Installing a Premium Blog Theme
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The new design for the case study blog has gone live and in this post I’m going to look at the 3 stages I took to do it. And here’s the before screenshot of the blog.
- choosing the theme
- installing the theme
- setting up the theme
1. Choosing the Theme
With the amount of Wordpress themes available and the quality of the themes, picking one to use can be easier said than done. But I was after a premium theme that would take my blog design to the next level and give me greater flexibility. This also meant that I would most likely have to be willing to pay for a theme.
I didn’t mind that if it means I’m getting a quality theme. The old theme that I used was a Brian Gardner free theme, but I have long been an admirer of his Revolution themes that are premium customizable themes for $79.95 (US).
The decision came down to knowing what I wanted and being able to find exactly that from a source I already knew in Brian Gardner. As soon as I found his site I knew that one day I would be using one of his premium themes and planned for that. Now maybe I’ll start planning for him to do me a customised one…
After a bit of deliberation I decided on the Revolution Pro Media theme for now!
2. Installing the theme
I was a little bit apprehensive about installing the theme because there’s a lot more to it than an ordinary free theme. But the Revolution Themes have their own instructions and a set of tutorials and a support forum so there was no need to worry.
The problem was going to be how do I install and then fiddle about with the theme to customise it, without driving any visitors mad? I looked at various methods like local hosting and plugins, but these gave me permission problems and compatibility issues that I didn’t want to waste time on figuring out. So I decided to use a simple plugin called the maintenance mode plugin. It’s really easy to use and as you can see from the screenshot it does what it says!
Installing the theme itself is just the same as any normal theme the only difference being once installed there is more to do. The Revolution Pro Media theme has it’s own options page for a start, and also a lot more files in the theme editor to play around with. I found it easy to use and adapt to what I wanted, but that was mainly because of the support forum and the tutorials.
3. Setting up the Theme
To say this theme is customisable is an understatement, it’s a brilliant base to build a unique and quality site from, and it’s been written with this in mind. I on the other hand have had very limited knowledge of HTML and CSS so I have kept it fairly classic, but it’s also so incredibly close to what I wanted to do in the first place that I was happy to just tweak a little. Here’s the after screenshot showing what the new design looks like, to compare with the before shot.
As I’ve said above the best and quickest way to set the blog up and get it running is to use the tutorials and the support forum. If you are wanting to do a little more they even have a list of approved designers to help customise it for you.
It’s a work in progress in my eyes and at some point I will do more with the header, but I am really pleased with the results so far. I’ll just take one thing at a time and the next thing is a Newsletter.
In the mean time please feel free to visit The Photographer Blog and take a look around at the design.
Mandy
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