Welcome and Thank you for visiting our blog. You might have downloaded our Free Minimalist WordPress Theme from WordPress theme repository. In this section we will show you how we setup our theme just like the way we did on this blog. We are currently in the process of writing our setup guidelines for now but you can always contact us using our contact page or simply leave us your comment in this section if you have something in mind.

WordPress Theme Updates

Our theme updates will be provided here in this section such as instructions, features and changes made on the theme. Should you have any questions how to setup the theme. Leave us a comment and thank you for downloading our WordPress Theme.

HOW TO SETUP HOME PAGE

Basically there are three (3) important sections (POST TITLE, FEATURED IMAGE and EXCERPT) that we need to pay attention to achieve a good copy such as seen below.

TITLE SECTION

When writing a post title it is important that you have to maintain the number of lines for your title. In the example above we decided to have a three (3) liner title.

Here are some reasons why do we keep our titles short:

1.) Shorten the time of thinking of a better title

2.) SEO Purposes

3.) Give out readers a straight forward idea about the article

We could be wrong in our perceptions and you could be right but remember we are talking about having a good copy to get the most of our theme.

Installing Yoast SEO plugin may help you doing your title right. The usual suggested SEO title would be around 50 to 60 characters. Our suggestion is keep your title clean don’t go beyond the suggested character limits.

FEATURED IMAGE SECTION

In the above example. We have set our featured image to 550 x 315 pixels. You may want to increase or decrease that if you want but always remember to use your desired featured image size in every post consistently.

Hence, that in your post images you can define larger images if you want other than the featured images.

EXCERPT SECTION

We have two (2) options to choose from (Automatic and Manual) when making excerpt but we only want to discuss whats works best

USING THE AUTO EXCERPT

Again, remember we have to maintain consistency when making your excerpt. Don’t make your excerpt too long. If you are an SEO aware person. Try limiting your excerpt to 300 to 310 characters though the actual preferred limit is 320 characters.

In our perspective. We write seo wise excerpt as much as possible and use it as our post meta description which definitely works best with yoast seo plugin.

But for the sake of copy consistency you may or may not follow the 300 character rule as long as you’ll get the same excerpt height in the front page.

The CONTINUE READING button is more likely dependent on how you setup your excerpt. Inconsistent excerpt height may result to unparalleled block since your excerpt will push the continue button at the bottom.

HEADER IMAGE

We have included a header image example on the image folder of the theme such as the one you see in the above example.

In the WordPress themes directory go to niftygoodies > img > niftygoodies-header.jpg

UPLOADING THE HEADER IMAGE IN YOUR WORDPRESS DASHBOARD

In your WordPress dashboard go to:

1.)  Apperance

2.) Header

4.) Click Publish button

The header image is set to have a 970 pixels in width its should stay as 970 pixels other wise it will be cropped. hence if you want to have a full width header you can definitely customize it by changing the html markup.

ADDING SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS IN FOOTER

1. Go to Appearance
2. Click on Menus
3. Click create a new menu link
4. Name your menu as Social.
   – Try naming it anything you want. But if it doesn’t work for you just follow step #4 (We haven’t tried this method yet we just named the menu as Social)
5. Select the menu that you’ve created.
6. Click on the Custom Links tab
7. Enter your social media URL
8. Click Add to Menu
9. Finally click on the Save Menu button
10. Refresh your page.

Additionally, If you want to have a professionally designed logo or banner and other customization for your new setup. We can help you with that! Use our contact page and tell us more about it.

FUTURE UPDATE PLANS

• Setting an automatic default size for featured image
• Adding a child theme
• Adding more options in the customizer like (social media accounts field)
• Adding Footer widget

RELEASE UPDATES

Release Date: February 13, 2019

Version: 1.2

Changelog:

1. Fixed landscape view on small screen display width
2. Minified CSS and Javascripts
3. Increased sticky sidebar bottom spacing from 155 to 160
4. Fixed custom logo container div closing div tag
5. Added gutenberg block color pallete option
6. Restructured theme directories
– assets
|_css
|_maps
|_app.css.map
|_bundle.min.css.map
|_app.css
|_bundle.min.css
|
|_fonts
|_Material-Design-Iconic-Font.eot
|_Material-Design-Iconic-Font.svg
|_Material-Design-Iconic-Font.ttf
|_Material-Design-Iconic-Font.woff
|_Material-Design-Iconic-Font.woff2
|
|_images
|_favicon.png
|_niftygoodies.jpg
|_niftygoodies-header.jpg
|
|_js
|_all.js
|_bootstrap.bundle.js

Release Date: January 11, 2019

Version: 1.0.7

Changelog:

1. Fixed Navigation Issues
– resized navigation font size and weight
– fixed navigation menu on both desktop and mobile display
– fixed block text menu
– removed outline border on parent menu during hover state on child menu

2. Improved typography styles
3. Removed scroll-to-top css styling
4. Fixed HTML Lists element spacing
5. Added Social Menu icons option in the footer
6. Updated Bootstrap to v4.0.2
7. Added multi level menu support
8. Added sticky sidebar. Works with sidebar if it’s taller or shorter than the viewport, integrated with resize sensor to re-calculate the dimensions automatically when the size of sidebar or its container is changed

We will surely add more basic features on it in the future other than a fancy options. We wanted to focus on the content that every novice blogger needs making things not more complicated.

If you wish to contribute on our theme project we will post later our github repository soon. Thank you for downloading our theme. If you are having problem with the setup instruction provided please do not hesitate to contact us. We will be very happy to help you.

Like what you see and want to support our creation, consider buying us a cup of coffee.