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.

Heartbleed Could Affect Your WordPress Site

A critical OpenSSL vulnerability nicknamed “Heartbleed” was discovered recently and you need to know whether your information could be impacted. What is Heartbleed anyway?

What is Heartbleed

The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. SSL/TLS provides communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as web, email, instant messaging (IM) and some virtual private networks (VPNs). (source – Heartbleed.com)

Basic Things You Should Know About Heartbleed and OpenSSL

  • The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software.
  • OpenSSL is a library that provides cryptographic functionality to applications such as secure web servers. Be sure to read the documentation of the application you want to use. The INSTALL file explains how to install this library. OpenSSL is based on the SSLeay library developed by Eric A. Young and Tim J. Hudson and the OpenSSL toolkit is licensed under an Apache-style licence which basically means that you are free to get and use it for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
  • The Heartbleed bug compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content.
  • The Heartbleed bug allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.
  • The Heartbleed bug is not a design flaw in SSL/TLS protocol specification. It is an implementation problem, i.e. programming mistake in popular OpenSSL library that provides cryptographic services such as SSL/TLS to the applications and services.

Should You Be Concerned?

Encryption is the process of encoding messages or information in such a way that only authorized parties can read it. Encryption doesn’t prevent hacking but it reduces the likelihood that the hacker will be able to read the data that is encrypted. Encryption is used to protect secrets that may harm your privacy or security if they leak. This bug has compromised secrets in four categories:

  • The Heartbleed bug leaked primary key material – the crown jewels – the encryption keys themselves. Leaked secret keys allows the attacker to decrypt any past and future traffic to the protected services and to impersonate the service at will.
  • The Heartbleed bug leaked secondary key material – the user credentials (user names and passwords) used in the vulnerable services.
  • The Heartbleed bug leaked protected content – actual content like personal or financial details, private communication such as emails or instant messages, documents or anything seen worth protecting by encryption handled by the vulnerable services
  • The Heartbleed bug leaked collateral – Leaked collateral are other details that have been exposed to the attacker in the leaked memory content. These may contain technical details such as memory addresses and security measures such as canaries used to protect against overflow attacks. These have only contemporary value and will lose their value to the attacker when OpenSSL has been upgraded to a fixed version.

OpenSSL is the most popular open source cryptographic library and TLS (transport layer security) implementation used to encrypt traffic on the Internet. You may be directly or indirectly affected if your popular social site, your company’s site, commerce site, hobby site, site you install software from or even sites run by your government might be using vulnerable OpenSSL.

Users of OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f with the heartbeat extension enabled are affected. OpenSSL 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f (inclusive) are vulnerable

OpenSSL version 1.0.1g addresses the vulnerability, as well as OpenSSL instances compiled without the heartbeat extension.

What You Can Do

  • If you are not using OpenSSL on your servers (or are not hosted on one of our Shared hosting plans), you are not affected.
  • If you do use OpenSSL, identify which servers are running OpenSSL (versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f are affected).
  • Update to the latest patched version of the software (1.0.1g), or recompile OpenSSL without the heartbeat extension, if applicable.
  • Reissue any SSL certificates on affected web servers after moving to a patched version of OpenSSL.
  • Test your SSL installations. You can also test your site here: http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/
  • Revoke any certificates that were replaced. Please revoke AFTER the reissue has been completed and you have successfully installed it on your web server.
  • Consider resetting end-user passwords that may have been visible in a compromised server memory.

Helpful Resources regarding Heartbleed

It is wise to take all the necessary precautions but without allowing panic to come in. Learn all you can and act accordingly.

Finding and Establishing your own Niche WordPress “Channel”

The recently held digital marketing conference Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 was an eye opener to many. Many of the topics discussed were cutting edge and one of the main buzz words that came out of the conference was “channelization”.

The Channelization of Everything

What do we mean when we say “channelization”? Here’s an interesting way to look at it.

Rivers come in lots of different shapes and sizes, but they all have some things in common. All rivers and streams start at some high point. The high point can be a mountain, hill or other elevated area. Water from some source like a spring, snowmelt or a lake starts at this high point and begins to flow down to lower points. As the water flows down, it may pick up more water from other small streams, springs or or from rain or snow melt. These streams may slowly join together to form a larger stream or river. Small rivers and streams may join together to become larger rivers. Eventually all this water from rivers and streams will run into the ocean or an inland body of water like a lake.

River engineering is the process of planned human intervention in the course, characteristics or flow of a river with the intention of producing some defined benefit. People have intervened in the natural course and behaviour of rivers since before recorded history – to manage the water resources, to protect against flooding or to make passage along or across rivers easier.

Channelization of a stream may be undertaken for several reasons. One is to make a stream more suitable for navigation or for navigation by larger vessels with deep draughts. Another is to restrict water to a certain area of a stream’s natural bottom lands so that the bulk of such lands can be made available for agriculture. A third reason is flood control, with the idea of giving a stream a sufficiently large and deep channel so that flooding beyond those limits will be minimal or nonexistent, at least on a routine basis.
(source: Wikipedia)

In today’s digital market, how then, does this concept apply to finding or even creating your own niche WordPress stream or channel?

Let’s take a look:

Product distribution (or place) is one of the four elements of the marketing mix. Distribution is the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user, using direct means, or using indirect means with intermediaries. The other three parts of the marketing mix are product, pricing, and promotion. Distribution of products takes place by means of channels. Channels are sets of interdependent organisations (called intermediaries) involved in making the product available for consumption.

Today’s digital economy is shifting towards “channelization” – the way products are made available for public consumption. Because of the way business is evolving, what worked years ago may no longer work today. What was effective yesterday may already be obsolete today. Interestingly enough, starting your own business and distributing your own products has never been easier. However, the challenge of independent business owners or new players in the eCommerce arena is being discovered and being able to establish their own loyal market base. Creating your own stream or river from scratch is like pushing a boulder uphill everyday. This is where the shifting or the channelization occurs.

Today, the traditional trader can start off his business by taking advantage of these established “high starting points of distribution” like Amazon or Ebay, plug in to their channel, utilize their structure and distribution network to launch or introduce a new product or project.These powerful distribution channels have significant traffic and extensive networking connections to give your business a boost in the right direction. Once the channel is strong enough and the customer base is established, the business owner can spin off and establish his own business base according to his own terms. On the other hand, DIY-ers and boutique type businesses can create their own online stores in niche channels like Etsy. Other types of businesses can use other distribution channels such as KickStarter, AngelList, CafePress or Barkbox. How to get started? All it takes is to register.

What about digital goods such as WordPress Themes, Plugins and other types of digital products? New players in the WordPress themes business have found opportunities to introduce themselves and pool their work portfolio through established WordPress marketplaces or “channels” like ThemeForest with very little startup capital. The key, really, is to draw a loyal crowd or “traffic”, establish connections, and service them so that their conversion as long-term customers or customers for life will be cemented.

Bottomline, in today’s digital economy, having a good product is great, knowing your distribution channels is better, but having a good product + distributing thru the right channels + creating the media (email lists of customers) = the best starting point for you to build your own niche business and your brand.

30 Realistic and Inspirational 3D Artworks 2013

Some people believe that genius is something intrinsic, something inherent within a man and genius cannot be taught. You cannot be trained to become a genius. For e.g. you cannot be trained to paint like Da Vinci. Although this notion is true but some people take it far too seriously. Some students skip classes because they think that traditional education will tamper with their natural instincts. Others try to start a business without reading a single business book. Of course these people are flawed in their thinking. Albert Einstein once said – “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” So you see success has two parts. One is learning the rules of the game and the other one is playing better than others. This former aspect, learning the rules of your trade, can be trained and taught.

Below I have collected 30 artworks for those artists who want to learn the rules of art. These artworks are not genre specific. They vary from the children’s comic character The Incredible Hulk to the portrait of a simple innocent girl, from the picture of a super hero to Ibn Tulun Mosque. So scroll down and enjoy.

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25 Basic Adobe Lightroom Tutorials for Learners

The phrase “photo editing” has become synonymous with “Adobe Photoshop”. Photoshop is the industry leader when it comes to editing images. But one drawback of Photoshop is that a designer needs a good amount of coaching before he can use Photoshop properly. A coaching center near my house promises to teach Photoshop in 2 months to the layman. Not everybody will be willing to invest two months to learn a photo editing software, especially when one does not intend to choose photo designing as a career.

Understanding this problem, Adobe has designed another software named Adobe Lightroom to help even the general public to easily edit images. To quote Adobe’s website – “Lightroom includes all the tools you need for most digital photography tasks in one intuitive solution. Lightroom helps photographers work faster and more efficiently with one image, a set of images, or a large image library.”

When I stated that Lightroom can be used for the general public I don’t mean that one can begin using it merely after installing it. Obviously you need to have some guidance to use the software properly. Therefore, in this blog post, I have collected a list of 25 excellent tutorials on how to use Lightroom properly and get desired results.

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