Eye-Catching Retina Display WordPress Themes

The shift towards high-definition in gadgets and devices has been around for a little while. Today, software and digital products are often described as“retina” display read which simply means that these products are graphically ready, in terms of clarity, contrast, and sharpness, to be displayed in high definition devices without diminishing in quality.

Here are some of the newest retina-ready WordPress themes you can try on your HD devices:

Novelty (Portfolio)

This portfolio and blog theme’s clean minimalist look is a perfect complement to outstanding artwork and projects normally displayed in a creative professional’s website. Photographers, design agencies, freelance creatives, and corporate sites will love to show off their pieces in high definition and this theme is ready to do that. It is also 100% responsive replicating that HD experience even on mobile devices.

!LesPaul (Multipurpose)

A multipurpose user friendly theme equipped with Sharp Retina (high DPI) graphics that will look beautiful on modern high resolution displays. The crisp and sharp design elements incorporated in this theme will look great on handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Supreme Magazine (Magazine)

Subscribers will enjoy browsing through your online publication built using this theme. Supreme Premium WordPress Theme is a revolutionary Retina Responsive Magazine/Blog theme integrated with clean, modern, and crystal clear graphics that can be effectively displayed in retina ready modern devices.

Eagle Logistics (Logistics/Forwarding/Shipping)

This premium theme was designed with the logistics industry in mind. It was conceptualized to turn websites into an effective solution for logistic transactions. The retina-ready capability of this theme is most effective in the use of images and text used in promoting products and services related to your logistics business. These crystal clear elements add that attention to detail factor and communicates professionalism necessary in any business especially in this type of industry.

Slurp (Modern Creative Grid Portfolio)

Creative professionals will fall in love with the edgy and modern style of this theme. Images and graphics take center stage on the homepage with the unique organic and asymmetrical manner that they are displayed creating that cool and edgy look. This retina ready and responsive theme will surely wow your users, clients, and potential clients no matter what device they use to view you site.

Stress-Free Beauty, Health, and Medical WordPress Themes

The beauty, health and wellness industry is a lucrative industry. People will always want to look good and be healthy. Setting up an impressive website for your beauty or health and wellness business is key to getting the type of clients you want. Here are some great WordPress themes to help you create the right aesthetic for your beauty and health business online:

Blush

Blush is a professionally designed salon/spa/health/ beauty theme from Aloha Themes. This premium theme is easy to customize with lots of features to choose from – from using your own logo, changing theme colors, using widgets or built in shortcodes – to create the signature look you want.

Health and Beauty Theme

Health and Beauty Theme from Organic Themes is a beautiful and cleanly designed premium theme that won’t disturb your zen. This calm and soothing theme complemented by the overall classy and professional aesthetics is perfect for promoting health and beauty services that will impress even the pickiest clients.

HairPress

HairPress is a fully responsive premium WordPress theme perfect for hair and beauty salons, wellness centers, and professional medical services. It includes several built-in page templates ready for you to use straight away. Hair concerns are not just for women. Men are just as vain when it comes to hair. HairPress is a theme that’s not too feminine and it has lots of customization features that will help you create a strong online presence that will appeal to both men and women.

The Beauty Salon

The Beauty Salon is a sleek, modern, and professional looking theme that speaks credibility and confidence all over. One of the many obstacles to getting clients to try a new service or a new store is the lack of confidence. It is important for business websites to create the impression that they know what they are doing to allay fears of potential customers. This premium theme does just that and more. It’s packed with advanced features such as a sliding menu card, a tiled gallery, custom page templates, and multiple shortcodes to create that wow factor you need. Give your website a total makeover with The Beauty Salon Premium WordPress Theme.

HealthPress

If you are a health or medical practitioner, a wellness center, or a healthcare or medical service institution wanting to create your own website, check out HealthPress Premium WordPress Theme. This responsive theme is perfect for health and medical professionals, clinics, centers, hospitals, and other related industries. Running a health or medical related business online is tricky because medical consultations are personal and real world connections are important. HealthPress contains features like galleries, bios, credentials, services, testimonials, and other info templates to create that connection between your users and your medical team.

WP-Venus

Named after the Roman goddess of beauty and love, WP-Venus has that soft and pretty aesthetic that will appeal to a more feminine audience. With its soft colors, clean, responsive layout and extreme versatility, WP-Venus is an ideal theme for an online health, wellness, beauty and fashion, and even entertainment magazine that can appeal to a broader audience.

ThemeForest Theme Sells Over 800 Copies In One Week

One WordPress theme, 7 days, 800 copies, $36,000 grand. A lot of WordPress authors and developers on Themeforest would love to achieve even a fraction of that and most of them are probably scratching their heads wondering why. This popular theme has even dislodged U-Design from its top spot for the past few weeks and to think it’s the only item in this author’s Themeforest portfolio. If you are wondering what theme achieved such a feat check out AVADA, a responsive multi purpose theme created by ThemeFusion.

Let’s dissect this theme a little bit further and try or simply attempt to figure out why the market is loving this theme.

Overall aesthetic

Avada’s layout can be classified as clean, straightforward, and professional-looking with very neutral colors and lots of white space. If you are familiar with real estate open houses, real estate professionals really spend a lot of time to “stage” a property before “opening” it up to the market. Care is taken to display only enough design elements to highlight the property’s unique and outstanding features, pulling back from adding unnecessary and distracting clutter. This deliberate “staging” is intended to give the potential buyer the room to imagine what he can do with it to meet his own needs. The focus is on its potential and what it can become. Avada is like that, a well-staged theme with lots of potential for all types of buyers. The demo is clear and easy to maneuver, giving customers a taste of all that it can be for whatever need they have.

Features & Functions

This premium theme is not just a pretty face. It has enough built in features and functions to create the website you need for yourself or for your clients. Everyone wants to create a website that is unique and representative of himself or his brand. Avada has a plethora of feature and function choices that, when mixed and matched together, with the client’s own images and content, can create a one of a kind and totally different website every time. Here are some of Avada’s easy to customize features that you can “play” with:

  • Homepage – 10 versions
  • Sliders – 6 styles
  • Headers – 5 versions
  • Page Templates
    • About Us – 2 versions
    • Services – 2 versions
    • Pricing Options
    • Meet the Team
    • Side Navigation
    • Contact Page – 2 versions
    • FAQ – 2 versions
    • Sidebars – Left and Right
    • Full-width page
    • 404 page
  • Portfolio – 6 layouts
  • Blog – 4 layouts
  • Custom Posts, Custom Widgets,
  • Shortcodes for Elements, Icons, Media, Pricing Tables & Typography
  • Responsive
  • Retina-ready

Support

Aside from the extensive, detailed documentation and easy to follow HD narrated video tutorials, Avada generously includes the entire set of PSDs (20+ files) for those who want to customize the theme even further. Buyers get 100% free support via their support forum. Customer feedback has been, overall, favorable so far. Providing WordPress theme support is not an easy task especially if you are servicing thousands of buyers. To receive favorable feedback regarding their theme support indicates that they have a support system that really works. This translates into higher buyer confidence which translates further into higher sales.

Avada has sold almost 15,000 copies to date and has received more than a thousand 5-star ratings which is something worth noting. Receiving a 5-star rating from 2 or more people can be easily dismissed but 1,000 or more satisfied customers can’t be ignored.

Fluke or luck? We think not. A good product with a lot of hard work backing it up sounds more like it. If this is the trend that the market is supporting as far as WordPress themes are concerned, then it is good sign that the market and the industry are headed for better days.

Get Avada Now!

Matt Cutts on Upcoming Penguin and Panda Updates for 2013

We’ve been writing a lot about Google Panda and how it penalizes websites that are basically content farms – sites that contain low quality, thin, duplicate content that have no added value to users. A follow up to the Google Panda algorithm is the Penguin update which rolled out in February 2012. What’s Penguin all about?

Penguin is an over-optimization penalty targeting websites that practice keyword stuffing, web spam, reverse cloaking, backlinks, and unnatural inbound links coming from paid or sponsored text links (using exact anchor text), comment spam, and syndicated article marketing link tactics. Google has changed the way they have been evaluating links and as a result, sites that were guilty of over-optimization got slapped. This means that you might experience a drop in your search engine rank and a drop in traffic sent by Google to your website.

There are 2 types of penalties that can happen to you:

If you experience small drops in your traffic or ranking, this equates to links being discounted. You can:

  • identify and check your link profile using your Google Webmaster’s account.
  • check, identify, and clean up bad links: blog links, forum links, article links, paid links, partner links, scraper links, natural links, unnatural links and every other type of link that your site may have and fix keyword stuffing if applicable
  • build new links or get more high quality and relevant links using related yet varied anchor text
  • build new high quality links with the same anchor text you were penalized for
  • purge your site of suspected low quality links
  • review advertisement placement or affiliate/sponsored/purchased links

If you experience big drops in your traffic or ranking, this equates to penalties and often manual action. You can:

  • Remove the site-wide low quality links. Check your anchor text variation (most have the same keyword 50% of the time).
  • If you’ve received and unnatural link warning from Google, use the link disavow tool to aid you in the removal of any offending links
  • Make a reconsideration request admitting the offense or violation, describing the steps taken to correct or fix the problem, and promising not to repeat the violation again.
  • Provide Feedback if you think your site should not be affected.

Matt Cutts, Google’s Distinguished Engineer and head of spam, recently hinted during the SMX West (Search Marketing Expo) 2013 Conference that Google Penguin and Panda updates can be expected within 2013. He revealed that his search quality team was working on a major Penguin algorithm update that will be one of the more talked about and more significant algorithm updates this year while a Panda update was set to be released around March 18th. Cutts also reveals that the Panda algorithm will be deployed and more and more integrated into their regular algorithm updates (Panda Everflux). According to Matt Cutts, content and user experience are his recommended top priorities. Knowing all these, SEO professionals, webmasters, and website owners, need to be prepared for the next roller coaster ride of rankings and ratings their websites will go through. Meanwhile, you can follow the steps enumerated above or look up our previous article on how to Panda proof your website.

Themes Town Is The New Best Deal in WordPress?

Every once in awhile you stumble upon something pretty awesome that simply blows your mind away. Guess what? There’s a new WordPress site that just does that. It’s called THEMES TOWN. If you haven’t heard of Themes Town, you NEED to see it for yourself. There’s really nothing like it so far on Planet WordPress and we have seen most of what’s out there.

What’s Themes Town all about?

Before we get into that, we have to commend the designers who put this creative site together. From the first page to the last, the creativity you experience on the site is truly a delight. Every page is like a treasure hunt where you find little nuggets of gold tucked away in drop downs, arrows, and drawers. Reading through the information is like turning the pages of a storybook. Not a dull moment indeed even if you are simply browsing through the Pricing Table. Who says that websites should all look a certain way?

But wait, it gets better. Not only are you treated to this visual delight, you also get access to valuable WordPress resources you can use for your own website. We all know that many websites come out with their own daily or weekly listings of “20 Best Free Responsive WordPress Themes” or “50 Best Free Magazine Themes” and so many other great lists and roundups. The problem with this is that you have to go through their long lists just to find what you need scrolling endlessly and going back and forth between the list and the demo button (and then how are you supposed to know it’s code is good and free of malicious or encrypted links)? Themes Town has come up with a pretty cool solution that can be found in its Member’s Area.

Themes Town Member’s Area

Themes Town - Members

Say goodbye to endless scrolling and sorting through free WordPress themes post archives. Themes Town has done all the hard work for you.

From their site…

(We) have taken the world of WordPress and condensed it down to an amazing member’s area that is chalked full of the latest and greatest themes and plugins. Each has been painstakingly reviewed by our team to be of the highest quality, free to download, and ready to use right away. It is our goal to make your job as easy as point, demo, download, and use.

One of the many risks of downloading free WordPress themes is vulnerability to malicious code. It’s not hard to find free themes. There are thousands of them available out there. The challenge is finding the good ones that you’d actually want to use and that won’t hurt your website.

It’s nice to know that there is a place called Themes Town where you can download free WordPress themes without having to worry about installing unwanted code and knowing that each of the nearly 200 themes have been pre-screened by WordPress experts.

Another great feature of the Member’s Area is the ability to sort themes according to categories. This helps members narrow down their choices according to their specific theme needs. Each week, new themes and plugins are added to their growing members area, and we have never seen such a complete resource for WordPress.

But that’s still not all.

In addition to everything thus far, Themes Town kicks it into overdrive with their exclusive Themes (and soon to be plugins) that you can only get in the Member’s Area. These cutting-edge WordPress Themes are created with the latest trends in web development including being fully responsive, having clean code, and employing all the best practices for quick load time, SEO, and more. Reliability and convenience all in one awesome site for just $55 (one time). Not a bad deal at all, don’t you think?

Themes Town is not just a good product that offers good value to consumers. It is a great product that provides great service and valuable resources that will benefit many in the WordPress community. And we have to say, it is a really beautiful and creative site.

Don’t walk…RUN to Themes Town and get your membership today!

Visit ThemesTown

ThemeGrade Gets A Facelift

ThemeGrade loyal subscribers will be delighted to hear the great news about their favorite review site. This great WordPress resource that started in 2009 just went through a design overhaul and what was already a great website has now become even better. In our previous article about ThemeGrade, we touched on the unique services this website offers the WordPress community. The information and reviews of different WordPress themes and WordPress providers have helped guide hundreds if not thousands of WordPress buyers and users in making informed WordPress purchase decisions saving them time and money in the process.

What’s great about the upgraded and updated ThemeGrade?

Overall Design

ThemeGrade has switched from a dark theme design and opted for a more minimalist, white spaced design making it easier for users to find reviews of different WordPress Providers and WordPress Themes. Below are some of the design improvements implemented in ThemeGrade’s new look:

  • Clean and Minimalist Design
  • Simple, Easy, and User-Friendly Navigation
  • Streamlined, Organized, and Easy to Access Information
  • Easy to See Ratings
  • Improved Readability

Grading System

ThemeGrade provides an easy to understand grading system for both WordPress Themes and WordPress providers. WordPress themes are graded in 2 categories and are awarded a Bronze, Silver, or Gold award based on the combined score of both tests:

General Test – these tests focus more on coding and W3C compliance(HTML & CSS), browser compatibility, support from designer, post area tests, nested/threaded comments, sidebar link hierarchy, and other special effects.

SEO Test – these tests give you an idea how well a theme has been optimized for search engines. Tests are done for off-page and on-page optimization. Review scope includes coding and W3C compliance for SEO. SEO testing for home page heading, post and page heading, post and page title tag, and content code position.

WordPress Providers, on the other hand, are graded and are awarded Gold, Silver, or Bronze Awards based on the following:

Functionality and Usability – these tests focus more on the user’s experience regarding features of themes offered by the WordPress provider usually targeting usability, ease of use, and seamless integration to a theme design.

Graphic Design – these tests focus on the overall look and design of themes offered by the WordPress provider. Page design on header image, color, contrast, font and readability, and element placement are all taken into consideration in the review.

Coding – the General Test and SEO Test are also applied to the themes offered by the WordPress Provider. Test results are then added and averaged to arrive at an overall coding score of the theme provider.

Overall Best Score – The overall score of each developer is based on the sum of the providers’ score in each category. Theme providers with the highest overall score will be rated as the TOP WordPress Theme providers.

Search Functionality

ThemeGrade has made searching for WordPress reviews and ratings so much easier. These search filters are simple, easy to use and are categorized as follows:

Efficient Search Filters are grouped according to:

  • Theme Price
  • Theme Structure
  • Theme Category
  • Theme Ranking
  • Tags

ThemeGrade’s current facelift removes all the unnecessary clutter and information overload that distract from the more important information contained in the reviews. Finding the information users need is now more pleasant and user-friendly. With all these improvements implemented both on the design front and the functionality side, we give ThemeGrade an overall score of A+.

Check out the new look of ThemeGrade.

Free Designer Resources for your WordPress Theme: Icon Sets

Sometimes all it takes to add the finishing touch to a drab design is choosing the right design element. There are numerous resources available online but sometimes it gets too overwhelming to search for them. We’ve found a few design resources that you might be able to incorporate into your WordPress theme design:

Free Outline Icons from Vandelay

these minimalist, outline style icons designed by Grandiz for Vandelay Designs will go well with Swiss-style, white spaced WordPress themes.

Free Brands Icons from Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is giving away Simple Icons by Dan Leech. This set contains 100 white icons that have transparent backgrounds and can be used for popular websites, apps and organisations.

Free WordPress Post Type Icons from Fribly

Add some style to your custom posts with these sticker type icons. Icons are transparent and in png format. They include: status, link, quote, video, audio, image, gallery and aside. May be used for both personal and commercial projects.

Social Media Icons from Harkable

These sharp and sleek social media icons will add polish to any WordPress theme. Add that extra wow to your website using these icons. (PSD and PNG format)

Clean and Colorful Social Media Icons for 2013 from Mascot Agency

These simple yet vibrantly colored icons have that Windows 8 graphic quality about them. More icons are included in the actual download.

Icons are a great way to add a signature look to your website when done the right way. Enjoy these free resources to add that signature look to your site.

WordPress Themes 2013: The Must-Have List

WordPress Themes are here to stay. Throughout the years, we’ve seen many different design styles and trends – some good, some not so good. With WordPress powering a colossal 1/5 of the entire Internet, WordPress Themes have become big business with many individual theme shops and developers pulling in millions every year.

Any way you slice it, WordPress is here to stay, and for that reason so are the free and premium themes we’ve all come to know and love. If you have spent any amount of time searching for the top WordPress Themes, you’ll notice that several names continue to appear at or close to the top of the list. Elegant Themes, Themeforest, and StudioPress to name some of the more popular ones.

In this article, we’d like to introduce you to some very creative and compelling WordPress Themes of 2013. Each and every one of these themes was released in 2013 so you can rest assured these are among the latest and greatest that WordPress has to offer.

Stay in the know with our list of the top overall WordPress Themes as well. Updated at least once per month, this article covers the best WordPress Themes in all the different categories including responsive, portfolio, magazine, business, and E-commerce just to name a few.

For the time being, here are a few of our absolute FAVORITE WordPress Themes for 2013.

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Pandas and Penguins – SEOlogy According to Google

You either love them or hate them. Who would have thought that these cute and cuddly creatures would be the object of so much debate and controversy and even dread in the land of SEO. Because of Google’s recent and ongoing algorithm updates, it has given the gentle panda and the prim penguin new personas. These powerful updates have sent SEO heads spinning and scrambling to regain lost rankings, search engine visibility, web traffic and revenue. But what’s the buzz really all about? Let’s go back to the source.

The Goal and Philosophy Behind the Panda / Penguin Updates

According to Google,

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

What animal is that?

The Panda Update – It’s all about your content

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on. (Note: Panda Update 24 – Jan 2013)

The Penguin Update – It’s all about your credibility

This update is an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. (Note: Penguin Update 3 – Oct 2012)

What should you avoid?

  • Unnatural links – spammy links
  • Using techniques outside of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
  • Thin, duplicate content
  • Overuse and abuse of keywords (keyword density)
  • Spelling, stylistic, or factual errors
  • Sloppy, overspun, unhelpful, poor quality or nonsensical content
  • Dubious link building and black hat SEO strategies
  • Over optimization of content, internal links, backlinks, and anchor texts

What’s the Penalty? the Reward?

Of course nothing escapes the eyes of big brother, Google, and people who have been gaming the system have been severely hit. On the other hand, legitimate quality sites and small businesses have not been spared either.

It only takes a few poor quality, or duplicate content, pages to hold down traffic on an otherwise solid site. Google recommends either removing those pages, blocking them from being indexed by Google, or re-writing them.

However, Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer (that’s the head of the Webspam team for Google, warns that re-writing duplicate content so that it is original may not be enough to recover from Panda — the re-writes must be of sufficient high quality. High quality content brings “additional value” to the web. Content that is general, non-specific, and not substantially different from what is already out there should not be expected to rank well: “Those other sites are not bringing additional value. While they’re not duplicates they bring nothing new to the table.”

Theoretically, these updates reward well-designed and carefully thought of websites that provide an optimal user experience with high rankings. Failing to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and best practices for content creation, site design, and link development will definitely affect a site’s ranking and SEO chances. Conventional SEO tactics will no longer cut it. Efforts should be directed towards using clean Code, publishing quality Content, and establishing site Credibility instead of black hat or grey hat techniques. The marriage of white hat search engine optimization techniques, exceptional web design, coupled with effective marketing practices won’t hurt any company wanting to be on Google’s good side. But more Google updates are still anticipated so the results remains to be seen.

More on this next week.