A Redesign on the Eve of the Genesis Launch

01.31.10 16 Comments

Well as many of you know, the Genesis theme framework is going to be available tomorrow morning sometime, and I thought this was the perfect time to accomplish a few things. Not only did I decide to test Genesis here on my personal site, I also decided to redesign while I was at it.

It’s sadly been over 3 months since I’ve blogged last, something I desperately want to change in 2010 – so much in fact, that I plan to add a category here called “lifestream” where I plan to write shorter, more profound things.

I’ve tried my best over the years to separate my personal site from business, and this year it’s going to happen. After all, the StudioPress blog is really the place where any formal announcements should be made.

That being said, I’d like to introduce my new personal site redesign, and also want to warn you in advance, that this will now be the home of my lifestream. Expect posts that range anywhere from business (in terms of my experiences with it), my passions (which include music, entertainment and social media) as well as things that pertain my spirituality. So this is the time to decide if you want to continue having me in your feed reader, whether to receive emails with my posts, or simply to drop by and comment.

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AgentPress For Real Estate Agents Launches!

10.26.09 43 Comments

I am very pleased to announce that AgentPress has officially launched! The AgentPress theme is an ideal solution for real estate agents looking to market themselves and rise above their competition while being fully optimized for the highest search engine results.

Another element that I am very excited to share is that AgentPress has teamed up with Reggie and Nicole Nicolay, as well as Chad Johnson – who together form the team at My Tech Opinion. They will be handling theme customization and consulting – and can be hired to help take your real estate site to a much higher level. This will include graphic design work, additional search engine optimization, social media integration as well as real estate listing integration.

Here’s a video of Nicole Nicolay talking about AgentPress:

The 411 on the AgentPress Theme

The AgentPress theme provides the best opportunity to showcase your real estate listings as well as personal info. Why bother having two separate real estate sites, when you can have a powerful and amazing site that is search engine optimized, running on WordPress, which the Search Engines, like Google, LOVE?

Here are some features that the AgentPress theme includes:

  • 4 Color Schemes
  • Custom Write Post Panel
  • Search Engine Optimized
  • Custom Property Template
  • Theme Options Page
  • Auto-sized Thumbnail Management
  • Widget-Ready
  • Developed for Localization
  • Header PSD Files Included

Other Important Things to Know

Believe it or not, this project has been in the making for over 6 months – I’ve been very busy with a lot of great things that have been happening over at StudioPress, which took higher priority over the launching of the AgentPress site. Speaking of which, I do want to point out that AgentPress is completely independent of StudioPress – they are two separate entities, but we’ll certainly be extending the 25% discount that we always give our theme users for repeat purchases.

In other words, the AgentPress theme(s) is not included in the StudioPress All-Theme package. But don’t worry, we are very busy working on some more themes that will soon be released on StudioPress as well as upgrading our support forum/tutorials.

Now to the Good Stuff

If you have previously purchased a Revolution/StudioPress theme package, and would like the 25% discount on the AgentPress theme, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to extend that to you.

You can also follow AgentPress on Twitter – we’ll be announcing theme updates, as well as publishing relevant articles for agents that include WordPress tips, how to maximize use of the AgentPress theme as well as other real estate industry news and events.

So what are you waiting for? Go on and take the AgentPress Demo site for a test drive!

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StudioPress Joins Woo to Fight Breast Cancer

10.08.09 5 Comments

If you have followed me and my blog for any period of time, you know that I am an avid supporter of fighting breast cancer. My wife’s aunt and grandmother are both survivors, so I have personal reasons for my crusade.

This past year I participated in the Chicago Breast Cancer 3-Day, and raised over $34,000 for the event by giving away theme packages from StudioPress.

About a week ago as Breast Cancer Awareness Month began, I saw a post that Adii over Woo Themes wrote – they were campaigning to raise money as well to fight this horrible disease. As I was thinking about Woo’s attempts to make a difference, I felt the urge to send Adii an email to see if there was a way we could somehow team up.

As I had expected, they were more than receptive to the idea, so after a bit of brainstorming we worked something out. Woo Themes is now running a #woobs Giveaway where StudioPress has donated 1/2 the cost of the theme packages in prize list below:

  • 2 x 3-month Developer Club Subscriptions
  • 4 x Woo Themes Developer Packages
  • 10 x Woo Themes Standard Packages
  • 5 x Awesome WooThemes Ninja T-Shirts

You might find this cross-promotion a bit unique, I’d prefer to call it co-ompetition (thank you Brian Clark). More than anything, both Woo and StudioPress believe in giving back as we both have been blessed.

You can read more about their efforts to fight breast cancer…

Help spread the word by ReTweeting this post – thanks!

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Walking Down Memory Lane

10.01.09 22 Comments

For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter, I recently tweeted about a novel idea I had about taking one day out of the week and making it a “non-code” day. It’s really my way of taking a break to spend a day reading blogs, commenting and writing posts.

You see, ever since I launched Revolution back in August of 2007, my life has been pretty chaotic and I haven’t been able to really do some things that I enjoy. Mind you, I’m not complaining about the success of Revolution/StudioPress, but there are things about my world online that I miss – mainly reading blogs, commenting on posts and also writing my own posts here on my blog.

The Things We Think And Do Not Say

You can see that I have these Jerry Maguire moments from time to time, where I decide to slow down, and actually take a breath to do some things that I personally enjoy, and not just things that I have to do.

I still believe that many folks don’t realize just how much work running StudioPress entails – and I’d be willing to bet that guys like Cory Miller of iThemes, Jason Schuller of Press75, Chris Pearson & Brian Clark of Thesis and Adii Pienaar of WooThemes would agree with me. It’s more than just coding a few themes and setting them loose – there’s a number of things involved, that can very quickly consume your day before you know.

Research, coding, design, email inquiries, support, etc… and that’s not all of it.

Anyway, my point isn’t to talk about all that I have had to do over the course of the past two years, but rather focus on what it is I want to do moving forward. Thankfully, I have a wingman named Craig Tuller who I am proud to announce is taking over daily operations of StudioPress.

A Challenge to Give Back to the Community

Aside from a number of upcoming projects and future ventures that we’ll be going after, I really wanted to get back to a place that I seem to be missing of late – a time in my life where I thoroughly enjoyed interaction with the WordPress community. A few days ago, Andy Peatling wrote a blog post encouraging folks to give back to the community. This really made me remember the days where I developed a number of free themes, and how much fun I had watching people use them on their blogs.

While I have recently developed two free themes for the WordPress community (Shades of Blue and Core), I realized that it wouldn’t take much time, or effort for that matter, to update and submit some of my earlier themes such as Vertigo, Blue Zinfandel, Downtown Java, etc to the WordPress theme directory.

As much as I enjoy moving forward and developing new things, I also want to make sure that I take care of and nurture certain things that I have developed in the past – I think it’s only fair, and to be honest it was those themes/projects that really helped take me to where I’m at now.

So here I am, on the inaugural “Give Back” day of my week – and hopefully this is something that moving forward I can commit to. It’s a day where I’ll deliberately pass up future-minded things, and one where I’ll engage in the community that has supported me.

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Introducing the Core Blog Theme for WordPress

09.17.09 64 Comments

I am very proud to announce that the Core Blog theme for WordPress has officially been released. This is something that I’ve been coding for quite some time, and finally have had a chance to sit down and get it fully developed.

If you want to download it, feel free to test it out and take it for a drive and provide any feedback here. Or visit the official theme page in the WordPress theme directory. (yes, that means this theme carries the GPL licensed and what not…)

Traveling Back to My Find My Roots

A little about Core… as much as I enjoy developing premium commercially supported WordPress themes, I also really enjoy the simplicity of creating a free theme. After all, it was free themes such as Blue Zinfandel, Vertigo, Whitespace, Silhouette, Downtown Java, Tapestry among others, that really allowed me to build my business to what it is now, StudioPress.

In a weird way, I kinda miss the good ole days of releasing free themes and seeing what people can do with them. And besides, there are millions of people who are now using WordPress – many of which are relatively new to blogging and only want a simple theme.

Anyway – the primary reason behind Core is that I wanted to create one core (for lack of a better term) set of blog theme files that I could use to develop additional free themes. I figured that by building this set of files, it would then be easy to generate a number of high quality themes, and would be able to include some features that have been included in our themes on StudioPress.

Here’s a screenshot of the Core Blog theme (click to enlarge full size):

Core Blog WordPress Theme
One of the coolest features inside the Core Blog theme is the choice between a Sidebar/Content layout, a Content/Sidebar layout or the traditional Sidebar/Content/Sidebar layout for your blog. This can easily be changed in the theme options page.

Another cool feature that I added was the SEO options block is available for the blog posts. Here you can enter a custom title tag, custom keywords and custom description for each post.

Here’s a screenshot of the SEO Options block:

Core Blog WordPress Theme
That is a great feature for those who are just starting our with their blog!

How Cliche, but Sometimes Less is More

As I was developing this theme, I also wanted to do it in a way that only required an additional stylesheet to change the way it would look – in other words, instead of having X amount of free themes all which have their own theme folders, there would be one theme folder with many stylsheets inside. Why have 20 different themes sitting in your themes directory on your server when you only need one?

Having said that, the intent is for a user to simply select which style they want to use in the theme options page. They’ll still have the ability to customize the stylesheet in the theme editor section of the dashboard as well. So just like that, 20 themes become one. (and for those of you faithful original Brian Gardner theme users, the early ones just might be ported over as styles to Core)

Here’s a screenshot of an additional style I’m working on (click to enlarge full size):

Core Blog WordPress Theme
This additional stylesheet is not available yet, but I’m hoping to release it along with a number of other styles as well. (gotta leave something to be desired, huh?)

Download Core Blog Theme | Core Blog Theme Page

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