WordPress Plugins To Try This September 2013

Enhance your WordPress site with these useful plugins that will help beef up features and functions you already have:

Ajax Portfolio Grid for WordPress

Ajax Portfolio Grid plugin allows for smooth loading and reloading of pages because of its Ajax feature. Features include: flexible columns, Youtube and Vimeo support, Drag and drop support, and hardware accelerated touch swipe support among a few. This robust plugin is built around the MVC core and makes full use of HTML5, CSS3, PHP 5.2+, and jQuery 1.7 – latest technologies that allow it to render fast and lightweight results including effects that are responsive and adapt to most if not all handheld and mobile devices.

Paper Grid

Paper Grid is a lightweight and powerful content grid plugin for WordPress that allows you to showcase your team, your services and products, or any other type of content in a dynamic and interactive way. You can select images, icons, change colors and you can also easily share your team members or even content on your social networking sites. The Content Grid frontend css file is only 5 KB and the javascript file is only 2KB making it really lightweight which means your website’s loading performance will be fast.

Mobile.nav

Mobile.nav is an easy to install and easy to use mobile and responsive navigation menu plugin for WordPress that creates an awesome mobile menu for your website. It supports top level + nesting up to 3 sub levels (4 levels totally) but can expand to how many you need by copying few lines of css. This plugin uses the native WordPress built-in design language and easily integrates with the WordPress menu system and supports expanding menu tree. Mobile.nav works on iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.

Hashtag for WordPress

The Hashtag WordPress plugin uses the new auto-complete system in the WordPress editor which allows you to set up an integrated hashtag system for your website. You can easily add a hashtag (#word) in your posts based on # character and on other hashtags already existing on your site. This plugin filters all the sentences containing the hashtag and displays them with links and thumbnails to the related posts. The #hashtag word link and the #hashtag page can also be easily customized (font, border, radius, padding, margin, etc.) according to your preferences.

FormCraft WordPress Form Builder

Create your own stylized forms with FormCraft WordPress Form Builder plugin – an AJAX powered form interface that allows you to create responsive forms and add as many as 23 fields (conditional or not), add multi-columns, save form progress, generate form analytics, integrate MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Aweber and send to auto responders, embed objects, maps and videos, upload multiple images (retina-optimized), add form validation, get all submissions in your inbox, and many other useful features.

Frontend Builder

Frontend Builder WordPress plugin allows you to design your web page using intuitive frontend and backend options and a drag & drop system that allows you to add all the content that you need regardless of the template that you are using. This plugin is an easy-to-use solution for all users regardless of their skill level whether as designers or developers. Developers will find this plugin useful because they can assign this plugin to their templates with their own shortcodes and enable their potential users to design their own web pages using their own template’s elements. Other features include: clone options, WordPress shortcodes, pre-made UI system, live preview, and tons of other options.

Tips To Maximize Marketing To Your Local Mass Traffic

A panel of experienced resource speakers including Mike Cooch, Kevin Wilke, Jack Mize, Martin Maybruck among others shared valuable insights and wisdom (T&C Summit 2013) on how to handle local traffic.

Here’s a summary of some of the key points these experts shared and see how it applies to your own local marketing targets.

The top 3 strategies for getting clients are:

  • networking at local events
  • speaking at local events
  • direct mail

The top 3 online strategies for clients are:

  • videos (get ranked quickly) Tip: put your business phone number in the title
  • directories
  • social media

Effective Facebook Page contests include the ff. elements that can contribute to your list building efforts, free referrals, viral reach, etc.:

  • name – for brand positioning
  • video – builds trust
  • prizes – aligns with market and doubles attendance
  • fan gate – increases “likes”
  • webinar – adds value

Follow up with people over the phone and offer your services

Build your business eventually to be sold

  • build assets instead of just a source of income
  • keep your financials clean
  • document systems and processes
  • target margins to be at par or better than industry standards
  • think of transferable contracts
  • recurring revenue
  • proven sales model

Your number 1 job is to sell

  • Small businesses are not actively looking for someone to market for them. You have to sell to small businesses.
  • Focus on one vertical to start. It is the biggest secret to growing fast
  • Leverage channels (conventions, webinars, newsletters, trade shows)

Use tools and resources to help you find leads

  • Smartwebinar – automated prospecting webinar for local marketers
  • Localizer lead tool – find local prospects fast
  • Lead kahuna – find leads with bad online reputation and turn them into prospecting material to target them

Fast local lead copy works for landing pages, video scripts, online classifieds, biz listings, social media properties.

Small businesses want mainly is fast sales. Mobile consumers are among the highest percentage of searchers for local businesses but not all local businesses have websites.

If you are running a small business your local business must be listed in apps such as:

  • Google maps
  • Yahoo
  • Mapquest
  • Yelp

Local businesses owners need to build a custom mobile landing page catered to their target audience.

Your friendly neighborhood shop could be the next big thing to happen. Check out opportunities to connect and network.

Cool Blogging WordPress Theme From Elegant Themes

We all have a story to tell. Simple, funny, sad, challenging, happy – everyone has an opinion, a point of view, a story. That’s why blogging will always be here to stay and that’s why people secure their own dot coms as an avenue to voice their stories. As such blogs, need to visually reflect the author’s persona giving him or her the platform to share and present text and media content effectively to visitors who are drawn to our site.

Fable Premium WordPress Theme is a theme conceptualized to help us tell our story to a worldwide audience. An important method employed in this theme is the use of post variation, allowing visitors to distinguish one post after another. The theme is also designed for easy reading as it employs a full width, long format style turning your scrolling into a pleasurable journey. Subtle emphasis on your content is achieved by using bold types giving your content a non-overpowering full screen attention.

Fable comes with an options panel for convenient and powerful customization features. You also have the option to use shortcodes for more complicated customization. Ready page templates are also available for those who’d like to put the theme up and running in no time. Fable is responsive and adjusts to the smaller displays of mobile devices.

Features:

  • Responsive Design
  • Theme Options
  • Shortcodes
  • Page Templates
  • Perpetual Updates
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Browser Compatibility
  • Complete Localization
  • Unlimited Colors
  • Unparalleled Support

Fable Premium WordPress Theme includes perpetual updates, unparalleled support, and access more than 80+ high quality WordPress themes included in every Elegant Themes membership.

Get 86+ WordPress Themes For $39!

WordPress News You Can Use: September 2013

The WordPress community is a great resource for anything and everything to help you get your feet wet. Get to know the movers and shakers in the industry or simply develop your WordPress skills whether as a beginner or a seasoned developer with these useful articles and news updates we’ve culled in and around the web community you can read, glean, and learn from:

Update For Best Theme Coming Soon

Good news for all you Best-ies out there! We’ve heard you and we are coming up with an update to our Best Theme soon. We’ve added a lot of features and functionalities based on what we think will make the theme better integrating and incorporating many of your suggestions and input. We’d like to thank all those who have downloaded the theme as you have inspired us to push a little more. But wait there’s more!

Lots of exciting things are in the offing here in Blogex and we are working on many cool developments to serve you better. Don’t forget to bookmark our page, subscribe, or add us to your social networks to get the latest news on Blogex.

Great things up ahead!

Creative WordPress Themes September 2013

The latest crop of new WordPress themes that are coming out are all inspiring and filled with features and functions all wrapped in pretty packages. Here are the latest WordPress themes to whet your creative juices:

Gridstack Responsive Agency Theme

GridStack Premium WordPress Theme is a unique and beautiful easy to use portfolio theme for agencies, artists, graphic designers, and freelancers. The theme’s extra wide and parallax-style media complemented by the clean and modern title rotator make it a perfect solution for showcasing photos, illustrations, videos and audio. It is responsive and automatically resizes to accommodate a variety of devices – computers, tablets and mobile phones.
It is also Ajax-enabled, allows you to display your brand logo on screen, and is SEO optimized, ensuring a consistent user experience while maintaining best practice SEO standards.

Big Gallery Photography/Portfolio WP Theme

BIG Gallery Premium WordPress Fullscreen Photography Portfolio Theme is an impressive way to showcase your photos on a grand scale made possible with the creative use of CSS3 and Javascript. Fullscreen WordPress themes are tricky especially when showcasing photographs that highlight the photographer’s composition intent. Some themes make photos look cut or stretched and lose their original intent. You have 4 full screen slideshows to choose from where you can fill the screen with the whole image, or automatically adjust images to prevent them from being cut. You have the option to change the slideshow type for every page and even play music or turn it off if you prefer.

Jarvis One Page Parallax WP Theme

Jarvis Premium WordPress Theme is a one page parallax WordPress theme for corporate, agency, nonprofit, freelancer or general business that includes features such as: MailChimp subscription support, 12 homepage variations, stunning parallax effect sections, Premium Revolution slider, background video support, ultra-responsive (including sliders), 6 navigation styles, advanced styling customization features with tons of customizable backgrounds for each section (unlimited colors, images, built-in patterns), ajax contact forms, Font Awesome icons, unlimited skins, awesome extensive theme documentation and help support, and other functions and features.

Craft Responsive and Retina-ready WP Theme

Craft Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern theme designed for creative agencies, design professionals, graphic designers, and freelancers dabbling into creative design. This retina-ready flat designed theme built with HTML5 and CSS3 includes many modern features such as graphically intuitive shortcodes, ultra high resolution graphics, advanced theme options panel, mobile ready sliders (FlexSlider 2), classic and masonry blog styles, paginated/ajax portfolio pages, and several page templates applicable to other business or web applications.

Storyline Board WP Theme

Discover Storyline Board Premium WordPress Theme – a different, creative, innovative and user friendly theme to present your portfolio, blog, online magazine, personal site or anything you may think of in a not so typical fashion. From innovative post styles (circle, square, image, text, sidebars,etc.) to unique design elements that will make your website truly stand out. This trendy and progressive product is a perfect vehicle to display your creative work/portfolio/photography gallery and amaze your visitors with an unusual new generation blog. This premium theme comes in three styles: colorful, glass, and facebook tabbed version.

Frame Photography WP Theme

Frame Premium WordPress Theme is a photographer’s virtual playground chock-full of features and options for portfolio and image gallery presentations. This premium theme HTML5 & CSS3 valid, responsive, retina-ready, comes in dark and light skin versions, has a powerful admin panel, includes a full screen, grid, and masonry style gallery/portfolio page, a working Ajax contact form, easy color management options, tons of options, and extended documentation to get your photography site up in no time.

Authority Blogging with Tim Young and Eric Prelic

Authority Blogging Defined

Authority blogging is a deliberate effort to publish quality content with the goal of establishing credibility, expertise, and authority over a specific area or topic whether by single or multiple author(s)/blogger(s) with the objective of growing, influencing, and filling the needs of, and expanding a niche fan/user base.

Authority

  • the power to influence others, esp. because of one’s commanding manner or one’s recognized knowledge about something
  • the confidence resulting from personal expertise
  • a person with extensive or specialized knowledge about a subject; an expert

Here are some of authority blogging highlights shared by Tim Young and Eric Prelic during one of the breakout sessions at the Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 held early this year:

  • Great writing doesn’t happen overnight
  • Preparation is key
  • Learn, test, and retest
  • Be ready to evolve
  • Writing isn’t everything, it is the product of everything.
  • Gain as much knowledge as you can and check nonstop what is working on the web.
  • Check out what topics are trending, how it applies to your business, and write about it from your perspective or point of view
  • Be original. Don’t steal photos, rip off someone else’s blog, or claim content as your own.
  • Be on the lookout for new and potential writers, authors, bloggers, and influencers. Be open to guest bloggers who can write for you.
  • Be Personal. Use personal pronouns “you, your, me, my, etc.”
  • Learn from your mistakes
  • For WordPress users: Install Jetpack and monitor stats, metrics, trends, traffic data. See what your readers are responding to and don’t be afraid to junk what’s not working
  • Maximize social media efforts like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
  • Check your website’s load time

Be entertaining. Having a strong opinion may attract enemies but it also drives traffic and creates an audience. Don’t be afraid to attract enemies.

Blogging is currently one of the best sources of free traffic and is one of the fastest ways to grow readership on a specific subject. Publishing good content establishes your “expertise” in your chosen genre. This quality content signals Google to send you traffic which further establishes your blog authority which translates to increased web traffic which can be funneled and converted into an email subscriber base later on.

Revolutionary WordPress Themes – Is the Market Ready?

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

Revolutionary

  • involving or causing a complete or dramatic change

Innovative

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

The business dictionary defines innovation as follows:

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

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

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

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

WordPress 3.6 and Beyond

Oscar is out of the can! No, it’s not a trash can and Oscar ain’t grouchy either. Named in honor of the great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, WordPress 3.6 Oscar is out of beta and has been officially released premiered with a cool video to go along with it. Matt Mullenweg introduced the latest version in WordCamp San Francisco and along with several other announcements. Versions 3.7 and 3.8 are close on its heels too with a tentative fall and end of the year release together with a book in the offing. It can only get better.

Here are some of the highlights of WordPress 3.6 Oscar to get excited about:

User Features

  • The new Twenty Thirteen theme inspired by modern art puts focus on your content with a colorful, single-column design made for media-rich blogging.
  • Revamped Revisions save every change and the new interface allows you to scroll easily through changes to see line-by-line who changed what and when.
  • Post Locking and Augmented Autosave will especially be a boon to sites where more than a single author is working on a post. Each author now has their own autosave stream, which stores things locally as well as on the server (so much harder to lose something) and there’s an interface for taking over editing of a post, as demonstrated beautifully by our bearded buddies in the video above.
  • Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds with no reliance on external services.
  • The Menu Editor is now much easier to understand and use.

Developer features

  • A new audio/video API gives you access to metadata like ID3 tags.
  • You can now choose HTML5 markup for things like comment and search forms, and comment lists.
  • Better filters for how revisions work, so you can store a different amount of history for different post types.

The Future: WordPress 3.7 & 3.8, WordPress The Book, and a whole lot more

Matt Mullenweg mentioned that the first chapter of WordPress The Book – a book about the history of WordPress – is currently being written in Github similar to the way the software itself started. They’ve also been working on security and stability features He also announced a developer resource dedicated to WordPress developers (developer.wordpress.org). He also mentioned the work they were currently doing on the MP6 plugin project and the development of WordPress 3.7 and 3.8 aiming for smaller teams, quicker iterations, less bottlenecks, and temporary hooks. In WordPress 3.7, all developments will be done as independent units or plugins while in WordPress 3.8 is targeted for release in December 2013. WordPress 3.8 will be similar to the 3.7 model. Another target is the release of Twenty Fourteen theme before 2014.

Matt also mentioned that there was a 96% attrition rate on those who start a blog and actually follow through (wordpress.com data) – a danger that needs to be addressed. The goal is to improve the numbers by next year in line with democratizing publishing on the web. The success of WordPress lies in the fact that the WordPress community is and has always been actively committed and involved in improving this open source software even after a decade later.