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WordPress Theme Generator Makes it Easy to Build Personalized Themes For Your Site

By on June 9, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Theme Generator Makes it Easy to Build Personalized Themes For Your Site

WordPress theme generator can greatly help in making profit through your online business. It helps in developing a personalized theme for your website. Many website owners do not mind investing money in buying a WordPress theme builder as it will eventually help them in making attractive and unique themes for their website.

A custom made site will give your online business a professional look as compared to your competitors. Creating a WordPress theme is not an easy job and requires a lot of knowledge on various things like coding, html, graphic designing, etc. Even the experienced website designers find it difficult to make use of all these elements in creating a WordPress theme.

This is where theme generators come into play. Theme makers will help you create beautiful looking themes even if you are clueless about WP coding, and graphic designing. Moreover, it will also save a lot of money that you may spend on acquiring the services of a web designer in order to create a customized WordPress template.

The best part about theme generator is that you will able to produce search engine optimized themes. On the web, you can find simple theme makers for free whereas you can also find theme generators that are available at a price. Simple ones comes with less features whereas the paid ones come with advanced features that will help you create amazing looking CSS-based and XHTML based WordPress site.

Theme generators give webmaster the full control of their site and also help in customize the site at any time. Before you buy any WordPress theme maker, you should do a good research to find the best one. You can visit discussion forums to find out the most excellent theme builder. If you have any queries about any theme generator, you can contact its developer and get answers to your queries. With minimum or no web designing skills, you will be able to create fabulous themes for your site.

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How to Make a WordPress Website – Make a Brand New Website By the End of Today With These 4 Steps

By on May 2, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Make a WordPress Website – Make a Brand New Website By the End of Today With These 4 Steps

Want to know how to make a website in just a few hours or less? WordPress is the answer. Here’s a basic 4 step process to that will help you make a website from scratch and be online by the end of today.

Step One) Buy a Domain and Cheap Hosting Plan- In order to make a website, you need these two things. There is no way around it. But the good news is, these are both cheap things to purchase. The hosting account will be the place where you place your website files. The domain name will be the name of the website.

Average Hosting Cost- Less than $10 per hour.

Average Domain Cost- Around $10.

Step Two) Install WordPress on the Domain- What? Install it on the domain? Don’t worry, this is as simple as clicking the WordPress button, then choosing the domain you want to put it on from a drop down list. Done.

Step Three) Customize The WordPress Site- Click on Appearance and choose from 1,000’s of Themes that will change the look and functionality of the website itself. Some themes are very customizable, whereas others are just “”plug and play””.

You can choose between thousands of Plugins as well, which help to further enhance the usability of the website. Some plugins will help you insert YouTube videos, or add star-ratings, or tables, or anything else under the sun you can think of.

Step Four) Publish the Site- All you have to do to put the website onto the web from here is click “”Publish””. Voila! You are on the web with a fully functional website.

The most important step is to find a quality hosting plan that will give you everything you need to make a WordPress website.

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How To Create A Custom WordPress Page Template

By on April 9, 2012 in Randy Roedl

There may be times when you want to create a blog page or that looks different than a normal page. Or Perhaps you want to use WordPress to run your entire website but want the main page of your domain to look completely different than a typical blog. This is an easy way to customize WordPress that can be very easily accomplished by creating a custom WordPress page Template.

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Best Minimalist WordPress Theme and Why Use Minimal Themes

By on March 25, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Best Minimalist WordPress Theme and Why Use Minimal Themes

What is a minimalist WordPress theme?

It’s a theme that has little or no design and graphics. Essentially it’s a naked theme that you can design from scratch.

Most themes are fully designed. They’re great if you like the design, more or less.

Why use minimal themes?

Because in some cases, it’s faster to start creating and implementing a website design from scratch than changing a designed template.

What’s the best minimalist WordPress theme?

Of course, any “”best”” determination is an opinion. You may agree or disagree. I like reading “”best of”” and “”best whatever”” articles because it’s a starting point for me when researching for a product or service purchase.

Therefore, I’ll throw my two cents worth in the ring on what I think is the best minimalist WordPress theme.

Prose by StudioPress is in my view, the best minimalist WordPress template. I base this opinion on two grounds:

1. It has a comprehensive built-in customization panel, and2. It’s actually a child theme that operates on the Genesis Framework.

Reason #1: Prose has a comprehensive built-in customization panel

Prose is StudioPress’ “”build a website from scratch”” template. In order to do this, StudioPress developed a comprehensive panel in which you can easily and quickly design your website.

Also, Prose comes with pretty much no design. Essentially you get a naked minimalist WordPress theme but with the power of the Genesis Framework. Which brings me to my second reason for proclaiming Prose as the best minimalist WordPress theme.

Reason #2: Prose Operates on the Genesis Framework

The Genesis Framework operates as a parent and child theme configuration. The parent is Genesis, the design and style is dictated by a child theme.

Why not just customize Genesis the parent theme?

Because when you update Genesis (all themes get updated), you’ll lose your customization work. When you design your website on a child theme, when you update Genesis, your customization remains unaffected. This is one of the major benefits of the parent / child theme set up.

Before I moved my sites to Genesis, I resisted upgrading my themes because I knew I’d have to do a bunch of work. Now updating is simple and no work (as long as you restrict all customization and design on your child theme).

Moreover, Genesis has an “”update now”” button in the WordPress dashboard. Just click the “”update Genesis now”” button and you’re done. No more updating via your CPanel in your hosting service.

Premium themes such as Genesis drive innovation

In the early days of WordPress, there wasn’t a huge difference between premium (paid) themes and free themes. Your choice came down to design. Premium themes promoted the fact they paid more attention to design.

Now, however, premium theme developers are constantly pushing the envelope on WordPress innovation. In my view, StudioPress, with Genesis, is a leader in theme innovation.

StudioPress themes were my first WordPress paid theme purchase. I liked their design. I also liked the navigation flexibility and the Featured Posts feature their themes offer. Since then, I’ve bought many other premium themes to see what else is available (I’ve stopped using free themes a long time ago). In the end, after much testing and toying with many themes, most of my websites are built on the Genesis Framework.

Changing your mind about your design – consider the following scenario:

You buy a minimalist WordPress theme (or use a free one). You spend some time designing it, but then aren’t pleased with the design and wish to use a pre-designed theme. Chances are part of your design process is configuring navigation and layout. If you use Prose on the Genesis Framework, all you need to do is install another child theme and your navigation and layout configuration remains generally the same (the home page may change depending on the home page of the new child theme).

If you don’t use a parent / child theme set up, then when you install a new theme, you start from scratch. My point is swapping child themes reduces your overall work in the long run. I know, because I’ve gone through this process more than once with and without the Genesis Framework.

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How To Design A WordPress Website

By on March 11, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How To Design A WordPress Website

It is not hard to find out how to design a WordPress website. All of the instructions you need are in the program. All you have to do is follow them. The easiest way I have found is with WordPress Express.

WordPress Express makes learning how to design a WordPress website very simple and fast. There are only a few prompts in the program. You will have to get a domain name yourself, but other than web hosting, that is all the program requires to get the site up. Depending on your content, you will have hundreds of templates and color schemes to choose from. Please note that you will have to supply all the content for your site. This program only helps you put the site up, not filling in the pages you create.

As I was saying, there are hundreds of choices. You can pick out layouts and color schemes that compliment your banners and graphics, or pick something very simple that does not have a lot of space you need to fill in. It also had something for everyone. It doesn’t matter which product you are building the site for, you will be able to customize it to suit anything you can think of.

Learning how to design a WordPress website is very fast. Depending on which program, but with Express it’s a matter of five of six easy steps. You type in the domain name, pick out your layout, review your choices, and create. Nothing to it at all and the page looks great. It is has some suggestions under the layout choices to help you decide which would be better. Some of these are tailor-made for certain functions, and some are made to just be user-friendly. For your first page I would recommend a simple layout. This gives you a chance to get use to customizing before you get into something more complex.

There are tutorials available on how to design a WordPress website. Many of these include tips that will make the most of your pages. I would highly recommend them since not all of us can think of everything the first time we try something.

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How to Customize WordPress Theme

By on March 7, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

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.

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Beginner’s Guide to Installing a WordPress Plugin

By on March 1, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Beginner’s Guide to Installing a WordPress Plugin A WordPress Plugin is an add-on that allows you to easily add customization and functionality to your blog without programing any files. Basically, they add tons of new features to your blog in a simple manner. There are thousands of plugins available for WordPress, and each one exists for a certain purpose. For example, there is a plugin that will display your most popular posts in the sidebar. Now that you know what a plugin is, its time to learn how to add them to your blog. There are a few ways of going about this, but for the beginner, this is the most simple and straight-forward method. Once logged on and in the WordPress Dashboard, find the ""Plugins"" tab located in the left sidebar. Under this tab you will find a section labeled ""add new"". Click on this. You will now be in the plugins section where you can search, browse, and upload plugins. Type in the name of the plugin you are looking for. (For example: ""Popular Posts""). This will bring up the search results. Browse through these and find one that strikes your interest. (Pay attention to the star-ratings of the plugins, because they will give you an idea of what other WordPress users think of them). Once you find an appropriate plugin, click on ""Details"". Here you can read more about the plugin, view screen shots, and most importantly, check if it is compatible with your version of WordPress. If everything checks out with the plugin, all you must do is click on ""Install Now"". The plugin will now be installed, but you still must activate it by simply clicking on ""activate"". Once you have activated the plugin, you will see the title of your plugin displayed under the ""Settings"" tab in dashboard sidebar. Here you can edit the settings of the plugin to further customize it. (Please note that not all plugins have settings to adjust). You have now successfully installed your first plugin! Way to go! It wasn’t so hard, was it? Beginner’s Guide to Installing a WordPress Plugin

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Become a WordPress Pro

By on February 22, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Become a WordPress Pro

WordPress is my website platform of choice nowadays. I find it extremely easy to use and with so many templates or themes to choose from and I do not need to ever hire a web designer.

Add a few SEO plugins and you really have a powerful website. Yes, I said website. I use WordPress as a blogging platform and also as a website.

What I try to do is look through the thousands of templates until I find a theme that looks more like a static site. Then I go into the CSS and customize is just a little to make the theme a little different then the original.

When I want to add content I usually use the page feature. I add my content to a page instead of a post. Maybe each of my sites will have ten or 15 content pages. Then I go into the Options>Reading panel in the Administration area and change one of my pages to a static front page. And presto. I have a nice static website.

Now, if I want to also add a blog on the site, I will just post normally and I have a combination website and blog all rolled into one. The really nice advantage is that I can update anything instantly and I don’t need a html editor. I like this feature because I travel a lot and sometimes use other computers instead of my own. With WordPress I always have a way to update my web sites fast and easy.

For those that don’t know how to set up a WordPress site it is very easy. All you need to do is go to your cPanel of your website. Scroll to the bottom and select the smiling icon called “”fantastico””.

Select WordPress from the navigation bar on the left and then select install. Fill in the data fields which consist of your administration name and password, the name of your website and a short description. All this can be changed in the WordPress Admin Panel once the site is live. Click the install WordPress button and you have your very own WordPress site.

Now all you need to do is add some content and you will have a great professional looking website that would have taking you a lot longer to build if you had to do it in html and especially if you are not skilled with coding.

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