BatFlattery

I’ve been trying to find a decent theme for my LED lighting site for awhile now: I wanted something that’s easy to use from an affiliate perspective, and also easy to customise, so that it doesn’t look like a themed or template site! In the end I decided to go with the Thesis theme, as it’s very customisable just from the control panel, with additional customisations available with a bit of coding (such as the header graphic). I’ve ended up with quite a minimalist site, which I think goes well with the ultra-modern design of some of my lights.

I’ve also switched to using Skimlinks to find products for the site: using their Skimkit app it’s very easy to find products, and pictures and links are just a click away. Much easier than hunting through different affiliate programmes, getting the links right, etc, plus Skimlinks are just straight links to the merchant, so no weird-looking codes and stuff.

The only issue I have, and it’s not the fault of either Thesis or Skimlinks, is the way Thesis uses Wordpress’s thumbnail system to show thumbs on category and tag pages, and post previews. This only works if you actually upload the image to Wordpress. Since it’s much easier to just paste the link to the product image that Skimlinks provides, that’s what I do, but unfortunately this means no thumbnails. Anyway, it’s a small price to pay; image uploads are just too much hassle, and I don’t really like the idea of having any of my Wordpress directories writeable, I think Wordpress is insecure enough as it is! (I’ve found a brilliant solution to updating Wordpress easily, but that’s the subject of another post.)

So overall I’m quite happy with the site now; there’s still a bit of tweaking to do, but I think it’s coming along quite nicely!