The Next Web

The ultimate personal branding Wordpress theme

Written on October 2, 2008 – 6:49 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck

Blogging has become a major business.

Bloggers have become super powerful. Bloggers like Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Arrianna Huffington of the Huffington post and Geenstijl (Dutch) are influencing their thousands of readers on a daily basis.

Another indicator of the importance of blogging is the number of conferences and events about blogging. We’ve had Les Blogs in Paris, US-based Blog Her, our own BLOG08 and many, many others.

Gurus and authorities

Blogging is not only used as a news portal tool, a lot of people use their blogs to promote themselves. By sharing their thoughts on their favorite topics they became gurus and authorities in their field. Robert Scoble, Hugh Macleod, Loren Feldman, Fred Wilson all became famous because of their personal blog.

Ask around what blogging have meant for the people who are passionate about it and blog on a regular basis. Tim Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Workweek said it really well when we were in Greece on a beach: “There are more currencies than money, take this as an example, we’re here because of blogging”. He is so right, although a small amount of people can actually live of blogging alone, there are a lot of bloggers who get other currencies than money out of it. They get jobs, invitations to parties and conferences, they meet people and get into situations that people who don’t blog (as passionate) miss.

Personal brands without blogging works for some as well. Photo by ∗natsu∗

Ultimate personal branding Wordpress theme

Blogging is a really important tool for personal branding. So is being present on social networks, having your photos on Flickr, share thoughts and ‘mindfarts’ on Twitter etc. etc. But here comes the question, if blogging is a must in personal branding, how come that there is no ultimate personal branding blogging theme for Wordpress?

I was looking for a new design of my personal blog. I wanted an upgrade, something that would

1. look neat.
2. would make it easy for me to update on a regular basis.
3. a blog that keeps track of what I’m doing all over the web, so my parents, less web savvy friends and people who are interested in me (for business purposes) get a one stop shop blog with all (interesting) info.

I couldn’t find the ultimate theme. I’ve thought about just using Facebook, but that doesn’t do it for me. I’d love to use Facebook as a marketing tool, but as a stand alone personal blog it’s just not good enough, maybe not different enough.

How would the ultimate personal blogging theme look like?

I’ve made a list of some things I’d like to see. Feel free to add your wishlist to it. I’ll get in some of the best designers and we’re gonna build this thing. If your suggestion is integrated (and you’re the first) you’ll get this theme for free (when it’s done)!!

Wishlist:

• Twitter integration - show my tweets on my blog, but let them fade out and disappear after x minutes / hours (option in the settings)
• Show my Flickr photos - not all but only my photos with a certain tag
• (Livestream) video - Vimeo, Youtube, Qik, Kyte. I want to show the last video I uploaded to one of these services (maybe two videos, for frequent vloggers. one featured) I think this should be continues on the frontpage
• Where am I - It would be cool if there is a map with my current location, but also where I’ve been traveling.
• Testimonials - display at random one testimonial in a widget in the sidebar and give the opportunity to write one
• Where can I be found on the web - some icons of all the services where I have presence.

All this in a stunning design (of course) and widget compatible.

Well it’s a beginning, I’ve left enough room for your creativity. What do you want for your own personal branding blog?

I hope you like that post!

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blog, personal branding, wordpress, wordpress themes

39 Comments »

Make your blog iPhone compatible with these luscious plugins

Written on August 15, 2008 – 5:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

You better face it: with millions of iPhones flying over counters world-wide, more and more of your visitors will read your blog on the shiny object. On this blog for example, already 2 percent of the visitors does. So it might be time to consider making your blog iPhone compatible. Especially now the crappy plugins are replaced with cool tools which have that “OMG-it’s-so-shiny”-flavor.

You’ll need two plugins: the WPtouch iPhone Theme and Yoast’s Blog Icons. Before we continue, please mind the iPhoney. This nifty tool shows you how your blogs would look on an iPhone.

WPtouch iPhone Theme

Bravenewcode isn’t the first one to develop an iPhone template, but definitely the first one who does a good job. While other versions depicted a rather boring lay-out, WPtouch does have that shiny feeling all over it. Moreover, there’s an option to switch to a normal view, which is something some iPhone users asked us to offer when had an old iPhone theme running. Mostly because they were using a wireless Internet connection.

After uploading the theme, there’s an admin panel available to play around with. For example, there’s the possibility to specify the icons per page or post. It’s also possible to switch off some of the fancy features - mostly Ajax-based - to make your blog for more accessible EDGE and 3G connections. I won’t do it, as I already save these users a lot of time by cutting away the heavy images.

If you don’t feel like installing an iPhone theme, then at least make sure you insert one important line of code that specifies the width of your blog.

Blog icons

So now you’ve taken care of ALL your visitors. But you might want to give your fans something extra, right? Well, Joost de Valk takes care of that with his latest plugin. Based on an idea of my co-editor Boris, he wrote a Wordpress plugin called Blog Icons. It allows you to upload a favicon, rss image, and…, an iPhone icon - the one you see when adding a bookmark to your start screen. So when somebody decides to make your blog available with one click, it will look pretty damn good.

(more resources here)

blog, blog icons, favicon, iphone, shiny object, wordpress, wordpress themes, wptouch

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Thesis represents the next generation of Wordpress themes

Written on July 17, 2008 – 11:11 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Chris Pearson from DIY Themes and Pearsonified has spent the last couple of months on designing and developing “a frame work that had it all”. “Frame work” refers to a Wordpress Theme. “All” refers to “killer typography, a dynamically resizable layout, intelligent code, airtight optimization, and tons of flexibility”. So, let’s discuss the result. I gave away quite a bit with the bombastic headline, so be prepared.

Serious SEO and usability for beginners

Although the XHTML is unvalid, most of the code looks clean and effective. Moreover, the typographic details are superb. Pearson has put great effort in helping his users styling their blog posts - from h3 tags to drop caps. Pearson built in several features that he describes in his “SEO for Everybody” series. Examples are image optimization for Google Images Search, a XHTML sitemap, and dynamic, descriptive title tags for each page the blog. He claims that when bloggers use his theme, their SEO strategy will only consist of “just add links”.

Oh, and did I mention the rather impressive admin panel?

Uniformity

Pearson’s loyal followers are also raving about the theme, and there are many of them. Each of Pearson’s blog posts attract a truck load of commenters - all thankful for his work. Yet I hope his group of followers doesn’t keep growing at such a speed, as the blogosphere would become pretty homogeneous.

Ok, I owe your explanation here. The problem with Thesis is that it seems hard to give the theme its own face. Maybe it’s because of the serious code work Pearson has done. I’m not sure. But when I look at the blogs from the Thesis showcase, they all appear to be the same to me. Even if they use a completely different style:

So please dear readers, do not switch to the thesis theme en masse. Give some other themes a try as well. How about the latest from Smashing Magazine? (speaking of diversity)

chris pearson, Smashing Magazine, thesis, wordpress, wordpress themes

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