9 Tips to Improve Your WordPress Theme

In this article, you’ll be shown nine tips that can to improve your WordPress themes.

1. Make your sidebar tabbed

One notable feature of the new WPShoutdesign is the tabbed sidebar. It’s actually simple; First, take a look at a couple of scripts, deciding on DomTabs. Next, look at a tutorial on ProBlogDesign explaining one way to incorporate DomTabs to get an idea on how this works. After that, integrate the code from the PBD tut and start styling your way. At this point in the design process, you should have styled some tabs on the PSD.

2. Create a widgetised footer that keeps visitors on the site

Widgetising is not a new thing in the web, but it is often overlooked that you can do a lot with a nice footer. This field is basically made clearer if you can visit some tutorials. But to give you a summed up definition, here it is; ‘when someone finishes reading a post and the comments, they will probably now leave the site. Unless, that is, they come across some more interesting posts on the footer.’

3. Display images on the homepage without custom fields or any additional script

This is one tip seen in WebDeveloperPlus – by using WordPress’ built in functionality to display resized images on the front page in the absence of a custom field. To do this, first, log in and on the sidebar select ‘Media’ under ‘Settings’. Then, on the page you end up on, change the thumbnail size and then insert the code on your homepage:

4. Create a featured content gallery with jQuery

It’s a fundamental thing of any ‘magazine’ theme is its featured content gallery, and the new WPShout is not without a featured content gallery, using some lovely jQuery. One good content gallery one can use is WebDeveloperPlus, where you can see all the code etc etc. The code is quite complex, and to WordPress-ify it you’ll need two or even three loops, so that’s a tutorial for another time, but to give you a quick idea – the first six lines will need its own loop and you’ll need a second loop for the rest of the content.

5. Add (XHTML) valid social media links to the bottom of posts

Some people wonder why some posts are not saved in social bookmarking sites, this is becuase there aren’t any social media links at the bottom of posts. It’s actually simple to with a table and some nice images.

6. Use custom fields cleverly

Some custom fields can turn WordPress from a blogging platform into a CMS, if you know how to utilize them, you can make something very productive through it like the things as Chris Coyier could produce.

One tip to this is that custom fields have great potential and when used correctly, can be the thing that makes your theme stand out from the rest.

7. Display the most popular posts

Like the tip in number 1, WP-PostViews plugin is a really great plugin that allows you to show your site’s most popular posts. By simply installing it, you can then quickly show off your site’s best content, with it, you can prolong readers on your site.

8. Don’t demand users have certain plugins installed!

It’s never advisable to have themes work only if a certain plugin is installed. As much as possible use an ‘If’ function and enhance the theme if certain plugins are installed, but don’t demand they are. Plugins are basically for the user to decide if they want, and not the theme author.

9. Integrate a Tweetmeme style Twitter button to your posts

Twitter is undeniably popular, by using the Tweetmeme button bloggers can promote Twitter RTs. Luckily, its an easy task to integrate such function in a wordpress theme, as is shown on WebResourcesDepot shows.