WordPress Themes: IsoTherm News by BizzArtic

I googled free alternative to thesis yesterday and true enough, there were ample links to follow. I poked around and found a number of interesting posts on a few alternatives to the Thesis WordPress Theme. Of the number of links I followed, Raju’s post at Technically Personal was the main reason I decided to play around with this theme.

Of the different criteria I was looking for in a search engine optimized and friendly theme, the IsoTherm News WordPress Theme looked decent enough to take for a test drive. The general look and overall typography look pretty good so I figured, why the hell not? Downloading and installing the theme was as painless as can be.

Diving in Dashboard > Appearance > Themes and activating IsoTherm News, a new option appeared on the left menu pane. Click on IsoTherm News Theme Options and WALA! This is what you will get; or at least I did on my screen. Hit that box outlined in blue on the top right and all the options/fields are revealed.

IsoTherm News theme Options

Here’s some of the tweaks and options I felt deserved some mention.

General Settings

This one is rather simple and straight forward. Upload your site logo, favicon, set your date options and your RSS feed url. Speaking of RSS, that little field means you have absolutely no need for the FD Feedburner Plugin by John Watson. That’s good news since the general rule of thumb is if you can live with one less plugin, all the better. I find the custom.css under ‘Customize Your Design’ to be the real treat here. Experienced bloggers and those who are familiar with CSS style sheets might not appreciate this as much compared to those just starting out. Still, a simple addition that could mean you end up breathing easier and cursing less.

Instead of messing with codes on your main styles sheet, you copy, paste and edit only the block of codes you want to change on to the custom.css. That way, even if you do mess it up (like I have the habit of doing), your main style sheet is still intact. Simple but neat feature. Unfortunately, I could not get custom.css to pass W3C validations so I just edited the main style sheet.

Layout Settings

This section basically gives you the ability to decide if the ‘Featured Posts’ appear on your homepage. If you prefer a single column instead of the default 2 columns, it can be adjusted too. I’m used to a single column but will leave it at 2 for a bit. Default sidebar location is on the left but I have set mine to the right. Most of us start reading from the left. So for SEO and typography reasons, I prefer not to have a sidebar on the left. Unless there is something on the sidebar I want readers to see first and above my main content.

Blog Stats and Scripts

For most at least, slapping on some Google Analytics, tracking, stats, meta verification code on either the header.php or footer.php files isn’t all that hard. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to be able to do both from the same page now would it? It’s not that time consuming a task and we rarely need to make any amendments. It does however takes the hassle out of it should you ever need to add new codes.

SEO Options

The Home Page <meta> tags fields allow for some editing of Description, Keywords and Author tags. There is the entire list of <noindex> tags that you can check off. Again, with that, you could do without the All in One SEO Pack or Platinium SEO Pack plugins. Should you choose to use any one of these, I will suggest to leave the SEO Options fields on the theme blank. As for me, I rather have one less plugin installed and just use the options built in.

Advertising Scripts / Header Ad /Banner Ads

There is a whole selection of advertising spots for your banners if you wish to use this. The ‘Ad Script Codes’ are for your adsense placement and other javascript ads. These are only available in the 468×60 full banner options. For the sidebar, normal 250×250 or 125×125 HTML banner ads can be placed there. I am curious why isn’t a there the option to run 250×250 or 125×125 script codes. Personally, I prefer a 300×250 spot for both javascript codes or normal banner ads. I’m thinking that can be done by messing around with some PHP codes and files but the theme has made me too lazy to go do that.

Translations

I’m not sure how many folks would have bothered with these options. For those who want to personalized their blog, there isn’t an easier way to do it. I too went ahead to personalize my blog by a wee bit. Though any self-respecting English teacher would probably tell me that the first letter in the first word should be in upper and not lower case. then again, my middle finger equals an upper case.

Wishlist

If I could make a wishlist for the next IsoTherm News release, they would be:

• the ability to adjust main column and sidebar size. I like big fat sidebars up to 300 pixels. Some may prefer slimmer ones at 120 pixels.
• relevant to the above, running javascripts on sidebar on top of HTML banners.
• custom.css to pass W3C markup validation. Then again, this may not be a priority to most folks.

All in all, I found IsoTherm News to be very functional and works great. It may not have as many options as the Thesis down to the color of your links. Yet, it still offers sufficient customizations for the average blogger. So if tweaking overkill isn’t what you are looking for, the IsoTherm News should fit nicely with an extra or two options to boot. I posted a couple of screenshots below.

• Home Page
• Single Page

I would recommend the IsoTherm News WordPress Theme as one that does what it was built to do well. The best part of it, it’s free to download here. Unless of course, you have decided to go all out and get a copy of Thesis WordPress Theme (affiliate linked).

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 13:00 and is filed under pressed and tagged with css style sheets, custom css, dashboard, john watson, left menu, new option, raju, rule of thumb, typography, wordpress themes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.