Free Wordpress Theme – Released
Always trolling the internet for new stuff, I came across this theme the other day. As you can see, its simple and elegant looking. I decided to use it for my band’s upcoming website but, the theme was not quite there yet. After spending a little time with it I managed to get it to a new level.
Let’s take a look…
The Problems
Out of the box the Folio Elements by Jason Schuller of Press75.com is fantastic. By the sound of the name, this theme is great for a simple portfolio site; web design, visual arts, photography or anything like that. However there were several shortcomings the way it stood.
Pseudo AJAX Implementation – Try the theme out. It uses AJAX but, code wise it isn’t performing an asyncronous transaction at all. All content is loaded in to the page right off the bat. This causes slower page load and leads us to our next point.
Poor SEO quality – Any site that uses this theme needs to understand that SEO is not a goal. As the theme stood, any site would get a lower quality score because of the duplicate content on the homepage and all subsequent pages. Not to mention the slow loading time and inline JavaScript.
jCarousel Lite Bug – The theme was not having the 3rd item in the carousel pop up… WHY?!
The Solutions
True AJAX Integration – First things first. I setup the theme to use actual AJAX. I wrote a simple script that outputs the content using the standard Wordpress Loop. Then I setup all the links for the pages and posts to utilize this script and passed them into the FaceBox. This works a lot better and in favor of putting all the page and post content directly into the page.
Better SEO Scores – While this theme still isn’t good to use if SEO goals are important, the true AJAX integration helps out a LOT! This prevents the site from being indexed with duplicate content. Also I moved the on page JavaScript to a separate file. Both of the fixes decrease page load time and slightly increases its SEO score.
Fixing the jCarsouel Bug – This was actually easy and honestly a mistake that I make more often than I’d like to admit!! Basically the order in which you load JavaScript is important. Because jCarousel creates DUPLICATES of the content in the carousel, the carousel script needed to be loaded before the facebox script. Also, the whole reason that the jCarousel plugin uses duplicate content is to acheive the circular wrapping effect. This is crucial to this theme as it would look akward if the carousel bounced to the first post.
Get the Theme!!
2 Responses to “Free Wordpress Theme – Released”
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September 14th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I am also working with this theme and having the same bug with loading the facebox pages …
Is this a modified version that you have available or the original?
If you have the improved version or any tips (I’m an Ajax newb) I’d be very grateful.
Thanks!
September 14th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
hey I was using 1.1 not 1.2.
But the ajax still loads strange … at least it works!