15 Things Users Want To See Included On Theme Seller Sites

In an effort to follow up, Steven encouraged me to simplify his advice into a list of 15 items, making it easier for theme sellers to realize what changes need to be made…and hopefully implement them as well. Listen up theme sellers, here are the 15 things you must include on your website:

1. A pricing page
2. A link to the pricing page in the main navigation
3. Define types of support provided (forum, tickets, etc)
4. Simplify Your Pricing Optons (Steven saw one the other day with 5 barely different pricing options – frustrating)
5. Licensing details (GPL, Split GPL, etc.)
6. PSD’s or layered PNG’s available – even if as an upsell
7. If a monthly subscription, define what membership includes
8. Custom Widgets, Page Templates & Shortcode details further explained
9. Lifetime updates for your theme?
10. Support provided after membership ends? (some do – see table on SmashingMagazine)
11. Live demos a MUST (a few use screenshots) – all color schemes in demo recommended
12. Instructions & Detailed Documentation a MUST
13. 1+ new theme monthly if a club (and no false promises, gotta keep claims up-to-date)
14. Can footer branding be removed?
15. Can the theme purchased be used on multiple websites?

With WordCamp Seattle 2011 only 2 days after the meetup, I was surprised to see that this months meetup still pulled in a solid audience of 45 WordPress users, developers, “dev-signers” and more.  The topic and speaker may have had a lot to do with it. In the past, we’ve had speakers cover many topics about how to build and improve your website, but all that is worthless if you get hacked. That’s why we invited out guest speaker Andrew Villeneuve to present the topic of “Hardening WordPress: Securing your installation“.

Keeping Your Website Safe, Secure & PURE

Nowadays, WordPress is a popular choice not only as a blogging platform, but as a content management system. Although the WordPress developers work hard to patch exploits when they are discovered, users who self-host their own WordPress blogs are ultimately responsible for security. Unfortunately, not enough WordPress administrators take security seriously, and as a result, WP sites get needlessly compromised. “Hardening WordPress” will focus on securing an installation and protecting it from hackers. Topics covered will include upgrading, using HTTPS, setting permissions, making backups, best-in-class security plugins, and configuring .htaccess to build a strong firewall.

More About Andrew

Andrew Villeneuve is an entrepreneur and activist who discovered WordPress while looking for the ideal blogging platform in 2006. A lifelong Washingtonian, he is the founder and executive director of the Northwest Progressive Institute (a political strategy center working to raise America’s quality of life through innovative research and imaginative advocacy), as well as a columnist for Reporter Newspapers. He became a security evangelist after being repeatedly called on to assist friends in un-hacking their WordPress sites, which had been disfigured and/or compromised.

*FOR THOSE OF YOU LOOKING FOR PRESENTATION MATERIAL, IT WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ON THE MEETUP GROUP WEBSITE AND HERE ONCE WE GET IT IN.

WordPress Tips, Tricks & Hacks

One other huge WordPress advantage that you can get lot of free Tips, tutorials and hacks on WordPress. Sometimes you don’t know where to look for help, or even what to look for. In this article I am compiling a list about WordPress Tips, Tricks, and Hacks that you will definitely find useful.

1. Beginner’s Guide: How to install WordPress manually

There are a couple of ways to install WordPress, and you should do it in a way that works for you. Some hosts have “one-click” installs via applications that install WordPress without you getting your hands dirty. You can also install it manually with an FTP client or Shell access.

2. How to Build a Basic Portfolio WordPress Theme

f you’ve been following parts one and two of this portfolio website tutorial series you will already know how to design the concept in Photoshop and build a working demo in HTML/CSS. Now let’s take the design and convert it into a basic WordPress theme so you can easily manage and update your website through the popular WordPress application.

3. Add Useful Links to WordPress Admin Bar

In this tutorial, we’ll be building a simple plugin that will let us add some handy links (e.g. a Twitter search for the current post, analytics, and ad sales), as well as remove the links we don’t want.

4. Easily create multilingual sites with WordPress

Some days ago, I had to build a multilingual website using WordPress and the WPML plugin. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you what I’ve done to make a website available in three different languages.

5. Best Way to Have Quality Comments Only?

In this post, I want to share some ideas, along with a quick look at their pros/cons, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think would work best? Would it put you off commenting?

6. Killer hacks to enhance WordPress editor

When you’re a blogger, the editor is indeed something very important because it is the tool used to write your posts. In this article, I’m going to show you some hacks and tips to enhance WordPress editor. Enjoy!

7. Events List With Custom Post Types and Taxonomies

In this 2-part tutorial, we are going to extend our events list script to set up a new post type purely for the events, and create a new taxonomy for tagging our events.

8. How to Create Fancy JQuery Tooltip for Your WordPress Post Title

Usually, WordPress theme developer already provide a tooltip for post title. This tooltip appears when visitor hover the mouse over a post title in the home page or archive page or any page with linked post title.

9. How to List Categories along with Their Posts

To help site visitor finding one or two categories, We can use default widget or wp_list_categories to list the categories. In some case, We want to display the categories along with their posts. Unfortunately, this default widget and function can’t perform that. But this snippet can.

10. How to Create Preload Images with jQuery in WordPress

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to preload the images with jquery. With this feature your site can enhancing user exprience.

11. How to improve local WordPress development on a Mac

In this tutorial I will show you how to set up WordPress installs using MAMP in your Mac /Sites directory, how to set up multiple localhost aliases, and briefly talk about the various versions of WordPress I keep on my Macs.

12. How to find WordPress themes, quickly and easily

Sometimes it’s not easy to find the perfect WordPress theme. There are a lot of WordPress themes out there, but the perfect theme can at times seem like a needle in a haystack. To help you in your searching, we’ve put together the following guide to finding WordPress themes. If we’re missing a solid method, feel free to add your own tips in the comments.

13. How to Redirect Visitors to a Maintenance Page with Maintenance Mode

In this article, we will share two WordPress plugins that you can use to redirect your visitors to a temporary maintenance page while administrators can still work and access the site.

14. How to Add a Gallery in WordPress with a Lightbox Effect

In this article, we will show you how can add the native gallery in a WordPress post or page. We will also show you how to install a plugin that will allow your users to open the full-size images in a lightbox which will keep them from going to a different page.

15. How to Extend the Auto Logout Period in WordPress

Here’s a useful bit of code for increasing the time that cookies are kept, so that users can remain logged in longer. It was originally posted by Alex (Viper007Bond) on the WordPress StackExchange in response to a user’s question. It was originally posted by Alex (Viper007Bond) on the WordPress StackExchange in response to a user’s question.

16. Ten Things Every WordPress Plugin Developer Should Know

Having written several plugins myself, I’ve come to learn many (but certainly not all) of the ins-and-outs of WordPress plugin development, and this article is a culmination of the things I think every WordPress plugin developer should know. Oh, and keep in mind everything you see here is compatible with WordPress 3.0+.

17. Six .htaccess Tricks for Better WordPress SEO & Security

Here are six htacccess tricks that will help improve the security and SEO quality of your WordPress-powered site. We do this using .htaccess to establish canonical URLs for key peripheral files, such as your robots.txt, favicon.ico, and sitemap.xml files. Canonicalization keeps legitimate bots on track, eliminates malicious behavior, and ensures a better user-experience for everyone.

18. How to display Content from a Single Category in WordPress

If you have a category called Themes, and you want to display the last three posts from that category on your front page, in your blog sidebar, or somewhere else on your site, you can use this template tag.

19. Move WordPress Admin Bar to the Bottom

Not everybody likes the WordPress Admin Bar, which exists since WordPress 3.1, at the top of the browser. With just a bit CSS you can change it. The following function provides CSS directly in the footer of backend and frontend. It displays the Admin Bar at the bottom.

20. How to Remove the Admin Bar from WordPress 3.1

You may have noticed that there is a new admin bar add to WordPress 3.1 that shows up when you are logged in as a subscriber or above. While I can see that this might be useful on some sites, for most this is just an annoyance and makes the site look too generically ‘WordPress’ or detracts from existing functionality that you may have added, such as search adaptations.

21. Twenty Helpful WordPress SQL Queries Snippets

There are endless reasons for editing the WordPress database, but there are always those SQL queries that are needed more than the rest. And that is what we have for you today.

22. Twenty More WordPress Code Snippets and Hacks

When coding WordPress themes, especially if you do it regularly, its really useful to have a selection of code snippets in your toolbox to just ‘copy-n-paste’ as and when the functionality needs. Not just your most commonly used code, but also some snippets that can, when required, extend WP even further.

23. Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Plugin Development

We’ll be going over a few ways to get started in plug-ins development for WordPress. The steps are fairly simple and don’t require a large dedication to study. Rudimentary knowledge of PHP would be useful even with a basic understanding of the WordPress file structure and Administration panel.

24. How to Code a WordPress 3.0 Theme from Scratch

In this tutorial we are going to show you exactly how to code a WordPress 3.0 theme from the ground up to take advantage of all of these new features, as well as create a blogging-ready, minimal theme.

25. A Beginner’s Guide to Optimizing WordPress Websites

By default, WordPress websites are a lot like young athletes—skillful and full of promise, yet highly unrefined. In order to help your site reach its potential, you must provide coaching and assistance in certain key areas.

26. How to manually update your WordPress login

If you need to change your WordPress login, the easier is to use PhpMyAdmin and execute a simple SQL query to update it. Here’s a quick recipe to show you how to proceed.

27. Add custom parameters into the body_class() function

When creating a website on WordPress, it can be really useful to be able to add one (or more) custom parameter into the body_class() function. Here is a function I use very often when building sites for my clients.

28. Track post views without a plugin using post meta

Add this snippet into the functions.php of your wordpress them then follow step 1. and step 2. to display the number of views for each post.

29. Custom Post Type 404 Error Solutions and Fixes

WordPress 3.0?s Custom Post Types are undoubtedly a valuable feature. They allow you to extend the platform like never before, but also can occasionally cause some problems when developing; most commonly 404 issues.

30. How-to- Custom Post Types for Events (WordPress)

Chances are you found this page looking for a tutorial on how to create Events with Custom Post Types within WordPress.

31. How to Use WordPress Post Types and Taxonomies

With the release of WordPress 3.0, two great ways to better organize and display content were introduced: post types and taxonomies. These two advances improve WordPress’ role as an all-around content management system, and they continue to prove that WP is not just a blog platform.

32. An Updated WordPress Events List

Around this time last year, I wrote a post on how to create an Upcoming Events section on your WordPress blog. As several of you found out this January though, that code had an issue in it that meant it stopped working with the new year. In this post, we’re going to fix that.

33. WordPress $post, $term and $comment Object Cheat Sheet

There are several objects in WordPress that we use all the time, namely $post, $comment and categories/tags. If you’re like me though, you never remember everything that’s in there, or the names of the values you want.

34. Creating a Subscription Site Using WordPress

In this tutorial, I will walk you through creating a subscription site using WordPress and PayPal Subscriptions. By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to create and personalize the WordPress registration page and login page, create custom registration fields tailored to your site, and restrict content based on category and if the user is logged in. Along the way, I provide insights to WordPress fundamentals, and help point the way to further learning. This is a great WordPress tutorial for intermediate to advanced users who want to learn how to easily and effectively create subscription sites and use WordPress as a content-management-system.

35. Create a Universal Slider Manager in WordPress

In this video tutorial you will be learning how to create a very basic slider manager in WordPress. You can use the technique that you will learn from this tutorial to create more powerful slider managers for your WordPress themes or even plugins as I did for both of my themes on ThemeForest Space & Xero. Enjoy!

In this tutorial I will show you how to develop a WordPress Premium Widget similar to the Popular Posts Bars Widget at CodeCanyon.

37. Custom Portfolio Page For Your WordPress Theme

Whether you’re modifying an existing wp theme, or building a new one, this easy to follow tutorial will allow you to add the commonly used Portfolio/Gallery Page to your website. You can also use this same method to create other custom pages & custom categories (category-x.php) to display “WP Custom Post Types” in categories of your choosing.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to protect your web site from hackers, spammers, automated software, and bots that run rampant online. WordPress is by far the most popular self-hosted blogging solution, and for that very reason it’s also one of the most targeted for vulnerabilities. WordPress is so easy to setup and use from a shared hosting control panel that many non-technical people create web sites and blogs with no knowledge that they could be completely wiped out in a heartbeat -and all their hard work could be list in an instant.

Part 3: Walks you through converting your static theme into a WordPress template as well as how to tweak WordPress to run as your cms.

When most people think about WordPress, they think about blogs. If you look at the front page of WordPress.org, they talk a lot about blogging as well. What they don’t tell you is that WordPress can also double as a very powerful CMS ; you just have to set it up properly. It can be a bit tricky to get setup and working the way that you want; but this is where I come in.

Part 2: Walks you through converting the .psd layout to a valid HTML /CSS Template.

When most people think about WordPress, they think about blogs. If you look at the front page of WordPress.org, they talk a lot about blogging as well. What they don’t tell you is that WordPress can also double as a very powerful CMS ; you just have to set it up properly. It can be a bit tricky to get setup and working the way that you want; but this is where I come in.

41. WordPress as a CMS – Part 1

Part 1: Walks you through creating the site template in photoshop. You DO NOT get into anything WordPress in this part.

First off, I would suggest you touch base with John Chow (JohnChow.com). He makes $40k+ a month and at he heart of it all, he says consistency is key. His blog makes $500,000 a year in income. Oh, and he does this in only two hours a day. He spreads the word that “you will be successful if you consistently blog 2 hours a day.” It’s hard to deny his success. His success is made with affiliate marketing in mind. Pushing those thoughts aside, lets concentrate on the heart of the matter: Why Consistency Is Important To Long-Term SEO?

Consistency Is Key

I started First Time Online, a Seattle based web-agency that provides businesses with the services and tools necessary to build up a successful web-presence. I’m known for my ability to use organic methods in an effort to lower overhead costs and keep the budget simple. Building a website using WordPress or incorporating it into your website as a blog makes handling SEO that much easier, but it’s consistency that is key.

For most of my clients, I explain that when they first go live, they will see a short-tail response as a result of their initial marketing efforts via e-mail and social media. The long-term consistency is where SEO comes into play. Without pushing out new and relevant content, websites limit themselves to the amount of keywords they can be found for. My clients always complain how they want to be #1 for a keyword and I explain, “You have two options: Pay an SEO company a lot of money, or realize that as long as you put out relevant and strong content consistently, you will see significant traffic responses.”

I also find it interesting to note that the 80/20 rule is present when it comes to the concept of blog consistency and resulting traffic. You may push out 100 articles over 100 days, but at close examination, most of your SEO will come from 20% of them. Those two articles that made it on to LifeHacker, HuffingtonPost or simply went viral on StumbleUpon or Digg. You never know when it will happen, but consistently putting out content will assist in putting the odds in your favor.

In Conclusion: Be Consistent And Check Your Analytics

Before moving forward with an SEO plan, I leave you with this advice. Referencing Tim Ash (landing page expert), there are 3 keys to reaching your goals in online marketing that define what I call “Gravity”:

1. Acquisition (→) : Getting people to the site
2. Conversion (√) : Persuading them to take/select the desired action(s)
3. Retention (←) : Bringing them back as a client

Each step feeds the other and resemble a funnel. You have to be confident in the sites ability to convert, before dropping dough on SEO and any other acquisition methods available! Consistently pushing out content is key in helping you understand your websites ability to convert traffic and more importantly, to create a strong following.
Good luck!

WordCamp Seattle 2011 is happening on Saturday, April 16, 2011 at the University of Washington.  WordCamp Seattle is a one-day conference about WordPress – the world’s most popular content management system, blogging platform, and website creation tool.

Speakers will cover topics including an overview of WordPress, using WordPress, theme creation, plugin development, using WordPress to run your business, blogging, marketing, and SEO.

The event will be keynoted by best-selling author and speaker Scott Berkun who currently works for Automattic (the creators of WordPress) as Team Social lead.  Information about other speakers and an agenda for the event are available at: http://wordcampseattle.org/

Based on 53 Premium Theme Stores Minimum Pricing Plans…

• 62% have “No Pricing Pages”
• 31% have “Pricing” in their Navigation Bar
• 10% are “Subscription Only” models
• 33% mentioned “Footer Removal Rules”, of which 6 restricted removal!
• 40% allowed uploading to “Unlimited Domains”
• 21% included .PSD’s (In some cases, getting the .psd meant an increase of $100)
• 17% didn’t offer or didn’t define whether or not they offered Support
• 42% offered “All Theme Packages”, though in many cases, there were limits set.

(*These findings can be seen in further detail via the graph later in this article.)

A Little Background Information: Why This Matters?

Now more than ever, the threat of malicious code in free themes is growing when you head outside of the dedicated WordPress Theme Gallery, and the same holds for poorly coded themes. Quoting Ryan Imel of WPCandy.com, it’s “easy for devs to jump in before they really know what they’re doing, creating a nasty situation”.

I’m hunting through themes on a daily basis, assisting clients on how to locate the perfect theme for their business, and while there’s somewhat of a standard for what determines a well-coded theme, price remains a constantly changing variable. The goal of this article is to help give Theme Shops a better idea of what they are up against in 2011 in terms of Pricing Models! Hopefully, by reviewing their competitors pricing options, there may be some level of a standard among all theme stores. Ryan said it best, “There are a number of options, both free and paid, with varying levels of complexity and support. How do you even begin to choose?”

What Do WordPress Developers and Theme Developers Have To Say About Pricing?

In January, WPCandy Author/Founder, Ryan Imel, covered The future of WordPress Themes in 2011. He posed the following question:

“Where do you think WordPress themes are headed in 2011? What will be the new innovations and techniques that everyone will be talking about in 2011?”

With responses from big names in WordPress, including,Matt Mullenweg, Jason Schuller, Adii Pienaar, and more, I was surprised to see that none of them covered pricing. I decided to “Ctrl+F” the page for the word “Price” just to be sure…and discovered only 1 use of the word, out of context.

Really? Nothing about pricing changes? I can understand that for WordPress (being a free platform) it’s hard for community members to talk numbers, profits and more, but the truth of the matter is simple: Premium Themes cost money, and what’s included is a determining factor for many buyers!

Where Premium Theme Sites Are Missing The Mark: Pricing!

After spending countless hours going through them all, I’m beginning to realize a common trend with Premium Theme sites. They can’t seem to agree on a pricing model and what to include. There’s a lot you need to watch out before buying a theme, making it that much harder to decide. You may buy one thing and end up having to pay more for the “whole package”. Here’s a rough description of my experience.

Before reviewing the statistics below, bear in mind that my goal is not to target any specific company as doing something wrong. I’m simply trying to show you what competitors are doing and I leave it up to you to decide whether or not their methods are hurting or helping their sales numbers and overall user experience.

Premium Theme Stores & Their Minimum Pricing Plan:

• 62% have “No Pricing Pages”
• 31% have “Pricing” in their Navigation Bar
• 10% are “Subscription Only” models
• 33% mentioned “Footer Removal Rules”, of which 6 restricted removal!
• 40% allowed uploading to “Unlimited Domains”
• 21% included .PSD’s (In some cases, getting the .psd meant an increase of $100)
• 17% didn’t offer or didn’t define whether or not they offered Support
• 42% offered “All Theme Packages”, though in many cases, there were limits set.

These findings can be seen in further detail via the graph below – [*KEY: THEME STORE (Name+Link To Commercial Theme Store), PRICING PAGE (Link To Pricing Page), PIN (Pricing In Navigation), MP (Minimum Pricing Package), RF (Ability To Customize Footer and Remove Theme Branding), UNL (Upload Them To Unlimited Domains), .PSD (.PSD Included), SUP (Support), ALL THEMES (All Themes Package)]

Locating The Premium Theme That’s Right For You!

There are simply too many Premium Theme websites to track. (Believe me, I’m trying). The list can go on and on, and I’m increasingly growing concerned for anyone trying to do this on their own for the first time. I found the Premium WordPress Theme Guide by iThemes to be very helpful, but a guide isn’t what we need. Graphs like the one above are necessary for individuals trying to locate a theme and I’m doing my best to track them all. I have a constantly updated “Premium Themes” listed which includes, Frameworks, Marketplaces, Shops & search advice to better assist you to locate the theme of choice. Dedicated theme searching sites like WordPressThemes, ThemeFinder & PremiumWP are very helpful, but still stand to improve their search functions. WP Hell is getting closer to what we need and, while I’m not sure of the relevance to Hell, this is a great Premium Themes Directory (search).

Hopefully this area of WordPress will improve in 2011 and I look forward to meeting the company that stands up to the task!

*UPDATE – Looks like somebody is up to the task: ThemeSorter.com – Launched in February, owner Steve and his wife are working non-stop to get every premium/commercial theme from the major sellers indexed in detail.

PowerPoint Presentation By John Chow

Last night, at the  March 9th Meetup, we had guest speaker John Chow and brought in nearly 100 RSVP’s. John has provided me with the power point presentation used for the evening. Many of you have asked for it, so here you go:

How To Make Money with Your WordPress Blog
By: John Chow

Details: In this action packed Seattle WordPress meetup, John Chow will show you a method to make money from your WordPress blog that is beyond the “put up a blog and put advertising on it” model. He will reveal all the tools, plugins, systems and tricks that enable his blog to generate over $500,000 a year in income. Oh, and he does this in only two hours a day.

About The Speaker: John Chow rocketed onto the blogging scene when he showed the income power of blogging by taking his blog from making zero to over $40,000 per month in just two years. Today, John Chow dot Com has over 100,000 RSS readers, over 100,000 newsletter subscribers and over 50,000 Twitter followers. John Chow dot Com is ranked number 14 on the AdAge Power 150 list and number 1 in the list of the Top 50 Canadian Internet Marketing Blogs.

Seattle WordPress Meetup: Thank You Founders Co-Op/TechStars Seattle

With over 300 members in the group, the SeattleWordPressMeetup is growing fast! We owe a huge thanks to Chris Devore & Andy Sack of Founders Co-op for sponsoring the meetup space at TechStars Seattle.

Don’t forget to sign up for next month: Seattle WordPress Meetup – April 14th

What sets ThemeSorter apart from other sites is its in-depth search functionality and the amount of detail provided for each theme. Inspired by popular online shopping giants, finding a theme on ThemeSorter is a matter of clicking on an initial category of interest (format, niche, color or design style) then refining results by any combination of additional criteria including features, price and user rating. Each theme has a full detail page with description, features and screenshots of every color scheme along with a “Live Demo” button and ratings/comments from the community.

ThemeSorter currently has 327 themes from 12 sellers and dozens of designers indexed. Having added more than 100 themes since going online less than one month ago, they are on their way to meeting their goal of 1,000 themes indexed by the end of summer. In addition to being a useful premium WordPress theme search engine, ThemeSorter also maintains an active blog with the latest community news plus a regularly updated list of coupon codes and deals.

I’m happy to report that finding a theme that’s right for you is finally getting easier!

The weekend is about to start and I figured It’d be nice to leave you all with something to think about. A client asked me this question in August 2009:

My response to his question in an e-mail 2 years ago:

Has Much Changed?

Has much changed since my response in 2009? People are still trying to figure out what works best for them. It’s not a guarantee that one will work for you. Figure out your goals and decide which method, if not both, will help acquire & convert your traffic (aka: better ROI). Give this question some though and feel free to comment. If anything else, bear this in mind before you carry out your next campaign.

Have a great weekend!