Show Us Your Site And Win

More than a month ago

We’re preparing to kick of a gallery here at Organized Themes to show off some of the great sites that are using our themes. To help get things started, we’re giving away a Theme Package for you (or a friend if you already have one) to the site that wins best design! Plus you’ll get exposure for your site and your design skills.

All you have to do is submit your site here by July 30 to be considered for the Theme Package.

Sea Side Church

More than a month ago

Welcome to Sea Side Church a theme for WordPress. Designed from the ground up to meet the needs of churches all over the world, Sea Side comes ready to take your site to the next level. This theme includes a stylish contact page to show a map to your church along with your contact information/directions. I’ve developed a staff page to list your staff members with a picture and their contact information in an attractive and easy to use way.

The ability to podcast is in there right out of the box, or you can choose your own plugin. I’ve made custom widgets for your contact information, featured videos, recent Tweets, and featured posts. The theme is easy to use and you can have it up and running in no time flat. Plus it’s all backed by my personal support. Take it for a test drive and go on and purchase it today.

Sea Side Instructions

More than a month ago

Thanks for purchasing Sea Side Church theme for WordPress. I’ve included the features so you can run your church website the way you want to. Here are the instructions to get you started.

Installation:
You can download the current version of Sea Side from the support page at Organized Themes. Once you’ve downloaded the theme, go to the appearance menu in your WordPress dashboard and select themes. From there choose “add new” and upload the seaside.zip file you downloaded previously. Once the upload has completed, activate the theme.

Theme Options:
To configure the main theme options go to the appearance menu and select “Sea Side Theme Options.” The top right block will point you in the right direction if you need help. The WordPress Codex has quite a bit of help for general WordPress questions and documentation. If you have a question not answered by these instructions, please visit my support page to ask.

Identity and Header
This section controls your logo, favicon and the header button. To use an image logo for your church, first go to the Media menu in your WordPress control panel and select add new. Upload the image and once it finishes, select and copy the URL for your logo. Now go back to the theme options page and paste your logo URL into the box for it. Choose “Use image logo” from the dropdown menu and then save your changes. Now you should have your logo on the site. You can do the same for your favicon (the small icon that goes by your web address in most browsers).

You can also choose to display the site’s description or a button in the top right hand corner. If you choose to use the button, enter words for the top of the button and the bottom of the button. Then enter a URL that you would like the button to link to. This can be any page in your site, or an external site if you’d like to.

Home Page
Here you can configure your homepage. You can choose between a video or an image slide show. To use a video, select video from the drop down menu and then paste the embed code from the video service of your choice into the box. Save your settings and you’re good to go.

Additionally, you can set the links for the area below the video/slide show. Enter the names for these areas as well as the links. To space them out, you can enter a pixel number to add margin to the left. Enter a value like 80px into the box to move it over 80 pixels. This can help you with your spacing. The first area controls the name for the drop down area. This will display the two most recent podcast entries or this area can be used for widgets.

Google Analytics
If you’d like to use Google Analytics or another tracking system, just enter your code into this box and select to yes and it will be added to the bottom of your site.

Widgets
To add widgets go to the appearance menu and select “widgets” to open up the widgets page. To add a widget, click it and drag it to the area where you’d like to use it. Once the widget is added it’s options panel will automatically open up. Fill in the requested information and click save to update it. Please note that the Home Page Contact widget should only be used in the home page bottom section as it is too wide for the other areas.

Page Templates
To use a page template, create a new page, or edit an existing one. Look on your right for a drop down menu where you can select a page template. From there you can choose from the following page templates:

• Default: This is the basic page template with a right hand sidebar.
• Contact: This page has an area for content on the left and a spot for a map on the right. To add a map, just paste the embed code for your map (from Google Maps for example) into the box on the page for it and publish.
• Full Width Page: This page has no sidebar, but has a larger area for content. It would be good for calendars and the like
• Site Map Page: You can use this page to show a site map of your site’s content. It provides another way to help your visitors find what they are looking for.
• Staff Page: See below.

Staff Page
Staff pages have never been easier now that there is a page template specifically for staff members. To add your staff, click the staff menu in your WordPress control panel. You can upload a picture of each staff member, write a description or bio for each one and include any contact details you’d like to. Any contact fields you leave blank will not be displayed. Once you’ve added your staff, you’ll need to create a page and choose “Staff Page” as the page template. From there you can enter a description or introduction for your staff. Also if you add a featured post image, it will be displayed at the top of the page. All your staff members will automatically be added to this page. Posts are listed in date order with newest at the top. Just change the publish date to rearrange them.

Jen Rand

More than a month ago

You rock my world, Bill. Thanks for the help!

W3 Total Cache Settings That Worked For Me

More than a month ago

In my quest to speed up Organized Themes as much as possible, I’ve been experimenting with the settings of the excellent W3 Total Cache plugin and with my web host. Here’s what is working best for me according to Pingdom’s response times (see graph above).

1. For me, hosting on VPS.net (4 nodes), I get better performance using enhanced disk caching than APC. To be honest this surprised and somewhat disappointed me. But based on my load times, I do best sticking with enhanced disk caching.
2. Using database caching, either disk or APC, slowed the site down.
3. The biggest savings came from switching from basic Amazon S3 storage to using CloudFront. This dropped my average load time by about 50% and it was already quite low. I had to manually change some of my files to be viewable by the “world” when I switched, but other than that, it was easy to do. Plus, now all my files appear to be coming from Organized Themes which is a plus.
4. The css and js minify options are not compatible with my membership plugin. Every time I turn then on, the entire site would say you must be a member to view the page which is not good for sales.

Your settings for caching and minify may be different, but I would strongly encourage using CloudFront vs. the standard S3 environment. If you’re concerned with the speed of your site, I would strongly encourage you to use W3 Total Cache and CloudFront. If you’re using W3 Total Cache, let us know what settings are working best for you in the comments.

Cary Reinstein

More than a month ago

Your themes are very tasteful and beautiful and your help is great. I have recommended you to a number of my friends. I appreciate your spirituality. I believe that’s what infuses your themes with their uniqueness.

How To Troubleshoot WordPress Conflicts

More than a month ago

As part of providing support, I often get an inside look at WordPress conflicts. If you’re troubleshooting your own site a great step is to disable all of your plugins and see if that fixes your problem. If it does, then you just need to reactivate your plugins one at a time until you discover the conflict. That’s tried and true WordPress advice. But what do you do if you don’t have access to the WordPress control panel? Here is a quick method I use to solve conflicts on other people’s sites.

1. Go to the site in question and view it’s source code (in Firefox go to “View” and choose “Page Source”)
2. Copy the source code of the site
3. Create a new document in a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit
4. Paste the source code into this new document and save it as index.htm on your desktop

Thanks to WordPress using absolute links for everything, you now a local copy of the code that WordPress produces. If you open this index.html file in a web browser you will see a copy of your site (complete with the conflict). Now that you have a local copy you can begin to trouble shoot. Next you will need to look for tags where plugins and the theme load scripts. These generally will be at the top and bottom of the page. Many plugins place a note saying where their code starts and ends which is helpful in hunting out the conflict. Here’s how I treat these items that are loaded:

1. I start by deleting all the scripts that are loaded by plugins.
2. If that solves the problem, I paste them back in and then remove them one at a time until the conflict disappears.
3. Now I know not only which plugin caused the problem, but also which script or setting in that plugin is the culprit.
4. At this point I can either choose another plugin or try to edit the one I’m using.
5. If the plugins aren’t the problem, then I try scripts loaded by the theme by the same method.

That’s it. Now you know a way to help deduce conflicts in other people’s sites without needing to access their WordPress back end.