Win An Elegant Themes Membership!

Win An Elegant Themes Membership

UPDATE: Donna Fontenot is the lucky winner of a Developer account at Elegant Themes!

Looking for a fancy new theme for your WordPress site? Today might be your lucky day. Elegant Themes has been kind enough to let me give away some developer memberships. I have 3 to give away in total and I plan on doing multiple contests. This is part one in which I will give away 1 of the 3 memberships. So if you don’t win this one, you’ll have more chances in the future. Read on for the details.

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How Do Themes & Plugins Help With SEO?

How Do WordPress Themes & Plugins Help With SEO?

I recently wrote about the need for the website owner to take responsibility for  SEO and not rely 100% on a theme or a plugin. Themes and plugins do of course have some benefits if you understand what it is they do, and what they cannot do.

The benefit of themes and plugins

‘SEO-friendly’ themes and SEO plugins present your content in such a way that it is easy for search engines to understand, determine the relevancy of, and navigate. So if you’ve targeted your content for specific keywords, the search engine will have no doubt what that piece of content is all about. The content and keyword research is up to you. No theme or plugin alone can make your site rank highly if your content is not valuable and targeted. Also, this all relates to on-site SEO, but ranking is also determined by off-site factors such as incoming links from other websites. Themes and plugins cannot help you with these off-site factors.

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Simple WordPress Theme Tweaks – Online Webinar

We’re going to get intimate with your WordPress theme in the next webinar!

Simple WordPress Theme Tweaks
September 29th, 6pm – 7pm PST

to be rescheduled….

cost: $15 (hint, for discounts on future webinars, enter your email at the bottom of this page)

Ever clicked on the “Editor” menu and had the living daylights scared out of you by all that code?! Maybe you’ve come across a plugin that wanted you to insert some code into your theme and you were afraid you’d break your site?

Want to feel more in control of your WordPress theme files?

This is the webinar for you!

We’ll look under the hood of a WordPress theme and learn how to do some simple code manipulation. This will NOT turn you into a programmer!

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WordPress 3.0 New Features – ‘Twenty Ten’ New Default Theme

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” has now been officially released (as you may have noticed from the upgrade prompt at the top of your WP dashboard).

I’ll be doing a couple of posts about the new features – in this one I’ll be discussing the brand new default theme that you’ll find if you upgrade.

New Default Theme – Twenty Ten

WordPress - Twenty Ten Theme thumbnailTwenty Ten is the new default theme and it’s infinitely better than tired ole’ Kubrick. Twenty Ten serves as a demonstration of many of the new WP 3.0 features, making it much more functional and customizable right out of the box, but also making it a great framework on which to build child themes. Some of the new WordPress features aren’t obvious to the non-developer because they require adding some code in order to activate the features – Twenty Ten makes many of them visible to the ordinary user and provides a nice guideline for theme developers to understand and expand upon what’s now possible.  See the theme in action.

Here are some of the main new features that Twenty Ten demonstrates:

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How To Choose A WordPress Theme – Design & Functionality Considerations

This post follows on from – How To Choose A WordPress Theme -Free, Premium or Custom

When choosing a theme you must consider design, layout and functionality.
When considering these, keep in mind the general type of theme you are looking for (see previous post). If you are looking for a free theme,  you need to find something as close to what you want as possible (or be savvy enough to tweak it yourself). If you are looking at Premium themes,  you may have some flexibility on colors and admin options. The closer your theme is to what you want to begin with, the less tinkering you will have to do. Determining what options the theme gives you will be important.

Remember as you are looking at themes that colors and fonts are easier to change (with a little CSS) than things like sidebar placement, and changing the layout/ structure, unless you’re comfortable with PHP.

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How To Choose A WordPress Theme – Free, Paid or Custom?

One of the biggest sources of frustrations I hear from clients when using WordPress is choosing a theme that looks good and does what they want it to do.  The next couple of posts will attempt to provide some guidelines to help make this process easier.

Selecting a theme is about more than the way it looks. Functionality and the ability to control options from your WordPress dashboard can be just as important. Many people choose a theme on looks alone and then become frustrated because it doesn’t work the way they want it to.

Generally speaking, there’s 3 types of themes available – free, premium and custom-built. To help decide which category you might be in note down your answers to the following questions:

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