An Elite Evolution
- April 30th, 2008
- COMMENTS 17
Today the redesign of Elite By Design is finally complete. After two weeks of working, designing, coding, and nine days of missed posts, I’m ready to roll this baby out. But at the same time I’m also unveiling the next step in the evolution of Elite By Design and have never been more excited.
Today is the start of Elite Theme. This is my Premium WordPress Theme site where I will be selling my themes to the public. I feel that the site itself can explain what this is all about way better than this blog post, so check out some of the following pages to learn more about EliteTheme.com:
Coupled with the launch of EliteTheme.com, I am unveiling the Elite WordPress Theme. This theme is what you are looking at right now on Elite By Design - take a look at the Live Demo here.
The features of Elite are as follows:
- WordPress 2.5+ Compatible
- Automatic image resizer
- Custom page templates for Archives, Blogroll, & Portfolio
- Built in comment gravatars
- Featured post section
- YouTube integration
- Flickr integration
- Twitter integration
- Fully widget-enabled sidebar
- RSS & Feedburner integration
- Over 15 included backgrounds
- Transparent background option
- Advertisement management
- 100% valid XHTML and CSS
- SEO friendly title and tagline
- One-click logo implementation
I’ve written all of the documentation for this theme at EliteTheme.com. I’ve covered such things as the background customization, one-click logo integration, advertisement implementation, and many other features.
Let me introduce you to a few of the greatest features found on Elite:
Automatic Image Resizer
The Elite’s back-end will save you time and energy because we have implemented an automatic image resizer. Never worry about cropping your images or adjusting the dimensions before putting them into your blog posts. Simply use any image URL and Elite will automatically adjust the dimensions to fit into the post.
Gravatar Enabled
The comments section of Elite is smooth, elegant, and well structured. We’ve implemented Gravatar support that lets your commentators’ premade Gravatars show up next to their comments. This feature can be easily turned off - but more importantly it can be customized in any way to fit your website’s needs.
Custom Pages
One of my favorite features of Elite is the custom pages that we’ve built into this theme - for example, the Portfolio page. We’ve made it easy for freelancers and web designers to showcase their portfolio in a clean, elegant manner. Take a look at what your portfolio page will look like on Elite.
Maximum Customization
Let’s face it - the default color schemes and options on WordPress themes aren’t always the most attractive. We’ll be the first to admit that. What we’ve done is package over 15 different background colors right into the theme that you can change with just the click of a button. You will also notice at the Live Demo that all of the content has a brushed metal background. While some people might be a big fan of brushed metal, we understand that this won’t always be the case. So what did we do? We made it so that you can turn off the metal background with just the click of your mouse to be replaced with a nice transparent backdrop. This feature has been enabled on EliteByDesign.com. These are the preloaded background colors that can be switched with the click of a button.
Everything Else
Those are just a few of the many features that are packaged into Elite. Check out Elite Theme to read about the rest.
The starting price for this theme is only $74.95. The Developer Package will cost only $199.95 and can be used as many times as you want. Learn more about these themes at the FAQ page.
If you are an affiliate marketer and are interested in making money off of Elite Themes, we’ve set up our very own Affiliate Program to help you.
This is an exciting evolution of Elite By Design and I look forward to hearing your feedback about our latest venture into the Premium Themes marketplace.
**Please note - I’m still working on adding in the correct images to all my posts so things will still be changing over the next few days.
Brian — the site looks amazing!
Thanks Daniel - I’ve got some great plans to go with this design - and keep in mind the bugs are still being worked out
But I appreciate it!
“E” stands for Elite and Excellence! Great layout, colors and innovative functions. The auto-image-resizer is genius. Congratulations!
@Skarld - Thank you very much
I’m very proud of this theme - the theme options are just incredible in my opinion. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to switch back to “non-premium.”
wow! its so lovely! The wood background is a nice touch and the slightly reflected header and the semi transparent bits give it a great web 2.0 look!
Great work Brian! Good to see the new layout live, I really like it. Seems like your feedreader count is growing!
Keep it up!
Greetings,,
@Marco - Thanks a lot. Yea, I decided to display my feedcount on this design - I felt that I was far enough past the 100 mark that it would be alright.
What do you think of elitetheme.com?
Love the new site very cool. Just a quick question what plugin or code did you use to get the banner at the top and the images in the posts? I really like what you have done and its bugging me on how you have done it.
Keep up the good work, I can’t wait for new posts.
It’s looking good too, hope your template will sell rapidly!
Ps. You’ll need to fix your “advertisement” page
. And did you, by any chance, get my StumbleUpon message a month ago?
i love wideplank dark hardwood floor.. very nice background.
@MacTips - What banner are you referring to? If you mean my logo, I made that in photoshop. Images in the post is used with a custom field when you’re writing a post. I don’t know if I answered your question though - let me know! And yes, regular posts will begin right away
@Marco - Thank you very much. I hope so too! Advertisement page is being fixed - thanks for the catch! And no, I didn’t get your SU message - sorry! What is it?
@JY - I love it too. I originally was going to go with the design @ http://elitetheme.com/elite - then I thought I wanted an image background. Then I figured that I wanted the content sections to be transparent. And walah, now we have the Elite Theme!
Sorry I meant to say the “Featured Post” at the top of the page. I think I no how you did it. Sorry I wasn’t clear.
Oh, well it just grabs all the posts from a specified category, and along with a custom field for the image, displays the post in that section only.
Hello evryone, does somebody know a place where I can learn how to handle Photoshop CS3 in London? cheap please!!! I like so much this program.
i’d definetly love to learn. I ve just arrive to england so i dont know a lot bout this.
Thank you.
Sergio
brian,
after looking at the new site for a few days, i have couple suggestions:
1) for blog sites, i prefer to see all the comments displayed by default, without having the extra click
2) can you put in a pngiefix so your png transparency show up for ie6 as well? i know most response would be “use ff, or upgrade ie.” the truth is, a lot of us surf sites at work. if we happen to work in a gov/corp environment, it’s not up to us what browser to use. a lot work places are very slow about upgrading software. just something to consider.
@JY
1) If you click on the link that says “comments (#)”, from the home page, it will display the article with the comments shown. When you click on the title of the article, the comments are hidden. Really, I did this to reduce the length of the page. This will definitely be a probable addition to the next version of Elite - in one of the future upgrades (free to buyers).
2) I promise it is on my list of things to work with. When I made this theme, I originally had the brushed metal background seen at http://elitetheme.com/elite. I figured that not everyone would really like that as much, so I added an option into the theme that allows users to simply make that transparent. A sacrifice of doing so is that yes, the png’s load funky in IE6. I will definitely be working on this, and will probably be included in an Elite update. I appreciate your feedback though.
[...] you have read about my site redesign that I unveiled yesterday, than you are sure to know about my latest business venture into the [...]