Now 200 is not a massive amount, but it still amazes me when I see it being used. It was my first attempt at designing a public theme and seems to have worked surprisingly well.

I have been meaning to update it since late last year, but never seemed to find the time. Now it has reached the 200 mark makes me want to do it as soon as possible, so stay tuned for an update soon.

Tumbled is a single column, no nonsense theme loosely based on the popular Block style on Tumblr, and can be found/downloaded here Tumbled – A Wordpress Theme.

They are meant to advertise what we are selling, be it a product, service or even just ourselves. Yet, they really don’t do us justice, they are difficult to read, look gimmicky and hardy every relate to what we are trying to sell.

Remember, they should be driving traffic to your site – so come on, get serious… visit 12Cards.com, grab a free template and start designing a better Advert.

A typically Squeeze Page tries to entice its “target” audience with marketing and copywriting techniques such as headlines, bullet points, teaser copy, deadlines and testimonials. All of which are generally so well researched that they can take the author days and several attempts to perfect.

But something that I just can’t fathom out, is why such a well written bit of marketing tends to have to look so aesthetically unpleasing to the eye. I have found myself on several occasion just giving up trying to read such a page as the design is so appalling.

The classic example generally has a blue or grey background with either a white of light yellow text area. The text for some god-awful reason seem to usually be Courier – can anybody tell me Why? And with alleged meaningful words and phrases picked out in a collection of insipid Red, Yellow or Blue bold text makes the whole thing unbearable.

Maybe this is why the work? Maybe people just sign up because their brains want to get away from horror as quickly as possible. But maybe, and here is a crazy idea, maybe they could work even better if they looked aesthetically pleasing. Just imagine combining that beautifully crafted bit of copy with some design?

Surly that is what advertising is all about? Cleverly crafted words and pictures fussed within a beautifully constructed layout? Drawing in the audience and making them want to participate because they are enjoying themselves.

I’m in the process of writing such a page at the moment. And in the process of doing so I have been thinking long and hard about whether I should use the classic squeeze page layout or try for something a bit more up market.

My conclusion is that I may try both designs alongside each other and compare their performance. The only problem with having two sites with the same (duplicate) content is that it could effect page ranking and search results. So I am thinking of implementing a script that would change the theme every other visitor. One visitor would see the classic design, the next would see the modern one. I would then monitor the success rate of each over a period of time and see which returns higher sales. Assuming one will work better than the other, I would stop using the least productive theme to maximise on profits.

I am obviously forgetting one import point here – the Product itself. I could have the best looking website in the world, but nobody is going to want to buy what I am selling unless it is something they really want. And this is why the standard squeeze page probably works they way it looks at the moment.

But if I had something to sell that people wanted, would I be able to sell more with a better looking design? That is what I am hoping I will find out, and when I have some facts and figures I will make my findings public.

One last thing though, I’m sure other people have already tried this – have you? If so I would be interested to know thoughts, suggestions and findings.

I have just spent the last 2 hours sorting through my inbound links to this site trying to cross-reference genuine incoming inks against stupid hot-links.

Bizarrely, the image that every numskull seems to want to hot-link to is this – a montage of some funny monkey portraits (link to my original post).

Good old .htaccess to the rescue is all I can say. Basically I have used RewriteEngine/RewriteCond as describe here: How do I stop hotlinking and bandwidth theft? Which seems to work perfectly.

If you think you are being hot-linked, check your top inbound links first and check for your images on the site linking to you. If the site is a blog or forum, you may need to check previous pages/posts. If you suspect somebody is using your images on their site, then customising your .htaccess is probably the best solution for blocking them.

Note: I don’t use an alternative image, but the temptation to redirect to a rude alternative is very tempting at times – but that would then lower me to the thieving hot-linkers standards, and to be honest, I am above all that!

On reflection it was probably the best thing I could have done, as I got thinking about Tumbled (my free Wordpress theme), and I think I should try and make it more Tumbleblog-like with separate styling for each category – links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video being the obvious ones – what do you think? Should I make it more, dare I say it… Web 2.0 ish?

So here goes, I would like to introduce you to Tumbled, a single column, no nonsense theme loosely based on the popular Block style on Tumblr.

Yep, that’s right, you can now have that Tumblr look on your Wordpress blog.

I must warn that Tumbled is still a Beta, but rest assured I have tested it in Safari and Firefox on the Mac, and Internet Explore 6 and 7 plus Firefox on the PC. Everything seems to work fine, although there is a slight discrepancy with the navigation in IE 6 – there always something wrong in IE 6 though isn’t there!

NOTE: A problem was found where Smiley Faces inherited the default image styling! It is recommended that everybody downloads the latest version to avoid the visual unpleasantness – sorry about that!

Installation:

• Unzip the downloaded file. You’ll get a folder named ‘tumbled’
• Upload the entire ‘tumbled’ folder to your ‘wp-content/themes/’ folder
• Login into WordPress administration
• Click on the ‘Presentation’ tab
• Click on the “tumbled” theme thumbnail/screenshot or title
• That’s it. Go to your blog and hit refresh to see your newly installed theme.

Custom Archives Page:

• Login into WordPress administration
• Click on the ‘Write’ tab and then the ‘Write Page’ tab
• Enter a Page Title i.e. ‘Archives’
• Leave the Page Content blank < important!
• Select the ‘Archives’ template from the Page Template list on the right hand side
• Click ‘Publish’
• That’s it. Go to your blog and click on the new Archive button

Image Tags:

• You can use alignleft or alignright to make your images float left or right on the page.
• For example, after adding an image to a post, check the code and add in class="alignleft" or class="alignright".
  e.g. <img src="yourimage.gif" class="alignleft">

Download:
The latest version is: Tumbled 0.2 beta released 23rd August 2007

The CSS, XHTML and design is released under GPL: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php

Stay informed – Join the Tumbled Twitter update feed.

Version History:
Version 0.2 Beta
Fixed problem where Smiley Faces inherited image border styling

Version 0.1 Beta
Realised 22nd August 2007

If you have any problems i.e bugs, please let let me know and I will try to fix them.

Also, if you have any comments or suggestion, please let me know – the more feedback I get the better!

Smultron: A free text editor for the Mac which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to not confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced user. I have been using Smultron for well over a year, and it has become my default text editor of choice for .txt, .html to .php

Website: Smultron by Peter Borg. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.9 Tiger or later
Price: Free!

CSSEdit: This little application is quick, clean and offers superb CSS styling of absolutely any web page. It is the fastest, easiest CSS editing application I have used, and find using anything else a real pain in the …

Website: MacRabbit. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
Price: $29.95.

Adobe Photoshop: Possible slightly over the top, in price terms, for most web-designers, and can be a bit daunting to use for the first time. But I’ve been using Photoshop for fifteen years now and know it like the back of my hand – so I never start a new design project or website without mocking it up in Photoshop first. It is always running on my Mac and allows me to edit any image instantly.

Website: Adobe. Requirements: PS CS3 Mac OS X v.10.4.8 or higher.
Price: from $649.

Transmit 3: If you design your site locally like I do, then you need a way to get it from your desktop to your server! For pure simplicity I have used Transmit for years now, as it does just that. It is the FTP app of choice for a lot of Mac user, allowing perfect Synchronisation between Your Stuff and Theirs (local and server).

Website: Panic. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.
Price: $29.95.

Parallels: If you build it you really (really) should make sure it works in every browser! I must confess I am slightly cynical on the whole browser testing thing because I use Safari for most of my browsing these days, and generally it seems to work with 99.9% of every website I visit. Firefox does come a close second, and I do use it for writing and editing posts on my Wordpress sites as this is one thing that Safari doesn’t like (sigh!).

But if I am building a website for a client, I really need to make sure it works in everything, yes, even the lovely Windows browser Internet Explorer! And that is where Parallels comes in as I really cant see the point in also owning a PC when the Mac can now do both! On my XP install I use the excellent Multiple IE app which lets me test in every version of IE, I can also test in Firefox and any number of other browser I like – all from the comfort of my Mac.

Website: Parallels. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4+ running on an Intel Mac.
Price: $79.99.

Although this is a Top 5 list, I can’t really leave out two very important application that I use when designing and testing websites. So here are 2 extra apps I always use, and wouldn’t leave home with out!

MAMP: It stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP, and installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac, be it PowerBook or iMac. MAMP is much quicker and easier than fussing around with trying to install and configure a server manually, and to top it all, it’s Free!

iTunes: Yes I know, it is not a design app, it can’t make wonderful website or clean up your messy code. But what iTunes does do is to block out surrounding noise and distractions, thus helping me to concentrate and maximise my time and energy so that I can get away from the computer every once and a while so I can have a life!

My Top 5 web building tools was inspired by Mark over at 45n5, who originally wrote his own Top 5 Website Building Tools. Unfortunately, his website is no longer available!

What do you use? If you want to write your own top 5 and let me know the link, I will add it here.

Anyway, just tweaked a few things here on Davinian:

1. Removed the over-sized RSS logo from the top of the sidebar – I have no idea why I made it so big, but it was taking up too much room – so its gone and in its place I’ve added the Feedburner feed stats.
2. After playing around with an additional ad on single posts, I’ve decided to move them from the top-right to the bottom of the post just above the comments area. I’ll continue to monitor its performance and see if it is really worth having a 3rd ad box at all.
3. You may have noticed that there is now Related Posts at the bottom of ever post. I meant to implement this from the start, but completely forgot to add in he necessary code when I re-designed everything on the 14th August (I’m wondering what else I forgot?).

OK, not a bad few hours this morning – especially as I’m a little hung-over!

Sucker for punishment? Why yes — but heck it is better than fishing?