Description: Customized WordPress blog featuring adsense ads, and embedded flickr photo gallery.

The site is built on Word Press 2.7 and utilizes several revolutionary Word Press Plugins that extend the site from a normal blog to a sophisticated Content Management System. One of the best features is the Flickr Album that enables the site to showcase and rotate images from my Flickr account. Natural search optimization is promoted through various means including relevant articles, keywords and link trading with other Croatia related sites.

I’ve been researching tutorial sites for advanced WordPress theme development lately and have discovered some excellent resources. The WordPress community is passionate about the platform. This is reflected in the outstanding theme development I’ve seen in the past several months.

Here is my collection of resources for aspiring and advanced WordPress developers.

WordPress Codex:
The WordPress Codex is the Vatican of the WordPress universe. All knowledge resides here. The community is constantly updated detailed information covering every aspect of coding in WordPress. The Encyclopedia nature of this site is best used as a reference tool rather than a tutorial.

How to Create a WordPress Theme From Scratch by Kai Loon
Kai has put together a very readable yet detailed three part tutorial on WordPress Theme development. My favorite section is the tag definitions. This is an excellent learning tool to see all of the WordPress tags in a single location. He does this with each primary section of a theme. I’ve read and referred to this site many times, and can’t recommend it enough.

How to Create a WordPress Theme from scratch by Sam Parkinson
Sam created an excellent overview on WordPress Theme development. LIke Kai’s site he provides detailed explanations followed by detailed code examples.
Additionally there are other articles on this site covering WordPress plug-in development. Overall this resource is excellent, and one I refer to quite a bit.

Jquery.com
This resource is for advanced developers, or those who dare to take a dive in the deep end of WordPress Theme extension. If you’ve ever run across sliding panels, or ajax type interactive tabs, then it’s likely the developer used jquery.com as their resource. This is a huge library of free scripts and lesson on how to implement them. Any developer with basic PHP and java knowledge can make these work. It’s worth checking out and bookmarking this page, as I’m seeing a rapid growth in these components within the WordPress theme community.

Nexugen.com is an ecommerce store that features natural anti-aging skin care products. The store is built with Zen-Cart, and is wrapped in Word Press, which I configured as a content management system. A central homepage mixes elements from Word Press and from Zen-Cart. The customer can easily navigate either to a blog to read articles about skin care products, or they can go to the store to shop.

This site encompasses several features for natural search optimization including dozens of relevant articles that are keyword centric, various modules to support meta-tagging and keyword featuring tools to attract search engine spiders.

This configuration has proven to be immensely more successful than the old site in terms of SEO and customer experience. Since I launched it in November 2007, sales has steadily increased, as well has natural search terms list ranking.

Technology: WordPress (used as CMS). Zen-Cart. Various modules and extensions added as well.

Description: Customized WordPress blog with Flash audio player, featured site video display, Zen Cart Store.

George is a talented jazz pianist that wanted a site to promote and sell his albums and tickets to his show. With his long list of contacts in the world of Jazz, George wanted to build a comprehensive jazz site to showcase and reflect his expertise and interest in the world of jazz. This would include interviews, music, and video posts. To achieve this I decided to use the Structure WordPress Theme by Justin Tadlock. Just is doing some really innovative development with WordPress themes, so I had been wanting to use one to learn his methods.

I considered WP-Ecommerce for the store portion of this site, but once I got into I realized it is a very flawed product. It’s built in tables, which is always horrible, and there is no easy way to set it up for a SSL (encrypted connection). I used Zen Cart which actually ended up being a far better choice.

In the end the client was very please with what I created for him. The site seems to fit his objectives and provides the content management features he needed, in an format that easy to maintain.

Technology: WordPress, Zen Cart