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40 useful modifications in wordpress themes that you can do in less than 2 minutes.

Modifying wordpress themes is quite easy once you know your way. Some changes take more time than others, but many useful changes can be done quickly. We have separated the easy ones from the more difficult ones and listed below 40 extremely useful changes to wordpress themes that you can do in less than 2 minutes each.

This list below is to inspire you to be creative with your theme and to personalize it to give a little twist to the user experience at your blog or site. Are these changes practical and easy? Of course! To prove this we have practically modified free wordpress themes in two to five minutes each. We have incorporated many of the modifications given below in the quick mods shown in the earlier post.

1. Wordpress based home pages usually show recent posts in the content area in the reverse chronological order – that is, the most recent post comes at the top with earlier posts below it in the descending order of the date they were published. That is not something that you might want always. You can have your important posts higher up on your home page (even if they are from an earlier date) and prevent them from being buried by newer posts on your blog.
You can customize the order of appearance of posts per category, per tag - or over-all - in a WordPress blog. Useful for using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS).

2. Have important announcements appear on the top of the home page before the other content.

3. Show how many users are online. Modify wordpress themes to display this information in real time to visitors.

4. Run a poll within your wordpress themes.

5. Add gravatars to comments. This is a cool web 2.0 change that you can make to your wordpress templates.

Learn to make these 40 and other
exciting wordpress theme modifications.
Let your imagination rule.

6. Truncate long urls in comments. The urls will still point to the same place but the displayed url will be truncated.

7. Show and control ads in various zones of the wordpress theme. You can add advertisements in your posts too without having to insert the ad manually in each post on your blog.

8. Rotate ads in a way that new ads are shown every time a page is loaded.

9. Allow users to speak and give audio comments.

10. Find out how many times a file attached to your post has been downloaded.

11. Live stats. Unlike google analytics and other stats tools you can chose to view what visitors to your site are doing at the moment.

12. Add a graphic signature to all your posts on the blog.

13. Drop caps – Create drop caps with the first character of the post for a magazine look for your wordpress themes.

14. Exclude some categories from the front page. This tweak to wordpress templates is specially important when you want to focus on few categories and avoid others on the home page.

15. Set up repeating templates within posts such as adding picture of the day or footnotes.

16. Adding repetetive content before and after the post.

17. Add a reminder to the bottom of each post to subscribe to your RSS feed.

18. Link to a complete list of posts by a particular author. Usually wordpress themes are set up in a way that takes you to the author’s profile page on a click on author’s name. This can be changed to take the user to a list of posts by that author.
19. Automatically create posts from selected rss feed. Within the wordpress theme, you can control various aspects of such post creation.

20. Share posts from your blog on social sites like digg, stumbledupon, and others. Also allows posts to be saved as bookmarks.

21. Allow users to rate posts on your blog.

22. Integrate wordpress theme with shopping cart and ecommerce. Make your wordpress theme ecommerce enabled.

23. Allow users to subscribe to comments of particular posts

24. Put up forms in the sidebar or static pages or dynamic posts and gather data. You can easily set up opt-in forms and offer freebies that can be delivered by email subsequent to opt-in.

25. Optimize your posts for search engines. Search engines love wordpress posts. You can make it even easier for search engines to rank your important posts higher for selected keywords using special tools and techniques for wordpress.

26. Organizing series. Make it easier for readers of your blog to discover all the series you’ve written and also to easily find posts that are part of the same series.

27. Display list of posts in each category. You can display this list in static pages or posts or even templates.

28. Add a captcha (image verification) to your comments to avoid spam.

29. If you liked that … Provide readers a list of posts related to the current post. You can provide this list at the end of posts.

30. Add a fav icon to the wordpress theme The fav icon is the icon that shows in the address bar next to the URL.

31. Change or add a custom graphic to your header. Using the default header isn’t normally an option, so getting your own graphic into the header is a good idea. It adds a personal touch to your theme, and will make your site stand out from the other sites using the same theme.

32. Add no follow tags to hyperlinks which link to unimportant pages on your site. Particularly if the links are in the header or sidebar of your theme, and thus, on every page of your blog. Regular links without the no follow tag pass link authority around your site. They indicate to search engines which pages are important. Although most blogs have an about page, it’s not normally a page on your site which you are wanting to feature prominently in search engines. So add no follow tags to those links, so important pages such as your home page or top articles get the authority.

33. Add a horizontal line to an element such as a sidebar or footer. It’s simple, but also very effective to add a line into your design. You can use it to break up different lists, or for breaking up a footer.

34. Change the width of an element such as a sidebar. There are many reasons why you may need to alter the width of your theme. In particular, you may find yourself needing to alter the width of your main content element to suit existing content.

35. Add a mouse over effect to your hyperlink. A mouse over, is when the appearance of a text link changes when your mouse is over it. It is very effective at highlighting links, and is simple to add to the style sheet of your Wordpress site. You could change colors and add effects such as underline to a mouseover event.

36. Use images for bullet points of list. You can add simple images as the bullet point for your lists. It’s not a good idea to get too carried away, however, a simple bullet image can be very effective.

37. Add a background image to a page element. You can add an image to appear behind text or as the background of any page element.

38. Make a page element scrollable. You can add scroll bars to page elements. This allows users to scroll individual parts of the page, with the rest of the page remaining static.

39. Add a Tag cloud. Tag clouds a very common in Web 2.0 sites. They are lists of all the commonly used words and terms on a site, which link to pages that they relate to. They normally use text size to indicate which tags are used more often, where a larger tag indicates a more commonly used tag.

40. Add a post Excerpt. You can force Wordpress to display an excerpt of your post. This is useful if you want to make your homepage a portal to your site, with short post starters rather than full posts.

If you are new to html and php and would like to know how you can make the above modifications to wordpress themes and templates easily and quickly without being a coding geek, then you could try our wordpress theme customization video tutorials. The video tutorials for non coders come with a FREE workbook and a FREE resource book which has readymade code snippets and resources which can enable you to make the above 40 mods and much more.

Related posts:
Beware - Don’t use wordpress themes before you ‘mod’ them.

2 minute makeovers–themes that were modified in 2 to 5 minutes.