Well, I am sure alot of you noticed that I wrote an ebook about How to Make a Magazine Style Theme in Wordpress. Its been 2 days and I am very delighted by the results.

I don’t know if I have mentioned it before, I have never written an ebook or a book in my entire life. This was a first time and I was very nervous. One of the main reasons were the grammer. Knowing that english is not my first language, I was already frightened by the results. I didn’t ask anyone to proof read the book. I thought it would be worth a try if I write and just be myself in my book.

Apparently thats what everyone liked. Within the course of 48 hours, I have had 826 Downloads of the ebook. Usually it takes a while for my zip files to get these downloads. Specially this quantity. Within a day, I saw the book breaking the 500 mark and I was very happy that each of my reader got the copy.

Balkhis is still growing, and I cannot rely on subscribers to see how many readers I have. The downloads from this book and the comments I have recieved from multiple places were the true indication of how many readers I have and how happy they were to see this addition to the blog.

Before I begin to celebrate, I didn’t do this alone.

As you all know Blogosphere is more like a family where everyone helps each other out. My fellow friends helped me by writing about this book on their blogs, or at different places.

Enkay Blog

Jim Hutchinson, I met him on Plurk. If you are on Plurk do add him as your friend. Jim’s Plurk Profile.

Themerious

Aravind Jose – He is a regular reader on balkhis and we have talked via email before. Thanks for the link buddy.

Some other Plurk friends who wrote about my ebook on their plurk pages. And everyone who dugg, stumbled and added it to other social media.

I try to do the most by helping other people and I believe the good Karma returned. When I needed people to blog about this ebook, some of my friends jumped up and did it.

I myself wrote it about on all wordpress related forums which also got me results. I have been getting very good reviews of the ebook. So if you haven’t checked it out yet.

With this kind of encouragement, I will write another ebook in coming time that will be a bigger and much better resource. It will list all the details that I know about Wordpress, Marketing, SEO, Designing and much much more. Ofcourse since it have so much stuff, It will take time to write it.

Stay Updated.

I got a private plurk message at my Plurk which asked me the question:

Syed, How do you make the most out of social media. I see that you have joined Plurk recently and you have a Karma higher then alot of us who started way before you. How do you manage to make the most out of social media?

The question asked above is a bit difficult therefore I will try to take my stab at it and if you guys find that there is something you can add on please put it in the comments.

The key to social media success is excellent time management skills. Any Social Media Network will require you to spend time on it. Now that there are so many Social Media Networks, you have to be very picky. You have to make sure that you join a one that benefits you the most. This is the only rule of thumb in my social media book.

Other than the above, everything is different with each social media. I have went about different ways in different social media networks. In twitter, I went about following people massively, and with the big numbers, I expected to see some results. In Digg, I went about finding the people who digg the most and are very good at digging the topics that I post about, and added them as my friends.

With Plurk it is way different. It is not about how many friends you have. It is about how active your friends are. Because Plurk ranks you through a Karma System. The reason for my success at Plurk is reliant on two things. One, it is still not as big as twitter, so people notice me. Second I made some good friends through whom I got more friends.

With Plurk, you cannot add massive friends. Like I said it goes different with each network. In twitter, I added massive friends and it worked out. If I add tons of friends in Plurk and half of them rejected me, then my Karma will decrease.

I wrote about People like to see Numbers. If you have a high Karma you will get alot of new fans and friends. In twitter, if you have a high number of followers by default you will get more followers. But the trick to get the most benefit is to make your profile mostly oriented towards you and then about your website.

There are some places where you are just experimenting and there will be other places where you would like to stay serious. I am serious at Plurk, but twitter was one of those things where I experimented alot. I am already seeing different results. When I ask someone to digg a post on Twitter, I don’t get much response, but when I ask people to digg on plurk I get a response. Why?

Because when I am plurking, I write about my personal life, interesting things, so people like to read that. So if once in a while, I throw in something like my ebook or ask for a digg. Most likely than not I will get it. Whereas in Twitter, it is my feeds mostly and I go there sometimes. Therefore I don’t get a high response.

Social Media can be a big distraction so you have to make sure when you want to spend time on it. How you want to spend time on it? Who will be the best friend? Once you have that down, you will be on your way to be a King.

If you still haven’t Join PLURK Now

Last year, Wordpress decided to close off their Theme Directory. Which made it difficult for alot of designers like myself to promote our themes. Many people went their own ways listing their themes on their own sites but there wasn’t that one collection.

As Wordpress updates, it was getting harder and harder to find themes that worked well with newer features. Well Thanks to God that Wordpress has opened up the Themes Directory Again.

All of these themes will be human reviewed before being published to ensure the quality. So make sure you submit only the top notch theme. Also make sure you start submiting your themes quick before the que gets too big.

Another thing to take in account is do not put more then one link in the footer if you want to have a chance getting in the list. If you have more then one designer link, then more likely then not you won’t make it in.

But all to all the good news is that the Theme Directory is back up.

By the way if you guys haven’t noticed I have released my e-book that teaches you how to make a magazine style theme, so take a look.

I don’t know if you guys have been noticing, I have been writing a whole lot about wordpress. The reason why I was doing that because I wanted to write a post about How to make a Magazine Style Theme for Wordpress. The post would get so big If I try to make it one, therefore I put it in different peices, so I can put it all together when I think I have enough peices. In this post I will show you how to make a Magazine Style Theme for Wordpress. I will also tell you some of the advantages of it.

Wait a Minute – Surprise, I have written an E-Book which is available for free. Which covers basically all the stuff below. Available both in .rtf and .pdf format. Download it now

**This tutorial is an intermediate level tutorial. I am assuming you can already design, and code in html. **

First you need to have a simple blog design in place. Make it very simple. Header, Footer, Sidebar and Content.

First thing you would need to do is Create a Custom Page in wordpress and make it your homepage. If you read I have already showed you both ways in the post above. Now you would also need to make a separate blog page. I have showed one way to make a blog page in the post above.

The Raw Code Method to make a custom blog page is here. It is if you use the Raw Code method to make a home page.

Next thing you want to decide what to put on your home page to make it a magazine style theme. Few advices:

Display Recent Posts on the homepage and in the sidebar of the blog pages.

Display the Most Recent Posts from your main categories making it like a column so it looks like a magazine or newspaper.

Use my tutorial about How to Add a Dynamic Sidebar in Wordpress, so you can use your widgets anywhere on the template other than the sidebar.

That way you can display The Most Popular Posts on the homepage as well.

Make an Archive Page for your Wordpress.

Add a Contact form in Wordpress

You can Create as many custom pages in wordpress for different purposes.

You Now have a general Idea to setup a Magazine style Wordpress Theme. If you need anything else feel free to ask your question in the comment box and I will try to answer the question in the comment or in my future posts.

Next thing you want to consider is the SEO Friendly URLs for Wordpress also known as Permalink structures.

Don’t forget to give your Website it’s Identity. In other words, add a Fav Icon. The post explains how to add one.

When you are working on your comment area don’t forget that I have written a post about how to Pimp Your Comment Area. It have some great plugins that relates to comments.

I have made a list of the top 5 Wordpress plugins in my list as of July 2008, so get those.

If you are going to add advertisers, I haven’t seen a better plugin then OIOPublishers to Manage my Advertisers.

Keep the site simple and clean. I have written about How to Optimize your Blog Page to Attract Readers. Read that.

Once you have everything done, don’t forget to Check on your W3C Validation. I have written a guide with tips on w3c validation for your site. Read those.

The advantages of having a magazine style theme is that your blog looks more then a blog. You can make it more like a portal with other things going on. It becomes more of a community. Your page views increases. That is one of the future trends that I have been seeing in the designs.

These tips are not just for blogs. These also help when you are using wordpress to set up custom websites other than blogs.

Hopefully this helps. Like I said this is a intermediate level tutorial. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Alright I don’t know if I look like a Wordpress Guru or something, but I get questions regarding wordpress alot in the email and often times via Direct Message on my twitter account. Well this was a question that was asked to me in email in response to the new design of Balkhis. How do I display a post from a specific category in wordpress.

Before I tell you how you can do this, I want to share what you can use this for. This can be used to make a custom homepage for your blog. If you want to show your posts on some other pages in the blog from a specific category this is the way you would do it.

Add this code where you want to display the post

<?php
query_posts(‘showposts=1&cat=3′);
while(have_posts()) : the_post();
?>
<ul>
<li><h3><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

<ul><li><?php the_content_limit(520); ?></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<?php endwhile; ?>

At the top where I say showpost= change the number to how many posts you want to display, and cat=3 is the id of the category, so change the ID of the category to pick which category will you be displaying.

I am using a limit post plugin for wordpress to limit the content. You can download one for yourself also.

Now you can display the most recent post from a specific category