Download Theme

               Demo Theme

I designed this template in Photoshop, coded and edited it in Dreamweaver and Notepad++. Although this theme is visual attractive (which in many cases means “heavy”) it does not take a lot of resources like some other similar wordpress themes. Most of the visual attractive themes tend to be heavy for your host and slow loading for the user. Most of those themes load a lot of add-ons in their header.php, plus they have a very complex functions.php. I designed Director to be as “lite” as possible, yet visual attractive.

Many more features will be added in the next versions of Director. Some extra features like custom CSS, Analytics, Adsense and more. Custom CSS will let you modify the stylesheet and save the customization, so you don’t lose the changes when you update. Twitter, Facebook and Custom RSS can be added from the theme’s options. Enter the WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance -> Director Options. You can also send suggestions here. This WordPress theme will be offered in Spanish (my native language) in the next few versions. Want to translate Director Theme to another language? You can contact me as well and I will add your credit (name and site) to the changelog!

Here are some stats of WpThemesPlanet first year:

20,000 downloads of Patagonia and 10,000 of Tandil

100 articles

800 approved comments

12,000 spam comments blocked by Akismet!

300 user Emails received.

450 Support emails sent.

3 Free WordPress Themes and 50 Theme Updates released.

Many theme customizations for clients of Patagonia and Tandil.

I want to thank everyone for using my themes and supporting the project. The first year is hard. Most internet projects collapse during this period. If you manage to survive the first year, you are good to go. During this period, I spent time adding content and supporting users, as well as updating and improving both themes. During the second year I want to take the whole project to the next level. Many good things will follow! Stay tuned!

Finally I want to quote a phrase from Thomas Alva Edison:

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Never give up!

Download Theme

Preview Theme

Download Theme

Preview Theme

You can either install or update Patagonia and Tandil theme automatically from your dashboard. This is recommended if you didn’t change anything in the css or php files manually. Otherwise, make you sure to save your customization before upgrading.

Happy WordPressing everyone!

Creating the image

The first thing you need to do is to create the image that you want to use as favicon. Don’t make your image too complex because small detail tend to get lost when resized to a tiny 16 by 16 pixels.

If you want to easily draw your own favicon, there is a great online tool called Favicon.cc. It lets you draw your own icon while the Favicon in the browser updates in real time to reflect your changes. If you use this tool you can skip the next step as the tool will handle the conversion to .ico as well.

Converting your favicon to .ico format

If you draw your image with Photoshop or any other editor, you will need to convert your file to .ico format. Modern web browsers will generally let you get away with using a png, gif or even a jpeg for your favicon, but to be compatible with older version of internet explorer and Firefox, you’ll have to convert the image to .ico format.

To convert your image, you can also use the Favicon.cc website, only this time, click the “Import Image” button on the left side of the page and upload your image. The tool will convert your image to .ico format and let you download the final product.

Add the favicon to your site

Then make sure you store/save your favicon icon inside your WordPress Theme images folder. For example /patagonia/images/favicon.ico.

Then, assuming you save your favicon.ico file in your theme directory, add the following anywhere between the tags.

1

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/favicon.ico">

Just copy that line and paste it in the header.php. In patagonia theme, you can paste this line right after the <link rel=”pingback”…> line.

Download Theme

WordPress is no longer known as “just a blogging platform”. The job of theme designers is to style WordPress for everyone and to make Internet sites look great and easy to browse. Amazing Free and Premium WordPress themes will be released in 2010. Version 1.6.6 of Patagonia includes excerpts in the category and tags pages which shows a resume of each post and a link to the full article.

If you are upgrading Patagonia and your theme was manually customized, remember to save those changes before upgrading. WordPress will probably release a feature to make theme upgrades easier in a coming future, specially for users who customize themes. Another great news is that I have partenerd with one of my colleagues to start offering free blog hosting to my theme users, but I will release this via Twitter and RSS first, so make sure to subscribe to the RSS and Twitter. Wish you a great start of 2010! Happy blogging!

I won’t name them as it’s Unprofessional to do. You can contact me if you need more info or if you need me to review your premium themes. Anyway, many webmasters buy those themes, because the themes are actually sold using excellent marketing tactics that make people buy them. However take care before wasting money on wordpress themes that are not going to fit your basic needs or will fail to integrate with the latest WordPress Versions. And when you ask for support, they don’t give you any at all.  Now I am very happy to say that both Themes I designed are fully compatible with WordPress MU and with the latest versions of WordPress. I’m currently working on new themes. I will release a very good free theme soon. Something that cannot be found on the market actually. Something fresh and original. So stay tuned.

Follow me on Twitter. Subscribe to my RSS Feed.

Download Tandil Theme

Enjoy!

Create a custom HTML page and set it as front page:

Using your favorite HTML editor, create your own page and save it as “index.html”. Then upload it to your root folder, for example “yourdomain.com”. It doesn’t matter if wordpress is installed in the same folder. All internet browsers will interpret the index.html as the front page of your site.

Then go to “settings -> general” in your wordpress dashboard. There set your desired Blog Address. For example if you want your blog to display in “yourdomain.com/blog” then set that as url. Again, it doesn’t matter if wordpress is installed at “yourdomain.com”. Remember to have a link in your custom front page that goes to your blog. This option is great for those who want to have their blogs separated from their main sites. That is it. Now let’s see the second option.

Create a static page and set it as front page:

Sometimes you want to display a static page as your blog home. In this case you will have your posts and articles in a secondary page. This is very easy to set thanks to the new WordPress features. The first step is to create the static page you want to display, you must do this in the Pages settings. In this example I will name it “Page 1″.

Then you must create a second page, but this time you will leave it blank. There is no need to write anything in this page, because this will be your posts page, it will be filled with your own posts/articles. We will name it “Page 2″.

Go to “Settings -> Reading” and in “Front page displays” select “A static page”. Now you must tell WordPress which page you want to set as home. So in “Front page” select the page you want to show as main, in this case “Page 1″. This will be the first page to show up when you enter your site. Then in “Posts page” you must select in what page you want to show your posts or articles. In this case “Page 2″.

Save changes and you are done! Everytime your visitors enter blog, they will see a static page as the first thing. They will access your articles/posts/updates by clicking on the “Page 2″ in the header navigation bar.