This post is here for discussing WordPress theme development, what would you like to see added to the Stallion Responsive theme?
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Stallion Responsive
The best responsive WordPress SEO theme, guaranteed!
WordPress SEO Theme Development
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Add a Logo to a WordPress Blog?
Hi
Please confirm that the image at the top can be changed on your templates.
Can the images in your templates/themes be easily edited? Also, can the colors of the header and colors of the widget headings be changed?
Thanks
Mark
How to Add a Logo to a WordPress Theme
With regards editing the theme, yes it’s possible to change the Talian theme, how much depends on your skill level and what you plan to change.
The mountain/desert image near the top is very easy to change. Go to the images folder within the Talian folder and find the someimage.gif and replace it with your image.
As long as your image is a gif and named someimage.gif with the dimensions 480 by 120 that’s all you have to do.
The other images like the ones that create the orange and green stripes are also found in the images folder, would be quite easy to edit, for example the menu headers are created from the image h2navbg.gif, load it in Paintshop Pro or something and make yourself a new version and upload over the original images.
Don’t forget to backup your original images.
David Law
How to Add a Logo to a WordPress Theme
WordPress Blog Author Archives
Hi again.
Everything worked fine.
Here is an odd thing that happened before the last update and after;
Where I have the wordpress theme 2.7.1 installed, click on one of the “Rangers” on the left sidebar. (The Rangers are the “Authors”. when you click on one of the Rangers, the new page does not show the Title of the the website at the top left of the page.
This happened before I made the change from “Authors” to “Rangers” I think.
If it is not too much to ask, I am wondering where I insert this piece of code into a loop to display a Post Author name under the title of a post. I have been reading lots of wordpress help and trying to place the code in different places of the wordpress theme and template files with no result.
WordPress Blog Author Archives
WordPress Author Archives SEO Title Tags
I think I’m going to have to block you from these comments Clayton, you keep finding my mistakes :)
Thought I’d covered the author pages, apparently not. The header.php code of the themes are very complex now and I’ve missed out the code for author names so it shows the H1 version of the blog name.
Easy to fix when you know how.
Editing header.php find
class=”header_site_desc”
below it is the code for the large link to the blogs home page.
What I’ve done here is create two** versions of this link, one is within a H1 header for pages that have no real SEO focus (monthly archive pages and the home page for example) and another that has no H1 header for pages with a keyword focus like category pages, single blog post pages etc… This way the H1 header on single blog posts are used for the name of the page which is the title of the post is keyword rich will help with the pages SERPs.
I should have added the author code within the H1 version as those pages have no keyword focus.
Find
if (is_page("archives") || is_year() || is_month() || is_day() || is_home())Change to
if (is_page("archives") || is_year() || is_month() || is_day() || is_home() || is_author())Save, upload and that will fix the problem.
**Actually it’s three versions, but one is to make the themes backwards compatible with early WordPress versions that don’t use the tag function, pre 2.3, lots of new themes that include tags on the menu etc… won’t work on WP 1.0 to 2.2, mine do by adding an if statement when including tag coding, if it’s not WordPress 2.3+ the tag coding is ignored and the theme should still work.
Glad I’ve only sent out the update for the Talian theme so far :) can fix this oversight before sending out update. I won’t send this out as a Talian update right away (will add to the next update and for new orders) since few people use the author pages, most blogs have one author. If a past customer wants this change and don’t want to do the editing above drop me an email listing the email address you used to order your theme and I’ll send it out ASAP.
Regarding your author pages, like monthly archive pages they have no real SEO focus and so from an SEO perspective don’t add anything to a site. This is why I removed the author links from all the themes: on most themes where you see the name of an author who posted the post (on my themes not linked) there would be a link to the authors page (like your author menu links). Since most WordPress blogs are single author sites this results in a set of archives pretty much identical to the home page archives.
Duplicate content = waste of link power and possible Google mixups: for example if there’s just the admin posting to a site the admin author page will be identical to the home page and there’s a very small risk Google will remove your home page from the search index and list the admin author page as more important (depends a lot on backlinks and luck, Google is FAR from perfect). From experience I know not to take risks with duplicate content, I’ve seen Google do some very strange things.
David Law
WordPress Author Archives SEO Title Tags
WordPress SEO CMS
Thanks again David! I think I am pushing WordPress to the limit – my site may be better served by a total CMS system like Joomla but this WordPress system is so easy and intuitive to use, I’ll stick with it.
I really appreciate your SEO FREE consultation! :-)
But more than just giving free advice, you are helping folks like me get a real solid understanding of WordPress SEO.
I am using your advice! It is very valuable. When we set up a site we have to take any measure to avoid Google pitfalls. Like you say they are not perfect and sometimes they make global updates like a couple months ago when many bloggers websites fell from front page rankings into the basement. If we pay attention to good SEO advice and do not use Black Hat methods, our websites should continue to rank high on Google and other search engines.
Thanks again. (had me worried there when I read the first line of this post) I think I have most of my bug testing done now though! :-)
WordPress SEO CMS
Poorly Written WordPress Plugin Crashes Site
My recipe site has over 60,000 posts and doesn’t struggle anymore :)
Had a problem with a plugin that made the Category menu ‘fold’, reduced the Category links from all of them shown all the time (as it is now, hundreds of Categories!) to only the top parent Category (about 30 Category links all the time), you would click a Parent and the Child Cats open (resulting in 30 to about 70 Category links opening on the menu).
This plugin resulted in 600-1000 database queries if I recall correctly for every page loaded at a time where the site was getting over 10,000 visitors a day not including search engine spiders and this caused my server to STRUGGLE (crashed a few times) and surfing the site was slower that swimming through sand!
Before realising it was the plugin I bought a second dedicated server and only added the recipe site to it, still had problems (not as bad), realised it wasn’t the server to blame (the other server had all my other sites on it as well, millions of pages indexed in Google).
Removing the plugin reduced the queries per page loaded to a more normal 30 queries and now it runs smoothly. So without using a poorly written plugin WordPress can at least handle 60,000 posts with no problems.
I have other sites with, 5K, 10K, 20K, 30K posts on them with no issues. Many of these are datafeed like sites and so don’t get much traffic, but Google etc…. still spider the CRAP out of them most days and my servers memory (not that high) is doing fine! A case of 20,000 real visitors a day and the equivalent of another 100,000K visitors a day in the form of search engine spiders!
Added the WP Super Cache plugin to the recipe site as well, but don’t think it’s needed, especially as the site has a Google penalty which has the site at about 1,000 visitors a day right now. Just before the penalty looked like it was going to break into the 15K visitors a day region as added 30K+ new recipes that had just been indexed and started to rank! Tried selling text links from it, despite removing the two links sold the penalty remains other than a 7 day period when it was lifted.
So unless your site is on a really badly overloaded server I think WordPress can cope with it. 1,000 pages is nothing for WordPress.
BTW I enjoy giving SEO advice.
David Law
Poorly Written WordPress Plugin Crashes Site
Free Internet Marketing and SEM Advice
Hello Mr. Law.
Really appreciated your last post. It is rare to find someone in internet marketing and SEM be so transparent. The information and guidance given in this feed is a real help and encouragement. Not only that but you have already answered my next concern and I did not even mention it yet! I was thinking a drop down menu would be real nice but the reality of my visitors and that of many websites is that visitors come to individual posts or pages from a search engine instead of dropping by the home page and pouring over the menu.
The info about the menu plugin above really helps me be aware of any thing that I may try in that area.
Thanks!
Free Internet Marketing and SEM Advice
How to Use a CSS Wrapper Div?
Happy New Year David,
A quick question –
Can you suggest me on how to use wrapper in the CSS?
I’d like To get a fixed width “page wrapper” element to center at all window resolutions and in all modern browsers.
Thanks
How to Use a CSS Class
Do you mean a CSS class that when you add the code to a post it centers?
Create a class like postcenter and add it to the end of the style.css file.
.postcenter { width: 200px; text-align: center; }Edit the width to the size you want.
And use the class in a post
Merry Christmas :-)
David
How to Use a CSS Class
Light WordPress SEO Theme
Hello,
I have tried changing the colors of the black header, but have not been able to, how is it done?. I was wondering if you can do it for me for a fee? Maybe you can offer different color options of the talian theme for sale? As the black and grey does not go with every niche. Please let me know if this is possible.Thanks.
Best regards,
Nasma
Light WordPress SEO Theme
How to Customize a WordPress Theme
Your site hasn’t got changed images, so though you’ve made CSS changes (edited the style.css file) you’ve not changed the actual image files to get a different look like I did at
You have to go into the theme folder that you unzipped onto your computer.
Find the images under (this is offline, not on your website, probably on your C: drive),
talian-adsense-seo-04/images
In the folder on your hard drive you’ll find over 20 images. The important ones are:
headerbg.gif : the image for the header, black background with an orange and green stripe
footerbg.gif : the image for the footer, black background
h2navbg.gif : the image for the sidebar headings, black background with an orange and green stripe
You’ll need image editing software like PainshopPro or Photoshop (any program that can edit gif images) load these images into an image editing program and edit them.
The images are really simple, the footer one is all black, so replace the black with your choice of colour. The other two have a block of green at the top and orange at the bottom, rest is black with a little colour grading on the header image. Replace the black, green and orange bits with your choice of colour.
Save the three files and upload them over the images online using FTP (upload the whole theme, it’s easier). Make sure you refresh the page to check it’s worked in a browser (CTRL F5 usually works, if not clear your browser cache).
You could also change search_button.gif (the orange search button image). commented_v.gif the number of comments button.
Any other colour changes are through the style.css file that it looks like you’ve already figured out how to edit.
BTW if you want to pinch the blue images feel free, easy to do download the images one by one from
Wouldn’t bother me, but my wife (it’s her site) might slap you :-)
David
How to Customize a WordPress Theme
How to Customize WordPress Theme
Hi Dave,
I have uploaded this theme and use it on my web. I want to change the font size and type in my post. The current font is too big for me, I want to make it smaller/same size and same type as used on adsense one, also want to change the current black and yellow background colours with other colour to suit my web topic.
Please let me know how to do that. Thanks
Effendy
How to Customize WordPress Theme
WordPress SEO Talian 5 Theme Custom Colours
Changing the colours of this theme has been discussed on other comments under this page, you have to edit a few images.
My wife is not very good with computers, but on one of her sites she’s been making custom banner images with PaintShop Pro and she plans to change the colours herself (I did the last ones for her at to get the blue).
To change font sizes and the font you’ll need to open the style.css file in a text editor and change the font family and font sizes manually.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of fonts sizes within the style.css file so it’s not a straightforward thing to explain what they all do, so it’s a case of change them and see what happens. Search for
font-size
through the style.css file to find them all (about 15 instances). The em value is a relative value, relative to 1, increase the number to make it bigger, decrease it to make it smaller.
The font types or family. Search for
font-family
And change the font family for each one you want changing (about 5 of them).
To match the AdSense font go to Google AdSense control panel and check what fonts you have set
Since the default font for each ad unit type (the difference ad unit sizes) is different, you’ll have to set the default font to one of those available, otherwise they won’t match what you do to the theme.
If you look at the sample ad units at you can see the different default fonts used (though they don’t list them).
So if you want the theme and AdSense fonts to match exactly you’ll have to change your default AdSense font to either Arial, Times or Verdana and match the em value to whatever small/medium/large look like.
David
WordPress SEO Talian 5 Theme Custom Colours
WordPress Theme How to Remove WordPress Widgets?
help i just bought and installed a copy of Talian O5, How do I get to remove the Categories, Meta, Links and RSS widgets on the left side of my blog they are not in the sidebar options for me to drag out
How to Remove Default WordPress Widgets by Adding Widgets
You use the widgets menu to build the sidebars as you want them, so drag whichever widgets you want and only those widgets. Do this for each of the two sidebars and you’ll have the sidebars you want.
David