40 New WordPress Themes – February, 2013

Published February 27th, 2013 in WordPress - 6 Comments

One of the great benefits of using WordPress as a CMS or blogging platform is the availability of high-quality themes. New themes are being released all the time, and it’s pretty difficult to stay up-to-date on the available themes because they come out so quickly and because there are so many different companies and websites releasing themes. We thought it would be helpful to showcase some of the best new themes that have been released during the past month.

StyleShop eCommerce WordPress Theme
Price: $39 (includes access to all themes by Elegant Themes)
Available at: ElegantThemes

10 of the Leading WordPress E-Commerce Plugins

Published February 11th, 2013 in WordPress - 13 Comments

Recently we published a post that showcased many of the best WordPress e-commerce themes. If you’ve been thinking about using WordPress for an e-commerce website you may be wondering which e-commerce plugin is the best fit for your needs. There are several different options available, and in this article we’ll look at 10 of those options. Hopefully this information will help you to find the plugin that is best for your project.

WP e-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is one of the plugins that has been around and has been popular for several years. Before many of the other e-commerce options for WordPress existed WP e-Commerce was on the scene. The plugin itself is available as a free download, with a variety of upgrades and add-ons available for purchase. WP e-Commerce includes features like flexible coupon codes and discounts, control over shipping calculations, product and category RSS feeds, multilingual, support for multiple currencies, PayPal and Google Checkout integration, one-page checkout, admin dashboard for sales overview, basic inventory control, and much more.

The Best WordPress Real Estate Themes

Published February 4th, 2013 in WordPress - 8 Comments

Most people who are looking to buy real estate will do research online before anything else. For this reason having an effective web presence is essential for real estate agents and brokers. Several years ago it was costly to set up a professional-looking real estate website that could be maintained by the agent or an assistant, with no web development skills required. Today, however, there are much better options.

WordPress, the most popular (and free) content management system in the world, is a viable option for anyone in the real estate industry because of the quality themes that have been developed specifically for the industry. For less than $100 a high-quality theme can be purchased that will allow any agent or broker to maintain a website that is attractive and effective.

Here we’ll take a look at 15 of the best themes that have been created for the real estate industry.

wpCasa (€59)

wpCasa is a great option for having a feature-rich real estate website powered by WordPress. It’s actually a theme framework that can be used on it’s own, or you can select one of the available child themes if you want a different look. The theme framework uses somewhat of a minimal design style (although it still looks great), so it is a good starting place if you want to customize the appearance of theme.

wpCasa comes with several important features that make it extremely useful and effective. It uses a responsive design, so the site will look good on any device. You’ll also have control over the layout thanks to drag and drop widgets. The property editor makes it easy to add listings, and it even offers optional IDX/MLS integration. The advanced search makes it easier for visitors to find the right property.

55 Amazing WordPress Photography Themes

Published January 28th, 2013 in WordPress - 10 Comments

WordPress is an excellent content management system for photographers, in part because there are so many outstanding themes available, both free and premium. With so many quality themes/templates available either for free or for less than $100, most photographers can get a site that meets their needs without hiring a designer to create a custom theme. Whether you are looking for a minimalist theme that will allow your photos to stand out, a theme with a full-screen background photo to wow visitors, or a responsive theme that will provide a good user experience on any device, you’ll have some options when it comes to choosing a WordPress theme.

In this post we’ll showcase more than 50 themes created specifically for photographers.

Free WordPress Photography Themes:

Elegant Photography Theme

The Best WordPress Themes for Bands and Musicians

Published January 21st, 2013 in WordPress - 10 Comments

Every band and musician needs to have an effective website. Established and popular bands must be able to communicate with their fans, promote their live performances and tours, and offer audio clips or sell their music. Smaller bands that are working hard to get their big break will need to use their website to spread the word and to help make people more aware of their music.

Since many bands are working with limited budgets, having a quality website hasn’t always been easy. Fortunately, there are now a number of quality WordPress themes that have been created specifically for bands. With the help of any of these themes a band can have a professional-looking website for less than $100.

In this post we’ll take a look at 17 of the best WordPress themes for bands.

Soundstage

Soundstage from MintThemes is a great choice for any band. It uses a clean design and has all the features a band will need. It integrates with WooCommerce to provide e-commerce functionality for selling music and merchandise. The homepage uses a stylish slider, and the theme also includes an HTML5 audio player.

40+ of the Best WordPress eCommerce Themes

Published January 7th, 2013 in WordPress - 31 Comments

While there are plenty of options available when choosing an eCommerce platform, the possibility of using WordPress or eCommerce has become more enticing in recent years due to continued development of plugins and themes. Today there is no shortage of quality themes that can be purchased, or in some cases downloaded for free, to use WordPress for powering an eCommerce website.

One of the main benefits is having WordPress as an eCommerce option is that so many users and developers are already familiar with WordPress, so the learning curve can in some cases be shorter than with another platform. Another advantage is that WordPress is free to use and can be hosted anywhere. Many of the leading eCommerce options require your site to be hosted with them, which can be a good thing, but it’s not what every user wants.

Having a custom theme designed and developed is always an option, but the improving quality of available premium themes makes it possible to start a professional-looking eCommerce site with very little upfront investment. In this post we’ll showcase more than 40 eCommerce themes for WordPress, and every one of them sells for less than $100.

Some eCommerce themes come with their own eCommerce functionality built in to the theme, but most are designed and developed to integrate with one or more of the leading eCommerce plugins for WordPress. Those plugins include WooCommerce, Jigoshop, WP e-Commerce, and Cart66.

Gather ($49)

Gather is an extremely well-designed and responsive theme from ThemeTrust. It comes with an extensive list of features and integrates with WooCommerce.

Best Membership Website Plugins for WordPress

Published December 18th, 2012 in WordPress - 9 Comments

Once purely known as a blogging platform, WordPress has developed in to a powerful and popular content management system, used by millions of websites worldwide. WordPress also has an active and loyal reader-base and this has led to a huge variety of themes and plugins that are available. Membership plugins are popular for giving webmasters the chance offer subscription and membership to fans, providing them with premium content that is not available to those that are not signed up.

As membership sites become more popular, the number of available plugins grows, and there are now dozens of these add-ons, ranging from simple free plugins with limited support to premium professional plugins with numerous features.

If you’re looking for the best membership plugin for your WordPress site, the following list maybe of some benefit:

aMember

Before WordPress was the force it is today, and before numerous membership plugins started popping up, there was aMember. The original add-on is still one of the most popular and has many great features, the most notable of which is its full integration with WordPress. Content drip is another standout feature of aMember and affords users the ability to protect downloads, and change subscription lengths. Users can also benefit from multiple language support.

Managing 301 Redirects in WordPress

Published December 14th, 2012 in WordPress - 3 Comments

A 301 redirect is the HTTP status code returned by your browser when a web page is requested pointing the browser to go to a different location. The status code everyone will be most familiar with is a 404 which indicates that the requested page could not be found. The two main types of redirect are 301 and 302 the difference on the surface is minor but important, a 302 is a temporary redirect while a 301 is permanent. While the average user is unlikely to notice the difference search engines treat them very differently; a 301 passes SEO value (or ‘PageRank’) on to its redirect target while a 302 does not.

Other forms of redirect include Meta Refresh where the redirect is handled on a page rather than on a server level and 307 which is a HTTP 1.1 successor to a 302 redirect.
There are a number of reasons why you may need to permanently redirect to a new page including moving to a new domain, changing site structure or merging content, while a 302 would be used for displaying a clean URL for example when a session ID is used. The type of redirect a web page is using can be checked using a HTTP request and response header tool such as web-sniffer.net or a plugin for Firefox such as HTTP LiveHeaders.

Challenges and Solutions for WordPress Publishers

Published December 10th, 2012 in WordPress - 0 Comments

Today very few successful bloggers can exclusively write all of the content on their blogs. A majority of the top blogs on the web have a number of writers producing content for them on a regular basis. Inviting other bloggers and writers to become co-authors is a great way to expand one’s blog. After recruiting the writers, the next problem that the publisher faces is management of the writers and their content.

Managing multiple authors for a blog is never an easy task. When the publisher manages a multi-author blog he or she spends less  time writing articles and more time handling the administrative tasks, such as generating content concepts, scheduling articles, managing authors and reviewing articles. It is often challenging to manage multiple authors, getting them to write quality content on schedule, making sure they do not miss deadlines, etc.

Luckily, there are many WordPress plugins available today to help publishers and media companies to manage multiple authors. If you are planning to turn your WordPress blog or website into a multi-author blog/website, then below is a list of five solutions that you might want to check out.

1. Betaout

Betaout is an editorial project management solution targeted at publishers running their sites on WordPress. A cloud based service Betaout plugins with WordPress installations. It offers a user friendly, sleek and highly intuitive interface.

Showcase of the Best WordPress Magazine Themes

Published November 28th, 2012 in WordPress - 3 Comments

Wordpress is one of the best content management systems which supports many frameworks and themes of almost any style imaginable. You can find free and premium themes for WordPress which can be of any style including portfolio, business, blog, gallery, etc. I personally like colorful magazine style themes and suggest them to people because these themes preview your posts in a very unique style. Most magazine themes show excerpts of posts in many different categories all on the front page.

A good magazine style theme can give a site a professional, elegant and satisfying look. So, here I have collected 36 of the best magazine and news themes for use in your own projects.

80/20: ($45)