Click here to preview and buy the theme

Almost five months after launching my first WordPress theme on ThemeForest (I really have to pick up the pace!), I’m back with yet another very affordable theme. This time it’s a gallery WordPress theme called Domino, ideal for publishing your photography, design inspiration, portfolio, etc. You can even use the theme for a personal blog!

The theme is available for only $25 at ThemeForest and I personally think it’s a real bargain, considering you get a squeeky clean design, a lot of neat features as well as video tutorials using Screenr and constant support on the Rubiqube Forums.

The layout breaks away from the usual post listing and uses a domino-like display instead, with content snippets nicely aligned one next to the other.

Screenshots

Home Page

Single Page

Static Page

Strong Points

First of all, the theme design is clean, easy to use and has just the right amount of zing! Not too flashy, but enough to make it stand out. Your content is the star here, but you can always take the design to a new level. The CSS is very easy to update.

And then there are all these neat features:

• Easy to install and ready to use in minutes
• Well documented – VIDEO tutorials included using Screenr (my Screenr page)
• Widget ready sidebar and footer
• Built-in jQuery image zoom script – FancyBox
• Built-in localization – easy to translate in your language
• Built-in social bookmarking links
• Built-in breadcrumb navigation
• Built-in FeedBurner RSS and email subscription
• Sweet page navigation and dropdown category menu
• Tabbed sidebar navigation to add static or dynamic content

Preview and Buy

Click here to preview and buy the theme

If you have any questions about the theme, please use the theme’s comment section on ThemeForest or the Rubiqube Forums. I prefer that you use these ways of communications, but if you don’t want to sign up to any of them, you can also use the contact form on my website.

I will be more than happy to fix bugs and such, but there’s a very slim chance that I will be able to address any requests for adding functionality. I can only do that of they’re part of a bigger project.

What next?

Next stop: White Balance (this is just a sneak preview), a clean WordPress theme aimed at photography professionals, especially wedding photographers. The initial plan was to release this theme on my own website, rather than ThemeForest, but I think I will go with TF after all, for the sake of getting it out there sooner.

December is usually a lower income month, freelancing wise, so I will have time to plan my strategy for the next WordPress themes I intend to release. It will probably be a mix of two or three delivery channels, one of them being ThemeForest.

There are plenty of exciting themes to follow, so make sure you subscribe to my RSS or subscribe by email. You can also follow me on Twitter or follow me on ThemeForest, if you have an account there.

Click here to preview and buy the theme

Last year I began working on what was to become Visual, a WordPress theme aimed at bloggers and web publishers who wish to make more of the images they use with each blog post. The theme makes  use of thumbnails and post excerpts to offer visitors an overall view of the website’s content.

I consider this theme to be ideal for visual blogs (hence the name) such as  food blogs or travel blogs. I actually started designing this theme with my own food blog and travel blog in mind, thinking I would create personalized versions of Visual for each one, once I gather enough articles.

You’re probably wondering how can a theme’s design and development take so much time? Think of it this way: the first pixel was placed back in October 2008, but I didn’t actually work on the theme every day. Not even every week! I changed my mind a few times, then reconsidered, plus there was a lot of procrastination involved, so that’s where the huge time frame comes from.

Affordable premium WordPress theme without the “premium”

I don’t know how this heading sounded to you, but what I meant was that I’ve tried to put all my knowledge into a theme that’s really useful and easy to use and not just an excuse for using the word “premium”. I don’t really like the term “premium theme”, cause now everyone seems to be using it. Everyone is more “premium” than the next guy!

As for the affordable part, I’m gonna be honest with you here: I asked around, I did some research of myself when I decided to put a price tag on this theme. I really feel this theme is worth much more than what it’s being sold for (which is $25 at ThemeForest), but I chose this road for two reasons:

1. ThemeForest is an established marketplace, that can give theme developers a boost. Yeah, they set the price for you. Yeah, I only get 40% from sales, but I can live with that. This is not a “get rich quikly” scheme for me, so I plan to take my time and develop a few more themes for ThemeForest before maybe creating a mini-marketplace of my own.
2. The fact that they set the price was actually my second reason. I know theme usually get a price tag between $20 and $35, so this way the theme will be more accesible to more people. Those who want additional design or functionality on top of what Visual already offers can always contact me and get a nice custom design for a fraction of what a “design from scratch” type of theme would cost.

Screenshots

Home Page

Category Page

Single Page

Theme features

The theme doesn’t use a complicated admin panel and it doesn’t use a lot of effects either. It does however provide an easy way to edit all the content, as well as the look & feel. For more info please check the instructions provided with the theme. Here are some of the theme’s features:

• Three built in color schemes and and a very flexible skinning system that allows you to create your own skins, while keeping the layout intact. And you can do it in under 5 min!
• Very clean and simple artice carousel, allowing you to bring back some of your favorite articles or the articles you really want your users to read.
• Easy way to edit the categories that should be part of the main menu, the category blocks featured on the homepage as well as the posts that should show up in the Featured Articles section.
• Smart scripting that prevents duplicate article links, ensuring more of your content will be featured on the homepage.
• Two widget ready sidebars (one for the main category pages, one for the single pages and archive pages), as well as customization for WP-Polls and FlickrRSS.
• Clever visual navigation inside the single article page and thumbnail integration for the archive pages, both ensuring more page views.
• sIFR implemented for block and widget titles, for an even nicer look and feel
• You get all the main design source files (6 files), both in PSD and in layered PNG (I personally use Fireworks)

Preview and Buy

Click here to preview and buy the theme

You can check more screenshots, as well as preview and buy the theme on the ThemeForest page. Feel free to leave a comment there or on this page. I’m monitoring both and I will do my best to answer all questions.

If you buy the theme and pimp out your website, I would love to hear about it. I’m really looking forward to showcasing the best Visual based websites.

Check the new Rubiqube Forum I created for tips, tutorials and updates, subscribe to my RSS feed and stay tuned!

Note: If you just want the free WordPress theme, you might want to skip the long talk about who and how and why and just scroll to the preview and download links. But if you like a good novel, be my guest. Here goes:

About a year ago I released my first (turned out to be the only) free WordPress theme, called Corporate Sandbox. The theme is based on the Sanbox theme (no link, I think the website is being updated) and it’s the kind of WordPress theme that can easily be customized to match any brand or existing look and feel, making it ideal for corporate blogging.

It’s probably this minimalistic, “less is more” approach that made the theme so popular (4800 downloads and counting). In fact, I’m sure of it, as most implementations I’ve seen kept the same look and feel and only updated the theme with the proper logo / header / color scheme.

I used the theme myself on quite a few projects and for me it’s been a great way to save time and be more efficient when designing and implementing custom WordPress themes. But at some point, I realized that the whole Sandbox approach just doesn’t do it for me anymore. Of course I’m talking about “what’s under the hood”. I needed something even simpler, easier to adapt to my design needs.

Theme Frameworks

I won’t go into details about what a theme framework is and what it does, there are more capable people who have done that already. Justin Tadlock’s article is particularly interesting if you’re into the “behind the scenes” type of articles. Just check the links below.

Some WordPress theme developers will argue that theme frameworks are the thing of the future, while some will say they can get in the way. While I do acknowledge the power of a theme framework, I personally wouldn’t use one. I feel it would slow me down, rather than help me be more efficient. And I’m saying this from experience. So you could say I’m part of the second category.

Naked Themes

Not sure if this is the proper terminology, but there are also quite a few themes out there that have been stripped of almost all the styling. They are supposed to be the theme to start from when creating a new custom WordPress theme.

Some of them are pretty clean and are a step forward from the themes using hooks and and filters and other contraptions that 90% of WordPress designers probably don’t (want to) know about anyway. But now they were all too skinny for me!

So I had to choose between the high tech, state of the art WordPress themes that can even cook you dinner if you know how to ask nicely and the very simple themes, that would have you reinvent the wheel evey time you want to implement a new design.

Enter Empty Canvas

You know that saying: “If you want a thing done well, do it yourself!”. Well, that’s what I did. I created my very own canvas to draw on, allowing me to focus more on what counts: custom design, custom features, etc. I called it Empty Canvas, and you can now download it for free.

I always serve my articles with a pinch of humor, but don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all these other themes I mentioned are not done well, on the contrary: they were carefully crafted, I’m sure! But I wanted to do my own thing and the amount of projects I completed in only 4 months tells me I made the right choice.

Also, don’t download this theme and expect the Mona Lisa. It’s only a simple theme, that does wonders for me. My feeling tells me you’ll find it very useful as well, but there’s a possibility that you won’t.

Preview and Download

First of all, here are some features, so you know what to expect:

• compatible with WordPress 2.7.1 (sorry, no threaded comments though – I don’t like them too much)
• wider than Corporate Canvas, allowing better ad integration ( the days of 800×600 are pretty much gone anyway)
• same simple look as Corporate Canvas, but got rid of the comment bubble
• dynamic top menu (page navigation) and widget ready sidebar
• archive page, catering for most situations: categories, tags, search, authors, etc.
• valid, cross browser, minimalistic code
• following a “want more stuff? add it yourself!” philosophy

Preview Theme|Download Empty Canvas (4282) - 60.55 KB

Sorry for the long article, but I’ve been meaning to write it and share this theme with you for a long time.

LATER EDIT 1: Claudia from Chica Blogger pointed out something I’ve been meaning to address myself, since I forgot to mention this yesterday: yes, there are no credits in the theme footer and I’m ok with that.

The theme is free to use for your personal and commercial projects. Most people will probably use the theme for client projects, so the link in the footer might get in the way. Plus, I’m not going crazy about SEO and links right now, I’m happy just building a loyal readership (I know… link + SEO > readers, but you get the point).

So if you do something great with the theme or simply want to write about how it helped you be more productive, I would love to hear about it, so I encourage you to link to this page. Maybe even post a link on Twitter! Or you can just tell your close friends or clients about it and not share it with “the competition”. Whatever your channels are, I’m ok with that.

I almost forgot to give you the theme’s motto: “Work smart, work less, create more!”

LATER EDIT 2: If you are experiencing problems setting a static front page, you might want to redownload the ZIP file and overwrite your old sidebar.php and functions.php files.

I just found out via WPZOOM that the guys over at Deluxe Themes just released a new WordPress Theme, called Red Carpet. This is their best theme by far, no doubt about that and I personally like it. There’s only one problem: they say “Inspired by People magazine…”, but the design is an almost exact copy.

Which makes me wonder: how long will the theme last, before Deluxe Themes (or one of their clients) gets a lawsuit on their hands? If the theme becomes very popular, there will be a lot of People.com copycats out there, powered by WordPress. Think about it: how many people afford (or have the skills) to create a custom design? So they’ll be stuck with the copycat.

Wrong choice? What would you do?

Hope I’m wrong about this, but I’m afraid they made a bad choice by copying the design as well, rather than just using (some of) the website’s layout and functionality as a starting point and be more creative on the design side. I’m afraid this choice might jeopardize their chances of selling a theme that would otherwise have been a hit.

There are lots of great news websites and blogs out there that can be a source of inspiration (even I have a long list of bookmarks), and People.com is definitely a great source for inspiration if you’re building a glossy WordPress theme. But my question is: where do you draw the line? Is this good publicity or bad publicity? Will potential buyers be turned on or turned off by the similarity?

Just to be clear

I like some of their themes and I respect the fact that Deluxe Themes are one of the few WordPress theme developers (maybe the only?) that make their themes available for download and charge you only for a “copyright removal”. Bold move, if you ask me. So I’m not throwing dirt or anything, I’m simply raising a couple of business strategy questions here.

I encourage you to share your thoughts, but kindly ask you to do it in a constructive manner. Thanks!

P.S. Just noticed another theme, caled Google Mail.

Most of you are probably familiar with ThemeForest, but for those of you who are not, ThemeForest is an online marketplace where people can buy and sell web design templates (from static XHTML / CSS to full blown Joomla or WordPress themes).

I have been following the website ever since they launched it, because I have a couple of WordPress themes in the pipeline myself. And there’s another reason: as a custom WordPress theme designer, I always try to make my life easier (and sometimes meet a client’s budget), by customizing an existing WordPress theme. There are a lot of free ones out there, but in some cases (especially with more specialized themes), the solution comes from payed themes.

To be totally honest, not all of the WordPress themes from ThemeForest are good quality, but there are a couple of themes that I would buy anytime and you’ll find them listed below, along with some usage recommendations / ideas. The main criteria for choosing these themes were clean code, flexibility and attention to details.

1. Real Estate Theme

There are a couple of other similar WordPress themes out there (not on ThemeForest), but Real Estate Theme is by far the cleanest and easiest to brand for any client. But should come as no surprise, since the theme was created by Collis himself.

2. Briefcase

Briefcase is a really nice and simple portfolio WordPress theme. It has a large feature on the homepage and also provides an easy way to organize and showcase your work. It’s the ideal theme for designers and photographers. One other application I’m thinking of is a book website: add some sample pages, a couple of words about the author, throw in a PayPal button and you’re set.

3. Sharp

Sharp is a WordPress theme inspired by the desgin of Creattica and of course created under the Envato umbrella. The theme is ideal for design showcase blogs, because the sidebar is narrow (maybe too narrow), leaving a lot of space for the content area. I also think the theme is cool for other niche blogs, where big bold images are key.

4. On The Field

The concept behind this WordPress theme is sports, but I think On The Field is a really versatile theme. I like the big titles, bold images and the top navigations. The last comment on each blog post is a really nice touch as well. All in all, it’s the kind of theme that you can use out of the box (because the design is clean), or you can custmize it to fit your needs.

5. Hawaii

Hawaii is one of the few travel WordPress themes that I like. The three column layout, the centered post title, the subtle use of graphics… all these things bundled together seem like the perfect canvas for a travel blog. And with a few small tweaks (updating the header), this theme can be ideal for a fashion or gossip type of blog.

6. Yourfolio

Just like the Briefcase theme, Yourfolio is great WordPress theme (I like it more actually) for showcasing design work or photography, but also to be used as a personal website for book authors, speakers, etc. The Portfolio section can quikly be converted to a My Books section or Events section.

Hope you like this selection! Stay tuned (or better yet susbscribe to RSS), because I will buy one or two of these themes and implement some of these ideas. And of course, everything will be documented into a nice, detailed tutorial.

I’ve been thinking about writing a post like this one for a long, long time, because it’s the kind of post that would make my life as a custom WordPress theme designer so much easier. These are not groundbreaking tips or anything, just 8 common sense tips for people who are not very familiar with how the WordPress editor works. If you’re an experienced WordPress user, you might as well skip this post.

If you’re a WordPress theme designer or a web designer using WordPress as CMS in your client projects, then I think you should really bookmark this post and keep it somewhere safe, because you’ll need it! It will be so much easier to give your clients the link and encourage them to read this post, rather than explaining why their blog posts look bad or why their WordPress theme breaks, even though the theme you designed works fine.

Table Of Contents

1. The right way to use copy / paste in WordPress editor
2. Using simple styling in your blog posts
3. Adding images to your blog posts
4. A few tips on linking to other pages / blogs
5. The easy way to add a Read more link
6. How to structure your posts using headings
7. The reason why Text color is a bad idea
8. How to clean up a post when things go wrong

1. Copy / Paste

This is where most non experienced WordPress users manage to really mess up their blog. And it’s so easy for them to do so! All it takes is the wrong kind of copy / paste: simply copy / pasting text from Word or from another web page will most likely add a lot of unnecessary (and sometimes harmful) CSS styles and HTML tags. It’s what I call “garbage”. Based on the source you copy from, there can be a lot of garbage!

If you’re used to writing your posts directly in the WordPress editor, you won’t have this problem. But in some occasions, you do need copy / paste. So in order to avoid this issue, there are a couple of things you could do:

• Click the Kitchen Sink button to show more options, click Paste as Plain Text (Paste from Word removes only some of the garbage) then paste your text there. You will loose simple styling such as bold text or links, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Just read below to see why.
• If you have Dreamweaver (other WYSIWYG editors might work too), just paste the text in Design View, then go in Code View and copy the text. Click the HTML tab in the WordPress editor and paste the text there. This will remove all garbage, but keep simple styling.

2. Simple styling

While using clean text is a great way to start a blog post, you still need to properly structure that post in order to hook users into reading the full post and ultimately transforming just another blog post into a succesful blog post.

The WordPress editor offers a wide range of styling options, but my advice is to keep it simple:

• Use Bold and Italic to make a point, to highlight something. If you use Bold for 75% of your text, the users will not only miss the point, but will find the text difficult to read.
• Lists are great! I love lists! I think 99% of Internet users love list, for obvious reasons. This doesn’t mean you have to make a list out of everything, but if you have “list material”, do use them! Don’t let your cool content fade away between your paragraphs.
• There’s a reason why the WordPress guys added a special button for quotes. It’s because quotes are important! Whether it’s a testimonial, a press release or “something cool a guy said”, that particular paragraph must stand out! So using the Blockquote button along with a nice CSS style (your theme should have that built in) will do precisely that for your quote.
• Unless you’re writing in a language that reads text right-to-left, I see no reason why you should use anything else other than Left align. Period!

3. Adding images

There are many reasons for using images in your posts and since it’s easier now to find free images for your blog, it would be a shame not to do it. My favorite source for images is flickr Creative Commons and I sometimes buy images from iStockphoto as well, cause they’re very cheap.

Here are a few tips for adding images to your blog posts:

• First, the obvious: don’t use copyrighted images and carefully read the licensing before using / purchasing an image.
• Don’t link the image source to an external URL. That image might not be there tomorrow.
• Don’t use a high resolution version of the image. Instead, resize the image to fit your content width, using an image editor (lots of free ones out there).
• Click the place where you want your image to be and use the Add an Image button to add the image to the WordPress Media Library. That way you can set various image attributes and also use the same image in a future post.
• Once the image is uploaded, add a title (good for SEO too), click None for Link URL (in most cases you don’t need links on images), align the image Left or Right if it’s a portrait image (you will save some page real estate and also make the post look nice and compact) and select Full size (you did resize the image, right?).

There is one other thing: when you choose the image alignment, this doesn’t actually float the image left or right, it just adds some CSS classes to your image, based on your option. Themes usually have the right styles defined and things should work out of the box. But in case you choose alignment and the images are not aligned, you can open style.css in Design > Theme Editor and add the following lines somewhere:

img.alignleft { float: left; margin: 0 25px 15px 0; }
img.alignright { float: right; margin: 0 0 15px 25px; }

4. Linking

If you followed my advice on how to copy / paste, there’s a chance you “lost” the links. This is where we’ll put them back. I always thought that it’s better to add the links yourself, one by one. This allows you to double check that the URL is correct and also allows you to set a couple of other attributes.

This shouldn’t be such a difficult task, when you have only a couple of links in your blog post. If you’re thinking “do I have to do this for all 76 links from my post?”, then you’re doing it all wrong! There is such thing as “too many links in a post”, you know! It’s bad for both SEO and for your user’s focus.

The next tips might not seem relevant to the subject of this post, but I think they are worth mentioning. So here’s how I add my links:

• I rarely link to Wikipedia, especially ever since I read Alister Cameron’s arguments. The article gives some common sense advice, that I really think you should read at some point.
• I select the Open link in new window option, just to make sure users stick around. If they do leave my blog, it should be a decision they took themselves.
• If you follow my first advice and link to a cool resource (especially one that’s still under the radar), why not show some appreciation by adding a title to your link? You’ll help them a bit with SEO and make that resource available to more people. I’m not saying to do their SEO work, just use their title. If they did their homework, you’ll do them a favor. The least you could get in return is some good blogging karma.

5. Read more links

I’m often amazed by the number of people who ask me to include a Read more functionality in their custom WordPress theme. I’m not sure why they miss the obvious feature from the WordPress editor, but I have a feeling it has something to do with the label: Insert More tag, instead of Insert Read more link or something else, more obvious for every user.

So here are the very simple steps to adding a Read more link to your blog posts and increasing that Pageviews number (cause that’s what it’s all about for most people, right?):

• Click the place where you want your content to split (for example if you want to show two paragraphs, click just after the second paragraph).
• Click the Insert More tag button and hit Save. That’s it! Easy, huh?

Of course you can later customize the More tag in any way you want: you can simply change the text or change the look and feel of the link.

6. Headings

Headings are a great way to organize a blog post. Before actually writing a post, you can write down a couple of subtitles for your post. They can be a break down of your main topic into subtopics, or maybe a list (yes, a list is more powerful when using headings).

Most bloggers don’t use headings too much, but there are also those who feel they should really dissect a subject, so they split the subsections many times. From my experience as a blogger, you won’t need more than two headings, even for longer articles. You may feel that you’re making your content easier to read, but at some point things will get confusing for your users.

Since Heading 1 is usually reserved for the page title, what you will ever need to structure a blog post is Heading 2 and in some cases Heading 3. Combine this with the power of simple styling described above, throw in a couple of images and what you’ll have is one kick ass article! Well… at least from a visual point of view.

7. Text color

This one is the shortest tip I can give you: don’t do it! I won’t even show you where the button is. The less you know, the better of you and your WordPress theme will be.

Now seriously: there is no real reason why you should use color, when you have all the other styling options at your disposal. No need to make your blog look like a Christmas tree, right? If you do need some custom styling in your WordPress editor, just throw in some quick CSS in your styles.css (or hire someone to do it).

8. Clean up

If you’re reading this article and thinking “Man… wish I knew all these things 5 months ago!”, then this last tip is for you. Worst case scenario: if you click HTML, instead of plain, clean text, what you see is a lot of that garbage I was telling you about and also inline styles (like style=”blahblahblah”).

Inline styles are bad, because even though your WordPress theme’s CSS says “text is dark gray”, the style in your post says “nah! it’s red and sometimes green”. It’s why I told you NOT to use Text color. Text color adds inline styles and doesn’t allow you to change your mind about the look and feel, unless you go back to every post and remove the colors. Think about how that’s gonna feel like 342 posts later.

Fixing all this can be time consuming if you have many posts, but I think it’s worth it. So here’s what you should do:

• Go to Manage > Posts and click the nasty looking post.
• Select all the content and click the Remove formatting button. This should remove most of the garbage, but sometimes it’s not quite enough.
• Click the HTML tab and do one last check for funny HTML tags (stuff like div, span, even br) and inline styles. The only acceptable tags should be the ones for links (a), headings (h2, h3), images (img) and lists (ul, ol and their li).

Conclusions

This is probably one of the longest post I ever wrote. Maybe the lack of writing on this blog made a mark on my writing style? Nah… Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with such long posts any time soon.

I know some of the topics I covered don’t have much to do with writing a clean post and they are more about good blogging habits, but I just went with the flow and hopefully, created a nice mix for people who are just starting out with WordPress. Actually… if you think about it, this whole post is about clean blogging, visually and content wise.

P.S. Yes, that’s a Mr. Clean version of myself. I had some fun in Fireworks. Maybe I’ll write a nice tutorial about photo manipulation sometime.

I promised a follow up on my tutorial on using WordPress as CMS, where I would put together some conclusions. While these tips are not rocket surgery by any means, I just thought it would be nice to have some closure on that three part tutorial. So here goes:

1. Always use nice permalinks (/%postname%/ is probably the best for websites). Not only is this a must do for SEO, but it’s also common sense. An URL like http://mysite.com/about makes more sense than http://mysite.com/?page_id=142.
2. Before starting to work on the WordPress theme implementation, think about what you’re trying to achieve and pick plugins accordingly. Just use what you need, don’t over do it!
3. Add a main navigation (browse pages) to your header and if necessary add a secondary navigation (browse subpages) to your sidebar. You can even go crazy and create a dropdown menu as main navigation. I’ll show you how later.
4. Use breadcrumbs! Breadcrumbs are great for so many reasons: usability, SEO, etc. In terms of plugins, there are many options, but I recommend Yoast Breadcrumbs, because it’s easy to use and I really trust Joost’s expertise.
5. When it comes to WordPress themes, start from something simple (maybe a 2 column or 3 column theme) and add just what you need. You want something light, easy to update.
6. Like I said, I’m no SEO expert, but I know how to use SEO common sense: clean, valid code, SEO friendly titles, moderate use of keywords, a couple of links from good PR websites and most imporatnly: good quality content.
7. Page Templates are just a way for you to create custom layouts for your WordPress Pages (on my website for example, the About page and Portfolio page are different). So when using WordPress as CMS, you should use Pages for all content pages and Posts for news / blog section.

When I posted the first roundup called 10 Great Website Designs Using WordPress As CMS, it received a lot of comments, being in fact one of the most commented blog posts. Some of you mentioned other great websites making use of WordPress as CMS, some of you mentioned you use WordPress in your own web design projects.

I also received a lot of requests recently, from people who wanted to convert their old websites to a WordPress driven website. So WordPress is clearly growing in popularity! That’s why I’ve put together this follow up of cool designs, using some of your suggestions, as well as some of my own finds. Enjoy:

1. Feedback Audio

2. fraai

3. Future Snowboarding Magazine

4. Ginger Restaurant

5. Inbound Pass

6. International Screening Solutions

7. kineda

8. Little White Lies

9. Miami Dating Coach

10. ten24media

I’m just checking now some of the links. Looks like Kineda changed look and Future Snowboarding merged with another website. I created these screenshots a while ago, just didn’t have the time to put the post together.

Darren Hoyt just released Agregado, one of the best WordPress themes I’ve ever seen. And I don’t just mean free themes. This WordPress theme is way better than most of those fake “premium themes” out there.

It basically allows you to use WordPress not only as a blog, but also as an aggregator of various web services, like flickr, twitter, del.icio.us, etc. Hmm… sounds familiar? I wanted to create a similar theme, in order to use it on my Romanian blog. Well… that’s definitely one WordPress theme I’m never gonna release. I mean… I always say “if you can’t do something original or at least something better, don’t do it”. And since Darren’s theme is so cool, I’ll probably use Agregado with a custom design for my Romanian blog and just do something better with my time.

Agregado also comes with a homepage mockup in PSD format, which makes it easier to customize your own version (although I’ll probably create my own mockup in Fireworks). Darren probably spent a lot of time building this theme, so to realease it as a free download… I really respect that.

So guys… if I were you I would hurry and download this free theme, before Darren realizes he made a huge mistake and starts charging for it. Just kidding. Great job, Darren!

Hello, everyone! Long time no see. Sorry about the lack of activity on the blog, but I’m working on a couple of client projects and I’m also trying to put myself in action mode and kick start some of my own projects. Not to mention I took a couple of days off and went here. Anyway… don’t want to stray away too much from the topic of this post.

As you know, a while ago I started a three part series on using WordPress as CMS. And not only did I write about the whole process, but I also chose a real website as an example. A couple of days ago I managed to make the final tweaks to Sky Dental, so now I’ll tell you a bit about the final tweaks I had to make.

Making the switch

The initial website was build using static HTML files, so what I did was to move the files to a folder called “_old” and just create an index.html file with the logo and a message saying “We’re updating the website. Sorry for the inconvenience! Please come back in a couple of hours”. That’s right, an under construction page. Some people hate them, some say they’re so ‘90. I see no harm in using one, especially if you can indeed make the switch in a couple of hours.

So I installed the latest version of WordPress, uploaded my theme and imported all the content from the old pages. Basically, I created a couple of static pages, using the same tree structure as the old website.

One thing you should know is that WordPress will not allow you to change the permalink structure when dealing with subpages. To be more specific: if you have a page called Services and a subpage called Web Design and you’re using /%postname%/ as permalink structure, this is the URL you’re stuck with: http://mysite.com/services/web-design. Of course you can change the current page slug (web-design in this case), but not delete the parent page slug.

I’m telling you this because before, when I was using HTML files, my URL’s were something like this: http://mysite.com/page-name. I searched all over the forums, blog, etc. but couldn’t find a solution. So if you know something I don’t, just leave a comment.

It’s not such a big deal, especially since I noticed something interesting: if you use the old URL (http://mysite.com/web-design), WordPress will know what page you’re looking for and redirect you to http://mysite.com/services/web-design. Even so, I used a couple of 301 Redirects, juts to be sure.

Using 301 redirects and SEO rankings

Permanent redirects or 301 redirects are a must when updating an old website. If you want to keep search engine rankings for some (or all) of your old pages, you need to show Google where your new content is.

I will not go into too many details here, especially because I’m not an SEO guru or anything. I know a thing or two about SEO best practices, but that’s it. If you want to read more about 301 redirects, check this post from Steven Hargrove. It’s an oldie but goldie, very concise.

I added 13 redirects (hmm…) to my .htaccess file. Here’s one of them:

Redirect 301 /program-cabinet/ http://www.skydental.ro/contact/program-cabinet/

Don’t forget to add an XML sitemap to your site. I used a very popular plugin called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. Then you can create an account at Google Webmaster Tools and submit your XML sitemap. Google has a bunch of other interesting tools for webmasters as well.

Sky Dental ranks pretty good for “dental practice” (in Romanian of course). It’s on page 1 or 2 (don’t know why keep changing that often) for this competitive keyword. I’ll let you know how it goes after this WordPress migration.

Using Page Templates in WordPress

Most of the website pages use the theme’s built in page.php file. But I also created a bunch of Page Templates for Sky Dental, because some pages had different kinds of content and I didn’t want (couldn’t) add that content in the WordPress editor. So next I will go through the process of creating and using Page Templates in WordPress

Let’s take for example this page. That pages uses some JavaScript to display a Yahoo map, so the easiest way to do this without any hacks or plugins is to create a Page Template. Here’s how:

1. Duplicate page.php (you can also start from scratch, but this way is easier and you also keep tha same structure) and name the file map.php

2. Add the following lines above the existing code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Map Page
*/
?>

3. Update the file with the appropriate content / code. In this case, I added the JavaScript code just below the actual content.

4. In WordPress admin, go to Manage > Pages and open the page for which you want to use the template. Below the editor there should be a panel called Page Template. Choose your newly created template from that list.

5. Hit Save and refresh the page in your browser.

Conclusions

I initially wanted to write a short recap of things you need to remember when using WordPress as CMS, but then it hit me: the tips I gathered were so great, that it would be a shame to have them tucked away at the end of this post. Not to mention this post is pretty long already.

So I’ll keep you guys waiting for a little bit more (muhahaha!!!) and I will publish these tips as a separate post. Trust me, it will be worth the wait! I worked on quite a few “WordPress for website” projects recently, so I’ll put all my knowledge into those tips and they will be perfect to bookmark for later. So… you know what to do, right? Subscribe to RSS.