There’s a new navigation bar for categories in addition to the larger, main navigation bar. Both can be placed independently of each other either above or below the header, or not shown at all if necessary.

Content can now be positioned either to the left or to the right of the sidebar, and there’s a new widgetized area spanning the full width of the theme and running below the navigation/header area and directly above the content. Similar to the widgetized footer area, it will display three wide widgets instead of four narrower ones.

Although dateless by default apart from the javascript clock in the top left, Abundance 2.0 recognises that the content of some sites is more time-sensitive than others, and allows you the option of showing a date on post pages.

Naturally the new version will be sent out free of charge to existing owners of the theme, and thanks go out to all those who suggested the new features.

This poor neglected site was remembered again this morning when I needed to use it – for testing something. It will go to the ball one day. Taking a look at the stats while I was there, I found this…

While we’re hardly looking at a traffic jam here and you can almost see the cobwebs draped gently over the graph, there’s a marked increase in activity since I installed The Abundance Theme a month ago. I haven’t posted a thing on this site since April (though I’ve a feeling that’s about to change!) and it wouldn’t know promotion if it walked up to it and bit it. Interesting.

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.

In contrast, the Abundance theme is coded to use the Get The Image plugin, which simply draws the first image from each post and re-sizes it – a major time saver if you’re using something like Amazon Autoposter, because it means that you don’t have to open and edit each one. If it can’t find an image in the post, the plugin then looks for a custom field, and uses that instead. If it finds nothing, it simply displays nothing.

Using custom fields is a great way not only to quickly offer a digital product for sale, but to build entire sites which offer them. While the payment buttons will show up at the bottom of each post where used, the price field shows up not just at the bottom of the post, but automatically at the end of the excerpt on the home page, as well as at the end of search and category archive excerpts. Yet if any editing of the price is necessary, you’ll only need to do it in one spot. You can also put your payment buttons and prices at the bottom of pages instead of posts. When done this way, prices will not show up on the home page or anywhere else.

Obviously the theme won’t create zip folders and Thank You pages for you, but it makes creating product and ‘catalog’ pages fast and easy, whether your site sells only one digital product or is completely devoted to them.

The theme makes no claims towards being a complete e-commerce solution (it isn’t), but makes it a breeze to offer digital products from a WordPress site in combination with PayPal, or systems such as DownLoadGuard or WHMCS.

Sites selling PLR, software, web graphics or even entire websites are possible, the only limit being your hosting’s disc space and bandwidth allocation.

If you’d rather just offer free downloads, to build your e-mail list perhaps, custom fields built into the theme allow you to do this quickly too. Again, you can do this on as many or as few of your posts as you like.

Fortunately, this is not a feature generated by the WordPress core files, but by the themes used with them. The default WordPress themes set the trend, and almost all have followed, with even many premium themes failing to address the problem. This is not so for the Abundance theme, which makes much more effective use of the H1 tag by using it on blog titles.

Theme features such as color pickers and page templates definitely have their uses, but they pale into insignificance beside the importance of a properly placed H1 tag. A quick glance at the source code of a post will reveal will reveal how many theme creators have overlooked this, which is really quite shocking. The most attractive and easily maintained website in the world will not make much money if the search engines can’t find it’s pages.

It takes a matter of minutes to do, and – preferably in combination with a little article content or something equally substantial – also makes a fast and easy way to produce an Amazon affiliate store using the output from a plugin such as Amazon Autoposter. Thumbnail images from such posts will automatically show on the site’s front page.

The Abundance theme recognises that sometimes a magazine is overkill, and allows you to publish the equivalent of an unillustrated pamphlet instead. It’s likely to be more profitable than just parking a domain – or worse, doing nothing with it – and doesn’t take much longer.

Gone is the need to repeatedly edit and upload CSS sheets until you’re either happy with the result or just prepared to settle for it – the color picker makes changes possible in seconds. This last is probably obvious, but what many website flippers fail to realise is that the little things that make life a bit easier for them will often make things a lot easier for their buyers. This in turn will make life easier for the website flipper – with less support requests from newer site owners asking how to FTP their stylesheets etc or desperately asking for help because they’ve overwritten parts of them, a startling increase productivity is possible.

It’s surprising how a seemingly minor feature can make a big difference to the bottom line.

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.