As most of you know, tomorrow (or today for some of you!) is Blog Action Day. To celebrate this monumental effort by Envato to raise awareness, I’d love to learn how all of you are throwing in support. Visiting the site today, I couldn’t believe how many people have come on board. It truly is incredible. Visit BlogActionDay.org to read over many of the news articles that have been published.
So you’ve created your first theme and are eagerly checking the site every day to see how much income you’ve brought in. It’s fun, isn’t it? But, there are more ways to make money with ThemeForest than just selling your templates! Have you considered linking to the site from around the web? If you do, 50% of your referral’s first deposit will go directly to you!
Like many others, I spend about thirty minutes a day reading over my RSS feeds. Every Friday (Saturday for some of you), I’ll post links to the articles that I found to be especially helpful – when it comes to creating templates. Feel free to include yours in the comments section.
Let’s face it. If the design isn’t up to par, nobody will purchase your template. So, beyond all of the tips that I list in this article, make sure that the design fits the bill – something I struggle with all too often, being more of a back-end developer. 
Nevertheless, there are many steps that you can take to ensure that you get the best possible boost after submitting your theme.
I love Google’s Chrome. My pages run multiple times faster. But, at least for the time being, you won’t see me jumping over the Firefox ship just yet. The massive number of Firefox extensions make developing your themes much, much easier. In this article, I’ll list six extensions that are crucial to developing your web applications quickly.
Ready to submit your template to ThemeForest? Screengrab is an easy to use extension that allows you to instantly save a png of your entire webpage to your desktop. While you might currently be prepping your snapshots in Photoshop, Screengrab will reduce your prep time dramatically.
Are there any web developers who don’t have this extension installed? Along with Firebug, this is easily the most beneficial plugin in your arsenal. You can validate your html and css with just a keystoke. You can resize your window to view your site at different resolutions. You can edit CSS on the fly (which I use more than any other feature). Do not load Firefox without it.
Equally as powerful as the Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug allows you to inspect every aspect of your document: HTML, CSS, Javascript. See how long it’s taking to load all of your Javascript files. Use the console to debug your documents. View which of your CSS styles are being overridden.
You know the drill. You’re working on your website, but you can’t remember the hex value for the red that you’re using. Many people would quickly press “Print Screen”, copy it into Photoshop, and use the eye dropper to grab it.
Or – you can use Colorzilla. This extension works exactly like the eye dropper in Photoshop. You’ll be amazed at how much time this saves you.
FireFTP is an extension that will allow you to quickly transfer your files to your server. It’s simple, easy to use, and works perfectly. I use this tool five to ten times a day.
Like everyone else, I hate compensating for IE. Even more, I hate spending the extra ten seconds to load Internet Explorer so that I can view my site. Enter IE tab. This plugin will allow you to create a new tab in Firefox that renders the page exactly like IE. Now, you can switch between modes in a second or so. Very, very convenient.
Any tools that I missed?
If you’ve never submitted a theme to one of the Envato marketplaces before, you might find the process to be slightly confusing. Because of this, I’ve created a screencast that will give you step by step instructions for formatting and submitting your theme to us.
I’m pleased to announce that one of our authors, Amanda Fazani, has allowed us to offer her wonderful E-Book on building Blogger templates to everyone for free. She’s done a fantastic job with this book. If you’ve been thinking about building Blogger templates, or are simply looking to refine your skills, I highly recommend that you read it. It goes into the details of choosing, uploading, and customizing themes.
Our Theme Forest launch competition ended this morning! For those of you who tracked the contest over the course of the month, you’re well aware that it came down to the wire; So much to the point that we had a tie for first place in the site template category. That means that four hard working authors have won $600! Congratulations to the following people.
I’ve got wonderful news for you Microsoft developers (me included). Early this morning, John Resig and Scott Guthrie announced on their respective blogs that, beginning in a few weeks, all versions of Visual Studio (including the free Visual Web Developer) will include Intellisense support for jQuery. For those of you who already own Visual Studio 2008, you’ll be able to download an update sometime in October.
Hey everybody! If you missed Adobe’s online broadcast on September 23rd, you can now watch the hour long video on their website. One thing is for sure, it’s definitely appealing. We can complain about the increased price all we want, but we’ll all end up getting it sooner or later! People have accused this new release of being more of a “technical update”. But according to John Loiacono, this is far from the truth.
Lost in the Woods is the community blog of ThemeForest, an Envato marketplace. At ThemeForest you can buy or sell website templates and scripts for every purpose, from plain HTML/CSS templates to themes for popular CMS products like WordPress and Joomla. Items are created and sold by a huge community of authors from all over the world making it the leading open marketplace for web development!
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