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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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Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere

By on September 6, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere

There are millions of blogs out there on the internet and thousands of them are promoted on a daily basis and updated regularly. This means that in most cases there will be other bloggers in the niche that you choose to blog about, and although there your competition they can also help you out. You don’t always want to look at your competition as your enemy when it comes to blogging because there are ways you can benefit from other bloggers in your niche. The importance of becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche is becoming more important as each day passes and you should make sure you start commenting now. If you’re unsure as to why you should spend time becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche that’s fine as we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons now.

Reason #1

The first reason you want to become active on blogs in your niche is for the backlinks. The backlinks only count in the search engines if there do-follow, but nowadays there are lots of bloggers who use the do-follow feature on their comments. You should find all of the blogs that offer do-follow comments in your niche and you should make a note of commenting on these blogs regularly. The search engines love relevant links so by commenting on blogs similar to yours you’ll be getting about as relevant as links as you possibly can manage to get.

Reason #2

Commenting on blogs helps to also gain traffic for your blog over the long-term, and is one of the main benefits of commenting on blogs in your niche. As visitors see your comments on the blogs they’ll be able to click your link and visit your blog. You won’t get to much traffic from doing this, but it adds up over time and you should use any advantages you can over your competitors. The traffic you get from the comments will also be targeted and could result in a long-term reader of your blog or even a customer.

Reason #3

If you comment regularly enough on the authority blogs then the owner will begin to take notice of you and it could benefit you and your blog. As you grow a relationship with the other bloggers in your niche you open up your chances of exchanging links with them. To get an authority backlink in your niche usually means spending a lot of money, but if you can grow a friendly relationship through blog commenting then you may be surprised what the bloggers may do for you. If your blog has good content then they’ll have no problem linking to you in one of there posts, and this is when you get the real traffic.

There are even more reasons as to why you should become active in the blogosphere, but these three are the main reasons that I do it. You don’t need to go to blogs in your niche and spam all the posts on them as this will just upset the blog owner. You should comment on a regular basis as the blogger adds new content, as then they’ll know that you continually check their blog out and will make them more likely to check out your blog.

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