Customizing the Thesis Nav Menu

You want a navigation menu that stand out to the visitors of your site and using the Thesis theme will allow you to create Nav Menus that really stand out to your visitors.

Why do you need a great Nav Menu?

You need the menu to stand out because it allows visitors to your site, to realize the overall direction of your site. Having a Nav Menu also allows you to better direct your visitors to the pages and posts that you want them to visit. When you can effectively direct your visitors, this means higher conversion rates for you.

This is why having a great Nav Menu that stands out to your visitors should be of prime importance to you, and if you are working with the Thesis theme you will have the power to easily create Nav Menus that really standout to those that visit your site.

But so many people that use the Thesis Theme have no idea how to create these menus. But I'm going to give you a little information on the subject.

Without any prior knowledge of php or css, Thesis will give you the power to customize a NAV Menu for your site. What is the first step?

You first must enable your menu. Read below how to accomplish this.

For a little background information, when you first install Thesis you will be under the default settings. And the Nav Menu you see under these settings isn't the Thesis menu, what you see under the default settings is the WordPress menu.

Your first step is to enable the Thesis Nav menu so you can begin customizing.

This is how you enable.Once you have the Thesis theme installed, in your WordPress dashboard, go to the thesis button and then site options. Once you are here you will see the heading, Navigation Menu, right under the Big Ass save button.

Next you need to click the plus sign next to the word "Select Menu Type", once you open this you will see this:

What you what to do next is click "Thesis nav menu", taking the choice off the WordPress nav menu.

Once you do this you will see:

And once you do this you will be ready to learn how to design your Thesis Menu
   

What is a Favicon In WordPress

You're building a WordPress site and wondering what a favicon is? First, just so you understand, a favicon is not only for WordPress websites.

Most every major site on the net has one. YouTube, Facebook, Blogger. All these sites have these.

But what is a Favicon?

It means "favorite icon". These are small images.

Next time you're on your favorite website, look up at the tab that is open for the page your on. You will see a little icon. Right now you're on blogger, if you look up at the tab open for this page you should see a image/icon that looks sort of like this:

This is the favicon for blogger.

Further down the page I will show you how to add a favicon to your Wordpress website and show you where on the net you can go to get one of these icons.

Is it important to have a Favicon for your WordPress websites?

What is the advantages of having a Favicon in WordPress? Having one will give your site more credibility to both your visitors and to Google. Many professional website builders say having one will help improve the overall SEO of your website.

Also if someone book marks your site, having a favicon in place will really make your site stand out. A picture is worth a 1000 words right? And this is one of the many factors that will give you my clicks, say if your site is bookmarker on digg, redditt, or Google+.

Since you can get one for free and it's very easy to upload these small icons onto your WordPress site. And there really is no excuse not to have one. Well, the only excuse not to upload one of these icons for your site is only because you are too lazy to do this.

One more cool thing about the Thesis Theme is it has a favicon uploader built into it so you will not need to install an extra wp-plugin.

But if you are using a free wp theme or even a paid theme (many paid themes do not have the built in ability to upload these icons) here is the best wp plugin for uploading a favicon. This is free at WordPress.org

But now that you have the plugin to upload your WordPress favicon where do you find one. One great site I use to find these icons is icon finder.

Changing Fonts with free WP theme vs Thesis Theme

When I first began my journey in learning internet marketing I started at a place called wealth affiliate and here I constantly hear new people ask how do they change: Font size, family and color of their text and links.

Well the truth is when you are using a free WP template accomplishing tasks, while not impossible but many times will require a little bit of css knowledge or maybe you can find a wp-plugin that will allow you to make these changes. I believe one decent plugin you can use and find at WordPress.org is name Tiny MCE Advanced. But the Thesis theme makings changing your font sizes, colors and families so much easier and quicker and allows you to use the entire color spectrum.

 I mentioned the wealthy affiliate website is where I first learned internet marketing, looking at my blog spot site, your probably saying, "I'm not impressed with your skills", this blogger site sucks!!! What you may not realize though is this is not my main site, this is only a site I use for back links to improve my keyword rankings on my main site.

I also use blog spot to write posts on what I learn, writing what I learn out on a webpage like this helps me expand on my understanding. Then I will make a post on my main site over this same topic, "Fonts WP theme vs Thesis Theme" but the post I make on my main site will be that much better because I have given myself some time to think things out here first. If you're interest in learning internet marketing I suggest you check out Wealthy Affiliate. This is an honest and helpful community.

OK back to changing fonts sizes and families on the Thesis theme. As I said this theme makes thesis tasks much easier compared to free WP themes. You will not need any extra knowledge of css or to download any WP plugin to make these changes when you use Thesis.

Here's how easier making these changes. First you need to go into your WordPress dashboard and if you have the Thesis theme already installed you then need to go to the themes button on the side bar within the dashboard and then to, Thesis theme design options and open the "plus sign" and Fonts, Colors, and More!

You can see this from the image below: Then to make your changes in font and color or font family all you need to do is click on the drop down box or the color boxes and make your decision. But remember to push the save button after you decide so the changes are actually applied to your site.

Use for the Thesis theme Multimedia box

I had originally made a post on how to remove the multimedia box on this theme. Up until the time of this post I had always remove the media box. And stated I know of absolutely no use for it. But after leaving this post I started to tinker around with the box and researched and read more online about the uses of this box on the thesis theme.

So I experimented and found something I like very much and I do believe it can:

1. Improve your sites rankings for certain keywords.
2. Improve your click ratio on adsense, amazon products or however you are monetizing your site.
3. Overall led to improved user experience on your site.

So what use am I referring to?

If you go to the thesis theme design options inside your WordPress dashboard and then to the multimedia box option and open up the "plus sign" you will come to a drop down box. In this drop down box one of the options is "embed a video".

And when you choose this option a text box will appear where you embed your video code. It should look much like this:

So where do you get video codes to embed? Well, of course YouTube. Here is an example of the a video code from a Youtube video that you want to use to embed in your multimedia box.

Now notice in the image above, the red line under share and the blue line under embed. These are the options you want to choose when you are at the Youtube video you plan on using to embed in your Thesis media box.

All you do is copy the entire code in the box, and then paste the code in the "Video embed code" box, shown in the very first image above, and then save the changes in Thesis.

But special note notice in the Youtube video code it says "width"420". You will want to change this to a smaller number since your sidebar will not have that great of a width. All you need to do is after you paste the video code is to manually change it to like 170. You can save it then and look at your site to see if it is fitting or not, if not go back and change the width again.

Ok now that you know how to do this, how will this help you rank better for certain Keywords, gather you more clicks on ads and overall improve the user experience on your site.

First thing you want to make sure you have done is used a video that has Keywords in the title that apply or are related to the Keywords that you're trying to rank for on your site. 

Having a Keyword related video will help tell Google your site is about this subject or keyword and Google should pick up on that and improve your rankings.

And having a relevant video on your site will improve user experience because it will give visitors the opportunity to watch a video about something they are searching for.

Now for the most important thing, how will having a video in your thesis multimedia box improve your clicks on your ads. Well if your ads are located near this video and visitors watch this video, it just makes sense that your ads will be more visible to them as they are watching the video. They will notice your ads more because they eyes are concentrating on an area of your site where your ads are located.

Multimedia in Thesis theme design option

This page is about removing this box from your Thesis theme default settings.

When you first install the thesis them onto your WordPress website you will notice there is a default appearance, which is the content area is on the left side and two sidebar are present on the right side of this content area.

Another thing you will notice in the default thesis setting is right above the two sidebars is a box with images in it. This is a fairly large box, you shouldn't miss it. This box is called the Multimedia box.

I hate this box, I see no practical use for this box but just because I see no use for this image box on the default setting of the thesis them doesn't mean there 's not some good practical reasons to keep the box.

Update I just figured out a use for the Multimedia box and wrote a post about it and how to use it. This has improved both my SEO for a few Keywords and also improved my ad clicks.

If you happen to like this media box and always keep it on your website when using the theme, I would appreciate hearing from you and your ideas in the comments below.

Now I will show oyu a couple simple things you can do with the Multimedia box, like remove it as I do.

To work with this box you need to:

1. Gto into your WordPress dashboard and find the Thesis button.
2. Choose design option. This will open up Thesis design options. And on the far right side you will see:

Then open the "plus sign":

There are different options to choose from, as you see form above I choose, "do not show box". But if you want there are design choices to make rotating images in the boxes, add a video, or even put a custom code. 

I'm sure as I gain more experience using the Thesis theme I will find some good uses for the box but for now I just remove it entirely.

Thesis Theme Framework

If you want to get the most out of the Thesis theme, you must use it correctly. This means it will be very helpful to you if you learn as much as possible about the theme. Right? Here I will briefly cover what the Thesis Theme Framework is and how you go about changing it and some suggestions on what framework you will want to use.

When all you want to do is start your blog/website, learning can be a pain in the ass, this is understandable but you need to take the time to learn.

Thesis offers two different types of framework, which you can change with a simple click of the button inside the dashboard. These are:

1. Page framework
2. Full width framework

A webpage consists of a header, a content area, sidebars, and footer.

When using the page framework option all these different areas of your webpage listed above will appear as one, meaning when looking at the page you will not be able to identify any difference, the page will have one common background. The page framework works very well if you're designing a sales page.


On the other hand, when using the full width framework. The header, the content area, the footer will be divided in three parts and each part can be further customized to look very different. If the feel of a website, I would recommend using this full width option.

If you are having a hard time understanding the difference between the page vs full width framework here are examples of each. I think once you actually see these examples you will understand the difference better.

 

Thesis theme page layout

Before you start with your major customization endeavors with the Thesis Theme you will want to decided on your page layout. What does this mean?

When you visit a website you will usually see a content area and then sidebars (column) flanking.

Upon installing this wp theme:

The Thesis Theme has a default setting. In the default setting, your site will have one wide content area on the left side and two columns on the right side. There will also be a multimedia box on the right side, above the two columns. 

This description of the default setting above is what I'm referring to when I say the page layout of the site.

Now, what you need to do is decide how you want your site to look and the thesis theme will allow you to effortlessly change the layout.

Maybe, you like the default setting? Or maybe you only want one column and you want it to be on the left-hand side of the content area? Maybe you want a two columns, one of the left and the other on the right? Or maybe you want a three column layout?

So the first thing you need to decide about the page layout, is the number of columns you want and what side of the page you want these on.

And after you choose the number of columns and their order on the page you will need to change these to the appropriate width so your new Thesis theme site will appear best on all types of monitors. This is very important for you to do correctly and is also very easy to do. Learn more specifics on thesis theme layout and other information on how to customize this powerful WordPress theme.

Also, before you start customizing this theme you may want to take these three important steps.