I try not to switch themes on my sites too often as I find it often causes a Google dance – themes have different approaches to SEO and I’ve found in the past a top ranking site just disappear without a trace by naively switching out a theme. But yesterday I found myself perusing the shelves over at Elegant Themes.
My travel site was overhauled a few months ago using the Lifestyle theme – but I’ve hacked it about so much that it started running really slow. If your site takes longer than a second to load people will click away so I finally decided that it was time to do something about it.
I stumbled across an attractive looking blog yesterday and from there found myself at Elegant Themes where you can get access to 30 odd premium themes for less than $20. Yes, you read that right, $20 for a year’s subscription. I instantly saw a great photo theme for when I finally get around to sorting out my vacation photos, and I fell in love with this one for Seven Somewhere – the hand drawn elements are brilliant! After a bit more searching I settled on a theme for my authority site and cracked open my PayPal account.
Of course the issue with long standing WP sites is that if like me you hack them about they don’t always work too well with new themes. The first one I tried was dead in the water so I went back to Elegant Themes and tried again. This time I found one that worked a treat. Installation is simple and there’s an option panel that let’s you adjust settings to your heart’s delight.
So easy to use too – I have images in my blog posts and the settings were making them appear again as thumbnails in the posts. So I opened up the editor to start hacking the theme and then something caught my eye – in the options box was a simple check box to switch off post thumbnails. Just like that – no theme editing required!
Whether you’re a WP newbie or an advanced user you’ll love these themes – they look great and are so easy to use and tweak to your heart’s desire. I even found one that could make my Xfactor sites look less Xfactor like!
By the way this site is much less complicated so it was just a case of upload theme and activate. Now I just need to work out why the footer isn’t lining up properly and I’m good to go 
Hey Clare,
I've had a bit of luck using elegant themes, but then eventually just purchased the developers version of thesis for wordpress. Either way the sites look pretty good.
What kind of travel site are you working on? I only ask because I'm documenting building a travel site to the Waikiki area on my website and in the future if you'd like to exchange links for those site or if you'd like to guest post on Planting Dollars to promote what you're doing feel free to let me know.
Ryan
.-= Ryan @ Planting Dollars´s last blog ..Why Ideas are Like Sperm =-.
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