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As WordPress 3.0 was released, there are new features that allows anyone to simplify the entire blog optimization. However, many people have had to update their theme in order to be compatible with the new WordPress releases, while other probably looking for a theme that works flawlessly with WordPress 3.0. While find free WordPress 3.0 ready themes could take time, to simplify the job below I’ve listed 6 cool WordPress 3.0-ready themes for any needs. I hope you enjoy this list.
UPDATE – 16 November 2010 – Recently I’ve updated my new theme and switched from Frugal 3.3 to Frugal 3.6 right now. The reason is quite simple. The newly added features looks awesome.
Before to give you a sneak peek of the newly added, I would make a little summary of the main features for those don’t know this great premium WordPress Theme yet.
My friend Eric Hamm is the designer that created the Frugal WordPress theme that powers this blog. Frugal is a Premium WordPress theme for those like me whom likes to mess around with our theme.
I think screwing up a theme is part of blogging daily work, because it is important to optimize any aspect of layout and design in order to make ours web pages most attractive.
When it comes to getting a free theme, if on one hand you have a lot of free themes available out there, and most of them are crap, on the other hand you need to know that most of them don’t have integrated widget. Also, no free theme give you the necessary support and this is a great lack into your work as blogger or affiliate marketer.
Recently, someone asked me this question: Frugal or Thesis? What to choose? What is better?
Well, one things seem to be clear is that Frugal is different from Thesis. If you want to get the Frugal features, then Thesis is not for you. If you think that Thesis features is just what you’re looking for, most probably Frugal is not for you. If you want a well organized WordPress Theme, then Thesis is for you, but if you want a clean theme with a wide space for your advertisers, frugal is right for you.
We know people don’t want to be hung out to dry, so to help you get a full sense of what this theme is all about, here I’ve put the main features who this great provides.
Through its admin area you can change how the design looks and where information is displayed, so it is perfect for beginners and experienced designers alike. Just look at the image below to see what you can change of your font.
What I particularly like about Frugal is that it provides a minimalistic, clean design. The default design use the Georgia font for headings and Arial for body text. Text is black or dark gray, and links are a nice dark blue. There’s enough whitespace around elements that you can use to advertising.
Frugal is very customizable thanks its wide array of widgets. You can customize any aspect of your content, such as the fonts or change the colors, size, alignment, letter spacing, and so on. The image above is only a sneak peek of what this Theme can do.
Most beginners should be able to take advantage of all the above features without be a coder. Don’t worry if you are a beginner and if you don’t know how to start with Frugal, a complete and detailed documentation will help you to explain any step by step process to walk you through it.
You can go to the Frugal forums if you have other question where you will find other expert. Also, you have many videos that will show you how it works.
In general Frugal provides some features that really add the value to the theme. It will bring the design control to the next level. Here the details:
Finally, here what the new Frugal 3.6 bring into table.
The release of Frugal 3.6 is a bittersweet milestone for us at Frugal HQ. Not only is it the first time we haven’t added any features or options in a new version, but we also went so far as to completely remove the Snapshots feature we introduced in Frugal 3.3.
For most of you, Frugal has been installing and performing without any difficulty every time. Unfortunately, it’s become apparent that the Snapshots feature in Frugal was asking more of some Web Servers than they were willing to do. Those of you who had trouble in the past with permissions issues or other server-related environmental conflicts know that the benefits of the Snapshots feature were outweighed by the hassle of getting your servers to play nice with Frugal.
At the time we created it, Snapshots felt like such a great addition to the Frugal feature set that we worked it into almost all corners of Frugal, from every click of the “Save” button to our installation process to our import/export features. What we’ve learned in the few months since Frugal 3.3 is that, between the Snapshots trouble and some other rare issues, things were adding up. Lots of tiny leaks can sink a ship, and so it was that we decided to pour our efforts for Frugal 3.6 into patching all the little annoyances we could find.
The bright side of all of this is that it marks the first step towards amazing things in store for the future of Frugal! Our goal for Frugal 3.6 was to make Frugal as easy to install and operate as possible, regardless of what Web Hosting Company you choose to host your sites on. In the days and weeks following this release, we will be watching closely for any other details to fine-tune before we move on to the fun stuff.
The following video will go into Frugal detail, but for any frugal theme documentation I will reccomend to visit their site too.
Frugal come with a premium version that goes from $79 for a single user license, while the developer license goes up to $199.
Is Frugal a good theme for beginners? Yes, I can attest it, because I’m using it on my website The3dtechnologies.com and natural-supplements-tips.com as well.
Frugal is clean, fast and easy to use wp theme. You no need to know a lot of things to use it. It has a lot of positive stuff, so I can only recommend to use it and stand behind that recommendation.
UPDATE – 30 December 2010 - Before to read this post: Frugal theme is switched to Catalyst theme. Welcome to Catalyst.Read my full review.
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.
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.
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:
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
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Here, the Thesis Theme video
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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).
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.
In a nutshell, the steps required for subscription:
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.
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.
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.
As Affiliate marketers, I’ve tried several of free website templates a while back, but recently I’ve decided to buy a premium WordPress theme that support more widget and allows me to simplify time and works.
Of course, free web site templates is all ok, I’d admit that some are really well made, but most of them are not adapt to working with affiliate marketing, at least not for me. They are not flexible as they should be, and do not allows you to modifying layout parts or change existing parts in several ways.
For example, you can not do any of the following: change background colors, the type of font and so on, in a few click as a professional theme does. Also, they do not offer any type of support. Free is great, but have its limitations.
Image Credit: Valentinian
However, to getting a professional web templates, the beautiful designs is not everything. This is a minor concern. There are other factors that you are need to consider and that affect your website success, such as, search engine optimization, readability, and functionality.
Theme should reflect your topic and idee that you want share to your readers. So, if you are still confused, about the professional theme you should use, you need to consider some points, first:
A professional website template haven’t too many colors, but the colors are arranged to differentiate the importance of your website content.
On the other hand, the colors of the images inside your website should match the topic of your website. For instance, if you talk about money, the prevalent colors could be the green, while if your topic is about cabin rentals you could choose the brown as main color.
As many of you know, for my two sites, cabinrentalsideas.com, and nickdeiana.com, I make use of two WordPress themes, respectively thesis theme and Arthemia. One of the main reasons I use these professional templates is why they allows me to change my layout look, change background colors, sidebar colors and so on, with a few click directly from my WordPress dashboard, and without too css or php knowledges.
Another important point that a professional web template take in consideration is the search engine optimization. Many of professional theme allows you to make your search page seo-friendly. In a few step you are able to add from your dashboard, meta tag keyword, meta-tag description and so on, in a simple and fast way.
Remember, web visitors will run away from your website if your website has lesser chances to appear in search engine results because the web pages aren’t optimized.
Last but not least, a website template must be simple as possible. Choose simplicity over complexity. Your web visitors should be able to identify the topics of your website theme quickly and then easily find what he is looking for at the second. Also, more simple your site is, more webpages will load, quickly. In these case, I highly reccomend you to use Frugal theme.
UPDATE – 29 June 2011 – When I started blogging I realized rather quickly that I had been terribly short sighted on the importance of SEO.
If you don’t know it yet, behind most successful websites out there are a SEO friendly WordPress themes. The reason is quite simple, those who want to increase their site traffic, a SEO friendly themes semplify the way to make things.
However, before to pick one of these ready wordpress theme for your blog, you need to take some important decision. If you do not realize your goals for your blog, you can not make the right choice. For instance, imagine you are owner of a real estate company and you would to highlight your business by creating a professional niche site.
If you don’t have a web page design built for that specific purpose, better, if you don’t get a professional theme that allows you to attract new visitors will become very hard to turn potential customers into sales and make money from it. Well, here is where the Thesis Theme for WordPress comes into play.
I have to admit, I was really impressed when I first seen this theme. So, a month ago I planned on fully optimizing one of my blog themes, cleaning up the code and adding in the final needed plugins to make them as search engine friendly as possible. The blog where I installed Thesis theme is my new site cabinrentalsideas.com as you can see.
When I started researching it a little more about Thesis, I thought…….. Why bloggers and affiliate marketing entrepreneur such as Danny Sullivan, Google’s Matt Cutts, Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, all use Thesis for their sites?
Also, why would over 5,000 other bloggers and webmasters purchase the same WordPress theme? it’s very strange.
Well, the answer is simple. The answer is: Thesis isn’t really just a WordPress theme. It’s actually an SEO-optimized code framework with tons of design flexibility.
For those are novice when it comes to CSS or don’t know how to manipulating sections and columns of a default theme, Thesis give you all necessary to do it directly from your dashboard. With Thesis is never be so easy to set up a niche site in a fast and simple way.
But don’t just take my word for it. Watch this video created by Lisa
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Never have I saw a theme that is so easy to customize. Usually, by using a free theme you need to touch the source code if you want to make some change at header, sidebar, and so on. With Thesis you have the flexibility that you desire. You are able to set up every options from your admin page.
You can move elements around the page (sidebars, etc.) without getting into the code. Thesis allows you to upload, resize and crop your header image once you have choice it. Also, the new “Design Options” panel allows you to customize fonts and font sizes all across the theme.
The best thing is that, once you join the Thesis community, you get every upgrade at no extra charge. If you want have an ideas of its options look below.
Thesis is a low cost solution if you want a professional WordPress theme created by a professional designer. It’s available with two license options. The personal license is $87 and the developer’s license is $164. The main difference is that the second license allows you unlimited use of the theme across as many sites as you like. For that price you have an high quality WordPress theme with support from the designer.
With so many design options and support, well worth the price. If you are starting your new site, I reccomend you to try it.
UPDATE – 3 January 2011 - I felt compelled to discuss this article because I’m seeing many affiliate marketers do the same big mistakes when they build their first blog. Now you’re probably wondering what this mistake is. The answer is simple. The answer is: They use a bad web site template.
Often people ask me for recommendations about what to choose as template for their blog. In my long blogging journey(4 years right now), I’ve tried a lot of free templates, especially when I was a newbie blogger, and I must admit some of that were good templates. However, I realized immediately that something’s missing with a free templates. They doesn’t had widget, and most important the support, which in my view is the most important factor to consider if you want get serious in creating a killer theme for your blog.
As my esperience with affiliate marketing is grown, I had needed of a new template that could simplify my workday.
If you want to make money from a blog, you need to customize layout and design, often and quickly, and without using professional web templates become very hard to do if you don’t have technical knowledge of PHP and CSS.
Often, I’ve noticed, there are a lot of bloggers that try to make money online with their blog by using a bad template, maybe even outdated. For instance, with my first WordPress theme, I need to change the PHP code each time I want to customize the layout for my website, change the background colors, font, and so on. Whenever, the entire process taking me a lot of time and effort before to complete it.
Recently, I’ve tweet a question about which are the most complete WordPress theme for affiliate marketers. Well, I’ve received a few direct messages on TwitterDeck where some people have answered they were using Thesis Theme.
It’s not the first time I talk about it. This is a very powerful theme for WordPress blog that has been developed by Chris Pearson. I can attest this because I use it on my latest site cabinrentalsideas.com as you can see.
If you don’t have enough PHP and CSS knowledge, this theme can give you a great hand to help you to create and manage a professional blog without effort. You can customize your blog design, and definitely does optimize it for search engines and give you a lot more features to your blog rather than the default WordPress theme.
Before you go spending you money you need know what is better for your business, right? First and foremost, Thesis theme has three main positive aspects:
Simple to Use – Thesis is quite intuitive, and is easy to use and I’m sure Chris will continue to add new features and ways to use the theme.
Design – Looks very clean.
SEO – Thesis allows you to optimize any blog post in order to rank well in Google.
It has had a lot of reviews around the blogosphere and it is no wonder – because it’s full of great features such as:
With Thesis theme you are able to have a great control through two control panel menus. Also, has a free support forum, that compared to others premium theme support is very active, and queries are very quick. 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.
It’s easily customizable. Chris has create a theme that has rich options(image below), such as support for custom CSS, can have different backgrounds and much more.
Here, a sum of the main features:
Though it may have seemed like a long post, it’s just the tip of the iceberg on functionality that you have acess to through Thesis.
Thesis Theme has a lot more options and features to justify the non-free price, $87 for the basic version and $164 for Multi-use Package. Thesis is very professional theme with great admin panels. For common sites is a great choices.
