55 of the Best Responsive WordPress Themes

Published May 22nd, 2012 in WordPress - 5 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 - 2 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 - 9 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.

27 of the Best WordPress Themes for Photographers

Published March 14th, 2011 in WordPress - 16 Comments

Most photographers need a website that they can update easily and frequently, as they add new photos and sets to their portfolio. WordPress is a great platform for that, in part because there are already a number of well-designed photography templates available. Photography websites often use a minimal design style to keep the focus on the photos, and for this reason templates and pre-made themes can be more appropriate than for some other types of businesses.

In this post we’ll showcase 27 WordPress themes from various designers that are created especially for photographers.

Carousel ($50)

The Best WordPress Themes for Churches and Non-Profit Organizations

Published March 2nd, 2011 in WordPress - 22 Comments

Most churches and non-profit organizations need a website that they can easily update and maintain on their own, and many are also working with limited budgets. For both of these reasons, a WordPress-powered website is a great option for many organizations. While a custom design is almost always preferred, there are a growing number of quality themes created specifically for churches and non-profit organizations, and they are very affordable. In this post we’ll showcase 12 WordPress themes from various designers that have been created especially for these types of organizations.

Grace ($65)

25 of the Best Real Estate Themes for WordPress

Published January 31st, 2011 in Galleries, WordPress - 25 Comments

Real estate is a very competitive industry and having an attractive, usable and up-to-date website can help agents to stand out and increase the exposure for their listings. In the past, managing a website could be a costly a complicated task for real estate agents. However, there are now many WordPress themes designed specifically for real estate that can make it much easier and affordable.

WordPress is a great platform for most real estate agents because it is simple to add new listings in most real estate themes, professional themes can be purchased for less than $100, and because having a search engine-friendly site is possible with WordPress.

While there are some free real estate themes available, the quality and functionality of most premium themes is far better and prices are very reasonable. In this post we’ll showcase 25 of the best professional real estate themes for WordPress.

AgentPress ($59.95 at StudioPress)

WordPress Ecommerce: 30+ Resources

Published August 3rd, 2010 in WordPress - 35 Comments

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems for blogs, portfolios, and other types of sites, but with the right plugins and/or themes it can also be used for e-commerce. While WordPress is not specifically intended to be used for e-commerce sites, the quality of available plugins and themes has increased in recent years. In this post we’ll feature more than 30 resources and tutorials to help you get started with e-commerce for WordPress.

WordPress E-Commerce Plugins:

WP e-Commerce Pluign (free with premium upgrades available)

Create an Advanced Contact Form for Client Inquiries

Published June 25th, 2010 in Tutorials, WordPress - 17 Comments

Most web designers rely on inquiries from their portfolio website to produce a decent portion of their business. Contact forms can be very simple, collecting a name and contact information, or they can be much more detailed, providing enough information to get an estimate. While the primary purpose of the contact form on our website has always been to make it easy for potential clients to contact us about web design projects, there are also a number of other reasons that visitors use the contact form and a one-size-fits-all approach has its drawbacks. We recently changed the contact form to include some conditional fields that make the form more customized according to the reason the visitor is contacting us, and in this post we’ll go through the process of creating this type of form.

The form we’ll be creating will contain some basic fields (name, email, phone, website, and message) that are shown to all visitors who are filling out the form, but based on the reason they are contacting us they will also see a few other more specific fields. If the visitor selects “Web Design Services” as their reason for contacting us they will be prompted to tell us if it is a new website or a re-design, enter a budget, and tell us how they found us. If they select “Content Development Services” they will also be prompted to enter a budget, but with different options than the budget for web design services, and so on.

In the past our contact form has included a field to allow visitors to select a budget, but that was based on the assumption that they were contacting us regarding web design services. Since the budget field isn’t applicable for someone who is filling out the contact form just to say hi, this “advanced” form will only show what is relevant based on user input.

9 WordPress Hacks to Encourage User Interactivity

Published August 24th, 2009 in WordPress - 96 Comments

All bloggers would like to get more interaction and participation from their readers and visitors. In this post we’ll look at nine different things you can do to your WordPress theme to add the possibility of some type of interaction. Some involves comments, social media, and other ways of getting readers involved.

1. Show Most Recent Comments

One of the most important ways that blogs can encourage readers to get involved is through the comments. There are a number of different strategies for increasing comments and participation from readers, and many of them involve placing extra emphasis on the comments. By displaying the most recent comments (in the sidebar for example) you may be able to encourage more comments because visitors will see that you value their participation.