Thesis Wordpress Theme

Influence. Leverage. Authority.

How To Fix Paypal Button In WordPress Thesis

by Lisa Angelettie · 8 comments

How To Fix Paypal Button In WordPress Thesis: The Quick Fix!

When I run into little glitches building and running my websites, I like to post the workarounds I find for my readers. This was one that was driving me crazy a few months ago and that a few of my clients have also recently run into (I forgot to warn them:)

So here’s a little weird thing that happens primarily on Thesis WordPress blogs. When you create a PayPal payment button and post the code for the button in your WordPress blog’s html editor and save, you’ve probably noticed that your PayPal button looks ENORMOUS and as a result also — distorted.

After searching the web (thank you Andrew ), I found that the quick fix for this is simply copying and pasting a little bit of code in your CSS code file:

1. Open your Thesis Custom File Editor.

2. If you open this file directly through your blog’s admin, your custom.css file should open automatically or you can select it from the drop down menu. Select EDIT to edit the file.

3. At the end of the file add the following code:

.custom .format_text input, #commentform input, #commentform textarea { width:auto;
}

4. Save your file and refresh. Check out the page where you pasted your code. Your PayPal button should look a normal size now.

Hope this was just the FIX you need today:)

WordPress Thesis Skins – New!

by Lisa Angelettie · 2 comments

WordPress Thesis Skins – All New!

I’m very excited to say that slowly but surely there is movement in the WordPress Thesis Skin community. As you know, I love using Thesis as the framework for all my highly-optimized websites. The SEO features kick butt! My rankings definitely improved when I moved to this theme. So I use it for myself and my clients. The only problem is that while Thesis is highly customizable, I don’t want to do the customizing! And neither did anyone else. That’s why so many people’s WordPress Thesis sites look the same and honestly kind of boring.

While I have made a few tweaks to my own sites, which I’m perfectly happy with, I know that what the world needs now is a lot more Thesis customization done for us:) That’s why when a new Thesis skin is created, I try to post them to my site so that you have the opportunity to use them.

These latest WordPress Thesis Skins that have been released are not free, but they are excellent premium skins. Well worth the money, especially considering what it would cost to pay someone to create a customized WordPress Thesis site. They can all be found over at the ThesisThemes site. (I am not an affiliate of these skins, this is simply a good faith referral.)

Business – WordPress Thesis Skin

Business Thesis Skin

Magazine – WordPress Thesis Skin

Feedpop – WordPress Thesis Skin

Thesify Social – WordPress Thesis Skin

Thesify Business – WordPress Thesis Skin

*For other Thesis skins, you can check out my comprehensive list of WordPress Thesis Skins

Google Analytics WordPress Plugin

by Lisa Angelettie · 6 comments

Google Analytics WordPress Plugin

When I work with a new client, I find that one of the reasons that many of them are floundering in their marketing is because they have no idea who is visiting their site(s), how they found them, what pages they visit when they are there, how long they stay, what keywords they may have used to find them, and the list goes on and on.

Without knowing how people find and use your site – you really have no clear idea of what content to create, what products and services to offer, and how to attract more traffic. Without the knowledge of what’s going on inside your website, you are flying blind. How can you possibly expect to make more money than you did last week, last month, or last year flying blind?

That’s why I strongly recommend using the free website statistics tracking tool – Google Analytics.

If you take a look at your statistics through the admin panel of your webhost (Bluehost, Hostgator, GoDaddy), you can get a somewhat general overview, but nothing like all the robust and user-friendly information that Google Analytics will give you. And it’s so easy to get started with Google Analytics if you have a WordPress blog (and you should:).

All you have to do is install the Google Analytics WordPress Plugin. It’s fast and easy.

1. You need to sign up for a free Google Analytics account: http://Google.com/analytics

2. Download the Google Analytics WordPress Plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

You can either download the plugin to your computer and FTP it to your blog, upload it through the Install Plugins section of your blog, or you can search for it and install it right from the plugin section in your blog’s admin.

*Please note that if you use Thesis as the framework for your WordPress blog that you will not need to download this plugin. All you have to do is sign up, get your Google Analytics code and paste it in the section for tracking scripts in Thesis:

What’s New In Thesis Version 1.8?

by Lisa Angelettie

If you use Thesis as the framework for your WordPress blog, then you may have been notified that a new version: Thesis 1.8 has just been released. As with any upgrade, I always want to know what new and improved functionality will I get (if any), and I figured you would want to know the same before bothering to upgrade.

Feature 1 – Header Image Uploader
Yippee! One of the things that most of my WordPress clients need me to do for them when customizing their Article SEO optimized site, is to add their header image. This has been made totally easy with the new image uploader. And if your image is too big, Thesis will resize it to fit your site. This qualifies as a feature worth upgrading for.

Feature 2 – SEO Character Counters
Search engines only show a certain amount of characters in a search result. That’s why your titles and descriptions need to be air tight, but this feature will show you a word count and how many characters you have left. Typically like you see in an article directory interface. This is a pretty good upgrade for SEO novices, but pros pretty much know how to keep my titles, etc. short and sweet.

Feature 3 – New Google Fonts
Now you can give your site more personality by choosing the right font. We were limited to a few “boring” fonts, but now there are a lot more choices. Best of all, the fonts are all web-safe, directly served from Google’s server, and FREE! There were ways to get around the boring font thing, but this feature just makes things a lot easier. Go right to Thesis “design options” and choose fonts for different sections of your site. New look in 3 seconds flat!

Feature 4 – WordPress Nav Menu Support
This feature supports WordPress 3.0′s new navigation menu builder. I haven’t used this yet so I can’t say whether or not this is a great feature.

Feature 5 – Category/Tag/Taxonomy Page Options
This feature was in 1.7 but upgraded in 1.8. Basically in a nutshell, what this does is allow you to add SEO details to your category and tag pages. PLUS you can add a unique headline and description for each category and tag page. This feature also adds full support for custom taxonomies if you choose to use them. This SEO feature is great because I have ranked for specific search terms based on the fact that I had those keywords as one of my tags. I imagine if I tweak that tag’s SEO, I’ll probably rank even higher.

Bottom line – the new features added in 1.8 are totally worth the effort of upgrading or buying the theme if you haven’t already.

*If you want the advantage of good SEO but don’t want to put out the effort, I will be offering a new service that will address both of those issues really soon. Stay tuned!

Thesis: How To Expand Text Area Columns In Thesis

When you install the Thesis template on your WordPress blog, it comes pretty much ready to rock. Of course what makes a blog unique and this template so fabulous is the fact that there are so many tweaks you can make which are user friendly. Learning how to expand your text area and sidebar columns [...]

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Thesis Skins

Thesis Skins – For The Thesis WordPress Theme The Thesis framework is a great way to build a highly search engine optimized WordPress blog. I highly recommend it (and practically force it:) down my clients throats. Yet one of the drawbacks to using the Thesis theme is that only about a handful of people know [...]

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