Tag Archives: wordpress

New Theme: Bwd 3

As you can probably tell by my new site design I have another new WordPress theme.  It’s called Bwd 3 and is a basically two things:

  1. A minimalist theme with a robust options page that includes allowing you to participate in CSS Naked Day, have an intro message on the home page, have a custom home page, and/or have a social networking area in the right sidebar.  It additionally includes a footer that will check your first published post date and build a copyright off it ([first post date year]-[current year]).  Finally, it includes 4 sidebar widget areas – blog (tags, posts, categories, etc), custom home page, page, and 404.
  2. A theme template which comes prepackaged with all of #1 and good (I hope) commenting in the theme as well as a CSS template with comments (mainly via selectors – my challenge to myself was to use the least amount of classes/IDs as possible).

There’s more information as well as a download link on the theme page in my portfolio.  Enjoy.

WordPress themes in the Theme directory

Just a quick post.  I finally got around to submitting two of my themes in the official Theme directory.  They were accepted after some minor corrections.  You can find them here.

I just happened to check the stats today and between the two I have over 1200 downloads.  While not impressive considering some of the other themes on the site, I’m pretty happy with that.  It will be interested to see if it starts to be actually used on sites and gives me some linkbacks.

Next: I have to make homepages for the themes.  I’d also like to do some updates to them and craft a third.  Hopefully all before the end of the year.

5 WordPress Plugins Everyone Should Use

I’ve finally started to get my site up and running and have been actively searching for various plugins to enhance my site. So far, I’ve come up with a short list that anyone should start with in order to have the basic functionality – for yourself or a client – without paying a lot from a hosting company or anyone else to have them.

  1. Akismet – because of the good code, SEO-wise, that WordPress generates you get a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, that means you get a lot of bad traffic too – including comment spam. A must have.
  2. Google Analytics – a simple google account and you have access to all the advanced stats you could ever want or need – does any more really need to be said?
  3. Google Sitemap Generator – with the same google account you can generate an XML sitemap – that will dynamically re-create itself and notify Google everytime you add a post – that will allow the 3 major search engines to index your entire site easier.
  4. Share This – nearly every social bookmarking site known to man is included, as well as a feature for people to e-mail your site/post/page to friends. Easily allow your users to index your site for you with popular sites like del.icio.us and get traffic from sites like digg and reddit.
  5. Add Meta Tags – although less important for SEO, this plugin lets you dynamically generate keyword and description metatags based upon your categories and the content of your post.

Random Tidbit: Excellent article on five principles to design by.