Recently I wrote about why I don’t use free themes, and how I use different themes depending on my needs.
Many have asked me why I change between themes, and honestly, it all has to do with how I’m feeling that day. In other words, it’s about how motivated I am that day to start tweaking out a theme or not (some days I just want to put one together without too much effort going into it… if you know what I mean).
There are instances when I ALWAYS use a specific theme though and I’ll share that with you in this series.
Are there other themes I use outside of the ones I’ll discuss… yes.
But the ones I mention in this series are themes I use on a regular basis.
Note: I decided to create this series in 4 parts… simply because I wanted to give you a decent overview of each theme (I hope you don’t mind).
So, the first theme I want to share with you is:
Canvas by WooThemes is probably my favorite theme right now, and I use this theme for many of my larger sites… both personal blogs and Niche blogs. For niche blogs, it would be larger blogs in niches where I intend to spend some time growing (in other words, a macro blog or a content curated blog).
One of my biggest pet peeves is having to go through a TON of tutorials to figure out how to setup a blog… and having to tweak the heck out of it to make it look decent (like a framework type of theme).
One of the nice things about Canvas is that it is clean looking out of the box, yet very flexible.
What I like most of all, is that it’s easy to use and allows you to tweak the site out to your hearts content (if you so choose)… but it’s totally unnecessary to get a decent looking site.
Here’s what it looks like out of the box, with some sidebar widgets installed (these widgets are included but have to be added to your sidebar after you’ve uploaded the theme):
It also has two “bonus” templates that allow you to instantly change the look of your site from the ‘default’ look into a “Magazine” or a “Business” look.
Here’s the Magazine template:
And here’s what they call the “business template:
Is this look too minimalistic for you?
No problem.
The Canvas theme has a ton of options (if you choose to use them all). And you can actually watch a video walk through of all of their features here (it’s actually part 1 of a tutorial on how to setup the theme) . But here’s a snapshot of the “Theme Options” page:
(and yes, my blog AffiliateMarketingDiary.com is using this theme!)
So, if you wanted to you could spend hours tweaking this to your hearts content (although I personally don’t take the time to that).
Here are some of the KEY features that I like about this theme (in no particular order):
Layout Options
While these features aren’t really unique to Canvas, I like that it’s “push button easy”.
First, there’s the “site width”.
It uses a simple drop down menu and it allows you to customize the width of your site. Some of my niche blogs are set pretty narrow (760px), because it targets an audience that may not be super computer savvy (and often have older computers with smaller monitors).
Having said that, all of my newer blogs are set to either default or the widest width.
Another layout feature I like is the fact that you can choose where you want your sidebar with a simple click:
Just highlight the one you want and you’re done.
For layouts, I prefer to use a 2-column layout for a lot of my niche blogs. For some I use a 3-column layout with the sidebar on both the left and right side. My personal blogs (and some of my larger blogs) I often use a 2-column layout with a footer widget area.
For instance on my blog Affiliate Marketing Diary, I have two widget areas enabled in the footer (although Canvas will allow you to add up to 4).
You can actually add footer widget areas very easily in this theme… it works pretty much the same as the layout menu above in that you just choose how many widget areas you want by highlighting the picture (I know, it’s very complex… lol):
Fonts
Changing fonts within the theme can be a royal pain in the… with some themes. Thankfully, Woo Themes have made this very easy with most (if not all) of their themes.
You can change font styles for pretty much all of your text areas (as far as I can tell), and they allow you to also use “Google web fonts” to break out of the usual web safe font styles (I don’t do this, but it’s cool that you can).
The cool thing is that it’s all done via a drop down menu (and all “unsafe fonts” are listed with an *):
Being able to change the fonts easily is a big deal, especially when you build niche blogs because you may want to increase the size of the fonts (and style of fonts)
Header & Favicon
Uploading a header or a favicon isn’t really a super big deal, but because I use a custom header for EVERY site I prefer to use themes that make this simple to do…
Some themes don’t allow for you to add favicons easily either… so having a simple place to add it is nice as well.
I generally use Adobe Photoshop to create both the header image and the favicon.
Color Scheme
Changing the color scheme is also an important feature when building niche sites. I generally try to customize each site slightly in colors used depending on the markets I target, so being able to change the background, navigation and link colors are important.
This theme has a centralized area where you can change the color of your layout:
SEO
These days I prefer to use themes that have SEO built-in to the theme (one less plug-in you need to install).
And with most of the more powerful themes this theme has very robust SEO features built in to the theme as well; which negates the need for a SEO plug-in (like “All-in-One SEO” or “Platinum SEO”).
There are quite a few SEO options, and are fully customizable.
It has “general” SEO options, where you set the site wide options (like page titles, how you want descriptions, meta keywords etc. of your content to be displayed) that is set from within the Canvas theme menu:
And it also has options for individual pages and posts (some of which can be automated if you so choose), which are controlled from within your post editor:
Other Cool Stuff
There’s other cool stuff as well, like:
- Tumblog feature – you can turn your blog into a “tumblog” with a simple click. It also allows you to use the “Express iPhone App” to post to your blog as well (very cool option I use for a couple of my personal blogs, but not super useful for most niche sites).
- Pre-configured templates – I talked about this at the beginning of this post, but having the business and the magazine templates are nice. Especially if you plan on building a blog that’s based on content curation (I use the magazine theme for some of my curated blogs).
- Easy Thumbnails – This theme comes with built-in auto-sizing of thumbnails. Really useful when you build magazine style blogs or even regular blogs where you want to include thumbnails as part of your post (see AffiliateMarketingDiary.com for example).
There are tons of other features as well… but I’ve listed the ones I think are cool and important as a full-time (niche) blogger.
That’s it for this post!
Hope you found this helpful. I know it sounds like a commercial, but seriously, it’s that good.
Another BIG plus of this theme is that it’s only $70 for the standard license (for use on unlimited sites and they offer a 2 for 1 deal).
I highly recommend this theme and any other from WooThemes… they’re very robust, well supported and works with the latest versions of WordPress. (I also haven’t had any issues with plugin compatibility with their themes).
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