Over the past week, a number of interesting – both informative and useful posts were published throughout the blogosphere, which aim to help you create a better blog theme and website in general.
Check out these links below and feel free to share your thoughts or suggest others through the comments area.
- [How to] Create a Magazine-Style WordPress Theme – A rather basic, yet simple guide on how to properly create a magazine styled theme WordPress, creating a professional front page, with a first post followed by an unordered list of the archived posts.
- How to: Displaying Your Most Commented Posts – Code and instructions on how to add a “most commented” posts list within your sidebar, although it requires editing the theme code.
- Discussion on Premium WordPress Themes and Open Source Ethics – An ongoing discussion of the struggles of theme designers/users and clients over the use of a free, open-source blog system and the coding and distribution of premium themes.
- Using Blogger’s New Followers Feature – Instructions on how to properly use the rather new social tool on Google’s Blogger service, from Blogger Buster.
- WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5 Winners – WP Comment Remix, Manageable, and WP Easy Uploader were the top three winners of the competition, winning the top prize of $2000, production of a professionally recorded song, dedicated server for one year from iWeb, and a copy of the OIO Publisher Plugin.
- [Potentially] Big News from Brian Gardner and Jason Schuller – Sometime next (this) week, a new design/theme or entire concept will be released by this duo, who are considered top theme designers in the WordPress community.
- Easier Theme Development with the Sample Post Collection(s) [WP Candy] and [Self Conclusion]- Two designers have come out with collections of tags, posts, pages, categories, links, comments, and lists, as well as HTML elements for people that work with WordPress and potentially other blog platforms. You simply need to upload the XML files, and all Lorem Ipsum text is included.
- 75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques - Techniques that both developers and designers can use in their modern web designs. Samples include hyphenation in web, Textboxlist Auto-Completion, Social History, and addSizes (checks the size of MP3 and PDF files on your page; from Smashing Magazine.
- Using WordPress as a CMS with Thematic [Series] – Step-by-step guide to using WordPress as a CMS using the Thematic theme framework – includes coding, best practices, plugins, and other tips to maximize the flexibility of your website/blog.
- 45 Beautiful and Creative WordPress Designs – Although there are literally hundreds of posts highlighting the best websites, this post contains clean, effective, and beautiful designs that you should be modeling your next site’s redesign after. {Posted on September 1}.
- The Renaissance Blog Designer - With the return of Vinh Le (from Blog Design Blog), he suggests that designers should also focus on improving themselves and their skills, including in PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and AJAX.
- Where to Position Ads in Your RSS Feed – From ProBlogger, this article discusses the best method (more from the design perspective) on how to monetize your RSS feed using Google AdSense or other advertising methods.
- 250+ Shiny and Free RSS Feed Icons – An immense collection of RSS icons for use on your blog or for design work.
- WordPress Logos and Graphics – I believe that the WordPress logos were updated, with additional images reflecting new changes in the design of the WordPress pages.
- WooThemes [The Showcase] – Take a look at the creative examples of sites that have been created using themes purchased from WooThemes.
