12 hours in the life of an Ads Theme

Like a cat our the proverbial Harry Houdini bag, HeatMap Ads Theme 2.1 was released onto the WP Theme directory. At the time of writing around 340 WP’ers have downloaded it, and from my referrer stats I can see lots of you have actually installed it, and some of you are even giving it a bit of a makeover with your own logos. Looking good people!

Its Alive!

When the WP theme team emailed me to say that HeatMap Ads Theme was live on the directory I was quite excited. They only knocked my submission back once to me, on the tiny technicality that it had a thumbs.db file. I quickly eradicated the pesky extraneous file, uploaded it and Ads Theme was released into the wild.

Vanilla-ice-ice-baby

I was a little concerned at first that the WP Theme Directory preview looks a little bit underwhelmingly vannila-ised to say the least when compared with the all singing and all dancing demo on HeatMapTheme.com. Stripped of its widgets, the WP theme directory preview is nothing to get overexcited about. All that awesome power is well hidden under the hood.

I guess WP do this to make it an easy to administer level playing field, for all themes. Just the standard test file applied to every theme and nothing else.

Obviously, most of you who are now downloading it must be seeing past this, as it doesn’t seem to be hurting the download count right now.

The First Thing on my Ads Theme to do list

So, having seen what it looks like on the WP Theme preview the first thing I’d like to do is update the code to build in some ‘fresh from the zip file’ widget position presets, so all the widgets are set up as soon as you install the theme. Once you’ve seen them you’ll be able to just go to the widget admin and rearrange them to your own liking. I’ll bundle that in with a few more goodies on the next version update.

Hmm…lets have a look at the download count so far… 350(!). Can we reach 400 by the end of the day?.