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Double right sidebars blog designs are popular nowadays. However, free double right sidebars WordPress themes are far and few. Therefore, I took some time to put together a list of free WordPress themes with double right sidebars.

1. Zeke – Preview
2. Fresh
3. myJournal Hypereal – Preview
4. Grid Focus
5. Vertigo – Preview
6. Pride – Preview
7. News Blue 0.1 – Preview
8. Silhouette 3 Columns – Preview
9. Qwilm! 0.3 – Preview
10. Sakura3 – Preview
11. Dust 3.17 – Preview
12. Bluebird 1.0 – Preview
13. Seashore – Preview

13 Double Right Sidebars WordPress ThemesRead More

Adding comment avatars to your blog is a great way to quickly recognize comment authors and distinguish same name commenters. It also bring a community vibe to your blog. Here’s an example:

Although there’s no one central avatar system, fortunately, there’s practically a plugin for every avatar system. Pick the system you prefer, download the matching plugin, and then install and integrate the plugin to start displaying avatars with comments.

Currently, Wpdesigner is using the MyAvatars plugin to integrate avatars from MyBlogLog. For the longtime Gravatar users, there are several available plugins. For examples: WP Gravatar and Gravatar 2.

Of course, no one external avatar system will catch all commenters. No worries, there’s a localized avatar plugin that allows your users to upload their own avatar. You then decide which factor to recognize the commenters by (name, email, etc.), in order to assign the uploaded avatars.

Comment AvatarsRead More

First, bookmark the WordPress theme check list. Second, here are some more items to add to your checklist.

Cross version (Backward) compatibility

If you can make your design work across multiple browsers then why not enable your theme to work across multiple versions? Not all WordPress blogs sport the latest WordPress version anyway.

For one, is your search form using

<?php the_search_query(); ?>

or

<?php echo wp_specialchars($s, 1); ?>

? I can’t tell the difference between the two because I’m PHP clueless, but I know that wp_specialchars work with 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2.

For another example, are you using

wp_list_categories

or

wp_list_cats

? Wp_list_cats is the older of the two, which is the one that works with 2.0, 2.1, and WordPress 2.2.

For more new versus old functions, read Lorelle’s Template Tag and Function Changes.

Have you tested your theme?

You never know what bloggers are going to use your theme for and what features they might turn on. I’d recommend installing WordPress locally (on your computer) in order to easily test it. Here’s how to install WordPress locally on Windows or Mac.

After installing WordPress, create filler content posts, about 11 or 21 of them so you can test the

posts_nav_link

function for the Previous Page and Next Page links. Make sure one of the filler posts have a long title that takes up at least two lines so you can test the line height of the post title when it’s time to use CSS.

 

Within one of those filler posts, you should test your images. One photo aligns left, another aligns right, and another one in the center (see example). Below are my codes for styling images within a post.

img.centered{
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

img.alignright{
padding: 4px;
margin: 3px 0 2px 10px;
display: inline;
}

img.alignleft{
padding: 4px;
margin: 3px 10px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

.alignleft{
float: left;
}

.alignright{
float: right;
}

The use of

.alignleft

,

.alignright

, and

.centered

is based on Kubrick.

Within a different post, test the order and unordered lists (see example). There’s more stuff to test, in the example: blockquotes, code, and headings (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6).

Horizontal menu – If your theme has a horizontal menu, make sure you apply

to it. And, don’t hardcode any link within the horizontal menu. For example, don’t link to the About page using

; use

or something like that. If you do use a horizontal menu, don’t forget to test

in the regular sidebar listing. The best way to do it is to create multiple levels of links (see example).

With this checklist combined with the last one, did I leave anything out?

Check List for WordPress DesignersRead More

Let me start out with my own wish list.

1. Circular navigation and the option to turn it on and off – I wouldn’t know where to even begin with this. It would be unbelievable if the WordPress team could tack this on for the future. Here’s my example of a circular menu (created in Photoshop):
   
2. Dynamic sidebars – You’re already moving sidebar widgets up and down, back and forth. Why not apply that feature to the actual sidebar content? Allow users to rearrange sidebar content, not just from the Sidebar Widgets page. Check out the iTheme by NDesign Studio for an example.
3. New SEO-friendly structure – Although Google loves blogs and not many bloggers actually care about SEO (search engine optimization), it would be nice to go to sleep knowing that your blog’s theme is SEOed. For one thing, WordPress uses H2 for sidebar titles, when it should be using H3 or no heading tags at all. Sure, you can change this by using a functions.php file and tell it to adjust the tags before and after sidebars titles, but it’s a pain if you have to do that with every theme.

That’s all I can think of for now. Do you have a WordPress theme wish list?

What is your WordPress theme wish list?Read More