What madness makes an Ads Theme?

What madness drives a person to create a WordPress Adsense Theme? To create a new one totally from scratch for public release is an undertaking not for the faint hearted or the time poor. I guess thats why out of the multi-millions of WP users there are only (at the time of writing) 900 free GPL themes on the directory. That may sound like a lot, but when you go looking for ‘just the right blog theme’ you soon find that there isn’t quite the amount of choice that you imagined.

Yes, in most cases themes need to be prodded, poked and modded into something that resembles the thing you were imagining in the first place.

“I still, haven’t found what I’m looking for…” (U2)

Hence the birth of HeatMap Ads Theme. I just couldn’t find the theme I was looking for and so set off on the journey of making a Theme I could call my own.

Uber Theme anyone?

At first I thought I wanted to make a Theme Framework; an Uber Theme that would enable me to make lots of different themes and would do absolutely everything. So HeatMap Theme 1.0 was born, but never released into the wild. It still lives happily today on PaintPJ.com where it earns its keep admirably.

“You were always on my mind…”
Pet Shop boys (by way of Elvis)

In the back of my mind though, I always had the thought that what I really wanted to do was create my content and then experiment with the placement of various elements (as inspired a Google post about the blog and website heatmap).  So I set about creating a Theme (as opposed to a framework) which would allow me to experiment with all Google’s toys to my hearts desire.

I had a shopping list of things for it to do…

  • In built Adsense ad manager
  • Widget based
  • Abundant amounts of widget areas
  • All the Google toys built in (Google Analytics, Google Feedburner, Google Custom Search)
  • Relatively plain – as a canvas for further creative imaginings
  • Child Theme ready – so I can upgrade a the core theme easily.
  • Built for SEO
  • …plus a few other useful tricks that I like things to do (the list would be too long)

So, off I went, to complete my mission to make the all-in-one-Google-Adsense-theme-no-plugins-required.

Recursively Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

The more observant of you might notice a slight nod in the styling towards the early Revolution Magazine Theme by Brian Gardner of StudioPress fame. That’s because when I first started to seriously get into blogging I was impressed by his Premium themes enough to buy his all-in-one-all-inclusive developer package, and used Revolution Magazine theme (modded to my own taste) for my other blog CreativityPro.com (where I occasionally like to have a rant about the world of art). When I designed HeatMap Ads Theme for Creativity Pro I wanted to retain the ‘brand’ I had developed using it, and so default styling was set and the child theme ‘Purple People Eater’ was born.

Pushing the design (a bit)

You’ll notice that on HeatMapTheme.com I’ve pushed the design a bit further all using the power of Child Themes. I’ve even added extra functions into the Child Theme, all of which will  not be affected when I get round to upgrading the core HeatMap Adsense Theme.

If you want the ability to change things around in HeatMap Theme but still be able to upgrade when new HeatMap Theme versions come out you really have to get into child themes. At the moment I distribute the Purple People Child theme to those who donate to the project. If you want one just ask. It does make the job a heap easier.

I designed the ‘framework’ of the theme to potentially be able to do something really fancy such you see on webdesignerwall.com. That’s something to work towards.

So what’s next?

In part that’s up to you. I know what I want, but what do you like in an Ads Theme? Feel free to make suggestions.