How to Select a WordPress Theme
I am much better at design than some developers I have worked with, but I will never be great.
If I depended on my artistic flair to earn a living, I might be in trouble. Fortunately for me, there are cheap templates, and there are designs I can imitate.
Because I have been using it for years, I have found WordPress easy to start using it as a basic CMS for some of my clients.
My favourite place to buy a template is Themeforest. I host small sites for clients who do not have big budgets. Themeforest provides attractive templates at a very affordable price. However not all themes are equal. Here are some things you should consider.
1) Read the comments. Users often post comments about themes. They contain useful info. You do not want to buy a theme that has problems and issues, and you especially do not want to buy a theme from a designer who does not respond to that are raised problems.
2) Buy a well supported theme if you can. At ThemeForest, at least one designer has posted training screen casts.
3) If you are buying a theme for a client, buy cautiously. Themeforest displays the number of times a theme has been sold. I prefer themes by designers who have made number of sales. Also, I tend to choose themes by designers who have posted multiple themes that I can also check out.
4) Ensure that your theme is web standards compliant. There are tools you can use to check the template before you buy it. Read about this subject to learn more.
5) Use the theme preview and look at the CSS files. Do the CSS files contain useful comments? Can you figure out how the CSS corresponds to the pages you see? If you need to customize the template, you may have to work with these files. Don’t buy yourself grief. Buy templates the employ some CSS best practices.
6) And, finally, it never hurts to have a good book to help you alter the template, or to add functionality. I depend on Smashing WordPress, but there are others. And, of course, there is a lot of information available online.
7) Do not buy a template just for how it looks. Be smart. Buy something you can support and change with ease. Buy something that provides good functionality. Buy something that saves you and your clients headaches.
Strategic Blogging 101-001
If you having been visiting this blog for a period of time, you will have noticed a few changes. After five years, it was time for a new look.
However, I have bigger plans than that. For five years, I have blogged about whatever I pleased and I have created a haphazard collection of categories to classify my content. Now, I want to blog strategically, and I need to create tags and categories that help drive traffic to this site. I am also beginning to work with clients to show them how to do the same.
Today, I deleted useless categories, and I began to think about what I want to achieve by blogging. In short:
- I need to know what I want to achieve.
- I need to prepare to measure my success.
- I need to measure my success, and course correct as necessary.
I am going to delete more categories, and tags. Then, I will create new categories and tags, and I will apply them to my old content as I see fit. This blog needs focus. This is happening after the fact, but it is never too late.
The first part of the exercise is about branding, I guess. Strategy, for me, is about knowing what you want to achieve, identifying the resources you have at your disposal , and planning how to use them to achieve your end. My blog is a resource.
Back To Jython/DB4O: Part 1
Ok, I let this work drop a while ago, but I have received a few requests for more info on using DB4O in Jython. Let’s make it clear, I am just playing with Jython and DB4O, but if this information is useful to you, then that makes me happy.
If you are impatient, like me, follow the steps I outline below, and you can stop reading here.
First things first: get the book. You can purchase the PDF of the Definitive Guide to Jython by clicking on the image of the book that appears above. Or, you can view a preview that is available at Google Books.
Last, but not least, there is also an open source version of the book. I will refer to this version in my examples, but, if you own the book, follow along.
I suggest that you download Aptana and install PyDev – that is the IDE I will be using in my examples. Since Aptana is based on Eclipse, you also have the option of installing the PyDev plugin in your current Eclipse Install.
I am going to assume that you have Java running on your machine, but I will provide instructions for the other steps. So, just to keep things easy, to get started follow these steps:
- Install Jython on your machine.
- Get Pydev running on your machine. (As part of Aptana, or as an Eclipse plugin.)
- Get the latest version of DB4O for Java.
Bookmark the useful resources:
You are free to bookmark these resources any way you please, but I am fond of Delicious because I can access my links from anywhere, because there is a Delicious API and because there are some cool plugins for Firefox and Google Chrome that make it more fun to use the service.
Get this done, and move on to part 2 when I have written it.