via @Rokie1984

I see a lot of discussion on web design forums and blogs about the trend in modern web design for designers to simply modify ‘Premium’ WordPress themes and charge a reduced rate for the service, compared to designing a site from scratch. The argument is that this trend will keep the rates we can charge for custom design too cheap and keep the premium theme companies loaded. On the latter I agree, but I feel this trend is only going to get more popular and in fact it’s allowed small/medium business and people wanting personal sites to be able to afford cool looking websites with great functionality that was never before possible on a budget; it might have even helped ‘beautify’ the web a little more as most of these ‘Premium’ themes don’t look too bad straight out of the box.

I’m all for this trend, and good-on the premium theme companies for creating a new marketplace that basically didn’t exist 2-3 years ago (you should gladly reap the benefits, as you are the ones actually building the themes from scratch and doing the support) but I think it’s important designers do their best to make their modifications really stand out and different from the original themes in the interest of keeping the web diversified. I also believe there is still a place to earn a decent living as a designer through custom premium theme modifications – if you can explain to the client exactly the changes you have made and can show some initiative on improving the functionality of the theme in some aspects, then why can’t you charge a 1/3 price to building a site from scratch and be able to build 3 sites in the time it takes to design one from scratch; thus earning the same income?

I have been an affiliated Wooworker with Woothemes for the past 2 years and most recently most of the sites I’ve built have been modifications of Woo themes. Even this site is a modified Woo theme (see images below).

Below I’ve put together a showcase of 13 of my favourite Wootheme modifications that I have done in the past 18 months. Click on the links to see the original theme and it’s current modification online.

Woothemes – Delegate

Woothemes – Diarise

Woothemes – Aperture

Woothemes – Spectrum

Woothemes – Gotham News

Woothemes – Irresistible

Woothemes – MyStream

Woothemes – Meta-morphosis

Woothemes – Diner

My recent redesign of AUS120.com™ has turned a few heads and is currently being showcased in a small competition run by WooThemes.com. Each week two websites built on the same theme run head-to-head in a voting competition to see which has the best looking design. You can vote for my site here by clicking this link and scrolling half way down the page to the voting poll. UPDATE: I have won the competition!!! Check the results on this link.

Thanks to everyone who voted and for WooThemes.com for picking out my site. The site is built on ‘Aperture’ theme by WooThemes.

For the past 6-months I have been working as an affiliated ‘Woo Worker’ with the well known WordPress Theme company, WooThemes. As a Woo Worker I provide custom theme modifications and tweaks, site styling and graphical work for those who’ve purchased a theme from WooThemes. This week I was interviewed by Adii as part of an ongoing series of interviews with the other WooThemes workers. You can read a transcript of the entire interview by ‘reading more’ of this article or head on over to the WooThemes blog to read the full interview and post a comment.

1. Tell us a little about yourself, your design / development skills and how this translates to your (freelancing) business.

Maybe I’m a bit different to some of the other workers; when I’m not on a computer I’m usually at the beach or on a plane, travelling, training and competing on the international Windsurfing Pro Tour. I’ve been racing professionally for about 5 years but have had a relationship with computers ever since Commander Keen arrived in 1990. I’m currently 25, and reside in the Netherlands for half the year, and in Australia the other half. I studied a few months of ‘Communication Design’ (basically a course in using websites and digital media to communicate) but then ended up with a Psychology/Biomedical Science degree and plan to study Medicine if I ever stop going to the beach. So I’m not classically trained too well in computers but I feel this have given me a more ‘outside the square’ look at design and coding as I’ve taught myself, I don’t really conform to a certain style.

I started out work mainly building websites for friends and for companies/organisations/clubs within the windsurfing world, so I’ve always been more interested in building ‘graphically’ more beautiful sites with lots of images, graphics and working with brighter colours as that fits the tempo for ‘sporting’ websites. Since my beginnings I’ve built websites for all sorts of businesses and individuals, but I guess my underlying passion still lives with sport related projects.

I have a manager who looks after my publicity/promotion/sponsorship needs whilst I’m in Europe, but I do all my promotion/media work myself when I’m in Australia. As a result, I’ve taken a keen interest in teaching myself the ropes of marketing, promotion, media correspondence and creating sponsorship proposals for my windsurfing. Now, with my webdesign work I feel I can pass on a lot of that knowledge to clients and somewhat advise them a little about branding and marketing through their websites – especially for athletes. Just recently I’ve built sites for an Australian Olympic sailor and an American Baseball player and also worked with them on some ideas on ways to create a ‘brand’ of themselves and how to promote/live through that brand on the internet.

Having recently started working with WooThemes, I find the scope of sites I am working on is vastly different to the simply ‘sporting’ ones I started out with, but this has also been an interesting and great added challenge to my work as a freelancer.

2. What is your favourite theme by WooThemes? And why?

I think right now it is Aperture, because I’m currently using it to revamp my windsurfing campaign website (www.AUS120.com). It got some really slick features but aside from that the layout is very square and symmetrical so it’s been really easy and efficient to completely cut it apart and revamp it!

3. So you’re an Affiliated Woo Worker, right? What does this actually mean to you and what does the “job” basically entail?

The important thing it means to me is that I know what I’m getting myself in to every time I reply to a clients request for help. Originally, if a client approached me wanting to get a premium theme modified and I’d never used that theme before, I’d have to ‘guess’ what was possible within the framework of the theme and blindly get involved in to projects that sometimes were great, but other times were awful (like when you discover you basically have to re-write the entire code of a ‘premium’ theme that was written by an amateur coder!). All the Woo Themes are built on the same framework and generally speaking most of the Woo guys have similar styles of writing code, so when somebody comes to me with a request and I’ve never used that particular theme before, I know exactly what I am getting myself in to, and can give a more accurate quote in terms of price and the time it will take to complete.

The end result is basically I am probably charging the end-clients less than years previous, getting things done quicker because I am so used to the Woo coding and also able to finish more jobs in a shorter timeframe which is good for my hip-pocket 

4. How has working with WooThemes influenced your business and / or earnings as a web designer / developer?

Starting working as a Woo Worker completely changed the way I’ve been working as a designer and also how I schedule my workload to fit in with my ‘other’ job; being a professional windsurfer. Previously, I’d been only building sites from scratch or doing heavy modifications of themes for clients. Each project may take 2-5 weeks and I always found myself up against deadlines and having to constantly spend time on the phone/Skype etc with the client rather than working at my own pace. Since starting as a Woo Worker I’ve noticed most people are coming to me wanting only small modifications (move this up here, or change this colour to here etc) or customising plugins they’ve downloaded (eg, forums like bbPress or Simple:Press) to fit in with their WooTheme colours. As a result, I can do 10 or so jobs a week rather than one big project for a month. So the end result is actually that I’m working with a lot more clients on smaller scale projects which is a lot less stressful but also allows me to fit in all the other millions of things I have to do each day.

The other cool thing with working with more people all the time is I’m constantly “meeting” new people (maybe just by email but sometimes by phone/Skype or in the “real” life version) and am having a lot more fun working – less stress mean I can get more done!

5. Would you recommend WooThemes over other, alternative free / premium WordPress themes? If yes, why?

Of course. For a number of reasons. Firstly, you guys have much more themes than any Premium Theme company out there and have more people involved with the theme/support process which is important. I’ve done some work previously with other premium themes and the end result I always find is there is usually little to no support floating around after you purchase the theme. Sure, they have a forum or such, but its usually just the one designer replying to queries and often they’ll have a 5-6 day period between responses and the nature of the internet is that everyone wants everything IMMEDIATELY. So waiting 5 days for a support request is not an option for most people!

Another thing is actually having us Woo Workers. What a great idea! It gives us freelancers a great opportunity to be part of something big, but it also gives the customers an opportunity to get custom work done by designers experienced in the Woo code. I’m not sure any other theme company has this luxury, and I know the designers of premium themes get indundated with requests for custom modifications which I’m sure they can’t attend to all of, which in turn again frustrates the customers!

The final thing is the reassurance you have if you were to purchase a subscription. Do you really know if you signed up for 6 months whether another smaller company would still “exist” 6 months down the track and whether they’ll still be having the creative output to create new themes for all that time? We at least know with WooThemes, the creative juices won’t be running out as there’s a multitude of designers and also many upcoming and current collaborations with other designers for themes. We also know how passionate they are in their online work, with all of them blogging on their own personal sites and on other social media outlets; there’s a sense of pride that you can see that none of them would allow the quality of their work to drop – out of sheer embarrassment to themselves and the public that follow them online. That’s reassuring 

6. What do you think about the ease-of-use and customizability of our themes?

The major case in point is that all the themes are built on the same framework, grid system and essentially all have similar features. Often I get clients asking about modifying a theme that I haven’t worked with before, but I can answer most of their questions before even looking at the code because I know what to expect with each theme. As I mentioned earlier, this means I usually end up charging less because there’s less time I spend trying to work through the code to make changes and I can get work done much quicker and look after more clients in a shorter period of time. Basically, case in point, with WooThemes, everything comes up Millhouse!

7. Anything else that you’d like to add? Maybe a little compliment or something?

One thing I’ve always been impressed with about WooThemes is their complete transparency. Nearly all the guys (Adii especially), blog or design or tweet on their own personal sites, independent of their Woo work which means you can actually see what these guys are up too in their spare time a little bit and outside of their Woo lives. There’s always a familiarity and ‘comfortable’ association you feel with companies where they are very transparent and open about their ideas and lives – and that familiarity leads customers to better trust and usually to better end sales results.

The reason I like this way of doing business so much is because I’ve grown up in a world of Professional Sports, where EVERYBODY on the tour is the enemy and you share no secrets about gear, training, lifestyle with anyone in case they copy your ideas and beat you on the racetrack. I’ve always felt that is a poor way to play sport as I’m interested in the grass-roots part of the sport as well as the professional side, and I find the non professional guys in the sport never learn how to get any better because none of the pros share any of their secrets. That’s the same in business I feel, the customer never understands why decisions are made that effect them, so the end result is they are usually more reluctant to give you their hard earned money.

I’ve always followed Adii’s adventures on his site because he’s always been the most transparent entrepreneur that I’ve come across on the internet. Reading his blog actually inspired me a few years back to start www.CarbonSugar.com, a website I’ve started to share ALL the secrets of pro-windsurfing, much to the horror of all my competitors! Haha.

I’ve always been a big follower of Adii Rockstar, so when he got WooThemes started I thought it cool to do a mod of the free ‘Metamorphosis’ theme (by WooThemes) rather than code a complete site myself. Not to say that I couldn’t do this myself, but during the past few weeks I’ve been on the road through Europe for windsurfing and have hardly enough time to sit and build a complete new website. Modifying a theme is actually a little more fun as you can spend more time on the fun things like semantics, aesthetics, graphics, colour and fung-shui. Which for someone like me, who’s more interested in the front-end of the website than tinkering in the back-end, this is actually pretty cool.

I started by taking out the standard two-tone Woo background and used a CSS random rotating series of 4 large images which I morphed myself in Photoshop. I seem to be doing a lot of websites with the background-attachment: fixed; (which makes the background stay fixed in one spot, and the content scrolls over the top – cool effect!) but I just really like this effect! 

Then I used a 50px transparent .png with 50% transparencyas a background filler for the content-box on the main page. I also changed the fonts of some of the headings and removed the borders. Wasn’t a whole lot of work, but I think the finished product deviates enough from the original theme to make it worthwhile.

The premise of this latest site design was to relaunch the site in a more professional sense and showcase some of the other things I have done in my life outside of the design work. An online CV of sorts.

I wonder what people think about using somebody else’s theme (albeit, a paid Premium theme) on a website that’s showcasing your own webdesign skills? I guess the market these days is looking for cheaper, more professionally looking websites made in the shortest time possible and modifying themes seems to fulfill these requirements much more cost-effectively than completely coding a website yourself (which is kinda a lot of work!).

As a Professional Athlete myself, I’m always interested to see what other athletes are doing to promote themselves on the internet. One would think that with the amount of money flying around in most high-profile sports these days, the highest earning athletes on the planet would surely have the slickest looking websites; this is not always the case. What shocked me more is that I could only find 2-3 athlete websites using WordPress as a CMS. Suffice to say there are some great athlete websites out there but they are in the few, so I’ve compiled a list of my favourites for you everyone to check out.

I didn’t really want to join the list of billions on the web posting a ‘my favourite blog designs of 2008′ article which most likely they ripped from SmashingMagazine anyhow, but spending a few hours today doing some research I’ve discovered that there are absolutely zero resources on the web to list professional athletes websites (I got the list mostly from googling famous sports heroes and trying to find their websites) and it seems the more famous the athlete, the less they spend on their website budget (mostly I would think, because the internet is not a great marketing tool for sports compared to Television and Print media – sorry guys!).

Anyhow, I thought I could be the first to publish a list like this featuring athletes, and I would hope with a few Diggs from you guys out there this could be become a valuable resource for webdesigners who have been given the task to build the new Roger Federer website. So enjoy and read on to check the sites!

Click on the screencaps to go direct to the athletes website [ websites are ranked in order of best to 'least best']

1. Rafael Nadal
This is just a cool website, period. Big typography with a flash section in the middle; easy to navigate content and the grungy/come modern style of the site really suits Rafael’s playing style on the tennis court. The current World #1 Tennis Star has certainly made an impression on the web also.

2. Maria Sharapova
Another tennis star tops the list, this time the smoking hot Russian and former World #1 Maria Sharapova. Although I’m not personally a fan of full flash sites – this one does the trick. There’s almost no loading time and no horrendous intro that is common in full flash sites. The content is easy to navigate and the layout is clean and to the point. Great website!

3. Natalie Gulbis
This American born LPGA (women’s golf) superstar has a really cool website. Kind of reminds me of the old Hemingway theme for WordPress in its layout, but the website is full CSS and is nice and clean whilst keeping a ‘girly’ theme with the colours which some female sports stars don’t seem to want to portray. Golf never looked this hot!

4. Andy Roddick (using WordPress!)
Just using WordPress alone would have been enough to put American Tennis superstar Andy Roddick up the list, but the fact its actually a Revolution Theme mod and done very well makes it even cooler. Relatively clean layout (a little cluttered, but that seems to be the style for sports stars in America) and easy to navigate and not to mention – NOT using flash! Props to Andy!

5. Kobe Bryant
Nicknames are cool and so calling your website KB24 gets a tick in my book. The rebel American NBA basketball star has a very cool light-on-dark website with a nice woody textured background. The auto-play flash video at the top takes a while to load but once you’re past that the website is a head-turner.

6. Alex Ovechkin (WordPress!)
This site popped up on the WooThemes.com Showcase recently as it’s a mod of their VibrantCMS theme. A very cool featured slider is the first thing you’ll see then the site is kept very clean and simple with the blog and other content. Not a big NHL Ice Hockey fan but this website is really cool!

7. Kimi Räikkönen
Again I’m not a fan of full flash sites, however if you can manage to do them without a lame and annoying intro and take the load time down to almost zilch, then you get a tick from me. I’m a big Formula1 racing fan so I have to pay tribute to one of my driving heroes. The site is easy to navigate and really fits with the persona of the Ferrari brand’s own website – which is important when someone’s paying you +$30 million a season to drive their cars.

8. Amanda Beard
Unfortunately, this smoking hot American Olympic swimmer was beaten to the .com of her name by someone else so she had to settle for the .net extension. This is another full flash site (seems to be common with athletes) however its very clean and has a fairly small amount of information on it so it doesn’t feel cluttered. The menu at the bottom is nice and using big pictures of Amanda as the background is fine in my book!

9. Dave Mirra
Dave Mirra is one of my favourite Pro BMX riders and is widely regarded the best street BMX rider ever. I love his website because it goes straight to the action – latest pictures and videos are available without clicking a ‘media’ gallery or such. Only drawback is the background is a 1.76MB .png file (surely it could be smaller, its just a texture!). A cool grungy website for a BMX’er is a job well done.

10. Gretchen Bleiler
Snowboarding, what a cool sport. Gretchen was a silver medalist at the Torino Winter Olympics (I remember watching her compete) and this site definitely sums up what I think about when I think of snowboarding. Big colourful menus, confusing layout and big colourful photos of Gretchen airborne. Although its not the most practical website, it certainly sums up ‘hot’, ‘snowboarding’, ‘girl’ all in one hit – which is the aim of a personal website of a pro snowboarder.

11. Shane Warne
Now this isn’t exactly a personal website, more of a personal website of Shane’s next gig after sport (professional Poker playing) – however, I must give testament to one of the greatest Australian Cricket players on the planet as I’ve met Shane personally a few times and he’s a pretty nice guy. The website is really clean and functional and just wreaks of Shane goodness.

12. Çaĝla Kubat
Don’t ask me how to pronounce her name, but this is the hottest girl in windsurfing at the moment. She’s from Turkey, a professional model and now a professional windsurfer. I have the luxury of seeing this girl on tour quite a bit through the year. Her website again is full flash, but its clean and minimal and able to distinguish between her sporting and modelling career achievements.

13. Ronaldo
I love it when athletes flash their cash, and the Brazilian soccer megastar is no exception. This awesome flash enabled (mostly CSS) website is available in 4 languages and features the colours of his native Brazil as well as a really cool signature logo of Ronaldo’s. The website just screams soccer superstar – and does the job so nicely as well as giving good visual cred to his sponsors (ie, Nike).

14. Tony Hawk
The world’s most famous skateboarder needs no introduction and neither does his website. Some would say this website is cluttered and ugly, but I’m impressed by designers who can accurately capture the essense of the sport the athlete is playing. When I think of Skateboarding or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, I think cluttered, messy, colour, grunge-graphics and lots of advertising – which is exactly what this website does best. Well done.

15. James Courtney
Last year I was a guest speaker at a lunch for athletes and spoke alongside James Courtney. He’s an Australian racecar driver and his website eeks of clean racing goodness. The colours are cool (green websites are hard to pull off) and I like his cleancut JC logo. The website features an update of the next race circuit on the tour which is a good plug for the race tour as well as for James himself.

16. Björn Dunkerbeck
Dunkerbeck is the greatest windsurfer ever, period. He won 12 Overall World Titles in a row – a feat which will never be topped I reckon. I’ve raced Björn a few times over the years and he is a true champion. His full flash website is a little difficult to read the content, but it makes up for it with some truly amazing windsurfing photography as his backgrounds. The black on blue content/background is a nice touch also. I don’t like the autoplay music but you wouldn’t say it to his face – he ain’t called The Terminator for nothing!

17. Antoine Albeau
If anyone could top Björn Dunkerbeck’s winning streak in windsurfing – its this guy. Antoine is from France and now that Björn has had his day, he’s winning everything that’s left to win. His site is kind of a copy of Björn’s I feel (that’s why he’s one behind) but I do like the graphics and the elephant on the splash page (Antoine is nicknamed little elephant or something I think) is so cute. Windsurfing rocks!

18. Daniela Hantuchova
Tennis players seemed to have figured out how to make a presence on the web (this is the 3rd in this list of 25). Admittedly, its usually the more attractive female players who make it and this Slovenian girl is no exception. This website is simple and clean and the top bar graphics are nice. The colours are a little “whack” for a tennis player but that’s the only drawback I think.

19. Wojtek Brzozowski
This Polish World Champion windsurfer is actually one of my rivals in the racing discipline of windsurfing I compete in. He’s a pretty nice guy to boot too! This is actually the 4th version of his website (I preferred v3.0) but its very clean and the colours are easy on the eye. Its available in 2 languages and has a decent amount of content on there. Only thing missing is videos …

20. Sasha Cohen
This American ice-skater is a good example of how to turn an Olympic Silver Medal into a long career in the public eye; she’s now a tv-star and advertising spokeswoman. The splash page to her website is horrible, however once you get past the purple you find this clean, cutesy, white website which is nicely layed-out with a left-alignment. The site really fits well with her youthful teen look.  

21. Patrik Diethelm
Although the single column layout is a little strange on this site, I love the big windsurfing backgrounds on this Italian Pro Windsurfer and board designer’s website. It takes a little while to load (my pet hate with full-flash sites) however the backgrounds are just awesome and the content is easy to read, spaced out into each topic’s own block.

22. Allison Shreeve
Allison is a good windsurfing friend of mine from Australia and happens to be 3x World Champion in Windsurfing. Her website layout is nice – I like the colours matching with the water of the top graphic and the fact that the front page gets STRAIGHT to the point of what the site is about. Although I prefer CSS menus rather than images the site is really clean and fits with Allison’s squeaky clean image – good job! 

23. Fernando Alonso
Another great Formula1 driver, this time from Spain. This website actually has a few things I hate about it, but if you wait for the flash section on the top left to play through you will find this AMAZING hand drawn image of Alonso (which I captured in the screenshot) which was the final point that made me include it in this list. I think the scrollbar moving to the right of the content must be an error with the coding because it looks terrible and the menu is kinda blurry, but otherwise the website gets the point across. 

24. David Beckham
You really disappoint me here Becks. You’re one of the biggest names in the sporting arena worldwide and you’re getting paid more than most could even imagine, yet your website is soooooooo 2002. Its like a FashionTV ripoff.  That being said, the site is clean and the information is presented in a very clearcut way. I do like the flip menus being used on the site so Becks did make my list of Top 25 (barely).

25. Serena Williams
Don’t click past the splash screen on this American Tennis Star’s website – it gets REALLY ugly after this sleek and subtle splash page. This picture of Serena screams glam and I think it really fits with the layout and colours of the splash page. Pity about the website inside, but I included it because I was so impressed with the splash.

… and finally, the one you’ve all been waiting for …

Worst Website Award Goes To …

Roger Federer (worst website ever!)
My god this site makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a pick-axe. Where do I start? Is it the awful colours, the 1997 layout, the horrendous fonts being used or the shear lack of ‘presence’ this website gives. For the man who’s undoutably the highest paid tennis player on the circuit right now and even has his face on a postage stamp in his home in Switzerland, I’m fairly disappionted with this site in comparison to his main rival Rafael Nadal’s who featured at No.1 spot in my list.

My contact details are here if you need a new website makeover Mr Federer.   

Parting Notes

I hope you enjoyed my list and if you do some research yourself you’ll find that there’s not as many pro athletes out there (as we might think) with cool looking modern websites and even less using the glorious WordPress as a CMS. I’d love it if you guys could Digg this article or at least spread it over the social bookmarking websites below as I’m sure there’s many up and coming athletes out there who see the benefits in promoting themselves on the web and want some inspiration when they build their personal website.

And feel free to post any more athlete’s sites in the comments!

One more for the road …

And Finally… this is MY personal website.
I’d be interested to see what you guys think of my personal website. Its using WordPress and I’ve tried to make it as graphic as possible while keeping a clean layout. AUS120 is my international sail number for windsurfing for those wondering what the heck the url is all about … 

On a recent project I just finished  I got to try out the Arthemia Premium theme and here is what I came up with: www.followthewinds.com. I had quite a few emails from people asking me how I got the flash animation working in the Headline section. Funnily enough, I saw the script on someone else’s website and figured out how to do it myself.

Unfortunately, its not a free script; it’s “paid” and will set you back US$15 from FlashDen:
http://www.flashden.net/item/accordion-v1-xml/4332

You can get other similar scripts for free but they’re not as complete and usually haven’t got the .xml file attached which will let you very easily add text to the images and assign the right pictures without editing the original flash files (.swf/.fla) themselves.

This script was a little tricky to get to work in because (my copy at least) didn’t come with any decent instructions and it wasn’t apparent where all the files needed to be sitting in your header.php and in your source folder. Anyhow, I worked it out after all the emails I received from others asking how I did this, I decided I’ll put a quick tutorial together on how you can put it in the Arthemia theme.

If you would like to attempt to get the newer v2.1 script to work, some discussions and a working tutorial can be found on this forum post, for those who are members of the Colorlabsproject Forums: http://colorlabsproject.com/forum/topic.php?id=128.

Step 1.
Upload the following files (which you should have the from the FlashDen download) to a directory in your wordpress folder. I used /wp-content/themes/arthemia/ to make it easier.

• image1.jpg
• image2.jpg
• image3.jpg
• image4.jpg
• image5.jpg
• image6.jpg
• image7.jpg
• preview.swf
• swfobject.js
• accordion.xml

Step 2.
Add the following piece of code to your header.php after the last carousel script. It should be somewhere around Line 22 depending on what update you have of Arthemia theme.

<script src="http://www.followthewinds.com/wp-content/themes/arthemia/deploy/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Change it to your website address obviously! And be careful that it links perfectly to the file.
Try copying the address into your browser to check!

Step 3.
Now we need to add the following code to replace everything in the Headline div. Just delete everything between line 188 – 227 in your header.php and replace it with the following code:

You’ll notice I’ve changed this a little from the original code in the FlashDen download. This is because it would not validate in strict xHTML without these changes. I’ve only changed two things:

• delete the table value height=”100%”, this is not a valid value – you don’t need a height in this instance, the height will be defined by the size of your .swf file.
• replace all instances of & with &amp;. This is the correct html special characters to use to validate your flash code.

Step 4.
Now go to your accordion.xml file and change all the image1.jpg instances to a full address (it needs to be the exact address to work, or you can use the tag < ?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ? >.

Step 5.
Once you’ve got up to Step 4 and you’ve edited your pictures to suit, you should be able to view the player on your website.  You’ll notice the .swf file is a little wider than the Headline section and you have about 1-2px of your player being cut-off. A simple fix of your style.css file will fix this:

Here’s what you need to change to make it fit like mine:

#headline {
width:600px;
}

#featured {
width:300px;
}

And there you have it. A nice flash accordion style menu featuring whatever content you’d like!

If you are having any problems with this (I know I made this tutorial pretty short, and I’m having issues with my GoogleSyntaxHighlighter Plugin so you can’t copy and paste the second piece of code as I’ve had to use an image of it!) feel free to send me an email about it. I’ll try to help out where I can.

And props to Michael for a great theme – Arthemia Premium