Revolution WordPress Theme

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This post is more of a rave than a review. I love Brian Gardner’s themes and his latest offering, The Revolution Pro, has not let me down, it is a cracker!

This site is a customized working version of the Pro theme and I am so happy I could do back flips. The home page is the part of this theme that I really love; it allows my blog readers to find relevant information super easily.

Let’s break down some of the components and see what is so good about Brian’s Gardner’s latest WordPress theme.

Here is a screen shot of the top half of the Home page:

1. The home page acts much more like a traditional website but at the same time, it has the feel of a blog. The tabs across the top are all static pages. This is perfect for letting people have easy access to important information.

2. The second nav bar is what Brian calls the ‘tabber’ section. Each one of those tabs is a different category that I have chosen. Each time a new post is made in one of those categories, it will show here. So essentially, you have your 7 most important categories at the fingertips of your readers.

This makes it super easy for your visitors to find posts they are interested in. The other very cool feature is that it pulls a different image from each post that you make. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Instead of just a link for your visitors to see, they have an image to capture their attention.

Once they have finished reading, they can easily head for home and find something else of interest. The longer people stay on your site and read, the more the search engines will view your site as a creditable source of information. So this home page is making the search engines very happy because of all of the short keyword descriptions of the posts on the home page, and hopefully; visitors will find more content and stay longer (our whole objective, really who cares what Google thinks).

3. This is a preset box coded for YouTube videos that you wish to display. To change the video, you simply copy the url of the desired video and paste it in the theme options area and it is done. It is super easy.

Lets move on down to the bottom half of the Home Page…

This area again is designed so that readers have as many of your blog posts easily available as possible. There will be 14 available posts for your visitors to choose from.

You will see where I have put ‘five links text’; at the top is the most current post and then there are 4 links to related posts from that category (not showing at the moment as I am yet to post in these categories).

Next you will see the area to the right, I have named this, ‘Product Review’. This will pull the four most recent posts from this category, including the images that you choose.

This home page is so impressive because of the ease in which people can browse your categories. There is access to 10 main categories on my home page and 21 links to my most recent posts. Unlike a typical ‘Recent Post’ area on a blog, this home page gives the visitors images to draw them into your posts. This can only help people click through your site and that is exactly what you and the search engines want.

A few features that I didn’t use…

Usually there is a sub nav bar under the main nav bar where you could have another 8 or so categories. This will also have a drop down box showing the posts within each category. I have modified my blog for simplicity sake.

The main nav bar and the sub nav bar actually both have drop down boxes so that visitor can see all the the posts that you have made in each category and all of the sub-pages in your static content. This makes it so easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for it is crazy. Essentially this theme is the ultimate content management system.

There are a few other things that I don’t have on my blog that come standard with this theme. You will notice in the upper right hand corner of the screen shot; the email, RSS, and Comments icon. Again, this theme is making your visitors experience as easy as possible.

The next thing you will see is the Flickr photos. This is basically a media theme, but if you where doing a book review site, you could put images of books you are reviewing. If you had an art-work site…I am sure you see what I mean.

The Blog Proper…

Once a person navigates to a post from the home page, the Revolution theme then reverts to a more typical blog format. The side bar to the right has some pretty nice features as well. The email subscription box at the top comes standard with this theme. To activate it, all as you need to do is go over to FeedBurner and grab you id number, copy it, and then paste it in the theme options area and you are set.

Under the subscribe box is an area where you can put your featured ad, this would be for the number one product that you want to promote. To get this ad working, you simply go to theme options, enter the url of the image you want to appear in the ad, and then in the area below you enter the url where you want to direct people. It is as easy as that.

The other thing that I have not used is the Google Adsense feature. This allows you to put Google ads very neatly at the bottom of each of your posts (I personally would rather people stay on my site but for the people that like adsense, this is very nice).

I am not a techie kind of a guy, and I am definitely not a coder, but this theme is well within my ability to work with. The other great thing is the support forum, it is incredibly interactive and so if you get stuck, someone will help you out, and usually very quickly.

So these are the main things that I love about Brian Gardner’s latest Revolution theme. There are some other things that I have not discovered yet, but I have only been using it for less than a week so it will only be a matter of time.

Big Thumbs Up

So without even a trace of reservation, the Revolution Pro WordPress theme gets the big thumbs up from me.

I was so happy with this theme, I purchased the developers package so that I could build my other niche sites using variations of the Revolution theme. There are 6 to choose from, each one more suited to a particular industry.

So what are you waiting for? Go grab one of Brian’s Revolution themes today! Get it here…