In this win-win partnership, Catswhocode gets a link hardcoded in the footer of the theme while my theme gets a feature on Catswhocode.

As you see, I only partner with big players when it comes to theme release. Smashingapps, Sixrevision, Hongkiat are some of the super blogs that I collaborated with. Now it is Catswhocode which added to the portfolio

Let me introduce a bit about Catswhocode. This site is like a coder’s paradise. You could find almost anything you need to start up a Wordpress blog or a new website there.

There’s a wealth of tips to be found there for bloggers as well as some really good Wordpress themes, widgets, plug-ins, theme reviews, short codes and fonts. For the ones who are still new to blogging there are plenty of help articles to be found there too.

Along with Wordpress tools there are web design and web development tools and tips available on the website where you can find tips, tutorials and a host of tools to be downloaded. The website is designed in a user friendly and an attractive manner which makes navigating and searching for topic easy. It will soon become a good one stop shop to find all that you need at one place.

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Theme Partnership with Catswhocode

You can still leave your non-support related comments in the comment section, e.g., you can share your opinion about the themes you use.

Besides managing support, you can find everything you need to know about my themes in the forum too. For example, there is a section where you can showcase your themes modified using my themes. If you want to perform customization for my themes, you can request help from other users because I am not available for custom work at the moment.

I welcome all my theme users to actively participate in the forum and make it a friendly community effective in solving problems. See you there

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Theme Support Forum is Launched Officially!

Here, I proudly present ThemeGrade.com that I have been working on for months!

In my journey of designing Wordpress themes for more than a year, I have downloaded more than 200 Wordpress themes to gain insight of how other designers code the themes in order to improve my own skill. During this period, I have found themes using clean coding standard as well as those which are badly designed.

It is quite impossible to tell if a theme has clean coding just by looking at the theme itself. You might get some clues from the source code but few people understand the meaning behind the coding.

This is when I think, hey, why don’t I create a system to review the Wordpress themes?

My next task was to find the Wordpress theme directories in the industry and see what others do. Not to my surprise, I have found tons of the theme directories from the Google search. Of all the sites, 95% are listing free Wordpress themes while the rest are listing premium Wordpress themes or the combination of the two.

I visited the sites and most of them are quite disappointing. It seems that the site owners published free themes that are also available in other directories without putting any effort to review them. There is only one site (ThemesPreview.com) which provides some review for a theme. I have written about this site and it’s scoring method few months ago.

I found the tests used by Themespreview useful and have included some of them in the tests on ThemeGrade. However, there is something about Themespreview’s tests that are missing. Nothing has been told about how well a theme was optimized for search engines. It has a test about W3C compliance but there are more things that could be tested in a theme to see if the theme is well-optimized for SEO purpose.

I decided to build a site similar to Themespreview with added tests and features. It is easy to understand how ThemeGrade.com works. Let me explain the layout a bit and some of the key features below:

1. Top Slider
This is the section listing the premium Wordpress themes from top designers. If you like the theme, you can click on the shopping cart icon to purchase them.

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2. Featured Wordpress Themes
This section features high standard FREE Wordpress themes from top designers.

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3. Wordpress Theme Showcase
All the themes, free or premium are listed in the lower part of the site.

1. User-friendly Theme Search
The themes are grouped into many categories that it would be easy to find the themes of your choice. Are you looking for a 3-column magazine style themes that are free? Simply select “3 columns”, “Magazine Style”, “Free” and click on the search button and the themes will be shown in the result page!

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2. Theme General Test
Each and every one of the Wordpress theme listed on ThemeGrade has undergone comprehensive tests. The general tests of a theme give you an idea of how well the designer coded the theme. When pass, the score will be added to the General test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the general test score of the theme.

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3. Theme SEO Test
The SEO tests of a theme give you an idea of how well a theme had been optimized for search engines. When pass, the score will be added to the SEO test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the SEO test score of the theme.

After you get the general and the SEO test score, the total score of a theme can be calculated. To do that, first, take the general test score and multiply by 0.6 and the SEO test score multiply by 0.4. Sum up the two number and you’ll get the total score of a theme.

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4. Different Ranking Status for Themes
What makes ThemeGrade so special is the ranking system. Quality themes will be awarded either a Gold, Silver or Bronze status. The themes with the highest standard are those which score more than 90% and are awarded with the GOLD status!

Ever since I outlined the details of each test, I have found out a few things that I could improve for my themes especially the SEO part. Therefore, some of my themes are not getting high marks. I want to make ALL my themes score GOLD in ThemeGrade so it’ll be in my to-do list to revise my themes and make them GOLD!

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5. Two New Themes will be reviewed Daily
Selecting good quality themes and reviewing them in such details take a lot of time. Thus, I have hired a responsible lady who has worked for me before and understands my high standard. She will be the editor of ThemeGrade.com and the person in charge of the theme review.

I strongly recommend you to subscribe to ThemeGrade and get new reviewed themes deliver to your feed!

What do you think of ThemeGrade.com? If you have any suggestions of comments about this site, feel free to leave a comment below.

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ThemeGrade.com – One of a kind Wordpress Theme Review Site

I promise you that this is something you have not seen elsewhere (at least the big part of it) so please follow this site now to get the first hand information!

For my theme users, since I am dedicating most of my time working on this new site, I can only release a new theme (the theme in the Upcoming New Theme section) this month.

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A new Wordpress theme site is in the making

This is one of the blogs that I consider premium and I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce more about this site to you.

Sixrevisions.com is your top and practical choice when you need useful and functional information and reference for standards-compliant and modern web design and web development. It presents a broad range of exceptional, unique, up-to-date and noteworthy tutorials, tips and references that are very essential for today’s web design and web development professional.

The weblog also teems with a wide array of tutorials about all possible topics and subjects relating to web design and development. For instance, you will find a lot of options when it comes to tutorials about frameworks of Javascript including MooTools and jQuery.

If you are looking for innovative and new ideas for your web design and development projects, sixrevisions must be at the top of your must-see sites. With the fast paced changes that occur in the field of Web design and development, this blog comes at a very opportune time to help professional keep up with the demands of the industry. You can find useful references and articles that cover the basics about web building, the standard techniques and approaches to Web design, blogging, usability, Web 2.0, AJAX, Adobe, information architecture and a lot, lot more.

This blog is also the perfect site for both the newbies and the advanced professionals covering Photoshop techniques, CSS and HTML, concepts relating to website layout and navigation, icon designs and templates, etc.

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Theme Partnership with Sixrevisions.com

The way he strategically link the Best Wordpress Themes post in the header nav and promote the post in other blogs show that he knows about the fine art of SEO. I can’t wait to see the post rank high on Google!

Pingable.org has rich and varied information and useful references of SEO, Web design and Blogging tips. The main purpose of Pingable.org is to share with its readers unique and relevant content that can be used by bloggers and to promote discussion on a wide variety of interesting topics affecting bloggers.

WordPress has achieved phenomenal success as a blogging engine. This is mainly due to the sustained efforts of sites like Pingable.com that have dedicated their energy and resources in delivering all relevant information and references to the blogging community. This site also helps in the development of themes and plugins through their regular write-up about them.

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Partnership with Pingable.org owner who Knows About SEO

Being one of the few female techies, she is a freelance web designer currently works for an email archiving and web hosting provider. Her site, Divageekdesigns.com, is powered by Wordpress and you can find some useful Wordpress resources so I think my themes fit well in the site.

Divageekdesigns is a site where you can find free design resources for bloggers including free social networking icon sets, iPod themes, Wordpress plugins and tutorials and Free Wordpress Themes.

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Themes Featured on Divageekdesigns.com

It is a real honor to be selected as the first theme partner to release and distribute my latest theme, Grunge Style on the site.

This is another super site that I constantly follow up with. For a savvy designer and developer, I can find tons of useful information on that site that helps a lot in my theme development.

The stats below show you how big the site is:
* Feed Subscribers: 1 million+
* Monthly Visitors: 1 million+
* No. of Posts: 500+

Thanks SmashingApps for featuring my theme. I am sure the partnership will be a fruitful one for both of us!

I am constantly seeking good partners and open to ideas and discussion to arrive at something that is beneficial to both parties. If you own a good site and would like to partner with me in some form, please contact me and we’ll talk.

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Theme Partnership with SmashingApps.com

In this post, I’d like to give a review of this site because it is so special that set them apart from any other Wordpress theme directories. I also give a brief review of another theme review site, Wpthemereview.com.

By far, ThemesPreview.com and Wpthemereview.com are the only two sites that provide review and rating of Wordpress themes. There is another yet-to-launch site, Wpthemecritic.com that will be reviewing Wordpress themes.

Let’s spend a little time talking about Wpthemereview.com before I review ThemesPreview.com in details.

When you visit Wpthemereview.com, you’ll see a “SEO score” being assigned to each theme.

Click on any theme and you’ll see SEO score note below the screenshot of the theme. There are two categories:
1) We like this theme because it…
2) This theme could be improved, though…

As you can see, this site reviews mainly the SEO part of a theme. Nothing much has been told about the coding structure and compatibility issues.

Another problem with this site is the scoring method. There is no specific information as to how the SEO score came about. I even found two Wordpress themes having the same SEO score note but having different SEO score.

On the contrary, I am amazed at how ThemesPreview reviews a theme. The author has outlined the review criteria and grouped them in two sections: must-have criteria and optional criteria.

A theme must pass the must-have criteria to get a listing on the site. Then comes the optional criteria. There are more than 10 tests in this section and each passed item will be given points ranging from 1 to 3. The total score (in percentage) is what makes a theme better/worse than the other. 6 points have been assigned to the W3C validation test. It is the highest assigned points among all other tests because this is the toughest test to pass.

The other 2-point tests are “Theme Support” and “Firefox compatibility”. Theme support is important. The author makes it a point that a good coder should be more responsible for his theme. Also, a good theme should work on the Firefox as most internet users are browsing websites using Firefox.

Other less important tests are assigned 1 point each.

To calculate the total theme score in percentage, simply take the total points of the passed criteria and divide it with the total points of the tested criteria.

Themes which score between 60-74% will get a Bronze status. Score between 75-89% will get a Silver status. Score above 90% will get a Gold status. Most of my themes are getting Gold in the directory.

You can also calculate easily from the stats to get an overview of the quality of the free Wordpress themes in the market. From the stats, it’s surprised that more than 60% of the themes in the directory are not even getting Bronze status. In ThemesPreview, you get an idea as to how many of the designers are really doing a good job…. not many of them!

New themes are added to ThemesPreview every day for months. It is currently the main source for comparing the quality of different themes. As for Wpthemereview.com, the author hasn’t updated the site for more than a year so it is no longer a good site to follow. Therefore, I have excluded this site in my theme submission plan.

I am closely following the new review site, Wpthemecritic.com. When it is launched, I’ll be one of the first to submit my themes because I am very eager to see how my themes rate and see which areas I need to improve.

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2 Wordpress Theme Directories with Review System

The most significant feature of the Wordpress 2.8-Baker is its capability to browse for themes from the Dashboard of Wordpress. This means that you are able to specify your color choice, the number of columns that you require and choose between flexible or fixed width, among others.

Wordpress 2.8 comes with a new widgets interface design with enhanced speed. Another great thing about this new version is that it offers solutions for over 790 bugs of the older version.

The other notable features of Wordpress 2.8 include:
* Improved widgets API and widgets admin interface
* Plug in and theme editors with function lookup and syntax highlight function
* Improved loading speed of admin pages through compression and concatenation of script

If you had problems with widgets with the older version, this latest release may well be the solution to your problems. This latest release comes with an enhanced widget interface design which is not available in the 2.7 version. This feature provides multi-functionalities like widgets on the fly editing, multiple copies of widgets, and a lot more.

This latest version of Wordpress is equipped with an enhanced CodePress Editor which will come in handy when you are making tweaks and edits to plugins and themes from your Dashboard. It also comes with contextual documentation capability which is an essential element for the functions in the file that is being edited.

With that said, will my free themes work on this latest version? I made it clear that my free themes will be compatible with the latest Wordpress version so I am taking the time to test my themes on Wordpress 2.8 at the moment. I will announce in Twitter and the theme pages whenever a new theme version that works on WP 2.8 is released.

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Wordpress 2.8 Features and Themes Compatibility