This page if for WordPress theme reviews and testimonials (good or bad) by Talian 5, Stallion WordPress SEO Theme and Stallion Responsive theme users. Talian 5.5 is quite an old WordPress SEO Ad Theme. Stallion WordPress SEO 7.* is the older version of the Stallion Theme. Stallion Responsive 8.* is the latest version of the Stallion Theme. David Law
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WordPress SEO Solutions
Mr Law, Thank you! I’ve reviewed many other WP Themes and almost switched from Talian because of the built in options to add other ads instead of Adsense in the hot zones where the default ad positions are in Talian. Well, to my great delight, I read your Stallion update email this morning! I know you have added many new features but the 9 widget zones compared to two are by far the best features for me!
Your idea of writing tutorials for the theme will help me as a Stallion affiliate! I cannot wait to begin to sell the new theme as THE way to start a new online business. Specially since I host websites for free on my Dreamhost account for people who contact me. :-) The tutorials will save me so much time in explaining how to set up a site.
I also thank you for the note in the above comments on how to upload a zip file via the “Install Themes” tab in WP admin. Being that I have three or four sites to install the theme on, this is a huge convenience!!!
Ok, I’ve read all the comments above, now I’ll get to the install and let you know how it goes, I will also be investing in Caleb’s electric guitar! (Go Caleb blow your Dads ear drums out and please let me know if you will be offering some of those cool animations you used on your banner site as a package – or if you will custom create some for tracksandtrails! :-)
WordPress SEO Solutions
WordPress Custom Banners and Header Images
Thanks for the positive feedback :-)
Regarding the Stallion Custom Banners and Header Images my youngest son is creating he is taking suggestions for custom banner packs (niches), he’s made over a dozen so far (with 7 on sale, still adding more) with two being made for people who asked for a particular niche.
Not sure he’ll be making custom animated headers for the packs, they take quite a lot of time to make. I told him it was possible to have an animated header when he was testing Stallion for me (during development) and as he’s learning this sort of stuff made a couple. One quick one (a bouncing ball) and the one on his site that took a lot more time. Does show what’s possible with Stallion.
I originally made the banner for this theme as an animated banner, but it’s 100KB in size (slow to download) so went with a static banner. I’ve activated the animated version temporarily.
I think he’s already a third of the way to buying a noisy electric guitar! It’s bad enough when he plays his acoustic guitar, he’s still learning and knows one song he plays over and over and over again!!!
Update he no longer creates custom banners, too busy with school.
David
WordPress Custom Banners and Header Images
WordPress Support Review
David,
Thanks for the help! I was able to get it added, installed, and activated. Everything looks great so far!! Thanks for the update and for the outstanding help/guidance.
Best Regards,
Gregg
WordPress SEO Theme Review
Wow, David!
Thanks so much for the new Stallion Theme. I bought the Tallion 5 theme back at the beginning of the MPP program, and you provided the Stallion theme at no charge for me. It is working great so far, and I have seen both an increase in traffic and revenue after installing it. I am sure I still need to work on a few things, but I just wanted to let you know it worked wonders for me, and I really appreciate you supporting your customers this way.
Best Regards,
Mark
WordPress SEO Theme Review
Stallion Theme Review
Hi David.
Firstly many thanks for your input to my site speed issue using another theme, which was one I purchased months ago but isn’t supported now, long story.
As you’re aware I would still prefer a single column theme for this site but with the speed issue I thought I’d take the plunge this morning and install Stallion two column version just to see what happens.
I cannot believe the difference your theme, together with the recommended cache plugin has made to my site, unbelievable.
If anyone doubts who provides the best theme and support on the web they need look no further!
Now to spend the rest of the day configuring Stallion and getting the correct images, banners, widgets etc but I just had to record my initial impressions.
Thank you.
Nigel
Stallion Theme Review
Stallion WordPress SEO Theme Review
I have 6.1 running on about 20 websites flawlessly. In my personal experience upgrading:
1) I would advise anyone who has problems with the automatic upload to do FTP.
2) Remember to copy over any custom-made landscapes, headers or RSS images (found in ICO).
3) I started off only changing the color on most of my websites as I need to start to play with all the oodles of options.
I am using a lot of darker colors, blue and Stallion theme gradient black as I have a lot of photos on my website and dark colors look good for photo sites. I have not made my mind up about white or dark text. I am always curious to see what impact it has on the CTR.
I also am curious about trying the double sidebar Adsense. There are too many possible iterations here to try everything all at once, so I will start from where I left off in my initial set up, and then make small improvisations from there and see if I can improve Adsense.
I have a lot of fun making headers and banners with paint.net and Pixlr for anyone who can not afford Photoshop by the way.
Stallion WordPress SEO Theme Review
Stallion WordPress Theme Options
Glad the Stallion 6.1 upgrade is going well, I finished upgrading my last site today, turns out I have 90 WordPress installations, been underestimating them for a while (thought it was closer to 70). Took me about 2 days to update them all, but this included updating WordPress and a bunch of plugins and customization whilst doing other stuff.
An entire site took about 15 minutes to setup not including uploading Stallion files via FTP, 10 minutes to find an header image online that was big enough (minimum 1000px by 288px) I liked (was a free desktop wallpaper, ~2000px wide), used the new Stallion 2011 header feature (via Appearance >> Header) to upload and crop the image, rest of the time was setting various Stallion options which, probably changed 15 options from the defaults.
My wife who is about as tech savvy as a smoked kipper :-) is complaining I’ve added too many options, to anyone worried about the number of options (~230 not including options related to various built in plugins) is they are almost all optional. When I built Stallion I had my wife in mind so she could use it with minimal input from me :-)
This is one of her newer sites Fun Photography Projects, as Mark said the new Black Stallion colour schemes are good for photo sites. The header image is us messing around with forced photography, we found a small (it was really small, looks big in the photo) wooden chair (falling to bits) in a field and I spent ten minutes in a field jumping in the air to get that photo :-)
Make a basic setup and you are good to go. Add your Stallion activation ID, add your AdSense publisher number (or turn AdSense off if you don’t want ads) and if you only plan to use AdSense that’s it, you get a site not unlike the one you are on now. You can setup widgets like most themes (if you’ve used WordPress before that will be easy). Few minutes of ticking boxes and you can achieve so many different designs with everything search engine optimised (if a feature isn’t either SEO positive or SEO neutral I won’t add it to Stallion) easily. Most of the options include information about what they do, so most features (optional features) are very easy to use and understand, lots of ticking boxes :-)
My youngest son has made quite a few sets of header and banner images at Stallion Theme Custom Banners and Header Images. We’ll be making some larger header images for the new Stallion 2011 header feature.
That’s also a good site to see the new thumbnail features, the archived posts are showing examples of almost all the thumbnail options, Stallion thumbnail set on posts, using a featured image (WordPress core feature), using a YouTube thumbnail screenshot and grabbing an image from the post.
This thumbnail feature sounds complicated, but it’s automated, if you’ve never set a featured image the thumbnail will either be nothing (if no images on a post), thumbnail of an image within the post or a thumbnail of a YouTube video. Want some control set a Stallion thumbnail for each post or a featured image. Timthumb 2 is built into Stallion, Timthumb creates thumbnails from any image on your server, so you can set a 1000px wide Stallion thumbnail and Timbthumb will automatically generate a thumbnail using the sizes you selected on the Stallion options page. The new Stallion thumbnail feature also ties in with the Contextual Related Posts Plugin that can be downloaded from WordPress SEO Plugins, that is as soon as I upload the new Stallion version of the Contextual Related Posts Plugin (made a lot of modifications).
The “Related Articles to Stallion WordPress Theme AdSense Setup” section below uses that plugin and the “Stallion WordPress Theme Chitika Setup” thumbnail is a Stallion thumbnail resized using Timbthumb (all automated). Will get the new version uploaded tomorrow, fixed the issue with the original Contextual Related Posts Plugin generating extra database queries on the home page.
David
Stallion WordPress Theme Options
Beautiful WordPress Theme
May probably buy this theme to some site – I really do believe it´s very good – but now I search for a SEO-theme which also are beautiful – out of the box.
The presentation is important here.
Wouldn´t it be nice to have both qualities in the same theme David…?
If you have some advice on this it would be appreciated.
Regards!
Mike
Beautiful WordPress Theme Designs
Beauty is subjective and adding appealing colour schemes to Stallion is currently top of the list of future updates.
SEO is covered, sure I’ll find the odd small SEO improvement (like the new search code I added in Stallion 6.2), but Stallion is already years ahead of it’s closest competitors SEO wise.
Ad features wise it’s one of the best WordPress ad themes available, I’m sure I’ll find improvements ad wise in the future that will eventually make Stallion the best WordPress ad theme by far as well, but it’s not a high priority.
Which means it’s all about aesthetics now.
There are 27 Stallion theme colour schemes in Stallion 6.2 (3 new ones), you can test the colour schemes out on this site on the right menu. Two of the three new ones (Delicate and Coraline) are based on the WordPress themes Delicate and Coraline which are currently two of the most popular WordPress themes (themes listed by popularity at https://wordpress.org/themes/browse/popular/ ) in the WordPress Theme repository.
So I’m adding new Stallion colour schemes based on what others use, the benefit of adding colour schemes this way is they are to some degree modular. The Coraline and Delicate themes for example do not include the header image code TwentyEleven has, Stallion does. So you can have a site that looks like Delicate with the TwentyEleven header image code. You get Delicate/Coraline with all the Stallion features making Stallion Coraline and Stallion Delicate better than Delicate/Coraline.
If anyone has any suggestions for new theme colours or features, feel free to suggest them as I browse through comments for ideas when working on an update.
Stallion WordPress SEO is sold through Clickbank which has a 60 day money back guarantee, you don’t need a real reason for obtaining a refund from Clickbank (it’s an automated process, request a refund from Clickbank a few days later a refund is issued with no input from the product seller), so try Stallion out for up to 60 days and if it’s not for you get a full refund.
David
Beautiful WordPress Theme Designs