Archive for December, 2008

Creating Your own WordPress Plug-in and Widget

Until now, whenever I needed to have something displayed on the sidebar of my WordPress blog, I simply input my HTML code into a Text Widget and added it to the sidebar. This worked fine until I needed something with a bit of intelligence to it.

I labored for a couple of days about this and eventually solved my problem, even with my limited PHP skills.

But what I discovered was that there did not seem to be a ready made, easy to use template for creating a Sidebar Widget or a WordPress plug-in. So I have created this easy to use template for everyone to copy and use as they see fit:
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Social Community for Small Business Website Owners

For those of us running an online business, we occasionally run into problems or issues where we don’t know the answer. It’s at times like this that we email or call that friend that we feel may have the answer. But even that isn’t always successful.

Enter the online Social Community for website owners. What’s This Web Thing? – Website Owners Helping Website Owners.

This is a brand new community made up of online entrepreneurs that have already experienced much of the pain of setting up and running a web site or an online business. If you’re interested, you can help build this brand new and FREE social network and community.

The community is currently in beta and dedicated to small businesses who run their enterprise on the web. This is an opportunity for web owners to make friends while learning to promote their business, exchange ideas on how to increase traffic, SEO, exchanging links/banners, making money and much more.

What's in a Theme

We have a new look!

The theme of this site is certainly not the first. And it may not be the last. But we feel that the current theme best reflects our message and provides it in a very nice layout.

And we think it’s cool.

This theme is called Arthemia and was developed by Michael Jubel. We have taken the free version of his theme and customized it slightly to meet our own needs. Michael has done a great job of using WordPress to the fullest to provide a better experience to our visitors.

We are always on the lookout for great themes. And we know that many of you are also looking to make your site look it’s best. So we are going to take this opportunity to provide a list of some of the best known sites for WordPress Themes. If you know of other sites, please share them with us.

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
The folks at Smashing Magazine are some of the hardest working when it comes to finding useful, high quality sites. So we thought we would start with their list of the 100 best free themes for WordPress that they have labeled as “high quality themes“.

Best WordPress Themes
This lists contains both free and premium themes for WordPress. It is quite extensive, so be prepared to spend some time on this site.

Top WordPress Themes
This site has a great variety of free WordPress themes. But they also offer Premium themes which we found to be very professional.

WPSnap – Best WordPress Themes
We like this site because it lets us browse themes when we already know some of the attributes we want in a theme. You can browse by color, layout, style, width and more. They have a very large selection of free themes to choose from.

I find it funny when I stumble across a very plain looking site using the default WordPress Theme with the topic of “Best WordPress Themes”. There are many of these sites. It is obvious that the owners of those sites aren’t taking there own advice on design.

We hope you enjoy our list. Please share your favorites.