Studio Press WordPress Themes
Wordpress theme designer Brian Gardner has teamed up with Craig Tuller to offer the professional (commercial) range of themes under the “Studio Press” banner.
It’s actually one of Brian Gardner’s earlier open source themes that I modified to create this site, I find his themes to be quite competent and practical.
The best thing is that when you purchase a theme, the common headaches associated with free Wordpress themes disappear: you get the theme files, unlimited theme support answered by Studio Press’ experts, customisation techniques with Studio Press’ detailed theme tutorials.
There’s also a list of recommended designers for professional design services to use with the themes (if you’re not using my design skills!).
To visit the Studio Press site and the entire suite of themes (11 at the moment, including the 5 highlighted below): Studio Press.
For each of the themes offered at Studio Press (click each graphic to go to the theme page, and from that page you can view a Live Demo of each theme in action):
Keeping up with Wordpress 2.6.5
Wordpress 2.6.5 was announced today — bypassing the 2.6.4 designator which was used for a fake version. The official advice is “There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.”.
This patches a minor security issue (always a worthwhile reason to upgrade) as well as 3 bugs. Personally, I’m waiting for 2.7.x for my next major site code update — preferably 2.7.1 or later, as I try and avoid a major “point” upgrade to avoid any coding bugs that slipped by. But in the meantime I’ll keep an eye on security updates — they’re often worth it!
After several years on FreeBSD/Apache, I can use SSH/Telnet nowadays to do my big upgrades — saves unzipping the files locally and updating files via FTP — that takes about four times as long! Took me a while to figure that one out!
2007 Internet Marketing Trends
Another Slideshare presentation to point to … this time relating to trends in Internet Marketing.
There’s interesting data in here how PPC (Pay Per Click) is moving towards SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) — finding ways of getting search rankings without the cost of sponsored listings/Google advertising.
Slides 18 to 20 have some useful resources to note.
Strategies such as the use of blogs — like this one — definitely help get attention. And then, on top of that, specific blogging methods and tools ensure you maximise your decision to create and use a blog to build online traffic.
For instance, I’m using Wordpress (self-hosted) with a number of specific plugins to help drive traffic to this site (more about that in a future post). And I notice in my stats that traffic starts to arrive at my blog literally within hours of making new posts (you can read a blog post I did last year showing how fresh content is rewarded in search results).
If you view this presentation on Slideshare, you can see it in full-screen mode.