The Abundance theme has several options which can allow you to break away from the box-like configuration of a central sheet against a contrasting background that’s typical of many magazine-style themes and let you get a bit more creative. If you’re a site flipper then you could well be able to command a higher price for the effort involved in creating something slightly different rather than churning out similar looking sites in a fashion reminiscent of a factory production line.

Quite honestly, the possibilities are almost limitless and space obviously prohibits me from describing them all here. You’ll probably have noticed that my design skills are not up there with the elite, and there’s little doubt that you could do better, but much can be achieved just by eliminating or altering the border, padding and top offset settings, and changing the tiling properties of the background image.

An image tiled across the screen, together with a central sheet that’s the same color as the page background can give a site the look of a conventional fixed width blog if you close the top offset gap and sit your header seamlessly over the top of the image, or you can draw the user’s eye from top to bottom by tiling an image that’s just wider than the central  sheet vertically behind it.

Losing the border and padding can make it look like your header sits outside the central sheet, and lets you do things like give the header corners of your sheet a curved appearance. Just watch that the file size of your images isn’t so large that it slows the site down, and make sure that the edges of your images will blend into your background color even if they go beyond the width of your monitor, as many of your visitors could be using a larger screen. Otherwise, just experiment and have fun with it. Not every idea you come up with will work out as you’d hoped, but sometimes you can start on something that goes off on a tangent and turns out better than you anticipated.

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 time into account if you’re planning to use many video thumbnails – in such circumstances it’s a good idea to scale back a bit on the file size of header and background images and let the video do the talking.

Conversely, the blogroll and the affiliate links that usually fill it often prove ineffective in the sidebar. Much better results have come from placing it in the lower banner area, which sits directly beneath every post. On some sites an image in the top left corner of every post draws the reader in to read the article down to the bottom, where they’ll see these links and click on them. On others, there is little visitor interest in these links and any sale from them is regarded as a bonus, with the majority of revenue coming from an Adsense block that shown instead of the image. Your mileage will vary just as much from one site to another too, but with the Abundance theme it’s as easy to quickly implement a new layout as it is to alter something as simple as link colors to test and see what the effect will be.

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’ areas beneath it allow you to showcase more of the posts that you most want the surfer to see. These could be your most profitable Clickbank or Amazon products, or even digital products of your own. The title bars above these areas are fully editable – giving Google or other search engine bots an overview of exactly what it is you’re featuring instead of telling them you’re one of millions of other sites showing ‘Featured Articles’ will give your SEO efforts a boost. You can choose to include the topmost featured area, the left and right featured areas beneath it, or all three.

You can never have too much good content, but you’ll be doing yourself and your visitors a favour by pointing them to the best of it.

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 Abundance theme’s main horizontal menu, and in addition you’ll see any sub-pages you’ve created appear in a drop-down menu beneath their respective parent pages too. The category menu works in the same way.

This has all kinds of uses, depending on the type of site you’re building and it’s end purpose. I’ve used it in the past to make Forex tools easily accessible, as well as football league tables, horoscopes, eBay ‘stores’ that needed to stand apart slightly from the rest of the site in terms of navigation, and to show the various categories of an embedded Amazon aStore. It’s a more versatile feature than you might think.

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 top banner area is often used for Amazon or Clickbank banners. If you’ve a blog roll that’s not especially long, it can be beneficial to place it in the bottom banner area where those few links can catch the eye of surfers immediately after they’ve finished reading an article, instead of over in the sidebar where they often remain unseen.

Seven of the widgetized areas are highlighted above, with the eighth shown below. For a variety of reasons it would be unwise to use this one on sites where there are images inserted at the top of some of the posts, but this does not mean you’re excluded from using images with it altogether. If you want to associate an image with the post in order to fill a spot with it on the front page, simply insert the image further down the post or define it’s URL in a custom field and not show an image in the post at all. The Abundance theme can handle either method of image management, and as already pointed out, displaying the ad box is optional. Whether you choose to display the ad box in your posts, carefully positioned images, both or neither, will depend on the purpose of the site you’re building.

With so many positions possible for the placing of ads, it’s important not to fall foul of Adsense rules regarding the number of units you can put on your pages. Check carefully before implementing what might seem like a bright idea – you’ll generally get a higher price per click with fewer ad units on your page anyway.

Placing navigation in the footer and using the sidebars for monetization, is a tactic that’s proven effective for me. You can use one sidebar, two, or all three.