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.

I decided to carry of the new look of the logo into other elements like the date badge and the RSS icon. Matt had specifically requested a graphic solution to the date badges after seeing the ones that I created for Cuzoogle’s new theme. The major difference with this version is that we have included the year below the date. Matt had a great idea for displaying the categories as a ‘tag cloud’, so we used the Category Cloud Widget from Lee Kelleher.

Looking Back at the Project

Although, the project took a little longer than anticipate to complete (thank you Holiday Season); Matt was extremely patient and easy to work with through the entire process. We have already received numerous feedback emails regarding the design, and we really appreciate the comments. This was a fun project to work on and I can’t wait to get rolling on the next one.

I really hate to admit it, but I need to buy a cheap PC for testing. No matter how great everything looks in Firefox or Safari…it always needs tweaking in Internet Explorer. We had some CSS issues with the footer not staying put on the YepYep theme in Internet Explorer, but after an hour of messing around I got it fixed.

Thank you Matt for trusting Jeff and I with the redesign of YepYep…we had a blast!

~ GrandmasterB

If you’re getting tired of that free WordPress theme you’ve been sporting, or want to migrate from Blogger to Wordpress; check out the Design Services page to see my portfolio.

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…

1. New and Improved Header Graphic
   • Larger Header to Incorporate Ad-Space
   • Built-In 728×90 Ad
   • Built-In 300×250 Ad (New Addition)
   • Custom Cuzoogle Logo (New Addition)
   • Streamlined Navigation
   • RSS Button Designed into Header
2. Improved Post Styling
   • Added Custom Date Badge (New Addition)
   • Changed Title Font to Helvetica Neue Bold Italic
   • Restyled Comments Section to Include Gravatars
3. Sidebar Improvements
   • Restyled Search Box
   • Restyled FeedBurner Widget
   • Made Split Columns Wider
   • Restyled Widget Text

There are a lot of really cool new features to the updated theme, but I think they add a lot of character to the site. The one thing that I might have done differently would be to make the header not as tall. However, I think it works and gives the site a unique element that you don’t see every day. I’m really proud of this new design…I think it’s going to generate a lot of buzz in the design community.

What do you think of the new Cuzoogle? I’d love to hear what you all think of it. If you’re interested in having GrandmasterB design something for you  let me know. If you want to see some of my other work check out the Design Services page.

~ GrandmasterB

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?

Cuzzy, this is actually a very common problem with installing plug-ins that need to be able to “write” to a given file on your server. In regards to your question the first thing you need to do is create the file for the sitemap. In order to do this you can use any text editor, I suggest using Notepad or if you have it Dreamweaver or another HTML editor. You don’t have to add any code to it, just save it as sitemap.xml and then upload it to the root directory of your site (wherever your index.php file is for WordPress).

If you don’t have an FTP client to upload your files I highly recommend installing FireFTP for Firefox. You should be able to download, install and setup the FTP client in record time; it is very user friendly. The only information that you will need to enter is your host (aka URL), username and password; once you have that hit connect and you should see the directory of your website in the right hand column. From here you will need to upload the sitemap.xml file to the home directory. Once it is uploaded right click it and choose “properties” (see image).

Once you have clicked on properties, it will bring up a window for you showing you the file permissions. Each checkbox has a numeric value, and for this case we need that number to add up to 0777. What you’ll need to do is make sure that you check Read, Write and Execute under each column and then click OKAY (see image). You’ve now changed the file permissions for sitemap.xml.

After you have changed the file properties, go back to your WordPress Admin Panel and click on settings and then access the XML-Sitemap settings. Under the top section labeled “Status” you may still see a warning that the file isn’t writeable, that is okay. It doesn’t automatically check the files if you’ve made a change. Simply click on the “rebuild sitemap manually” link and it should write the sitemap and create a new compressed file as well. One thing to note is that under the Location of the Sitemap File you should check automatically; that will save you time in the long run.

That’s pretty much it for the XML-Sitemap plugin settings though. Once you have everything setup, you should begin to see more activity from the search engines crawling your content. If you haven’t done so already I highly recommend installing the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin; with that plugin installed you can see when the top three search engines (GoogleBot, Yahoo! and MSN) are crawling your site and how often.

That is all for this week’s Q&A with GrandmasterB. Thank you again, to Cuzzy for his question and your 100 EntreCard Credits are being emailed to you now. Don’t forget if there’s something you’d like to know about hit me up with a question and you too can get a linkback and 100 EntreCard credits if I answer your question on the Q&A.

~ GrandmasterB