You may have heard when Joel Comm released the Socrates theme for WordPress last year.
This WordPress theme is really a great theme and simple to use! One of my websites, www.AllAboutGratitude.com, run on the Socrates theme. It was the first premium paid theme that I used. I found it really easy to learn and it helped generate a lot of Google Love for my site. It has helped me get onto the first page for a few different keywords that I am targeting!
Here is a little bit of trivia for you – while many people think the theme’s name is in deference to the great philosopher of the same name, it is really named after Joel’s puppy!
Let me tell you about my experience with Socrates. I purchased it from his site and downloaded it to my computer. Because it is a paid theme, you cannot ‘find’ it by searching for the theme within the Dashboard of your WordPress installation. It is easy enough to upload it to your site and activate it. Once it is ready to you, it is not really ready to go! You need to customize it to make it your own.
You can see the main sections of the Socrates Theme on the left. Each section needs to be clicked on and saved before you can have a live site. Without saving each section, you will get a banner that states you need to go through and customize each section and save it.
The next section is for Layout and it allows you to select which format you want to have on the site. You can decide to have one column or two, place the column on left or right, etc. You have a variety of options shown below (click on the image to see a larger view). Also in this section you will find an area to include your Site Title and Meta Tags, Affiliate ID and Analytics,Search Settings (where you can control how the search box is displayed), Social Networking links, as well as the ability to include several banner advertisements (among other things).
The next section is for Navigation. This area lets you choose where you want to have your navigation bars (otherwise known as menus). You can have it at the very top, just under the header, or even on either the right or left side. In addition, you can each one control different pages.
After the Navigation comes the Styling area. There is not a whole lot to do in this section – you can select which fonts you want to use and choose from a list of pre-designed color schemes. If you are good with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), you can add some code here as well. When I upgraded to v2.2, my fonts looked very different, but when I manually added the default fonts in the Body Font Family box, everything turned out ok. I found out to do this from the support forum that you get access to when you make your purchase. By the way, the support for this theme is outstanding!
The Header area lets you select from a myriad of header graphics!
There are even more categories for you to choose from. You can also upload your own header if you want. One minor drawback is that if you upload a header, it needs to be the proper size; Socrates will not automatically re-size it for you. You have the option to also include text onto the graphic, select the font size and even the color.
The Background section allows you to select the color, or design, of the, well, the background! Just like the header above, this theme provides you with a wide variety of colors and textures. You can see from all the possible customizations available, you can design the site in a wide variety of possibilities!
A new section, Language, section seems to be a it amiss. While the other sections provide a wide range of customization, this section only allows you to change the wording to display when comments are closed. It looks like it was an attempt to permit localization (making it easy to change text for different languages), but then stopped. In all due respect, I cannot think of a lot of hard coded values that are displayed, so perhaps this section is complete!
The final section is the Banner Exchange. “The Socrates Banner Exchange allows you to easily promote your site via banner advertisements for FREE in exchange for showing ads of other Socrates users on your site.”
All in all, using this theme is relatively straight forward and a very nice way to get started! Two-Thumbs up!
If you are looking to purchase your own copy of the Socrates Theme, it can be purchased by clicking any of the links on this page (By the way, I may earn a commission if you purchase it on any of the links on this page)
Thanks, Paul — the choices for themes and how-to get them up and going are endless, and I appreciate your clear and helpful review of your experience, and appreciation of, Socrates. And congrats on doing your first review — I think you have a talent for focusing and communicating what is important and helpful.