New Thesis Skin Straight Shooter At Tarot Elements

Phase One

Yesterday I began Phase One of the Facelift At Tarot Elements. Having already decided to use the elegant skin Straight Shooter from ThesisThemes, I installed it over my existing theme – the awesome Thesis. It was a painless process and the final tweaks were taken care of pretty quickly.

For those of you unfamiliar with Thesis, or indeed ‘themes’, let me give a brief outline as to what I’m rambling on about.

In my first post I told you that my Tarot blog is self-hosted using WordPress, but what does this mean? Quite simply there are two ways to own a blog that uses WordPress as its platform. Consider WordPress as the bones of your blog; also if you want things to be easier to work with, consider WordPress.com as your host (not unlike a web host). You sign up for an account, create your blog name and you’re away. WordPress provide you with a ready made blog that lives within the WordPress.com site. It’s easy and you don’t need to know any computer code to make it look any different – everything is done for you, which is awesome.

If you want to do things for yourself though, then self-hosting is the answer. It gives you total free licence to do what you like on your blog from the content to the style. If you decide to still use WordPress as your blogging platform, you will need to install this yourself on web space that you will have bought from a separate host. The fun is only just beginning though because self-hosted Wordpress (WordPress.org) needs something to make it look more attractive to your readers, the styling and functionality etc. You’re now entering the realm of themes.

What Is A Theme?

As I just said, a theme is the styling that you see when you go to a blog – the colours, the layout, the font styles and sizes. Self-hosted Wordpress comes with two basic themes to help you get started. Most people move on from these very quickly, though I rather like the Classic 1.5 Theme.

You can find many free themes that will suit the purposes of some, but being free, their functionality and options are limited. If you want something more, then you’re entering the realm of the Premium Theme. These come in many styles, layouts, colours – the list of options are seemingly endless. You need to be careful though, as good looking as some of these Premium Themes are, the code that lies behind them, that makes them, can be untidy and poorly written. If you’re familiar with the term ‘bugs’ or ‘buggy’ then you’ll know exactly what I mean. I can tesitfy to the reality of this because Thesis wasn’t the first Premium Theme I bought, the first one abandoned and written off as a bad job. You will see this more in the free theme arena, but if you’re going to pay good money for a Premium Theme, then logic tells me it should be the best you can buy or the best out there.

Strict code isn’t just all about your theme working properly without bugs. Search engines such as Google prefer strict code and will rank you higher in the search returns because they can read your blog a lot easier. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t just about keywords. It’s also about strict code. Enter Thesis.

Why Thesis?

Quite frankly it’s awesome. From its stricter code to its functionality; from the options for the layout and font changes. Thesis is a framework that allows youto decide what colours you want; where you want your sidebars; and without specifically knowing code, makes available to you key areas where you can insert code for widgets (Thesis Open Hooks) or embed videos, pictures or indeed anything that you decide, where you decide. The beauty of Thesis is that you need never get your hands dirty with code or get under the hood. Unless of course you want to…

Tarot Elements using Thesis theme without any style changes

If you’re a code ninja or a know-nothing-novice and you want to really get the most out of Thesis (getting under the hood), then Chris Pearson, the creator of Thesis, made that easy too by providing with his theme a way to make style and code changes without touching the original files. This serves two purposes a) you can undo any changes you made without causing your blog to crash; and b) any future updates of WordPress and indeed Thesis, means your style and codes changes are unaffected because you never touched the original files. The way that works is the subject for another post.

So What Now At Tarot Elements?

Well, I’ll spend a couple of days playing around with the widgets and layout – the footer is a new toy to me so expect the content to change in there a few times. But having aligned everything and decided on the navigation and functionality of my Tarot blog, the next phase is a change in colour. I have a few ideas in mind that I’m playing around with in Photoshop so I may dither here, and of course, being a woman, I’m likely to change my mind! A few times.

I’m really happy with things as they are right now though and I’m delighted with how cool Straight Shooter looks in its original form on my blog. I also can’t sing enough praise as to how easy the whole process was either. ThesisThemes made a cool Thesis Skin, maintained the strict code that Thesis is famous for and made me a happy Tarot blog owner in the process.

Phase One complete, let Phase Two begin…