A little bit of tweaking can go a long way, and that is definitely the case with The Bay Area Fashionista – the “leading fashion blog in the Bay Area.” With just a few direct changes to the overall style of a pre-built WordPress theme, we were able to achieve a look, feel, and style that was all their own.

Here’s what the client had to say:

“Our experience working with TweakMyTheme has surpassed any expectation our company had.

From our first contact with them, they were quick to respond, quick to work, and always, always, kept their promises in regards to time and cost. It has been nothing short of phenomenal working with them, and we will continue to use their services as we grow and expand our company.

If you want personal one-on-one service, coupled with exceptional, cost effective results, TweakMyTheme is the first and only place I would recommend.”

~ Mani – Men’s Editor/Contributor – TBAFblog.com

To turn that around, we enjoyed working with The Bay Area Fashionista just as much! If you’re into fashion, check out TBAFBlog.com and their wonderful WordPress layout.

I’ve been doing WordPress theme customization and tweaking for quite some time, but it wasn’t until I launched TweakMyTheme.com a few months back that this service really started to grow.

By launching a website devoted entirely to on specific service I was already offering (and have for over 2 years), people started to get a better feel for my expertise on that subject. Search engines have also started to index more and more of my WordPress-related content and traffic has increased, thus highly increasing my business as well. I’m also able to better dive into topics related to WordPress that might otherwise clutter and dilute my primary website at LiftDevelopment.com.

I encourage you to do the same. If you’ve already got a website set up for your main business, give each of your specific products or services a website of their own. If you carry a large assortment of products, give each product category a website. You can be creative, but the point is to create a space that revolves entirely around that product or service.

Be sure to include a blog like this one. I really don’t post here much but I don’t need to. This blog is solely for WordPress theme tweaks. It’s not a place where I post daily thoughts. I simply use it to share occasional tips with those of you who are interested in building a website on WordPress.

It’s so easy to build an affordable website. Both domain registration and hosting are very cheap. In fact, you can use a single hosting account and often host multiple websites on it. I’ve got about 15 different blogs and websites on my 1and1 account and spend a mere $5/month to do that.

Once you’ve got your domain and hosting set up, find yourself a dandy WordPress theme and plug in your content. There are thousands of both free and affordable premium themes available. Find something that matches up well with your product or service.

If you’re a carpenter, maybe find a theme with a bit of a grungy feel to it and use it for your handyman services. If you’re a business consultant, find something clean and easy to read that you could use for your business planning service. If you sell books, build a fun site that revolves around the children’s titles in your collection.

The point is, give each of your offerings a home and build content around that. It really works!

If you get stuck or need customization beyond what you can handle yourself, let us help. It’s what we do.

Thinking it would take too long to do this for each of your products or services? It won’t. While Rome wasn’t built in a day, TweakMyTheme.com was!

There are a few reasons I highly recommend ThemeForest. First of all, the designs are great. The administrators at ThemeForest make sure that they only feature designs that are professional in quality as they screen all of the contributors and designs. What this means for you is a process that doesn’t involve sorting through a bunch of ugly themes to find the one you really want.

Another reason I think ThemeForest is a fantastic resource for WordPress themes is the pricing. The lowest-priced themes are currently $12 and the most advanced themes are currently $47. Consider how much it would cost to  have a WordPress developer create a custom theme for you ($100′s to $1000′s), and $47 is an amazingly low price.

The other thing I love about ThemeForest is the extra information you get when browsing potential themes. Not only do they give you a detailed preview of the theme and the price, but they give you ratings by past buyers of each theme and the number of downloads per theme. If you’re not comfortable with the potential for quite a few other sites out there with the same theme as you, you can focus your ThemeForest search on themes that have very few downloads.

I’ve used ThemeForest myself a few times, and I am really happy with what I paid, what I bought, and the experience as a whole. I also love that any pre-paid credits I have at ThemeForest can be used across the entire Envato network of sites including AudioJungle (royalty-free audio files), GraphicRiver (stock graphics),  VideoHive (royalty-free video files), and more! Prices are very reasonable across the board, so be sure to browse the other sites using the drop-down next to the top logo on ThemeForest. Envato puts out some really great content.

Check out ThemeForest today. Be sure you have time, though, because if you’re like me you may end up spending hours drooling over the beautiful designs available for amazingly-low prices. You’ll want to buy more than one!

While this is the first post on my WordPress-hosted site devoted to tweaking WordPress, this is most definitely not the first time I’ve used WordPress. And WordPress is not the only blogging platform I’ve ever used. I’ve worked with blogs/websites hosted on Google’s Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, and more. Thus far, nothing has come close to the performance, flexibility, and extendability of WordPress.

There are four factors to the awesomeness of WordPress.

Affordability

Not only is WordPress itself cheap (open source = FREE!), but hosting it is cheap. You can usually find good PHP/MySQL hosting (required if you want your own WP site/domain) for less than $10/month. That’s cheap. Especially given the next three reasons…

Plugins

There are literally thousands of plugins out there to extend your WordPress website, including plugins for SEO, ecommerce, commenting, spam protection, social media, video, embedding, RSS, etc. Really, there are a ton. Simply go to Plugins > Add New within your WordPress installation and you can probably browse for hours.

Design

If you can dream up a design, you can adapt it. WordPress gives complete control over the style/layout of your site by editing custom themes. I have yet to see a platform that gives the end-user as much freedom as WordPress.

If you prefer to adapt your site from an existing WordPress theme (which is where Tweak My Theme can really help you), there are multitudes of free and premium themes available. Be warned: some of them will blow your mind. I still shake my head at the awesomeness of some themes I’ve seen.

Community

A TON of people use WordPress. Whether your looking for help, advice, or ideas, there are plenty of people who are using the same platform as you. Hence, the wide range of WordPress plugins, themes, and tips just waiting for you out there. The WordPress community is incredible.