Theme information
- Author: Justin Shattuck
- Description: A two to three columns, blue and pink theme.
Author’s Note
The new theme is titled, “salmon,†because of its pink and blue color tones. I have decided to leave most of the original design style in tact. Upon uploading and activating the theme, you will need to modify sidebar.php and place your Flickr ID as well as modify header.php to include the links to your various pages within the navigation.
Theme Comments by Small Potato
Salmon is based on JustinShattuck.com’s current blog design. Recently, there have been several JustShattuck.com-inspired themes released. I’m featuring Salmon because it’s the best looking version and it’s coming straight from JustinShattuck.com.
Needless to say, I like this theme. It’s clean, spacious, and has a nice color scheme. My favorite design feature of Salmon is its search form. Call me weird, but the search form is my favorite!
Code-wise, Salmon needs a bit of work. For starter, the header has three differently links, linking back to the home page; that’s too many links pointing to the same page.
Second, the Page template isn’t styled properly; font size on the Page template is 12px instead of the home-page 11px. Also, the Page template doesn’t call for the comments form.
Third, the Comments Template function is used within an if-else statement in the index.php file to display the comments form only on Single pages. However, the single.php file or template already uses the Comments Template function. Therefore, there’s no need to place the Comments Template function within an if-else statement in the index.php.
Fourth, the middle sidebar needs the Recent Comments plugin to display properly.
Theme information
Theme Comments by Small Potato
Bosco is a solid theme from an experienced WordPress theme developer, Michael Pollock (solostream.com). But, there’s always room for improvement.
In the next version of Bosco, I’d like to see the Digg link, in the postmetadata area, attach the the post permalink. Currently, the Digg link points to digg.com/submit.
Also, the Page template doesn’t use the comments template. I think readers should be able to comment on every page, by default. Adding the comments template to the page.php is a plus.
One last thing, the highlighted post dates are a bit distracting. I’d prefer a light or dark gray background color for post date, instead of a black background.
Finally, a new version of Wpdesigner.com will launch next week. Below is a photo of the home-page wireframe / layout (for you nosy people).
Recently, Wpdesigner.com had a facelift. It doesn’t make sense to redesign again, unless Wpdesigner will go through some big changes. This is not simply a redesign.
If you want to know what changes and additions are upcoming, read the news and updates.
Theme information
- Author: Julien De Luca
- Description: A two-column, translatable, widget-ready theme.
- License: GPL
Theme Comments by Small Potato
Julien took it a step further with the Freshy’s theme option page to allow you to customize the color scheme and banner. Most theme option pages that I’ve seen simply allow you to turn on extra features, not customize them.
I would be happy using Freshy right out of the box, without configuration or any modification. However, internally, Freshy could use some more testing, not by users, but by theme developers.
Freshy is missing the Archives (archive.php) and Page (page.php) templates. Also, the Comments Template function doesn’t need to be in the index.php file, since Freshy does use the single.php file.
Other than that, I would remove the individual category RSS icons, unless Freshy had a wider sidebar. In my opinion, the category RSS icons clutter the sidebar.
Theme information
- Author: Eston Bond
- Description: A two to three columns hybrid theme, not widget-ready.
- License: Creative Commons Attribution
Theme Comments by Small Potato
Why this awesome, stylish, magazine-like theme isn’t widget-ready is beyond me. Also, I almost skipped over Gridlock because it doesn’t look right, out of the box. It’s side-by-side, magazine like display format for the entries doesn’t work by default. You need to configure your blog (via Gridlock’s theme option page) to work with Gridlock.
I think the next step for this theme should be making the entries display side-by-side, without configuration.
Drawbacks aside, I like Gridlock because it doesn’t look like a blog, also because an HTML help page (sort of like a theme guide) is included with Gridlock’s download file, which is very rare because most WordPress theme developers don’t put in the extra time to create a guide for their themes (including me).
Theme information
- Author: Dean Robinson
- Description: A two to three columns hybrid, widget-ready theme, with multiple plugins support, asides, and sidebar modules.
- License: Creative Commons Attribution
Theme Comments by Small Potato
You’ve probably seen this theme on many top WordPress themes list before. It certainly doesn’t need any more exposure. However, it deserves a feature on this blog.
First, you should know it’s not a K2 skin. Reodable is a complete theme, independent of K2. Second, I don’t know how long it took Dean to create Redoable, but a theme like this would take me some serious patience to develop. Third, if you know me, you know I like dark, red themes.
If I weren’t so picky about having a unique look for Wpdesigner, I would use Redoable for Wpdesigner.com.
Theme information
- Author: iLEMONed and Bartelme Design
- Description: A four to three columns hybrid (seven all together) theme with fluid width and plugin support for WP-PageNavi, flickrRSS, Gravatar, and Ultimate Tag Warrior.
- License: GPL
Theme Comments by Small Potato
Dark is functional, flexible, well-designed, but still generic enough for you to customize and also comes with plugin support. The only drawback is it’s not widget-ready.
The recent releases of high quality themes like Dark and iTheme are refreshing. Together, Dark and iTheme are a sign of high quality themes on the rise. They also prove what I’ve been saying, “…one great theme is better than ten average themes.”
Well, at least, one great theme will get you ten times, if not twenty times, the reward of an average theme. If you’re a WordPress designer, regardless of what the intention behind your contribution to the community is, producing high quality themes should be your main focus.
A reward of a theme like Dark or iTheme is undoubtedly much greater than the $40-$60 that you get for running sponsored links on an average theme.
Wpdesigner is taking part in the “Orange and Maroon Effect” on April 20, 2007, to answer BuzzDroid.com’s challenge.
In the previous post, I started a new review series by first reviewing Problogger.net. I wasn’t reviewing the blog as a whole. I focused on design and performance.
The whole post pointed out design and performance flaws that Darren can fix for Problogger; flaws that you can fix for your own blog. I didn’t mean to disrespect Problogger; it’s a great blog.
And I admit, Wpdesigner.com has its own flaws; no blog is perfect. I’m just too lazy to fix them. Also, unlike what Shawn suggested, I’m not afraid that you’ll expose Wpdesigner’s flaws, like I’ve done with Problogger. In fact, I encourage you to review Wpdesigner.
Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net is first on the chopping block for the new Wpdesigner review series, which intend to help you spot drawbacks and areas to improve on your own blog.
Speed
According to WebsiteOptimization, Problogger.net takes 92 seconds to load for 56k users. Despite more and more users making the switch to broadband connection, it’s important to cater to 56k users, regardless of your target audience.
To decrease loading time, Darren could:
- Make MyBlogLog avatars smaller or lessen how many avatars to display. I’m sure a lot of blogs have had problems with My Blog Log (take NetBusinessBlog for example).
- Limit the size of sponsored banners. One of the button banners (125 x 125) on Problogger is 54kb. The rest of the button banners are between 8kb and 15kb.
- Decrease the size of in-content photos and images. Darren’s photo with Guy Kawasaki and Jeremy Shoemaker is 159kb. Open that photo in Photoshop, select Save for Web, then adjust the options for optimum size and quality.
Despite the fact that some users don’t actually come to Problogger for content (RSS subscribers), Problogger does get well over 100,000 unique visitors per month. For sure, a portion of that number are 56k users.
Cross Browser Issue
Unlike Wpdesigner, Problogger.net doesn’t look the same in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. (Don’t burn me for not testing with other browsers. I don’t have time for it. Thanks.)
Here’s Problogger in Firefox:
Here’s Problogger in Internet Explorer 6.0:
Colors
Other than the main content, which is black text on white background, Problogger is hard to read. Also, the main link color, orange, isn’t dark enough.
- The three blocks, at the top, to highlight top content on Problogger are hardest to read. It’s great that Darren highlights the most popular content on his blog so they don’t get lost in the archives. And yes, your eyes should gravitate toward the latest content (below those three blocks). However, that shouldn’t be an excuse for using white on gray, gray on gray, and white on orange color schemes.
- The sidebar doesn’t have enough contrast and contains mainly links. If that’s the case, why not make those links darker?
Missing and Broken Features
- Problogger’s individual post pages are missing the next and previous links. That’s probably because of the WP-Pagenavi plugin that Darren uses to generate the pagination-by-number on the front page.
The WP-Pagenavi plugin doesn’t work with single post pages. Darren needs to revert to using the previous_post_link() and next_post_link() functions for the single.php file.
- Also on individual post pages, the text-area for the comment form is too wide. In Firefox, that’s not a big problem. But in Internet Explorer, here’s how Problogger comment form looks:
Where is the box where you type in the comment? It’s at the bottom of the page. That’s what happens in Internet Explorer if your text-area or comment box is too wide.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Although the Problogger theme follows WordPress’s structure, which is pretty good, SEO-wise, Problogger isn’t optimized for search engines (specifically Google).
Theme information
- Author: NDesign Studio
- Description: A two-column, widget-ready theme with re-arrangeable sidebar boxes, for Mac lovers.
- License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
- Requirement(s): This theme requires a link back in the footer.
Note
I did not create this theme. If you would like to feature your theme on this blog, please sign up for an account, then contact me for permission to post.
Thanks to Jenny of PJMommy.com for bringing this to my attention.
Someone took my Dream On theme, stripped the footer message, and replaced it with a sponsored link to a web-hosting review website.
Here’s the stolen version:
Here are the stolen version’s theme page on the WordPress Theme Viewer and test-run link.
It’s been only seven days after my GPL announcement. Not all Wpdesigner themes have been re-released under GPL yet and someone already stole one of my themes. This is the kind of thing GPL theme designers have to deal with.
On one hand, I should go after this person to tell everyone it’s not okay to do such a thing. On the other hand, the theme viewer’s manager already has enough trouble on his hands. Bothering him about this on a case to case basis isn’t going to help.
Like I’ve been saying, the theme viewer needs to change into a manually filtered database and it needs a moderation area to review new themes before publishing.
I’m not writing this post to say, “FOUL!” This is simply for exposing the people manipulating the theme viewer, their techniques, and loop-holes.
