Download Elegantia, a Free Portfolio WordPress Theme from WPLegion

Published December 13th, 2011 in Site News, WordPress - 6 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 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 - 20 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 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.

15 Exceptionally Useful Resources for WordPress Theme Designers

Published August 13th, 2009 in WordPress - 59 Comments

One of the great benefits of designing and developing for WordPress is the amount of quality resources that are available from others in the WordPress community. Many times these resources can wind up saving you time in your own development. The only problem is that there are so many resources available that it is difficult to know about them all and sometimes to find what you are looking for.

In this post we’ll feature 15 resources that may be of help to you while you are designing and developing WordPress themes. If you have suggestions for other resources, please leave a comment.

Frameworks:

Thematic

Thematic is a very popular WordPress theme framework created by Ian Stewart. This framework can be used as-is, or is excellent for using with child themes. In fact, a number of child themes for Thematic are available for free or as premium themes, including the free gallery theme distributed by Smashing Magazine.

20+ Tutorials and Resources for Working with Custom Fields in WordPress

Published May 13th, 2009 in WordPress - 55 Comments

One of the keys to WordPress’s flexibility and endless possibilities is the use of custom fields. With custom fields you can do all kinds of things, but most designers and developers who are new to WordPress are not familiar with how to put custom fields into practice. In this post we’ll look at a number of tutorials that will show you some potential uses of custom fields, as well as a handful of plugins that make it easier or more productive to use custom fields.

Using WordPress Custom Fields: Introduction

This article from Justin Tadlock gives an overview of custom fields, and it’s actually the introductory post to a series on the subject of custom fields (other posts in the series are included in the list). If you’re not familiar with custom fields or if you just want to make sure you get the basics before moving further, this article is a great starting point.