WordPress is a wonderful platform for website builders, and for Google in particular it seems to be the virtual equivalent of a cake with an endless variety of tasty and unusual ingredients. Yet for those of us who need something adaptable enough to be served up quickly to the search engines on almost any occasion, and often with the minimum of notice, the icing on the cake can sometimes seem a little flawed.
Yes, we’re talking WordPress themes. These can make or break a site, and for search engines and surfers alike make the difference between encountering a flat and tasteless mass-produced sponge or an enticing confection that’s been specially created for the event.
However, with the right theme, it is possible to satisfy the surfers and feed the starving search-bots without spending hours slaving over a hot keyboard. As both a site seller (‘flipper’) and someone who builds and maintains a large number of my own WordPress sites, I’ve spent many hours trawling through themes in the hope of finding something that would fit the bill. For me, this would mean…
I’ve found a seemingly infinite number of bad themes during my search, and substantially fewer good ones. Some of these were very good, but all lacked at least one of the things that I felt I needed. It soon became clear to me that the WordPress fairy was not going to be waving her wand over my keyboard and giving me my ideal theme any time soon.
So I built my own.
Now available as the Abundance theme, it’s stark naked in it’s default form, but is readily capable of both the ‘bare bones’ configuration and the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ look.
I’ve got my custom fields for price and payment buttons too, which makes creating WordPress sites that offer digital products that much easier, and editing and maintaining them even more so. I primarily use DownLoadGuard code inside my own payment button fields, but I’ve created sites for clients which use PayPal code in the field, as well as two sites which have used the payment button code from WHMCS (a system usually used in conjunction with hosting reseller accounts) in order to integrate it with WordPress. Furthermore, where a digital product had two options (e.g. a choice between PDF and video, or between personal use and resale rights) there are enough custom fields coded into the theme to cater for both. You can also display payment buttons and prices at the bottom of pages instead of posts, in which case your prices will not be shown on the home page or anywhere else on the site.

There are several widgetized areas available too – a widget bar which spans the full width of the central sheet, the Signup Box (traditionally where subscriber code goes, you can put anything you like there), two sidebars beneath it, a 468 x 60 banner area above and below the content area, a top bar with room for three widgets and a footer bar with room for four more, and on the posts pages, a 336 x 280 banner area inside the content on the top left.

Use of all these widgetized areas is optional as none of them have any default content. If there isn’t a widget dropped onto one, it won’t be displayed. Likewise with any of the theme’s featured areas – tick a box on the theme options page and the area will be displayed, leave the box empty and it won’t. The options page gives users the opportunity to easily edit the appearance of the theme without having to mess with any of the theme files and the first image that appears in every post is displayed on the front page and in archives without the need to create custom fields. This means that aside from the occasional addition of article content, sites which use additional plugins like Amazon Autoposter to generate affiliate posts can largely be left to look after themselves. Video thumbnails are also an option.
The latest version of Abundance is compatible with WordPress 3.0, allowing you to easily replace the theme’s horizontal menus with the new WordPress configurable menus. It’s also possible now to use flash in the header area if you want to.
In addition, there are page templates to expand the functionality of the theme still further. There’s the ratings page template, which gathers the top ten posts with the highest ratings (assigned using custom fields) and then lists the linked titles in order from the highest to the lowest, then there’s a ‘no sidebar’ template for wide embedded content, a squeeze/sales page template and a blog-style page template for the times when a magazine look isn’t appropriate.
There are also various other options too numerous to mention, all of which can help create a different look to each site every time. Show horizontal navigation menus above or below the header (or not at all), sidebars left or right, replace the default sidebar list-bullet image… the combinations are virtually endless and the possibilities almost unlimited.
In a nutshell, the Abundance theme was created to suit me and my way of working and to make life easier for clients. Would these things suit you or make life easier for your clients too?
That all sounds very appealing, but there’s more. Purchase of the Abundance theme includes…
You can see the theme in action at abundancetheme.com where it demonstrates itself with short pieces about the various features, and also at the demo sites below, where the theme can be seen in a variety of configurations from basic to busy…
Discover an abundance of free time, an abundance of features and an abundance of opportunities to earn more money, more quickly. Choose one of the licensing options and hit the appropriate button below to buy now.
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You’re welcome to ask any questions via the contact form.