Themes Featured on Divageekdesigns.com
A sexy diva geek is featuring some of my themes on her site 🙂 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...
Read MoreTheme Partnership with SmashingApps.com
This week marks another milestone for Templatelite. My work has been recognized by one of my most favorite sites, SmashingApps.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...
Read More2 WordPress Theme Directories with Review System
In my previous post, I listed 100+ theme directories and forums that I submit my new themes to. Out of all the sites, I particularly like Themes Preview because this is the only site that provide comprehensive review of WordPress themes. 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...
Read MoreWordPress 2.8 Features and Themes Compatibility
The good news is now finally out! WordPress 2.8, with code name “Baker,” is now available. Once you log on to your WordPress you will be receiving a notice on the availability for download of this latest WordPress version. 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...
Read MoreChecking my Themes Against 10 Criteria Outlined in Yoast.com
I stumbled upon a post on Yoast.com outlining the 10 criteria of a perfect WordPress theme. Without hesitation, I went ahead and check my themes against those criteria eager to see how I score for my themes. The 10 checks are as follows: Hooks Template files Is your theme widgetized? Does your theme have a search option? Does your theme work in all major browsers? Is the theme’s code valid? Check the outgoing links! Can the theme handle pages? Make sure your theme supports trackbacks How is your theme handling titles? The following is the report: 1 Hooks Requirements: – In header.php, it should have a small piece of PHP code that looks exactly like this wp_head(); or this do_action(‘wp_head’);, usually just before a piece of HTML that looks like this: . – In footer.php, it should have another small piece of PHP like this wp_footer();, or this do_action(‘wp_footer’); – In comments.php and/or comments-popup.php, it should have a piece of code like this: ID); ?>, just before the HTML tag. Result: All my themes contain the code. 2 Template files Yoast said it is a standard to include all the 9 BASIC files below in a theme to avoid installation problem. Each file represents a standard WordPress feature/structure. home.php, single.php, page.php, category.php, author.php, date.php, archive.php, search.php, 404.php Out of the above mentioned files, I only have home.php, single.php, page.php Does that mean I am missing most of the WordPress features? Not at all. I actually simplified the file structure even more by merging category.php, author.php, date.php, archive.php, search.php, 404.php into one single file, index.php Result: All my themes contain the standard WordPress features. 3 Is your theme widgetized? Strictly speaking, a theme without widget is not a WordPress theme. To determine whether a WordPress theme is widgetized, look for this code in the sidebar.php file: dynamic_sidebar(”); . Result: Needless to say, all my themes are widget ready. 4 Does your theme have a search option? WordPress search function is quite powerful so there is no reason not to include it by default. Result: Search option can be found on all my themes. 5 Does your theme work in all major browsers? Your visitors will get turned off if your blog is not compatible with their browsers. However, it is impossible to make a theme work in ALL browsers. The author advises the users to install a theme which works on IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari. Results: Not only do my themes compatible with IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari, they are compatible with the Opera as well as an increasingly popular Chrome browser. 6 Is the theme code valid? It is very important for a theme to comply with W3C. A theme with W3C compliant will be crawled by search engines easily and it is more likely to work on several browsers and other display devices like PDA. However, you can’t find many themes pass this test either because the theme author is more of a designer than a coder or the coder doesn’t bother to take the effort to make it W3C compliant. To see if a theme pass the test, you can use the XHTML validator and the CSS validator Result: All my themes pass both the W3C’s XHTML and CSS test. 7 Check the outgoing links! Normally, the free downloadable themes will have the theme author’s link in the footer. Some will also have the advertiser’s link. You need to check where the external links point to in order to avoid linking to bad...
Read MoreWooden Fence Theme Reviewed by WPtavern
My Wooden Fence theme has got a candid review by WPtavern.com, a fast growing site focuses on topics about WordPress and projects under Automatic Inc. Thanks for the review, I found a few things that I could improve for my future themes. However, I also need to clarify a few things about the review here. Let’s talk about the license and the footer part of my themes. The CC license looks complicated but my main intention is only two things: 1) you have to keep the footer link and a footer script intact 2) you can’t use my themes on your commercial sites. Other than that, you can manipulate my themes freely without any cost. Unlike other themes, my themes are coded using the most basic elements. No options pages and plugins are found on the Wooden Fence theme as well as most of my themes. I created them that way because of 3 issues as follows: 1) Some plugins might not be compatible with the latest WordPress version and the plugins designers fail to fix the problem. 2) Some plugins have security loopholes. I don’t want your site to get hacked because of the security faults pertaining to the plugins. 3) I’ll be able to fix the WordPress compatibility issues in the shortest time whenever a new WordPress version is available. With that said, I am actually planning to design a theme with extra options for advance users. Anyway, it is still in the conceptual stage. As for the graphic design, I am appreciated to see some great pointers to improve the graphic part of this theme. I am especially grateful for one of the commenters, Terri for his critics from the aspect of a graphic designer. I take his words in mind. For those who want to suggest some useful features that I could add to my themes, please share with me your suggestions and ideas. I appreciate...
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