40 Rocking Rock Band Websites For Inspiration

This article is purely dedicated to music lovers from all around the world, nowadays lots of people are using the internet all over the world, so it’s not that surprising that even rock bands are maintaining their sites to get close to their fans.

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WordPress Music Themes April 2014

Music fan sites are a great way to bring together people who have a common interest in a specific musician, a music genre, bands, etc. If you are thinking of putting up a website for that type of audience, here are some of the latest music themes you can check out:

Dubstep – Premium Music WordPress Theme

Dubstep is a WordPress theme for bands, musicians, DJs, clubs and everyone involved in the music or entertainment business. This theme supports every post type that a music & entertainment theme would need such as: intuitive Events Management (ability to set date, time, venue, location, and map coordinates; provision for normal and recurring events, tickets support); Discography Management (ability to share your music with fans using either self hosted audio files using the powerful soundManager2 or embedded sounds from SoundCloud); Artists Management (display an infinite number of favorite artists, colleagues, or band members (their albums, tracks, or playlists) and categorize them easily; Media Management (share videos either self-hosted or from services like Youtube, Vimeo etc. and create endless interactive custom photo galleries from your events using templates or sliders).

SoundBlast – Music Band WordPress Theme

Sound Blast Premium WordPress Theme is a WooCommerce ready theme especially designed for bands and music websites. This easy to modify theme features include: Album + Track Management (options include Now Playing, Download, Play Only, and Buy Now), Slider Management, Event Management, Gallery Management, Sidebar Management, Powerful Theme Options + Page Builder, 2 pre-made color variations.

MusicVent – Premium Music & Event WordPress Theme

MUSICVENT Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, responsive, and a well-thought out HTML5 WordPress Theme for Music & Event related Personalities/Studios. The theme’s clean Lines & minimal design approach truly highlights the artist(s) and the work(s) showcased. Its unique design and streamlined navigation makes it easy for fans, music aficionados, potential producers, talent scouts, etc., to go through the website get the information needed and take the necessary action after. The 6 built-in page templates (Albums, Artists, Events, Gallery, Bloglist, Contact) are organized and give you or users everything that is needed. Transition and animation effects like black and white photos display their full colors when hovered over. It also includes 2 homepage layout options (fullscreen image slider and fullscreen video background) to choose from according to the audience you are targeting.

RockOn – Multipurpose Music WP Theme

RockOn! Premium WordPress Theme is a WooCommerce ready multipurpose music theme for singers, artists, music bands or musical events created using Twitter Bootstrap, with a responsive design which makes it a perfect fit for all devices. This theme includes features such as: Event Management using one of the best event management plugins – WP Event Manager, 100% responsive 3D Layer Slider, Sidebar Managerusing CrunchPress “CP” framework, WooCommerce Shop Catalog Grid OR Full Layout also Masonry (Filterable), and so many other features.

NOISE – Onepage DJs & Band WordPress Theme

NOISE Premium WordPress Theme is a cool, creative and modern theme perfect for musicians, DJs, bands and other music related professionals or businesses. Built with smooth and sleek CSS3 and AJAX animations including a unique spectrum analyzer to help you visualize music automatically on every single track. You can easily manage and display your artists, albums, audios, images, videos, events dates and sell your items (tickets etc.), allow users to rate music, and share instantly on their social networks. It also comes with 2 different players (SimplePlayer widget and Extended Player) to give users control over every single track played.

Music Club – Music/Band/Club/Party WordPress Theme

Music Club Premium WordPress Theme is the best WordPress theme for music, club, party, radio station, bands or even entertainment magazine. It comes with great features for music such as: a floating music player at the bottom of the page, a traditional boxed player for those who prefer something familiar, an Event post type that come with a ticket button with 5 tickets status, a Music Album feature which when clicked, automatically fetches all songs in an album to the floating player. Other outstanding features include a Page Builder, Revolution Slider, GoodLayers Importer, and other great music tools, to help you build a power music website users will truly enjoy.


Events and Entertainment WordPress Themes – December 2013

Get into the groove with these cool WordPress themes just in time for the most event-filled season of the year. Create a site for you or your clients that will surely stand out with these creative events and entertainment WordPress themes.

POLARIS – Responsive WordPress Theme

Polaris Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra responsive and modern one page WordPress Theme suitable for events or parties. This premium retina ready theme comes in 16 color styles and includes: Magnific popup, Font Awesome iconic font, parallax, easy to extend and much more. It is a great way to present your important events and activities all in one sweep.This premium theme is based on popular Twitter Bootstrap framework. This template uses the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technologies.

Clubix – Nightlife, Music & Events WordPress Theme

Clubix Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive theme designed especially for nightlife, events, and music related websites. Party goers,fans, followers, or nightlife club hoppers are always on the lookout for the latest happenings around town. A cool way to address the needs of this specific market is putting up an online calendar of events, concerts, gigs, tours, launches, and other events or nightlife activities that will keep them up to date. For music enthusiasts, Clubix has two custom post types ‘under the hood’ to help you create and upload new songs organised on albums and events. You can customize your background image and also the color of the main elements from the theme, add music players, sliders, WooCommerce, Google maps, and so much more.

Flycase – Complete Music Solution for WordPress

Flycase Premium WordPress Theme is a professional and easy-to-use Music WordPress Theme that is highly and easily customizable, ready for all devices, simple to set up, and even e-commerce ready. Specifically designed for music enthusiasts, professional or not, this theme includes all the features you need to present, promote and sell for your band or label. This edgy, modern theme has everything a fan wants and everything a music artist needs – from photo/video galleries, discography, tour dates, multiple playlists, etc. – all in one cool theme.

Amplify WordPress Theme

Amplify Premium WordPress Theme is not your typical band theme with its minimalist and clean design but still capable of managing music website requirement such as gigs, discography, and videos with ease using the AudioTheme plugin. The WordPress admin panel is transformed into your band’s ultimate management tool with an easy-to-use user interface. Add your own language and display RTL languages as intended. Upload your tracks and allow users to play clips or full songs on every page of your website with the custom audio player. It ties in directly to your AudioTheme tracks and offers an easy-to-use interface for selecting and updating tracks in the jukebox. This theme is powered by Foundation by Zurb and Sass, a powerful CSS pre-processor where you can either edit the CSS directly or use Sass to regenerate your theme CSS easily and quickly.

Applause – One-Page Responsive Music & DJ WP Theme

Applause Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive one page band & musicians theme, built using Bootstrap framework using HTML5 & CSS3. For all who love music or those who are in the music industry such as music bands, musicians, DJs, producers, labels or organizers of events and festivals, this theme is the perfect solution to organizing necessary information and media such as Events, Audio, Galleries and Videos. Applause can display each event on their own map with its location and venue, the price and availability of the tickets. It can display your latest audio tracks with awesome player and you can even add a remote link or upload your own mp3.


Niche WordPress Themes November 2013

Searching for a WordPress theme that fits you or your client’s specific needs can often be satisfied by multi purpose WordPress themes. The seed design can often be tweaked and twiddled with to create the whatever the desired website outcome intended. However, if you find a theme that already matches the type of website you need then a lot of design time can be saved and spent on optimizing other features of the website. Here are some of the latest niche WordPress themes that you might find useful for your website needs.

Organic Market Friendly eCommerce WordPress Theme

Organic Market Premium WordPress Theme is a fun and fresh eCommerce theme ideal for online stores and shops. The delightful and eye-catching colorful design has been tailored to an organic food store, but is highly customizable and can be used for anything else. This simple and no nonsense theme features the basic website necessities but is also equipped with WooCommerce integration and includes support for all WooCommerce product management, widgets, and shortcodes so you can add all your products and set up your storefront. It also includes Royal Slider and Layer Slider Support and support for custom shortcodes for product sliders, featured product sections.

Campus Premium Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

Campus Premium Multipurpose WordPress Theme is one of the newest WordPress themes for education and business. Based on the new Super Skeleton 2 Framework with the leanest and yet the most highly functional features maximizing all that WordPress has to offer. Significant features include: a brand new streamlined and simple to use theme options panel with simple visual cues, nested inline documentation, with the option to preload built in or user uploaded (Skin Builder) skins, the entire Google Fonts library, Drag & Drop Layout Builder, rock solid, compliant SEO friendly code, and the new WordPress 3.6 Post Formats UI, a ThemeForest first.

Medico – Medical and Health WordPress Theme

Medico Premium WordPress Theme is a feature-packed medical and health styled theme that is both stylish and functional. It features several important elements such as: a working appointment form, responsive HTML5 and CSS3 design, foundation grid using predefined HTML classes, Magellan – a style agnostic plugin, Clearing – a plugin that makes it easy to create responsive lightboxes with any size image, Joyride – an extremely flexible plugin that gives users a tour of your site or app when they visit, Visual Shortcode Generator, Styles manager – 1 click style change for many major elements, Portfolio with 2/3/4 columns support, pagination support with non-animated filtering, drag&drop item sorting, and so many other great features to get create a one of a kind medical/health website.

Metric Music Band Responsive WordPress Theme

Metric Premium WordPress Theme is a retro modern theme for all who love music, such as music bands, musicians, DJs, producers, labels or organizers of events and festivals. This bold and dynamic theme features a great way to present all the necessary information relevant to those in the music business such as Events, Albums, Galleries and Videos and even a Blog. This responsive and fluid theme can be displayed on all devices from mobile phones to desktop computers (smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops). The theme is also SEO optimized because of its highly semantic and well structured source code.

Agriculture – All in One WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Agriculture Premium WordPress Theme makes going organic look easy. This WooCommerce ready theme boasts of a simple to use custom user interface that can turn website management into a task even a child can handle. You can easily add products, arrange them into categories, schedule automatic sales periods, manage delivery and other options with ease. This premium theme is based on an extended WordPress admin panel, with many custom shortcodes and widgets that are so easy in use and customize that even WordPress beginners can handle. It includes: Layer Slider and Revolution Slider plugins, Woocommerce, Super Extended Shortcodes pack for easy content formatting and improved presentation, a powerful Form Builder Tool, customly developed by CMSMasters, lets you create an unlimited amount of forms of different types and complexity, from simple contact forms to complex questionnaires with numerous fields, radio-buttons, checkboxes and dropdowns, text areas, as well as set validation for these fields.

Booklet Personal Blogging Theme

Booklet Premium WordPress Theme is a fresh take on the way blog themes have always been done. The portfolio like homepage is fully responsive and images and layout will automatically fit the screen no matter which device you are using. Inspired by popular e-readers, Booklet is a sleek version of your online diary. Some of the best features into this personal WordPress theme include the ability to change the background color and font color from black to white, change the size of the font and even read in fullscreen mode. Overall, a great way to add that personal touch to stories you want to share to the digital world.

The Wedding Day Responsive Theme

The Wedding Day Premium WordPress Theme is an elegant and lovely responsive wedding theme couples are sure to fall in love with. It is suitable for users with zero programming skills as well as advanced developers. The theme is the perfect match for your wedding with predefined styles and features its very own VamTam drag & drop builder. This drag and drop tool will save you lots of time on building your pages or posts with the use of a simple interface with simple drag & drop actions. The VamTam drag & drop page builder is tightly integrated with tinymce editor and you can switch to visual or text editor at any time without losing any changes. Buyers will also receive a bonus print invitation template for free.

Atlas Directory and Listings Premium WordPress Theme

Atlas Directory & Listings WordPress Theme is a front-end online directory portal where you allow members to register, login, edit profile, submit and manage (delete/update) listings, change membership settings, and so much more from the front-end without having to log into the WordPress dashboard.
Set up an online directory portal of any type – companies, shops, restaurants, real estate, websites and so on. One of the core features of Atlas is its email notifications where every action taken on your website is notified to the site admin allowing you to have full control over what goes on in your website. This feature can be easily disabled through the theme options panel.


How To Get Started Building Your Authority Site Using WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular and most dynamic publishing platforms today. If you are planning to build your authority site from scratch, get the foundations right by building on solid ground. If you are wondering about the basic things you need to do to get started on your authority site check out the items listed below to help you out. This checklist can be a helpful guide for beginners and serve as a handy reminder to experienced WordPress users as well.

  • Secure your domain name. Choose your name wisely. Check how it will appear in the url as some words read differently without spacing in between. You don’t want to be stuck with a name you will regret. (eg. Top Ten Bands Hits.com might mean something else when the words are all squished together.)
  • Get a webhost like Bluehost.com to host your website’s content. Take note of features like unlimited domains, bandwidth, downtime, etc.
  • Install and configure WordPress as your publishing platform. Some web hosts include WordPress in their website packages and offer free installation. Take advantage of these features.
  • Choose a WordPress theme and install. There are tons of WordPress themes available, some free. Choose a premium theme over a free one as this is generally more stable and the developer/author usually offers and provides customer support for theme installation, issues and bugs.
  • Install basic plugins like Akismet, Google Analytics, WP SEO, etc. to beef up your site.
  • Set up pages for important standard information such as: About Us, Terms of Use or Terms of Service, Contact Us, and Privacy Policy. These add credibility to your website.
  • Add and integrate social networking links like Facebook (business page), Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. into your website. These networks help promote your content and will generate traffic for you if optimized properly.
  • Fill your site with fresh content based on the keyword research you’ve been working on (read more about this in our previous article: Building your Authority Site using the Google Keyword Planner Tool).

These are just some of the practical steps you can do as you start building your authority site using WordPress. If you have more tips and techniques, please share by leaving a comment. We’d love to hear from you.


Take it Nice and Easy With These Business and Leisure WordPress Themes

Good food and exotic travel destinations – the stuff that we plan for and dream about. Trying out new dining places and taking on new travel adventures will always be a favorite activity to do after work or during vacations. The good news is your restaurant or your boutique hotel need not be so obscure anymore with the help of the internet. Creating your own website not only to advertise your business but also to process business transactions has never been more convenient. If you are in the food or travel industry, check out these awesome WordPress themes to showcase your gourmet creations or your luxurious travel and tour packages:

Tour Package – WordPress Travel/Tour Theme

Tour Package Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and organized premium theme especially designed for those in the travel industry. This theme is equipped with a custom package post type that allows you to feature different travel and tour packages your customers can easily browse and choose from. This theme also comes with a booking form (Contact form 7 required) and a package filtering system to help customers find packages by location, price, available dates, etc. Tour Package also includes Page Builder, Layer Slider, Drag and Drop manager, WPML Support, WooCommerce support and many other features. It includes several page templates like gallery, sitemap, portfolio, pricing, etc. It is responsive, retina ready, and SEO optimized as well.

Iron Bull Restaurant WordPress Theme

Show off your gastronomic delights and mouth watering dishes with Iron Bull Premium WordPress Theme – a responsive WordPress restaurant theme that will surely make your visitors hungry for more. This bold and modern theme is the perfect theme to showcase your signature dishes and unique cuisine to stand out from the rest. You can customize this interactive theme anyway you like or choose from two predefined schemes (Sunfire or Victory Blue) to get started right away. Features included are: google maps, a sticky navigation with scrollspy, menus that have prices and calorie counts, food menu treatment, page templates (careers, polaroid inspired image gallery), and so much more. This premium WordPress theme is also available in HTML version.

Royal Gold WordPress Theme

Give your visitors that luxurious experience on your website with Royal Gold WordPress Theme – a unique WordPress theme especially designed for luxury hotels, exclusive resorts, posh restaurants, and spa/beauty centers. This premium theme features the easyReservations plugin, Contact Form 7, and Responsive Lightbox plugin to give your clientele the comfort and convenience of booking or making an online reservation with you. This mobile first premium theme is capable of optimizing bandwidth for smaller screens. This theme also features the 360º Panoramic viewer plugin which is quite useful for showcasing a panoramic view of rooms and accommodations.

Savory Responsive WordPress Theme

Savory Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, responsive WordPress theme for restaurants, diners, bars, pizzerias, coffee shops, etc. This no-frills theme comes in three skin types (Modern, Rustic, Classic), 4 custom widgets, a shortcode generator, a Retail Menu Cards plugin, all bundled in a simple, straightforward designed theme. You also get everything you need like: menu, contact information, map, opening hours, daily specials and other design elements necessary in setting up your restaurant’s online home.

Sweet Cake Responsive WordPress Theme

Sweet Cake Premium WordPress Theme is a one page Responsive HTML5 CSS3 Theme for WordPress perfect for your business. The graphic is very sweet and creative – ideal for bakeries, ice cream shops, restaurants and cake designers but if you want you can change the colors to adapt the theme for all activities. In the package you will also find sweet icons in vector format. The theme has been designed using the 1200 px grid system with 12 columns.

Soho Hotel Responsive Booking WP Theme

Soho Hotel Premium WordPress Theme is an organized and easy to navigate WordPress theme designed for hotels, hostels, service apartments and any other kind of accommodation which requires a booking system. This theme includes 4 preset and ready to use colour schemes that you can choose from or you can also choose to create your own colour palette using the colour picker in the theme options panel. This premium theme also includes a fully functional booking system and room availability plugin allowing visitors to conveniently book and make reservations without the hassle of overlapped or double booking. This fully responsive and translation ready premium theme currently supports PayPal.


Revolutionary WordPress Themes – Is the Market Ready?

Change unsettles. There is comfort and safety in the status quo. Not everyone takes to change easily unless you are the type who thrives in innovation and revolutionary thinking – a Steve Jobs personality type. If you are the latter, the status quo can become quite boring. But how innovative is innovative and how revolutionary is revolutionary when it comes to WordPress theme designs? Let’s define.

Revolutionary

  • involving or causing a complete or dramatic change

Innovative

  • (of a product, idea, etc.) featuring new methods; advanced and original: innovative designs.
  • (of a person) introducing new ideas; original and creative in thinking: an innovative thinker.

The business dictionary defines innovation as follows:

To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. Innovation involves deliberate application of information, imagination and initiative in deriving greater or different values from resources, and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products.

Innovation is synonymous with risk-taking and organizations that create revolutionary products or technologies take on the greatest risk because they create new markets. (source: businessdictionary.com)

Many WordPress theme designers come up with designs they describe as innovative, creative, revolutionary, unique. Some actually have but there are also copycats who just jump in on the trend bandwagon. Those who do take risks run into the challenge of going against the status quo and if you want to penetrate the market with something that is so deviant from what the current consumer demand is, you are in for an uphill climb. Observe how Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and a lot of the big companies introduce changes to their basic flagship products – whether it be design or feature related. A lot of prep work, a lot of marketing, and a lot of beta testing involving the actual target market.

As far as WordPress themes go, it’s a bit more tricky. What else can you offer that has not already been done? WordPress 3.7 and 3.8 will be rolled out soon with many new developments underway. Perhaps now is the time to step out of your usual design box and think beyond the usual WordPress feature fare and truly innovate a product that will meet the ultimate goal of the website owner – to put up a beautiful branded website as fast as possible with the ability to manage it on his/her own.


45 Creative And Artistic Websites For Inspiration

Have you even thought how all the designers around the world are coming up with unique design ideas? Inspiration is the key behind it. Have a look at all the following creative web layouts and I am sure you’ll find some inspiration.

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eCommerce 3.0 – How to Structure Your Basic Ecommerce Store and Make it Work

The face of eCommerce is slowly changing as more and more people look to the internet not only for information but for physical goods as well. The convenience of being able to shop from the comforts of your own home or wherever you are is luring more and more consumers to buying online. Here are a few pointers Ezra Firestone shares about setting up an eCommerce store that works.

According to Ezra, in an interview by James Schramko, Ezra stated that,

“… one of the big things about eCommerce- what I call eCommerce 3.0 – what’s changing about eCommerce right now is the day and age of the store, of the faceless eCommerce store is dying. The eCommerce that just puts up products and list manufacture descriptions is dying. What’s working now is adding value to your market, writing your product descriptions, ordering your products that are selling best and shooting videos about them, creating buyer’s guides like keep bundling products together that people want, figuring out ways that you can serve your community and creating a face and a brand and owning the race course within your eCommerce store.”

A. Basic structure of an eCommerce store:

Home, section product detail (most important) blog/content, checkout, PPC landing pages, more info, social profiles

SEO structure

  • Home page – 3 main KWs + modifiers (descriptor words). Ex. modifiers = colors, type of material
  • Top 75+ modifiers = section keywords. Section has products under it
  • Next 500 keywords that can be productized = products
  • Google product listing ads are great for ecommerce
  • Remaining relevant KWs = blog posts
  • 700 words per sections – modifiers written in (unique sections + descriptions)
  • Weekly blogging = about product, other keywords, EdC, each post has deep link + picture
  • Obvious on page – reviews, social buttons, etc
  • Internal link structure
  • Don’t over optimize
  • Author of the store – find some way to create a relationship with your customers

SEO Title Tags for ecommerce stores

  • “Vintage Costume Jewelry”
  • Description: KW, Phone #, Sentence, Modifiers
  • Get rid of big link boxes in the footer

Every search has a unique set of channels

  • Users prefer to consume media in different formats (video, audio, text, etc.) The goal: occupy as all positions as much as possible
  • Channel to occupy
    • SEO, PPC, Comparison Engine, email, social media
    • Image for each product – make sure if you have ownership of images, watermark them
    • Video for each section pages + home page
    • PPC ads (image ads + text ads, retargeting etc.)
    • Amazon listing for all products
    • Google search results: above the fold = ads, shopping, 1 or 2 organic results
    • Blog/ed content

B. Three Things to Track

  • Goal Flow: Product Page – Shopping Cart – CheckOut Page – Product Sale
  • Events: Product Options – Messages – Button Clicks, Errors (most important)
  • Site Search: monitor how the big stores like Amazon do it

C. Check Your Pages for These Items

  • Header : Search, Contact, Security, More Info, Cart, Chat/Live Help, Opt in, Offer (ex. Zappos header)
  • Favicon, Social links, Video, FAQ, Video Customer Service
  • Testimonials (random display), Bestsellers
  • Footer: Trust Seal, Search, Opt in
  • Homepage : Main rotator or slider with 3 images, tabbed featured products

  • Section Page: Items on sale – show percentage saved, Images open in lightbox for quick viewing, Featured item or deal should be on top of the page
  • Product Pages: Get rid of left navigation, Tabs on the left, Display social buttons above the fold, Cross sell recommended items, Guarantee, Trust, Shipping, Videos, Multiple Images, Recently Viewed, Put features/benefits under Add to Cart
  • Checkout Page 1: Make it look as nice as the Product Page, Shipping Calculator, Proceed button at top and bottom, Image, Product, Guarantees
  • Checkout Page 2: Multiple Payment Options

D. Boost Your Conversions With the Following:

  • Create FAQ on Shipping
  • Follow-up script on cart abandonments by email. Offer a discount
  • Use in-page analytics to optimize Section pages. Put products clicked the most on top of the page
  • Thank you video
  • Post purchase survey
  • Follow up with review request

If you are currently running an eCommerce website you can use the information above to evaluate how your site is doing. If you are planning to put up one for the first time, use them as your guide to jumpstart your business in the right direction.