More and more people are realizing that Wordpress and Thesis is not only a great theme to run your blog on, but also a great way to operate a static website. This means that you should dismiss Wordpress as just a social blogging platform, and look at it for what it truly is – a highly customizable, and easy to use content management system (CMS) for all kinds of websites.
Let’s look at some of the ways that you can run a static website with Thesis and Wordpress.
- Create a Static Front Page
If you go in to your Wordpress dashboard, you can go in to the reading settings and change it so that you display a page rather than all your posts as the front page. This is great if you want to have a static bit of content about your business on your home page.
- Use Thesis’s Design Options to Create a Website
Thesis comes loaded with an ever-improving set of design options. This means that you can quickly, easily and importantly without coding, update your site to have between one and three columns in various orders. You can change the fonts and colors to your hearts content and you can utilize the in-built features such as the multi-media box.
- Don’t Worry About SEO Plugins
Thesis comes fully optimized for Search Engines. This means that it will lay the content of your site (titles and tags) out in a way that makes them work well with search engine spiders. You’ll of course need to make sure that your content is search engine relevant, but the key here is to understand that you can have a fully optimized web site without the need for any additional plugins to do that for you.
- Expand To Interact with Your Customers
You can utilize plugins such as contact forms on your website to interact with your customers. This means that you can create simple order forms, surveys and other items that you might need when running a Static website.
- Focus on Content
With Thesis’s simple but elegant design and Wordpress’s super easy to CMS you can focus on what truly matters on your website – the content. You don’t need to spend time messing about with your site to make it work properly or look right. Thesis and Wordpress takes the sweat out of that job.
As you can see, Thesis is a great way to run a Static website. It utilizes a very strong theme and an excellent CMS to enable you to quickly put up websites on any topic for any reasons. So why not get your hands on a copy of Thesis today and start to build your static website.
There are thousands of different free wordpress themes so how do you find the right one for your site? I would suggest that rather than just pulling themes of random websites, that carry a small risk of being dodgy software, that you visit the official themes collection on the wordpress.org website. From here you can browse a large range of themes submitted by the user community. The search options on this site are great as well as they allow you to narrow down your search to options such as color, use of widgets and number of columns your require.
When you are searching for wordpress themes, with so many available it can be quite and overwhelming task. With this in mind it is useful to think about the kind of theme you want before you start your search.
Things to consider when looking for a Free Wordpress Theme
I would suggest that you start to thing about the number of columns that you like to have on you site first. To determine this you need to think about how users navigate round your site. Do you want them to use a menu at the top or bottom of the site or on the right or left-hand side. Do you like to have a lot of stuff in your sidebars such as your twitter status, and photos or do you like to just keep things simple. Do you like a large content area or a small one. Once you have narrowed down the type of layout you want, you can start thinking about colors. There is a time honored tradition in design that says you should stick to just tow or three colors, with one color as the primary or lead color for your design. With this in mind, think about the colors you would like on your site.
Once you have thought about the layout and design that you want for your site you can start to look for themes and quickly discount the ones that don’t meet your criteria. If you can’t find something that looks how you want from the free themes, then maybe you should look at investing in a premium theme that has plenty of customization options so that you can get exactly what you want.
Wordpress is the worlds most popular blogging platform. This is great as it means the user community is very large and the range of plugins and themes enabling you to customize your wordpress site grows each day. It also means that more and more of the websites that you visit run on the wordpress platform, so you want to make sure that you word press site stands out from the crowd. The best way to do this is to get a personalized theme, and wordpress makes changing the theme a very easy process.
There are a lot of different wordpress themes out there, and choosing one for your site can be overwhelming. While the free themes are great there is nothing more disheartening than finding a great theme for your site, only to see that many other people are also using it on there site. If you want something truly unique for your site you really should look at getting a premium wordpress theme. Premium themes, as you have to pay for them, are less common on the run of the mill sites, and they show your readers that you are serious about your site and willing to invest in the professionalism of it’s look.
Premium themes are also better for running serious sites on as they allow you to customize how they look and are backed up with support communities that mean if anything goes wrong with the look of your site you can get it fixed quickly and easily.
Premium wordpress themes are the way to go to stand out in an increasingly wordpress dominated market. Get hold of your premium wordpress theme from such as the excellent thesis theme today, and you will be pleased at the customization options and better look that you site has for your visitors.
You may have started out on a wordpress.com free hosted blog platform, but now, for any number of reasons, you have decided to host your own blog. This is an excellent move. Self-hosting a blog will allow you to have full control over the site, and this will mean that you can run adverts or commercial activities on the blog. You will also be able to customized the blog to your hearts content and be safe in the knowledge that you are in full control of everything that goes on with your site.
In order to self host a site, you will need to get some web hosting that will enable you to run a wordpress site. Web hosting is your own little piece of real estate on the internet, and on this space you can do build what you like. You need this real estate to give you somewhere to run your site from. If you are running a wordpress installation, or looking to, then you will need to get hosting that allows SQL databases. Don’t worry, finding such at thing isn’t as complicated as it sounds and setting up a site is very easy thanks to wordpress’s famous one click installation method.
The best way to keep things easy is to find a hosting company that does the hard word for you and installs the wordpress CMS correctly for your site. The easiest way to do this is to get hosting from a company that runs on the cPanel software, and has either Fantastico or Simple Scripts software as part of that. Using this software, you will simply login to your site, click a few buttons and your new wordpress site will be set up.
Another top when looking for this type of hosting, is to find a company that allows to host unlimited domains at no extra cost. This way if you want to set up more websites you can do very easily with only the cost of a domain name.
Wordpress is a great, free, content management system (CMS) that can not only be used to quickly and easily create blogs, but also static websites. The great thing about wordpress is that it does all of the complex back end processing of your website, whilst allowing you to quickly and easily change your site using plugins, widgets and themes.
Wordpress themes are very easily changed. All you need to do is to login to your wordpress dashboard and you can change the theme from within there. You do this by downloading the theme files to your computer and then uploading them through the ‘Appearance’ settings. In just a few clicks you can give your blog or website a completely different look.
There are thousands of wordpress themes available. These range from the standard ones that come with the wordpress software, to free ones that can be found on the wordpress.org website right through to premium themes that come with technical support and a multitude of different features. As with many things in life you certainly get what you pay for, so whilst there are many great free themes out there, it is the premium themes that really make your site stand out.
Premium Wordpress themes will usually have a feature settings control panel that appears inside wordpress once you activate the theme. For example, the superb Thesis wordpress theme, offers the user customizable layouts, colors, fonts and loads of background features such as web analytic settings, search optimization out of the box and a simple upgrade path.
If you are serious about blogging, or want to make your static website look great with ease I would suggest getting hold of the wordpress CMS and a good quality premium wordpress theme such as thesis. You will soon have a stunning looking, easy to manage site to impress your visitors.
Wordpress.com is a great place to quickly set up a free account and learn about blogging and how WordPress works. You can quickly build up a blogging community and showcase your blog to receive subscribers and comments. There comes a time when you become more serious about taking blogging forward when you decide you want to run a self hosted blog and benefit from the additional flexibility that offers you, such as the ability to place adverts on your site, install themes or use any number of thousands of cool plugins.
Wordpress.com has a very easy import and export mechanism which means that moving your blog from one place to another is very quick and simple, giving you more time to concentrate on writing and all the other great things a self hosted blog has to offer. This post shows you how to do the actually migration once you have your self hosted blog installed.
How to guide to move your blog from Wordpress.com to a Self Hosted Wordpress Blog
Firstly you need to login to your Wordpress.com blog and go to you administration panel. Click on TOOLS – EXPORT. Here you are given the choice to confine the export to a particular author or select all authors (in most cases you’ll want to move your whole blog so click on all authors). Confirm everything and the export tool will gather together your posts, pages, comments, categories and tags together. This process creates a WXR file (Wordpress eXtended Rss). Once that process has finish click on the DOWNLOAD EXPORT FILE button and save it to somewhere safe on your desktop (this is a great way of doing quick local backups of your blog too). Congratulations you are halfway through the move!
The second part is importing your blog into your self hosted installation of Wordpress. This guide assumes you have already set up your self hosted wordpress blog on your own domain. To do do this you need to login to your self hosted blog and in the administration screen click on TOOLS – IMPORT. This gives you a choice of blogging platforms to import from but in this case you are importing from Wordpress so click on that. Next, click to browse and location the WXR file you downloaded (exported) on your computer. This will then upload this file in to your self hosted Wordpress site and unpack the contents of the files to your blog. All your posts, pages, categories, tags etc. will be there and will be in the template of your self hosted blog!
If you are moving to a self hosted blog to take advantage of the additional control and features of the Wordpress platform, you’ll probably be looking for a Premium Wordpress Theme to add that professional touch to your blog. To help with this please check out our Premium Wordpress Theme Reviews.
Woo Themes offer some exceptional theme designs. Unlike other premium theme providers they also offer a themes club in addition to the standard Single and Developer license options. This gives you greater flexibility in your options to buy a premium wordpress theme.
Here’s How it Works
All Woo Themes Premium Wordpress Themes are available to purchase individually (with single or developer licenses) or you can join their theme club and have access to all of their great themes, giving you plenty of choice in Premium Theme downloads. They offer a great range of theme designs and each theme comes with many configuration options, analytics integration and access to the original photoshop files for further customization.
Woo Themes Club
If you choose to join the Woo Themes Club you get full access to all of their themes, with new ones released monthly. This means that whilst you club subscription fee stays the same you get access to more and more themes which means this club becomes more and more value for money as time goes on.
Subscriptions
Subscriptions to the themes club are purchased in 3 month periods for both single and developer licenses. With a single license you can run up to 5 concurrent themes or if you go for the developer license you can run unlimited license, which of course you can use as the basis for all your client projects.
Single or Developer Licenses
With a Single User Subscription the theme club you can use any of the themes on up to 5 different domains at the same time. This offers great value if you have more than one blog that and you you want flexibility of the different designs to make each of your blogs unique and stand out.
With a Developer Subscription you can use the Woo Themes as the basis for your online entrepreneurial activities which is great for if you run a number of niche sites for example or if you want to use Woo Themes as the basis for you client projects. You can use the themes on as many websites / blogs that you own at the same time.
Support
Along with a wide range of fantastic themes, and choices over the level of club membership or license ownership, Woo Themes also provides an excellent support system. offering plenty of tutorials for their themes you can learn how to get the most from your theme. There are plenty of active forum members and ‘Woo Ninjas’ to help you out if you have any issues with your themes.
Upgrades and New Themes
The themes are regularly updates to provide new features and if required compatibility with the latest versions of Wordpress. In addition to, with theme club membership you also get access to the latest themes as soon as they are released.
Woo Themes offer an ever increasing number of great theme designs, and with the Woo Themes Club options you they provide excellent value for money – check them out!
There has been a lot of buzz about the blogosphere about the latest theme design by Chris Pearson. Thesis is the offspring of years spent research, redesigning and understanding SEO, theme design and blogging. Combine Chris’s skills with the internet marketing and copyrighting skills of Brian Clarke of Copyblogger fame and you have perhaps the more flexible, useful and efficient Wordpress blog theme available today.
What makes Thesis theme worth it?
Firstly, Thesis is so competitively priced for a theme of this quality and with this many options and regular upgrades that any serious blogger would have to have some sound reasons not to use this as their theme of choice.
Secondly, the unique, simple and well thought out concepts of how to architecture the themes coding mean that you can regular take upgrades of the latest features without sacrificing any customization that you have spend you precious time on. Chris has removed and design related elements from the core files to control all the customization with just two individual files meaning that when an upgrade comes you these files are kept in tact keeping your customization in place – something that other theme designers have to date been missing. What does this mean? Well if you change something in your footer, or add a design tweak to the way your comment section look, when an upgrade is done those files will be in tact rather than you needed to make the same customizations again on the new versions of the files.
Let’s look deeper in to the Thesis Wordpress theme:
1. Design
Taken in it’s basic configuration, thesis offers a very clean and simple theme. Something that bloggers, especially new ones, forget is that when it comes to theme design and blog layout less if often more. You can easily tweak design features such as text style and size all from a convenient control panel within the Wordpress dashboard. Put simply Thesis has been thought through from end to end and back again with the emphasis on taking the requirement to do coding to change the look of their blog from the blogger so that they can concentrate on the important elements of writing and marketing.
2. Options
The thesis options and configuration variations are seemingly limitless, this is not to say that they are overly complicated or tedious. A simple user interfaces allows you quick and easy access to the areas of the blog you want to customize instantly. These include:
- Adding a Feedburner URL without any coding or additional plugins
- Changing the navigation options for your site, with some unique options such as pages build from categories.
- A multimedia box to display videos, ads or custom code to add further professionalism to your blog with a couple of clicks.
- Advanced Post Options such as removing the author name, or the date of posts and much more.
- Google Analytics, mint and more stats integration, again without the need for addition plugins or coding.
- Design Options where you can change your blog layout such with a choice between 1, 2 or 3 columns and control on how the columns are displayed with sidebar positioning (helpful for widget lovers).
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Thesis makes the best use of tags for titles to enable search engines to pic up the most relevant content to your readers in search results. But the SEO doesn’t stop there, each post has a raft of additional SEO tweaks such as dynamic titles, meta-tags and more. There is far more SEO tweaks, some seemingly simple, in the guts of this theme but rest assured that this has been thought out to the nth degree and if it’s good enough for copyblogger to run on then it’s probably good enough for most bloggers.
4. Theme Support
Thesis has a support forum where you can get quick fixes for common problems, or post further questions for very quick responses. There are ‘how to’ guides and hints and tricks within the forum to enable you to get the absolute most from Thesis and your blog. You can be guaranteed of the very best support for the Thesis theme, for life.
Thesis really is an exciting development in the blogging world. It gives the blogger so much control over the design of their theme, and with the vibrant support community you can start to tweak your theme to your hearts content. Unless you need a particular style, coloring or graphics heavy theme design, perhaps a magazine style then Thesis really is the best place for you to start. At just $87 for a Single User License, or $164 for a Developer License for a theme of this quality it really is a bargain. Use thesis as the skeleton and framework to build your blog to great new heights, the only way is up with Thesis.
Premium Themes Review Verdict
Overall Rating for the Thesis Wordpress Theme *****
Have you anything to add about this theme? Let us know in the comments below!
Many people who start blogging are taking their first foray in to creating a website, and their own web real estate to host visitors from all over the world. One of the reasons blogging has really taken off as a platform is because buy using an content management system (CMS) such as wordpress, it takes the technical leg work out of being an webmaster and enables anyone with access to the internet the opportunity to showcase a website.
Once you’ve become more accustomed to the world of blogging and you have decided that you want to take the next step, it is likely that you are going to want to have your won hosted blog which gives you more control over what you can display on your site, the design of your site and the fancy stuff like plugins, widgets and other integration which can really take your blog to the next level. When you take the plunge, and you have realised that you need a premium wordpress theme to stand out from the rest you want to be sure that you money will be well spent, this is where theme support comes in. When you purchase a theme such as Thesis or a Woo Theme, you are not only benefitting from a creative design with many configuration options but also excellent support services should you come across any problems with you theme, something that you certainly don’t get from a free theme.
Examples of where premium theme support comes in useful:
1. You want to tweak the design of your theme but don’t know how
The support forums are friendly and helpful places, as a newcomer you are welcomed and not shot down for lacking technical understanding. Ask your question and you’ll get a helpful response very soon.
2. You change something in your theme and it causes an issue with how you blog looks
It’s not uncommon for you to want to slightly tweak you theme to your taste. It is also not uncommon for you to have the odd issue along the way which in 99.9% of cases won’t be down to an issue with the theme, but more likely a small bit of syntax you have left out of any coding changes you have made. No problem for the support forum, you’ll be back up and running in no time.
3. Learn of design changes or optimisation
Support forums are great places to get ideas, connect and interact with other users of your themes similar for yours. You’ll get some great tips and ideas to improve your own blog, safe in the knowlegde that if you have any issues along the way, the support forums will be there to help you.
Theme Support Etiquette
To get quick theme support responses always pop a link to your blog, a screen shot of the issue if appropriate and if asked the relevant files from your site. Please and thank you go a long way. Also before raising an issue, spend 5 minutes checking that the issue hasn’t been raised and resolved before – not only does this stop people repeating themselves, but it also means that you get a response to your issue straight away as it has already been resolved!
