Comment Management Solutions for WordPress

Who doesn’t love Spam? We’ve consumed cans and cans of this comfort food and we never get tired of it. Unfortunately, spam has become synonymous with what the internet hates the most – especially by bloggers. Too much of it is just pretty hard to ignore.

Comments – Love ’em. Hate ’em.

Admit it. When you started out blogging, you would check your blog everyday to see if someone left you a comment on your post. AND, you were absolutely thrilled when someone actually did. Never mind that it wasn’t from some popular blogger or someone famous. Someone left a comment. Hooray!

Soon after, someone left another comment. And another comment. And another comment. And another comment – this time with a link. More comments. More links. And pretty soon, your dashboard is exploding with millions of comments and links that have nothing to do with your blog post. “Hello world.” just turned into “Hello spam.” Now, you’ve probably realized that more doesn’t exactly mean great. What to do?

Approve. Reply. Delete. Trash.

WordPress has a built-in system that can handle all the basic comment management requirements necessary like approving, replying, deleting, or trashing comments. However, the native WordPress system, albeit simple and easy to use, has its limitations and the more savvy users need more than just the basics. Features like social media integration, media support, public user profiles, or better spam filtering options cause people to turn their heads to third-party solutions especially when comments flood the back end and become challenging to monitor and manage.

Ban-The-Spam Solutions

Why ban the spam? Spam is a global problem and often WordPress comments are the place when bots try to enter bogus content full of links to their sites. Here are some of the blog comment systems and/or plugins you can use on your websites to help you manage those annoying spam comments.

  • WordPress Default Comment System – built-in comment management system that’s simple and easy to use but needs supplemental plugins to ban spam effectively.
    Cost: FREE
  • Akismet – It is an external service for battling spam with a database of known emails, IP addresses, and usernames used for sending spam. This advanced hosted anti-spam service efficiently processes and analyzes masses of data from millions of sites and communities in real time. When a visitor submits a comment, it is checked by Akismet and put in a special Spam folder to be managed by the website admin later on.
    Cost: FREE (Personal, Non-commercial sites/blogs)
    • $5-$50 (For commercial, business, and professional sites / For publishing networks, agencies, hosts, and universities)
  • Disqus – Disqus, Inc. is a blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that uses a networked platform. The company’s platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. Features a powerful moderation dashboard and all the filters you’d expect: blacklists, whitelists, spam controls, and word filters.
    Cost: FREE (core version)
  • Livefyre – Livefyre Comments 3 is a comment platform for real-time conversations. Important features include real-time user generated content-publishing, mobile device-friendly, real-time profanity filters that administrators can moderate and flag comments from directly within the stream, or block by IP address and Web Browser, social media and multi media support.
    Cost: FREE (basic version)

Other practical tips to manage spam:

  • Control which comments are automatically published and which ones need to be moderated. WordPress has a built-in provision for this.
  • Tag comments that have more than one link to be manually approved.
  • Create a blacklist and/or white list of frequent commenters.
  • Disable comments on older posts and pages.
  • Install tried and tested WordPress plugins or 3rd-party plugins to beef up your comment management system.
  • Wipe out your spam folder regularly.

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 …

Best WordPress Plugins to Boost Your Business Site’s Performance

Most corporate websites are extensions of real-world businesses that want to create an online presence. In the real world, these companies most likely have real-time tools and metrics in place to determine how the business is doing at any given point. Reports and analysis are part and parcel of normal operations as is marketing campaigns and feedback. Does this apply to the company’s online presence?

The online address of a company serves as a virtual business card cum portfolio cum marketing tool which the company can use to expand their reach. It is not unusual for business owners to expect that the same measurables to be derived from their corporate website. The ability to track, measure, and analyze data extracted from online activities is one of the key things a business owner needs to be able to do to be able to asses the effectiveness of the corporate website.

Here are some of the best WordPress plugins and tools you can use to enhance the efficiency of as well as measure the viability your business website.

Site Security and Backup

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software. iThemes Security works to fix common holes, stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials. This plugin hides common WordPress security vulnerabilities, preventing attackers from learning too much about your site and away from sensitive areas like your site’s login, admin, etc. iThemes Security works to protect it by blocking bad users and increasing the security of passwords and other vital information. This plugin monitors your site and reports changes to the filesystem and database that might indicate a compromise, works to detect bots and other attempts to search vulnerabilities, and makes regular backups of your WordPress database, allowing you to get back online quickly in the event of an attack.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

WordPress Backup to Dropbox keeps your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes and on a regular basis. Simply choose a day, time and how often you wish your backup to be performed and just wait for your websites files and an SQL dump of its database to be dropped in your Dropbox account.

Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security is a free enterprise class security plugin that includes a firewall, anti-virus scanning, cellphone sign-in (two factor authentication), malicious URL scanning and live traffic including crawlers. Wordfence is the only WordPress security plugin that can verify and repair your core, theme and plugin files, even if you don’t have backups. Key features include: real-time blocking of known attackers, two factor authentication used by banks, government agencies and military world-wide for highest security authentication, includes a firewall to block common security threats like fake Googlebots, malicious scans from hackers and botnets, block entire malicious networks, etc.

Site Statistics and Analytics

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog. It supports Universal (analytics.js) and traditional analytics (ga.js), includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches, supports outbound link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress, and many other features to support Google Analytics on your site.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily with lots of metadata, views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews. This plugin uses the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the fastest and most reliable tracking code Google Analytics offers. It features simple installation through integration with Google Analytics API where its as simple as authenticating and selecting the site you want to track. You can also easily connect your Google AdSense and Google Analytics accounts.

Site Content Management

Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar plugin makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog and gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

Zedity™ The Easiest Way To Create Your Content

Zedity™ is an innovative Editor to create your posts or pages amazingly easily, quickly and hassle-free with no technical skills required. It gives you total flexibility and unprecedented possibilities to create any desired design, as easily as if done on a piece of paper. Key features include: content in posts and pages that scale down accordingly to your responsive layout, additional content boxes (color box, document box, HTML5 box), audio and video embed capabilities, snap and alignment positioning, and so many other features.

WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache plugin creates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Performance enhancement features include: Generating static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, Minify HTML (decrease the size of page), Minify Css (decrease the size of CSS files), All cache files are deleted when a post or page is published, Enable/Disable cache option for mobile devices, Leverage browser caching which reduces page load times for repeat visitors, etc.

SEO

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, designed and developed by WordPress Consultant Joost De Valk, is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

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.

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.

Top 5 BuddyPress Themes April 2014

BuddyPress ready themes enable you to create your own special social network centered around your website and content. This means that visitors can register as members and connect and network with other members who are part of your specific niche community. This is especially useful in creating and growing a social network where members share common interests. Here’s a rundown of the top 5 themes that have BuddyPress integrated into them.

WPLMS

WPLMS Premium WordPress Theme is a learning management solution for WordPress. It is designed to deliver and manage educational content for an online audience. WPLMS enables you to create and sell courses as single items, as subscriptions or as a combination of both. You can embed videos and other multimedia content into your courses, create your own question bank with multiple choice, single answer or essay type questions including quiz timers, timelines and auto submit with WPMLS’s built-in quiz and test capabilities. WPLMS includes an instructor dashboard allowing you to check submissions of students as well as your own course content. The theme also has a progress page for users to track progress and l badges and certificates earned and attained. This theme uses BuddyPress for collaboration and discussion with other learners.

Kleo

Kleo Premium WordPress Theme is a multipurpose theme designed to meet various requirements of most websites.This BuddyPress and bbPress ready theme gives you great flexibility to create a membership site with complete ease. Powered by the popular visual composer plugin, Kleo enables you to simply drag and drop elements into a single page. Kleo enables managing content according to membership level. The theme gives you the ability to restrict content according the type of membership one has. Kleo comes with key features such as an awesome option panel, shortcodes and templates for easy customization, 700+ Fontello icons, WPML ready, and so much more.

Xphoria

Xphoria Premium WordPress Theme showcases what BuddyPress and bbPress plugins are capable of doing. Xphoria gives you the ability to create display forums turning your site into a big social network exchange. Visitors can join groups, post messages, make connections and the like. Conversations are displayed in a neat tiled fashion showing the number of posts under each thumbnail. Groups are displayed on the homepage and may be viewed according to popularity, alphabetical order, activity or date created while each group has a separate page displaying member info and conversations. Essentially, a social network in a box, Xphoria can hel you build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community.

Plexus

Plexus Premium WordPress Theme is a multisite theme created especially for enabling your site to host a blog network within WordPress. This theme is fully integrated with BuddyPress and bbPress giving the social networking power fitting for a blog network. It comes with specific network settings that give you control over what blog admins can do with it. Aside from BuddyPress and bbPress full integration, the theme also includes: Visual Composer plugin for that drag and drop convenience in customization, Layer Slider plugin to create a responsive slider with hundreds of transitions, site wide widgets that display content across the blog networks, and so much more.

Klein

Klein Premium WordPress Theme is a powerful community theme that gives you the utmost power to maximize social networking. At the heart of this theme is the Gears core framework that enables you to integrate other plugins easily. This innovative WordPress theme was built to support BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce. It is ideal for a website that interacts with a lot of users. Members can create profiles, send messages, add connections, or simply share what’s happening. It also allows members to collaborate through forums or sell any products you require. Key features include: Visual Composer plugin for drag and drop layouts, paid membership pro features to manage subscription packages, supports Woocommerce to set up a vibrant private online ecosystem, etc. This theme works well with BuddyPress plugins such as Events Manage and Album Plus, extending the power of your site’s network.

Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes Review

Elegant Themes - Updated Review for 2014

Updated: April 12, 2021 – 2021 is nearing the middle of the year, and now is a good time to update one of our most popular articles here on Blogging Experiment. For several years we have been singing the praises of Elegant Themes, and 2014 is shaping up to be no different. In a day and age where companies and websites come and go, Elegant Themes has not only stood the test of time, they have continued to innovate by creating massive value for their over 250,000 customers! In the following article, we’d like to give you a detailed overview of just why we call Elegant Themes the Best Deal in WordPress!

After all, having the right WordPress Theme is crucial to your websites’ success. It’s kind of like the study that showed how people looking to buy a home can make up their mind within 8 seconds of walking in the door whether they like it or not – by not giving your visitors the right first impression (your design) – you’re literally inviting them to hit the back button.

The Dilemma

As a blogger your focus should be on content. Blog design is important, but when you think about it, do people go to Craigslist because it looks pretty? Absolutely not. They use it because they’re the best in the field.

Since we’re not all Craigslists, we must merge the design and content aspects together in as seamless a manner as possible. You want to have a nice looking design, but you most likely are not strong in design itself (much less coding that pretty design). You want a unique, impressive look that conveys professionalism and passion about your craft, but you’re probably not an expert at usability (how “usuable” your site is to visitors). And finally, you want to do all this in the cheapest, most cost effictive way possible (nothing wrong with that).

Elegant Themes

Have you ever spent any length of time browsing around countless free wordpress theme sites only to be left feeling unsatisfied? Does it seem like most of the free themes are … well … free for a reason? Where are all the best wordpress themes? After going through these motions for a period of time, I decided to take a look at some premium wordpress themes to see if they were really that much better than the free ones. Shortly thereafter, I discovered Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes, and that changed everything for me.

I knew I could hire a web designer to create a nice looking website as I’ve done countless times in the past. But at $800 to $3500/pop, designers can be expensive. I was interested in finding a nice looking design that I could learn to tweak and modify myself to make it more personalized and customized to my liking.

As a website and blog developer, I am frequently developing new sites, and aside from the content itself, I want each design to be unique and professional. Enter ElegantThemes.

Elegant Themes Premium WordPress Theme Club

Forget $200 to $500 like many other premium theme clubs, for $69…YES, $69 – members get unlimited access and unlimited use to all of Nicks’ premium WordPress Themes. To date there are 80+ elegant WordPress Themes.

I’m going to get out of the way and let Nick’s design speak for itself. As you will see, these are top notch designs that would normally run you several thousand dollars a piece (I’ve researched hiring a good WordPress theme designer, and that is the going rate – typically the floor of their going rate).

Without further ado, here are some of the premium WordPress themes from Elegant Themes:

Nexus WordPress Theme

Blogex image_nexus

Nexus Features:

  • Magazine style
  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Nexus Theme (Showcase):

More Information On Nexus From Elegant Themes:

Demo Nexus

 

Vertex WordPress Theme

Blogex image_vertex

Vertex Features:

  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Vertex Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Vertex Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Vertex From Elegant Themes:

Demo Vertex

 

Fable WordPress Theme

Blogex image_fable

Fable Features:

  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Fable Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Fable Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Fable From Elegant Themes:

Demo Fable

 

Foxy WordPress Theme

Blogex image_foxy

Foxy Features:

  • eCommerce
  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Foxy Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Foxy Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Foxy From Elegant Themes:

Demo Foxy

 

Explorable WordPress Theme

Blogex image_explorable

Explorable Features:

  • Location based directory
  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Explorable Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Explorable Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Explorable From Elegant Themes:

Demo Explorable

 

StyleShop WordPress Theme

Blogex image_styleshop

StyleShop Features:

  • eCommerce
  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the StyleShop Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the StyleShop Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On StyleShop From Elegant Themes:

Demo StyleShop

 

Fusion WordPress Theme

Fusion Theme from ElegantThemes.com

Fusion Features:

  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Fusion Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Fusion Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Fusion From Elegant Themes:

(more…)

Membership Plugins For WordPress January 2014

WordPress is a proven powerful tool you can use to create your own website any way you want it. What’s also great about it is that you can take it even further and enhance its functionality to suit your needs with the help of plugins. From personal blogs to eCommerce sites to BuddyPress to so many other types of websites – a plethora of options is available out there for WordPress users.

One of the many ways you can use WordPress for is to make it function as a membership site where you can allow users to register, access or deny specific functions and sections, or create a social hub where fellow users can interact with each other.

Here are some popular WordPress plugins that can turn your website into a fully featured membership site:

Member Mouse

MemberMouse is an easy to use WordPress membership plugin that allows you to sell products, subscriptions and memberships, setup a password protected member’s area, offer 1-click upsells and downsells, manage customers, automate customer service, track critical retention metrics and more. No matter where you’re starting from, MemberMouse has the power you need to maximize revenue and get your business running like a well-oiled machine.

MemberMouse gives you everything you need to easily manage a successful online business. No matter if you sell digital products, subscription content, software as a service, or ship physical goods, MemberMouse provides a flexible platform that you can quickly shape to your business, with absolutely no programming required. This powerful plugin gets you up and running quickly, and handles many of the common tasks in your business, freeing you to focus on your value proposition.

Membership by WPMU Dev

Membership is a flexible, powerful, easy-to-use WordPress plugin for dividing your website into free and premium content. It’s a plugin built by WPMU Dev with WP Multisite in mind that can transform your entire network into a fully featured, multi-tiered membership and subscription site s o you can host a variety of membership sites, for yourself or for clients. Features include: a drag and drop interface to customize according to your exact specifications, control how access to any content or functionality is given, works with BuddyPress, add payment gateways easily (Authorize.NET AIM, 2Checkout, PayPal Express, etc.), built with WP Multisite in mind.

Restrict Content Pro

Restrict Content Pro is a complete membership and premium content manager plugin for WordPress developed by Pippin Williamson. This plugin can help you create an unlimited number of memberships levels, including free, trial and premium. Manage members and their subscriptions, track payments, offer discounts with a complete discount code system, and provide premium, members-only content to your subscribers.

Restrict Content Pro includes a complete member management system that lets you easily view all active, pending, expired, cancelled, and free users. Member’s subscriptions can be added or modified at anytime. This premium plugin is integrated with PayPal payments where all subscription payments are made via PayPal, allowing extremely fast and secure transactions.

Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is a customizable WordPress Plugin and support community for membership site curators. PMPro’s rich feature set allows you to add a new revenue source to your new or current blog or website and is flexible enough to fit the needs of almost all online and offline businesses. Integrated with Stripe, Authorize.net, or PayPal® for recurring payments, flexible content control, themed registration, checkout, and more to help you process all your business transactions. You can: name and control access for unlimited membership levels. Members are added as a WordPress User at the subscriber level in addition to their selected membership level during registration, create your Payment Gateway with any of the built in payment options and then paste your API information into the plugin’s setup page, control access for each membership level offered, and so much more.

WP eMember

WordPress eMember is a powerful WordPress Membership Plugin that can help you build a secure and reliable fully featured WordPress membership site easily. This easy to install plugin lets you selectively protect articles by creating various membership levels (example: Free, Basic, Premium, Ultimate etc.) and protect the content (posts, pages, comments etc) of your site. The plugin manages all the membership management side of things. Key features include: content protection where you can create different membership levels and select what content (posts, pages, categories, comments) can be viewed by each membership level., unlimited membership levels where you can create “Basic”, “Premium”, “Ultimate”, or any other levels you want, Multi Site License – you can use it on as many sites as you own, Autoresponder Integration – can be integrated with Autoresponders (AWeber, MailChimp, GetResponse) so that members automatically get signed up to your list/campaign for email marketing purpose, and so much more.

Discover the many benefits of creating a membership site with these plugins and build your network faster than ever.

The Perfect Landing Page?

So you’ve got all this great content and you’ve gained a group of regular readers that visit your website almost all the time. What do you do next?

Many website owners start off their websites with a simple blog without a thought about creating a landing page. Landing page? Huh? What’s that? Is that necessary? Others, on the other hand, start out with a main sales page and append other pages like a blog or a gallery page as the need arises later on. Is there a right order as to which should come first?

What is a Landing Page anyway?

Seth Godin puts it simply,

A landing page is the first page a visitor to your site sees.

Technically, whether it’s a blog page or a static page – any page that your visitor “lands” on is your landing page. Some prefer a static page over a blog and vice versa. Whatever type of page style you choose, your page treatment (goal of the page, page design, call to action, etc.) and the traffic that you direct to it will determine whether you have a successful and effective page that eventually leads to conversion. The goal is to make the visitor do something when he gets there.

How do people arrive at your landing page?

What you can ask people to do when they get to your landing page (CTAs)

  • Buy something
  • Register or sign up
  • Subscribe (mailing list)
  • Share
  • Learn
  • Download
  • Leave a comment or feedback
  • Click a link

What’s the best type of landing page?

A simple, uncomplicated landing page is the best. Your visitor got to your page because his interest was sparked. Now that he’s there give him a clear call to action that is tied to achieving your goals. Keep it simple and be specific. More than two CTAs is probably too much already but it still depends on your goals.

Poorly converting landing page? Keep testing. Revise if necessary. Check for distracting elements. Most people are comfortable just giving their first name and email address. Remove extra fields if necessary. There’s always room for improvement.

Try creating a landing page and see how it works out for you. Leave a comment and let us know.