Entries Tagged 'Web Design' ↓

If you’ve ever read any of my posts here then you’ll know that I’m a big fan of all the wordpress themes that Chris Pearson has put out.  Well recently he released a paid theme called Thesis that has some outstanding features.  Last month after reading a great review from Sugarrae on Thesis I decided to buy the developers license.  The developer option was a $164 but to me that was a bargain considering I could use it on unlimited sites and I’d get free theme updates forever.

Let me first start out by saying that the Thesis theme is everything that I thought it would be and more.  Currently I’ve got my first site up and I was able to launch that with about only 5 hours of work and it looks great.  If you’ve got some CSS knowledge then the sky is the limit when is comes to customizing Thesis.  However if your not that strong with customizing CSS then don’t worry, because you can still build a great looking site.

One of the things that really impressed me with this theme was the options pane that comes built in with Thesis allowing you to really do some nice customizations with little or no effort at all.  Chris really put some nice effort into making this extremely easy for everyone to use and I can’t wait to see some of the future enhancements that he’ll be coming out with.  The second feature of this theme that really impresses me is the overall support.  The thesis site has some great tutorials available and the community forum is amazing.  It’s such an active forum that there is a great chance you’ll be able to find the answer that you’re looking for and everyone there is very responsive and you’ll get some great feedback.

How am I Using the Thesis Theme for Wordpress?

I’ve got a few sites that utilize the PhpBay Pro wordpress plugin for the Ebay affiliate program.  I’ve gone through countless free Wordpress themes on these sites but I never really got the performance that I knew that I could achieve with some of the niches that I was targeting.  Honestly I think that not many people would consider using Thesis for an Ebay affiliate site, but I thought there could be some potential there so I decided to give it a shot.

Website Bounce Rate Decreased by 38% with Thesis

Well so far I’ve configured one of my PhpBay Pro sites around the Thesis theme and the results have been absolutely fantastic.  I’ve been running it for a few weeks now and my overall website bounce rate has decreased by 38% since I took the Thesis theme live.  My site as also seen some huge increases in revenue since I launched with Thesis, currently my Ebay revenue is up almost 363% from where it was before Thesis.  I’m getting ready to roll out some more sites with Thesis so I’ll be interested to see if this trend continues, but I’m confident that they will.   I think the bottom line is that you can do so much to customize Thesis that I can make these sites look much more attractive and engaging.

So if you haven’t picked up Thesis or Phpbay Pro then you might want to give them a try together.  You might not have the same results that I did initially, but with the power of Thesis you’ll be able to use it in a variety of ways for all of your sites making it worth your while.   I know that I’m looking forward to launching quite a few more sites based off Thesis and its continued future updates as well.

Ok, so lets face it not everyone is a great designer that can build or customize their own Wordpress theme to fit their tastes. However most people would like to have a blog design that stands out and distinguishes them from the rest of the crowd.

I actually came across this really cool WP Theme Generator the other day that basically lets you pick out the color scheme and layout to be applied to your own custom theme.  Once your done choosing everything you want then you can just export the theme and simply upload it to your Wordpress installation and your ready to go!

So now really you’ve got no limits as to what you can put out there for your own blog. You can choose the most hideous color scheme around and this tool gives you the creative freedom to be able to do that.  So if your looking for an easy way to quickly customize a Wordpress theme for yourself then I would definitely check out the WP Theme Generator.

If your time is valuable like mine is then you definitely appreciate this wordpress plugin. Awhile back I was looking for a quick way to put together a product review website to promote some different merchants. During my search I came across the Wordpress Review Site Plugin.

It does require some manual work to get going, but  it provides some great features once you do get the plugin fully installed.  Some of the features include:

• Allowing users to comment on products and adding their own ratings
• Displaying numbers of negative and positive ratings
• Click here to see the rest of the features of this plugin

I’ve downloaded this neat plugin and I’m going to see how quick I can actually develop wordpress review site this weekend.   I’ve also got to give some credit to the author Dan Grossman for creating a plugin that looks like it has the potential to be very valuable.  I’m looking forward to see what kind of site that I’m able to develop using this.  If you’ve used this plugin I’d like to hear your thoughts on it.

I love looking for new ways to turn visitors into buyers on sites that I’m working on. Now because of this I usually spend alot of time in my design tool of choice Fireworks, creating fancy buttons to try and increase my conversions. The problem with this is that it takes away from my precious time that could be better spent on other projects.

A few weeks back I was reading a post from Zac Johnson about a package he bought called Marketing Graphics Pro. It contains a bunch of great premade buttons that you can use on your own sites. The entire package of over 2000 professional looking elements and icons was only $17! After reading his post I decided to make the purchase and give the program a try and the results have been really good so far.

Overall the buttons and icons in the package look outstanding and there is really a variety of things that you can use in the package. I’ve actually been testing some of these buttons out on some of my sites over the last few weeks and in some areas I’ve seen conversion rates rise significantly! I’m still testing this in several areas, but I’d definitely say at this point I got a pretty solid ROI on my $17. So if your looking for an affordable easy way to try and boost your conversion rates then I highly recommend giving Marketing Graphics Pro a try!

Alright, well this new design has taken me much longer than I expected it to but its finally up.  I guess thats what happens when you are trying to redesign your site on top of working, buying your first home, and your wife studying for a major board exam.  The site is completely done for the most part, but I still have a few little small things that I’m planning on doing to tweak it over the next few days.

As you know I’ve always used Cutline  up to this point when designing my blogs, but this time I chose to go ahead and customize the new Copyblogger theme that was recently released.  Overall I’m pretty pleased with the way the site turned out and I think it looks much nicer and cleaner than my previous design.  Now that I’ve got the new design out of the way, I plan to concentrate more on doing some quality blogging here and some other projects I’ve got going to try and bring in some revenue.

Anyway I’d really like to know what you think of the new design here, so leave me a comment with your honest opinion.  I really don’t care if you want to trash my new design or anything, but just be sure to put the address of your site so I can check it out.  Its amazing some of the people that will take shots at your hard work, yet they have nothing quality to show for themselves.

As most of you know I’ve been a big fan of Cutline created by Chris Pearson.  Well now that he sold the Cutline theme, he released a new theme in conjunction with Copyblogger.  So far from what I’ve read it basically resembles the old Copyblogger design and is fully customizable.  It even has a specialized theme package titled organic that makes use of the custom CSS stylesheets the same way the most recent version of Cutline did.

I was actually pretty excited when I read this today, because I’m just getting ready to redesign this site in the next few weeks.  I’ve pretty much used Cutline on everything up to this point and I’m going to go ahead and give the Copyblogger theme a try on my new design.   It looks like it has some awesome features and it should be fun to customize, so look out for a design that is totally different sometime in mid June.

In the meantime go check out the new Copyblogger Wordpress Theme and give it a try.

I seem to always find myself browsing the web in search of great resources that offer tips to help me with my projects. Needless to say I’ve found alot of great information out there and I wanted to offer some valuable info and tips in return to help you build a better website.

1. Choosing a Color Scheme - This is a concept that I have always seemed to struggle with in the past. Now I feel as though I’m actually getting much better at being able to choose color schemes for my sites. One of the things that I think helped me out the most in this area was a site that I found called COLOURlovers a great site dedicated to numerous different color trends and palettes submitted by users. Be sure to check it out as it helped me tremendously.
2. Find Great Photos - More often then not I find myself looking for photos to use that don’t cost a ton of money. There are a ton of different photo sites out from a variety of different price ranges. Lately I’ve been using Fotolia and I really like it. Their prices range from $1 -$3 per photo depending on the license you choose and they definitely have a great selection of stuff.
3. Web Usability - I have to admit that web usability is something that I never paid close attention to until about 6 months ago.  Previously when designing I never really took into account what the overall user experience was like and I think this definitely had a negative impact on some of my designs. Well last fall I purchased Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and it totally changed the way I look at designing my sites now. I highly recommend this book and its definitely worth the money.

Hopefully those 3 tips will help those of you looking to enhance your design skills.  I plan on posting more tips like this in the future as well.

On a side note I’ve become quite bored with the design here and I hope to completely redesign it and have it up by sometime in mid June.  I think I can do alot better than what I currently have here so be on the look out for that.

Currently up to this point I’ve strictly used Wordpress as a blogging platform for myself. I’d also heard others talk about what a great content management system it is for regular websites as well, but I didn’t have any direct experience myself.

Recently one of my good friends asked my to build a quick website for his mom who owns a restaurant in my former hometown of Kingman, Kansas. I agreed and decided that I would use Wordpress and the Cutline Theme to build a customized standalone website for her. They really didn’t need anything too fancy, but with this option it would provide for an easy way to allow them to modify content easily on a daily basis.

Overall this was extremely easy to implement and I was impressed with the way that Wordpress can be used as a CMS for almost any site. On top of that because it has such a large user base, there are a ton of great plugins are available that can enhance the functionality of your site as well. So if your looking for free and easy to use CMS for your next website I highly recommend Wordpress.

Lately I have gotten a few requests for help on how I modified Cutline 1.1 and gave it a custom look on my own blog.  I was asked to possibly create some type of tutorial that would help other users in modifying Cutline to give it a custom look.   In my honest opinion I don’t think a tutorial is the best way to go about learning how to customize this wordpress theme.  I think spending some time learning about CSS and that all that you can do with it will serve you far better down the road than just following some tutorial right now.  Chris Pearson did a great job at making Cutline so easy to modify that if you have some knowledge of CSS and XHTML you can build a great custom blog to separate yourself from everyone else out in the blogosphere.

At this point I don’t consider myself to be anywhere close to a master of CSS, but I find myself learning new stuff about it all the time and one of the best resources that I have used is CSS Mastery by Andy Budd.   I highly recommend this book if you want to learn CSS, as it gives a great foundation about all concepts that relate to using CSS in your design.  I can say that it has helped me imensely in sharpening my CSS skills.  Believe it or not I am even starting to get away from using tables to layout my designs and moving to use CSS for all my layouts on my sites.  Now please don’t laugh at me for that last comment!

So do yourself a favor and go download Cutline 1.1 and get a copy of CSS Mastery.  Spend some time playing around with the CSS in Cutline 1.1 and testing out different solutions on your blog, from my experience that is the best way to learn.  If you do come across a question, stop by here and I will do my best to help you out.

Ok so it go up to 64 degrees here in Kansas City today and then a cold front hit and now its 26 degrees outside!   Nothing like a 38 degree swing in temperature in like 5 hours.  Oh well I guess it could be worse, I could live further north where it has been alot colder than it has been here in KC.

Anyway, I finished updating my blog to Cutline Version 1.1 and so far everything seems to be working great after a few minor problems.  I do have to mention that Chris Pearson added a great new feature to Cutline.    He added a custom stylesheet option for users like myself that do a lot of css changes to the original, so everytime an update is released you don’t have to worry about going through your CSS to update it.  This is an awesome feature and it will save me alot of time with some of the other modifications I plan to do in the future.

On a closing note if you don’t read Shoemoney’s Blog go check it out.  He had a hilarious post today featuring video all of the Geico caveman commercials.  I have watched them several times today and personal favorite is the CNN interview, so go check them out