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:

The following is the report:

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.

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

Read the rest of the criteria

Wordpress themes’ license has been a debating issue among the Wordpress community. Due to the fact that Wordpress is an open source program and releases under a GPL license, many assume that all Wordpress themes should also be GPL-licensed.

Indeed, a lot of free downloadable themes are released under GPL license. But the problem with those themes is that majority of them can’t match the quality of other themes that are released under a different license.

I have researched major players who design Wordpress themes and none of them released the themes under GPL license with one exception from Studiopress.com. This site releases professional magazine style Wordpress themes. Their themes’ license is GPL but still, you have to purchase to use it.

All my themes are free to download. To sustain the site, I have to get advertisers to sponsor my themes so I can use the proceeds to continue releasing more high quality themes. Therefore, I can’t afford making my themes available for free under GPL license.

My themes have been using Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license and it will continue to stay that way. In addition to the current license, there is one amendment that I’d like to include as follows:
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.templatelite.com/terms-of-use/

The reason behind this change is that the current CC license doesn’t specifically mention about the footer links and script of my themes. Now I make it clear that removing the footer links and script of my themes is against the terms!

In short, the license allows you to share and remix the work of my themes but you have to make sure that
1) you keep the footer link and a footer script intact
2) you can’t use my themes on your commercial sites

Those found in violation of my terms and conditions will be ordered to remove my themes from the affected sites.

Wordpress is a powerful CMS program that is capable of turning a complicated graphic design into a web page. You can see a list of 50 stunning template designs that are running on Wordpress here. The design of these websites may look complicated but if done in an organized way, they aren’t really hard to code.

From the designers’ perspective, a website can be divided into 5 main sections:

There are several elements found in the main sections where you can define the styles. The styling of each elements can be controlled in the css file. Normally, we name it style.css.

Different designers have their own ways of doing it. I’ll show you how I configure my CSS file in an well-organized way. I made it easy to understand so you can modify the styles of each element without much difficulties.

Open any of my themes’ style.css file and you’ll see that I grouped them into 9 categories:

Click here for the details of my themes’ CSS structure

My themes are getting popular in the Blogger world

Since I authorized Bloggerstyles/Falconhive as my official WP-to-Blogger template converter last month, more and more Blogger users are using my templates.

Recently, I receive quite a number of requests from the Blogger users who use my themes downloaded from Bloggerstyles/Falconhive asking me to solve some of the Blogger template issues. Since I am not the person doing the conversion, I can’t provide feasible solutions for your Blogger template problems.

Here, I would like to clarify to all the Blogger template users that I do not provide support for Blogger related issues.

All the Blogger template issues have to be directed to Bloggerstyles.com

However, I want both the Wordpress and Blogger template users to enjoy problem-free templates (template without functionality issues). To ensure that your issues posted on Bloggerstyles will be addressed, I have contacted Bloggerstyles’ owner and arrived at a solution.

Bloggerstyles’ owner has assured me that he will address your Blogger template issue within 5 working days. However, if he fails to address your issue, you can forward to me by posting it on the theme page. I’ll then look into your issue personally and contact Bloggerstyles’ owner to facilitate the process.

In this way, I hope I’ll be able to take care of my Blogger template users effectively.

I am happy to see that some of my themes have been certified by ThemesPreview.com. To add to my excitement, some of my themes are awarded GOLD status!!

Some of you might not have heard about Themes Preview. Let me briefly describe what this site is doing. ThemesPreview is a Wordpress theme directory listing some of the best themes with FREE downloads. If it is just a free Wordpress theme directory, what is so great about this site when there are so many theme directories around? Let me get into some of the details.

Firstly, it is not that easy to get a theme listed on ThemesPreview. A theme must fulfill the following basic criteria to get a free listing:
- it must be able to get installed on the latest Wordpress version
- it must have quality graphic
- it must be widget ready

Needless to say, my themes fulfill those basic criteria.

Secondly, the editor will test each and every theme against several criteria. Most of the tested criteria are code-related. This section is to test how well the designers code the theme. If the theme passes a criteria, points will be given. The editor will then compare the passed score with the tested score to come out with the total score of the theme.

Now, to be awarded Bronze status, out of 100%, the theme has to score within 60-74%. To be awarded Silver status, the theme has to score within 75-89%. To get a Gold status, the theme has to score above 90%.

I have done some statistic about the number of awarded themes out of all the themes listed on ThemesPreview. As of this writing, there are a total of 296 themes listed on that site. Out of which, 62 themes are awarded Bronze status. 26 themes are awarded Silver status. Only 8 themes are awarded Gold status. In other words, only 32% of all themes listed on ThemesPreview are getting Bronze status at least.

Another thing you can tell from the statistic above is that a theme needs to have VERY clean coding to be awarded Gold status. Less than 3% of all themes are good enough to be awarded the status.

Out of the 8 Gold themes currently listed on ThemesPreview, 4 of which are designed by Templatelite.com. This shows how much effort I put in to create my “babies”

My principle is: Creating Wordpress themes with high standard for FREE downloads!

I am very selective as to who I want to partner with. A good partner will make my business flourish and a bad partner will affect my business in a negative way. I am a person who puts a lot of emphasis on the quality so I choose only good partners.

In my search for the Blogger/Blogspot templates, I found out that many of the good templates are converted from the Wordpress themes. This was when I started to think: it will affect my reputation in the Blogger world if my themes have been converted poorly. I need a good coder to convert my themes!

I am glad that I found Alvaris Falcon, the owner of Falconhive.com and the co-owner of BloggerStyles.com. Though he has only 9 months experience in converting Wordpress theme to the Blogger platform, his converted templates are so Blogger-friendly. Until now, he is still very active in doing the conversion work. You’ll see 1-3 new Wordpress themes converted by him to Blogger almost every week. Check out Falconhive and Blogger Styles for more info.

I also notice that Alvaris won’t stop there after finishing the theme conversion. He will make sure that his converted Blogger templates work. When the template users reported any problems, he will look into them and try his best to solve them. Each revision being released signify less problems for the template. Take a look at how he handles the support on one of his most popular converted templates, Zinmag Primus and you’ll know what I mean.

Due to all his effort being put in the theme conversion, I am sure he will do a fantastic job in converting my Wordpress themes to the Blogger platform. In this January, I contacted him about my request of making him the official converter of my Wordpress themes. I am glad that he accepted it.

In this post, I’d like to announce that BloggerStyles/Falconhive has been given the rights to be the official Wordpress theme converter for Templatelite!

Previously, all my themes were tested against all Wordpress version from 2.3 onwards. That is doable when I only need to work on less than 10 themes every time Wordpress releases a new version officially. 

Since mid February 2009, I have decided to dedicate myself to releasing at least 4 themes and 10 articles/resources per month. After 3 months, you’ll expect to see a total of about 20 quality Wordpress themes on this site and all of the themes are free to download.

I foresee that I’ll be super busy in the months ahead so I will have very limited time left to test all the themes against previous as well as the latest Wordpress version. However, since you are using my theme (I am honour that you do), it is my responsibility to make sure it works on the latest Wordpress version that is released officially. I won’t test against the Beta Wordpress version.

When Wordpress officially releases a new version, I will test my themes against the latest version. It will be an ongoing process so you will have to wait a bit before ALL the themes complete the testing. When I have finished testing a theme, I will update it under the “Change Log” section of the respective theme pages. 

However, my testing might not be so thorough so if you find that any of my themes that doesn’t work well on the most updated Wordpress version, please let me know and I’ll look into that and solve the issues the soonest.

Do I provide support for the older Wordpress versions?
I am afraid not. Though the upgraded theme should work with the older version, I advise you to upgrade your Wordpress to the latest version and use my theme that has been tested against that version. 

One of my goals is to make themes with personalized design. Currently, only the Photo Frame theme allows certain extent of customization by changing the image in the photo frame. In my latest theme (Simple Style), you’ll be able to customize the whole header and part of the footer.

How to change the images for the Simple Style theme?
Step 1
Create your own header and footer images with the size as follows:
Header image size: 1280 x 400 px
Footer image size: 400 x 160 px

Step 2
Name the header and footer images as bg.jpg and bg_footer.jpg respectively.

Step 3
Upload the file to the /images folder.

To see how a theme using the same coding can look so differently, we have created a few samples.

Read more..