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.

Best WordPress Themes 2021

UPDATED April 12, 2021: 2021 is sure to be another great year for WordPress Theme development. Like the millions and millions of people using WordPress, we eagerly await the Themes and Plugins to be released this year, and you can …

WordPress 3.9 – Jimmy Smith

If you haven’t updated your WordPress version yet, now would be the perfect time to do so. WordPress has just released WordPress 3.9 and as it has been tradition, this release was named after another music legend, jazz organist Jimmy Smith.

As was posted in a previous article, WP 3.9 includes many refinements that will improve the multimedia experience of both site owner and site visitors. Check out the features below:

WordPress 3.9 Key Features

Improved visual editing

The updated visual editor has improved speed, accessibility, and mobile support. You can paste into the visual editor from your word processor without wasting time to clean up messy styling.

Edit images easily

With quicker access to crop and rotation tools, it’s now much easier to edit your images while editing posts. You can also scale images directly in the editor to find just the right fit.

Drag and drop your images

Uploading your images is easier than ever. Just grab them from your desktop and drop them in the editor.

Gallery previews

Galleries display a beautiful grid of images right in the editor, just like they do in your published post.

Do more with audio and video

Images have galleries; They’ve added simple audio and video playlists, so you can showcase your music and clips.

Live widget and header previews

Add, edit, and rearrange your site’s widgets right in the theme customizer. Preview your changes live and only save them when you’re ready. The improved header image tool also lets you upload, crop, and manage headers while customizing your theme.

Stunning new theme browser

WordPress 3.9 comes with the beautiful new theme browser – Twenty Fourteen.

(source: WordPress.org News)

WordPress 3.9 is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard.
ETA: WordPress 3.9.1 update is now available

WordPress News Roundup 2013 – The Year That Was

Here are some of the top WordPress stories that made 2013 one of the most exciting years in WordPress history:

  • The release of the Twenty Thirteen default WordPress theme. The 2013 theme for WordPress takes us back to the blog, featuring a full range of post formats, each displayed beautifully in their own unique way.
  • The release of the Twenty Fourteen WordPress theme. This default theme lets you create a responsive magazine website with a sleek, modern design, feature your favorite homepage content in either a grid or a slider, use the three widget areas to customize your website, and change your content’s layout with a full-width page template and a contributor page to show off your authors.
  • Automattic acquires Cloudup, a company founded to easily share videos, photos, music, links, and docs.

The release of the last few WordPress versions, particularly 3.8, marks the beginning of a new era using the plugin-first development process. The ongoing commitment of the WordPress community to come up with better and more responsive software raises the bar and expectations for a more exciting new year ahead.

Hello world. Hello 2014!

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.

Portfolio WordPress Themes for December 2013

Gear up for the year-end and display your holiday photos or your best creative work with these flexible and dynamic portfolio WordPress themes for you or your clients. Check these out:

Sonnet – One Page Parallax Multipurpose Portfolio

Sonnet Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and streamlined One page Parallax Responsive Business Template built with Bootstrap 3.0.2, HTM5 & CSS3. This flat, easy to customize theme with its well-placed content blocks boasts of professional coding as its core power. Also included are Visual Composer – the most popular & powerful drag and drop layout builder for WordPress, a powerful section editor, responsive grid portfolio plugin – Megafolio, Zilla Shortcode, a Pricing Table manager among others. This premium theme supports Automated Plugin management and even includes a demo content importer which will let you build the site with dummy content in a second.

Mocha Flat Bold WordPress Portfolio Theme

Mocha Premium WordPress Theme is a unique and bold portfolio WordPress that is aesthetically clean, flat, minimalist in design ideal for any design agency, creative professional, freelance designer, photographer, or anyone in the creative industry wanting to make a good impression on clients. It’s very flexible and is powered with Bootstrap framework. This premium WordPress theme has advanced theme options with unlimited styling options, unlimited colors, 500+ Google Fonts, a Visual Shortcode manager, and tons of other features to help you fully customize your website. This premium theme is WordPress 3.6 and 3.7 compliant.

Mercury Responsive Portfolio Photography Theme

Mercury Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, minimalist parallax style portfolio theme that can be used for any portfolio, photography or business website. Features include responsive design which adapts to mobile devices (iPhone, iPad) and can be deactivated with one click in your backend, it is retina ready for ultra-sharp high resolution graphics, sticky main menu navigation, off-canvas mobile navigation, drag & drop content builder, 20 gallery templates, 6 portfolio templates, filterable portfolios, instant AJAX search, Music support for gallery pages, Password Protected Gallery Support, Image Gallery Comments Support, Fullscreen Youtube and Vimeo video support, and a whole lot more.

Upward: Experimental Portfolio & Blog

Upward Premium WordPress Theme is a unique experimental responsive, retina-ready WordPress theme using pseudo-elements to create a distinct presentation style on original browsers (Firefox and Chrome) unlike any other theme. Usually, non-original browsers (like Safari for Windows) do not support anti-aliasing of pseudo-elements. Also, not all browsers support CSS3 animation completely, thus some part of animation isn’t available in IE8-9, Safari and Opera. Other than that, this premium theme includes important features like: light and dark skins, post/page options, powerful visual shortcodes, unlimited sidebars, unlimited fonts, and so much more.

Nervaq – Responsive One Page WordPress Theme

Nervaq Premium WordPress Theme is a fully responsive Ajax-powered, parallax one page portfolio template with a modern, clean and minimalistic design ideal for creative agencies, designers, freelance creatives, and those in the creative industry. This premium theme is highly optimized for both mobile and desktop platforms, it uses lazy-loading of images assets and compression of all required scripts. Other features include: Drag and drop gallery management, localization ready, and is built on a full OOP , modular, load-on-demand, WordPress framework.

Grido: Responsive and Multipurpose Grid Portfolio

Grido Premium WordPress Theme is a minimalistic theme ideal for creative professionals that love flat and clean design. Its stunning design and layout capabilities with excellent color (ten preset) and typographic choices will give your portfolio the attention that it deserves. This premium responsive theme is highly customizable using the dedicated control panel and is a highly flexible and widgetized theme, packed with WordPress features such as post-formats, page templates, custom widgets, shortcodes, including important features specifically designed for it. It is also Themelovin plugins compatible: Themelovin Dribbble, Themelovin Portfolio, Themelovin Shortcodes, Themelovin Team, Themelovin TwitterIt.

Dirty Saloon – A Rugged One Page WordPress Theme

Dirty Saloon Premium WordPress Theme is a Cowboy Western-inspired premium responsive Theme that will surely make you hold your horses. This unique, flexible, and freshly designed theme features innovative AJAX loading of Posts and Portfolio items which can be turned on and off on demand with one click in Page Builder. It features a premium Aqua Page Builder for easy creation of new pages for your site.The theme also comes with a Revolution Slider, a convenient Administration panel, and many more.

Running Out of Content? Content Curation Might Be Your Answer

Have you ever gone down a supermarket aisle and just labored at the thought of choosing which cereal box to choose from the dozens and dozens of flavors right before you? Or what about a candy store? A bag shop? A book store? Having so many choices can be pretty overwhelming.

Imagine the Internet is as wide and as deep as the Pacific Ocean – filled with letters, words, images, music, videos, games, information, spam, bacon, and everything else you can think of. All this content begging for you attention and yet you don’t know where to start, which to choose. So many choices. In the end, you end up with nothing. What if someone filtered out all the stuff irrelevant to you and presented you with the best of the content you are interested in and then served it to you on a silver platter? Convenient, don’t you think? This process of sorting through the vast majority of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful way is called Content Curation. (Neil Patel, Kiss Metrics)

What is Content Curation?

Content curation is hand selecting content created by other sources and sharing them with your community. Best done when whoever is curating adds their own explanation for sharing, reaction or opinions.
– C.C. Chapman author of Amazing Things Will Happen and co-author of Content Rules.

According to Michael Kolowich of KnowledgeVision,

Content curation is a way to view the world through an expert’s eyes. A great curator selects from a great many sources, is clear on mission and scope, is consistent on selection criteria (“most thoughtful”, “most original”, “funniest”, “latest”), adds value with indexing and/or commentary, gives credit where credit is due, and shares generously with his/her sources.

“… Content curation also pulls from many sources. However, instead of automatically posting every piece of content pulled in there is a manual filtering and sorting process that takes place in order to select only the most valuable pieces of content for a given audience. Curation also involves adding helpful annotation that frames the information already provided from the original source in such a way as to add additional value and/or understanding.” – (source: Nathan Weller, ManageWP)

We know that the name of the game today is delivering high quality relevant content on a regular basis. Google demands this. Google rewards this. Unfortunately, the reality is, your content creativity well can sometimes run dry. And when that happens what do you do? Many websites turn to content curation. Is it a valid option?

At SXSW 2013, WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg stated that content curation along with long form content would be one of the key areas of focus for his company in the future.

Of course there will always be detractors and those who will argue against it in favor of original content creation and this is normal. However, websites will benefit when content curation is layered with content creation – adding a different dimension and variety to the usual fare being dished out.

Curation tools, websites, and plugins are readily available and have made it simple and easy for anyone to curate content and distribute it within seconds. If you are interested in integrating content curation into your WordPress site, check out one of the more popular ones, Primal for WordPress to help you get started in the right direction in no time.

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.

Excellent Resources for Free and Premium Micro Stock Video Footage

Video is an excellent visual eyecatcher making it an effective marketing tool. It generates curiosity and is a perfect hook to grabbing the attention of website visitors. If you are not so video savvy or simply don’t have the time to shoot videos yourself, here are some outstanding resources for micro stock video footage for your website.

Videohive

VideoHive is an Envato Marketplace where you can buy and sell royalty-free footage and motion graphics, After Effects Project files, motion graphics, and dvd menus starting at just a few dollars. Items are priced on the complexity, quality and use of the file. You can also get a free featured video file monthly when you sign up. Registration is free.

Pond5

Pond5 is a stock media marketplace with over 1.9M stock video footage to choose from. Prices start at $5 for video which tend to be among the lowest in the industry because they are are set by the artists themselves who earn a much higher percentage than they do elsewhere. Free weekly stock video clips.

iStock by Getty Images

iStock started with just a handful of photos in 2000 but now offer vector illustrations, videos, music and sound effects. All iStock files are royalty-free1, which means you only have to pay once to use the file multiple times. iStock has 3 types of licenses : standard, editorial use only, and extended license for all their multi media stock. Free video given away monthly.

Sony Pictures Stock Footage

Sony Pictures Stock Footage is the stock footage arm of Sony Pictures Entertainment, provides advertisers, corporate video producers, and entertainment productions access to over 120,000 stock footage clips. All of the clips in the Sony Stock Footage collection were originally filmed for Sony Pictures feature films (Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures, Screen Gems, & Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) and Sony Pictures Television productions (previously known as Columbia TriStar Television). Sony Stock Footage content is available on 35mm, HD and any other digital format. Sony Pictures Stock Footage offers a wide range of rights managed clips with pricing determined by the exact licensing terms you require for your production.

Video Blocks

VideoBlocks.com is a subscription-based (monthly) website that provides members with unlimited downloads of stock video, motion backgrounds, production music, sound effects, special effects, After Effects templates and much more. Instead of charging per download, members are given unlimited access and are allowed unlimited download rights to royalty free multi media clips that can be used on all types of video productions and projects.

Fotolia

Fotolia is the first worldwide microstock organization to offer both crowdsourced and professional images on one site. Their crowdsourced library includes millions of royalty-free images, vectors, illustrations and video footage clips. All video footage clips on Fotolia are royalty free, and can be added to your commercials and presentations without time limits or restrictions on the number of copies you distribute. Fotolia requires you to use your credits to download images, vector illustrations and video footage. You can also download with a subscription plan and benefit from amazing volume discounts.