Tag Archives | Images

How to Customize WordPress Theme

How to Customize WordPress Theme

Learning how to customize WordPress is not as difficult as you many think it is.

With so many themes out there it is fairly easy to find a new theme for your WordPress blog. But if you just can’t seem to find a theme that is quite right, you can always take matters into your own hands and learn how to customize WordPress yourself.

Keep in mind that if you have downloaded a theme you will have to check with the theme creator to make sure they approve your customizing the theme. Most will have no problem with it as long as the theme contains the link back to their site, but you want to check to be sure. If all else fails, you can always customize the default WordPress theme.

Now today I am going to go over customizing the graphics in the WordPress theme. This is the easiest way to customize a WordPress theme and make it your own. I believe in keeping things as simple as possible. As long as you like the layout why get into restructuring the whole site? In keeping with our simple theory, we are going to find the current graphics used on the theme and change them up to fit our new theme.

You will want to find the image files for the theme you are using. This will be simple to do if you installed the theme manually. If you installed the them automatically using WordPress then you will need to find the theme and download it to your hard drive.

Once you have the theme on your hard drive you will want to browse to the image folder. The image folder will most likely be located in an image folder within the theme folder. Each theme creator can name this folder whatever they choose, but most creators will name it ‘image’ or ‘img’.

In this folder you should be able to find the header, background, icon, footer and any other graphics files that are used on that theme. Make a copy of these images so you don’t alter the originals and copy them to a work folder on your hard drive. For me it is easier to make a copy of the image files and use them as my base. I already know they work with the theme and they are the correct dimensions I need and there won’t be any second guessing on my part.

To edit these files you will need a half way decent graphic editing program. If you have Adobe that is great, if not you can download GIMP for free. Once you have your graphics program fired up the first thing you should do is add a layer to the image to start your work on a ‘fresh canvas’.

From this point on it is basically putting your design skills to work. If you have other images you want to replace the images with you can just copy and paste them onto the new layer. There are no limits to the options you have when editing your graphics. I could go into detail here but graphic design is a whole tutorial in itself.

Once you have edited your graphics and are happy with them, it is time to reveal your customized WordPress theme.

There are two ways you can install your new customized theme.

You can manually upload your new graphics by using a FTP program. You will want to make sure you upload the graphics to the correct folder and overwrite the original images.
You can copy your new files into graphics folder of the original theme on your hard drive and then log into WordPress blog and install it automatically. If you already have the original theme installed, you may need to remove it to install the new one or rename the theme on your hard drive.

0

Some Things to Watch Out for When Choosing a WordPress Theme

Some Things to Watch Out for When Choosing a WordPress Theme

There are literally hundreds of WordPress themes out there and the quality can vary markedly between different suppliers. Some of the more popular options in the marketplace at the moment include the Thesis Theme, the Genesis Theme, Woo Theme, Elegant Themes or even that vast range of themes available through Theme Forest.

It’s important before deciding on a particular theme supplier to have a look at the pricing plans they have on offer and compare these to the rest of the marketplace. Ideally, a consumer shouldn’t be spending more than $39 on a premium WordPress theme however some themes such as the Thesis Theme do offer extra functionality for the additional cost. It’s also important to watch out for recurring monthly fees – some theme providers will charge a monthly fee for access to all the themes in their catalogue, furthermore some may charge a development fee in case you wish to apply the theme across multiple sites.

WordPress Themes are typically designed as an out of the box solution, they are provided as an out of the box solution for webmasters who have little to no design skills or even to web developers who do not have the time to continually redesign websites. However, due to the fact they are an out of the box solution it’s important to be able to control as much of the layout of the site as you possibly can, this means being able to edit all of the various elements on the homepage and maybe even change between a two and three column layout.

Some WordPress themes also come with pre-installed sliders – a slider is an image board that rotates between different images and is usually found at the top of a page. Some webmasters do not like the slider being positioned so prominently on the page and may in fact wish to remove it – it’s important then to be able to either change the images contained in the slider, or even remove it if you so choose.

0

Making Links WordPress Tutorial

Making Links WordPress Tutorial

To start off, you should first confirm that you’re using the best Permalinks setting for WordPress. Go to Settings > Permalinks, then click the Custom button and add the following code: /%postname%/ This will make nice URLs that are named after your documents instead of the default URL structure ""?p=123"" which is ugly and bad for search engines. The next concept to grasp is the parent-child relationship with pages.

A parent is a top-level page; it’s children, everything else below. Children are also known as sub-pages and they’re a handy way of organizing the content in your site, especially if your template has a drop down menu. Now, let’s say you’re linking from the homepage to a page several sub-pages deep.

First, go to the new page you’ve made and copy the URL which appears right under the page title. For example: WordPress-training/editing-content/adding-images/ Notice that I don’t have the domain name. It’s not necessary. Now, if I’m on the home page and I’m making a link to the Adding Images page, I just select my text, click the link icon and paste the link in. But what if I want to make a link from one page to another, in this case a link from this page: WordPress-training/editing-content/adding-images/ to this page:

WordPress-training/editing-content/adding-videos/ The correct link on the Adding Images page would look like this: ../adding-videos/ Notice the extra periods and forward slash? This is the bit of code that tells the system to go ""up"" one level to editing-content, then come back ""down"" to the page that exists at the same level. If this is at all confusing, you can find a video version of this tutorial at the link below, where it’s explained visually, inside the WP interface.

0

WordPress Theme from your Photoshop Design in Seconds

psd2cssonline.com – now you can take your WordPress Theme Design in photoshop and convert it directly to all the code and images needed to be a real working WordPress theme. Just name some of the layers in your Photoshop PSD file right, upload to psd2css Online, and seconds later you’ll download a zip file with all of the code, files and images. Then just unzip it into your WordPress installation and it works!

14

A Very Slick Photo Gallery WordPress Theme

A Very Slick Photo Gallery WordPress Theme

Without a doubt, the Manhattan theme by StudioPress is a very slick photo gallery WordPress theme.

Why is the Manhattan theme such a slick photo Gallery WordPress theme?

Keep in mind, this is my opinion. I’m not basing this proclamation on any official WordPress theme rating organization. My reasons for liking this gallery WordPress theme so much are twofold:

It has my preferred photo gallery layout on the home page, and
It’s a theme that operates on the Genesis Framework.

My Reasons Explained

1. Photo gallery layout and Design of this theme

The home page is what makes the design so fantastic. I like the large above-the-fold image slide show for featuring your best photographs.

Under the large photo space on the home page you have space to create a gallery. The Manhattan gallery demo features only 4 photos, but you can add many more if you like. You can create a large scrolling gallery of photographs on the home page. This is easily done in the WordPress Widgets panel.

What you do is drag the Featured Posts feature built into the theme on the Genesis Framework and drag it to the home page widget section. The Featured Posts widget pulls your images from the specific posts you place your images. You can also manually insert source image code in the Widgets to display any number of photos.

The point is you can create a huge or small photo gallery on the home page. Those photos can link to a post or not. It’s up to you.

Moreover, because the Manhattan home page is configured with widgets, you can add article titles and/or excerpts as well or in place of photos.

Essentially, you have many options for designing your home page with the Manhattan theme.

2. I like the Genesis Framework

There is much to say about the Genesis Framework.

If you go with the Manhattan theme, you gain the benefits and features of Genesis. That is a fundamental advantage of the Manhattan photo gallery WordPress theme. In other words, Manhattan is not a stand-alone WordPress photo theme. Instead, it’s driven by Genesis which gives you the tools for building a fantastic photo gallery website.

Just so you know, I use the Genesis Framework for many websites, including my offline business website. When Genesis was released, I fairly quickly migrated most of my websites onto Genesis. I’ve been very happy with that decision ever since.

Why pay for a photo gallery theme when there are many free gallery themes available?

Good question. In fact, before I used paid themes, I used free themes as well. I became frustrated with free themes. Then I read something about some free themes being encoded with links and perhaps even poor code. I became a concerned and dug a little deeper.

I wish to emphasize not all free themes are compromised. The trouble for me then was I couldn’t tell whether a free theme was okay or not.

A few words about StudioPress

When you buy a theme from StudioPress (such as Manhattan), you can use it on as many domains as you like. This is important. Some premium themes restrict the number of uses. Not so with StudioPress.

You also have access to a good support forum with senior moderators who know A LOT about WordPress themes and StudioPress themes specifically. They answer questions generally within 24 hours.

0

Why WordPress is So SEO Friendly

 To start with this article, defining WordPress would be relevant. WordPress is a publishing platform available in the Internet for free, particularly serving people who wants to create Blogs. It is one marvel of modern technology that lifted journalism to greater standard.

What is a Blog? What is Blogging? This is the modern way of writing multiple topics such as description of proceedings, individual diaries and commentaries. Why modern? The answer is simple. It is available and created on the Internet. Other materials such as graphics and videos may also be posted.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is an operation and plans of obtaining higher status (position) in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). There are people who do these jobs and they are called Search Engine Optimizers.

The point of what they do is to make sure that your blog will be listed on the first page of the SERP, or if not, the succeeding first few pages. In this sense, millions of people looking and searching for your blog would find it on the spot or by just clicking these first couple of pages of SERP. If your blog is very far from the first couple of pages of the SERP, then less people will be able to read it. Most people are satisfied with what they may find on the first pages of SERP.

What are the reasons why WordPress is so Search Engine Optimizers friendly? One aspect that people need to look into before building a website or even a blog, is the Search Engines. For bloggers out there, WordPress uses dissimilar roles which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example distributing pings to extra sites, creating categories, classifying your posts, use of h1/h2 tags and others. Because of t he availability of these different functions by WordPress, Search Engine Optimizers can easily structure strategies and help users increase the level of their blog ranking on the Search Engine Result Page.

WordPress is SEO friendly because every post may have Meta and Meta tags images routinely created if the correct plugins are set up, the blog writing routinely generates a RSS feed, every post has an exclusive heading, and it has commonly restructured content that is typically interactive and creative, sites are frequently in print with quite fresh system,

Moreover, blog is set up by a static face page or an energetic pages like the customary blog, both post may be frequently tendered to RSS Feed aggregators whenever you have the correct plugin, everyone post could be presented repeatedly to the blog index, every post in the WordPress have a search engine responsive URL whenever you post in your blog, and every post can demonstrate the most recent X figure of posts inside that groups by only including up a plugin headed for WordPress.

Barriers in Technology and all industries will always be present and perhaps, would never go away. Surely, WordPress is still finding for enhancements and improvements, to amplify the good service for its users, one of them is to make the WordPress even more SEO friendly to the web users.

0

10 Best WordPress Plugins That Will Increase Your SERPs

10 Best WordPress Plugins That Will Increase Your SERPs

Doing SEO is a complicated process. However, if we understand well the technique, we can achieve the goal. In order to get better search engine ranking, we can use some useful plugins for our websites. 10 best WordPress Plugins are the important things that we can use in order to increase our serps in google. We can easily narrow the gap between success and failure in SEO by installing these plugins into our websites.

The following plugins are tested and used widely by SEOers:

1. All in One SEO Pack

This is the first important plugin that can help you customize the post title, post description, and post tags for individual page. In addition, this also can help you to customize the Cononical URLs for the entire WordPress site. By using this plugin, you can have a good chance to be listed with high SERPs.

2. Broken Link Checker

This plugin is very important and essential to your website because it can control and monitor all links in your site. Once your site has broken links, it will list out and and give you reports about dead links. This will help you control easily all links in your website. By using this plugin, you can update information regularly, and keep your site free from dead links.

3. Google XML Sitemaps Generator

Sitemap is very important to a website. This plugin plays an important role in your site because it can generate an XML-Sitemap of your WordPress site. Since then, the content in your site will be crawled easily by SES ( search engine spiders). This plugin can support for other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, Ask and others.

4. SEO Friendly Images

This plugin will help you gain 1 point for SERPs because you have SEO friendly images in your website. A website with proper alt and title attributes in images will help you gain more traffic from Google image search.

5. No Self Pings

The internal links in your website are very important to help visitors navigate easily information. However, your page rank will be down due to the sefl pings effect. By using this plugin, you can remove all pingbacks from your own site. This plugin will eliminate the bad effect and enhance your SERPs.

6. Enforce www. Preference

Canoical issue is very important to decide your backlinks and ranking. You will have two options to think about. www(dot)domain(dot)com and domain(dot)com are two different sites when you do backlinks for your site. So in order to avoid losing backlinks, you must use this plugin that can overcome this problem. It will redirect from www(dot)domain(dot)com to domain(dot)com and vice versa. So you are again free from trouble.

7. Platinum SEO Pack

This SEO Pack is as good as All in One SEO Pack, but it has more futures when you compare to All in One SEO Pack ( index, noindex, noarchive, nosnippet…etc..). However, the usage of those two packs are the same. So it depends on the users’ decision.

8. SEO Smart Links

This is very important for SEO because it can help users and spiders navigate your site easily. This plugin can gather keywords, tags, phrases and links with your related posts in your website properly. This process will be done automatically, but you need to configure it appropriately in Control Panel.

9. SEO Slugs

This is very useful for your website to be ranked well once you install this plugin. You will have a better chance to be ranked well with many keywords in your long URL. However, some common words such as “”a””, “”the””, “”and””….are redundant to SERPs. That is why this plugin can help you get rid of these unused common keywords. This process will be done automatically once you install this plugin.

10. Robots Meta

The last but not least. Robots Meta is one of the most important plugins that can help your website to be indexed or not. It can help you to decide to prevent search engines from indexing your website or not. This will help you eliminate some pages with duplicate content. Since then search engines will not decrease your page rank.

0