What Features Do Most Commercial WordPress Themes Have in Common?

WordPress users enjoy many benefits not necessarily available in other content management systems. The plethora of high quality WordPress themes that users can choose from is more than enough to dress up any website. Whatever type of website you plan to put up, most likely, there is a WordPress theme for it. Here are some of the most common features present in some of the most popular WordPress themes in the market today.

A Great Slider

An effective theme must help create a steady following for your site. It must be able to captivate casual visitors and convert theme into followers that eventually become clients and customers. A slideshow is a great tool that can deliver quick, dramatic visual impact combining the use of images with taglines, spiels, or memes to hook visitor interest. This billboard-like effect gives casual visitors something to spark their curiosity and encourage them to examine and explore your site further. The short attention span this generation has, a slider is an indispensable feature for any website. Popular plugins like Slider Revolution, Layer Slider, Nivo Slider, and Flexslider make the job a whole lot easier.

Parallax and Animation

Once you’ve gotten the attention of visitors, the challenge shifts towards keeping their interest. Perhaps you’ve attended lectures were you came in with excitement about what you could learn only to be disappointed by a boring, uncharismatic instructor whose droning voice put you to sleep. This is analogous to going through great content in boring or even hard to read content. This actually narrows your followers to those who are actually already sold to your content. If your goal is to convert more people to your product or service, the presentation of your content has to facilitate easy reading and assimilation of information. Corporate presentations are often more effective when stats are represented as animated charts and bullets. These actually help executives focus on the items that need to be considered. Having animated bullets and content sections also give focus on items you want your visitors to remember.

Flexible Layout with Drag and Drop Capability

Presenting your content is important in developing your following. While animation helps your audience focus on key points of your content, a sound content structure is still required for visitors to make sense of your site as a whole. Being able to piece together key points into a cohesive body of knowledge will drive home a stronger message to your visitors that will keep them coming for more. To do this, your content has to be organized in such a way that visitors go through important sections in a natural, stress free manner. The natural flow of content will vary according to your audience. Recognizing this, themes that have been designed and devised to respond to the needs of various audiences will bring a higher conversion in terms of subscribers and followers. A lot of themes now include drag and drop page builder features allowing you to assemble your own pages from scratch. Some themes come with ready made layouts for almost any type of site which can be tweaked to meet specific audience needs. Most, if not all, of these themes have powerful options panels and shortcode generators for maximum customization flexibility.

Mobile Friendly

Mobile is a platform that cannot be ignored. Mobile gadgets are part of today’s lifestyle because of the convenience it provides its users. As such, theme designers and developers are forced to confront the peculiarities one encounters when using a mobile device. A theme has to be responsive. This means it has to be able to adjust to give the best possible display regardless of what device you use to browse your site. Theme pages need to have the capability to reorder and resize according to tablet and smartphone displays without sacrificing the beauty of the theme on desktop. In addition to this, special navigation menus for mobile devices must be able to facilitate the interface differences on these devices from desktop. Usually, the Bootstrap framework is a theme author’s go to option to ensure optimal performance on mobile platforms.

Good SEO

No matter how great your site is in terms of content or aesthetics, it must be found by your target audience. Great themes are coded in such away that is friendly to search engines to help land your site on the first few pages of search results. This is accomplished in a number of ways: meta and links, XML sitemaps, RSS Optimization, and Breadcrumb among others. There are numerous options to ensure your site is covered by good SEO measures. Clean code, SEO optimized images and videos, and installing reliable and tested SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, etc. are some of the many SEO practices you can integrate on your site.

Moving to WordPress?

Many website owners start off as casual bloggers, typically on a free platform, and usually not expecting any life-changing thing to happen to their websites. However, life in cyber space is full of surprises and no one can really predict which site will be the next big thing. Some, are fortunate enough to find their match audience and experience reasonable success. This could mean that the free platform might not be enough to contain and sustain the increased volume of traffic and content. Migrating to a more robust and dynamic platform could be the solution.

But what about all the historical content that’s been created? Or what about a test or a private staging site you use for you or a client? If you are moving from a free platform, another WordPress site or any other platform and migrating to a self-hosted WordPresswebsite, here are some tools to help you make the transition as less hairy as possible.

All-in-One WP Migration

All-in-One WP Migration allows you to export your database, media files, plugins, and themes. You can apply unlimited find and replace operations on your database and the plugin will also fix any serialization problems that occur during find/replace operations. It is also the first plugin to offer true mobile experience on WordPress versions 3.3 and up. Features include: multisite compatible, works on Windows OS and IIS.

WP Migrate DB

WP Migrate DB exports your database as a MySQL data dump (much like phpMyAdmin), does a find and replace on URLs and file paths, then allows you to save it to your computer. It is perfect for developers who need to update their local install with fresh data from the production site, or copy their locally developed site to a staging or production server. It also takes into account serialized data (both arrays and objects) and updates the string length values. You can select the tables you want to migrate, pull production db down and replace local db, push local db up and replace production / staging db, enjoy unlimited find & replaces (free is limited to 2), Multisite support, Video walk throughs and how-tos.

WordPress Duplicator

WordPress Duplicator gives WordPress administrators the ability to migrate, copy or clone a site from one location to another. The plugin also serves as a simple backup utility. The Duplicator supports both serialized and base64 serialized string replacement. This tool is great for pulling a production site down onto your local machine for testing and validation. It also works great for developing locally and then pushing up to a production server for a first time site release. Requires above average technical knowledge and not recommended for WordPress beginners.

WordPress Move

WordPress Move is a migration assistant for WordPress that is capable of changing the domain name in use and/or migrating your installation to another server either as is or based on your choices. You can use WordPress Move to transfer your database or create backups of your installation.

Site Push

SitePush is a WordPress plugin that allows you to have multiple versions of your WordPress site, so you can edit, develop, test without any risk to your main, live site. It’s great for developers, designers and editors or anyone who wants to be able to test changes to a site before it is visible to the world. You can easily easily move content between sites, test new themes and plugins – all in a private staging site, and you can also test and easily push new code on to a live site.

Google Author Rank – Does Google Know You?

Building an authority site is much like pursuing a traditional career. The only difference is the arena. For the web professional, the career path is via the digital workplace. In the not so distant past, Google’s ranking results came from SEO tactics that were not always reflective of the quality and the value of the websites that managed to achieve the #1 SERP spot. Keyword stuffing, thin content, excessive backlinking, and other techniques pushed websites to the top while other legitimate, high quality, killer content websites suffered in obscurity several Gooooooogle pages away. False authority.

Fast forward to today, after numerous pagerank casualties from several algorithm updates – the Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird – Google has managed to steer the internet bull by its horns and is slowly making it ‘behave’. Generally, websites that employ black hat SEO tactics and other non-Google approved techniques get ‘slapped’, while on the other hand, legitimate websites get rewarded. The playing field is slowly being leveled. The name of the game today is author rank. Google has been slowly implementing it and so should you.

Author Rank, Google Authorship, Google+, and rel=author

Othar Hansson describes the rel=author markup as an HTML5 link attribute saying that the other side of this link represents the author of that page where the link is coming from. What will you get when you implement rel=author ? Your photo may show up next to the search engine results. Hansson says that Google uses it to provide authorship information and that it also hopes to use this markup information as a ranking signal. This markup will also provide information regarding credibility and knowledgeability of authors – hopefully creating a feeling of trustworthiness regarding their posts & sites.

Tips on how to implement rel=author on WordPress:

  • Make sure you’re using the latest version. If your template allows a byline with an author URL, this will let you add rel=”author” to your post byline.
  • If your blog has an About page, you can modify its link to include rel=”author”.
  • If rel=”author” is disappearing from your profile page, you can enable rel=”author” in author bios.

(source: Google Webmaster)

You can also choose to install a WordPress authorship plugin like Google Author Link to make it easier and simpler to manage your Google Authorship links.

Google’s webmasters blog states,

Google is piloting the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content. This feature is being rolled out gradually and will be implemented algorithmically, so author information will not always display in search results.

To identify the author of a blog or article, Google checks for a connection between the content page (such as an article), an author page, and a Google Profile. Authorship markup uses the rel attribute (part of the open HTML5 standard) in links to indicate the relationship between a content page and an author page.

A rich profile is not only a great way to share information with users, but it also gives Google information we need to better identify you as the author of web content.

You can setup your Google author profile using Google Plus. This will help you build your reputation as an established author and will help put your site on the map. Once you establish your credibility, anything associated with you will be considered trustworthy and worth paying attention to. This will trigger Google to notice you and it tells them you are someone who knows and writes quality content – an authority or expert – on a particular subject and will eventually result in better SERP ranking results and higher CTR for you and your website.

Check out this interesting article – Author Rank by AJ Kohn.

Tech WordPress Themes July 2013

Technology has one of the fastest turnovers in terms of design and features. If you are into technology and the latest tech products out there, show them off on your website on an equally tech-savvy looking theme like these WordPress themes we’ve found:

Host Depot

Host Depot is a theme designed for modern hosting and server services. It has a built-in layer slider that allows you to do 170 3D and 2D hardware accelerated transitions to catch the eye of visitors. The theme also has a hassle-free and easy to use pricing table editor. Host Depot integrates well with WHMCS to give you seamless processing of your financial and logistic transactions. You can easily set-up forums on your site with the bbPress plugin. HostDepot is indeed a great solution for those in the web hosting business.

Elegant Hosting

Elegant Hosting is a sleek WordPress theme designed for web hosting services. The main strength of this theme is the easy to manage hosting plan tables. This theme has a special feature to add hosting plans right at the admin panel. With the plans displayed side by side, comparison may conveniently be done by potential customers. You can customize the theme with shortcodes to create the look most appropriate to your marketing efforts. Theme also comes with a slider which will be useful in marketing.

Appland

Appland Premium Theme is a WordPress theme designed for promoting your hottest app. Built on the powerful Twitter Bootstrap, this theme is designed to work well on mobile devices incorporating touch gestures that works even on the Flexslider. Appland also has amazing eye-catching 3D parallax effects to help you keep visitors glued to your site. Customization is easy with the plethora of design options and features such as using the shortcode generator, available Google fonts, the quick uploader feature, awesome icons, and so much more. Appland is responsive fitting for a theme designed for mobile.

Mega Host

Mega Host Premium WordPress Theme is an impressive and modern theme designed for virtual hosting services. Although primarily designed for web hosting, this theme includes all the necessary features to build a corporate website as well. A notable feature of this theme is that it is built on twitter bootstrap, making it more mobile device friendly. Its advanced admin panel and its CSS design make it easy to customize. Mega Host is also built for retina-ready devices giving you sharp stunning images on these devices.

Rocking Parallax

Create that interactive effect with this stunning WordPress Theme – Rocking Parallax a WordPress theme especially designed to showcase your iPhone apps. This theme makes a great one page solution to your marketing needs. This theme’s awesome parallax 3d effects will definitely make your apps shine. It features many design elements that allow you to create countless mix and match combinations and layouts that will match your design aesthetics. Rocking Parallax Premium WordPress Theme is the perfect tool for marketing and promoting your iPhone apps.

Apley

Mobile apps are one of the hottest ways to make it big in the market. The influx of free and paid apps flooding the market is an indicator of what people are interested in nowadays. Apley Mobile WordPress Page is a clean and modern theme designed to showcase mobile apps. The elegant black, minimalist features suggests the theme’s affinity to most mobile devices. It has an easy to use WordPress customizer to help you tweak the theme according to your preferences. Apley also has a fully working blog, a custom homepage, a custom subscribe form, a shortcodes plugin to help you customize in minutes, and many more features.

Cloud Hoster

Cloud Hoster is a professional looking WordPress theme designed to promote your web hosting and server services. This theme is equipped with the popular Revolution Slider so you can create stunning slideshows with different and customizable transitions to grab the attention of casual visitors. Cloud Hoster also has a unique two color blog which can be configured at the backend. Shortcodes give you the power to customize and stylize this theme with ease.
This responsive theme is also built on twitter bootstrap with advanced API features to help your site look good on mobile devices and ensure a pleasant browsing experience for your users.

Awesome New Themes for June 2013

Orange Core

If you’re looking for a theme that can do a lot to meet what a host of clients need then you definitely want to check out Orange Core. This multi-purpose theme is great for business and corporate sites although it does have excellent portfolio capabilities too. Awesome presentations may be done using the panoramic full-width homepage slider. Built in pricing tables, service pages, column variations and other page templates included are great tools necessary in building business and corporate sites. Orange core can be a great way for potential customers to get information about your business using these features. Orange Core is optimized for mobile and touch screen devices and is built on twitter bootstrap.

Vernum

Vernum is a clean, modern and powerful One Page Parallax theme that can virtually be what you want it to be. This theme has a drag and drop page builder to help you create the pages you want. Vernum also uses the parallax effect for added drama as you scroll down the page. In addition to these, Vernum uses retina ready graphics, is responsive, has great blog and portfolio capabilities, and uses CSS3 animations. It is flexible enough to meet the demands of websites of different kinds.

WP Education

WP Education is a premium theme designed for schools and educational institutions. Many educational institutions suffer from unimpressive websites. WP Education is a viable solution to add that professional air to any academic institution. Aside from the normal blog and gallery capabilities, schools can use this theme as an administrative and organizational tool to publish available courses, their descriptions and comments, and even process applications from prospective students.

Universfolio

Universfolio is a responsive multipurpose theme you can use for business or for pleasure. Whether it’s a corporate website, a personal blog or a creative portfolio, Universfolio has something for you. The theme uses the popular and powerful Revolution Slider to give you stunning slide transitions and layered 3d effects. This allows you to present eye catching slideshows to make casual visitors stay on your site longer. The theme also has awesome portfolio and blog page templates to showcase your work and keep visitors up to date with what’s going on. Universfolio is WooCommerce ready giving your site extra ecommerce capabilities.

JP Animated vCard Theme

JP is a cool and modern vCard WordPress theme for the creative professional. It’s got everything you need to create a good first impression on visitors, current clients, and potential clients. It’s simple and clean menu system allows you to navigate through the whole site without much fuss. It includes a great portfolio that allows you to showcase images, videos and other media projects on your site for interested parties to look at. You also have a blog page so visitors can get an insight on how you approach projects and tasks. This theme also has a Services Page and a Contact Page for those interested in hiring your services.

Lambo Photography Theme

If you are a photographer wanting to setup your own website or wanting to revitalize your existing one, check out Lambo. Lambo Premium WordPress Theme gives you special ways of showcasing your photos and images. This theme is perfect for the photographer or graphic artist who wants his/her work presented to potential clients artistically. The theme’s homepage slider is designed so that the graphic gives you the semblance that you are looking through a lens. The full screen slider presents your works in a choice of sliders including one with the popular Ken Burns effect.

Realia

Realia Premium WordPress Theme is a real estate and property rental theme ideal for real estate agents, brokers and professionals. This theme allows you to manage properties for sale or for rent so that potential buyers can go to your site and look for the property they desire and easily find it. This google map integrated theme allows visitors to search according to location based on defined filters like: number of baths, price, whether for sale or for rent. This theme has a dedicated page for each property with a description, an image gallery and a google map indicating its location. An inquiry form is conveniently located on the sidebar to facilitate contact with a broker. Property owners can submit their properties for sale. Theme supports IDX infrastructure trusted by professionals in the real estate industry.

Foxy WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes Is Here

Foxy Premium WordPress Theme is one of the latest releases by Elegant Themes and it is foxy indeed. This theme combines beautiful design with powerful function all in one neat little package. With all the features this premium theme has, it could very well be your one stop shop WordPress theme for business websites.

Whatever you are looking for in a WordPress theme, this one has it with a little bit more. You get all the page templates you need to set up great portfolio pages, a blog, an image gallery, a sitemap, an advanced search page, and a contact form. Not only do you have all these flexible and customizable templates useful for corporate or portfolio websites, you also get built-in e-commerce capabilities that take your website up another notch.

What’s in the box? A look at the homepage and you can tell the well thought out design process that the theme went through. The use of vibrant colors and elegant text layout are enticing and encourage interactivity. The homepage slider beautiful and functional and gives you a platform to throw out your message and get casual visitors to stay a bit longer. Text boxes for summaries are adequately spaced and can be used as tools to develop interest in your business and your products. A strategically located sign-up button is useful in building a loyal customer base. Built in shortcodes also give you flexibility to customize the theme even further with design elements such as tabs, columns, colored boxes, etc.

Foxy Premium WordPress Theme fully integrates ecommerce functionality and is compatible with the WooCommerce plugin, giving you an elegant yet fully functional e-commerce solution right out of the box. This theme runs on HTML5/CSS3, is also localized for easy translation, is responsive and looks beautiful even on handheld devices.

Features:

  • Responsive Design
  • Theme Options
  • Shortcodes
  • Page Templates
  • Unlimited Color Schemes
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Complete Localization

Foxy Premium WordPress Theme includes perpetual updates, unparalleled support, and access more than 81 high quality WordPress themes included in every Elegant Themes membership.

Get Foxy And 81 More Themes for $39

Specialty: Clean Business WordPress Theme

The main purpose of a business theme is to create awareness, generate interest, and convert casual visitors to engaged followers/clients/customers. For a business theme to be effective, it has to have the following elements:

  • Great SEO capabilities.
  • Great design recall.
  • Readable, well organized text and multimedia content.
  • Effective interactive feedback system.

WP Business Bundle just released Specialty, a responsive premium WordPress theme designed to present your business or your company in a clear and concise manner. Overall, the theme is clean, modern and generous with whitespace. It has a great, sizeable slider that can really grab attention of casual visitors. Visitors are given control over slider transitions which gives each slide the appropriate airtime based on visitor preference.

Content is definitely readable on this theme. Font size and spacing between text boxes are great, giving visitors an uncluttered, relaxed reading experience. Images are displayed in a clean, well organized portfolio grid style which can also be sorted according to category. There’s also the option to use a jQuery masonry layout for those who want that Pinterest look. Thumbnails are slightly bigger that typical portfolio pages giving visitors a better overview of the work. Pages containing detailed narratives include large images of the work. This theme can also handle video and it includes a large section where you can showcase a special video or image right on the homepage.

Specialty does have a responsive design giving visitors the chance to appreciate the site’s content on smartphones and tablets. Specialty includes a basic contact form, custom post types, an easy to use custom panel, and just the right amount of widgets and features to get your site up and running without much fuss.

More Features:

  • Import/Export Functionality for Theme Options
  • Seven Pre-Defined Color Schemes
  • Breadcrumb Navigation
  • Adjustable Footer Widget Area (1-4 Columns)
  • Custom Post Types: Slider | Portfolio |Testimonial
  • Engaging Portfolio Layout with jQuery Masonry
  • HTML5 Markup | CSS3 Effects

Specialty Premium WordPress Theme is part of a bundle of themes and business-tailored plugins at WP Business Bundle available starting from $79. This theme includes documentation, future updates. For an additional $9 per month, you also get the PSD files, XML files, and access to the theme’s support forum.

Join WP Business Bundle Now

Magazine WordPress Themes 2013: Trends

One of the usual challenges of online newspapers or magazines is streamlining content in a more readable and user friendly format. Because of the verbose or content-heavy nature of these sites, careful thought needs to be made in creating a theme layout that employs clever typography skills and information management techniques to create content that is readable and easy on the eye. Visual cues need to deliberately designed and strategically placed to draw attention to the most important sections of the site despite being bombarded by tons of images and information all at the same time. Because we are living in the digital age, careful thought and consideration also needs to be given to the never ending technological race to release the latest device or gadget where these websites will be accessed.

In light of all that, we think that Magazine WordPress Themes will continue to see improvements and changes in the following areas:

Easy to Implement, Clean, and Streamlined Design with an Emphasis on Readability

A well organized layout eliminates clutter and confusion and creates a pleasant navigational experience for visitors. This creates the impression that the people behind the publication are professionals and consequently adds credibility to the magazine’s reputation. Carefully chosen fonts and font sizes also add to the overall readability of the site and will hopefully encourage casual readers to become loyal subscribers.

Drag and Drop Features

Every publication is different. Each one has specific requirements based on their own reader base. Some formats may work for a certain season but become dated in the next. Magazine WordPress themes should be flexible enough to handle different layout configurations without much ado. One viable solution is to integrate a Drag and Drop feature to give website owners flexibility to reconfigure their websites and switch design elements around easily.

Single Page Templates

One of the benefits and yet at the same time one of the disadvantages of a magazine styled theme is that more content is featured on the front page. The homepage is filled with images and content to gain maximum exposure and accessibility. Perhaps more and more Magazine WordPress Themes will be designed with alternative options to use infinite scrolling single page templates to ensure that all posts will be given equal amount of exposure. This also eliminates the need for more clicks from visitors.

Responsive Layouts

The mobile web revolution has forever changed the way people access the internet. Online publications hosted on WordPress should be responsive or have that option available to them. Devices and gadgets are constantly evolving therefore Magazine WordPress themes need to be in step or be able to adapt to these technological changes quickly.

Search Engine Optimized, Affiliate, and Ad Ready

The lifeblood of print publications is in advertising. The same holds true for online publications. As these websites increase in size and readership, more and more resources are required to maintain it like hosting space, multiple authors and contributors, maintenance costs, etc. Magazine WordPress Themes authors need to design with these considerations in mind and give WP theme users backend options to monetize the site. Provision for and management of ad blocks or affiliate links should be standard built-in features already.

Rating and Review System

People love to voice their opinions and having this feature built into a Magazine WordPress theme encourages interactivity. This helps increase site traffic and later on adds credibility and authority which is translates into higher ranking sites as well.

Translation Ready

The Internet is an international marketplace represented by people from all around the world. Magazine WordPress themes need to be translation ready to take advantage of the untapped global target market.

The digital revolution has already eaten up a great chunk of the print generation but there is still room for growth. Although there are some printed materials that digital can never replace, those that can, will definitely benefit from this paperless trend we are seeing.

CSSIgniter Goes After Elegant Themes

In September 2010, CSSIgniter started churning out Premium WordPress themes for the WordPress community. What was intended to be a side project to augment the founders’ day jobs didn’t bring in the cash they were hoping for.

Early this year, CSSIgniter put some focus and resources to keep its creative engines running consistently. In the last 7 months, this developer has released 16 new themes, half of its existing inventory of 29. A closer look at their last 7 releases show how they have significantly up their game by joining the responsive bandwagon and now this dynamic development team of 4 is now cooking up their 2nd responsive e-commerce theme.

CSSIgniter offers members a year’s access to its catalogue of themes for the price of $39. This brings them in direct competition with Elegant Themes who offers similar access to its members at the same price. What differentiates CSSIgniter is its willingness to give out PSD files to all its members. Elegant Themes gives out these files to its Developer members who pay $89 annually. While Elegant Themes continues to create stunning, highly functional, easy to use themes, CSSIgniter isn’t far behind. Considering the bold shifts in pace and design the Greek quartet have taken in the last few months, it would not be surprising to find their products standing toe to toe with Elegant Themes in the very near future. Their Aegean Resort Theme now offers visuals which can be developed to generate the stunning effect of Elegant’s Gleam.

CSSIgniter still has to master how to showcase their work on their website. A casual visitor, would probably find their Theme descriptions too concise in comparison the level of detail one finds on Elegant Theme’s website. To offset this, CSSIgniter may consider including video introductions as part of the live demo similar to the video introduction on their blog post to introduce Femme.

CSSIgniter appears to be beyond the stage of ignition and is now beginning to burn up really bright. We looking forward to the next releases of this rising star among the current WordPress premium theme providers community.

Check Out CSSIgniter