Green Flamingobecause I said so

I have some sad truth for you all, and it is that you will never find the perfect wordpress theme. There are many reasons to this, hopefully I will be able to make my point and explain why it’s true. Also, I would like to acknowledge Chelle for indirectly giving me this idea.

There are so many out there!

One, on actually finding the perfect wordpress theme, there are so many available that it is difficult to sift through what you have. I am not sure of the number that have been made, but I know it is higher than you can search through in 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, or maybe even 2 years.

Problems Arise

I have seen thumbnails of what I think will be a great theme, and when I take a closer look it turns out to be pretty crappy. Sometimes you have your hopes up high from a demo, thinking that it may look great on your site. That is only 1 of 3 problems that can arise. The second problem is that when you upload and use the theme, you are tired of it and don’t like the look. This has happened to me many times, and I mostly download them because they look interesting and not always because I think they are perfect for my site. The third problem that might strike is that of having technical difficulties, saying something doesn’t display right, things aren’t aligned as they were in the demo, words overlap, things like that. I hate these things that happen, and wish I could get rid of them with a click of a button. So, unless you are a professional theme designer or it is your theme then trash that theme, it has no use to you if it’s “broken.”

Interests Change

Because your interests in theme can change, and will change, then you may have the perfect theme but it will never be perfect forever. Even if you have a high-quality custom job done you will not always love the theme the same way, though you may keep it for months, years, however long. I am just saying that your theme interests will change just as your love interests do.

Those are my reasons, I could add a few more, but they are the most obvious and the ones that standout the most. I have a few small updates for you, and a little notice, so don’t hop off to another water pool yet.

Updates

I think I am going to re-brand this blog, though I will continue to dish out blogging tips. Mostly I would like to add a little niche, and there is no word for it really, because it is a new niche. Since it is new, I might be able to dominate it easily, who knows. It is just “about blogging,” just little things that happen, tendencies, news, and just a general about blogging blog. This is not considered a category in most options, so I will continue to officially brand this as blogging tips or young entrepreneur. If I have to, I might say it is MMO, but I have learned to stay away from that path.

I may be changing the theme soon, I am on the lookout, and Rajaie is coming out with one that I might be able to use. I advised him in the making, and added some things that I like, and I am going to be happy to promote it and use it.

I have started to think or branding “flamingo” a bit more, and trying to go with a green flamingo feel. This is why I mentioned the water pool, and in contest I might play on words with “flamingo” and “flaming.” If you have any ideas as to how to make this have a more “Green Flamingo” feel, they will be highly appreciated.

Note

Tomorrow I assume I will be heading off to an amusement park, and I will most likely  staying the night in the region. I may not be back for a day or two, so just look out for me, I won’t be gone long.

Over the weekend, I may go on another trip to Dallas Forth Worth, flight training does allow you I think to bring family along, so I might tag along there a few days. If there are any bloggers I know in Dallas, I would love to meet, though I am not sure it is possible. I will open this option in a few years, as I get older it will seem more professional. Going to Dallas I hope to bring my computer with me, maybe write an article on the flight and publish it at the hotel. I will have Internet access, so I will probably be blogging.

I am sure you have heard that you need to create a “user friendly” blog, so here we will expand on that idea. Of course, you do want to make your blog friendly to all visitors (excepting spammers) so that they will like the blog and come back. This will be part of a series here, and this is part one, the theme.

A theme distinguishes the look of a site, including colors, pictures, and layout can come with theme. If you look at my blog, the cover that you see is the theme, or if you are noticing how the design is constructed.

There are different types of themes, for different people and for different platforms.

• Probably the most common theme is the Wordpress theme. Since many, many, many blogs are using wordpress as a platform, then wordpress themes are all over. Now there are three main types of wordpress themes, which are:

Free themes – there are many free wordpress themes that you can find, and they really have a great look. The theme I am using is a free wordpress theme, but I have other plans for this blog and it’s theme. The only problem with the free themes are that there are so many out there, and so many good ones too, that it is hard t find the perfect one. I am not going to refer any free wordpress theme sites to you yet, because I think you should search on your own.

Premium themes - premium themes are made by very experienced theme designers. Premium themes cost you a bit, but they can be worth it. One thing notorious for premium themes is that they have a lot of features, meaning there will be places you can easily edit, such as banner ads, featured posts, RSS details, and many other things that can be much easier than going into your code and editing it.

Custom Themes – custom themes seem so great to me. Every blog that I come across with a custom theme really seems to have a nice feel. Custom themes are themes that you pay someone to make for you, it is custom for you, having whatever you need with it, and also is used for only you. It will not be sold to anyone else.

Now we move on to the second kind or type of theme, and these are Blogger Themes. These themes are for people joining Blogger, where it is yourdomain@blogspot.com. There can be some great blogger themes, but I see nothing special about them, maybe the reason being I am not a Blogger user.

Our last type of theme introduced is the plain html template, or CSS or xhtml, but basically it is just code making this template. I have started a site using just code, but that was a practice of Green Flamingo Designs and I have decided not to mess with code so much anymore, it just cannot do the same things as Green Flamingo › Edit — WordPressthe themes can. I do not recommend this type, for it is hard to deal with and a bit of a pain.

Choosing and creating your design

You should always combine certain aspects of a basic theme design into what your site looks like. Those will be introduced here, as well as some guidance on choosing or creating a theme.

• Creative
• Semi unique (not a hugely common theme)
• unique graphics
• friendly graphics
• accessible and usable
• not overwhelming or scrambled
• black on white text, not white on black

Creative – be yourself, be creative. Make the look something that is you.

Semi unique – if you have a free theme, choose one that is not too common, you do not want to be the same as everyone else! Same thing applies to the premium themes, so you might want to move on from the John Chow or Cow “Milk It” theme.

Unique Graphics – you want to have unique graphics, so you should probably get your own header, logo, maybe even RSS button.

Friendly Graphics – you want to keep your graphics friendly, mostly to the eyes, but in general as well. You want to have everything neat and friendly, with fun but professional graphics.

Accessible and usable – we want your visitors to be able to use the theme functions, so make sure they can do that!

Not overwhelming – you want to keep it short and sweet. Do not load up and graphics and pics, ads, or anything else disturbing to the eyes. If if hurts you to look at your blog, it’ll kill others.

Black on white text - I think you should keep it so that your text is black and background white. I have heard complaints from the white text/dark background thing. It does not have to stay completely black and white, you can add some variation, just have dark text on light background.

This was day 1 of the tips! Expect to see more tomorrow! I will be updating all of this, and I may put much of this into separate posts. We do not want too much in one post! I am not sure exactly how I will balance out all the information, I think I will just turn it into a long series of post, each one being about half this length. If you like it all in one, then let me know.

I think that this was a great post and would be very grateful if you submitted this to any sites. Thank you!

Now, finally, I have wordpress 2.5. After talking about it like a week ago, I finally have upgraded using the help of the automatic upgrade plugin. The automatic upgrade plugin helpfully carried me through the process of upgrading wordpress and also what motivated me to do so. I still have the problems I had, not being able to/knowing how to edit the pages at the top, so those will be stuck for a while though I wish that I could edit them and make this a more professional site. To see how different I was you should read my first post ever written. It’s embarrassing to read it over again. But those were the times when I had the beautiful theme Mushblue. It brings back many memories. But, that’s all for now, just saying I have the latest technology too.

I have a new theme if you have read this blog before. A little to talk about, that’s all. There are ups and downs of it.

It has a professional look, flowing nicely with the orange and black

It has a LOT of space. I can put in tons of pages. Also, the posting area is much bigger making room for more posts on one page. Now, my previous posts that were pretty short are now REALLY short.

I have some nice pages at the top that add to the professionalism. But, unfortunately, I do not know how to edit them and have them be a page. (A little help?).

I was thinking of a few April Fools jokes to play on you guys, but non e relevant. Thought enough of them I have. Hmmmmmm. Happy April Fools Day everyone!

There was a trick that I basically played on myself that I sadly didn’t know about. When I changed my theme, and after that, sitemeter kept talking about how I had zero views or (on the day I switched the theme) only a few. I was wondering, how could this be, why do I deserve this after my hard upgrading work? So then I didn’t post for a few days because I thought I had lost my readers. Well, as it turns out, since I had changed my theme, there was no sitemeter tracker there so it appeared as I had no views. I am glad I still have readers and that I really have a lot more than no views a day. So, it was an April Fools weekend joke played on me by a few. (Myself, wordpress, sitemeter, etc.).

I wonder what the next post will be about?

Wordpress 2.5 was supposedly released 1 day ago, or yesterday, and the chances of me looking to see what new things were added were very low. But I did. When I attempted to download it, and when it was done, I didn’t notice much change. The new version of wp has been worked on for six months and even has full screen editing. Click here for the original post by Matt.

Some new features of Word-press 2.5:

The dashboard is said to have been cleared some, the things that were thought most important were the only ones kept. The dashboard also carries handy widgets.

You can now upload a whole load of something, instead of doing it the painful way of waiting and never knowing how long it will take, and the worst part, having to do it one at a time. With wordpress 2.5 you can do more than one upload at a time and watch the progress of each one.

Then of course there are the basic upgrades, really great I’d say. Better searching, tag management, a password strength meter, all those are nice features.

For multi-user blogs, wp automatically locks the autosave when someone else is writing so that they don’t overwrite each other and you lose hours of work.

Now some of the upgrades you have to take a while to download and install will automatically download and install themselves, though if you don’t want something then you can stop it from doing that.

For the photo thing, you can now have people comment on individual pictures.

After this it is mostly developer features, such as salted passwords and secure cookies. Things to keep it safe.

I think that this is a great wordpress update. I think it will prosper especially since the version 2.3 has already had 1.92 million downloads. Wordpress 2.5 is claimed to be a major milestone. And actually I do know how to get it working. You may want to read these upgrade instructions. I hope you enjoy!