Ron Dubin Photography is more than a photographic blog – it has images, information and music!
Ron’s blog is a great example of customizing Thesis Theme into a darker theme, using grey, black, red and white with great effect. His photographic images add even more colour. This Thesis Theme blog is sophisticated yet comfortable. You can easily travel around the pages looking at images, listening to the music and reading people’s comments. I love to come here and relax so I thought I had better put together a review to explain why this is so.
Visit Ron Dubin Photography and see the following great customizations.
1. A Darker Theme
- The site uses light and dark shades of grey, a splash of bright red and white to give the colour of the photographs their greatest impact.
2. Colored Sidebar & Latest Comments Widget
- This site has adopted a mid-grey colored sidebar that displays a drop-down categories box, latest posts and latest comments, as well as other items.
- The grey coloured sidebar highlights the white font of the sidebar headings.
- Dynamic content – such as latest comments - is a great way of giving credit to visitors who participate and leave comments. This content changes and is especially good when using a static home page and you want the search engines to continue to index it, despite no major changes.
When I saw my name (“Somone”) up in lights for a comment I thought he had made a spelling mistake on one of his articles (I often get “Someone” instead of “Somone”) but then I realized that I had just made some comments!
3. Combined Contact Form and About Page
- Many sites have a separate post/page for the contact form with some information about why readers might want to contact them and giving them the chance to do so. Many sites also have a separate post/page for About information.This site has integrated both about information and a contact form nicely by customizing the cforms plugin.
- The About section has its own sidebar, brief information about Ron and the site AND a contact form that allows you to send the comment to yourself via email as well. A captcha function is used to ensure a real person is sending a message, to prevent automated spamming.
4. Bend it Like Beckham Click it Like Dubin
- I don’t know how Ron does this – will have to get him to answer that one – but he has a funky Random Post function that allows you to click in this box – similar to getting a random post from your StumbleUpon button and voila! You have a random post from his site. No more looking for the next link, or searching through categories.
- I often visit and click on this button just to hear the music associated with an image…
5. Music
- Carrying on from dot point 4 – Most of Ron’s images have a song link nearby to listen to while enjoying the image.
- I recommend you leave the tab open with the music playing while you surf. No pressure in choosing tunes to surf to. The music/song links open a new tab for the YouTube video clip to play in. If it doesn’t play nicely straight away – push pause and let it buffer (download) – you will see the faded dark band fill up and when it is way ahead of the play button’s moving marker, it is good to go.
- If you like the song, you can find like songs in the playlist on the YouTube page to listen to. Some of these songs have great videos as well. I just finished listening to Billy Joel’s – The River of Dreams.
6. The Soundtrack
Ron has included a post/page where he lists all of the songs that have ‘appeared’ on the blog. This is handy for people wanting to catch up on the songs and find them easily.
It is also a very clever way of making some money by linking to Amazon for a little bit of affiliate earnings. If Ron is using an affiliate link – then that is great. Why not let Amazon share some of their profits – although very small when you consider most songs are only 99 cents and affiliate earnings are probably only 4% of this! It is a win-win situation.
- Readers get their song – probably off an impulse buy when they realise that they want to have the song for their iPod, MP3 player, etc.
- Ron gets a little bit of affiliate earnings.
- Amazon gets an additional sale – one that they probably weren’t expecting.
Adding Amazon links on The Soundtrack page is very subtle and gives me lots of other ideas for lists on blogs that will encourage people to click.
Who knew it is so simple and cheap to get a song that you love? Thanks Amazon.
I didn’t know how simple it was until late last year when I stumbled over another site selling songs using an Amazon widget in their sidebar. I only got my first iPod last Christmas – a long way from the CD playing Walkman and the cassette tape players that sort of fitted into your pocket!
I buy a lot of music from Amazon these days – Amazon has virtually everything!
Amazon Associates Program
Learn more about Amazon and how they share their profits via the Amazon Associates Program
7. The Gallery
This is what Ron Dubin Photography is all about – the photographs. This gallery is beautifully designed. You can get this effect with many gallery plugins available through the WordPress plugins directory. It really depends on what effect you want.
The Crunch – What Can Be Done Better
- This site will only get better with more content and time will take care of that.
- Perhaps a more dynamic header, incorporating the nifty way Ron weaves his name together through photography. I suggest that this will fill in the large blank grey area in the header area that makes the reader pause before scanning down to the content.
- When you hover on the links – words are underlined in dark grey/black – the hover colour is electric blue. While this colour is one of my favourites, my suggestion is to change link colour to red. This will limit the colours used in the overall design. While blue does make the link ‘pop’, red or white, bolded or not bolded, with or without underline, will do the same job without adding a foreign colour to the mix.
- Last but not least – size does matter. A larger font for the Subscribe / RSS button and decent sized search box is essential these days. Not huge, but bigger.
Check out Ron Dubin’s Photography Thesis Theme site.
Ron – let us know how you do that Random Post function!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Somone,
Thanks so much for taking the time to write this and the kind words about my site and my work, I’m truly appreciative.
I’m still tweaking things and as most people look at their own blogs, it’s a work in progress. I plan on changing the link colors as you suggested. The header was a conscious design decision. I wanted to keep things as “neutral” as possible since the images are always at the top of the page or post.
I’d love to take the credit but the random post function is a plugin aptly named Random Redirect by Matt Mullenweg and can be found here. I use Thesis’ open hook to call it. There are 543 posts on my site, at least 500 of which contain my work and I think this plugin helps move people to see images that they would have otherwise missed as it did you. It’s a great companion to the related post plugin I use.
Again, thank you Somone for this great review.
Ron
Ron Dubin Photography
Win a Print of your choice, see site for details. Ends April 30th.
Great post! I found a lot of great tips and useful information here today. These are great for newbies like me. A big thanks to you! :)