The Artiste theme by Orman Clark of Premium Pixels is a flexible and easy-to-use WordPress theme for artists, designers, photographers, and other creative types. Like all of his themes, this first word that came to mind as I was first considering this theme was “clean.” Orman is the master of themes that have the capacity for a lot of content, yet maintain a certain level of clean minimalism. These themes are also very straightforward to tweak and make all your own (I’ll get into that in a future post).

My Freelance Jam co-host, Brian Casel, and I purchased this theme to house the 2012 version of our podcast website (visit the site to check it out in action). With a few simple edits we were able to turn this theme into the perfect container for our ever-growing library of podcast episodes. Since launching last week, we’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback about the design and layout. This theme really makes it easy to browse our episodes and the single show pages display each episode video at the top with well-organized content below. Even the comment threads are well-designed.

Oh, and it’s already set to support both video and audio content, which was perfect for us.

Offering both “dark” and “light” templates for starters, you can use one of those or take the design whichever direction you’d like with some basic CSS knowledge. We really enjoyed customizing this theme and it took us less than a week to go from purchase to launch. Awesome theme!

A few months ago I came across Site5, a web hosting company that includes web designers (that’s me) as their target customer group. I signed up just to try it out and within a week I had transferred all of my smaller sites from 1and1 and shut down that account. Site5 was that good.

Here’s what I love about Site5 hosting for WordPress:

• Setting up a new account is painless & fast
• They have the easiest-to-use control panel (cPanel) of any shared host I’ve used
• Setting up a new MySQL database for WordPress site is also painless & fast (ready right away – I don’t like the automated WordPress installs by the way)
• Their support is great. The live chat availability is usually my go-to method of support
• If you have existing WordPress websites that run on a cPanel-based web host, they will migrate them to their own server FOR FREE. That’ll save you some time!
• They have several options for scaling if your website gets too popular

This is just a heads up that Envato is back with their annual “Birthday Bundle” for 2011. This is ALWAYS a great deal and you get some nice WordPress themes, HTML templates, PSDs, and a bunch of other stuff. In fact you’ll get over $500 worth of files for a whopping $20. What a deal!

It’s a limited time deal and only good until August 26th, so check it out today.

1) Download and install the Genesis Post Teasers plugin. Also, make sure you’re already running the Genesis Theme Framework.

2) In your WordPress admin section, go to Genesis > Theme Settings. You’ll see a new panel called Homepage Teasers. Here you can set things like number of full posts before the teasers kick in, width height, thumbnail image size, etc. It’s super flexible.

Here’s a screenshot of the settings I currently have set on my site:

I realize that this “tweak” is pretty much limited to installing a plugin, but it makes a HUGE difference and really allows me to keep my WordPress template clean and simple. Give it a try!

One of the things I’m going to try to do with TheDailyTheme is give follow-up tweaking advice or tips for each theme that I post. Most of the themes that I post here I’ve used for actual websites, and tweaking is always involved.

The tweak I’d say I make the most with any site running on the Genesis theme framework is to change the text in the footer. I’m sure WordPress and StudioPress like the links back to their respective sites, but you probably want to put a link to your site there if you’re a web developer.

There’s more than one way to do this. First, I’ll show you one method using the hooks feature of Genesis. This is the method I’ve been using and it will help you get a grasp on how hooks work in case you need to edit the header, navigation, etc.

The “total control” method

1) Purchase, download, and install Genesis and the child theme you’ll be using.

2) Download and install the free Genesis Simple Hooks plugin.

3) Go to the Genesis > Simple Hooks option on the left menu of your WordPress installation and scroll all the way down to the option that says genesis_footer Hook.

4) Select the “Unhook genesis_do_footer()…” checkbox to overwrite what  is already there. Also, if you’d like to run any custom PHP or WordPress shortcodes, select the appropriate checkboxes for those as well.

5) By default, Genesis outputs the following resulting code in the genesis_do_footer() hook*:

<div class="gototop">

<a rel="nofollow" href="#wrap">Return to top of page</a>

</div>
<div class="creds">

Copyright © 2010  · <a title="Genesis Framework" href="http://www.studiopress.com/themes/genesis">Genesis Framework</a> by <a href="http://www.studiopress.com/">StudioPress</a> · <a title="WordPress" href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a> · <a href="http://dev.liftdevelopment.com/xyz/wp-login.php">Log in</a>

</div>

A good method for customizing this is to simply paste in the above code and edit what you’d like. I typically like to leave the “gototop” div in place, but I usually take out the various links next to the copyright. So I paste in something simple like the following:

<div class="gototop">

<a rel="nofollow" href="#wrap">Return to top of page</a>

</div>
<div class="creds">

Copyright © <?php echo date('Y'); ?> <a title="Lift Development" href="http://www.liftdevelopment.com">Lift Development</a>

</div>

The “echo date” portion will pull in the current year so you don’t have to worry about editing that at any time. Pretty simple and you can put anything you want there including links, graphics, and text.

*NOTE: You can use the Firebug add-on for Firefox (my favorite) to view the default outputted HTML of each hook, or simply use the “View Source” option in your browser of choice.

The “uber-simple” method

Okay now that I’ve shown you the method that you can use for any of the hooks, I’m going to show you a super simple way to edit the format/content of the footer, post meta, and post info regions.

Just download and install this free plugin from StudioPress.

I’ve been using the hooks-method to edit the content of the footer for quite a while and I feel like it gives you the most control of the various hook regions, but if all you’re concerned about is the copyright region, the above plugin will get the job done.

The very first theme I’m going to cover for TheDailyTheme is the Genesis Theme Framework by StudioPress. It’s only fitting as this has become my theme framework of choice whenever I develop new websites for clients (as well as my own – I’m using it on this very site). There are a lot of WordPress theme frameworks out there, but Genesis is currently my favorite.

One of the primary benefits of using a theme framework for WordPress is you can get a head start on the design and layout of your new website. Most websites have some sort of header, navigation, main content area, sidebars, and footers. With a framework like Genesis, these regions are pre-defined and you don’t have to build the tags, regions, and functionality for each of them. Instead, you can simply hook into these defined pieces and build on top. It really makes the process of building a website much more efficient.

The approach to working with Genesis is to first install it as a stand-alone theme, and then install and switch to a child theme. The Genesis theme options remain active but the styles, images, etc pull from the child theme files. StudioPress offers a large assortment of pre-made Genesis child themes that you can purchase, or you can simply develop your own which is what I typically do. See the StudioPress “Introduction to Child Themes” page for a great guide to get started.

One of the features I really like about Genesis is this concept of “hooks.” For example, you can tap into a hook that executes before, on top of, or after the defined “footer” region (through the use of a free plugin from StudioPress). You can even execute PHP and WordPress shortcodes in that hook. And you can do it within WordPress instead of having to manually go in and edit PHP template files. It’s super slick.

Other great features of the Genesis theme framework include:

• Advanced SEO options for each page, post, and the site as a whole (one of the best SEO-ready frameworks available)
• Six default layout options (full-width content, content-sidebar, sidebar-content, etc)
• The ability to set up custom sidebars for unique pages
• Custom widgets to display pages, extended post information, etc.
• Multiple navigation menu configurations & depths
• Automatic framework updates

Who should use this WordPress theme?

The Genesis theme framework is ideally suited for a front-end web developer or designer. While Genesis is a functional theme right out of the box, customization will require knowledge of CSS and HTML through a child theme. But the customization options are endless once you dig in and get to know it a little bit.

If you are not a web developer, Genesis can still be a great starting point for your WordPress website if you install one of the many child themes from StudioPress. If you’d like to be able to do some point-and-click design without needing to know HTML and CSS, be sure to check out the Prose child theme.

Aside from that, Genesis is perfectly suited to run a wide variety of websites – everything from a business to a non-profit to a church to a real estate company. Genesis is a great starting point for any site.

Up next, I’ll show you a handy tweak for the Genesis theme framework.

Why start from scratch?

There are times when you want absolute control. But having absolute control often times also means having the time, energy, and money to pay for it. Much of the time you can do just fine without having to re-invent the wheel.

That’s what I love about WordPress and WordPress templates (known as “themes”). You can launch a great-looking site, tweak it a bit to match up with the look and branding you’re trying to emulate, and launch it for the world to see…rapidly and affordably. You can then focus your attention on creating awesome content and interacting with the visitors to your site.

I’m a WordPress designer and developer. I’ve built plenty of sites from scratch, and I’ve also launched a growing number of sites for clients on a tight budget using pre-built WordPress themes. To be honest, much of the time I’m happier with the final product of the theme-based approach. Yet sometimes the final product looks nothing like the original theme.

For example, this is my brand’s website: www.liftdevelopment.com

I think it looks decent and it has resulted in increased business and numerous visitor compliments. Well, I have to confess that I didn’t start from scratch. It’s actually based on this theme from ThemeForest.

They don’t really look that similar, do they? Actually they really look nothing alike. I’ve made a few tweaks to the original theme design and ended up with a completely unique website. And it didn’t take long to launch.

The purpose of TheDailyTheme is to bring you a steady dose of premium WordPress themes and frameworks that you can download, install, and tweak. One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve accumulated a nice collection of premium themes is that much of the time I had no idea what to expect before I made each purchase. I didn’t really know what the theme options panel looked like, what was possible, etc. This site will provide you with theme reviews, discovery, pros and cons of each theme, and demonstrations of specific tweaks you can make to improve each theme.

I spend a good portion of my project schedule tweaking themes (see TweakMyTheme.com) and TheDailyTheme is where I will be sharing what I learn…hopefully on a daily basis before too long. Read, enjoy, say hi, and get tweakin’!