Tag Archives | wordpress-theme

How to Find the Best WordPress Themes Using Search Engines and a Little Bit of Intuition

By Randy R on November 12, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Find the Best WordPress Themes Using Search Engines and a Little Bit of Intuition

Finding a good WordPress template can often be a bit of a task and a process that can last countless hours as you manoeuvre through all of the less that suitable options. The standard option for most people looking for WordPress themes is to use a search engine or a popular WordPress templates directory such as Woo Theme, Theme Forest or Elegant Themes. However, there are countless other ways to find WordPress themes and there are even a few under-utilised ways you can utilise to find premium WordPress themes for free.

The easiest way to find WordPress themes is to use a major search engines such as Google and perform a relevant query like “”best WordPress themes””. However, this will typically bring back endless lists of themes from blogger’s whose sole intention it is to profit from the referral commission they generate. A better option is to perform a quick query around your main target term and look at the returned results by opening them up in your browser. Once you have opened them up try appending the term “”wp-admin”” to the end of the root URL (this will allow you to identify whether or not the site is using WordPress).

Then, if the site does use WordPress, look in the source code of the site by going to the view menu and selecting source. Scroll down to the stylesheet tag and look at the filename – this will usually include the name of the particular theme the website is using. Perform a search around the name of the theme and there you have it, an attractive WordPress theme that is suitable to your particular niche or sector.

Another useful way to find potential WordPress template is to be more specific with your web queries – for example, if you are looking to build a technology magazine website then try searching for something like “”Technology Magazine WordPress Theme””. This will bring back more relevant results and results that are likely to be more suitable in terms of how you want your site to look.

How to Create a WordPress Theme1

By Randy R on November 4, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Create a WordPress Theme

As most bloggers know, WordPress is an amazing platform for blogs, personal sites, businesses and portfolios to publish content, news, pictures and anything it comes to your mind. It’s very powerful and nowadays, it’s not just for blogs, most people are using it as a CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is for free & incredibly secure! It’s open source and one of the best thing about it, is that you can integrate plugins very easily from your WordPress admin panel. You can search for plugins all over the web, in the WordPress official website (WordPress.org) or anywhere else.

Designing a theme can be a hard task, specially because you can get a bit lost if you know nothing about html or php, but it’s definitely not impossible. With patience and perseverance anything is possible.

Looking around the web you can find several interesting tutorials, very useful and easy to understand, they guide you step by step on how to use the codes and tags, but very few of them are precise about what it takes to build a WordPress theme from scratch and what you need to know beforehand. They usually assume you already know about html and CSS.

First of all, you need to understand how HTML works. HTML is essential to learn how to create a WordPress theme. You need to find a way to learn and get familiar with the basic html tags and commands. Use Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage to play around a bit and get used to the html structure. Without HTML, you are completely lost, because you are going to deal with a lot of coding! Simply Google and key something like this “”learn html from scratch””, “”html for begginers””, “”html for newbies””, “”html step by step””.

After learning the basic html tags and functions, you need to learn how to style a webpage, that is to say, in other words, you need to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets ). Learning how to Style an html page will allow you to style a WordPress theme, with pics, colors, font sizes, etc.

Why is this so important? HTML + CSS = CSS TEMPLATE. In order to build a WordPress theme, we need to create an HTML CSS layout first. It is the easiest way to build a WordPress Theme. That would be an html page styled using CSS. As we already mentioned before, with CSS you can control the different font sizes, font styles, colors, layer positions, margins, etc.

Once you’ve created a CSS template, THEN you will be able to easily convert it to a WordPress Theme.

So, to sum up the first phase:

1- Learn html. 2- Learn CSS. 3- Create a CSS Layout. 4- Convert the CSS Layout to a fully functional WordPress Theme.

Remember it’s a process that takes time but it’s definitely worth it if you aim to work freelance to make some extra money! don’t be afraid, use Google and search for tutorials, play around with Dreamweaver, and you’ll be able to create a WordPress theme!

How to Apply A WordPress Theme1

By Randy R on September 1, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Apply A WordPress Theme

One of the biggest advantages to WordPress is the easy to use theme system. This makes changing your blog or websites design a really easy task. Best of all, many themes are available for free of charge. The key is to learn how to use the theme system so you do not waste your time trying to figure out why your theme is not working.

If you want to apply a WordPress theme, the first step is making sure you have the theme installed. There are two different ways that a WordPress theme can be installed. The first option is to install it manually by uploading the theme folder to your themes directory. This requires some knowledge of FTP and web directories.

The second option is to use the build in theme uploader, which can be accessed from directly in the WordPress administration panel. To get started, just browser to the appearance section in WordPress and click on the themes section. One in here, you can just click on the add new theme button to get started. You can either search for a theme in the directory or choose the zip file you downloaded from somewhere else on the internet.

Regardless of the way you choose, WordPress will automatically install the theme for you and place it in the correct folder. Once this is done, you are then ready to apply the WordPress theme.

Guess what? Activating the theme is even easier than installing it! All you have to do is look at your installed themes and choose the one you want to use. Then just use the activate link to automatically apply any given them. Within a matter of seconds, your entire blog or website layout will completely change based on the theme you are using. Talk about an easy way to design websites!

So there is a quick overview on how to apply WordPress themes.

How to Install and Activate a WordPress Theme1

By Randy R on August 12, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Install and Activate a WordPress Theme

[This tutorial applies to WordPress blogs running in a self-hosted environment, meaning that you’ve installed WordPress on a web host of your own. It doesn’t apply to blogs hosted on free WordPress.com accounts.]

Installing a WordPress theme is very straightforward. WordPress themes available for download from various places on the Internet are typically packaged in .zip files (i.e. theme-name.zip). Installing a WordPress theme involves nothing more than unzipping the .zip file into the appropriate directory of your WordPress installation, and activating the theme from your WordPress administration console.

Structure of a WordPress Theme

In order for you to install your new WordPress theme correctly, you need to understand the basics of how the WordPress system interacts with themes. A WordPress theme needs three essential files in order to work correctly with the WordPress administration:

o An index.php file: This file is the controller of a WordPress blog. Most WordPress themes also have other PHP files that represent various sections of a WordPress page, but index.php is the only truly necessary PHP file.

o A style.css file: This file controls the look and layout of the WordPress-based website using style definitions. It also contains the information that is used in the Manage Themes section of WordPress to display the theme name, version, author, and description

o A “”screenshot”” image: This image is used to create preview of the corresponding theme in the Manage Themes section of the WordPress administration. It can be any of the common web graphics files (png, jpg, gif), but it needs to be named screenshot. For instance, screenshot.png, screenshot.jpg, or screenshot.gif.

If you’ve gotten your theme from a designer who knows what he’s doing, you don’t really need to worry about making sure the theme is set up correctly. If you’re not sure, you might just want to double-check that you’ve got the basic files needed to install your theme.

WordPress Directory Structure

The WordPress directory structure contains three folders in the root directory:

o wp-admino wp-contento wp-includes

Under the wp-content folder there is a folder called themes. Inside this folder is where you need to deposit the folder that contains your theme. Here’s an example. Say I’m installing a theme for a recipe blog. The theme is called Recipe, and its folder structure looks like this:

recipe-blog/ index.phpstyle.cssscreenshot.png

This theme would normally be packaged in a .zip file. To use the theme, I would need to unpackage the file, then upload it (probably using FTP) into my WordPress themes folder. If I have WordPress installed on my web server under a directory called blog, my directory structure would look like this:

/WordPress/wp-content/themes/recipe-blog/

index.php

style.css

screenshot.png

Activating a WordPress Theme

After I upload the theme to the correct directory, I can now go to my WordPress administration to activate it. After logging in to the WordPress admin section, I go to Appearances->Themes. I can see that my new theme is installed correctly and ready to be activated, because I can see it in under Available Themes on the Manage Themes page.

At this point, all I have to do is click on the Activate link associated with my new theme. My new theme is now active on my WordPress blog.

How to Retain Your Blog Readership

By Randy R on May 20, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Retain Your Blog Readership

There are countless articles published on the internet talking about how you can build traffic to your blog and there seems to be an unlimited amount of resources to building your traffic. The only problem is that most of the traffic generation techniques that are being taught don’t send return visitors. I simply mean that you may get traffic by completing certain things like article marketing, social bookmarking and link building but the traffic typically won’t sustain and everyday you’ll need to regain the traffic. The point of blogging is to have a solid readership that comes back to your blog on a daily basis, and this is when you can start making good money with your blog so you need to do your best at retaining visitors. There are some great methods at retaining your visitors and building a readership and I’m going to briefly talk about some of these methods with you right now.

Unique Themes

You should make sure that your blog uses a unique theme, simply because too many people use the free blog themes and they don’t stand out anymore. If you use a unique theme that is attractive you can build your blogs branding while also gaining a solid readership. People are also more inclined to read blogs that are designed nicely according to surveys recently conducted. You can buy a coded WordPress theme for under $200 nowadays on many webmaster forums so the investment isn’t going to make you reach too deeply into your pockets.

Great Content

An attractive theme isn’t going to be the only thing you need in order to stand out from the rest of the blogging world and you’re going to need to put a lot of effort into your content as well. Writing blog posts is an ongoing process that you need to do everyday, but you need to make sure that you do in fact post daily so that when you begin to grow a readership they have content to read that is fresh. The search engines also love content so the more you post on your blog with useful content the more search engine placements you’ll begin ranking for.

RSS Feed Subscriber

You need to make sure you utilize the RSS feed subscriber which allows your readers to read your blog from a number of different blog readers on the internet. The more RSS feed subscribers you have the better because this means that people want to keep your blog nearby so they can continue reading it. You should have a widget in your header or sidebar that allows all of your readers to join your RSS feed and there is also a plug-in that you should use. The plug-in will post a short line at the bottom of each of your blog posts automatically that asks the reader to join your RSS feed and gives them the link to join. This is a great way at reminding people about your RSS feed and can result in more readership.

As you can tell there are quite a few methods that you can use to make your readership stick around and keep coming back to your blog. You should also keep reading the internet for other great sources because there are more ways to retain your blog readership other then the ones I listed above. You should also be trying to make your blog more enjoyable for the readers because after all the success of your blog depends solely on the readers.

lynda.com Tutorial | WordPress 3.0: Creating and Editing Custom Themes—Building the sidebar

By Randy Roedl on April 23, 2011 in Randy Roedl

Watch the entire course at www.lynda.com In WordPress 3.0: Creating and Editing Custom Themes, author Chris Coyier shows how to build a custom WordPress theme from scratch and satisfy common client requests. The course covers steps necessary to build a theme using a complete workflow with Photoshop, HTML, CSS, and WordPress 3.0. Also included are tutorials on enhancing a WordPress site with JavaScript, using plugins, and ensuring site security.