New Theme XD06

Offer Closed

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Starting on Sunday 13th January at 2.00pm GMT (9.00am EST) I’m releasing theme XD06 at an introductory $10.

The theme includes a home page that is ideal for creating a show case for a service or product (or set of products) and allows you to display a slideshow of either images or videos. Each slide is easily editable and comes with a WYSIWYG editor, plus you can easily change the button text and URLs.

Here’s an annotated screen shot of the home page.

And here’s a video showing how easy it is to change various aspects of the home page in the admin panel.

By selecting different options in the admin panel, you can change:-

o Theme colours (7 included).
o Logo or logo text.
o Favicon.
o Quote boxes (WYSIWYG editor on the top quote).
o Home box content (4 boxes plus WYSIWYG editor).
o Home box content (3 box plus WYSIWYG editor).
o Enable/disable Home boxes.
o “Get in touch” (Contact) details, including movable special widget.
o Footer text.
o Social Networking buttons integrated – FaceBook, Twitter, Google+.

In addition you can:-

o Add tracking (analytics) code.
o Add up to five slides either images or videos.
o Change background, font, link and hover colours (colour pickers).
o Add and move the special “Get In Touch” widget.

I’m sure you’ll agree it’s perfect for showing off a product or service and gives you all the flexibility you need to introduce people to either.

In other words with a little effort you get the power to make it look like a theme that’s been custom designed for your business.

You can get the theme starting at just $10 if you’re one of the first 50 buyers, then the price rises like this:-

1-50 – $10.00
51-75 – $12.50
76-100 – $15.00
100+ – $17.00 until sale end.

The theme will then be officially released at a more realistic $27.00 when the sale is over.

The sale starts Sunday 13th at 2.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST). If you’re on the mailing list I’ll send you an email when it begins.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood

13 comments

Dear Frank.

I’m getting your emails twice, from two aweber accounts: wso (frankhaywood.com) & smartdd (support).

Would you please consolidate into one or can unsubscribe from one of them and remain on the other one?

I’m always interested in your new products but, of course, my main interest is being informed about updates.

Thanks!

Frank Haywood

Hi Diego,

Hmmm. Aweber is NOT supposed to do that according to the rules I’ve set up. The best thing is for you to unsubscribe from one of them, maybe the SmartDD one.

-Frank

Hi Frank

For the new Theme release XDO6,
– Is it responsive to mobile?
– Can it be adjusted to full width instead of boxed sides?
– At the very top right, can a quick contact (phone number or email
address) kind of widget be placed up there?

On a side note, I’ve got quite a few of your products and use them
on most of my sites.
Perhaps your next project would be to make good legal pages plugin.
There are some free ones out there, but most are older and only have a
very basic Privacy page and Terms of Service. A lot more legal pages in
the present are needed.
A listing of different pages and a check box to include whichever ones
from the admin panel.

EVERY site needs these regardless of the niche or content and yet is
the most neglected aspect of site building.

Just a request.

Thanks
Jack

Frank Haywood

Hi Jack,

Good questions that lead me onto thinking about how future themes should be presented. 😉

-No it’s not mobile responsive as it is now – I’ll ask my themes guy what experience he has in this area. Responsive themes are quite difficult to do (I’ve noticed that some sites break with multiple copies of the same block appearing) and I’d guess they’d double up on development time as you have to do two lots of CSS plus device detection. However, I *did* take a look at the theme on my Kindle Fire HD and it looks pretty damn good on it and the text is perfectly legible even when viewed in portrait mode. It might get a *little* harder to read on a smaller display, but pinch and zoom is pretty good on most devices. I accept we’ll have to do something for mobile on all these themes as it seems the way to go in future.

-For pages only there are full width page templates (with and without date and author) to choose from, the posts all have the sidebar. (I don’t know why WP don’t treat pages and posts in the same way, it’s about time they did and would remove a layer of complexity from WP themes.)

-That’s a good idea for the quick contact widget, I’ll see what we can do in the next couple of days. In the meantime, you could place it at the top of the sidebar on interior pages.

As for a legal pages plugin, I’m a little concerned about doing that (I HAVE thought about it) as I think it’s a minefield. The cost for getting a lawyer to produce generic legal pages that are good for all countries (or even just NA and EU) would be prohibitively expensive to create and maintain. Probably the best I could do is provide an easy method of setting your own standard pages in text files (HTML aware) that you could then transfer from site to site with the plugin. The responsibility would then be on the end user to maintain them and nobody can turn round and sue me for bad advice. That might even be a better plugin to create now I think about it as it would have far more uses than just legal pages – you could create all sorts of standard pages to be used on different sites. It’s now in my product ideas doc.

And finally, thank you for buying my stuff. 🙂

-Frank

Frank,

Great looking and flexible theme! Think it is your best yet :).

BTW, how well optimized are the codes underneath the hood to make sure the site loads fast?

That’s the problem I had with another very nice looking theme but after set up, even with only small feature picturse, pages load very slowly.

Also, is this theme SEO friendly?

Thanks!

Frank Haywood

Hi TW,

Thank you. 🙂

I’m not a coder (any more) and I get other people to do it for me and they know the guidelines and I trust them to do their best. The site/theme seems to load quite quickly for me and my server is in the US while I’m in the UK so I’m happy with it.

Optimising your images before uploading them to WordPress is always a good idea – I sometimes use a tool called Advanced JPEG Compressor – and making sure they’re the right sizes for display helps a lot too. For example in the screen shot on this post, I used a FireFox add on called Screengrab, resized it to 550 pixels wide, and then added the ballons afterwards. I then uploaded it to WordPress and used the full size image rather than let WordPress compress it as I don’t think WP always does the best job.

Alternatively, if you’ve got a site loading slowly because (images slow them down even more), then you could put them somewhere else such as Amazon S3 or ImageShack hosting for faster loading times.

Do you know what? I should do some tutorial videos on how to do this. I take it for granted that everybody knows this stuff, but I know that’s not always the case so I’m being a bit silly aren’t I?

As for SEO, WP is pretty good at SEO out of the box, but there are some easy to use plugins that greatly extend any WP site capabilities such as All-In-One SEO (my current weapon of choice), and some thoughtful use of page interlinking with anchor text. I also recommend the Dagon Design site map generator (I should create my own I think) and Google XML sitemaps. Between them they should really cover all your basic SEO needs. (Is that another short course?) 🙄

-Frank

Hi Frank,

this is very good looking theme, like all XD-Themes 😉
but i have some parts what you maybe must change on the theme, i think i have ask this parts also before some time for the other XD-Themes,
i mean when you not put some content in the quote boxes it will show all thime the default text, and also i think this is also in the 3 home boxes, like you use only 2 boxes from the home content and put there your own content inside, then in the rest boxes there will be show the default text inside, what you think how this will look? 😉

i think it will be better when there is no default text inside or it must be so that you can disable all the boxe seperate, like 2 in use and the other 2 will be disable 😉

i have see all also the same problem in the footer, like what you have show in the video, there you have put only in one footer widget, and in the other footer there was showing the default text, also not so nice 😉

and will this theme come also for the XD-Theme Membership? or will this membership not setup again?

best regards from finnland
Olaf

Frank Haywood

Hi Olaf,

Thanks for your thoughts, let’s see if I can answer this to your satisfaction.

I like your idea of being able to disable individual Home boxes, but this might leave the home page a little messy? Maybe we could automaitcally move them about on the home page to fill the gap but that would remove some control from you. However did you know you can hide one of the 4-Box boxes by putting a single space in the “Title Box” field for the box? 😉

(This doesn’t work with the 3-Box boxes though as the theme draws the box and button – I’ll see what we can do to get that changed as it would be an easy way to remove those box areas if you don’t want them.)

You can also put a blank text widget into any of the footer widget areas and it will remove the content in that area. There’s nearly always a workround for some of these problems.

As for the membership, when I can get past the issues I have with payment processors and the script then I’ll probably resume *after* this theme or possibly even the next one I release depending on how long it all takes. EVERYTHING takes twice as long as you think it will. 🙄

That means I won’t be resuming the membership with this theme, I’ll skip to the next one or the one after when I can get it all started again. I think. It’s complicated and I might even change how it all works – I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about all this, and the more thought and effort I put into it, the simpler and slicker things should be for you. 😉

-Frank

Well, I’ve just bought XD06 & I don’t even have a blog – yet.
Frankly, I thought it very interesting & decided to have it.
I even kicked my grandson out so that I could get to my pc so as not to miss it.
When I have made my fortune with it, I’ll take you to tea at the Ritz

Frank Haywood

Hi Jim,

Well thank you for your faith in me. I saw the order come in and didn’t recognise the name so I’m glad you’ve left a comment here. 🙂

If you need any help with web stuff / marketing in general or you’re unsure about things, give me a list of any of your questions (reply to my email please). I’m compiling a list of likely tutorials so I really need to hear from people like yourself who need to know what’s what. I tend to take it all for granted as I’ve been doing it for so long and I’m unsure about what people need to know first of all.

-Frank

Hi Frank,

I bought XD06 and really like it except for one thing:

It looks good in Firefox, but It doesn’t work well with IE 8.

One example is: The image slider on the homepage isn’t working. It is freezing between the changeover of images so there are half of two different photos/text on display at once.

If it can’t be fixed, can you suggest a work-around? I tried just having image/text in only the first slide, but this doesn’t work, either. Also, the tabs at the top don’t display, and there are a few other differences.

It there any chance this can be fixed and I could re-install the theme? I read about 25 percent of people still use IE 6, 7, or 8. So that’s quite a few people.

As it is, I may not be able to use this theme after all, even though I really like it.

Please let me know what you suggest. Thank you!

Frank Haywood

Hi Vivian,

Because browser updates seems to come thick and fast nowadays, we tend to check for compatibliity with the latest browsers and not care too much about older ones. IE is always going to display pages incorrectly unless special action is taken to work around the shortcomings of that browser, and we all have to say “enough is enough”.

You have to eventually put some onus on the end-user to do the right thing and upgrade their browser. (I think there’s a free plugin that prompts people to go upgrade away from IE.)

Here’s the whacked out thing. XD06 works fine in IE9, and it also works in IE8 when in IE6 compatibility mode. So what did MS do to break things by default in IE8? I reckon they tried to do more of their “embrace and extend” thing for IE8 and it blew up in their faces when people started complaining sites didn’t show correctly and so now we have IE9 that works just like IE6 did.

-Frank

Hi Frank,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my concern over the browser issue. I will give it some though, about what to do.

In the meantime, is there a way to Turn Off the Slider? That seems to be the most incompatible element.

Thanks again!

Viv