WordPress themes make it easy for you to set up your blog and go, but there are definitely some disadvantages to go along with those advantages. While pre-made WordPress themes are great if you don’t have the time, resources or knowledge required to code your own theme from scratch, there are a few downsides:

• Inability to easily customize colors, images
• Some themes aren’t widget-enabled
• In contrast, other themes may be widget-only, so you won’t be able to thoroughly customize your sidebars
• Lack of choices in colors, layout style
• Obtrusive credit text/links
• Outdated code, obselete plugins, etc.

Personally, I’m a fan of creating my own WordPress themes. My theme “base” is from one of the original premade themes that came bundled with the WordPress installation I uploaded to my server way back in 2005. Here are a few sources worth checking out if you’re interested in making your own theme:

Eruanna.net: How to Write Your Own WordPress Theme
ThemeShaper: How to Create a WordPress Theme
Spoon Graphics: How to Build a Custom WordPress Theme
WP Designer: So you want to create WordPress themes huh?

I have literally dreamed up my last few layouts. From personal experience over the past 2-3 years, I have found that if given the choice between opening up Adobe Photoshop and Notepad and playing around with designs and codes, or going to sleep with CSS in mind, it’s better that I go to sleep. When I’m laying there in the dark, my mind is free to wander, unobstructed by other distractions. And it’s there in bed, hovering on the edge of sleep, that I’m able to dream up new layouts. Then I usually grab a piece of paper and make a few quick notes and a scribbled outline of what I intend on making, and off to sleep I go. If I’m lucky, I’ll wake up the next morning with the image of the new layout still fresh in my head.

How do you plan new layouts?

I have been an almost religious user of Flickr for several years now; aside from the occasional screenshot, spur of the moment photo, or cellphone photos (those get uploaded to Ping.fm), all of my photos go to Flickr. And since I regularly write blog entries that include photos, it only makes sense to find an easier way for me to search through my photostream to find the photo(s) I want to add to those entries.

Enter Flickr Photo Album. Unlike other WordPress Flickr photo plugins, this one actually worked right out of the box, and with little in the way of configuration. Simply install, activate, then visit the configuration page to authorize the plugin with your Flickr account. Easy, huh? Now if only losing weight were so easy as well as cut & dry (though I’ve heard that certain weight loss pills can make it a no-brainer).

Here’s the plugin “in action”:

I love how you can browse your stream, or search by album or even by tag. Insertion of photos is flawless, and you can even change the caption and alignment of the photo (tip: use the alignleft, aligncenter and alignright elements in your stylesheet to take full advantage of the class options!).

There’s an awesome plugin for WordPress called Let it Snow. As the name suggests, it creates a pretty — and easy on the browser & eyes — snowing effect on all pages of your blog. Go visit Jenn.nu to see the snow effect in action! I actually just activated it earlier today. I was reading a blog entry about one woman’s struggle with hair loss and the hair loss product that ultimately worked for her, and it reminded me of this time last year, which is when bits of my hair started falling out. That reminded me of Christmas, which made me think of snow, which made me think of the plugin!

As with most WordPress plugins, simply add the plugin files to your wp-content/plugins folder, navigate to your Plugins page on the WP admin, and activate. That’s it — snowy perfection on your blog will now commence!

Today I discovered that the plugin ViewLevel 2.0 isn’t protecting my posts. I had it set up in conjunction with Role Manager to hide posts from registered users who weren’t at least a level 3. Fortunately, I was able to use WordPress’s built-in batch editing feature to quickly set all of my protected posts to draft mode. For what it’s worth, I’m using WordPress 3.0.1.

I ultimately switched to User Access Manager to protect specific posts, and it too works beautifully alongside Role Manager. I will be writing a separate post about that shortly.

There are plenty of layout trends I do like (including the use of WordPress, minimalist layouts, and tagboards), but there are also some I don’t like. In no particular order, they are:

• Skinny blog/content columns. In my opinion, anything less than 400px in width is just too narrow. Give your blog posts room to breathe, you know?
• Checkerboard backgrounds. They’re hideous.
• Most celeb “blends” (remember those?). A small handful are nice, but the rest just suck.
• One column layouts, because the wannabe minimalist in me is jealous of them. *blush*
• The use of Blogspot. Gag.
• Including your DeadJournal/LiveJournal/Tumblr via an iframe.

What layout trends do you loathe?

If you want a new look for your blog but don’t have the time, desire or skills required to whip up something new, consider changing up the colors of whatever your blog has going on now. Picking out an entirely new color scheme can do wonders for the look of your site. Take, for example, the current and previous layout on jenn.nu:

Same layout, new colors = a brand new look. ♥

As far as picking out colors, I highly recommend using Colour Lovers for palettes and general color inspiration.

Custom fields have been a core part of WordPress for quite some time. They are designed to add extra information to your posts, or change the way that information is presented, depending on how you use them. Up until recently I never bothered to work with the custom fields, but then a client approached me with a request that I felt would best be solved by making use of them.

In a nutshell, here is how to use custom fields to display images in posts. The nice thing about this method is that the HTML source code is inserted into the post only if there is data in the custom fields. In other words, any posts that you do not bother to insert custom field data into will not display any of the source code. So you can add images only on those posts that you feel need them; you won’t have to worry about empty or incomplete HTML code being displayed in other posts.

First, create a custom field named “Image”. Its value should be the URL to the image you’d like to display in your post (for consistency and ease of remembering, I recommend uploading these images to wp-content/uploads/images.

Next, create a custom field named “Image Class”. Its value should be image-class, or whatever class element name you’ll be using in your stylesheet to create the visual effect on your images (left alignment, padding, borders, etc.).

Finally, consider creating a custom field named “Image Description”, and inserting into its value the alt description you would like to use for your image.

Now that you have your custom fields set up, open your theme’s index.php and single.php files (assuming that you’d like to have the images displayed on both posts listed on your index and on the individual post pages) in FTP, or in the Theme Editor in the WP admin area. Insert the following after if(have_posts()) : while(have_posts()) : the_post();:

// check for image
$thumb = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘Image’, $single = true);
// check for image class
$thumb_class = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘Image Class’, $single = true);
// check for image alt text
$thumb_alt = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘Image Description’, $single = true);

That code checks for the existence of the custom fields in your posts. Insert the following code before php the_content();, as this is the code that actually displays your image (please change imgsrc to image src, and add before/after php!):

php // if there’s a image
if($thumb !== ”) { ?>

”
class=””
alt=””
/>

php } // end if statement

// if there’s not a image
else { echo ”; } ?>

And that’s it! Happy posting.

I’m usually not one to pay for WordPress themes, but the pool of free themes is rather boring and overused, and I don’t have the time to design custom themes for all of my blogs. I always use my own themes for my personal domain, jenn.nu, but for others I will often take advantage of pre-mades. Many people, both personal blog owners and commercial site owners, take advantage of pre-mades. I have already seen recipe blogs, identity theft protection companies and even debt consolidation companies use pre-made themes on their WordPress-powered blogs.

Anyway, I recently paid for a subscription to Elegant Themes. I was enticed by their Glow theme, which on its own is definitely worth $20 or more. They have several themes, and it seems as though they add new themes often, so there’s always a varied selection to choose from. Glow is definitely a popular theme. I’ve seen it in use on kallure.com and caity.nu, which is how I first discovered it and found out about Elegant themes!

I am not a fan of widgets. I never have been. From my earliest coding days I have always preferred to hard-code HTML and XHTML, rather than rely on a widget or pre-made block of code to do the job for me. I’m picky about styles, colors and fonts. Widgets take away some of the control you have over the final product. I love being able to get balls-deep in code and manipulate it to my satisfaction. I’ve worked with widgets for a few client websites (one sold ceiling fans; another sold light bulbs; a third specialized in wedding favors), and I can honestly say that 99% of widgets don’t allow you to do everything you may want to do. And if it can be done, it usually requires editing the widget settings and the widget .php file. And that is just an exercise in inefficiency.

How do you do your layouts? Do you code every single element on your own, or do you use widgets to make things go up quickly and easily?