Welcome and a Happy New Year. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

If you are not confident adapting Wordpress themes but cannot quite find one that is ideal, you may like to consider using a a free flexible and customizable theme; where changes are made via an admin dashboard theme interface. There is no need for you to touch the code at all, with theme options built into the admin area. Some of these type of themes are also ideal if you want to easily take advantage of the capabilities of Wordpress to create something a little different, do not want to go all the way with a magazine type theme, or want to use your site for more than just a blog.

Here are a selection of such free WP themes. They vary in the amount of customization available; all are widget ready. Another advantage of all of these themes is that there is more help available. The theme designers have gone the extra mile to provide you with with help pages, forums, tutorials or wikis.

Dkret2

- An adaptable theme with its own options in the admin/presentation area for choosing which stylesheet to use - either one of the included styles (or if you are feeling adventurous one you have created or modified yourself.

• A dashboard theme page for making adjustments
• Up to five Sidebars including 3 "footer" sidebars.
• Choose from one of the supplied style schemes or add your own without the need for editing the base them files.
• Includes Guestbook Events and Todo templates. and the ability to have no Sidebar,
• Uses AJAX for comments and has a built in AJAX comment preview

Download from Wordpress.org
Documentation
Forum
Making Schemes Video

 

Mandigo

A customizable theme from onehertz which among other features allows you to choose from 7 color schemes and determine the placement of sidebars.

 

• Dashboard Themes Option page for easy customization
• 38 languages .
• Two widths 800×600 screen resolution or 1024 pixels.
• One or two columns, right or left side selected selected from the Theme Options page
• Per page or random header images
• 7 Color Schemes - blue, red, green, pink, purple, orange & teal.
• Schemes can be selected from the Theme Options page, or switched randomly by enabling the random scheme feature

 

Download from Wordpress.org
Wiki

Royale

Another customizable theme from onehertz with layout and color options and an unusual feature of changing link colors.

 

• A fluid-width layout
• Two or three-column
• 3 column layout - side by side or right/left sidebars
• Choose the accents (link) color from a 360-color palette or make colors cycle automatically, which means that the color of links will change smoothly as your visitors read your blog.
• Translated into thirty-eight languages.

If you do not like the black background color this is reasonably easy to change.

Download - Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage

onehertz also has a customizable theme based on Nintendo’s Mario Bros although you could change the background image to your liking - smw theme

Starscape

This theme has a large range of customization options and the creator MillaN has added more and more features over time. StarscapeII in the pipeline.

 

• Theme Control Panel
• Inbuilt ready to use themes of different colors.
• Customize header logo and background
• Control the rendering of menus and sidebars,
• Sidebar customization - left and right or just one -
• Sidebar width options
• A footer ’sidebar’ for 3, 4 or 5 widgets.
• Icon customization
• Date Button for Posts and Pages
• plus even more features

Theme Control Panel

A selection of the built in styles

 

Download - Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage
Tutorials

Tarski

by Ben Eastaugh and Chris Sternal-Johnson.

This theme comes with different styles and layouts and a choice of stock header images.

 

 

• Tarski comes with a choice of several stock header images but you may prefer to add your own.
• You can choose from with three alternate styles, which tweak the theme’s colours slightly or add your own custom style.
• There are a number of different sidebar options

Theme Homepage
Download - Wordpress.org
Documentation and Help
Forum

Ikarus

Finally one with over 2,000 options configurable from your admin dashboard area. Here is but one example of the layout and colors available.

 

• Theme options page and help page in admin
• Live theme preview in admin area
• 4 homepage layouts to choose from, Blog, Magazine, List or Magazine List
• Content Gallery (on or off) Slideshow or static header image with link
• Featured Sidebar post (on or off)
• Many sidebar features built in without the need for additional plugins - popular content rating, recent posts, comments and feedback, tagcloud, Social bookmark tools
• 6 125×125, 1 header 468×60, 1 footer 468×60 banners all managed from theme admin area
• 10 color variations to choose from for header bar, widgets, post titles, links and footer
• 3 Columns, Widgets 2 columns
• CSS multi-level drop down page menus across header
• MooTabs slider box
• Featured YouTube Video post
• Custom typography styles
• and more …,..

Download - Wordpress.org
Homepage and Demo

I have created a list on diigo for this type of theme and will add to the list and this post as I find more of interest. I will be continuing with this series of posts to bring you details of unusual themes, niche themes; free and premium.

Please let me know if you use any of these themes or know of more themes that allow for easy customization.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Rate this:

3.3 (1 person)

Premium Wordpress themes and theme sites have been springing up over the last couple of years, often catering for the increasing popularity of magazine style themes. Free themes have not always measured up to premium themes in design complexity and, at times, in their coding accuracy. The additional support offered with premium themes is also a draw card.

Theme Directory

For personal bloggers the cost of buying themes tends to outweigh their advantages. For those who are making money or promoting a business with their blog the price is less of a factor. The good news for those who do not want to spend money on themes is that the new Wordpress theme directory not only has a huge repository of themes but, to be eligible for inclusion, themes have to meet certain standards. This means that anything downloaded from the directory will work, without any coding glitches. That is the theory; although I would have thought that there are bound to be the odd few that fall through the net. Despite this we can feel much more confident downloading themes from the WP theme directory than from sites we don’t know and trust.

If you do want a magazine style layout you may still have to consider paying for a premium theme. The WP Themes Directory only has two tagged as “magazine”. There is however more good news, hence the title of this post. The site that brought us the premium Revolution Theme is going open source (under a GPL licence) as from 1st November. The themes will all be new (as it is not fair to offer the Revolution Theme itself after many have already paid for it). There will be an option to purchase packages which include support, tutorials, access to customization and a few other things (not yet specified) but the themes themselves will be free. More details can be found on the site of Revolution’s creator Brian Gardner - Revolution Going Open Source.

WP Limits is following the lead with some soon to be released free themes, including a “never before created knowledgebase theme”.

I have spent some time researching magazine style themes, free and premium, and have a post in the pipeline showing you my findings.

For Blogger users, there is a list of blogspot template sites on my Blogger blog.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Rate this:

3.3 (1 person)

The website that has been taking up my time and my passion, to the extent that I have not been posting here as often as I would like, is launched. The Fragile X Association of Australia now has an interactive site built around Wordpress.

From posts I have written before, you may know that I have a son with the condition and, at the time he was diagnosed. little was known about it - despite Fragile X Syndrome being the most common form of inherited intellectual disability and the own known genetic cause of Autism. I have since been on a bit of a mission to ensure as many people know about it as possible so that other kids and carriers are diagnosed and get the proper treatment. Male and female carriers may have their own distinct health issues that are quite distinct from those affected by the syndrome. Some males are being incorrectly treated as having Parkinson’s disease for example.

As well as standard Wordpress pages with information relating to Fragile X Syndrome and the support and services offered by the Association, the blog section will enable them to update the site frequently with news of Fragile X and the various activities run by the Association and its State Support Groups. Pages can be easily added and edited when more information is needed. With frequent advances in research and treatment trials anyone interested can be kept up to date. Although I am going to be around to teach and help with the system, the Association’s office manager and committee members will be able to operate the site themselves.

More technical aspects:

I chose Wordpress as a CMS system over Joomla and Drupal because of its easy of use and administration. Other CMS systems can be quite hard to learn and Wordpress has all the features needed; either inbuilt or via plugins. Although I am very familiar with Joomla in particular adding content is still more time consuming than WP. I have found that despite all good intentions the clients I have built Joomla systems for add very little new content, or ask me to do it for them.

I did have to add some coding manually rather than use plugins to get the navigation system to do what I wanted, so that only certain pages showed in the main menu and specific menus appeared on particular groups of pages. Despite having very little practice with PHP this was not too hard because of the excellent documentation on the Wordpress.org site. If anyone would like to know how I created any particular aspects of the site, please let me know.

My last addition to the site was the forums, which I did not want to configure until the site was being hosted on the proper domain. The rest of the site I had created in a subdirectory of my own server and transferred over afterwards, with a bit of editing of the database. I used SMF for the forums because of the extent of features available. I still need to redesign the template to match the rest of the site.

A request

Please visit the site and have a bit of a read - your knowledge may possibly be of great help to someone you know. If you have the time please leave a comment on a news item - it will give the site editors some practice with the comment section and encourage those who are not used to leaving messages to do so. If there is anything particular you would like to know that you cannot find within the main site, drop by the forums and ask - or leave suggestions for content or feedback on the site.

Now I will do some catching up on what is happening in the blogging world to again bring you news of new tools, software, social networking and other stuff that will hopefully be of use to you.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Rate this:

3.2

 

What are the less interesting but necessary blogging tasks we need to complete? I will be taking you through them over the next few weeks. For those of you who are saying “but I only want to write” and not do any of this stuff” I promise to try and make it as painless to read as possible. Some of it you may already be familiar with this of course but others may be starters on the blogging path (anyway reminders do not go astray from time to time).

I spent quite a while yesterday writing a post which contained a list of things that I am going to do and then scrapped it. My idea was to create a list type post, I am sure you have seen the sort I am talking about - e.g. 30 Must Have Tips on Removing Dog stains from Carpets*. This type of post tends to score well in the rankings. The post ended up too detailed and I thought I would lose you after about point 15 so I ditched it. I did attempt to add some relevant keywords to the first paragraph of this post though so I did do a little sucking up to search engines. Instead I will just do a summary of the main areas I will be covering over the next weeks so that I can share with you the experience of moving from a hosted platform to my own domain.

Setting up the blog:

• domain names and domain registering
• hosting
• ftp (how to upload, download from your blog hosts server)
• learning to use Wordpress

Introducing my blog to the WWW

- submitting it to:

• social networking services
• bookmarking sites,
• search engines,
• directories
• commenting on other blogs
• doing a little begging, requesting some help from blogging mates.
• link building

I will not be spammy or use what I consider unethical techniques under any circumstances - no leaving comments of no value, no blatant asking for links from strangers nor any ” I’ll pat your back but only if you pat mine” kind of thing.

Make the blog Search Engine Friendly

- help the busy little Google bot and other crawlers find all the things they need to find. (I think it will be me crawling to them though) This will involve among other things:

• Adding a sitemap
• Tweaking Wordpress a little, mostly with the use of plugins.

Making the blog reader friendly

- by styling it so that:

• it is easy to navigate
• visitors can find content of interest
• it is clear, uncluttered and easy to read

The latter is not a chore, as I just love messing around with styling.

I am sure I have missed some things off this list and I will add to it as time goes on. Please let me know if there is something particular, not mentioned here, that you would like to learn concerning starting a blog on your own domain - if you wish to know then I am sure others do too.

*I really do have to do a bit of a clean up now my daughter’s puppy has left with her for their new life at the other side of Australia

Popularity: 2% [?]

Rate this:

2.5