A great site we have recently discovered is Themeforest. There are many categories, and you can view them rated by popularity or rating.

Though this is not the only source, but so far the templates we have seen have been really well developed.

When looking at templates, remember to look at the general layout and find one coming closest to what you would like in a website. Try to disregard colors, fonts and graphics as these are easy to change.

Though there are many third party sites offering WordPress themes, it is a good idea to start your search at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes.  If nothing strikes you there, begin to broaden your search using Google to search for WordPress theme sites.

Typically, WordPress blogs are set up in columns, usually between one and four of them.  One column is usually reserved for widgets.  Widgets enhance your users’ experience by giving additional information and options in an easily accessible format.  Popular widgets include latest posts, image galleries, RSS feeds, related posts and web links.  The widget column (or “sidebar”) can be on the right or left of the main blog text.

Not all themes are widget-ready.  If you plan to use widgets, check the theme to see if it is compatible with them.  Widget-readiness can be added later, but it takes some coding, so it’s nice to start with one that is ready to go.

The other columns are where you will add content.  As you scroll through the templates, you will get a feel for what more or fewer columns might offer to your site’s layout.  A single column would be good if you want clean simple look in which you scroll through the text from top to bottom.  Multiple columns can help you to get more information on one page in more of a Newspaper format.

Themes come in a variety of colors.  It is easy to get hung up on a theme’s color scheme when browsing themes.  Remember when you are choosing that colors can easily be changed.  Images can also be changed, rearranged, relocated or removed.

The other important variable in theme selection is choosing between fixed width and flexible width.  With a fixed width template, your site will display at the same width regardless of each user’s screen resolution.  With flexible width, you will get a different width depending on the resolution of your screen.  In my opinion, flexible width is becoming less needed as the zoom screen technologies for devices rapidly increase.  Still, many people are unaware that they can zoom pages.  A flexible width theme will look nice on the lowest resolution screens, but can sometimes appear small on high resolution screens.

If you are creating a WordPress site for business purposes, customization will be important.  You won’t want your theme to look like 20 other sites out there.  So when looking through themes, think about what you want to change (remember, anything can be changed!) and take notes on what you like and how you might make the theme more original.

Now that you have the basics, you will be able to find the perfect template for your site.

We have had a very busy summer with some new projects. One of them is about to launch and we wanted to share it with you.

Café Campesino, a long time client, has been growing in a nice organic way by merging Sweetwater Organic Coffee Roastery down in Gainesville Florida, and partnering with some great folks in Atlanta to open a coffeehouse. Café Campesino sends out a monthly e-newsletter with all these and other updates including a lot of news about their travels to coffee growing countries to meet with farmers and cooperatives. They usually have a ton to share, so why limit it to those who subscribe to their newsletter?

We invite you to check out their brand new shiny blog, fairtradewire.com! Using WordPress as a platform, this was Lowthian Design’s first really challenging WordPress project. With new features to design and implementation twists and turns being thrown at us every week, we had a ton of fun customizing templates, experimenting with great plugins and finding ways to make WordPress even easier to use.

We have a couple more WordPress projects on their way, so stay tuned..

This article is to help those using Postie to easily post articles, images and even movies to their WordPress blog.

Postie will only accept emailed items from a pre-approved address, so make sure you are using an address that is setup in the Postie configuration, let us know if you need to add a new address.

When sending an article, put the title of the article in your subject line, it will be converted by Postie into your title. If you are sending via SMS, put your title in hash marks “#your title here#”.

If you want to categorize the article in a single category, put the category followed by a colon (ex  News: Title) If you need to put it in multiple categories use  [Cat XXX]s (ex: ‘[Cat XXX] [Cat YYY] Title of My Article’ ). You can also wait to categorize your article until you are online and can log in to WordPress.

Start your article with “:start” and finish with “:end”, this will strip out any signatures etc. that follow your article, and only what is between these tags will be published.

If you want to add tags, add this at the bottom of the article in this format:
tags : one, two, three (must be in lower case). You can also add tags later when you get to a computer and login to WordPress

To add a comment to a post, use ‘Re:’ in your subject line. For example, if your original post had a subject line “New Post”. If you then send an e-mail with the subject line “Re: New Post”, it will get posted as a comment on the original post.

You can delay posting of the article with the following:

If you are sending a picture, with or without text, use the :start and :end tags and the following:

#img1 caption=’caption for the image’# (the caption is optional)

You can attach more than one photo, just make sure to attach them in the correct order to correspond to your img1, img2 etc.

If the float is set up, the image will allow any text added after the tag to float around the image. If you want the image to float in the body of your text, include the #img1# at the place where you want the text to begin wrapping.

Add video’s one at a time. Send them as and attachement and put any text inside your :start end tags.

A WordPress Plugin Review: Webpsilon Morfeo Gallery

Here at LDW, Morfeo Show has been one of our favorite plugins for our clients’ Joomla! sites. Thanks to Webpsilson Morfeo Gallery is also available for WordPress.  I find the WordPress version every bit as user-friendly as the Joomla! version. It provides for basic image needs very well.

While the Joomla! version is more advanced and offers a wider range of gallery themes, I do not believe the WordPress version is limiting. It’s meant to display within blogs, whereas the Joomla! version has been developed to be very versatile for websites’ many needs.

There’s one limiting factor with Morfeo on WordPress: you have to get your photos to the site using ftp, and many bloggers are not familiar or comfortable with the ftp side of a website. There is a workarround for this by changing your default upload location to the Morfeo image folder, but you have to remember to switch it back to the default once you are done.  Even with this limitation I feel that this is a plugin worth mentioning.

Thanks to the developers of Webpsilon Morfeo Gallery—it was just what I was looking for.

A WordPress Plugin Review: Subscribe2

The Subscribe2 plugin is a way for your WordPress visitors to sign up to receive an email subscription to your blog. You can configure the frequency with which subscribers receive emails: every time you post something new, weekly, daily or even hourly if you prefer. I set mine to only send out an email when there is something new to read.

My goal was to create a separate page on a WordPress site which would give the visitor a place to sign up for the subscription. I was provided with two options: I could manually insert the Subscribe2 token into a newly created page, or I could simply press the Subscribe2 button in the WYSIWYG and it would be inserted on the new page. I picked the latter, and there it was. Subscribe2 also has a widget option, in case you would prefer a widget on your blog’s sidebar rather than having a separate page for email subscriptions.

I really enjoyed working with this software. Plugins can sometimes be a struggle to get to work, but with Subscribe2 this was not the case. I am happy with this plugin’s performance and would recommend it as a simple and effective way to handle email subscriptions on a WordPress site.

I have found that this application works well to get my basic ideas in one place and up on the website in draft form. When I do get to the computer all I have to do is proofread it, get the layout right and send it on its way.  I am also able to add categories and tags right from the phone. Note: there was more editing to do with voice to text than if I would have simply typed the blog post.

The mobile wysiwyg has the ability to add links, bold, blockquote and italics.  It even enables the user to add images. However the image uploader works much better on the web based version of WordPress. When done from the phone I was not able to pick where the photos would be displated or how large they would be.

This week I found it to be an entertaining way to post my blog.  Time will tell if it is just a novelty.

Well, here goes nothing… post!