In this part of the blog series , we will discuss themes. I will provide you with links to download some themes and some simple theme installation instructions. It’s a pretty quick process to change out the default theme and it’s pretty easy for the most part. You should take the time at this point to think about your goals with your blog as far as monetizing strategies go. It’s not always advisable to start plastering your site with ads right out of the gate but it is a good idea to map out where you would like to place the ads so you can find a theme that accommodates. It’s sometimes a bit of a pain to change your theme after it’s been going for awhile, especially after adding plugins and custom modifications. You will want to change it at some point for freshness but not because you don’t have room for your ads.
It’s nice to have a theme with lots of spots around the content to promote other areas of the blog. It’s sometimes nice to have 2 sidebars and a tall footer area for this reason. You may want to include things like; most popular posts, top commentators, recent readers, recent posts, recent comments and the typical categories and blog roll sections. Plus, you may want to add some widgets for membership promotion sites (like Entrecard or BlogRush for example) in the sidebar or footer. Also, it’s really popular to include a strip of 125×125 ads in the sidebar in your blog. Like I said, it really depends on your monetizing strategy when choosing a theme. When I use WordPress as a Content Management System to test offers and create landing pages, for example, I generally opt for plain, no column themes with just a large content area and a header. I use the footer area for navigation.
Themes for SEO
From my experience, it seems that most of the free themes available aren’t designed with Search Engine Optimization in mind. From my understanding a web page should have no more than one h1 or h2 tag but a lot of the themes that I have come across will use h1 tags for the title of every post on the main page and use h2 tags for all of the sections in the sidebar…not that I am an authority on SEO, but that probably won’t help your rankings in the search engines. I didn’t consider this when installing the theme for this blog. In fact, the layout is all wrong for what I want to eventually do…live and learn I guess. In the next section I will give you a link to a site that provides free SEO optimized themes. I think they are themes that can be found freely on the web but have been modified with SEO in mind.
Finding a theme
Use the links below to locate a theme that you like and that fits with your monetizing goals. A lot of the themes can be viewed live, others will just have screen shots. Once you locate a theme that you want, download it to your computer. The installation instructions that follow will assume the theme is downloaded in zip format which in most cases it will be.
- Themes compatible with version 2.5 of WordPress (WordPress.org link)
- Free WordPress themes from Jauhari with heavy monetization in mind
- Free WordPress theme generator
- Free modified WordPress themes with SEO in mind
- Unique Blog Designs (not free)
There are tons of themes available all over the Internet, some free, some not. I think I covered most scenarios above but you can also search Google for "wordpress themes" or "custom wordpress themes" or "free wordpress themes". It’s easy to waste away a bunch of precious time theme-searching but just pick one and get rolling :)
Installing a WordPress theme
OK, you have your theme zip file somewhere on your computer right? Now, unzip the contents of the zip file. A new folder should be created with all of the theme files inside. You will need to upload that folder to the themes folder on the server. Fire up your FTP software and open up the wp-content folder. Now open up themes . Upload your new theme into that folder.
Activating the theme
Login to your WP Control Panel. Go to Design, then Themes. A screen shot of your new theme should be there. Click it. That’s it. You’re sexy new theme is activated.
The next post will discuss the free WordPress plugins that I recommend.
May 1, 2008
Miscellaneous