I actually stumbled across this method completely by accident, not that what I did was accidental, but I had no idea that i would reap the benefits that I did. For the longest time I have been a designer at heart, graphic, print, apparel, interfaces, I just love to design. I also love to blog, so it was a no brainer that I would be modifying, and redesigning the look of my website, over.. and over again. First I started with a simple theme someone else created, just changing the colors and images. Then I moved on to totally restructuring other theme designers’ themes and layouts. Finally I got around to creating my own. Now I’m no expert coder so I had to pay someone to code the layout I came up with, but it was still all worth it. My first theme completely created from scratch was called “Shooter Red”. I initially was just going to use it as my site layout, and not let anyone else use it, but then I thought about how I feel when I go to a great looking site and hope they offer the theme for download, but they don’t. If someone loved the look of my site, I wanted them to be able to use the theme as well. But before I could prepare the theme for distribution, I lost time to keep blogging on my personal site and Todd Dickerson and I started on the development of our relaunched company “Jetpacked”. While we were busy developing the first two tools of the JetTools suite, I found some time to prepare the theme and created a section on our site for “WordPress Development”. I posted the theme for download there, and also did a “Shooter Blue” version as well. To let the community know about the theme release, I sent a few bloggers messages and wrote a little bit about the themes. That’s where it started, word of the “Shooter” themes spread like wildfire through the blogosphere and theme directory sites. Our site saw traffic go up steadily by the hundreds. But not only that, we started to see that we were gaining back links by the THOUSANDS. Feeling pretty good about this method, I decided to have a go at a second wordpress theme. In no time I whipped up a theme I called Infonightly, it was a simple 2 column “web 2.0″-ish theme. But I did something a little different this time as a test. I didn’t tell anyone about it, didn’t submit it anywhere, to this day it’s not even on our site! What I did was partnered with a site owner that offers wordpress themes for a fee. And we created a “Sponsored Theme” section on his site. In this section was a free download to my newly created infonightly theme. To this day the theme has been downloaded more than 4000 times. Resulting again, in thousands of back links.

Creating or modifying themes is relatively easy if you have any experience with HTML and CSS. Keep in mind you don’t have to create a theme from scratch to distribute it, you can simply modify someone else’s (but do something effective and noticeable, don’t be a sap and change the header color and redistribute it, I’ve seen a lot of these and it makes me angry every time). If you don’t have any experience doing this, and you’re not willing to learn how, there are plenty of individuals and companies that will be happy to design and create a theme for you to distribute. (for a fee of course).

If you would like to gain thousands of backlinks from releasing your own wordpress themes, contact me.

If you’re a blogger, you’re probably using wordpress, but no matter what platform you’re on, you really have only three choices to theming your site. Choice number one would be using a free theme found on a site like themes.wordpress.net, or provided by someone who creates free WordPress themes. Choice number two would be to edit an existing free theme provided by one of those sites, inserting your logo, changing the colors, background images, etc. But the third choice, the one I want to talk about, has so many benefits that I think the majority of people don’t really know about, and that’s having your own unique theme custom made for your blog. Here are just a few of the benefits:

CSS Galleries and Showcases
I have had A LOT of traffic come from CSS galleries on some of my past sites and blogs. Nobody will submit a site layout that they’ve already seen to a gallery, so having a completely unique and great looking theme and layout will get you linked and into just about any showcase.

Uniqueness and Brand Security
What happens when you’re using the same theme thousands of other people are using? Most people will not remember your site from the others, and you wont stand out unless you write some seriously breathtaking content. It’s always beneficial to have a theme nobody else has, it stands out, and your site will be remembered 20x better.

Distribution Options
When you create your custom theme, or have it made for you, you can have the option of distributing it through theme showcase sites. But not only that, there are dozens of bloggers just waiting to blog about your new theme. Buzz around the blogosphere is never a bad thing. Distributing a free WordPress theme is an easy way to get increased traffic and hundreds if not thousands of back links.

If you don’t know how to create a custom theme, there are people that do (for a fee of course). If you ask me, it is 110% worth the time, effort, or money to do it or have it done. I am available for hire, so to have a custom design created and/or coded for you, you can email me at Jason@jetpacked.com, or you can check out one of the following sites to see if they fit your needs.

- XHTMLized
- CodeYourDesign
- The Blog Studio
- Business Logs

This new wordpress theme is based on the current theme we’re running the Jetpacked site on, we got a lot of good feedback on it, so we decided to create a theme similar, but not too similar to it. Hope you enjoy.

Download it here.

Our latest WordPress theme, “Tripwiring” is a great looking, simple, and dark WordPress theme.

Grab it here

There is a post on the front page of Digg right now with the title “83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen”. Before I made the jump to the site, thoughts of skepticism went through my head and I asked myself “How bad are these going to be..?” See, the thing is, Digg is full of a lot of tech oriented people, there are more people who design on the back end, coders, than graphic designers. So I was expecting to see a link to the usual ugly blog, with the usual listed post, with mediocre, or even terrible themes on display. When the window loaded Smashing Magazine, I didn’t see any of that, I saw a decent looking blog, (decent, don’t push it. It’s just a free distributed theme anyway, but hey, content is king.) And 83 GREAT looking themes, some look better than others, but over-all there is some great design in there. So if you’re in need of a new theme, don’t bother looking through page after page of TERRIBLE themes at wordpress.net (I’m not even going to link wordpress.net, because you shouldn’t go there.) Just check out this list, you are bound to find a theme that works for you. And if you don’t, and you’re willing to pay for a good theme made specifically for your blog, leave a comment, and you and I can work something out.

Jump to the themes

Here’s a little sneak peak at the new WordPress themes from Jetpacked & Massive. Stay tuned for their release.