The Abundance Premium WordPress Magazine Theme » Layouts

Demo 6 – Lorem Ipsum Buya Stackovum

The Abundance Theme — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:36:50 +0000

This demo was created to show that with the central sheet border and padding removed, the sheet corners needn’t be squared but could be rounded instead. I’ve way overdone ’rounded’ here – if these corners were any more rounded you’d be looking at a circle, but it does make them very hard to miss and so in that respect it’s done it’s job! By way of a change we’re showing a single wide sidebar here, and title bars which are the same color as the central sheet – defined by a border above and beneath them rather than by solid colored blocks.

http://demo6.abundancetheme.com/

Demo 3 – Lorem Ipsum Getta Loadavum

The Abundance Theme — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:47:21 +0000

Depicting how to escape the regular magazine theme layout of a central sheet surrounded by the background, the header appears to have broken out of the box, sitting above the central sheet instead of within it. This is achieved by losing the central sheet padding and border, and blending the header into the background by making them the same color. The site is also showing three widgets in the widgetized area across the top.

http://demo3.abundancetheme.com/

Demo 2 – Lorem Ipsum Cummun Gettum

The Abundance Theme — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:02:52 +0000

Originally intended to illustrate that, with the use of image tiling, it’s possible to to leave the framed central sheet behind for a look more typical of a blog than a magazine site. The best use of this demo is probably to leave you with the empowering feeling that you can do substantially better, joyful in the knowledge that in creating the theme, I’ve provided you with all the tools you need to do so!

http://demo2.abundancetheme.com/

Breaking Out Of The Box

The Abundance Theme — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:06:57 +0000

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 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.

Test And Experiment With Different Layouts

The Abundance Theme — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:54:37 +0000

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 it’s available – but the majority of search visitors who encounter your site will do so via the inner pages. As the image on the right shows, these are usually considerably shorter. It’s not uncommon for a visitor to browse several pages and leave without ever seeing the home page at all.

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.