Over the weekend, I put the finishing touches on another custom WordPress theme by The BlogFixers. Jeff and I were commissioned by Matt from YepYep to do a complete overhaul of his existing site and create a new theme from the ground up. We worked with Matt throughout the entire process from the brainstorming phase (how many columns, column widths, etc), through the design phase with Photoshop comps and finally the finished product which went live yesterday. The cool thing about this project is this was my first attempt at developing a three column WordPress theme. While I worked on the design with Matt, Jeff worked on getting his server configurations tweaked and dealt with some issues that Matt was having with the WP Super-Cache plugin.

Upgrades and Improvements

As I already stated the new theme is three columns now, as opposed to the previous theme which had only two columns. When designing the new header section I wanted to give the logo a little more flare, so I decided to place it at a bit of an angle and added in some gradient effects. The background behind the logo got a bit of a treatment as well with the addition of a few carefully placed graphic elements. Moving down we created a navigation bar with buttons for the many featured categories of the site. Previously, Matt didn’t have any navigation…this was a big improvement.

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In my Week in Review post for October 20th, I mentioned that I had been working on a “secret” project for a client of mine and that we would probably be launching the site on or around November 3rd. Unfortunately, we didn’t make our November 3rd launch…but November 11th is just as good. The project as you might be able to tell was a redesign of Cuzoogle. Cuzzy had been talking about redesigning his site for awhile now and giving it a more updated look. We both sat down (cross-continent) and came up with an interesting layout that would allow for him to put in his necessary ad spots as well as something that looked fan-freakin’tastic!

While this project wasn’t a completely custom theme; we did start off with the basic layout from the Simple Red Theme from Easy Wordpress that Cuzzy had been using. The biggest challenge in getting everything looking as it should were the widgets that Cuzzy uses for advertising. They took some tweaking, but they all fell into place like they should. The new theme is in between Evolutionary and Revolutionary when it comes down to it. Since the original theme had a lot of good quality stuff already built-in, we didn’t need to revolutionize the theme…however, the design elements added were HUGE improvements over the old version.

This is a quick breakdown of all of the new added features… (more…)

I skipped the Q&A last week in order to get some good questions rolling in the door and to find a good day of the week to commit to the feature post. I’ve settled on Thursdays for the Q&A with GrandmasterB feature; since it allows me to get things caught up over the weekend and more time to put together a clear and concise answer. Don’t forget to send me your questions and if your question is published you’ll get a free linkback from GrandmasterB and 100 EntreCard credits for your bankroll. Now onto the question for this week.

My boy Cuzzy (Cuzoogle.com) wrote me an email the other day asking me the following question:

I have recently started a new blog and want to set up a google site map. I downloaded the plugin and activated it but I am still having trouble getting my site map to work. It says I need to make sure the file is writeable and this was where I got lost. Can you help?

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