Today as I got back from my vacation, I was reading ProBlogger like usual and saw a post where Darren was asking which wordpress themes are the best ones that users prefer. Basically everyone’s favorite themes. I just wrote a short response there, but then decided to make a good list of the ones that I like so my users can use those.

Before I start displaying the list, I like to mention that the best Wordpress themes are the ones that are custom created because that adds unique identity to your blog. So if you want the best for your blog, consider a custom created blog theme. If you need help finding a designer do check out my designing portfolio for blog and web designs.

List of Excellent Wordpress Themes that I like:

iTheme – (View Demo)

Blogging Pro’s Theme – (View Demo)

The Morning After – (View Demo)

WP-Polaroid – (View Demo)

Live Green – (View Demo)

Neoclassical Theme

Thesis Wordpress Theme

Cutline Theme for Wordpress

Ext JS Wordpress Theme

Aspire Theme – (View Demo)

Margot Theme

Structure Wordpress Theme

Visionary Wordpress themes

Revolution Themes – Premium Theme with great collection. ($79.95)

Portfolio Press – ($49)

Premium News Themes – Prices Varies.

These are the themes that I liked alot over the web that I can find for wordpress. Ofcourse like I said the best ones are the custom ones. Maybe I might make some premium magazine style themes in the future when I get time. I am mostly loaded with contracts.

Enjoy the list of excellent free and premium wordpress themes.

When a blogger launches their blog, they want others to read it. Well most of times they want others to read it, and comment. But in the beginning, they have trouble because they are not popular enough, but when the blogs are there for a long time and still no readers that means the user is doing something wrong. In this Post I will be pointing out a few things that a blogger can do to optimize their blog page to attract readers.

In my last post, I showed you guys how you can display latest blog posts on a custom page in wordpress using the Raw Code Method. Now I had a number there to show how many posts you want to display. But sometimes people don’t know how many posts to display on their blog page. So that will bring me to my first point.

Pick The Number of Posts you want to display on Your Blog Page?

There are alot of things that plays a factor in making this decision, so I will go in one by one, so you can see the reasoning behind the answer.

You Don’t Want the Page to be Crowded.

You Don’t Want the Page to be very very long.

So What do you do in that case? Well you have to evaluate what type of content you will be posting. Will you be posting alot of images, Videos? Will you have very lengthy posts?

I have heard many solutions to this sort of problem. Some people will say that just display excerpts, and use auto-summary to 100 words, and you can display 10 – 15 posts on one page. I don’t think that is good enough.

Here is the technique I used to answer that question:

You would know it if you read the full post….

When I first started Balkhis, I wrote about Creating your own Custom wordpress page in which I discussed two ways to making a custom wordpress homepage, but I only shared one method of making a custom blog page and that was through the WP-admin method.

I recommend the users to read the post I just linked to above before continue reading this one because you won’t get lost if you read that post first.

Well, sometimes you might not want to use the WP-Admin functions to set custom homepage and separate blog page. Therefore you will go ahead and use what I called the Raw Code method to make a homepage.

<br /> <?php<br /> $homepage = get_settings('siteurl')."/";<br /> global $wp; $wp_received_argument = false;<br /> foreach ($wp->query_vars as $k=>$v) if ($v) $wp_received_argument = true;<br /> if ($wp_received_argument) {<br /> include(TEMPLATEPATH . “/index.php”);<br /> } else { ?></p> <p>Here is whatever you can put any html code you like.</p> <p><?php } ?></p> <p>

Now you want to make a blog page, so in this post I will be sharing the codes to display your posts in wordpress through RAW Codes.

Basically just copy and paste the codes below in your page-blog.php or whatever you want to call that file.

<?php $page = (get_query_var(‘paged’)) ? get_query_var(‘paged’) : 1; query_posts("showposts=15&paged=$page"); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post() ?>

Change the 15 to whatever you like and it will be the number of posts shown on that page. Now you need to follow rest of the index.php settings to align the posts and all the good stuff.

I will put an example of a text file that you can use:

<br /> <?php $page = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; query_posts("showposts=5&paged=$page"); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post() ?></p> <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>“></p> <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2> <div class="entry"><?php the_excerpt(); ?><br /> <b><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”>Read The Full Post about <?php the_title(); ?> by clicking here.</a></b></p></div> </div> <p> <?php endwhile; ?></p> <p>

The above page should do the job well. Now you have the code to display latest posts on any page of your blog by just adding a simple .php file.

Well, eventhough I wasn’t born in America, now that I live in this land which has open the window of opportunities to me. I would like to say to everyone Happy 4th of July.

4th of July is an indpendence day of United States of America.

Whatelse, I am taking this weekend off and travelling to Orlando. I might be in Wonder Works, Old Town, and one of the states park enjoying the springs.

I will be slacking for the week so bare with me.

-Since majority of my traffic is from U.S, people take this day off and go to movies. Watch Hancock starring Will Smith. Pretty cool movie.

Eventhough I predicted the entire story while I was watching it.

Enjoy the fireworks and the barbeque.

Making Design usually is not hard, but making nice design is a task that not everyone can do. One of the most important features of a nice designs is a cool logo. For a cool logo, you need a cool font. Well in this post, I will share some of the useful fonts to create logos. These fonts are the ones that I tend to see myself using alot. But before I present to you my list, I would like to explain what I consider a decent logo.

My definition of a Decent Logo is:

- One that blends in with the theme, yet is astonishing.
- Readable, and Clean
- Creative and Good Looking

Well to fit in the guidelines, I can suggest you some of the fonts that I use alot to make logos that looks good. I have downloaded these fonts over a long period of time. This is a good source for web designers specially the new ones who are entering the industry. The list is not in any specific order, so don’t think the first one is the best one.

Cicle – 7 Font Files – Freeware

Existence – 3 Font Files – Freeware

Diavlo – This is the font that I use for Balkhis Logo.

Delicious – Another cool font.

Fontin-Sans – Last one in my cool listing.

These fonts are the ones that I use in almost all of my posts other than some premium ones which I downloaded for free in their promotional moments. The ones above described are freeware which means free for both personal and commerical use. These were mostly found from Smashing Magazine Posts.