templates used primarily for auto blogs or spam sites, but I am sure there is the one person out there that might have a thick blog on "chess openings" that has a page rank of 6 and does well in all types of long and short tail organic searches and knows no better about using that theme.

The best thing to do is use common sense. If you see a certain theme showing up on spammy sites, don't use it as your subconscious will try to use it as reason should your site do poorly in the SERPS. Along the same lines, Yoast has a nearly 2 year old post on 10 Checks to the Perfect WordPress theme that I always point people to. If you can fit into your budget having a theme personalized just for you and a group of your sites, by all means do it. I preach uniqueness, the more you can be less associated with spam the better. Is it a must to succeed? Not in my eyes, but it never hurts in branding though. Just look at the theme of the link I just sent you to. Down at the bottom it says Theme by W3 EDGE, WordPress Experts with a link. I bet that theme is unique and has more than the 10 checks included as Yoast is a Wordpress master.

Just be careful and check the little things, including the RSS feed as I found an error I talked about in the Keyword To Websites included theme. Little things like that might not look like much, but cam hurt you in more ways than one.

Keywords To Websites Theme RSS Modification

Not sure if Mark corrected this in his default giveaway template in the Keywords To Websites Wordpress plugin since I purchased it, but you need to make sure you are showing the proper RSS feed in that template. I hate a note about that, but forgot to mention it in the previous post.

if you click on Appearance and then Editor in your Wordpress admin, you will then Main Index Template(index.php) on the right of the page. Click on that link and then edit the line of code below:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://feed.affiliatemarketer.info/affiliatemarketerinfo" />

and replace with the code below and press update file:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Comments Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>" />

The current way it is coded shows his sites RSS feed and not yours.

Socrates Wordpress Theme Download Review

When the Socrates theme was released, I purchased it on the first weekend and installed it on a revamped site. I wanted it to take a hard look at it from a newbie stand point. There has been a ton a buzz about it and now the newness has worn off, so I figured I would give my review on it. First, it is a good theme, especially from a newbie viewpoint. It is much easier to use then the other Flex themes out there. If you like header images, you will like Socrates as well. In addition to huge selection they give you, several others are offering free headers for the theme as well. The large RSS and Twitter buttons are great for sites you are wanting to promote followers with. The rotating ad and easy to add Adsense are also pluses for newbies. I have also seen the support side of things and the creators seem dedicated still to fixing the early bugs and adding a few more features. They have released several updates since I purchased it. Is it the end all, do all theme for Wordpress and the last one you will ever buy? No, I do not think so. It is however, quick and easy to use and great to build niche sites with. It is a theme I suggest only if you can fit it in your budget. It is not a miracle worker, but takes a lot of the little work out of initial site builds. I like it and will continue to build with it when the need or niche arises. I use a large selection of themes, but ones that require a large header, Socrates will be my choice to build with.

Yet Another Clean Minimalist Wordpress Theme

Happy Friday everyone. I have worked my ass off since getting back from Vegas. Time has gotten away from me tonight. I did bookmark a very clean Minimalist Wordpress Theme today. These themes are easy to work with and look very clean with tons of white space. Thisc one has a header image as well, that is easy to edit or create your own the same size. Let me know what you think of this one. I have it bookmarked myself for future use. Have a great weekend.

Clean Dateless Wordpress Theme

A reader emailed me asking if I knew of a clean Wordpress theme that had a small header image that was easy to change out along with the theme being easy to customize. I went through my 1000's of bookmarks and uncovered one that I had forgot about. The theme is called Dateless Mini-Site WordPress Themes and it is free to download. The header image is 780x80 pixels and it comes stock in 7 colors and if they do not meet your color needs the colors are easily changed in the css via the # hex numbers, as they are not images. Everything should be super simple for you to modify. This is a no frills template, but very pliable and easy to adapt to ANY niche. Make sure to bookmark this one for later use.

Amazing Grace Is No Secret, Just A Good Wordpress Theme

A reader sent me an email asking about the Amazing Grace Wordpress Theme and what I thought about it. I never have used this on a site, but do remember seeing it before. I downloaded it this morning to have a look at it and it like many other great free Wordpress themes and templates, I see no reason not to use it if it fits your taste. It is very customizable as you can even download the PSD file and change the colors with Photoshop or Gimp. You can easily swap out the image as well very easily. It is a great free template for a newbie as well. So yes, get you some Amazing Grace, i think I might even use it sometime in the near future as well. The biggest thing with any template is to make sure no embedded links to other sites are included or any unorthodox coding that may make the site not view right in any of the browsers. Just open up all of the files in PSPad if you are unsure and have a look especially in the header or footer files for links to sites that might be deemed harmful to link to. Not ALL free Wordpress themes are free if they link to sites that are not deemed trust worthy.

Yet Another Clean Wordpress Theme

A reader of mine knows how much I like clean Wordpress template themes with tons of white space and emailed me one that I had yet to see. The name of the theme is Plain Scape and you can see a screenshot below. The color is easy to change in the CSS file as well and with a clean logo, makes for a great theme for a niche site. Looks really sharp in maroon or dark red as well. If you know of a clean Wordpress theme with tons of whitespace that I might like, feel free to send it to me and I will post it in the future.

EDITED TO ADD: Seems his hosting is none to good. You can also get the template here I believe. http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/plainscape

Another Clean Wordpress Template

I always am on the lookout for clean Wordpress templates with a ton of white space. They seem to perform well for me. I recently found this template from Midmo Designs. You might recognize it from the demo used in the CJ Niche Store plugin I have talked about recently. I like the cleanliness of it and thought I would pass it on to my readers.

Studio Press Fix For Using ReviewAzon

I recently was implementing the ReviewAzon Wordpress plugin into the Lifestyle Wordpress theme by Studiopress and noticed it shoves the Amazon listing all the way on the right of that theme. This is easily fixed by opening the index.php and page.php pages of the template and adding:

<div style="clear:both;">

before:

</div>
<?php the_content(__('Read more'));?><div style="clear:both;"></div>

on both template files.

This should bring everything into alignment. This fix will likely be needed on a few of the other Studiopress themes, but I haven't gotten to any of them yet to check.

Changing The Header Ad Banner In Wordpress Ads Theme Template

The next change is to change the default ad banner that sits in the header file. If you log into your Wordpress admin and click Appearance and then Editor and then header.php on the right hand side, you will see the code below:

<a href="http://www.linkworth.com?a=4155" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.linkworth.com/adm/affiliate_manager/affiliate_banners/bann-36.gif" border="0"></a>

Merely replace this code with your banner of choice and link to whatever you are promoting. You can also just delete this if you want no banner at all or what to add one at a later date. Make sure to save your changes and double check that your changes took when done.

Changing The Google Adsense Ads In Wordpress Ads Theme Template

To continue on with editing the Wordpress Ads Theme Template, we will address the Adsense ads that are scattered throughout the template. There are 5 files that need editing. I have listed the 5 files below that need the default Adsense of the creator changed to your own ad. Listed next to the file name is the size ad that you need to replace it with. 4 files use the 468x60 size ad and one uses the 160x600 size add. You can edit all of these files in your Wordpress dashboard by clicking Appearance and then Editor and the the matching file on the left hand side. These is a very easy process and should not take you more than 30 minutes at most.


single.php 468x60
index.php 468x60
page.php 468x60
page-archive.php 468x60
sidebar.php 160x600

Changing The Header File In Wordpress Ads Theme Template

I meant to knock this out earlier for those using the Wordpress Ads theme. It has some coding issues in the header.php file. If you have already uploaded the theme, you will want to go to your Dashboard and click on Appearance and then Editor underneath that. Then on the far right you want to click on Header (header.php). You will then want to replace the code listed below with the second set of code in this post and click Update File. This will cure some bad coding in the header of the template.

REPLACE THIS:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php if (wp_version()=='21') language_attributes(); ?>>

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<title><?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title('',true); } else { bloginfo('name'); echo(' &#8212; '); bloginfo('description'); } ?></title>

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->
<meta name="description" content="This is 2 or 3 column Ads Theme and it is totally free for download."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="theme, template, wordpress, wordpress theme, wordpress template, beautiful theme, beautiful template, beautiful wordpress theme, beautiful wordpress template, unique wordpress theme, professional wordpress theme, unique wordpress template, unique wordpress theme"/>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="Shortcut Icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory');?>/images/favicon-adstheme.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>

WITH THIS:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php if (wp_version()=='21') language_attributes(); ?>>

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />

<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />

<link rel="Shortcut Icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory');?>/images/favicon-adstheme.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>

Changing The Logo In Wordpress Ads Theme Template

As promised, I will address a few things in relation to the Wordpress Ads theme template that I mentioned last week. Today we will address changing the logo in the header.

The current logo looks like the one below:








It is referenced in the style.css file on line 52.

First you will want to create your own logo in a size of 440x100 pixels and save it as a logo.gif file. If you want to change it or save it as a .jpg file with a different file name, you will need to change line 52 of the style.css file. The current statement in the styles.css file reads:

background-image: url('images/logo.gif');

If you want your logo to be mystorelogo.jpg then you would edit that line in the style.css file to read:

background-image: url('images/mystorelogo.jpg');

Upload your newly created logo to the images folder located in the AdsTheme folder located in the themes folder of your Wordpress install.

Reload your site in the browser by pressing the F5 button on your keyboard. You should then see your new logo. Let me know if you have any questions with this process in the comments section.

Next Week, Wordpress Template Week

I have had quite a few email concerning Wordpress templates since I posted a recent favorite of mine. I wanted to let everyone know that next week will be dedicated to Wordpress templates and the editing of them. I will break it up into several days and try to be as thorough as possible. Check back starting on Monday. I am starting to put a few things together now.

A Great Wordpress Template For Niche Sites

I am pretty picky when it comes to templates I use for niche sites. I have learned the cleaner the better. I do use the Arthemia theme that is suggested in the new N1WAY BANS Guide among several others. I recently found another that fits the bill as far as what I look for in a theme. The theme is called the Ads Theme and a demo can be found here. The colors are easy to change in the CSS and it has top navigation as well. It looks great with niche sites and products. Give it a try on your next site.


EDITED TO ADD: Gerry reminded me I forgot add the correct download link: http://www.eblogtemplates.com/ads-theme/

Free Blogger Blogspot Template Generator

I know a few readers have been playing with blogger as of late, so I thought I would pass on this fun blogger blogspot template generator.

http://psyc.horm.org/

It takes a bit of playing with, but you can get it wide enough to show EPN ads from the tool generator in your EPN account.

Design Your Own Themes & Templates With Artisteer

As you get more in tune with how to build your niche sites, you will no doubt get pickier about how you want them to look. I often times have a design in my head, but just can't find a suitable design out there to match it. If you are looking to design your own Wordpress or straight html type templates, you might want to consider Artisteer. It is pretty easy to get just the look you want with this program. You will want to play with it for about an hour to get all the features of it, but you can really make some great looking templates with it. Also after creating a Wordpress template, it is fairly easy to turn it into a straight BANS template buy combining the sidebar with either the header or the footer and then calling in the BANS includes. I do not suggest this for a newbie, but if you have been working with templates for a little while and are familiar with BANS, this will be right up your alley.

Double Column BANS On Root Wordpress Template

I now have released the new double 3 column BANS template converted to Wordpress and can be installed with BANS on the root and Wordpress in a directory called blog.

This theme has both sidebars enabled for widgets as well.

This template is also very EASY to install and I am also including 8 style sheets of different colors for those that do not know how to edit the template colors.

I have tested this on both Hostgator and Lunarpages hosting and should be compatible for any server that allows PHP includes.

As always, I offer great support on every purchase as you can see by the feedback on the BANS forum. Demo can be seen here.

Template pack only cost $29.00