Well – It’s done…. mostly….

Reminds me of the little girl, Newt, from the 1986 thriller movie Aliens, when the expedition finds her and she talks of the aliens on the planet, she says… “They come out at night… mostly!”

The dust is still settling and there are a few empty pages that still need to be filled in, but overall, I’d call the WordPress theme upgrade a complete success…

There were quite a few questions from readers about why we switched themes, which theme we choose, and what the current direction of the company is… fair questions, so let me take you by the hand and we’ll go over it all, play by play.

Let’s start with the details of the upgrade itself. Our previous version of WordPress was at version 2.6.2, and the latest version of WordPress is 2.7.1. There are tons of WordPress upgrades and features added to the latested version of WordPress, including the enhanced administrative interface.

So even if we used the same theme as before, we were going to upgrade versions of WordPress anyhow. And with WordPress, upgrades are extremely easy, and the whole WordPress upgrade process took me less than 5 minutes. The only question I have is – “Why didn’t I upgrade WordPress sooner?”… oh the things we ponder after the fact.

So once I was upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1, it was time to install the theme… I copied the files over to my themes directory, went to my themes page in the admin side of WordPress, and clicked on the image to install the theme – and presto theme installed.

So which theme is it? It’s called the Magazeen Theme and is a free theme, generously created by the nice folks over at Smashing Magazine and We Function.

The style of theme we chose is what is referred to as a magazine style theme, which tries to imitate some of the layout styles that a traditional magazine would have, including multiple columns, ad spaces, featured articles and the like.

There are a number of free and paid magazine themes out there that we reviewed, and we really liked this Magazeen theme so much, that we used it on my wife’s business blog and on our (yet unfinished)lingerie review blog

There are a many great WordPress magazine theme review pages to find your own selection, including, Theme Playground, and WP-Hacks. A simple Google search on WordPress themes or WordPress magazine themes will give you plenty of ideas on what you want for your blog

I’ll write more about what plugins I’m using on this blog later, but I wanted to point out a really cool system that I put together for my resources page. I’ve combined the power of two separate wordpress plugins into one stupendous result. In the administrative interface, I have a separate page to insert my resources information, and it automatically inserts the resource right into the resources page, in the right category, in a pre-defined template.

I’ll be doing a Camtasia movie demonstration of it next week so that you can see the power of such a system first hand. The idea first came to me when I was putting together lingerie deals for my lingerie review blog a while back, making it an easy place to find the latest bargains, specials and deals.

So that answers, in a nutshell, what we did for the upgrade, so why did we upgrade, and where is Kettlewell Enterprises going with this new theme?

The truth is – that after looking at our blog, day in day out, I didn’t like it anymore. I thought that it was rather ugly, bland and boring… and didn’t really have the overall crisp look that we were looking for. I like the crispness and professional look of this blog… for now!

The other reason for changing the theme is that we needed to update a lot of content. We are adding a new “Live SEO” experiment that we’re really excited about… I’ll have a whole blog post on the Live SEO experiment, but in a nutshell, we’ve started an online shopping cart, and are going to discuss the things that we need to do to build it up to become a reputable online store.

Another thing that we changed, was that we are no longer offering our Total Domination Mentoring program (TDMP). We had a lot of positive results come out of it, and we helped a lot of people understand more about what they need to do to get more traffic to their online site. That’s also where the idea of a Live SEO experiment came from.

Kettlewell Enterprises is growing in many, many directions, all in support of you, our loyal visitors and clients. Our focus has shifted in a dramatic way to really focus on the positive mental attitude that is required to be successful in Internet Marketing. We cater to those that strive to be be number one in their industry, and have entrepreneurial spirit running through their veins.

We also no longer perform full up hands-on SEO work for clients. We now focus on developing solid marketing plans and action plans that have enough impact to stand out from the crowd of 100 million other businesses competing for the same audience.

You can read more about what we do on Kettlewell Enterprises About Us page

So I’ve made two promises to you for great content to come.

1. Camtasia video outlining how I made my resources page
2. A blog entry on what we’re going to do for Live SEO

So keep an eye out for our new posts – I know you’ll love ‘em! You can always sigup for our RSS feed to be sure you get it all.