The theme I recently released on the WordPress Repository, Wordsmith Anvil, has a number of features and some custom page templates. After taking a quick look at several sites that have downloaded this theme, I have made a few observations and thought it would be a good idea to make not of a few of them.

The font size for the title is designed to be fairly large. As a result, if the title of the blog has more than 15-18 characters it will not display very well (up through version 1.6.3). If your title contains more characters, you will need to edit the file main.css, located in the stylesheets directory. Decrease the font size until your title displays correctly … or select a blog title with less characters. NOTE: You will most likely need to also adjust the height, margin and/or padding on the header elements to accommodate your changes. DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.6.6 … I fixed it for you.

I have also seen several sites where someone has attempted to edit the pages and the end result is that the pages do not display correctly. I cannot provide an easy explanation that will address every possible edit to the pages in this theme. However, the best caveat is to save a backup of the page before you attempt to edit it. That way, if you delete something that breaks the page, you can always revert to the original version of the page and try again. One of the most common errors I have seen is removing an opening <div> or a closing </div> tag; and not deleting the companion tag. Every opening tag needs a closing tag. Otherwise, you end up with unexpected results. Your sidebar may not display correctly, or maybe your footer, or the widget areas above the footer, or the page itself may not display properly.

If you would like to use any of the page templates, take a few minutes to read through the FAQs, which you can find here. Without reading the FAQs, it is not likely you will be able to setup the page templates. You will need to understand what the custom fields are, and the directory structure.

I have also seen where a different header image has been uploaded which displays a title or other text. Unless you comment out the site title in the header.php file, you will see the title of your blog displayed over the top of the text in your header image; which, is not likely your intent. I may consider adding the option to enable or disable display of the site title in a subsequent version; as I have done for the tagline, and logo.

I have also seen where people have tried to hardcode in elements that are already made available in the theme options page; or install a plugin that does not have theme styling already built in. Unless you are very comfortable editing php code and comfortable with editing stylesheets your best bet is using the theme options to perform the functions they are designed to perform. If there is not a theme option available, then feel free to make a suggestion about other functionality you would like to see in future versions of this theme. Also, you might find other plugins that will perform functions that are not already built in.

I am talking about this now, because, you may have noticed my site was down for a few hours today. I didn’t really want it to be down. However, the upside is that I am now working with a really great web hosting service that should make my life easier; so I can focus on positive activity rather than spending my time trying to troubleshoot server and support issues.

I transferred several domains over to my new hosting partner today; and for the most part, everything went off without a hitch. In fact, on one of my other domains I was able to quickly install and configure the newest release of Joomla in a matter of a few minutes. This would have taken me several hours with my former web hosting partner. The biggest issue I had with transferring this site was that my database import said it went okay, however, it missed chunks of data here and there. Also, I did not use shell access and ftp’d everything; which, normally is fine. However, I did discover that some files did not upload the first time around. So, this caused me a little grief. Fortunately, I have experienced that before and was able to recognize where the potential issue was at.

All said, I don’t think I lost more than three or four hours, with the transfers and setup. Now, with a great hosting partner, I can focus on design and marketing.