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Frugal Theme Vs. Thesis Theme, Which Are Better?

UPDATE – 30 December 2010Before to read this post: Frugal theme is switched to Catalyst theme. Welcome to Catalyst.Read my full review.

catalyst-time

Some days ago, I received a Facebook message from my friend Sarie which asked me the following question:

“Hi Nicola, what is the difference between Frugal and Thesis theme? Thesis or Frugal, which is better?”

To help Sarie remove any doubt, I throught  to put down a detailed review of both themes due to compare their features.

Before to enter into the main discussion about the difference between Frugal and Thesis theme I want to tell a few things. I do not received a free copy of Frugal and Thesis. I read about their features, liked them, bought them. Currently, I’m using Frugal on my main site the3dtechnologies and Thesis on my second site cabinrentalsideas.com.

First at all, I purchased a developers license for both themes. The reason is simple…..in this way I can Install both themes in all of my websites, and use them for commercial purposes as well.

Thesis Vs Frugal WordPress Theme, Who Is The Winner?

First at all, I choosed both themes for my sites because are the two best customizable themes for WordPress I’ve ever seen.

If you visit my site cabinrentalsideas.com, the top of the page has integrated a cool Multimedia Box, which allows me to rotate pictures, embed video, or even include custom code for all those readers that want to show advertising in that area.

This features make Thesis different by other themes out there. Also you can change what appears in that area on a page by page basis if I want to. For instance, if you go on my homepage you’ll notice that my cabinrentalsideas homepage, the box includes pictures that change once you load the page, while the other single pages have an Youtube video.

Both themes allows you almost every aspect of adjustment for your fonts: type, size, weight, color, link hover color,  link color, alignment, line-height and letter-spacing, all without ever having to touch a drop of css code in the WordPress templates. Of course, there is a custom.css file that allows you to edit further if you wish although most Frugal and Thesis users will find themselves doing the majority of their customizations in the options panel.

For instance, in this image below, you can see what you could setting directly from your Frugal control panel.

frugal options

Thesis’s and Frugal are both great for creating SEO friendly pages. They allows your website to improve in SEO. In a nutshell you have:

  • SEO title tag
  • Permalink redirect
  • RSS footer
  • Robots meta
  • WordPress breadcrumbs
  • Custom query string
  • SEO slugs

Both themes present many different hooks to let the users to add custom content. Also,to monitor your site they can allows you to insert your Google Analytics tracking code… all right from the control panel.

Whatch Frugal Theme video

[HTML1]

Here, the Thesis Theme video

[HTML2]

While Frugal provides you different layout options such as: Sidebar left, sidebar right, double sidebar and no sidebar Thesis let you create different type of layout. If you want to add your logo and personalize it, they allows you to do it as well.

Also, both themes offer page templates that give you all the flexibility you need to grow with your WordPress website.

Conclusion

Tough answer and it depends on your own use. If your site is full of content, then Thesis is the right choice because is wonderfully organized. But if you want an extremely clean and simple theme and need space for advertisements Frugal is by far the best. Take a look my advertising page to show how many space you have with Frugal. Consider that these black areas in the image are only private ad space, while the other space run with buysellads. So you have a lot of space with Frugal.

You can get more information about Thesis or Frugal by clicking on those links.

Important:

Frugal team are planning to updating their theme to a new cool version, called “Catalyst”. They will give every single person who owns Frugal access to Catalyst for free.

So if you buy a copy of Frugal now you will be upgraded to Catalyst when it comes out and receive the awesome features that will come with Catalyst.



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Improved Thesis Theme For WordPress – What You Need To Know

UPDATE – 32 May 2011 – There are hundreds, perhaps thousand of free and Premium WordPress theme out there ready to be installed on a blog.

Often people are obsessed with make the right choice, including me. In my continuing quest to speed up the blog and clean up the codes I finally come across to one theme that probably many of you already have heard.

Thesis is one of best Premuim WordPress theme I have ever come across. My new blog cabinrentalsideas is now powered by the Thesis Frameworks.

Before I purchase it for my blog I certainly didn’t know what to think, and I feared that I may lose my money. Now that I’ve installed Thesis, I’m glad to have made this choice, and I tend to update it each time new features come out.

Well as you may be able to guess, Thesis is back with more upgrades. So in this post I’ll share with you what’s brand new in Thesis 1.8 and why Thesis makes WordPress way better. So you can benefit from Thesis like myself.

Note: Thesis users can download this latest upgrade for free.

Ok, let’s start now…

Quick Summary: What Is Thesis WordPress Theme?

thesis-theme

Many of the top bloggers such as Google’s Matt Cutts, search engine industry legend Danny Sullivan, web-hosting entrepreneur Scott Beale, top bloggers Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble, SEO guru Michael Gray and Microsoft search engineer Jeremiah Andrick, affiliate marketing entrepreneur Rae Hoffman, and thousand of other people use Thesis for their sites.

In my 2 years of experience with Thesis frameworks I learned more about it and I can attest that it is one of the best premium WordPress themes out there. I installed it on my second blog cabinrentalsideas.com and now I’ve a lot of features that allows me to customize any part of my blog.

Usually, first to upgrade my cabinrentalsideas theme,  I always like to wait a little while to see if any other users reports any issues.

Now the best part. You’ve probably heard about the recently new Thesis upgrade. Now there’s a completely revamped control panel and the newly added features  looks awesome and I’ve all listed below.

Thesis improved: What You Should Know About the new releases

flexibility1

Compared other themes out there, Thesis gives you the ability to customize any part of your layout and visual design. In general, you are able to:

  • Choose between 1, 2, or 3 column layouts and select the size of each column
  • Create a magazine-style layout
  • Alter font types and sizes
  • Create strong navigation menus
  • Customize colors design without code
  • Display rotating multimedia
  • Thumbnails images, and teasers
  • . . . and much much more

The following video will go into detail and will explain what the new Thesis brings to the table. Instead, I’ve listed below the main features included with the latest upgrade:

1. Header Image Uploader

seo

Thesis 1.8 has further improved its header image uploader:

Adding a unique header image is a great way to personalize your site. The problem is, simply adding a header image does not ensure proper SEO or good usability. Web ninjas know that header images should be clickable, CSS-based, and SEO-optimized, and let’s face it—this all sounds pretty technical.

2. SEO Character Counters

options_manager

This is one of the first things I’ve noticed: There is a new features that will help you choose a specific number of characters for your title and description:

Did you know that search engines will only show a specific number of characters in <title> and <meta> description fields?

No worries. Put your fingers away, because you don’t need to touch your computer screen to count characters anymore. Thesis 1.8 helps you work within these constraints by offering character counters on appropriate input fields throughout the WordPress interface.

3. New Google Fonts!

thesis_reorganized

Thesis now support the Google Font Directory, which gives you access to 28 web-fonts for free:

These fonts are web-safe—they’re served directly from Google servers, so everyone can see your fonts no matter what browser or operating system they have!

speed

Thesis 1.8 offers full support for the navigation menu builder, new features of WordPress 3.0:

One of the most awesome improvements in WordPress 3.0 is the navigation menu builder, and Thesis 1.8 offers full support for this exciting new feature. Best of all, if you choose to use the WordPress nav menu, you’ll be able to tweak its design by using Thesis’ existing nav menu design controls! Win-win!

Other Features Includes:

Favicon Uploader

Favicons are a great way to extend your site’s brand, and Thesis 1.8 contains a simple favicon uploader that you can use to add one of these babies to your site. Like the header image uploader, the favicon uploader is extremely simple—just upload your image, and Thesis handles the rest of the work for you.

Custom Loop API

The Custom Loop API allows you to target and modify the content area of every type of WordPress page and, if you’re so inclined, every page of your website.

Conclusion

Last but not least, Thesis have one of the best if not the best supportive community for wp theme. With over 21,000 webmasters and bloggers you can get a great help from Thesis Certified Designers, and a lot of your peers who simply enjoy lending a helping hand.

So, take a look at the new features and test it all out. Download Thesis Theme

Image Credit: F18E777Anke – Anart IslandBen DodsonĐạt LêAnaldelmann



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Widgets Ready Custom WordPress Theme, How To Creating A Web Page More Efficiently

When I’ve launched the3dtechnologies.com for the first time, just after three days, I started using the three columns WordPress theme called “Grid Focus Public”, with the hope to improving my brand, the users trust, and of course, my montly income stream.

The point is that as my traffic grown, and my daily work as well, I throught that my blog would have done way better if I had got the theme right that could help me to simplify my job.

Sure, nothing to say about my old theme layout, but onestly, I really was unsatisfied by the lack of the widget.

Now, for an expert is no new this term, but a newbie blogger may not know what are widgets and what is a widgets ready theme.

What Is A Custom Widgets Ready WordPress Themes

A Custom Widgets Ready WordPress Themes is a theme that lets you to customize your layout and design in a few click directly from the dashboard without any effort.

Most of free template ignore this great technology. Of course, if you want convert a custom WordPress theme to be Widgets Ready you can do it as well, however it take a lot of time and you need to have php knowledge.

In general, custom Widgets Ready WordPress themes have a post column(or body) and one sidebar. However are common WordPress themes with three columns and sometimes four columns.

For this site I’m using a custom Widgets Ready WordPress themes called “frugal“. Below, I’ve just put a sample of how robust the Frugal theme option really are.

frugal options

As you can see on the image above, Frugal theme lets you change anything of your theme, without having to get your hands on css or php files. You can set any type of color, font, weight of your column.

My Blog Section After I Moved To Frugal Theme

home_page_the3dtechnologies

For those are new at The3dtechnologies, yesterday finally I decided to move from Grid Focus Public WordPress theme to Frugal Theme. As you can see in the detailed image above, the sidebar now contain these four sections:

  • Email subscription forms – It’s very useful to grow my subscribers number and send my latest weekly email to them, plus I’ve put three cool button for feed, Twitter, and Facebook for who want to be updated with the latest post.
  • Recent post – Include the latest 5 post I wrote.
  • News - Is the work we do to aggregate and manually select the most relevant news for our readers from a group of about 50 selected news sources.
  • Ad post – In the middle between subscription forms and recent post I’ve added an ad spot to monetize my blog.

As you can see in the Email Subscription Forms basically there is an input form where the user needs to type its email address and click on “Subscribe.” He will then see the following popup window (for the sake of simplicity we will carry the analysis using the Feedburner service only).

subscription_form

In my view this method has some drawbacks. First off, of all it uses a lot of space. Precious space if we consider the monetization aspect. You have only a simple box where put your email instead of a full registration form.

On this pop-up windows the user will just need to put his email address and to pass the CAPTCHA filter by copying some letters. Once done, an email will be sent to the mail box containing a link that will be used for the activation of the subscription.

email_subscription_request

In a nutshell, the steps required for subscription:

  1. Click on the link
  2. Type email address
  3. Type CAPTCHA letters
  4. Click on “Complete Subscription Request” button
  5. Go on your email box
  6. Click on activation link

In the home page, in particular on the right sidebar I give a preview of latest news about the topic related to my site. I’m thinking to put the section “news” only in the home page while let the same section of every single page blank.

Every day I try to optimizing every post I write in order to ranking well in the Google search engine. When I’m selling affiliate products I make each single pages like landing pages. This is the reason I’m thinking to let each single pages as simple as possible.

Make Your Single Page Like A Landing Page

Compared to my old theme I’ve let each single page as clear as possible. I’ve only put a subscribers form and two adsense ads(one within the content and another in the right sidebar). I didn’t begin doing this until just a few month ago.

The reason I’ve choosed this strategy is because I consider these page like landing pages. As I said before, when I started with affiliate marketing each single page were full of stuff.

It means that they could distract the visitors from what they are really searching for, then from the content of my page, which could make me lose sales.

Sure, I do not tend to selling affiliate products every day, but when I promote something on my site I prefer leave those page simple as possible by anything doesn’t concerns the main topic of the page.

Make Money WIth The Header

Compared to my old header, I’ve left only the logo on the left header. I took this decision because on the right header I can use the blank space to add some affiliate banner or the next book I’m writing.



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