The design and appearance used is one of the mainstays of a blog. That is why Templatelite has the redesign. Just admit it – an attractively designed blog will have more pulling power rather than a plain and dull blog with no graphics, pictures and so on. These will result in the blogs gaining followers and increased readership. There are several pointers and tips below for those intending to design their blogs to make it attractively appealing to others :
- Adding Extras - a redesign will give you more opportunity on how you can extend the functionality of your blog by allowing adding extra features such as social bookmarking buttons, Subscriber Stats, RRS buttons, Portfolio Showcase, Chat Windows and many more. An extra feature that will make your subscriber stay and they will even invite their friends to join the blog.
Previously, I didn’t have any posts about design resources. Since this site is about theme design, it would be appropriate to include the resources. In future, I’ll also include more advertising options and probably do custom theme design and SEO work for others.
- Rearranging your Blog – if you have a messy space on your blog it is not recommended that you have so many unnecessary components and elements. The best way is to remove some of the unnecessary components and retain the best parts of your blog that are neglected sometimes. Keep it smart, simple but effective.
Take a look at this site for example, the top left is the showcase of my latest themes. The sidebar lists only important sections that include introduction of Templatelite, search feature, RSS feature, archive, about our themes, Wordpress tips and tricks, useful resources, tag cloud etc. The footer has 3 columns showing the popular themes, recent posts and recent comments. I think all these sections are necessary for my blog.
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Most of the free Wordpress themes out there are having Creative Commons Attribute 2.0+ License. This means that you can modify the theme in anyway you want but you have to attribute the work in the manner specified by the author.
If you download the free WP themes from other sites using this type of license, you’ll notice that most of them have the footer section encrypted.
Many of you would like the freedom to change how the footer looks. With an encrypted footer, you can’t change things like adding a “Contact” link or an RSS button. You might also want to check whether there is no malicious code in the encryption.
The following is the screenshot of how the encrypted footer looks like:
This post shows you how to decrypt the footer encryption. The good thing is you DON’T need any decoding software nor programming skill in order to do that.
Sounds simple. Yes it is! Please follow the few steps below to remove the footer encryption:
Click here for full instructions
To use the following emoticons, you need to first enable it in the admin following the steps below:
Settings -> Writing -> Formatting
Tick this box:
Convert emoticons like :-) and :-P to graphics on display
Click here to view the full Emoticon list
With the more tag, your posts will be splited. The excerpts will be displayed on the home and/or the archive page. The full article will be shown in the post itself.
There are a few ways to use the more tag.
Method #1
A link showing “more…” is placed at the bottom of the post where you insert this code in the HTML mode:
<!--more-->
Eg, one full article has 3 sentences as follows:
Hi, this is my first post. I have many things to write about myself. I live in a wonderful city of Angels.
To display only the first 2 sentences in the home or the archive page, you add this more tag in the HTML mode of the post:
Hi, this is my first post. I have many things to write about myself.
<!--more-->
I live in a wonderful city of Angels.
In the home or archive page, the post will be displayed like this:
Hi, this is my first post. I have many things to write about myself.
more…
Note: The link “more…” is defined in this coding: the_content(“more…”); which can normally be found in index.php, search.php or archive.php
Click here to continue to Method #2 and #3
To add a new theme to your WordPress, follow these basic steps:
- Download the zip file and extract the files it contains. The extracted files are grouped in one folder. The name of the folder is the theme name. Take the Coffee Desk theme for example, the folder name of the theme is “coffeedesk”
- Download and install Wordpress to your server by following the instruction at http://wordpress.org/download/
- Using an FTP client to access your host web server. Go to the “wp-content” folder and create a sub-folder called “themes” and the structure will look like this: /wp-content/themes/
- Upload the theme folder to “themes” on your host server. Again, taking the Coffee Desk theme for example, after uploaded, the structure will become like this:
/wp-content/themes/coffeedesk/
- Login to Wordpress admin, select Appearance -> Themes.
- Click on the theme you would like to activate. On the top right side of the theme, click Activate + “Theme”
- You are done. Enjoy the new look of your blog!
Please contact us if you encounter problems with our themes and we’ll be glad to resolve the issues.
