Switching to Thesis Theme: When Personal Blogging Becomes Business

Are you thinking of switching from your current WordPress theme to Thesis?

This post is a story about George Serradinho, who switched from One Theme to Thesis.

Here is what George had to say about his experience with Thesis after just two weeks…

“You just need to understand Thesis, I have been using it for less than a week and I’m happy to say that it’s not as hard as some people say it is.

I know many users/sites are not using Thesis and I must emphasis that it’s a theme that you can manage and change with ease. Thesis has somewhat revived my way of thinking when trying to change your site and I have great respect for the developers as they really made it simple and easy. My old theme (One Theme) took me long to understand what and how the developers thought with regards to adding simple CSS and basic features.”

Before and After Installation and Customization of Thesis Theme

Here are two screenshots of the home page, what his site used to look like using One Theme’s default look (left screen shot) and what his site looks like now using Thesis Theme (right screen shot).

Site Review: WordPress Thesis Theme on Serradinho.com

What do you think? Do you prefer the look of One Theme or the site’s new look, using Thesis?

Serradinho swtiched over to Thesis in late May 2009. The site is a great place to visit – both visually and content wise.

Thesis Theme Customization For Your Unique Look

George Serradinho puts a lot of himself into his blog. The site’s design includes a uniquely designed header complete with the South African landscape and its wild animals, and a personally branded post footer (below).

While the site is essentially a personal blog, it is fast becoming  a business blog in that it’s intention is to generate income for the blog owner.

If you have a personal blog and you want to continue into the future, you should seriously think about how to make money with your blog.

5 money making strategies for your Thesis Theme site

Serradinho uses a variety of strategies – some of which are subtle and others that aren’t – to make money:

Google AdSense in your sidebars or somewhere in your content column…

Affiliate links and Graphic banners in sidebars, as part of articles, at the end of posts using Thesis Hooks or on a page of their own…

Link list page that includes a list of sponsors (paid links)…

Adding a PayPal donate button and asking for donations when you are giving something away for free…

Selling advertising - by including a tab “Advertise” that takes a prospective advertiser to a page listing advertising options and prices…

Most frequent visitors to blogs understand that personal bloggers especially need to cover their costs if they are to continue. The first 1-2 years is particularly important – the ‘make or break’ period. Never feel bad about trying to make money from your blog. (Blogs that are set up for business from the start don’t!)

If you are like me you understand this. When I visit favourite blogs I occassionally click on a Google Ad of interest. It’s a bit like a lucky dip – you might find something that you wouldn’t normally find and the blog owner who hosted the ad makes anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars.

As of 29 May, Serradinho’s home page went from a PR3 to a PR4. [PR stands for Page Rank] George’s goal is to get to a PR of 5. This is most people’s dream, mine included. Copyblogger and DIYThemes both have a PR of 5 for example.

Great Content On A Variety of Topics

While true business blogs are encouraged to post articles on niche topics - e.g. all about telephones or a particular theme :-) – personal blogs have more freedom and for this reason can usually offer something for everyone.

George blogs about everything from gadgets, love and movies to South Africa, sport and his son Tyron. He is even brave enough to open his heart with a bit of poetry that he has written and posts about his divorce not so long ago. For WordPress fans and bloggers, many articles cover tips, tricks and site referrals that are very useful and maybe not all that well known.

His Jokes & Funnies offer a unique look into South African humour. Having a South African born father myself, I appreciate this angle on life :-)

Injecting Your Personality Into Your Blog

Personal blogs are personal for a number of reasons. They usually contain articles on a person’s life including their interests, life trials and tribulations and discoveries they find useful that they’d like to share. If a person is generous by nature, this is also usually reflected in their site.

While George doesn’t have an About page, he does share himself throughout his posts in pictures, words and actions. From reading a selection of posts I can tell you that he is a 30 year old South African who loves his son Tyron, is crazy about soccer, likes to go to the movies, idolises his brother (who lives in the UK but visits often) and wants to settle down one day on a farm with lots of wild animals. My favourite photo of him includes his son. He writes poetry, has a number of websites and shares lots of useful free stuff and link-love with his readers and frequent commentors. All in all, he reminds me a little of Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. If you can get an insight into somebody’s life and see them develop their blog your wishes for success are often heard across the universe.

George – if you’re listening – and anyone interested in becoming a successful blogger - have a look at Leo’s site and see how he went from struggle-town to success by sharing himself, writing good quality content on particular topics and setting himself and his family up financially.

Rewarding Readers, Subscribers and Regular Visitors

Serradinho offers free downloads of:

• PLR Articles
• eBooks
• images and graphics

If you like to get free stuff then you need to visit these pages and subscribe to his RSS feed to see when he updates his list of available downloads.

More great posts on Serradinho:

• 27 Links to help you with Thesis – there’s actually only 24 links, 25 if you include the reference to his tipster Harsh from ShoutMeLoud.com
• What’s your website worth?
• Grab your free pixels
• +50 WordPress Theme Options – What would you like?
• Funny – iBoob from Apple

Room for Improvement

Serradinho.com was only created in August 2007, has already received more than 1,000 comments and boasts more than 540 articles. It’s PR rating of 4 for its home page is also excellent. But, as with all blogs developed by non-programmers, non-marketing professionals and non-perfect humans there are little tweaks that may or may not improve a site’s appeal, stickiness and overall success.

George has an article called “Basics of website review questions” where he lists points to note and discuss when reviewing a site. He wrote this only a few weeks ago and has asked for reader feedback. So, I thought by way of feedback, I would comment on some of these points [in my humble opinion] with regards to Serradinho…

First impressions

How long does the site take to load?

• Not long at all.  I’m in Australia and my download / broadband speed is about 8.5 Mbps. I didn’t have to wait for any images to load.

Does the site catch ones attention straight away?

• I really like your header. By having a cartoon image of what I expect you look like (before I explored and found a picture of you) and a bit of your home country, I feel like you are providing a personal insight – perfect for building trust and encouraging visitors to become regular readers / subscribers.

Is the site direct in saying what it’s all about or do you have to dig deeper?

• If you don’t arrive at the site via the home page (which is pretty common these days), there is no indication apart from the categories, what the site is ‘about‘. I would have liked to have seen a tagline or an About nav tab or categories that clearly indicate the main focus of the site.
• I understand it is a personal blog so anything goes, but if you want to identify with particular keywords, key phrases, topics and interest groups (target audiences) you’ll need to focus your content and/or number of categories on display. [You won't be losing readers of these other categories - your related articles links will take readers to other categories that aren't listed in the nav menu or in the sidebars.]
• By having an image of a laptop, you are indicating you use a laptop – I assume for blogging and maybe this site is all about blogging? Depending on where you want to go with your blog determines whether you want to focus your site.

After browsing a bit longer

How easy is is to navigate through and find what you are looking for?

• Lots of different ways to find content including an extensive navigation menu, category lists, user-friendly and visually appealing site map and related post links.
• You could probably raise the location of your featured posts links to ‘above the fold‘ so visitors click on at least one of them. If readers don’t scroll down and leave your site before they see this list, they may never come back. Most visitors are on a site for less than 30 seconds and rarely scroll down unless they like what they see ‘above the fold’.
• Featured posts lists - whether they are popular as determined by a popularity plugin or because you are proud of them – are a great way of increasing visits to these pages and building PR for these posts. You can use a popular posts plugin, adding your favourite posts to a category of their own, e.g. featured [remember you can add posts to more than one category], or hard code them by adding them to a text widget using html <a href=”url”>Article title</a>
• The use of Thesis Theme’s default previous and next post link is a great way to encourage further exploration. If your visitor reads a post and gets all the way down to the bottom, then these links offer them more article headlines to choose from, before racing off to another site. Some people customize Thesis and remove this default feature – not a wise move in my opinion.

Would you sign up for RSS feed, email subscription, newsletter or even join their forum?

• Yes, and I have. There are different schools of thought about offering excerpts/summaries or full posts in your feed. I notice you use the full feed and therefore offer me little reason to visit your site to get the information. If you are after visitor numbers/traffic you may want to offer summaries only and work on wording your excerpts/summaries so readers are encouraged to visit your site.
• On the other hand, if you keep offering great content, I will probably keep your subscription (via email is my preference, using rules) for longer.

Is there an about/contact/sitemap page?

• You don’t have an About page! I had to trawl to get to know why you exist, what you are about and decide whether I was interested in getting to know you more by becoming a regular visitor. Reward those who are curious with an About page. You can even just add a link in your footer for those who search (like me). I note that you have a contact form (great) and your sitemap is reader friendly.
• Do you have a Google or other sitemap for the search engine robots who visit? There are some great plugins available and this will help you with your SEO.

Search functionality?

• Your search boxes are in a few places and this is good. What more can I say?
  

Comments about the site in detail

What do you think of the colours used?

• The header is great, but… your navigation tabs are cluttered, plain and uninspiring.
  • You could do with adding a bit of CSS styling in line with the rest of your site colours. The use of bright aqua blue on hover is out of place. [See my comment a few lines ahead on 'bright blue'.] I’m sure you can do better than this.
  • Grab some CSS code tips for changing the navigation menu tabs to one colour for looking at, another for hover and another for active (if you want three different colours!). You can also change the tab colour for particular pages.
  • I would at least add a border line to the tabs to differentiate between each of them and maybe style them so they are spaced across the entire navigation area rather than hugging the left side of the page. This will relieve a bit of tension created by having your logo image (your avatar) and blog title on the left side/portion of your header image. Balance is a wonderful thing.
• I note you have mentioned you wanted to add a background image. If you are going to do anything – ditch the grey! Do a little bit of reserach about colour psychology and the colour grey.
• Your use of bright blue in the sidebar headers and Google AdSense is out of place. You use a mid-range colour pallette for your header but strong/sharp contrast for ads and sidebars. Ditch the bright blue and replace with a colour or colours from your header.

Did you know that you can customize your Google AdSense colours – typing in your own #colour codes?

Graphics quality and their loading time?

• I like your post images and thumbnails. They are well tailored to each article and are not just the standard image grabs from Flickr. Loading time is irrelevant. No worries here.

Are there too many distractions?

• I think so, yes.
• I’m not a great fan of animated ad blocks, banners and elements.
• Your Google AdSense ‘above the fold’, subscription options, header and navigation menu consume most of the page that a visitor sees when they arrive. If they don’t scroll down they often don’t see any content to read. This is a little off-putting if you are visiting to read content.
• I would ease up on the number of Google AdSense links (maybe reducing it to two if you want to keep them here) or moving it to above the headline or right align it so the reader can at least start reading the first few words of a post before deciding to stay or go. You already have Google AdSense in your sidebar for readers who are interested in clicking – maybe this is enought?
• What is more important - happy readers who come back because they feel you are all about the articles (the reason people visit blogs) or making an extra 5 cents if the reader clicks away to another site before reading your article? 5 cents or a loyal fan?

Browser compatibility?

• I use Firefox - the best browser in the world. Is this a trick question?

Do they have any video’s?

• No, none that I could find. Maybe one day? Try out the Fast Tube plugin - it’s great for YouTube embedding and styling.

Conclusion

A note to Serradinho’s webmaster/author/owner

George,

I enjoy visiting Serradinho and understand that you are like millions of other self-taught WordPress bloggers who are constantly working at improving the design of their site while adding valuable content.

You are making a great start and have proven your worth with a solid PR ranking, numerous comments and regular readers.

Without knowing what your traffic stats are, I would assume that your site popularity is growing and you will develop a target audience over time – if this is what you want.

I won’t give you a rating out of 10 (“Not my bag baby”), but I will review your site again in 6-12 months and do a follow-up review.

Well done!

Lessons Learned

If you are using Thesis Theme, you can learn something new from any Thesis site review. This site review demonstrates three main things:

1. How easy it is to change your WordPress theme and start using Thesis. Just activate the new theme, make the changes to the multitude of drop-down boxes for dummies (I love them) and copy and paste some customization code snippets from the Thesis Forum, other Thesis site tutorials or your own knowledge of html or css.
2. How you can use various strategies to make money from a personal blog and turn it into a business blog – generating income to cover the costs of hosting, supplement your income or make even more money in time. Just keep in mind that you need to get over the start-up phase of the first 1-2 years – the ‘make or break’ period. If you aren’t making any money from your site, can you afford the time it takes to grow it?
3. Sharing a bit of yourself helps to build a relationship with your readers and show off the real value of blogging – the human factor. It isn’t about a faceless corporation with hundreds of ghost writers creating content to pump into a site for the sake of search engine ratings. Personal blogging and blogging for income using the WordPress platform is unique…it is human. Never forget to inject a bit of your personality. It is emotion, not cold hard facts, that sell.

Visit Serradinho & See Thesis Theme in Action

Get Thesis Theme For Your WordPress Site

If you don’t use Thesis Theme yet – what are you waiting for? Check it out today.

** Update – Serradinho’s new look**

George is fast off the mark and has already started implementing some changes.  Read his response post:

Review of Serradinho Site by Thesis Theme HQ

It’s always nice to hear some one else’s view points about your site as it gives you another perpective on what others like/dislike.

• Flowing on from Serradinho’s facelife – that incorporates a great slideshow viewer - I swapped the location of my Wowzio Widget from my right sidebar to the content column. Thanks for the inspiration George!

** Update – Serradinho’s Revamp November 2009**

George has tweaked his site yet again with some amazing Thesis Theme customizations. It really does look unique and beautiful.

10 Notable differences that I really like…

1. an awesome fat footer packed with content
2. rounded corners for that smooth look
3. great contrast between blues, greys and white with a touch of light blue that makes images ‘pop’
4. double navigation menu
5. strong hover colors throughout site
6. search box that blends in with the top right-hand side of the top nav menu
7. simple, textured background that adds interest and calms the mind for the content
8. the same unique header – yes, he does look like that
9. funky shadowed ad boxes that jump into full color on hover (How does he do that?)
10. “back to top” jump link at bottom of page

Need Help With Customizing Your Thesis Theme?

Okay, now that George has nailed Thesis Theme customizations, he has branched out into offering his services.

• According to his site it will cost you anything from $10 to $500 depending on what you want (as at 10/11/09).

Check out his Services page to see his portfolio and use his contact form to ask for further information.

I haven’t met George – he’s in South Africa! But I have had several online chats and have followed his steps around the web since discovering his site and I believe he is a really nice guy. His commenters and other site regulars also agree. I have watched his site transfer from another premium theme to Thesis and through several customizations – his latest I love. That’s my testimonial.