dznrokrthemes.com

Check out the new website for theme downloads. I’ll be posting all kinds of themes there for Wordpress, Coppermine, and Zenphoto, varying from free to premium. Right now there’s two brand new themes up, WP-Celebrity and DZNROKRZen. I’ve also got four premium themes in different stages of development. You can subscribe to the feed to always get the latest themes from DZNROKR.

Don’t kill me, but I’m still not open for orders - I’ve been getting orders even though I haven’t been open. The Availability space above these posts should help prevent that. I know that I didn’t really have a clear place for whether or not I was accepting so hopefully this will help.

The Theme Shop is still not open, I wanted to release the new design and the shop at the same time but unfortunately that didn’t work out. Very soon though!

I’ve also set up a support forum. It’s pretty bare right now, but I’ll be working on it over the next few weeks. If you have any questions or need any help regarding my themes, webdesign (html/css), or Wordpress or Coppermine in general I’d be glad to help. Sign up and start posting away!

I’ve got two clients I’m working with right now, but after I finish up their orders I WILL re-open orders. Thanks so much for your patience.

I’ve also got a theme sub-site I’m working on. It’s going to include free themes, exclusive themes, and premium themes. What’s the difference? Free is obvious, but those themes will only be base themes for you to design around. Premium themes will be DZNROKR-style designs, fully implemented into Wordpress - not just the basic stuff.  Exclusive themes will only be sold once, they are for the most part finished designs that I’ve never implemented before (some may even include domains!). Free and Premium designs will be available immediately (after purchase for Premium), Exclusive themes will have to be coded so there will be a week or so turn-around time for those. The benefit of Exclusive is you are basically getting a deal on a semi-custom theme, I won’t be allowing a ton of changes, but I will update your site name, navigation, photos, and things like that. Any questions or concerns please let me know, I’d love for this theme system to work for everybody.

I’m also hoping the theme system will alleviate some load for me. I’ve been super busy for months, and while I love it, I hate having to turn so many of you away because I’m so backlogged. So I hope that this will make the difference.

I’ve still got some things to do, and I’d like to have a nice selection of themes before I launch, but I wanted to give the heads up.

Top Ten Web Typography Sins

This article gives ten examples of bad type usuage such as too much emphasis, fudged copyright symbols, and the terrifying all-capital-letter trend (To which, quit it. Please? Are you seriously yelling at your visitors the second they come to your site? Bad!).

I’m still super busy. Last week my brain decided that it was sick of designing and I ran into a terrible layout block. Thankfully that seems to have passed finally, but I’m dealing with a terrible sinus infection that litterally has me rocking back and forth on the floor in pain at times. That’s no exageration, I wish it were. Thankfully, that too seems to be getting better today.

I’ll open orders back up soon. Promise!

Thanks also for all the downloads of the free theme! I’ve been checking my referrals and I’ve seen alot of really cool modifications. Here’s a couple of sites that really stand out. Both based on WP-Fansite:

• Isla Fisher Online
• EveTorres.net

Awesome!

Hopefully soon I’ll be able to get back into WP Wednesdays, my apologies for introducing that and then abandoning it. I promise it won’t be forgotten for long.

→ View Theme Demo

→ Download the Theme

» 527 downloads so far.

Installation & Usage

• Open header.php and edit your navigation into the list.
• This theme is widget-ready! Drop items into your sidebar, or edit sidebar.php for manual editing.
• Upload the WP-Fansite folder to your /wp-content/themes directory.
• Activate theme in your administration panel. All done!

Read-Me

DZNROKR is credited for this theme through a link in the footer.php file linking back to the original page where this is available for download. You may not remove this link, but you can place it either in the footer or in your sidebar.


WP-Fansite by DZNROKR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

This week, I’m going to talk about why tagging is a great way to get more people to your site from search engines.

What’s the difference between tags and categories?

A lot. A category should be something that can easily cover a good amount of posts. A tag may only get used once (or 1000 times), but is a more relevent word or short phrase to the content of the post.

Example:

Category: Stephenie Meyer
Tags: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, The Host

Granted, those tags can prove to be quite broad. This would also work:

Category: Hogwarts
Tags: prefects, quidditch, thestrals

Also, I should mention that tags do not rely on categories, meaning you could put prefects under Stephenie Meyer’s category (but why would you?).

Why use tags?

Tags are sort of like search engine sugar, an easy way to find your site from a range of keywords you might not use in your site meta. Also, why would you want to turn away amazing things that help your site like Technorati?

Tags also help the users on your site find content quicker via the use of tag clouds in your sidebar (or wherever). If they are looking for articles relating to a certain film, or album they can easily get to the archive for that tag, or even subscribe to it’s feed.

How to add tags to your theme

So if you’ve decided you want to take advantage of the tagging system in Wordpress, you may be wondering how to implement the tags into your theme.

First, let’s add the code to grab the tags to your post information. This is usually found in index.php, single.php, and archive.php. Open those, and find a spot in The Loop (they place where the title, date, and content are) and place this code:

<?php the_tags(); ?>

I usually place that along side my categories, or below the_content.

To add the tag cloud, open up sidebar.php, and add this code:

<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=24&'); ?>

Smallest and largest indicate the font size depending on the number of posts linked to each tag.

Comment with any questions or comments below.