As promised, today I’m releasing the first in my series of free Wordpress themes designed specifically with Ebay Partner Network based websites in mind. This is a very lightweight theme designed to maximize space and make your blog look more like an authentic e-commerce site.
In my opinion I think many EPN Wordpress blogs look too much link blogs with eBay listings stuffed in them as an afterthought. Most WP themes really aren’t desgined to look like e-commerce sites, they’re designed to look like blogs!
WP Commerce Steel is just the first of many themes like this to come. It’s a more basic theme, designed to let the EPN ads take center stage, and make visitors feel more like they’ve reached an authentic site selling products. Here are some of the features it offers:
Dynamic page navigation
a top sidebar to add a search box
2 left sidebars with 2 unique styles
Home page template so you can personalize your Blog and add graphics to enhance the visitor experience
Clean layout, great perfect for EPN and amazon, ready for PHPBay Pro integration
Neutral colors perfect for a wide range of niches
Works great for regular Blogs too!
Check out a demo of WP Commerce Steel here, or view a live site currently using the theme: Stainless Steel Water Bottle.
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Tags: Ebay Partner Network, free premium wordpress themes, Free Wordpress Themes, WP Commerce
January 5th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Wow this looks gorgeous! Thanks for sharing with the community!
January 6th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
I like the theme. Got a couple of ideas in mind, thanks for releasing it. Nice layout.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Hi,
I wonder how to generate the epn code that presents the layout(4 columns) on your demo?
March 4th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
I will be providing a tutorial on how to add the 4 column layout very soon.
March 6th, 2009 at 4:31 am
Love your site Sam.
How did you link your Popular Searches with the search box? Very clever and a great dynamic feature. Will you be doing a tutorial on this?
March 6th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Great question. It involves using the Search-2-Post widget and setting it up to create pages as posts. I will cover this in detail as it is an important and somewhat confusing aspect.
April 6th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Maybe I’m the only one having this problem…named a page and set it as static via ‘reading’ option but the static page shows up both page and post entries.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:54 am
I think you also need to set another static page as your posts page. Hopefully that will fix it for you.
April 7th, 2009 at 4:03 am
Nope, that wasn’t it. In the ‘reading’ section of WP, my posts don’t even show in the ‘front page display’ pull down menu; my pages show in both the ‘front page’ and ‘post page’ pull down.
Uploaded five other templates to see if they would do the same but they showed the ’static page’ as directed from the selection I made in the back and showing posts in the ‘post page’ toggle menu.
April 7th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Pulled this code out of the header and now the template displays as I want…
Will this cause any problems anywhere else or perhaps there is a way within to disable it so it doesn’t start up?
April 7th, 2009 at 10:34 am
div id=”top-search” ?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebar-top.php’); ? /div
code didn’t show in previous comment, took “” out…
April 7th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Yes, you need to designate a PAGE to display as your posts page, and a PAGE to display as your front page. For example, you could create a PAGE called Blog and set it to display as your POSTS page.
April 7th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Ok, figured a way to keep that code in; I tried ’starbucks water bottles’ on your waterbottle site and really liked the results so I got search2post for myself. Stuck it in the top-sidebar widget so now I’m using my first widget.
I’ve been using the Revolutions theme from Gardner for the past year and didn’t have any need for widgets so that aspect is new to me as is setting up pages / posts to display as the front page; trying to pretty much duplicate your front setup on water bottles so don’t be surprised or dismayed if I rant and whine for the next day or two while I get this all worked out.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
No prob. It takes a little time and trial and error to learn the process of setting these up, but once you get the first one down it gets a lot easier.
April 9th, 2009 at 5:18 am
Confused with the homepage template. Click ‘home’ on the water bottle site and it brings up the homepage template but the template doesn’t create it’s own button for the pagebar menu.
April 9th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
worded that wrong as an [a href=”http://www.xxx.com/tpl-home.php”}Home[/a} creates the home button in the header but what is the page that I am linking to; tpl-home.php? So far it hasn’t worked…
April 9th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
The home link is built into the top navigation bar. If you want a link to the home page on the left menu, use the Flexi-Pages widget instead of the regular pages widget. You shouldn’t ever need to link to a template. Assigning it to a page is all you need to do.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Any idea on how we can clean up all of the validation errors and warnings? I know it’s probably not a big deal.. but… a solid coded template should validate.
Your example has 10 errors and 300 warnings.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stainless-steel-water-bottle.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&ss=1&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.654
After playing around a little, I could get it down to 2 errors and 50 warnings… alot of the errors are generated by the file, and another seems to do with the character set… iso-8859-1 as opposed to utf-8. I’d really love to run with template on my 80+ sites, but I would feel much more comfortable using it if the errors were cleaned up. I wish I knew more on how to do it myself. Any tips, help or advice would be greatly appreciated & thanks for the excellent template.
April 19th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
alot of the errors seem to be generated by the file
April 19th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
man, comments wont let me put the file name in - php wp_head
April 21st, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Hey Carl,
Sorry you don’t appreciate the theme. To be honest, I could really care less about whether these themes validate cleanly or not. If I were selling premium themes it would be one thing, but since I’m giving the theme away for free, I don’t see any point in spending the extra time. Same reason why some of the css files with my free themes are unorganized.
If a user wants to fix the validation errors and send me an updated copy of the theme, I would be happy to update the download.
I spend a lot of time working in SEO and fixing validation errors really does not provide a huge benefit.
April 21st, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Hi Sam,
On the contrary… as my last words were tnanks for the excellent theme. Because I thought it was such an excellent theme and was considering implementing it on over 80+ sites, I thought I would inquire about the validation errors. In addition, I also said that it’s probably not even a big deal whether it validates or not… but the facts are that properly coded themes validate. And while it may or may not make a huge difference, I just don’t see how it can possibly hurt to have a theme that validates. Even though I am not an SEO or do programming for a living, I will get the theme validated and once I do, I will be happy to pass it on to your users if you like. And as before, I think it’s an excellent theme that could be a super one.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I agree it can’t hurt to have a theme that validates, my main point is that it just isn’t a big priority to me personally. If you do get a chance to fix the validation errors, it would definitely be kind of you to share it with me so I can update the download. I’ll be happy to credit you for it in a new blog post.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Recent Entries and Blogroll are showing up in the top right of the page. Any idea how to remove?
April 29th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Yes. You haven’t configured the top sidebar, so it is using the Wordpress Default sidebar.
May 8th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Hi, must it be used with PHPbay?
May 8th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
No, you definitely do not have to use PHPbay with it. You can use it as a regular WP theme if you like.
May 8th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Thanks Sam for the answer. What I meant is for the ebay list to appear on the blog. How did you do it?
May 8th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
I use PHPBay, however there are other plugins that do the same thing. You can also go into your ebay partner network and generate widgets for each page that way.
Personally I would recommend using only PHPBay if you’re planning on running this kind of site.
May 21st, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Thanks for sharing this theme with the community. I have been looking for something to develop a few store sites. This theme will work perfectly.