Follow the Official Twitter Hashtag

Social Media seems to be where it’s at these days and it’s no different with Headway Themes! If you live on twitter all day like some of us do, make sure you following the official Headway Themes hashtag, #headwaywp. People ask various questions, polls, etc. and a great way to give back would be to help them out.

Answer Community Members Posts on the Official Support Forums

A great way to give back to the community is to answer questions community members are asking in the support forums. When Headway Themes begins to add another person for support, they tend to look inside their own community first. So if you started now, maybe we’d look at offering you a job later on.

Like the Official Headway Themes Facebook Page

If you like to use Facebook, make sure you “like” the official Headway Themes Facebook page so that you could be entered in any official giveaway Headway Themes offers to only the Facebook friends. You could even get to know your fellow Headway Themes users a little more personal as you can friend them! ;)

Write a tutorial out on your blog

Another great way to help out the community is to write a tutorial out or create a screencast. This could be something you did figured out with one of your recent projects, or could be a new cool way of doing something.

Contribute to the Headway Hub

And of course you could even write for Headway Hub. If you want to reach a lot of Headway Themes users with your tutorials, screecasts, or anything else related to Headway, you can post on here.

As you can see there are lots of ways for you to contribute to the Headway Themes Community. Not only would I love to have you out helping making my job easier, but Grant and Clay would love to see more community involvement. Where will you be contributing?

This video runs just under 14 minutes. I tried to get it under 10, but there’s just too much awesomeness in it to make it any shorter! If you get stuck or need a bit of help, let me know in the comments!

Plugins Used: Gravity Forms (aff link), Custom Post Type UI, Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types

Video on Custom Post Types if you need help creating them.

What do you think? Does this sound like a good idea?

In this video, I take a look at how to setup a quote form so that it populates contact information and creates an estimate on Freshbooks. It’s just over 15 minutes long. Next time we’ll take a look at doing something else with these two very powerful plugins!

Redirection Plugin Visit the Plugin directory.

Backup Buddy

This is the first paid plugin on the list and there’s a lot of reasons why. A few weeks ago I posted on the Headway Themes blog a way I use Backup Buddy to move a site from one server to another. This is just one way I use Backup Buddy. My every day use of Backup Buddy is to use it to get backups of the sites I maintain. What I like about this plugin is the versatility it has. You can use is just as a backup (it backups the database and content), or you can use it to move site around. It even allows you to choose where you want your backups to go. A lot of my backups go directly to my Dropbox account. This way they are saved on my computer AND on Amazon S3 (who Dropbox uses).

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator is a free plugin you can download from the plugin directory. It not only ads the necessary code to your blog to enable logging, but also has a dashboard widget that allows you to see some important analytics data. I took a screenshot of the Headway Hub’s traffic (hidden some stuff for now) so you can see what the widget does.  There’s enough information here for that you can look at it daily and not always need to go into the GA website to look at this data. One thing I do everyday is make sure I log into each site I maintain. Having these analytics right on the dashboard helps me monitor how the site is doing and make adjustments to the content, etc.

Google Analyticator Dashboard Panel

Gravity Forms

This is the last plugin on this list that’s a premium plugin. Gravity forms is the best form plugin out there. I was lucky enough to purchase it a few years ago before they changed to a yearly support model. Even if I hadn’t though, I would be purchasing this plugin every year. There is no limit to how many forms you can make with this plugin, and the features of the plugin are awesome! On Headway Hub alone, I’ve got 5 forms that do different things. If you wanted to submit an article for the Hub, the form you’re using was made with Gravity Forms. It also allows you to make a pretty complicated form with logic that would display different fields based on previous answers and can even email to different places depending on what answers are to fields. A very handy plugin that everyone should use.

LiveFyre

LiveFyre (link to the plugin) is a great comment system. It seems that blogs nowadays always run some sort of comment system other than the WordPress default system. While many people like Disqus or Instant Debate (who’s own by Automattic), I prefer to use LiveFyre. What I like about LiveFyre does that the others don’t (or at least the last time I used them they didn’t) is keep your comments in your database. They also keep them in their service as well. It also allows commenters the ability to use their Facebook or Twitter accounts to login to leave a comment on your site. Have trouble dealing with spam on your blog? Use LiveFyre and I’ll guarantee that you’ll see a decrease! (Also make sure you use Askimet as a backup) LiveFyre is free for up to 1 MILLION page views a month. So there’s no reason to not give it a try.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, or YARPP for short, is a must have plugin for any blog. Not only does it help with SEO (by linking to other liked blog posts on your blog), but it keeps readers on your site longer. If you want to do a little coding work, you can even create your own template for how the posts get displayed. Earlier this year, I showed you how you can create a custom YARPP template with Headway. It was back when Caitlin and I were running Headway Toolbox, but the post is still up on the Headway Themes blog.

Well there are my 5 plugins I use everyday, are any of these on your list? Do you use different ones? Let me know yours in the comments!

Photo Credit: Scarleth White

I’m super excited to be launching the revised site today. In case you weren’t aware Corey Freeman, who used to run Headway Hub has sold it to us here at Headway Themes. One thing we did was make the products here free, but other than that we’ve left the site pretty dormant. That’s changing…and in 5 ways.

Community Articles

Besides the 3 posts a week I’m going to be doing, I’m hoping we’ve have enough community support to get 2 community posts a week. In the sidebar to the right, there’s a big button that says, “Submit Article.” If you’ve got a tutorial, news, opinions, you’d like to share with the community submit a post.

Plugin Reviews

A big question I’m always fielding in support is what plugins work well with Headway Themes. So we’ll be taking a look at a plugin a week. To start off you may be already familiar with some of them, as I’m going to start from the beginning, but over time there will be ones you likely haven’t used. If there’s a plugin you like that’d you’d like me to review (or you can submit a review yourself) let me know.

Updated Content

One thing I’m really striving for is to keep the content here updated to the latest version of Headway. If you come across a post that’s got out of date content, please click the link at the end and let me know if it’s outdate or not working for you. I’ll add the post to a list so that I can make sure to look at updating in.

New Screencast Series

There’s a lot of people that love the screencasts I’ve been doing Tuesdays over at the Headway Themes blog, so I’m starting a new screencast series here.  It’s not going to necessarily cover everything Headway. Believe it or not, Headway is just one part of the toolbox. There’s plugins that prove to be very useful and most of all WordPress. This series will be looking at way to use everything in your toolbox so each post might not be just about Headway. It could be about something in WordPress, or a plugin.

Better Commenting System

If you’ve been around the Headway Themes community for awhile, you know we love LiveFyre as a comment system. We’re moving tot he LiveFyre comment system because we believe it’s a better system than the WordPress default comment system. We hope you’ll like it too!

And that’s about everything with this launch. I’ve updated the design a little bit. Change the logo since we didn’t have a PSD (photoshop file of it) file, and starting a tips and tricks newsletter. And I’ve got a fee more surprises up my sleeve that I’ll be releasing over the next two weeks.

What do you think so far?

As the master, Jim Connolly, puts it, a “thunky” is a social media project he developed in order to try and help business owners and entrepreneurs get massively better results from their social media networking and social media marketing.

The idea behind a thunky is that you own your own name online. You have a central hub of short, interesting, relevant updates pertaining to your business/personal brand. Because search engines love regularly updated sites, you’ll start ranking better for your own name or business brand.

How Does it Work?

1. You develop a site like this one or Grant’s, which you own.
2. You use your site, to post the best of the short updates, which you currently post to social networking sites like Facebook.  Important note: You do not post EVERY update to your site, just those that you believe are relevant to your business or likely to be of value to your prospective clients, [customers or target audience].
3. Then, once that update is posted to your site, you share it via Facebook etc, just like you do now.

I’m going to walk you through how to create a “thunky” using the powerful headway themes premium wordpress theme. Are you ready?

How to Create a Thunky with WordPress and Headway Themes

1. Install WordPress

Before we begin building your site with headway themes, you’ll need to install wordpress on your website. The wordpress codex can help walk you through the installation process.

2. Purchase and Download Headway Themes

Purchase a copy of Headway Themes and download your personal or developer version from the headwaythemes.com dashboard.

3. Install Headway Themes via The Theme Uploader

Head over to the wordpress administrative dashboard → appearance → themes → and click “add new.” Upload the headway_xxx.zip folder to your website and click “install.” Be sure to activate the theme after it’s installed.

4. Purchase and Download the “Get Thunky” Skin

Head over to the skins page and purchase the “Get Thunky” skin. This skin is specially designed for a short updates blog and comes with 5 different color schemes.

5. Install “Get Thunky”

Head over to the wordpress adminstrative dashboard → plugins → add new and click “upload.” Upload the “getthunky.zip” file to your website and click “install.” Be sure to activate the plugin after it’s installed.

6. Activate the “Get Thunky” Skin

Go to the wordpress administrative dashboard → headway → configuration and scroll down to the “skins” option. Select “Get Thunky” from the dropdown and then click save changes.

7. Create a Two-columned Layout

The “Get Thunky” skin is optimized for a two columned layout. Go into the headway visual editor and edit the blog index. From the sidebar, select “leafs and columns” and click the “columns” subpanel button. Change the number of columns from 1 to 2 and then save changes and refresh.

8. Link Pages to the Blog Index

Once you’ve refreshed the page, select “linking” from the toolbar at the top of the visual editor and click “save and link.” Hold down CTRL (Or APPLE) and select all of the system pages except for the blog index and all of the normal pages. Then click the “save and link” button. This will give your blog a uniform layout.

9. Start Posting!

You’re ready to start posting updates! Congratulations on your brand new thunky.

Any Questions?

What questions do you have about creating a “thunky?” Have you made your own? Share your links and stories below!

body.custom.blog div#header {background: url(mysite.com/images/blogheader.png);}

body.custom.single div#header {background: url(mysite.com/images/singleheader.png);}

body.custom.single div#pageid-3722 {background: url(mysite.com/images/salespageheader.png);}

You can find out which body tag to use with the help of firebug for firefox. If you use chrome, it comes with his own developer tools.

The above code can be added to either the custom.css file or the live css editor. This code will not put an image over your site name or tagline.

If you want to have multiple clickable headers, many have used the dynamic headers plugin with headway.

How to Upload Your Background Images

You can upload your background images by following these steps:

1. Login to your wordpress administrative dashboard.
2. Go to media–>add new
3. Upload your header image
4. Copy the file URL for use with your CSS Code.