Skat Design - Web design freelancer

For Sale: Oblong – Premium WordPress Theme

Skat — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:42:17 +0000

I’ve just released another premium wordpress theme for sale. OBLONG theme.

Oblong WordPress Theme is very user-friendly with its THEME OPTIONS PAGE that features a long list of settings.

Features:

4 Colors
Premium Unique Design
Tabeless Design
2 Columns
SEO Optimized
Fully Widgetized
Custom Widgets
Thumbnails automatically created, cropped and resized (if the thumbnail is not set with a custom field it pulls the first image in the post)
Ads ready (custom optimization from options page)
Featured Content (can be disabled/enabled)
Easy change feedburner id, facebook url and twitter username from options page
Gravatar Ready (custom default gravatar)
Threaded Comments
Social Bookmarking (automatically creates tinyurl for twitter)
Plug-in Free
WordPress 3.0 Menu Compatible
Custom Ajaxed Contact Page
Valid XHTML/CSS
Crossbrowser compatible
PSD designs
Read Me
Additional Support if needed
AND MANY MORE

You can see a LIVE DEMO HERE.

This theme has never been sold before. After selling it, it will never be sold again (you get full rights).

PRICE: $150

Paypal only

Any questions you may have please ask.

For Sale: PREVIEW – Premium WordPress Theme

Skat — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:33:50 +0000

I’ve just released another premium wordpress theme for sale. PREVIEW theme.

PREVIEW WordPress Theme is very user-friendly with its THEME OPTIONS PAGE that features a long list of settings.

Features:

3 Colors
Premium Unique Design
Tabeless Design
2 Columns
SEO Optimized
Fully Widgetized
Custom Widgets
2 level Categories Dropdown menu
Thumbnails automatically created, cropped and resized (if the thumbnail is not set with a custom field it pulls the first image in the post)
Ads ready (custom optimization from options page)
Featured Content (can be disabled/enabled)
Easy change feedburner id and twitter username from options page
Feedburner subscribers and twitter followers dynamical displayed
Gravatar Ready (custom default gravatar)
Threaded Comments
Social Bookmarking (automatically creates tinyurl for twitter)
Plug-in Free
WordPress 3.0 Menu Compatible
Custom Ajaxed Contact Page
Valid XHTML/CSS
Crossbrowser compatible
PSD designs
Read Me
Additional Support if needed
AND MANY MORE

You can see a LIVE DEMO HERE.

This theme has never been sold before. After selling it, it will never be sold again (you get full rights).

PRICE: $250

Paypal only

Any questions you may have please ask.

What is W3C Validation and Why Does My Website Need It?

Skat — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:15:08 +0000

What does it mean to have a validated website?

A validated website can refer to HTML/XHTML or CSS. To construct a validated website, a website designer will first have to determine which doctype to use. This is solely up to the designer and how the website will function. Then he will need to keep within the guidelines of the doctype.

Benefits of a Validated Website

The benefits of having a validated website are as follows:

Desired design effect
Efficient functionality
Cross-browser compatible
Search Engine Friendly

HTML STRICT DOCTYPE

The HTML Strict doctype is for websites that rely more on structure. It doesn’t allow for deprecated tags or elements and requires that the website designer stick to up-to-date code. It relies more on CSS to put together the website’s appearance.

HTML TRANSITIONAL DOCTYPE

Transitional allows for depreciated elements to be used. For example, if is no longer the standard method to set the font size, Transitional will still allow for it. However, the catch with using the transitional doctype is that the website may not function or have the same desired look when using different browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox). However, being validated still means efficient cross-browser functionality.

MORE DOCTYPES

There are plenty of other doctypes, but understanding the difference between a transitional doctype and a strict doctype is important. Another thing to note is that a website designer can get a website to look exactly the same using the transitional or the strict doctypes. So what’s the point? Well, basically it all stems down to sticking to one form of coding ensure that a website is properly structured.

VALIDATED CSS WEBSITE

CSS is the style associated to a web page all in a separate file. There are guidelines to follow, like the doctypes, and will ensure a clean, consistent website design that delivers the desired effect and proper functionality.

This article was written by Daniel Losada. If you enjoyed it you can read more at his blog: Web Design

For Sale: Gateway – Premium WordPress Theme

Skat — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 19:54:28 +0000

So, I`m selling my latest WordPress theme called “Gateway”.

Features:

5 Colors
Premium Unique Design
Tabeless Design
2 Columns
SEO Optimized
Fully Widgetized
Custom Widgets
Thumbnails automatically created, cropped and resized (if the thumbnail is not set with a custom field it pulls the first image in the post)
Ads ready (custom optimization from options page)
Featured Fading Posts (can be disabled/enabled)
Easy change feedburner id, twitter username and facebook url from options page
Gravatar Ready (custom default gravatar)
Threaded Comments
Social Bookmarking (automatically creates tinyurl for twitter)
Plug-in Free
WordPress 3.0 Menu Compatible
Custom Contact Page
Valid XHTML/CSS
Crossbrowser compatible
PSD designs
Spoonfed Read Me
Additional Support if needed
AND MANY MORE

FREE: My Diary – Premium WordPress Theme

Skat — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:14:05 +0000

This is My Diary. A free premium wordpress theme that I’ll give away. It is a 2 column theme available in 5 colors and compatible with most browsers including IE6. It’s very easy to use with its custom theme option page to change the settings. Also the theme is “widget ready” and supports “Featured Post”. It is “Ad Ready” and “Adsense Ready”. Of course XHTML/CSS valid.

You can see a DEMO here. If you want to use this theme please check the Read Me files inside the archive (there are 2 versions .pdf and .txt files). If you have any questions just ask. Hope you like it.

Features:

5 colors;
widget ready;
ads & adsense ready;
seo friendly;
valid xhtml/css;
featured post;
automatic thumbnails;
etc;

Ultimate Tips for Powerful SEO on your WordPress Blog

Skat — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:21:14 +0000

If you have a WordPress blog and you’re chasing the first place in Google, tried almost all SEO tactics and followed hundreds of advices you’ll definitely find this post useful. So, in this article, I’ll tell you some powerful seo tips but most important I’ll SHOW YOU how you can optimize the seo for your WordPress blog.

Optimize the “h1″ heading of your WordPress blog.

Instead of having the same “h1″ (which on most blogs is the blog title) on every page you can change it depending the page that loads. So open “header.php” file of your WordPress theme and change the h1 of your blog to something like this:

This code will show the post title or the page title in the “h1″ tags on the single posts or normal pages, and the blog title on the rest of your sections (ie. category, archive, search pages).

Set the “Read More” links to “nofollow”

Add the “nofollow” attribute to your “Read More” links. Change the default wordpress tag that generates these links to something like this:

Read More

Use a WordPress SEO plugin

Generally I don’t like to use plugins but this time I’ll recommend one. “All In One Seo Pack” is an amazing plugin and it’s a must for any blogger who chases the first places in Google. It’s extremely easy to use and automates a lot of things like setting up the canonical urls, setting up individual titles for every page or article you publish or generating meta tags automatically.

Make your title tags Seo Friendly

If you don’t want to use a seo plugin that automates this process here’s how you can do this manually:
Open “header.php” file of your wordpress theme and replace your title tag with one:


<?php if (is_home () ) {
    bloginfo('name');
} elseif ( is_category() ) {
    single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('name');
} elseif (is_single() ) {
    single_post_title();
} elseif (is_page() ) {
    bloginfo('name'); echo ': '; single_post_title();
} else {
    wp_title('',true);
} ?>

Source: http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-make-your-title-tag-seo-friendly

Add custom meta descriptions

You know that when searching online, in the results, people will read the title and the description first. If these two don’t attract their attention you lost them. Here’s how to set up a relevant description manually if you don’t want to use a seo plugin.
Open “header.php” file of your wordpress theme and paste this code between your “head” tags:

Source: http://www.wprecipes.com/wordpress-seo-add-meta-description-to-your-theme

Use “title” attribute to your images

Besides using the “alt” attribute which is a must you also should set up the “title” attribute. If you use a lot of images in your articles, with the help of this attribute you will definitely increase your traffic. Use keyword rich descriptions in both “alt” and “title” attributes. Google Images has a lot of fans. Why not take advantage of the traffic that it generates, by optimizing your images.

Customize your post’s URLs

Carefully customize the “slugs” of your posts. If you have a title like this for example “10 Seo Tips and Tricks for your WordPress Blog”, WordPress will generate automatically the slug in something like “http://www.yourblog.com/10-seo-tips-and-tricks-for-your-wordpress-blog”. Even if the urls are seo friendly, this is not enough. Get rid of the stop words or any unnecessary and irrelevant words in the “slugs”. Edit your urls to show something like this instead: “http://www.yourblog.com/seo-tips-tricks-wordpress-blog”. You get the idea.

Make some Internal Link Building

If you write an article related to some other article written in the past, make sure you link to the old article through its keywords. This way you can revive old post and, even better, you can grow in Google rankings.

Add “nofollow” attribute to your blogroll sponsored links

You know Google hates paid links don’t you? Or maybe you just want to stop the “PR” leak. If you have such links in your blogroll, make sure you set them to “nofollow”. It’s very easy and it will help your rankings in the long run. You can use the “Better Blogroll” plugin for this or if you don’t like plugins just follow this tutorial: “Adding nofollow attribute to your WordPress Blogroll” (see how I made Internal Link Building?).

Use the “strong” tag to give weight to your keywords.

It is recommended to use the “strong” tag at least once on your main keywords in your articles. More, it is also recommended to bold keywords in the beggining of your content and also at the end. But this will give your article an ugly spammy look if you use it without the need to emphasize something. The easy way is to style the “strong” tag. See the example below:

My Keyword Here

Make sure you don’t make abuse of the tag in this way.

Hope you’ll find this post useful and use these tips wisely to increase the traffic and the quality of your blog.
Cheers!

WordPress 3.0 Insight – main features and settings

Skat — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:13:00 +0000

I have installed WordPress 3.0 for a little test drive before it’s launched and I played a little with its new settings and features. What can I say? I, personally, am not so impressed, but we will talk more after 1 May when they’ll release the final version.

The first thing you’ll notice is the new installer. They’ve added a “password strength” section that will tell you it your password is week/strong. Also you can choose your desired username, getting rid of the old “Admin” name this way.

Another new thing in WordPress 3.0 is the “Twenty Ten” theme. The old “Kubrick” theme is now gone but its basic design still resides in the new one.

There is a good thing ,for newbies especially, that you can change its background color or the background imageand header by uploading your own image. Other basic settings like the background position, repeat and attachment are available.

Now let’s get to the new menu system that everybody talks about. This is indeed a very useful functionality. You can create page menus, category menus, custom urls menus or a mix of all three menus.

So, the next feature (I don’t know if I can call this a feature) is the merger with WordPress Multisite – WordPress MU in a shorter term. I don’t know if this is something good or bad because I used WP MU just a few times. One thing I noticed is that in order to use it you must add a line of code in the “wp-config.php” file.


define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

A new option called “Network” will appear in the “Tools” menu from the “Dashboard”.

Custom post types is another feature we will enjoy in WordPress 3.0. This feature will allows you to create any kind of post types like product pages, portfolio pages, etc. according to your needs.

Add this code to your theme’s functions.php file to create a custom post type in WordPress 3.0:

function my_custom_init() {
    $args = array(
        'label' => __('Albums'),
        'singular_label' => __('Album'),
        'public' => true,
        'show_ui' => true,
        'capability_type' => 'page',
        'hierarchical' => false,
        'rewrite' => true,
        'supports' => array('title', 'thumbnail')
        );

    register_post_type( 'album' , $args );
}

Check this site and this site if you want to learn more about the custom post types.

A feature that I really like in WordPress 3.0 is the “Shortlinks” function. Especially the tweeter users will love this function. If you don’t feel comfortable using shortening url services like bit.ly or tinyurl you can easy use the “Get Shortlink” button or use its function according to your needs.

Another cool feature of the new WordPress 3.0 is the possibility to create specific author templates. Now the theme makers can call a specific file (ie. author- john-doe.php) for each of the writers that contribute on the blog.

Last but not least feature that I’ll be talking about now is the possibility to customize the WYSIWYG editor within WordPress. If you want to see how you can enable this feature visit this site.

For more info about all the features included in WordPress 3.0 check out the WordPress Codex.

Display latest tweets on your WordPress blog or website without a plugin or hard coded php

Skat — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:08:51 +0000

There are a few plugins and some custom coded php scripts for displaying the latest tweets on your wordpress blog or website. Here’s a more simple solution for adding your latest tweet/s on your blog/website without a plugin or a homegrown solution that requires wordpress php filters in the functions.php of your theme or additional php coding.

This method requires calling a twitter javascript from twitter.com and a simple html unordered list:

1. Call the twitter script by placing this code in your blog’s/site’s footer just before the closing body tag :

Make sure you replace the text “your_twitter_id” with your twitter username and change the number of count=1 option to as many tweets you would like to be displayed. (ex. count=3 will display the latest 3 tweets).

2. Create an empty unordered list and make sure it has the “twitter_update_list” id assigned and voila. It is as simple as that.

Now you can style the list in any way you like.

How To: Add custom social bookmarking in your WordPress blog posts without a plugin

Skat — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:46:31 +0000

There are many social bookmarking plugins for WordPress out there like SexyBookmarks, ShareThis, Bookmarkify, etc, but I don’t like to use plugins when I can do things myself and exactly how I want it. Sure plugins are awesome for those who don’t know or are not interested in coding.

In this article I will show you, step by step, how you can make your own social bookmarking section that you can customize in a thousand ways. Of course, this post is for those who know at least basic wordpress/html/css/php coding and why not for those who want to learn and want to get their hands a little dirty.

So let’s begin. At first we have to create the html/php of our wordpress social bookmarking section:






If you liked this article please consider sharing it.

RSS Feeds
Digg This!
Stumble Upon
Bookmark on Del.icio.us
Tweet This!
Reddit
Share on Google Buzz

I only added the social networks that people usually use. You can add whatever network you want.

Then the css part:

/*--social bookmarking--*/
.bookmarking {
background: #e3e3e3;
width: 550px;
border: 1px solid #c5c5c5;
}
.bookmarking p {
font: normal 14px Arial, Verdana, Tahoma;
color: #555555;
padding-bottom: 10px;
line-height: 30px;
text-align: center;
}
.bookmarking ul {
list-style: none;
margin: 0 0 0 100px;
float: left;
}
.bookmarking ul li {
float: left;
margin-left: 10px;
}
.bookmarking ul li a {
width: 38px;
height: 38px;
text-indent: -9999em;
display:block;
}
.bookmarking ul li.rss-bookmark a {
background: url(rss-bookmark.png) no-repeat;
}
.bookmarking ul li.digg-bookmark a {
background: url(digg-bookmark.png) no-repeat;
}
.bookmarking ul li.stumble-bookmark a {
background: url(stumble-bookmark.png) no-repeat;
}
.bookmarking ul li.delicious-bookmark a {
background: url(delicious-bookmark.png) no-repeat;
}
.bookmarking ul li.twitter-bookmark a {
background: url(twitter-bookmark.png) no-repeat;
}
.bookmarking ul li.reddit-bookmark a {
background: url(reddit-bookmark.png) no-repeat;
}
.bookmarking ul li.buzz-bookmark a {
background: url(buzz-bookmark.png) no-repeat;
}
/*--social bookmarking end--*/

This is how the social bookmarking section we’ve made should look:

If you want to see a live demo just look at the end of this article and see the social bookmarking section. For my blog I’ve used this free set of icons: 110 Free Classy Social Media Icons. For the demo I’ve used a free set of icons for personal use from Fasticon. You can find hundreds of social bookmarking icons on IconFinder or by searching on Google.

Hope you enjoyed this article and find it useful. Cheers.

Skat Design - Web design freelancer

For Sale: Oblong – Premium WordPress Theme

Features:

For Sale: PREVIEW – Premium WordPress Theme

Features:

What is W3C Validation and Why Does My Website Need It?

What does it mean to have a validated website?

Benefits of a Validated Website

HTML STRICT DOCTYPE

HTML TRANSITIONAL DOCTYPE

MORE DOCTYPES

VALIDATED CSS WEBSITE

For Sale: Gateway – Premium WordPress Theme

Features:

FREE: My Diary – Premium WordPress Theme

Features:

Ultimate Tips for Powerful SEO on your WordPress Blog

Optimize the “h1″ heading of your WordPress blog.

Set the “Read More” links to “nofollow”

Use a WordPress SEO plugin

Make your title tags Seo Friendly

Add custom meta descriptions

Use “title” attribute to your images

Customize your post’s URLs

Make some Internal Link Building

Add “nofollow” attribute to your blogroll sponsored links

Use the “strong” tag to give weight to your keywords.

WordPress 3.0 Insight – main features and settings

Popular social bookmarking link codes and icons for your WordPress blog

Display latest tweets on your WordPress blog or website without a plugin or hard coded php

How To: Add custom social bookmarking in your WordPress blog posts without a plugin