Flat Design WordPress Themes You Can Flaunt

Design trends come & go. Some rise to the top like a shooting star and stay there with the rest of the stars while others burst like comets and fade into the night sky. One so called design “trend” that has actually been around for the longest time has been getting much attention only recently. In fact, even Apple has finally embraced it and has incorporated it in their latest iteration of the iOs. Say hello to the flat design. And it has found its way in many of the newest WordPress themes being released. Here are some examples of WordPress themes that have gone “flat”. Check these out.

Nova Flat & Clean Responsive Theme

If you are looking for a WordPress theme that can be used for multipurpose applications and for diverse types of websites, check out Nova Premium WordPress Theme, a clean, flat design multipurpose premium theme that will surely amaze you. It’s got a sample content importer, 14 homepage options, 9 premium sliders, unlimited header options, a page builder, fluid layout, a skin manager, and a short code editor just to name a few. The flat graphics are integrated nicely and they add to the overall professional look of the theme.

Showy Bold and Flat Portfolio

Impress your clients with this ultra minimalist, boldly simple, flat design WordPress portfolio theme, Showy. Design agencies, creative professionals, and freelance artists will love the simple, uncluttered look of this premium theme that will surely put their creative work in the spotlight. Less is more, indeed. And if it’s a portfolio showcase you want, you have everything you actually really need in this excellent theme.

Flat Responsive Portfolio Theme

If your’re looking for a fresh new way to present your portfolio in step with the latest flat design trend, Flat Premium WordPress Theme is worth a peek. The horizontal scrolling action gives visitors the feeling that they are going through a glossy high end design magazine. You get a choice of 2 homepage options, flat design interactive social media buttons, AJAX pagination for quicker load time, collapsible side menu, tons of other features, plus it is retina ready (great for images) with an optional retina logo upload field feature.

Revusion Flat Corporate Theme

Revusion Premium WordPress Theme is a flat responsive, modern and very professional looking corporate theme packed with features for today’s modern business. Revusion integrates Pixeden flat icons into its design as inspired by the current flat design UI trend. This premium theme gives you several different layout options via its page templates. You can choose to add a testimonial page, a team page, a services page, an FAQ page, a gallery page, aside from the usual blog, portfolio, and contact pages to ensure you can pick exactly what you want to add to your site. This retina display ready theme also comes with the Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Plugin.

Sistina Flat Multipurpose Shop Theme

Sistina Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern WooCommerce theme, designed with a fresh flat style and with a great responsive and retina-ready design. The cool flat graphic elements, modern typography, and streamlined layout give this theme that modern flair that will appeal to today’s modern shopper. This WordPress theme includes several premium features like the Wishlist and the Compare Products features, the Product Enquiry form (for catalog use sans the shopping cart), the Ajax layered filter, and also a Popup plugin to show offers and news.

Building an Online Following through Publishing – NYTimes Best-Selling Author Tucker Max

You either love him or hate him – a common reaction when you hear the name Tucker Max. But there’s more to this foul-mouthed #1 New York Times Bestselling author of I Hope They Sell Beer in Hell than meets the eye. Tucker Max was one of the guest speakers in the Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 held early this year and he shared some practical and valuable insight as to how he became a successful author despite the odds against him. Here are some of the nuggets he shared during the event:

Publishing a book is just a “Trojan horse” to establish your reputation and do bigger stuff. Published authors have a lot of more perceived prestige and respect vs. marketers.

Book is the best way to become an authority of your field. Use books to build media and brands

Ryan’s model for launching a new brand: Find a thought leader, publish a hardback book, use as a self-liquid offer, use that to build a brand and media

At the very least, publish a Kindle book

Tucker’s Tips:

On Getting Opt ins from books:

  • In the first 10% of book, Amazon shows a “look inside” feature, include a link to your opt-in page. It’s even clickable on Amazon. Ex. “For readers only, get the bonus chapter/audio version over here.”

On Publishing Model

  • Competing goals of publishing a book: NYTimes best-seller, make a lot of money, spreading your message. If you’re not in Barnes and Nobles, it’s hard to become NYTimes Bestseller. Making money – selling stuff off the backend. If you’ve been self-published, it’s hard to get a big 6 publisher to pick you up later on. Easier to get mainstream media if you’ve been published with big 6 publisher.

On Manipulating Mainstream Media

  • Tucker bought sponsored tweets from big celebrities. You only have to pay if celeb accepts. He got Kardashians, Snookie to tweet about his book.

On Dealing with Competitors

  • Don’t compete with them and try to be entertaining. Be a different category completely and known as the “serious guy”

According to him,

“As marketers, we’re often seen in a bad light. Society views us scammers. It doesn’t matter how much money you’re making, you’re always going to be associated with scams, frauds and a lot of other slimey stuff.

But if you’re a published author, then everything changes. Suddenly, everyone respects you. Because you wrote a book. You almost have the same social status and prestige as movie stars and musicians now.The coolest part is, you don’t need to seek a publisher. You can self-publish on Kindle nowadays.

Also, keep in mind, you don’t want to publish books to make money (because chances are most people won’t make much, no matter how many little kindle eBooks they pump out). The real purpose is to use your book as to establish your authority and expertise in your niche.

Don’t go out and look for attention. Just focus on creating the best thing you can create. Worry about what you’re creating 80% and the marketing/selling 20%.

Tucker Max generated a huge following on his website prior to publishing his first and highly successful bestselling book. He has published several books since then. He had an epiphany that started after his first book was published and has announced that we was leaving behind the lifestyle that made him famous. He has turned into a health buff and he is also a mixed martial arts practitioner.

Nexus WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes

Stories are an important part of our identity as humans and as a society. More often than not, we go through magazines and newspapers looking for stories to inspire us, inform us and the like. It is easier for us to appreciate a situation if we read the experiences of people involved and see pictures as opposed to a detached report with just facts and figures. This gives the user a more concrete appreciation of what really transpired. Websites must be able to present content as stories that engage users to interact more. There must be a good balance between text and media content to achieve this. At the same time, the website design needs have the flexibility to be able to arrange content in such a way as to effectively create a synergy between text and media content.

Nexus Premium WordPress Theme is a theme created to give you the power to organize content and maximize your capability to tell your stories in an engaging manner. The theme’s homepage builder allows you to set-up content modules and arrange and organize them in such a way as to create an effective narration of your content. The theme’s overall design approach using a strict grid together with a typographical hierarchy and a clean layout gives your elements the ample space to breathe. This gives your visitors a pleasant and enjoyable experience browsing through readable, accessible content.

This premium theme is quite easy to customize according to personal specs and preferences using the theme’s ePanel. There are also tons of shortcodes and widgets available to expand the the look and function of your site. Nexus is built on HTML5 and CSS3 for fast, efficient loading of your website. The theme is also responsive allowing your site to look good on both mobile and desktop devices.

Features:

  • Perpetual Updates
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Browser Compatibility
  • Complete Localization
  • Advertisement Areas
  • Homepage Builder
  • Unlimited Colors
  • Custom Widgets

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

Get 85 WordPress Themes For $39!

Lorem Ipsum Alternatives – Dummy Text You’ll Want To Read

Dummy placeholder text can be predictable and boring. The good news is that there are interesting and fun alternatives that can add spice to your demo themes and dummy content needy projects. Check out these Lorem Ipsum alternatives to fill up those empty spaces.

Not Lorem Ipsum

Not Lorem Ipsum is an ongoing project by one of 2nd Floor’s Directors, Chris Wharton, copywriter and web design industry professional for nearly 10 years together with Jude Wharton, 2nd Floor’s Copywriter and Business Director who came up with the name Not Lorem Ipsum. They have written sample text for over 40 industry sectors including accounting, advertising, education, food, consultancies, holidays and resorts, photography, web/graphic design, churches, startups, and so much more. Sample copy is written in British English.

Fillerati (choose an author)

Add a scholarly flair to your demos with Fillerati, a creation by MadScienceApp built with HTML5 and CSS2/CSS3, jQuery, and best viewed in browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera. The source for the public domain filler text is provided by Project Gutenburg which includes extracts and excerpts from out-of-copyright books such as Around the World in 80 Days, The Wizard of Oz, Princess of Mars, Alice in Wonderland, The Scarlet Plague, Moby Dick, The War of the Worlds by authors L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, Jack London, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells.

Corporate Ipsum

Fill up those corporate pages with business sounding lingo that seemingly makes sense or maybe not. Corporate cliché and meaningless business jargon that will make your users think.

Chuck Norris Ipsum

Can’t get enough of those Chuck Norris jokes? Why not fill up your dummy placeholder text with loads of Chuck Norris facts? You can also mix it up with good old Lorem Ipsum copy just to break it up a bit and make it a bit more confusing, ehrm, interesting.

Picksum Ipsum

Not into Chuck Norris? How about some cool film heavyweights to fill your up those dead spaces? Bust those boring text fillers with some Eastwood, Freeman, Carrey, Caine famous quotable quotes from their most popular movies. Boredom begone.

Random Text

Random Text generator is every web dev’s friend when it comes to generating dummy text. It is a tool designers and developers can use to quickly grab dummy text in either Lorem Ipsum or Gibberish format. A number of features that make RandomText a little different from other Lorem Ipsum dummy text generators is that you can:

  • Grab HTML or just plain text – even save generated text as files: No need to waste time copying text and then more time marking it up in HTML manually, just hit View HTML Code and then Copy to Clipboard
  • Use the address bar to create a query: RandomText allows you to get at your text quicker by using the URL to construct a query.
  • Integrate into your CMS using our API: just use the RandomText API to return generated content in JSON format.

Blind Text Generator

For design control freaks, this useful tool provides Lorem Ipsum and a number of alternatives for any type of layout need. You can control the number of characters, words, and paragraphs you want plus you can set your font choice and preview how text will be displayed in your design.

Duck Island’s Greek Machine

Duck Island Greek Machine lets you pick from several languages to fit your website needs. Choose from: story telling styles like Dick and Jane, Fairy Tale and Hillbilly to other lifestyle, technical, business styles like Techno Babble, Marketing, Metropolitan & Pseudo German. You also get your good old Classic Latin.

HTML-Ipsum

If you are geek-speak certified then this dummy text generator will definitely appeal to you. You can copy everything already in HTML format including the kitchen sink. Check this one out.

What’s your favorite? Leave us a comment and let us know.

Take Care Of Your Affiliates And They Will Take Care Of You

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer‘ or ‘brand‘), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate‘), and the customer. (source: Wikipedia). It is a way for a company to sell its products by signing up individuals or companies (“affiliates”) who market the company’s products for a commission.

Here are some important notes shared by Mark Jenny and Vincent Fisher during the Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013.

Why You Want Affiliates to Promote You:

  • Affiliates help scale your business faster
  • Larger sales force marketing your business aside from you.
  • No marketing risk
  • Impossible to implement everything yourself. Let your affiliates be the experts on PPC, Direct Mail, Banner Buys, etc

Tip: Focus on helping your affiliates make as much money as possible. Your affiliates will build your business. The more they make the more you make.

Affiliates are always looking for a winning offer which consists of:

  • A converting product – your best product
  • Support – excellent product and customer support
  • Highest payouts possible – offer best commission scheme possible

Where do you find affiliates:

  • Competitors – your competitors can sometimes be your best affiliates (partnerships, joint ventures)
  • Networks – affiliates are already in the networks
  • Customers – turn customers into affiliates
  • Affiliates Promoting other niches congruent but not directly related

Commission Payouts and Affiliate Rewards Tips:

  • Payout affiliates as much as possible (lead generation, CPA, revenue sharing)
  • Never, ever miss a payment to your affiliates
  • Send affiliates notices when payments are made even if they aren’t getting any payment
  • Hold frequent contests and offer unique prizes or random gifts

At the end of the day, focus on your affiliates and not yourself.

45 Creative And Artistic Websites For Inspiration

Have you even thought how all the designers around the world are coming up with unique design ideas? Inspiration is the key behind it. Have a look at all the following creative web layouts and I am sure you’ll find some inspiration.

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Bluehost Wins Best WordPress Hosting 2013

The Internet has given birth to many virtual businesses that exist without having an actual physical store, showroom, or office space to speak of. Glitches, downtime, hacks, and all other risks of online businesses can make or break any business, big or small. Time, money, transactions, and traffic can go down the drain in a matter of minutes once a website can’t be accessed. That’s why it is absolutely crucial to select a webhost that these businesses can absolutely rely on. One such web host that has a proven track record is Bluehost, winner of this year’s Best WordPress Hosting Award as awarded by WordPressHosting4U.com.

“This award is granted based on the reliability, security, WordPress page loading speed, WordPress knowledge of customer support team, and price value. Bluehost outperformed its competitors on the combination of all above areas, which makes it the best choice for bloggers, web developers, small- to medium size businesses.” – WordPressHosting4U.com editor team

Bluehost has been providing quality web hosting solutions to businesses and individuals since 1996 with the goal of providing outstanding services for the best possible price. Through constant innovation and service upgrades it has provided millions of website owners fast, efficient, affordable, and 100% WordPress compatible web hosting services throughout the years.

Whether you are an individual or a big business website owner, Bluehost has a complete web hosting solution for you. Features like unlimited disk storage, unlimited domain host, a drag and drop site builder, 24/7 US-based support, SSH Secure shell access, and so many other features such as CGI/Databases, Site Promotion efforts through search engine submissions, Free Website Scripts, eCommerce features including SSL secure server and various shopping cart options, Multimedia Features, and World Class Technology make Bluehost the top web host service provider that it is today.

Bluehost has an excellent overall uptime percentage of 99.99%.

Secure your website. Check out Bluehost.com today

Tech WordPress Themes July 2013

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

Host Depot

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

Elegant Hosting

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

Appland

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

Mega Host

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

Rocking Parallax

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

Apley

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

Cloud Hoster

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

eCommerce 3.0 – How to Structure Your Basic Ecommerce Store and Make it Work

The face of eCommerce is slowly changing as more and more people look to the internet not only for information but for physical goods as well. The convenience of being able to shop from the comforts of your own home or wherever you are is luring more and more consumers to buying online. Here are a few pointers Ezra Firestone shares about setting up an eCommerce store that works.

According to Ezra, in an interview by James Schramko, Ezra stated that,

“… one of the big things about eCommerce- what I call eCommerce 3.0 – what’s changing about eCommerce right now is the day and age of the store, of the faceless eCommerce store is dying. The eCommerce that just puts up products and list manufacture descriptions is dying. What’s working now is adding value to your market, writing your product descriptions, ordering your products that are selling best and shooting videos about them, creating buyer’s guides like keep bundling products together that people want, figuring out ways that you can serve your community and creating a face and a brand and owning the race course within your eCommerce store.”

A. Basic structure of an eCommerce store:

Home, section product detail (most important) blog/content, checkout, PPC landing pages, more info, social profiles

SEO structure

  • Home page – 3 main KWs + modifiers (descriptor words). Ex. modifiers = colors, type of material
  • Top 75+ modifiers = section keywords. Section has products under it
  • Next 500 keywords that can be productized = products
  • Google product listing ads are great for ecommerce
  • Remaining relevant KWs = blog posts
  • 700 words per sections – modifiers written in (unique sections + descriptions)
  • Weekly blogging = about product, other keywords, EdC, each post has deep link + picture
  • Obvious on page – reviews, social buttons, etc
  • Internal link structure
  • Don’t over optimize
  • Author of the store – find some way to create a relationship with your customers

SEO Title Tags for ecommerce stores

  • “Vintage Costume Jewelry”
  • Description: KW, Phone #, Sentence, Modifiers
  • Get rid of big link boxes in the footer

Every search has a unique set of channels

  • Users prefer to consume media in different formats (video, audio, text, etc.) The goal: occupy as all positions as much as possible
  • Channel to occupy
    • SEO, PPC, Comparison Engine, email, social media
    • Image for each product – make sure if you have ownership of images, watermark them
    • Video for each section pages + home page
    • PPC ads (image ads + text ads, retargeting etc.)
    • Amazon listing for all products
    • Google search results: above the fold = ads, shopping, 1 or 2 organic results
    • Blog/ed content

B. Three Things to Track

  • Goal Flow: Product Page – Shopping Cart – CheckOut Page – Product Sale
  • Events: Product Options – Messages – Button Clicks, Errors (most important)
  • Site Search: monitor how the big stores like Amazon do it

C. Check Your Pages for These Items

  • Header : Search, Contact, Security, More Info, Cart, Chat/Live Help, Opt in, Offer (ex. Zappos header)
  • Favicon, Social links, Video, FAQ, Video Customer Service
  • Testimonials (random display), Bestsellers
  • Footer: Trust Seal, Search, Opt in

    • Homepage : Main rotator or slider with 3 images, tabbed featured products

  • Section Page: Items on sale – show percentage saved, Images open in lightbox for quick viewing, Featured item or deal should be on top of the page
  • Product Pages: Get rid of left navigation, Tabs on the left, Display social buttons above the fold, Cross sell recommended items, Guarantee, Trust, Shipping, Videos, Multiple Images, Recently Viewed, Put features/benefits under Add to Cart
  • Checkout Page 1: Make it look as nice as the Product Page, Shipping Calculator, Proceed button at top and bottom, Image, Product, Guarantees
  • Checkout Page 2: Multiple Payment Options

D. Boost Your Conversions With the Following:

  • Create FAQ on Shipping
  • Follow-up script on cart abandonments by email. Offer a discount
  • Use in-page analytics to optimize Section pages. Put products clicked the most on top of the page
  • Thank you video
  • Post purchase survey
  • Follow up with review request

If you are currently running an eCommerce website you can use the information above to evaluate how your site is doing. If you are planning to put up one for the first time, use them as your guide to jumpstart your business in the right direction.