WPDesigner

I’ve been having fun and ripping blogs some “new-ones” for the most part of my review series, for free. Before, I didn’t want to do sponsored reviews because it didn’t feel right. However, why shouldn’t I review relevant sites that I’m going to review anyway and get paid for it? Recently, a friend and fellow WordPress designer, Adii, ordered a sponsored review and I decided to accept it so here goes the review for this blog.

If you haven’t noticed, Adii (in motion) also does banner advertising on Wpdesigner. He must really love my blog. But, that’s not going to stop me from ripping him a new one.

First of all, who is Adii?
Adii is a freelance WordPress designer from Cape Town, South Africa. You can browse his portfolio here. For the most part, his style is bold and colorful. Whoever said web design is subjective surely haven’t said it to Adii. However, that doesn’t seem to be raising eyebrows at all as his clients are keeping him busy. He must be doing some thing right, price, service, and support-wise.

Design-wise
Adii.co.za sports a clean, grid-based, three column blog design. But Adii, you know I despise wide columns with a small font size, in which you could fit eighteen words in one line. Here’s your weekend to-do list to improve your blog’s design:

• Cut the average number of words per line down to fourteen or twelve.
• Don’t justify the main content text because that makes it hard for readers to keep track of which line they’re reading.
• Change the “Want to hire me?” text color to light blue.
• Play with the search form at the upper right hand corner because it’s not easy to spot that it’s a search form right now.

Content-wise
To date, the most successful series on his blog has been the Mini Interview series. Can you guess whom he first interviewed? It was yours truly, the potato behind Wpdesigner.com. I’m guessing I had something to do with motivating him to continue his interview series after sending him some traffic love for the interview effort.

Besides the fact that the mini-interviews are helping Adii’s blog grow traffic-wise, it sure doesn’t suck to be able to get in touch with admirable designers and developers like Veerle Pieters, Jonathan Snook, Roger Johannson, and many more.

Not to mention, Adii worked up the courage and patience (that I dumbfounded-ly didn’t have) to ask for interviews from guys like Seth Godin and Matt Mullenweg.

Below are some of my favorite interviews.

• Listen up if you want to freelance too…
• Wanna roll around in this Sandbox?
• Nate Whitehill on online business and blogging

With the mini-interviews aside, Adii also write about marketing, WordPress, and web design, but surprisingly he requested for this review to focus on the mini-interviews, which I have no idea why because I think his other series and articles are far better than the mini-interviews simply because his interview questions suck . Especially for WordPress related interviews, there aren’t much room for unique answers and the readers are left wanting more details. Details that Adii’s questions often failed to cover.

Personally, I think WordPress is his strongest topic and he should focus on that to further establish himself as one of the leaders in WordPress design and development. For example, it would be nice to see Adii continue his recent flood of commentary on what Brian and I are working on, regarding premium themes.

“Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research.”

Not everyone is able to make the switch to pink. Fortunately, there are generous theme authors out there providing pink WordPress themes specifically for Pink for October (P4O). (more…)

Wpdesigner and many other blogs wrote about how TemplatesBrowser.com re-packaged many authors’ themes with spam links, more than a month ago.

Right now, TemplatesBrowser.com is down, but another site has taken its place. The new WordPress theme spammer site is WordPress-Designer.com.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Themes that are up for downloads on WordPress-Designer.com have been re-packaged with a spam link to promote a blog about forex trading.

As you can see, even one of my themes, Digg 3 Column, is on that site. And of course, I DON’T support what they’re doing.

For this weekend, narrow down the number of categories that you use on your blog, unless it’s a general blog that covers a wide range of topics.

How does deleting categories benefit you? Plain and simple, your blog needs to stick to its niche, focused on its main topic(s), so your list of categories need to reflect that. A short list of categories makes it easier for wandering visitors to determine what your blog is about, just like the title, blog description, main navigation links, and etc.

Regardless of what it’s about, your blog needs to look the part, say the part, and most importantly be the part. Every little thing reinforces the fact that your blog is bout a certain niche. The more you make it clear that your blog is about a certain niche, the more likely visitors will come back for it.

While narrowing down my own set of categories, it was clear to me that I was wandering away from what my blog is about, WordPress themes. Instead of ignoring miscellaneous categories with few posts that didn’t have much to do with WordPress or WordPress themes, I moved the posts under those categories to the Uncategorized category and deleted the now empty miscellaneous categories.

Another benefit from shortening your category list is spotting your strengths. For some blogs, it’s easy to see what their strengths are. For example, you can clearly tell that Wpdesigner’s strengths are WordPress Themes and Tutorials. For some other blogs, it isn’t so easy to determine. Deleting miscellaneous categories will help you determine your strengths.

So, go through your blog to determine whether you need to re-focus and get back on track. If you can, delete miscellaneous categories.

Have a great weekend!

With the exception of working for small business blogs, there aren’t many options for WordPress designers out there. Mainly, it’s because WordPress designers are cursed by a paradox. Non-small-business clients actually expect to pay less for a design just because it’s a WordPress theme. So, what else is there for WordPress designers?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve given up freelancing for a long time. It’s no longer fun or worth while. I’m aiming for higher than what freelancing can pay me on average. Yes, I’m aware there are $10,000 projects out there, but the point is I would be working for someone else. Once the project is finished, I get the money and nothing more.

If you’re one of my loyal readers, you know I’ve been dying to open up my own WordPress theme store, especially after what I experienced first hand from the success of the Showcase theme. Ideally, I want to duplicate that success over and over again with less effort, and without the word freelance.

But at this point, after some research (more…)

Wpdesigner needs your vote to compile a list of the best WordPress themes of 2007. Instead of another top WordPress themes list, personally picked by one person, here’s your chance to contribute and correct where previous lists have been wrong.

To nominate a theme, write a comment based on the following format:

• Name of Theme
• Download page / address
• Author’s home page (optional)

Nomination period closes at 3:00 PM (PST) Sunday, September 23, 2007. Please double check nominated themes before posting yours.

Welcome to another edition of Wpdesigner Weekend Must Do (WWMD). For this weekend, you must reduce your blog’s bounce rate.

Let’s say you’ve paid $100 to get 400 new visitors to your blog and 200 of them left without doing anything. How do you feel about that? Even if you’re getting free traffic, you should be worrying about reducing your bounce rate. You could be losing those visitors forever. (more…)

This is the official release of the Showcase theme that I’ve been working on for the past several days.

Showcase is a premium (paid) WordPress theme created to power a CSS or web design gallery, which is also ideal for managing online portfolios and photo blogs. If you want to use WordPress as a web design gallery, Showcase is the solution you’ve been looking for. Beyond its core features, it comes with 5 different color schemes and 8 layout variations. (more…)

Last week, I started a new series on this blog called, Wpdesigner Weekend Must Do (WWMD) to help you improve your blog one weekend at a time. If you were here for last week’s WWMD then you should have uninstalled unnecessary plugins that you didn’t need, to speed up your blog’s loading time and decrease server load.

For this week’s WWMD, it’s very simple. Get me to review your blog. It’s free! And, getting someone, other than yourself, to review your blog is probably the best thing you can do to improve it. Go to the Wpdesigner forums; register for an account; wait for the email to activate your account; login and start a new topic under “Ask Small Potato” Reviews to make your review request.

If you have specific questions, be sure to include them. It’s best to go beyond making a general review request.

From design and speed, to SEO (search engine optimization) and making more room for your blog’s most popular content, I’ll give you the full break-down of your blog. Note: You should make review requests for blogs using unique themes only. I will not review blogs using free WordPress themes.

It’s first come first servered so don’t wait. Take advantage of this free review service!

Also as known as Pop-up Menu Layer, HoverExtended, or Tooltip Links, a hover menu is simply a list of links that appears when you move your mouse over a certain part of a web page. Why does it have many different names? Because there are different ways to create a hover menu, the name depends on the technique.

Here are some examples: 1, 2, 3.

Regardless of how many different ways you can approach the hover menu to create it, it isn’t easy. In the beginning, you’ll find yourself trying to recreate the hover effect using pure CSS. However, you can always trust Internet Explorer to mess up, which it will. (more…)

For the past three days, I’ve been working (hard) on a new WordPress theme, one that could power a CSS or web design gallery site. I’m very happy to say that it’s almost here and can’t wait to release it. However, there are some minor stuff here and there to clean up. Additionally, I have to write some guidelines to show you how to full take advantage of all the features of this theme. Therefore, I can’t actually release it today.

But, that doesn’t mean you can’t take a sneak peak. The following screenshots are from a live demo that I’ve installed on my computer. I can’t import the locally installed demo online yet because, like I mentioned, I still need to clean up some stuff here and there.

Here are the screenshots: (more…)

No, WWMD doesn’t stand for Wimpy Weapons of Mass Destruction. It stands for Wpdesigner Weekend Must Do. WWMD is a new series of posts that I’m starting on this blog to help you improve your own blog, one weekend at a time.

Your first Wpdesigner-Weekend-Must-Do task is to review your installed plugins and uninstall the unnecessary ones to improve your blog’s performance.

For this blog, I’ve uninstalled the WP Download Monitor plugin, which I used to track how many times my themes and other files have been downloaded. Why did I uninstalled such a useful plugin? I didn’t need it and it was putting stress on my server, simple as that.

If you want a more complicated explanation, here it is; the WP Download Monitor plugin was making too many queries to the database. The more queries your blog makes, the more stress your server (web host) has to endure. In extreme cases like surviving a Digg-effect or a huge sudden increase in traffic, your host could shut down your blog for putting too much stress on the server, even if you haven’t used up the storage and bandwidth resources. (more…)