The Best WordPress Themes for Wedding Websites

Published November 19th, 2012 in WordPress - 4 Comments

In recent years as it has become easier and less costly for people to set up their own websites, more and more websites have been used for providing information about weddings. Because WordPress is free and simple for anyone to set up with most web hosts, it is naturally a popular choice for engaged couples wanting to provide information regarding their wedding.

Wedding websites typically include many of the same features and content types, including bios of the couple, engagement photos, directions to the wedding and reception, hotel information, and sometimes the option to RSVP through the website. Sites are also used in some cases to showcase wedding photos after the big day to share them with attendees and those who were unable to attend.

With WordPress, setting up a basic website to provide this type of information is pretty simple, and a number of themes have been developed specifically with weddings in mind. These themes often include some enhanced functionality, and they typically feature a design that fits well with wedding websites.

In this post we’ll take a look at 18 WordPress themes that are great options for wedding websites. Most of them are premium themes that must be purchased, but there are some free themes included as well.

Premium Themes:

Marriage ($40)

A responsive theme available at ThemeForest.

The Best WordPress Theme Builder Options, No Coding Required

Published August 28th, 2012 in WordPress - 39 Comments

As WordPress has continued to grow in popularity, developers have continued to enhance the options available to users through advanced themes and plugins. While WordPress is popular with designers and developers who are comfortable creating custom themes, it’s also a popular option for website owners and bloggers who want to be able to manage their own sites without needing any coding skills or experience.

There are currently a number of products available that make it possible for WordPress users to have control over the layouts and designs of their site without the need to be able to code custom themes, or to hire a designer to create one. In this post we’ll take a look at some of the leading options.

Drag and Drop Builder Plugin from Elegant Themes

7 WordPress Setup Tips

Published August 13th, 2012 in WordPress - 7 Comments

WordPress is an immensely powerful blogging and website platform. There are, however, some important steps to carry out as soon as possible and some elementary mistakes to avoid once WordPress has been installed. This is by no means a complete guide but it includes a number of useful tips to help make your WordPress site as effective as possible.

1. Permalink Structure

A common critique of WordPress is that its default URL structure for posts is quite weak, with each post being given a page ID such as “http://site.com/?p=123”. This can give a bad impression if it is linked to from another site as it doesn’t give a good idea of what a user can expect to find and in some situations could look spammy.

To remedy this in the WordPress dashboard go to Settings, then Permalinks and you will find the default settings. Change this to Post Name – the second to last option on the page and you will achieve a much cleaner and more user friendly URL.

How to Add an Awesome Parallax Banner for Your WordPress Site

Published June 25th, 2012 in Tutorials, Web Development, WordPress - 6 Comments

The parallax effect has been used in the movie industry for a long, long time. Also, cartoons make great use of this simple technique. The general idea is to have 2 overlapped items moving in different speed ratios, to create an illusion of depth.

Parallax effects can work great even for websites. We can see many uses out there, and today we’ll take it a little deeper and create a banner making use of this technique.

The main challenge here is to do something simple because we’re dealing with dynamic content so everything will change pretty often. Our effect will need, for example, to automatically detect heights, since the only fixed dimension will be the width.

Also, we’ll learn how to do that on the top of a WordPress theme, in our case the Twenty Eleven theme (default theme), but you can easily use the concepts and snippets here to apply on your own theme.

Photo credits joeymc86

9 Leading Options for Managed WordPress Hosting

Published June 22nd, 2012 in WordPress - 21 Comments

As WordPress has continued to increase in popularity, a number of companies have found ways to meet the hosting needs of WordPress users by offering managed WordPress hosting. While most web hosts offer an easy WordPress installation, they don’t usually provide support for WordPress, themes, and plugins. This new breed of hosts that specifically target WordPress users often provide support for WordPress related issues. Additionally, and equally important, their servers are configured for the best WordPress performance.

This article will provide some basic information on 9 of the leading providers of managed WordPress hosting, and at the end I’ll share some of my own thoughts.

Synthesis

Synthesis is the hosting division of Copyblogger Media, the parent company of Copyblogger and leading WordPress theme shop StudioPress. The hosting division started after they had great success and better performance hosting their own websites. With thousands of customers using the StudioPress themes and their Genesis framework, offering hosting makes sense.

The primary selling features of Synthesis are performance and security, which are concerns of just about every website owner using WordPress. They offer migration services (for a fee) for customers who want to move to Synthesis. The $90 migration fee also includes things like file cleanup and permissions lockdown. You will get the best performance if you’re using their Genesis framework.

Pricing starts at $27 per month for a single-website plan that is intended to serve 2,500 daily unique visitors. Other plans are priced at $97, $147, and $300 per month, intended to support from 20,000 to 300,000 daily unique visitors.

15 Free WordPress Theme Frameworks

Published June 12th, 2012 in Web Development, WordPress - 31 Comments

For designers and developers that frequently work with WordPress, theme frameworks and starter themes can have a noticeable impact of efficiency. Frameworks and starter themes can eliminate some of the repetitive work that you probably do with each custom theme. In addition, many frameworks provide additional features that can make your theme more powerful with less development time.

In the past year or two, responsive frameworks have become more popular. Since designing and developing responsive sites and themes can be highly time consuming, these frameworks can be a great resource.

In this post we’ll take a look at 15 of the best free WordPress theme frameworks and starter themes. There are also a number of outstanding premium options, but in this post we’ll focus on the free ones. Despite being free, these resources can be highly valuable.

Bones

The Bones framework comes in two variations: classic and responsive. The classic version is built on the 960 Grid. The responsive version gives you are starting point to design for multiple devices, with a stylesheet set up for media queries and a mobile first approach. Bones isn’t intended to be a framework for which you develop child themes. Instead, it is intended to be a project template.

55 of the Best Responsive WordPress Themes

Published May 22nd, 2012 in WordPress - 14 Comments

Responsive design is obviously a popular topic in the web design industry right now, and WordPress continues to grow as one of the most popular content management systems. Many bloggers and site owners who are using WordPress are interested in having a responsive website, and the result is a quickly-increasing number of responsive themes that are available for WordPress.

In this post we’ll take a look at 55 responsive WordPress themes, including free and premium themes. The majority of the themes showcased here are premium. Although there are some good free responsive themes available, the time and effort required to create one is rather significant, so most of the good ones must be purchased. There are more free responsive themes available aside from the ones we’ve mentioned here, but we tried to showcase only the best ones regardless of whether they are free or premium.

Free Responsive WordPress Themes:

Skeleton

How to Code an Awesome Categories Menu for Your WordPress Site

Published May 21st, 2012 in Tutorials, Web Development, WordPress - 7 Comments

Sometimes it’s good to ditch the default functions for components and create our own stuff. WordPress has great features for category listing but when it comes to customization we need to dig a little deeper on its functions.

Today we’ll see how to do an awesome categories menu, based on Pawel Kadysz’s awesome menu design.

We’ll see alternatives to WordPress wp_list_categories functions that allows full customization. Also we’ll see how to do it with clean CSS and a little jQuery for final touches to make it smoother.

So, are you ready to rock?

The Final Look

Elegantia WordPress Portfolio Theme

Published December 13th, 2011 in Site News, WordPress, WordPress Themes - 7 Comments

Our friends at WPLegion have created a free portfolio theme for WordPress with Vandelay Design readers in mind. Elegantia includes premium-quality features but can be downloaded and used at no cost. View a demo of Elegantia.

Download Elegantia (MB zip file)

If you’re reading this post in an RSS reader or in an email you will need to click through to the site to download the file due to WPLegion’s hotlinking protection.

How to Create a Job Board with Gravity Forms

Published August 11th, 2011 in Tutorials, WordPress - 11 Comments

Niche or industry-specific job boards are highly useful for job searchers who are looking for work in a specific field, and they’re also great for allowing employers to reach a targeted audience of job searchers.

For those who want to create a job board or add a job board to an existing website or blog, there are several options for creating and managing it. There are several different WordPress plugins and themes that have been developed over the past few years for running job boards.

I have used 2 commercial plugins and 1 commercial theme for job boards with very mixed results. In some cases setting up the job board was rather complicated, and in other cases the support was poor and the developer disappeared. If you’re building a website or a critical part of a website on a commercial plugin or theme it’s important to have confidence that the product will continue to be supported in the future, otherwise you could have major problems as new versions of WordPress are released.

Gravity Forms is a very popular commercial WordPress plugin for creating forms and it includes all of the functionality needed to create a job board. Although it is not specifically a job board plugin there are a few significant reasons why you may want to consider using Gravity Forms if you are looking to create a job board for yourself or for a client:

• Gravity Forms is well-established and due to it’s popularity it is not in danger of becoming unsupported.
• The inteface is easy to use and manage.
• A PayPal add-on is available to those who have a developer’s license of Gravity Forms, so you can easily charge a fee for job submissions.