• User friendly error pages.
• Added box shadow option for comments, and navigation after post.

Other changes to this version are listed below

• Further enhanced captioned images styling.
• Changed the shortcodes download icon.
• Increased the size of comments submit buttons.
• Some refinements to buttons.
• Fixed the bug causing flicker in magazine layout.
• Reduced three HTTP requests by using base64 images for RSS subscribe widget, breadcrumbs icon and comment icon.

New comments styling

Complete list of changes to this version are listed below

• Added RSS subscribe widget, and more social media options to compliment it.
• Added new page template ( check the screenshot below)
• Changed the comments icon on blog page, single page and magazine page
• Changed the nav search and captioned image styling a little.
• Few performance tweaks.
• Updated the help page.

There will be another update in the first week of February. If you have any suggestions or need any new feature, post theme in comments.

3 things happened during this time…

1. I found a js script to make HTML5 pages backward compatible.
2. I came across Golden Ratio and it very quickly became an obsession.
3. I got my hands on an awesome book named “Professional WordPress Plugin Development“.

JS script to make HTML5 pages backward compatible

With the improved semantics in HTML5, it will be easy for search engines to rank your pages for the right keyword

HTML5 brings a lot of new features and standards, one thing that stands out the most is the IMPROVED SEMANTICS. There are many black hat SEO techniques, but they are all dangerous, they can bite you back anytime and you will have nowhere to go. A better way to move up in search rankings is to help the robots understand your page better, help them rank you for the right keyword. Problem with the earlier versions of HTML was, there was no way to tell the robots which part of the page has valuable content. For example… Consider you write about dogs, and a user with alias “Bond007″ is a regular commentor on your blog and on one post he has written over 10 comments. Now the density of the word Bond007 is higher than any other word on that page. If you don’t tell the robots which part of the page has the most important content, they will rank the page higher for the keywords bond, bond007, james bond etc and thus lowering the importance of the actual keyword. The traffic you get for that particular post is uses less, as the user was looking for info on james bond and seeing the posts about dogs he will leave the site immediately. The new improved semantics will help us help the robots to understand the page better and rank for the right keyword. When you are ranked for the right keyword, you get quality traffic.

Golden ratio (1.618)

The golden rectangle or golden section is a visually pleasing geometric shape with specific proportions, when things are in this proportion it makes our brain feel comfortable. The number also appears in nature all the time!

If you take the ratio of males to females in a honeybee colony it will be 1.618!
Sunflower seeds grow in spirals. the ratio of each rotation’s diameter is… 1.618!
Measure the distance of the top of your head to the floor and divide the distance from your belly button to the floor.
Shoulder to you fingertips, then divide it by you elbow to your fingertips.
Hip to floor divided by knee to floor.
EVERYTHING IS EQUAL TO PHI, 1.618!!!

The golden ratio is used in swift 6.0

1. Line height is phi times font size.
2. Slider image width to height ratio is equal to phi
3. Content to sidebar width ratio is phi
4. Thumbnails are in this ratio

Professional WordPress plugin development

This is an awesome book by Justin Tadlock. After reading the first few chapters, I couldn’t continue the development until I read the entire book. This book showed me the mistakes I was doing, and taught me how to do things in a better and efficient way. The result being, a faster swift with cleaner code, lots of hooks and filters.

Major changes to the new version Include..

1. A complete proper HTML5 theme.
2. Developer friendly with hooks and filters.
3. Variable site width, you can now set the site width and even have fluid width layout.
4. Improved NEWS paper layout with easy setup.
5. Option to set post meta around post titles with easy drag and drop interface.
6. No more fiddling with file permissions. Swift takes care of them on its own using the WordPress file system API, a secure way of writing files inside WordPress.
7. Dynamic generation of thumbnails using WordPress core functions, you no longer have to worry about hacking attacks due to flaws in third-party scripts.
8. New comment styling.
9. Delayed loading of the Gravatar in comments to add to SPEED of the site and USER EXPERIENCE.
10. Improved font and color options.
11. Adjustable slider speed.
12. Support to the newly introduced author tag.
13. Option to disable WordPress tinymce smartness on pages, and custom CSS specific to pages. Both come in very handy when designing statics sites with WP as CMS.
14. Help page included with in the WP dashboard.
15. Easily import/export and share color schemes and font settings between your blogs and friends.

Demo of Swift-v6.0

Here are some of the beautiful sites built with Swift-v6.0

• http://careerology.co.nz
• http://TechBU.com
• http://www.facelinking.com/
• http://softwarebuzzer.com

Buy HTML5 Swift now

Note: Paid version of Swift will no longer be called SwiftPremium, it will be called Swift. Free version of Swift, SwiftLite will be released next week.

Highly Optimized SwiftPremium beats Google in page speed score

*Page Speed is an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Its a measure of how well the site and the code is optimized.

PS: You can buy this highly optimized theme in a few hours, stay tuned.

How this works

• Winners of the 10 free copies will b picked by draw.
• For the discount, coupon code will be included in the first news letter and will be active for 20 purchases.

Apart from being faster than the current free version, there are a lot of improvements in SWIFT premium both visually and technically.

The major ones are..

1. Integrated breadcrumbs for better SEO and navigation.
2. Thumbnails will be picked automatically. You dont have to set them manually.
3. The new NEWS paper layout. (demo, TechBU)
4. Archive listing at the bottom of the page. (check screenshot below)
5. Option to add your copyright information in the footer.
6. Option to remove credit links in the footer.
7. New related posts with thumbnails. (check screenshot below)
8. New highly optimized social media icons.
9. Integration of short code plugin  Ninja Short codes.
10. Added badge to comments by author.
11. Some small JS effects on the magazine boxes.

SEO enhancements

SWIFT is already highly Optimized for Search Engines, Premium version pushes the SEO even further

1. Google announced that it will consider page load time will be one of the several factors its going to use in its Search Engine ranking algorithm, so I optimized the page size by
2. Optimizing the sprites
3. CSS
4. HTML

Earlier we used a <h4> tags for the sidebar and footer heading, that’s a valuable resource for search engine optimization. Using h4 for sidebars isn’t a big mistake, lot of themes do it. But we

Technical improvements you may not notice.

• Child theme compatible.
• I’m going through all the code again to keep it up to WordPress standards.
• Setting up default values, which make more sense.
• Inline documentation to keep up with WordPress standards.
• Optimized code.

Apart from the above mentioned improvements, I’m gonna get the theme thoroughly checked by SEO experts, and improve the typography and default colour scheme with advice from experts in the field.

I have short listed few SEO experts, and high profile designers, I will tell you the name once I finalize.

Some screen shots from the premium version

New realted posts with thumbnails and author badge for comments in SWIFT premium

Archives in SWIFT premium, with customizable colours. ( Will be located just above the footer )

Sprites in free version vs Sprites in SWIFT premium.

Breadcrumbs integration in SwiftPremium

WPaddict.net tested 8 themes to find the fastest loading theme and confirmed that SWIFT is the fastest loading WordPress theme beating the popular premium themes.

http://wpaddict.net/is-the-swift-theme-really-swift/

An awesome customization of SWIFT I came across recently

http://www.jennyonthespot.com/

List of bugs fixed

• Footer link bug
• Social media icons and related posts not showing up.
• AD’s not showing up.
• Excerpts not showing up.

Apart from these minor bug fixes, I made some minor modifications to navigation bars and the search box.

New navigation search box in SWIFT

I wanted a logo that represents the objectives of SWIFT, and I wanted it to be designed by a professional. So I went to logo pond and contacted some active designers there. David Pache from Helvetic brands was the first one to respond to my mail, after a small talk he gave me something which he already designed and not using as my budget for the logo was small.

This is the first logo he showed me

Honestly, I dint like it when I first saw it. I was looking for something like the ones below. But slowly the logo designed by David got into my head, every time I see it I like it more than before. It gets into you slowly. Once I decided this is the logo for my site, we played with the colors and tweaked the shape to have the final logo

Concept 1 of SwiftThemes logo

A variation of concept 1

Concept 2, with stop clock representing the SPEED

Final logo of SwiftThemes.Com

The new logo of SWIFT represents Speed, Options, ease of customization and scalability.

Speed: Light colours

Options: Various colours

Ease of customization: Smooth curves and the shape.

Scalability: Various sizes of the shape used in the logo represent the ease at which one can use SWIFT to build a very basic minimal blog to a very complex colorful blog.

Home page design

The main idea of the new home page is to give quick idea of what SWIFT is for the new users. Research says that people read a web page diagonally. So I have put the logo and the important information about SWIFT in the diagonal to grab the user attention. The first half of the diagonal we have

It tells the reader what SWIFT is and points them to immediate “Call to ACTION” that is to download. If they are not convinced at this point, they move further down the diagonal, to find the awesome features of SWIFT. Now that I convinced them why SWIFT rocks, there is an immediate call to action below it.

Testimonials and the showcase are there to increase the desire of the reader in the product, SWIFT.

PS1: Design of the interior pages is inspired from the design of SmashingMagazine.Com it’s still a work in progress, Its gonna get better in the coming days.

PS2:If you want your customization, or review of SWIFT to be included on the home page, drop me a mail through this contact form.

Constructive criticism and feedback appreciated, if you are reading the post in your feed reader, visit the site.