Most of us who’ve been using WordPress for any length of time have seen easily recognizable themes which have taken off in popularity to the point where they’re devalued to some degree because they’ve become common rather than desirable. This can pose a problem for site flippers once potential buyers start thinking ‘Oh no, not that theme again’ before sighing and moving on, and even those who regularly use an uncommon theme for their own sites sometimes wish that the appearance could be a bit less ‘samey’.

The Abundance theme has several options which … read more

Abundance does not limit you to the image thumbnails that are the mark of a magazine type theme, but lets you go beyond that by showing video thumbnails too, drawn from the embedded video content you choose to display in your posts (from Youtube, for example). However big the embedded video in your post is, it will automatically be reduced to thumbnail size for the front page.

You can fill all your thumbnail slots with video instead of images, or have a mix of video and image thumbnails. Don’t forget to take page loading … read more

The Abundance theme’s many widgetized areas allow ample scope for experimentation, as does the ability to choose whether to display the content to the left or right of the sidebar. My own testing has so far demonstrated that moving the navigation to the footer and leaving the sidebars almost exclusively for monetization does have a positive effect on revenue. If your home page is a lengthy one then it may seem a lot to expect your visitors to scroll to the bottom to navigate – it’s seldom a good idea to include everything, just because … read more

Few things make information look more unappealing or unreliable than having a date set in the past credited to it, however recent that past may be. The Abundance theme always looks up-to-date and fresh, thanks to the Javascript clock in the top corner of every page, and by default uses no dates on posts in order to avoid giving them an antiquated look two weeks after publication.

If you’d prefer to put a date to your posts, this is a simple matter of ticking a box on the theme options page.

The Featured Content Gallery is probably what’s most noticeable about the Abundance theme’s front page when you first see it, although it’s easily omitted if it’s unsuitable for the purposes of your site. It’s what catches your visitor’s eye as he or she is almost hypnotically drawn to watch what’s going to be shown next. Each of the images is linked to individual posts or a category, which you choose. It’s up to you to to find the images most likely to entice visitors to read the content.

The ‘Featured’ areas beneath it allow … read more

You want your sidebar ads above the fold where they can immediately grab your visitor’s attention, but you want your pages to be accessible too. There’s only so much space visible above the fold in even the biggest of sidebars. So what do you do?

The answer is to use horizontal menus for navigation. This not only frees up sidebar space, it also allows you to use a page template without sidebars should you need to, while still making the rest of your site accessible to your visitors. Hover over the tabs of the … read more

Eight areas of the Abundance theme are widgetized – the left and right sidebars, a wide sidebar area above these that spans both of them, a banner area above and below the content, the footer bar, the top widget bar and an Adsense box inside posts on the top left. All these are optional.

Of course, you can put anything you like in these areas and probably have some creative ideas of your own. They’ve all been used for Adsense (although obviously not at the same time) across various sites, and the … read more