After the success of TurboFSI.net – Audi Club Turkey, I have decided that I should be more involved with the car community. I wanted to step up my game, reaching a larger society, BMW owners. I have recently finished the design of bmwturkiye.net, and I am very happy with it, but it surely needs some touch-ups. I am using Vbulletin as the forum software and in a few months, will buy the VBSeo extension.

I have couple of goals for this website:

1. Since there are other bmw community forums in Turkey, its my most important goal to increase my user base to become a threat for them
2. Printing of Bmwturkiye.net Stickers and Handouts. (Already in progress)
3. Setup good relationships with BMW Dealors.
4. I have to reach the first page of “BMW” SERP in Google.com.tr
5. Increase the main page articles to significant number

If the site picks up a pace before 2009, I believe I will have a valuable assesment in couple of years time.

Chris Bloczynski is one my clients. Since his blog is relatively new and didn’t have the necessary requirements to enter my “Custom & Unique WordPress Themes For Your Blog” giveaway, he wanted to pay for a custom theme. Well, because he is a paying customer, I had to move him up in my to do list. His design was ready about a month ago, but he has recently changed his design. Eventhough I did the whole design and coding of the theme, Jerry Gartner of Gartner Web Development has helped to add the functionality, Chris wanted.

I know all you will be asking how much it cost to Chris, I ‘ll tell you right now: $200. All of my designs are fully optimized. The xhtml and css coding are all validated and the total size of the images on Chris’s site is only 9,40 Kb. Thats what I call a fast loading website.

Here is how the theme looked originally:

So what do you think? Is mine or the one modified by Jerry Gartner is better? I think the original one looks a little more “sleek”.

PS: I have to copy Chris’s surname from his MSN address everytime to find his website. He need to add more wovels to his surname :p

2 top bloggers have already received their designs and implemented them on their sites.

1. Bloggrrl – http://www.bloggrrl.com
   Pagerank: 4, RSS Subscribers: 440
2. King Nomar – http://www.kingnomar.com
   Pagerank: 4, RSS Subscribers: 175, recently sold for high $$$

Professional Design is a must

As I have said before, all custom wordpress themes will be designed from scratch using Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Do not underestimate the importance of design. A nice looking wordpress theme with functionality can bring additional visitors and rss subscribers. A Web 2.0 feel is important as the content of a website. Redesigning your blog can have tremendous effects on your traffic & income. 2 of the most obvious examples are John Chow and Tyler Cruz. You can read the effects of their new designs here:

• John Chow: Driving Traffic With a New Design
• Tyler Cruz: Early Effects of My New Theme

How will we work?

First of all, I would like you to find me website that you adore and would like your blog to look like one. I will NOT copy the website, its just to give me a basic idea while designing your new & unique wordpress theme. For easier communication, I would like to talk on MSN, so contact me via my Contact page, and I will email you my MSN address. I prefer working step by step:

• A couple of designs on Photoshop if you like the overall feel
• The design will then be coded into xhtml. At this point, all designs will be xhtml and css validated!
• The xhtml file will then be changed into WordPress Theme Files and the comment styling will be made at this point. I will upload the theme files to a demo site so that you can see the design progress.

What’s the catch?

Well, there’s always a catch. To be eligible for a Free Custom WordPress Theme, you should meet this criteria:

1. You blog should have at least a Pagerank of 4.
2. Your blog must be older than 8 months.
3. Your rss subscriber count should be more than 50.
4. You cannot remove the footer link, “designed by Turk Hit Box”.

That’s actually nothing comparing to what you get for free. Nowadays, a custom wordpress theme is going for around $199 – $299. Try asking Unique Blog Designs for a complete redesign if you don’t believe me :)

You can reply to this post or contact me via my contact page. Please reply with your blog address so that I can check if you are eligible even if you don’t meet the criteria..

I know I have been relating my low earnings with the lack of adsense units on the blog, so I decided to add more adsense units. I hope I can bring an end to my 20 something dollars per month income. I wish I could successfully make a linkbait sometime in 2008.

I now have 4 sponsor buttons to the right, I will get their links up as soon as possible. They are very cheap at the moment and I accept payments via Paypal. You can contact me using the contact me page. I will try to finish the comment & comment forms styling in 2 weeks because I am one of those “brilliant-but-lazy” people :).

By the way, what do you guys think about the blog icon on the top left? It just hit me and I designed it using some icons I had in couple of minutes.

And before I finish this redesign post, sorry WPdesigner, my theme is better than yours! Plain is not the way to go nowadays…

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I will also provide the .psd (photoshop) file for the header to the winner of the contest. This way, if you do not like the “make money online” look of the theme, you can always change it. The parts of the header template like recent comments & top posts work with plugins only and you need to integrate them yourself.

The total image size is 29.5 Kbytes including the 12Kb header image, so the theme is not image-heavy although it looks like it is. The comment template is finished, but I will get different styling for the blog administrators till the end of the contest.

I will be giving the redistribution rights to the winner of the contest. That means you can add your link (as long as you don’t remove mine) & submit it to theme galleries and get tons of link love!

Contest Rules:

• You need to make a post about either this post or Turkhitbox.com
• Your blog has to be older than 3 months.
• You can not remove the link at the footer (just a ‘designed by’ link)
• The winner will be picked randomly.

Contest End Date:

01/01/2008

So you have a full month to make a single post & receive a great WordPress Theme.

I was very lucky to find the background pattern in one of Jon Waraas ‘s web sites. Thats how I got the inspiration to design this theme. As you can see the pages are listed above the blog title and underneath the Blog Title, you have three link boxes. I find a lot of probloggers placing these boxes at the top of their themes nowadays. However you need to configure Top Posts and Recent Comments yourself. You will need “Top Posts by Category” & “Recent Comments” plugins.

Single post pages feature numbered comments and stylish Comment Input Boxes. Eventhough the page is loaded with images, they are optimized gifs with transparency. The total size of all the images and icons on this theme is 29 Kbs. John Chow‘s Zonda image is alone 18Kbs. And I have to say some of the jpeg files on that theme looks awful because of the compression!

There are two icons on the right sidebar. You can link them to anywhere you like, but I suggest you link one of them to “Add to Technorati favorites” and the other to Feedburner RSS Feed. Headings on the sidebar and the post content have custom made icons to their left as well.

There is not much more to say really. I would like to say thanks to everyone who have helped me in this project.

DOWNLOAD LINK REMOVED: PLEASE LOOK AT TURKISH CARPET V2

You just need to add a <meta> tag that lets the iPhone know how wide to display the initial page and believe it or not, but it won’t affect how your sites look!

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Here is an example of the <meta> tag I am talking about:

<meta name=“viewport” content=“width=950″ />

When you open the page that contains the above meta tag, it will force the iPhone to widen the view according to your CSS body information. This means you need to have a code like this in your css document:

body { ...

min-width: 950px;

}

I personally don’t own an iPhone for its locked in Turkey, but I am hoping to get my hands on one and get it unlocked in two weeks. Then I will be able to see how wonderful my site looks in iPhone :)

PS: for more information on viewports, check the Apple iPhone developer page (lick on “Optimizing for Page Readability” to view it.)

Eventhough Ali Nazik theme is ready to go as it is, you need to make some modifications to make it more user-friendly. The top links has to be modified manually as well as the sponsor links on the right. Recent Comments and Top Commentators have to be integrated by you. I just designed the theme having them in mind. The top 2 buttons represent Technorati and your Feed. You can link them to anywhere you like, but I suggest you link one of them to “Add to Technorati favorites” and the other to Feedburner RSS Feed.

I got theme validated for XHTML, but for some reason, I could not get the CSS file to validate. I would really appreciate it if someone could optimize & validate the css file and send it to me. You will get credit in this post.

I would also really appreciate it if you could point me to some resources where I can promote my wordpress theme. I will be adding more free wordpress themes to Turkhitbox.com, so subscribe to my feed & stay updated.

You can download the theme here:

< DOWNLOAD >
Please do not link directly to the file

Before passing on to the screenshots, I would like some help on css optimization. For example, if I have 2 styles like coded like this:

.input2 {
text-align: left;
background: url(images/icon_mail.gif) center left no-repeat;
background-color: #000;
color: #FFF;
border: none;
padding: 5px 5px 5px 18px;
margin: 2px 0px;
}
.input3 {
text-align: left;
background: url(images/icon_home.gif) center left no-repeat;
background-color: #000;
color: #FFF;
border: none;
padding: 5px 5px 5px 18px;
margin: 2px 0px;
}

How can I make it smaller. I know it can be done, but I don’t have experience with it. This is easier to edit for users, but takes longer to load.

Here are the Ali Nazik wordpress theme screenshots I promised:

and the one from the previous post:

I have created these web templates for a website called Sportstwo, who later decided to open up a design auction on Sitepoint marketplace. These free web templates that I am releasing are not coded and very rough designs. You will have to edit them yourself to fit your website. The icons on the designs except for the Sportstwo logo are freeware so feel free to use them as you wish. I suggest you use slicing option of Adobe Photoshop to fit them according to your web site.

1. – download Free Web Template
2. – download Free Web Template
3. – download Free Web Template
4. – download Free Web Template
5. – download Free Web Template

EDIT: The third design has been modified for a company named interconnect, but you can still use it as a free web template.

Please do not link directly to the template files; link to this post instead.