30 Different Content Slider Plug-ins for WordPress

When looking at websites, slideshows and carousels are the best way to present images and this is usually achieved using jQuery. To have jQuery slider galleries or other image presentation on your web page you have to code or download a jQuery slider plug-in and integrate it. Those sliders give effective looks and are very attractive to users.

Here you can see 30 Different content slider plug-in for WordPress. Hope these plug-ins help you…Enjoy!!!

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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!

Content Auditing – Is Your Content Up To Par?

“High quality content”, “Content is king.” – we often hear these phrases and although we know that content matters a lot, especially to Google, how many of us pay particular attention to what we post online? If you’ve been publishing large volumes of content on your website for how many years, have you ever taken the time to assess the quality of the content you have published? Have you ever conducted a content inventory, or better yet, a content audit on everything that appears on your website? Do you think managing your content will impact your traffic and conversion efforts or is its effect purely cosmetic?

A content inventory is the process and the result of cataloging the entire contents of a website. An allied practice—a content audit—is the process of evaluating that content.(source: Wikipedia)

WHY: Reasons for Conducting Content Audit

There are many reasons why you should consider conducting a content audit on your website especially for legacy content. You could use the collected data to evaluate specific functions and features of your website and its contents and optimize it to its fullest potential. Here are some reasons for conducting a content audit on your website(s):

  • Review your site’s architecture, structure, and navigational systems to make it more efficient and user friendly
  • Redesign, reconstruct, or renovate your website to make it more current or more responsive to the demographics of your current users. Consider the mobile market.
  • Migrate content to-from another site(s), from static pages to content management system (CMS)
  • Manage content quality, the amount of content, relevance, its layout presentation and design
  • Identify orphaned pages, content bloat, redundant pages that do not meet Google’s algorithm standards
  • Gather and analyze statistics as to user behaviour and interactivity on your website
  • Determine and identify popular and unpopular pages that get the most or the least visits – recognize effective content
  • Identify keywords and maximize organic search terms that drive traffic to your website

“Content audits are critical to understanding and evaluating the performance of your content against business goals, user needs, editorial standards, and performance factors such as search engine optimization and content use or web analytics. They bring value to your website project and on-going maintenance tasks by allowing you to carefully catalog and analyze your content structures, patterns, and consistency. Content audits tailored to your organization’?s content goals will reveal the highest quantity of specific opportunities for content improvement”.(source: content-insight.com)

HOW: Content Audit Strategy

Conducting a full-blown Content Audit especially on content heavy websites should be strategic and well-planned because it can be tedious and overwhelming. Strategy is key. Tactics can be modified and adapted. Some companies even choose to “throw out content” and start fresh. You can choose to conduct your content audit according to your needs and specifications in several ways:

  • Full Content Audit – Complete and comprehensive list of every content including all pages and all assets (downloadable or attached files etc.)
  • Partial Content Audit – Top hierarchy and subcategories or subset list
  • Content Sampling – Examine representative samples of content

WHO: Content Auditors:

  • Website designers and managers
  • Information architects and taxonomists
  • Content managers and developers
  • Content strategists and marketers
  • SEO managers

WHAT: Important Content Audit Items

  • Identify and document content volume and types
  • Identify and document the current content structure
  • Assess whether the content is being used
  • Document inconsistent content presentation

TO DO: Simple Content Audit Action Plan Sample

Conduct a Content Inventory

Create a content inventory spreadsheet and catalog. It may or may not include the following items based on your specs or based on the order of the most significant parts of your website:

  • ID, numbering or index
  • Page Title
  • Page Name
  • Page Type (homepage, navigation, ecommerce, blog, etc.)
  • URL
  • Level in the site (hierarchy)
  • Content type (multimedia, image, video, doc, pdf, HTML)
  • Owner/maintainer/author (content rights)
  • Comments
  • Character count or content size
  • Topics, tags, category, keywords, meta data
  • Date created
  • Last updated
  • Related files
  • Broken links (linking practices)
  • Duplicate content
  • Short Description or Notes
  • Alt tags on multimedia (images, video, audio, etc.)
  • PageViews
  • Unique Visitors
  • Bounce Rate
  • Page Authority

Track your content on the Internet, social networking sites, and contributions posted on other websites

Monitor the quality of your content as pertaining to topic, tone, consistency or compliance with your branding or marketing strategies

Assess and evaluate your content: keep, fix, improve, update, redirect, archive, remove, delete or trash

Use content analysis tools to get the job done if necessary (Excel, Content Analysis Tool, etc.)

Make an offline copy

If the job is too daunting, hire a Content Auditing Services Firm or a Content Audit Professional

The initial stages of the whole process can be time consuming and overwhelming but once you have a system in place that’s current and updated, you will be able to glean insight from all the information you’ve gathered and steer your website towards a richer, exceptional, more substantial, Google algorithm friendly content that will keep visitors coming back for more.

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.

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

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.

35 Different Educational Website Designs for Inspiration

Educational Institutions and Universities need attractive websites to attract new students and serve exceeding students. Educational websites have lot of information to show, they need to provide details of admissions, syllabus, results, information of a student. So these types of websites need good designers to be worked on as UI is very important to make it reader friendly.

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Back to Blogging Basics – Cool WordPress Themes for Your Blog

Even before it became the highly stylized content management system that it is today, WordPress has always been and still is the blogger’s choice platform for personal blogging. WordPress themes have come a long way since Kubrick as more authors and developers churn out beautiful themes to fit all types of users. Here are some of the latest WordPress themes for today’s modern blogger:

Clipboard Tumblog Style WordPress Theme

If you are into microblogging Twitter or Tumblr, check out Clipboard Premium WordPress Theme – an awesome tumblog style WordPress theme that comes chock full of style and customisation options. Customization and styling options is easy using the WordPress Live Theme Customizer. The Visualkicks theme translator allows you to translate a single line of text or the whole site. Clipboard’s intuitive and responsive Masonry design allows you seamless transitions while maintaining that minimalist look. Clipboard also supports all of the core WordPress post formats and has been built and designed with simplicity in mind.

Pilcrow Ajax Powered WP Blog Theme

Pilcrow Premium WordPress Theme is a simple yet elegant and responsive WordPress blog theme that will surely inspire you to write. This robust premium theme not only presents your content in an engaging way but because it is also powered by AJAX it provides users an enjoyable experience with its smooth transitions while reading your content. This theme supports custom WordPress post formats giving you maximum flexibility on how you can present your content. You also get several templates such as: a password protected posts template, comments template, and a template for pingbacks and trackbacks. All these and more AJAX powered goodness. Minimum clutter for maximum pleasure.

Keilir Responsive WP Blog Theme

Keilir Premium WordPress Theme is a bright, typographically bold, and beautiful responsive theme designed to make your blogging experience as pleasant as possible. Armed with superb visual design and great support for mobile and tablet devices you can easily reach all your readers wherever they are. This premium theme has 6 custom styled blog formats, 8 bootstrap shortcodes, 6 custom social media widgets (facebook, twitter, instagram, mailchimp, and more), 10+ specially made shortcodes, 600+ google fonts, and a customizable theme options panel, to make your blog your very own.

tdFuture WP Theme

tdFuture Premium WordPress Theme is a dynamic, responsive WordPress blog theme ideal for personal blogs where you can share your articles, images, videos, music, quotes and much more. The big bold design and typographic choices will definitely make your content stand out from the crowd. If you are a blogger who wants your readers to focus on your content without the clutter of sidebar widgets, etc., then tdFuture is the theme for you. This theme can also double up as a portfolio to showcase your creative work. This theme supports WordPress Theme Customizer that gives you an ability to do changes with a real-time preview. tdFuture is a fully responsive theme and will adjust to any screen size.

Literary WP Blog Theme

Literary Premium WordPress Theme is a beautifully crafted blog theme that will delight authors, writers, and publishers. If you’ve been publishing books and you’ve always wanted a place to compile them all for your readers, Literary is the blog theme that can do that for you. This premium theme comes with a post type for showcasing your books and even a post type for your portfolio. Literature often comes with specific illustrations made especially for specific books. Many times, it is the cover that entices people to buy a book. Now you can showcase both books and illustrations on your own website and give readers a chance to enjoy your work both visually and intellectually. Increase your market reach by adding all of your books and linking them to Amazon, iTunes, or wherever you sell them. This theme is built “mobile first” for speed and flexibility and looks great from mobile to large desktops.

Quickly Handcrafted WP Theme

Quickly Premium WordPress Theme is a beautifully handcrafted WordPress theme that focuses on user-experience, usability, and beautiful typography. This Masonry styled theme comes with four predefined color schemes, optional homepage sidebar, post formats and many more design options. This theme also allows you to: mix up content on the homepage with widgets and dynamic post formats, enable or disable sidebar in a click, choose from the predefined patterns and color schemes, change header position, change the thumbnail position, and choose from any of the theme’s predefined custom fonts. Quickly is fully responsive, touch enabled, and comes with a sleek and powerful theme options panel to help you set the blog without having to change any code.

Milli Responsive WP Blog Theme

Milli Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, graphic, 3D inspired WordPress Theme designed for professional or personal bloggers. Choose between light and dark styles, full-width or two column layout, 5 accent color schemes, and you can upload the background pattern of your choice. This premium theme also features super cool sliders with multiple slider effects that can be embedded within posts. Milli also supports custom WordPress posts. This fully responsive theme is designed to look beautiful whether you are using a desktop computer or a mobile phone.

Pravda WP Blog Theme

Pravda Premium WordPress Theme is a bold and colorful modern WordPress theme fit for today’s hip and cool blogger. This customizable, ultra responsive, retina-ready WordPress theme has got that young vibe, combining favorite features from Pinterest and Instagram with social networking features, that will appeal to digital millennials today. This premium theme can be configured for business/work, for blogging, or both. It was developed on Bootstrap and is powered by the SMOF Options Panel, which provides multiple options to manage and modify any aspect of the theme – for both beginners with no coding knowledge and also seasoned developers. Features include 10 custom widgets, 8 widgetized areas, 5 post formats (image, audio, video, gallery, standard), 6 Home page layouts, and tons of custom theme options.