A Round-Up of Tips about WordPress Themes
As you know, I’m not a designer but I’m a big WordPress fan so I recently attended a meetup about WordPress themes and learned a few tips I thought were worth sharing…
Whatever you need, WordPress can do it. Need a contact manager? Or to create a classified ad, job board or membership site? For virtually anything you’d want to do, there’s a theme for that.
Go ahead and take it off. According to Craig Tuller of Studio Press, it’s OK to strip off the promotional information (e.g. “Created by xxxx with a link) for the thememaker at the bottom of the webpage template. The biggest exception to this is Thesis, which requires you to pay for the theme if you want to eliminate that.
In my opinion, keeping the promo is the courteous thing to do if it’s a free theme–the backlink to their site is an always appreciated thank you. I just noticed the person who set up my free theme took it off though so I can’t throw stones at you if you do the same. But in short, it’s your call.
Only download free themes from a reputable repository (such as the Wordpress theme directory). There are a lot of sketchy directories out there where the themes have hidden backlinks to spammy and other non-desirable sites–which will come back and haunt your search engine rankings.
Theme customization is easier than ever. Apparently 99% of themes for sale these days have an options tab where you can change colors, the number of columns, and other basic formatting items to personalize your site in a snap.
You’ll soon see plug-ins built directly into WordPress. They’re moving toward integrating some widely used plug-ins into the main WordPress code so you don’t have to add them later. But to keep these “core plug-ins” from bogging WordPress down, they’re working with plug-in makers to strip out any little-used functionality. (Thank you!)
Did you find a custom blog design you love? You can use a FireFox add-in called Firebug to reverse engineer the theme and recreate it for yourself.
Parent and child themes are the new trend. A parent is a theme that provides the overarching framework for a site and has a lot of built-in functionality to boot. (For example, including SEO functionality.) You can use it solo if you’d like or you can add a child theme.
The child theme provides a different look and it’s also where you do all your work and design customization. That means you don’t have to worry about losing your posts, your settings or anything else breaking when the parent theme needs updating.
Each version of a theme adds improvements. But sometimes the new versions make a big leap in functionality. With a standard theme, you’d have to move your site over to that new theme to get those extra benefits. But a parent theme should be able to make those kinds of leaps without problems. For examples, check out the Genesis theme framework from Studio Press.
Want to add a sales page to your site? Maybe you’ve had the same issue I have–where you find a sales page template for WordPress then realize you can’t simultaneously use more than one theme on the same site. Apparently, the trick is to just create (or have someone create) a new page template for your current theme and select that page when you need it.
Moving your site to a new theme? This is something I’ve long wanted to do but have been afraid to because my blog wasn’t set up properly by the person I hired to do it. So I’m afraid I’d click to publish the new theme and the site would just implode. Instead, the safer route apparently is to create what’s called a development site.
Just create a new subdomain in your site’s cpanel. Install WordPress on the subdomain (which most hosts make super simple–just click on the “Install WordPress” option they offer) and install the new theme. Export your current site to the development site and see what happens. If all goes fine, you can just move that site to the main domain.
In fact, a development site is a great way to test drive any major changes you’re planning on making to your site.
Note: The link to the Genesis framework is an affiliate link. If that bothers you feel free to go directly to the Studio Press website.
Photo courtesy of Flickr, originally uploaded by Peregrino Will Reign
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Posted: March 12th, 2010 under Online Marketing.
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