Part 4 WordPress Themes, Minisite Design: Ultimate guide to Making Money with Minisites using PPC

in Domain Names Entrepreneurship by Francis Simisim — April 25, 2010 at 11:59 PM | 0 comments

This is the part 4 of the Ultimate guide in Make money online with minisites using PPC, which is all about how you’ll design your minisite’s web design using WordPress Themes. In Part 3, we went thru configuring WordPress settings and its plugins. Now you’re ready for fixing the overall look of your minisite. This is one of the most simple and fun part of the whole minisite process.

Free WordPress Themes for your Minisite

A lot of WordPress themes are free online, all you need is time and patience to find the right theme for you. What I always think when I do this is that I don’t want to make my minisite look like a minisite. Why? Simply because people don’t trust minisites and with the amount of minisites out there, it does get people turned off when they see one. The solution is to use WordPress to cover the design up to either make it look like a magazine or a blog site which can retain the attention of your visitors. Here are the steps:

Step 1: Search of WordPress Themes

I always want my wordpress themes unique and uncommon to the eyes of internet surfers. So I do spend a few days looking for a good theme online, I usually think about how I would like it to look if I was a user and then look for an appropriate theme. Here are examples of how I search for WordPress themes:

Free Unique WordPress themes
2010 WordPress themes
TOPIC WordPress themes – TOPIC refers to the topic of the keyword you’re targetting (e.g. Printer WordPress themes)

Try to find the most unique theme that you feel suits your minisite well. Do think about what you’re going to be adding like images, ads and how contents and the layout will be done. What I usually go for is something that I haven’t seen much before on other websites or blogs. The more unique the theme is the better it will stand out.

OR you could also use WordPress’ recommended themes which can be easily done with going to “Appearance” > “Add New Themes”. The advantage with this method is that it only requires the click of install and it’s automatically installed in your WordPress Minisite.

**Note: When downloading WordPress themes, make sure to download from the original maker of the wordpress theme. Some contains malicious codes which allows hackers to hijack your site. Be careful when downloading.

Step 2: Assess the top 3 WordPress Themes

Upload your top 3 chosen themes in your WordPress folder (under wp-content > themes), and try to run each script. Check the following:

Is it easy to post?
Images in post easily displayed in homepage? (I hate having to add my own custom fields)
Can you change the logo?
Is this what your visitors want to see?

You need to go thru the theme by trying to post a simple one paragraph article with image. And if you can do that easily even display the image in the homepage then that’s the right theme for you, if it gets too complicated move on to the next theme. Choose one theme.

Step 3: Designing minisite’s Logo and Favicon

After choosing the wordpress theme, some have a built in logo that copies the Blog Name and Description you placed in the settings while some don’t. For those that barely knows how to design, I’d recommend sticking to the Blog Name and Description for the logo. If you’ve chosen the ones that need a new logo replacement, then some technical skill would be required. You need Photoshop or GIMP application to have a decent logo.

I’m not great at graphics and quite honestly I suck at it. So the best thing to do is to get nice looking logos from the website called LogoInstant which has some great graphics that can be downloaded (PSD) and used for free for whatever purpose. The best thing about it is that it is editable in photoshop so you just need to use the images to make yourself a nice looking logo for your minisite.

As for the Favicon for you minisite, all you need is to go to Free Favicon and submit the picture that you want as favicon and it’ll generate a favicon for you. You then need to go to WordPress, upload the favicon on your site (Media > Add New). Get the link of your favicon (check details after uploading and copy the link).

The link to your favicon should be pasted in the Favicon URL, and click save changes. Try to open the web page of your minisite and see if it shows up in your browser.

Step 4: SideBar Widgets

Most of the wordpress themes come with a sidebar widget, this is really useful and helpful for a Minisite. These are my recommended Widgets that you can add:

1 PPC AD (336×280 or 300×250) – best to have it on top of the sidebar. Drag “Text” to the sidebar and copy and paste the Google Adsense / PPC code for the ad to the text box.
Pages
Recent Posts
Search
Categories
Tag Cloud

You don’t need to add all of them, what’s important is that the sidebar isn’t too short but rather something that stretches the whole page. You don’t need to add everything above, but instead add what you think that would fit.

This Post is part of the 6 post series on the Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online with Minisites using PPC

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Author: Francis Simisim

Founder of TechFilipino, Tech Enthusiast, Internet savvy, and Gadget Explorer. I blog for what I enjoy and love doing. To know more please read more About Me. Twitter & Facebook or my other blog Menllionaire