Is Your WordPress Theme Up to Standard?

Industry Standard that is.

You may have noticed a few changes on the blog this week.

I switched my blog theme to Standard Theme.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’ve followed Tentblogger since it first started almost a year ago and I’ve watched how he’s worked with this theme.

For those of you who don’t know, the Tentblogger is John Saddington. He’s the developer of Standard Theme. Saddington started tentblogger.com to educate people on how to blog but also as a kind of showcase for what could be done with Standard Theme. It’s almost like an extended tutorial on blogging with this theme.

Standard theme was built to be the world’s best coded WordPress theme. It meets the highest requirements for industry-standard (hence the name) best practices for coding, SEO and speed optimization right out of the box–without plugins.

Clean code is very important for getting found on Google, and for loading fast–also good for Google and good for you!

It’s light and it’s fast, and that’s a great thing for blogs.

Why I like it

Standard Theme does so many cool things.

The admin panel is stellar.  There’s so much you can do from there. Way more than my other theme. For instance, I had to use FTP to upload a header image with my old theme. With Standard Theme, you can do it right from the panel.

There’s options for moving the header navigation and the sidebar, adding custom menus, and excluding categories from the navigation bar. You can add social media follow buttons and share icons right from the admin panel too. It’s all built in.

And, there’s that cool social sharing slider on the side of the content…built in!

Want to add Google Analytics tracking codes? Just drop it into the special place in the admin panel. No need to go into the code. Very nice! Feedburner support? Built in!

I’ve gotten rid of tons of plugins because there’s so much stuff that’s already included right in the theme!

This new theme will allow me to do some new things too. What I’m most looking forward to is the ease of adding video and other post types with built in post templates.

Great support

The last thing that’s so great is the support. There are tons of tutorials for problem solving and customizations. The support staff is friendly and answers questions promptly. Some theme support guys are kind of snarky in their responses. Not here!

I’m looking forward to doing some customizations too. They have very detailed tutorials that break stuff down so that even I can handle it. I’ve already done some and didn’t break the site! Look for some changes in the future.

Sure, you can get free themes. They work. But, they’re missing a lot of the secret sauce that really makes a blog special–and fun. So far, Standard Theme is doing it for me.

P.S.

If you’re looking for a new theme, check out Standard. I really like it. I think you will too.

In fact, I like it so much, I signed up to be an affiliate. If you’d like to buy Standard Theme, click here and I’ll get a little commission to help pay for this blog…and coffee!

I’ve thought long and hard about selling on this blog. I only want to be an affiliate for products I absolutely believe in and woud use myself. Obviously, you can tell that I really like Standard Theme. I want to promote it because I think it will really help people.

If you are thinking of buying, definitely get the support license. It costs more but then you get access to the support forum with all the tutorials and customizations. And, with the support license you buy it only once. You get free upgrades forever and can use it on as many sites as you want! Sweet deal huh?

There’s also a great community of users that post what they’re doing with their sites.