Dec 17 2009
My another WP theme is here. Dark color theme with very attractive background. Hope you will like it and use it on your blog. Awaiting your further suggestions.
Theme Features:
- Two Columns
- Right Sidebar
- Plain Content Area
- Nice Header Image
- Black Color
Comments Off
Dec 08 2009
While learning Wordpress, I have designed a theme for e-commerce / Shopping related blogs. I hope you will like it. I would like your suggestions so that I can design much better themes in future. Thank You
Theme Features:
- Two Columns
- Right Sidebar
- Plain Content Area
- Nice Header Image
- Released Under GPL
Nov 23 2009
CityChain.com
Introduction
City Chain is one of the key players in the watch retail industry. With over 200 retail shops throughout SE Asia and the Far East, City chain is marketed as a sleek, professional brand with a website to match.
Form
Upon entering the City hain website, you are greeted with a trendy looking Flash intro that loads quickly and uses colour and patterns efficiently to attract your interest. With the option to skip the movie, it’s a very modern design that is correctly laid out in a good sequence. The home page which follows is just as nice-looking, but is left aligned while the intro is centre aligned. This detracts a bit from having a consistent design.
The main home page also has a Flash intro of a basketball star in sporty poses on a background of a lightning field and a large watch imposed in suitable places. City Chain has managed to convey this difficult-to-design message quite well and it’s very professional looking without being too corporate.
At the top of the page are red buttons containing navigational elements and the logo is in the top left. A few details made me think that this website is really well designed – the navigation was all in one place and simple to view, the elements of the page were simple but effective with colour and the focus was on the product (which is after all, why people are visiting this website).
I liked the Asian characters next to the logo and also for translation on the pages. It was essential this site was in another language as their shops are in Asia – but by being able to see the site in English I believe City Chain will reach a wider audience. The translation elements need to be consistent however – it would be good to choose to view the site in either language before entering it or making sure that only English is displayed when clicking the top right English button, as the translation buttons are in different places on different pages and some are interactive while some are not. This could confuse viewers who like to know where to find the right button!
On the Catalogue page, it would have been good to read a short paragraph about each of the brands so that I had an idea what they were about. The layout varies from page to page but this was done quite well from a one column layout to a two column one and kept my interest. It could help though if the red tabs on the left of the Catalogue page matched the red tabs on the left of the Contact Us page etc.
It was also refreshing to see a lack of advertising or Google Ads on the pages and I’m glad City Chain think their brand is more worthwhile content than someone else’s ads.
Function
Navigation was very easy to follow, with a main menu at the top with bright red buttons. The rollovers on the buttons are quite slow however and I have often found this to be the case when image rollovers are used. It could be worth making the image rollovers into textual ones by changing the CSS hover style. I know it wouldn’t be the same font as the logo, but believe me, customers will hardly notice with the red boxes and the fact that they are reading and clicking on the text instead of just looking at it.
There is a confusion between languages especially in the customer service page. If the default language is english, then all the pages should be in english without prompting the user to choose the language. Though the flash is attractive, I found it very lacking in terms of content. The “about us” page needs to work harder. If they consider themselves as a key player in the watch industry, we would want to know more about them! I would also like to read more about the different models they have, faqs… more, more and more.
The site is very dead in terms of content and there is no buzz at all. The company needs to re-think if they want any web presence at all. Perhaps if they allocate abit of budget in online advertising, things might get better?
Conclusion
Competitors watch out – if City Chain put as much content and presentation into their products as they do into their website, customers will be queuing up to buy! There are a few layout and design issues and a competition or special offer might be needed to attract new customers but this is a cool website that is attractive to modern watch hunters. Excellent concept and (mostly) well executed!
Comments Off
Nov 18 2009
There are only few who knows how to tweak wordpress theme. Well here I am presenting how to Tweak your Wordpress theme to Speedup your Blog. I think you people are aware about that every Wordpress theme contents CSS file, I just mean that if you can tweak the CSS file in your theme, then it will help your blog in speeding up.
There are several tools from which you can optimize your wordpress blogs CSS file. One of them is CSS Compressor, It compress your CSS to increase loading speed and thus also helpful in saving bandwidth. CSS Compressor allows you to choose three levels of compression i.e. Light, Normal, Super Compact. The “Normal” mode should work well in most cases, creating a good balance between the Light and Super Compact.
Explaining by taking an example: (Inove Wordpress Theme)
The CSS file comes along with Inove theme is of 22 KB, Now lets tweak it using CSS Compressor.
So, results are shown above, if you think compressing the CSS file will help you then use CSS compressor for sure.
Comments Off
Nov 03 2009
All In One Seo Pack is one of the most important plugin that every blogger should install on their blogs. This plugin allows you to edit and control the Title, Meta description, and meta tags for each article you write. As I said above its most important plugin for wordpress users because by default wordpress use your blog tagline as your meta description and keywords.
The keywords in your tagline wont have a positive effect on all of the keywords for all of your posts because they would not describe to the search engines what is found within the content of your posts.You can customize each post on your blog for maximum search engine results.
How to use it:
Titles: The text that you see in your browser’s window bar is the most important thing on your page. Make sure your titles are getting rewritten and the important stuff always come before anything else. You can leave a few words from your blog title to do some branding but don’t overdo. If your post titles don’t contain your most precious phrases you want to rank for then tweak them. Leave the post titles as it is but change the meta title.
Descriptions: Once your pages rank in search engines your description makes a potential visitor want to click through, or not. It’s meta descriptions, believed dead by many people, that decide over your site’s fate. If you don’t want to invest the time and write a description for every post at least let them be auto-generated.
Keywords: All in One SEO Pack can generate them from your categories or from Ultimate Tag Warrior or, starting with Wordpress 2.3, the built-in tagging system. Using your categories is optional, the rest is auto-detected and used if there. WP 2.3.x tags are the preferred keyword source.
Duplicate Content: You can have “noindex” and the like generated for archive-, category- and tag pages if you seem to have trouble with duplicate content.
The All In One SEO Pack is really easy to install and use. It will help you increase your search engine results. You can download it from following link:
Comments Off
