Free Wordpress Theme: SketchyTheme

22 January 2010 Friday

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Free Wordpress Theme: SketchyTheme

Sketchy Theme is a 2 Column, widgetized, adsense ready Wordpress theme. The theme comes with integrated Social Bookmarking icons, a customized footer, drop down CSS menu, integrated related posts, and comes equipped with room for adsense, and traditional advertisements.

Sketchy Theme is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

To install:

Upload the “SketchyTheme” folder to your theme folder on your server. In wordpress, activate SketchyTheme. Thats it.

You will also need to install the “Similar Posts” plugin, and the “Adsense Manager” plugin for the theme to work properly. Other than that, everything should work out of the box. If you would like to customize SketchyTheme, I’m including more indepth details below, and in the .zip file with the theme.

DEMO

Customizing Sketchy Theme:

To change the logo:

Simple replace the “logo.jpg” file in the theme’s image folder. In the “extras” folder that comes with this theme, I have included a blank gradient for you to put your logo on top of. Simply save it, and upload to your image folder, overwriting the standard “logo.jpg” file.

To change the “About the Author” section in the footer:

Edit the “footer.php” file in your themes folder. To change the picture, overwrite the “authorpic.jpg” file in the theme’s images folder. (Try to make it the same size, 185px by 80px for best results without editing the CSS)

To change the credit links in the footer:

You must keep the following credit text and links: Theme designed by Think Design. To add to that, you can edit this section in the “footer.php” file in the theme’s folder.

To change the menu colors:

To change the main navigation color (the lime green navigation bar) you will need to overwrite the “top-nav-bg.jpg” file in the theme’s image folder. The image is a thin image set to tile, so you should replace it with the same, for the best results without editing the CSS.

To change the hover gradient, overwrite the “top-nav-bg-hover.jpg” file in the images folder.

(I have included editable gradients in the “Extras” folder so you can easily change the navigation)

To change the Ads in the sidebar:

To change out the ads, replace the files “ad1.jpg” and “ad2.jpg” in the themes images folder. To edit the link attached with the ads, go to the “sidebar.php” file, and you will see the following code:

</div>

Change the web address associated with each ad. This is IF you do not use widgets. If you use widgets, just place the above code in a “text” widget, and you will get the same effect.

Plug-Ins needed for this theme:

Due to the adsense-ready areas, and the integrated “related posts,” there are 2 plug-ins you will need to make the theme work properly.

1. Similar Posts (You will also need to install the plugin “Post-Plugin Library” which comes with Similar Posts)
2. AdSense Manager

Download both plug-ins, and activate. The similar posts plugin will work fine with no need for adjustment on your part.

The set up your own adsense, install the AdSense Manager, and create an ad set. Then go to the “header.php” file. At the bottom you will see a code that looks like this:
<?php adsensem_ad(’sketchy-theme-top’); ?>

Replace ’sketchy-theme-top’ with the name of the adset you create in the AdSense Manager. Thats it. (Keep in mind, it can take up to about 10 minutes to see changes to AdSense)

In the “Extras” Folder, you’ll find:

- Blank logo gradient (So you can easily replace the header logo)
- Editable gradients for the navigation (So you can easily change navigation colors)
- Vector Version of Social Bookmarking Icons used (So you can have some cool free icons )

Special Thanks:

To Small Potatoes, for his wonderful tutorial on How to make a WP Theme. To Refueled.net, from which I got the majority of the dropdown CSS menu. To Bittbox.com, from which I got some icons and design elements used in this theme.

Enjoy! Please leave comments if you use my theme, I’d love to check out some in use! If you have any questions, you can ask in comments, and I will try my best to answer them.

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