Since it was neccasary to have niche blogs, I started looking for WordPress Themes that are suitable for my niche.  I had big big plans to start an Adsense empire of 50 niche blogs with the expectation of making at least 300 dollars per month from each blog. I did find the Themes I was looking for. In case you still haven’t learned, a WordPress Theme optimized for Adsense got to look real boring and not too attractive. Some make it plain ugly so visitors will want to click out rather as fast as possible. The theme too has to be SEO friendly with the right tags in the right places so that Search Engines can find your blog more easily.

I did find the Themes I wanted. In fact I bought the whole package with 30 Adsense Themes bundled together, all with different headers to reflect 30 different niches.  With the those themes in hand, I started my first niche blog.  It took a couple of months for the blog to settle down and by the third month, I had a steady flow of Search traffic coming to the blog. Inserted the Adsense Ads and within the first month or inserting the Ads, the blog brought in an income of $123.00 from Adsense. I was estatic. I thought I had really made it.

However, I learned a bitter lesson. That is, never reveal your earnings or at least never reveal where your earnings come from. I did just that as I was naive. I never thought there would be arseholes who simply do not like people making money with their blogs. Someone sabotaged that particular blog by clicking on my Ads for more than 130 times within an hour. The next day, I received the dreaded emal from Adsense informing me that my account has been terminated.

Why am I writing this? Remember the 30 Adsense Optimized Themes I bought? I don’t have any use for them now. The first thought was to give them away to my readers here in exchange for them subscribing. However, the re-seller license states that I cannot give away the product for free.  I can sell them though, as I have the re-sale rights.

So I am doing something really stupid and crazy.  I am selling the package which contains 30 full fledged Adsense Optimized WordPress Themes, together with the re-seller license for a downright stupid price of $5. I will not be advertising or publicise this sale anywhere else as I want to reserve this offer to my loayal readers here only. (or whoever is lucky enough to stumble upon this post)

If you are interested just click on the PayPal button below and you will be taken to a PayPal log in page.  Confirm the purchase, click “Return to Merchant” and you will be taken to the download link.

PS. If after clearing payment with PayPal and you did not get the download link, please contact me at: costafong@gmail.com
Please include the email you used for the purchase or the transaction ID from PayPal.

© Costa for Blog Templates Reviews, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Adsense Optimized Themes, Adsense Themes., Wordpress Themes

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If you know the codes to include, you can make use of the Custom Fields, but even then, it is quite tedious. Unless you know how to make the images auto re-scale to fit into the post excert, you will have to upload 2 images for one post if you decide that you want images in both the single post and in the excerpts. You will have to upload a normal size image for your single post and a thumbnail size image for the excerpts.

This problem is solved with a plugin I found via Weblogtools today. Titled “Thumbnail For Excerpts” this wonderful plugin will insert a thumnail image within your homepage excerpts with no effort on your side. All you have to do, or should I say, don’t need to do, is to post like usual, insert whatever image into your post like usual and this plugin will detect the image, look for the default thumnail image that WordPress creates for all your images that you have upload, scale it to your preferred size, and insert it into the post excerpts in your blog’s homepage. Really cool.

You can also edit the plugin to increase or decrease the size of the thumnail, change the alignment and if you know a little CSS, you can add things like a border or whatever to the image. Instructions are given for the various adjustments you can make in the author’s plugin page. The only goruse I had with this plugin was the margin between the image and the post, but that is easily taken care of by using the stylesheet.

As per instruction, the styling can be done with the defualt class, imgtfe, which means what ever variables assigned to this class will effect the look of the thumbnail. So to seperate the image and the post a little bit further from each other, you can assign a small instruction to the imgtfe like thus,

.imgtfe { float: left; margin-right: 10px; }

This will give you a 10 px wide margin between the post and the image and it makes the post excerpt looks neater. If you want to foat it to your right, just change the words accordingly.

Get The Thumbnail For Excerpt Plugin

© Costa for Blog Templates Reviews, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Inserting Images, Post Excerpts., Wordpress Plugins., WordPress Theme

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Anyway, back to the contest and the guys behind this contest, Unique Blog Design or UBD for short. If you haven’t heard of UBD, you must be a real newbie or you have been living in blog isolation.  They are the guys who made a big name for themselves by getting John Chow to use and publicize their theme in their initial foray into the world of blog theme designing. It was one hell of a business coup as at that time, John Chow was still using the personalized but free Misty Theme by Sadish.  Realizing this potential and the fact that John Chow was a huge celebrity in the world of Money Making Blogs, UBD scored the big one when they eventually got him to use their blog design.

From that initial success, spawned a huge tide of lookalike themes, as all those who are into blogging about making money online yearns to be another John Chow. These wannabes, with themes modified to look like their idol, indirectly contributed to UBD’s growing popularity, and with that one initial success,  UBD has never looked back.  After one short year, UBD has become a market leader in the field of blog theme designing with well over 200 A-Listers as their satisfied clients. They have become the first choice for most MMO bloggers when it comes to getting a Unique theme design. Among the notable names in their client’s list are, besides John Chow dot com, Shoemoney dot com,  Zac Johnson dot com, The Entrecard Blog, Courtney Tuttle, and Geeks Are Sexy, just to name a few.

Blog designs done by UBD bears a unique look. Their designs are easily recognisable with their bold and dark colored title bars. Another featured made famous by them are the top columns just below the headers. Many have imitated this and incoporated this feature into their themes.

Of course for a company of their status, getting a theme done by them is not exactly within the reach of many who has just started. The best chance for you to own one of their premium themes which sells for $99 is to enter their ongoing contest. All you have to do is to make a comment in the contest page to qualify for one entry. If you want to increase your chances of winning with another 5 entries, do a write up and link back to their contest page.  Last reminder, do it before 11:59PM Sunday, August 31, 2008. Good luck to all of you. You are welcome to the Ipod, I will just take the theme.  LOL.

Join The UBD 1 Year Anniversary Contest

Download The UBD Money Maker Theme

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Post tags: Free WordPress Themes, Money Making Theme, Unique Blog Design, WordPress Templates

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I do not know if R.Bhavesh (the owner) realized it, but the version he put up for download is, I suspect, the demo version instead of the full working version. When I activated the theme,

• The Sidebar widgets was not available because the Functions php was not included in the folder.
• The Featured Post in the front page contained a static post and image used for showcasing purposes.
• The division class for the Ad Blocks were not properly inserted.

All these don’t seemed to be coding “mistakes” but more like done on purpose for demonstrating the theme so he do not need to do a “real” post for the Demo page. I am saying this because it is an extremely smooth running theme once I placed in all the “missing” codes.

First, the dynamic sidebar which supports widgets. This tip might be useful for those who has a theme that has not been widgetized, though I believe most themes nowadays comes with sidebar widgets as default. The small piece of code to make the sidebar dynamic is

<?php if ( function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : else : ?>

If you have 2 sidebars then you have to specify the sidebar number at the end of the code inside the barckets. In this example,  this will be inserted into sidebar number one, whichever sidebar you prefer so when you open your Widgets page in your Dashboard, you will know what widgets goes where.  It should be placed in your sidebar php where you want the dynamic sidebar to start.

The codes were present in the sidebars of the Newsweek Theme, BUT, to make the sidebars dynamic, we must have a Functions php file to call up the function and that was missing from the download folder. Fortunately, that was not a big problem. All we have to do is to create one.  Open your notepad and type in this codes

<?php
if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebars(2);
?>

The 2 stands for 2 sidebars. Save it as Function with a php extention so it becomes functions php.  Upload this file to your server where the theme’s folder is located. Once that is done, you should be able to use the sidebar widgets.

Now, the Featured Article excerpt in the front page of the Newsweek Theme. There is am image included which I think is suppose to be inserted via the Custom Filed as in most magazine style theme. This however has been altered to make a static post appear together with am image from the theme’s image folder. To make the “Featured Article” excert work and include an image of my choice, I inserted these codes so I can use the Custom Fields function available but rarely used in WordPress just after the Featured Article  <div class=”listings”> in the Index php,

<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, “thumb”, true)) {
$size = getimagesize($_SERVER["/wp-content/uploads"].get_post_meta($post->ID, “thumb”, true)); ?>
<img src=”<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “thumb”, true); ?>” alt=”" width=”<?php echo $size[0]; ?>” height=”<?php echo $size[1]; ?>” />
<?php } ?>

The word “thumb” will be the custom fields key and the location where you uploaded your image will be the value. Normally for WordPress the default location will be www.yourdomian/wp-content/uploads/date/filename.  So all you have to do if you want to add in a custom image for the Featured Post excerpt in the Front Page is to upload the image in your post editor, copy the URL where it has been uploaded and paste it in the Value box in the Custom Fields option just below your post editor. Remeber also to type in the “key” which in this case is “thumb” as indicated in the codes above.

To specify the category which you want appearing as featured post, add in this line of codes just beneath what you have inserted just now.

<?php if ( in_category(’123′) ) ?>

Replace the number 123 with your own category number, obtained by going to your Categories Page and hovering your mouse over that category. You can see the category number at your browsers bottom bar.

Then of course you will need to show the Post Title, the Dates and so on. All this is achieved by adding these jumble of codes.

<h2 id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”>
<?php the_title(); ?>
</a></h2>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” class=”readmore”>Read More >></a>

Paste these codes all in the same place one after another should make the “Featured Article” excerpt in the front page of the Newsweek WordPress Theme work nicely. You can see a working version in my Homebased Business blog. Sorry, I have moved this blog and it is not viewable anymore.

Download The Newsweek WordPress Theme

© Costa for Blog Templates Reviews, 2008. | Permalink | 38 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Free Premium Theme, Free WordPress Theme, Theme Mods, WordPress Templates

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Every theme that Chris Pearson releases catches on like bush fire, because unlike most designers who offers free themes just to earn a backlink without any consideration for the user, Chris Pearson’s Themes are done and released with a conscience that when someone uses the theme, even though free, it falls nothing short from a paid for premium theme. Quoting him from his WordPress Themes page,

Oh, and rest assured that the SEO aspects of the theme are absolutely top-notch. I view my themes as Web site frameworks – not just “designs” – and I wouldn’t bother to build a framework unless it was up to spec in all areas.

Apart from the “top-notch framework” he maintains a support site for those who uses his themes and all enquiries and questions are promptly answered by Chris himself. Take for example the Neoclassical Theme released last November, Chris Pearson maintains a dedicated page just for the Neoclassical Theme users where they are taught how they can get the most out of the theme. I don’t think many professionals does that for their free releases. Even for the Cutline Theme, which has been sold, the dedicated support site is still being updated regularly offering upgrades and new tutorials as Wordpress changes. Such is the dedication that Chris Pearson has for all his themes.

Introducing The Thesis Theme For WordPress

Get The Thesis Theme For WordPress

As in all who makes a living from designing Blog Themes and Web Templates, and one who has gained such a reputable position in this field, the natural course to take is of course to offer themes of premium quality that cannot be found in free releases. Chris Pearson’s latest release is The Thesis Theme For WordPress. Going for a very reasonably low price of $87 for a personal license and $164 for the developer’s license, The Thesis Theme comes with a host of features not found in other premium themes. Every Thesis Themes also comes with,

* Lifetime theme upgrades
* Complete access to the Thesis forums
* Downloadable “stuff” that you can use to customize and enhance your theme (like background
images and styles)
* Support from Chris Pearson himself

The personal license limits you to use the Theme for only one site, the footer link has to be intact and you are not allowed to re-sell or modify the theme. The developer license does away with the first two requirements where you will be able to use it on unlimited sites, the footer links can be done away with but you are not allowed to re-sell or modify the theme. This requirements is to protect the interest and the livelihood of the designer which I feel is fair.

Like all his themes, free or otherwise, there is a fully maintained and regularly updated support page where buyers and users of this theme will be made aware of the latest upgrades and bug fixes due to WordPress regular changes. There is also a Thesis Theme User’s Gude for those who are new to changing Themes.

The Thesis Theme is in Version 1.0.2 after a minor update to make it compatible with WordPress 2.6 and judging from the comments received, this theme is getting really hot. As apposed to the 4 figure fees that Chris Pearson charges for his work if you want his services to design and code a unique theme for you, the $87 price tag is really a good buy. The only thing missing might be just a little bit of uniqueness, but hey, there are millions of blogs out there and the probability of the same guy stumbling on a blog with the same looks is very slim. Anyway being unique is only for the ego, it does nothing for the growth of your blog.

Get The Thesis Theme For WordPress Now

© Costa for Blog Templates Reviews, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chris Pearson, Premium WordPress Theme, SEO WordPress Theme, Thesis Theme

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