FreshPress Themes

FreshPressThemes turns 1 month today and it’s been quite a ride. We launched on the 4th of April with our signature FreshPress theme and the response has been next to phenomenal.

With over 900 downloads of just that theme and a hundred or so off my other WordPress themes this month has been pretty good. We’ve been linked too by hundreds of sites, each of which I thank profusely for taking the time to write about my work, I also see my themes in use by quite some bloggers. Some of which have even customized them to their liking.

I also would like to thank those that donated money too have the footer link removed, rather than some who just decided to remove it without doing so. Ah well…

The best part was when I happened to glance at my Search Status plugin chart for the blog a few days back and was AMAZED to see that we’ve been listed in DMOZ in under one month of being live. Which is nothing short of amazing to me.

So here’s to another month of knock out WordPress themes and more…

What more can I say except that the Title Says It All.

OK, so this theme is all about giving importance to the one thing that either makes or breaks your post, Your Title. A lot of bloggers, me included, cannot stress enough how important a good title is for your posts. I tend to spend at least 10 - 15 minutes thinking up one, by the time I’m done with my post I’ve probably revised it like 3 or 4 times. If not more.

So yeah, Titles Are Important! (more…)

Justin Tadlock, who’s work I admire, posted over on his blog about something that I’ve been thinking about myself for quite some time.

Killing the Sidebar.

WordPress enables us to widgetize virtually any area of our blog, so why exactly do you want to call a widgetized footer as a “Footer Sidebar” or similarly if it was in the header section as a “Header Sidebar”?

The only thing limiting many theme developers from using widgets in a whole new fashion is probably the methodology to implement them. Naming sidebars is probably the best option to do so, but in some of my trials I’ve noticed that if you are using a theme with “named” widget areas, for example - “footer widget”, “header widget” and so on, and if you revert back to a theme, or upgrade to a new one, that doesn’t use a naming architecture  then chances are you will have a lot of changes to make to your blog.

Justin has some code that takes a try in helping out with the process, I’ll give it a shot in one of my themes and see how it shapes up.

WOW! I’m just amazed that FreshPressThemes has taken off so well within the first three weeks of it’s launch! I’ve never had such a response to any of my other startups/websites in the past.

I just wanted to make a quick post to thank all those who have linked back, downloaded themes, and especially those that have donated for the themes they’ve downloaded.

Trust me, there’s a lot more still to come. I’ve only just begun. I’ve also lined up some tutorials that will help WordPress developers and anyone else looking at customizing their themes themselves.

Right, back to designing more themes…