Lessons learnt 2005
January 6th, 2006 by Kaushal Sheth
After making more than 10 themes for Wordpress I have learnt various lessons. I would like to share it with all.
- Create Universal theme :
The theme which will be more universal will gain more popularity than those which are very specific. My Abstrakt and Blue Horizon theme are more popular than Greetz or Anthosia just for the same reason - Create simple theme requiring less customisation:
I have seen so many blogs on this www using my themes but haven’t change their links ( still is link1 , link2 ) . I asked a few and they replied they didn’t know how to edit them. - Make it accessible:
I guess this is golden rule that almost all designer follow nowadays. But last week I had one incident regarding Mac Safari accessibilty. Strangely one of my custom theme wasn’t working well. Relentless hours of working I finally solved it. I never thought about those browsers before
- Interact with users:
This new year 2006 I have started this new tradition of visiting my user’s site and appreciating their work or just exchanging friendly Hello’s. What I do is do a quick search of my domain www.kaushalsheth.com on www.technorati.com and through that visit my user’s site. This has immensely helped me learn a lot and perhaps increased my popularity to some extent. At the same time gained respect for them.
Hope this lessons help you to make your theme popular and perhaps help you in selecting a subject for your theme.
Posted in Heart Felt |
January 7th, 2006 at 9:29 am
Just wanted to say I’ve been enjoying using your bluehorizon theme. Very simple, easy to modify.
Happy New Year!
January 8th, 2006 at 3:10 am
Interested in making an officially supported WP 2.0 theme from the andreas01 template? It has been requested by a lot of people and I’ve been working on it for a long time - but I never get happy with the result… If so, send me an e-mail and I’ll write you back with info about the requests I have got!
January 12th, 2006 at 8:40 am
Thanks for the tips! I’ve been wanting to create a Wordpress theme for some time now, and you’ve made some great pointers for me to follow.
May 7th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
I have dled your “bluehorizon” template, and let me tell you it’s awesome. I’ve been trying to do some customization (I’m a retard when it comes to working with code, but I’m trying).
Anyhoo, I am one of those people who’s having trouble with the links (link1, link2, etc.). I made adjustments to the header.php file in the template, but that only works on the actual page that loads when one enters “www.honolulucoc.org”. As soon as one migrates from that page (like to honolulu.org/blog), I see the links template again (link1, link2, etc.).
I definitely don’t want to take up too much of your time, but if you could point me in the right direction, I’d be even MORE grateful
Mahalo nui loa (Hawaiian for thank you very much)
Scott
May 7th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
Well now I REALLY feel retarted, because it all seems to be working now. Hmmmm…I actually hadn’t DONE anything to fix it.
Thanks again!
Scott
September 2nd, 2006 at 11:54 pm
learnt?