I’ve been planning on releasing an EE template for quite a while now and have finally managed to not only start one, but finish it too.

‘TealTemplate’ is a fairly typical blog-style template with (hopefully) a bit of an original look. It’s all valid XHTML strict etc and has been tested in most of the browsers under the sun. It doesn’t even look bad in IE5.5, which was a nice surprise.

I’ve uploaded a demo which hopefully gives a pretty good idea of the design of the various pages. You can download it here.

Any comments would be appreciated.

(Sorry if this is in the wrong place btw, I wasn’t really sure where was best to post this.)

Nicely done. It contains a minimum of graphics elements making it a good choice for customization and replication to a different color scheme.

And, though it’s XHTML Strict, it looks decent in MSIE 7 (no mean feat) and Firefox 2 on Windows.

Thanks Ronnie.

Btw, your Mac360 site is impressive. Looks like a great content resource.

That site’s done well, and ranks decently on Google’s HPR, but was one of the first sites ever on EE, going back to when EE was in beta. Some of the layout code remains from nearly three years ago. The DB has been moved from and to eight different servers over time. We made some layout decisions then that we wouldn’t make now (the result of learning) and have to live with them, but the site validates (mostly) XHTML and CSS, and runs well, considering the complexity and content (ads are served off a Mac mini).

A few key points to remember—

- Lock down the site to keep it secure (use all the tips found elsewhere)

- Install each new EE Update (though I usually wait a few days for gotchas)

- Content needs to be added regularly (search engines love that)

- Get your site linked to by other Google HPR sites (high page rank)

- Visit the pM Forums regularly for knowledge and contribute, too; sharing is good

- Don’t get pissed when things don’t go right; there’s usually a good reason, EE staff responds well

- There seems to be more money in simple text link ads than in banner ads or Google ads

- Host somewhere where you can handle spikes in traffic; Digg Effect, SlashDot Effect should not shut you down

- pMachine Hosting is highly recommended; dependability and service response are excellent

I tried out the VayaDesign site yesterday on a Windows PC using new MSIE 7 and Firefox 2. Your site is impressive, and the design is clean and attractive. I have a lot of trouble with design and layout. For me it’s like carving an elephant out of a giant piece of wood. I keep cutting away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant, or until I run out of wood. Either way, it’s messy.

Looks like a good set of tips to me. Glad to hear you like my VayaDesign site. I have always considered myself by far my worst client. For some reason things never look quite right, no matter how much time is spent tweaking and testing.

The elephant technique’s a new one to me I have to say, but I reckon it’s worked pretty well on the Mac360 site. There’s a lot of content there but the navigation’s still intuitive; I don’t get to the homepage and think “oh my god, what do I do?!” as I do on other sites. That said I would have thought some more semantic markup could really benefit the site. You mention that the site ranks well, but I’d be willing to bet that the addition of some header tags alone would see the site even higher up in the results pages.

Looks like a good set of tips to me. Glad to hear you like my VayaDesign site. I have always considered myself by far my worst client. For some reason things never look quite right, no matter how much time is spent tweaking and testing.

Constantly working at it. That’s pretty much carving the elephant. You’re just better at it.

The site and examples are pretty slick.

The elephant technique’s a new one to me I have to say, but I reckon it’s worked pretty well on the Mac360 site. There’s a lot of content there but the navigation’s still intuitive; I don’t get to the homepage and think “oh my god, what do I do?!” as I do on other sites. That said I would have thought some more semantic markup could really benefit the site. You mention that the site ranks well, but I’d be willing to bet that the addition of some header tags alone would see the site even higher up in the results pages.

I’m convinced that a lot of what’s considered “necessary” is probably overrated when getting site and page rankings. Keywords are almost worthless, though the combination of keywords, matching content, matching page name/URL, matching page title, has some benefit.

We’ve had better success getting linked to from other high page rank sites, and that works well, especially with Google. Growing organic content of substance doesn’t hurt either.

As I said, early design decisions were made that would be different today. Going back and making certain changes is painful.

Wiki’d- please feel free to add any new templates you code there. Thank you for your contribution!

Thanks Lisa, if I am able to release anything else I’ll be sure to add it to the wiki.

@Ronnie: Whatever works for you has definitely got to be worth persevering with.

Just a quick question for one of the moderators or anyone who has one of their template available for download at templates.pmachine.com. What’s the best way to go about submitting a theme to the site? I emailed the templates@pmachine.com address provided on that page around a week ago but have not heard anything back. Thanks.

That’s the approach I’d have gone with.  But I don’t really know how that end of things works.  I’ll give the crew a ‘heads up’ on this thread, though.

Hi Dom,

I did reply to you, perhaps it did not go through. Please . Thanks!

Hi Leslie,

Ah the wonders of modern technology! I’ll get that resent to you straight away (and have a dig around my server whilst I’m at it. I’d hate to think I’ve got an over-zealous spam filter blocking any legit emails. )

Thanks,
Dom

VERY nice, I think I’ll devote my afternoon to spicing up my own blog, using your excellent template as inspiration. Thank you for taking time to create this, very nice

Glad you like it Tommy. If you fancy sharing the URL when you’re done I’d be interested to see it.