Twitter is one of the most visited social networking platforms on the planet. WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging platforms. When the two meet, you can expect beautiful things to happen.
Below we present you with 25 helpful Twitter plugins for WordPress – Plugins can make your WordPress site do virtually anything.
Here’s an example of what you can achieve with one of these Twitter Plugins for WordPress.
It is a common habit nowadays that people sign into their Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail accounts when they start their computer, and after checking their accounts they typically close all these web pages but do not sign out of their accounts. Instead they go on to work on new web pages and they occasionally return to their accounts to check any latest updates. Now there is a plugin named “Simple Twitter Connect”, no. 5 below in this list, which enables you to log into your WordPress dashboard through your Twitter profile. Once you install the plugin and sync everything then you can login to your WordPress dashboard with your Twitter account. If you have the habit of being logged into your Twitter account all the time then you can log into WordPress by just a click of the button – you will just have to hit the “Sign in with Twitter” button and you will be in.
This is just one example of the power of the Twitter Plugins presented below. Scroll down for more info on these wonderful Plugins for 2012 – 2013.
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Attention Creatives! Looking for a colorful and creative theme to match your sense of creativity? If you are, then take a look at Creative Skeleton, a responsive portfolio style theme that will satisfy your colorful and artistic side. Creative Skeleton gives you several portfolio layout styles and two unique single portfolio layouts (Pile and HoverScroll) to choose from. Pile stacks your images on top of each other and brings each one to the forefront once you click on it while HoverScroll works like a carousel of images that scroll left or right when you hover on the directional arrows. All these layout configurations give you maximum flexibility to create the look and style of your online portfolio just the way you want.
Creative Skeleton Theme: $35 | Demo & Download
Dramatic in white and even more dramatic in black – with a myriad of accent colors to choose from – that’s Melrose Premium WordPress Theme for you. Melrose is an impressive and professional looking WordPress theme for the serious creative agency. It’s the perfect backdrop to house an equally impressive portfolio. The design elements are amazingly well-thought out and the features included will surely make you feel like you’ve bought everything in a candy store. This easy to work with, beautiful and flexible theme will definitely create a lasting impact on your visitors and eventually on your site’s conversion statistics.
Melrose Theme: $50 | Demo & Download
Creative Agencies and Multimedia Professionals will love Vitrux Premium WordPress Theme. Many portfolio themes include full screen portfolios on the homepage but not all of them offer full screen sliders with audio and full-screen videos as alternatives. This is what sets this portfolio style theme apart from the rest. Not only that, you also have a variety of Gallery presentation options to choose from. If you’ve amassed a large body of creative work in different multimedia formats and you want to give each project the exposure that each portfolio item deserves, check out Vitrux Premium WordPress Theme. It just might be the portfolio theme you need.
Vitrux Theme: $45 | Demo & Download
Tired of your boring blog layout and want something fresh? Why not check out Fashionista Premium WordPress Theme, a blog style WordPress theme that’s meant for bloggers but can also be used for other purposes. Pinterest-styled themes are the latest trends today and their popularity is still on the rise. Fashionista is not strictly Pinterest but uses an Isotope Masonry plugin that mimics the Pinterest look. What is interesting about this layout style is that every post is accessible and available to the visitor. This means that posts and articles are not buried in the archives where they may be forgotten – out of sight, out of mind. For bloggers, this ensures that every post gets equal exposure and importance on the homepage. Check out Fashionista Premium WordPress Theme and bring your blog style up to date today.
Fashionista Theme: $40 | Demo & Download
Point Break Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive portfolio theme and the sixth of the Super Skeleton Themes released by Epicera. This theme is more than just a WordPress theme because it also functions as a comprehensive HTML5 framework and a templating system as well. It’s an innovative way to creating and customizing themes and it’s primarily designed “for users, not geeks.” It’s innovative and definitely worth looking at especially if you want something that will be flexible enough to withstand the next WordPress update.
Point Break Theme: $45 | Demo & Download
What’s so unique about Unique? We included Unique Premium WordPress Theme in our list because of the guy behind it – Justin Tadlock. This premium magazine-style WordPress theme is Justin’s first foray into ThemeForest and is part of his experiment to “improve” ThemeForest from within, with the goal of getting as many authors to adhere to WordPress coding standards and practices. Unique may not stand out as far as “looks” are concerned but its creativity lies under the hood. It’s back to good old code and just enough cool features without going overboard with the bells and whistles. Check out Unique today.
Unique Theme: $40 | Demo & Download
You have to see Creative Portfolio Premium WordPress Theme by Gavick in action to see what it does. This uniquely creative premium WordPress theme with parallax scrolling effect is surely going to catch the attention of your visitors and create a lasting impression. If you want to start your website with a bang or re-launch an old site with an ultra new look, then you need to check out Creative Premium WordPress Theme by Gavick. The experience will definitely be unforgettable.
Creative Theme: $99 | Demo & Download
Check out some of the latest photography templates in the WordPress market today:
Folio Elements Premium WordPress Theme is a video/photography theme that would be great for photographers who simply want to create an online gallery of their photos and videos using WordPress. Folio Elements is a fun and fresh theme. This is not a cookie cutter theme and it is a departure from the typical photo/video theme but its design and code quality cannot be dismissed. This responsive WordPress theme is translation ready and is also a fully responsive theme which means that your site & photos will look amazing on any device. It is always refreshing to see something different in the WP themes market. Jason Schuller’s avant garde approach to design is evident in all his themes (this one included) and is always a welcome intermission to the regular programming.
Folio Elements Theme: $75 | Demo & Download
MediaBook Premium WordPress Theme is a wonderful and unique theme that can be used by photographers and creative professionals. If you need a theme that combines Minimalism and Focus/Simplicity and Function into one, then MediaBook is an excellent solution for you. If you’ve had big, flashy, slider overload, MediaBook is a sight for sore eyes. This easy to setup premium WordPress theme delivers the goods straight to the point. Some of the key features of this theme are: Dynamic Content Loading, Global Loop Showcase System, accepts Multimedia Content, can be configured as a Blog or as a Single Page site, and the Gallery can be color customized if you prefer to. If you want to try something different and fresh, check out MediaBook today.
MediaBook Theme: $40 | Demo & Download
Are you a professional photographer looking for a complete online solution for your photography business? Would you like to be able to do more than just showcase your photographic skills and portfolio on your website and be able to sell your prints as well? If that is you, then take a look at this fully responsive WordPress theme from Organic themes simply named Photographer Theme. Not only can you showcase your images and multiple portfolios in a professional manner, you also can take advantage of the built-in WooCommerce functionalities to sell turning your simple online gallery into a full-blown money making site as well. Most photography templates are simply online galleries to display images. With Photographer Theme, not only do you have full control of your images, you also have full control over your earnings as well. Check out Photographer Theme by Organic Themes today.
Photographer Theme: $69 | Demo & Download
The holidays are almost here and what better way to spruce up your website than with some great eCommerce themes to improve the look and function of your e-store. Here’s a rundown of some of the best eCommerce themes to get you ready for holiday shoppers:
Sold! Premium WordPress Theme is an excellent mix of style and function. The clean, white space design does not distract and serves as the perfect backdrop to highlight choice merchandise. Sold has a beautiful slider where you can put your most interesting items on sale. You can even define points on the slide where you can add comments or even zoom images ala Flickr. This is perfect for highlighting detail on specific points of the product. Sold! uses two of the most powerful plugins – WooCommerce and Jigoshop – making it an effective eCommerce solution. Its multi-lingual capability, responsive features and easy customizability enables your store to service both local and global market.
Sold! Theme: $55 | Demo & Download
Another interesting theme worth mentioning is Mercor. Mercor Premium WordPress Theme gives you the look and feel of a department store or supermarket weekly catalogue. This responsive theme’s clean, fresh layout and white space styling creates an uncluttered look that’s easy on the eye even if there are numerous images and texts on the page. Mercor has a dynamic Nivo homepage slider to highlight store specials or to announce store events and sales. Mercor is fully responsive and uses WooCommerce to power e-commerce transactions. This powerful feature combination makes your site current, competitive and able to address the emerging mobile shoppers market.
Mercor Theme: $55 | Demo & Download
This latest eCommerce theme from CSSIgniter is bold and eye-catching. Intrigue Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive eCommerce theme that combines the power of WooCommerce and CSSIgniter’s straightforward theme design. This means that setting up a powerful eCommerce site need not be a complicated and tedious task to accomplish. With Intrigue, you can use a plethora of widgets to create the functionality you require. This theme comes out of the box in a hot red and black color scheme but you can also choose from the available 7 color schemes to create the look most appropriate to your market. Intrigue Premium WordPress Theme is not over the top and includes just the right amount of features and functionalities for whatever you need.
Intrigue Theme: $39 | Demo & Download
Mearishop Premium WordPress Theme is a great eCommerce solution that’s edgy and modern. The Lookbook-ish appeal makes it a perfect match for a fashion and accessories store. Customers can check out the portfolio or lookbook pages to determine the style that best suits them. Mearishop uses the powerful Hana panel combined with WooCommerce functionality to give you the power to control almost every aspect of the theme. With tons of options available, this features makes this responsive theme perfect for both WP noobs and experienced developers to use. Choose from unlimited color options, 7 backgrounds and 34 patterns to define your custom look. You can even upload your background image. With 7 sliders to choose from, Mearishop gives you the options you to reach your target market in style.
Mearishop Theme: $55 | Demo & Download
Xing Premium WordPress Theme is a modern and clean theme designed to meet the eCommerce needs of both small and large scale business alike. Xing is primarily an eCommerce theme but it is also flexible enough to be used for creative portfolios or for magazine/editorial blog type websites. Xing uses several jQuery powered features like the Flexslider and the jQuery Product Carousels(for WooCommerce recent/featured products). This highly customizable and responsive theme gives you tons of options to create the look you want. Xing is not wanting in anything – from shortcodes, to custom post formats, to custom widgets, to 8 portfolio layouts, to social sharing features and other features and functionalities to help you to create and customize your eCommerce site. Check out Xing today.
Xing Theme: $55 | Demo & Download
Keep your eyes peeled for more WordPress holiday roundups in the next few weeks!
Time management is one of the biggest problems faced by business owners be they digital business or brick and mortar. There are too many things to do and when you do one thing you obviously can’t do something else (MBA programs call this the “opportunity cost”). Therefore, to manage your time properly and make the most out of the few working hours that exist each day, you must find the best tools to help you manage your time properly. Enter digital calendars.
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With WordPress being one of the most popular content management systems available today, many WordPress users, developers or not, are beginning to realize that there is a market out there seeking for new and innovative themes for their WordPress powered sites. So how do you start make your very own WordPress theme? Let’s look at a few resources available on the web to help us do that.
Our first stop is the WordPress Codex. This compendium of WordPress resources is rich with “how to’s” from installing your WordPress theme to playing around with code. If you go to the Codex’s Theme Development section, you will find all the useful information from the structure of a WP theme, to template files to practically everything you want to know about WordPress. It has links to sections on theme design, teaching about the proper layout and other design aspects of the theme. Studying the Codex is essential to serious players in the WordPress community.
When you’re ready to try our information you learned from the codex, siteground.com has an interesting tutorial to build a simple wordpress theme. The site helps you go through the process of creating simple code to generate a simple WordPress theme. You can play around with the code to make more complicated themes if you wish. This would be a great place to help you take your baby steps a little further as you work towards being a more experienced theme developer.
If you’re really in a hurry to build your theme because of an opportunity you just can’t miss, you can probably start off your first few themes with Artisteer. This is a WYSIWYG theme builder software which enables you to make professional looking WordPress themes in minutes. You can create a theme in Artisteer then export it to WordPress in the form of a folder containing the normal WordPress files. Studying the files and your Artisteer rendition will give you a lot of information about building themes. The Artisteer’s home edition is available for download at artisteer.com at a price of $49.95.
A lot of folks who want to develop themes are more designers rather than code geeks. If you feel more comfortable with photoshop than messing around in notepad to tweak code, then you might fancy psd2cssonline.com. This utility enables you to convert your photoshop design into the equivalent wordpress files in a few minutes. Now you can spend more time working on the aesthetic aspects of your theme and worry about the code later. Check out this video to get an idea of how easy it is to use psd2cssonline.
You can also check out an excellent article on Lifehacker entitled “How to Create a Custom Theme for Your WordPress Blog with Minimal Coding Required.” What’s great about this article is its simple approach on what you can expect as you go through the process of creating your own theme. It also has valuable resources like links to creating photoshop files for your theme as well as basic html/css knowledge for you to complete your task. The article also explains the structure and files of a typical WordPress theme.
Other Resources You can Check Out
These resources will definitely whet your appetite for theme building skills. There’s a ton of other resources available out there for your to refine your WordPress coding skills. As the WordPress mantra goes, “Code is Poetry.” Start writing your WordPress poems today.
Have you ever stopped to consider what makes a theme the best WordPress theme of all time? Taking a look at some of the best themes of 2012 we have compiled, which one would be your choice? What qualities should a theme have in order for it to be ranked as the best WordPress theme ever? Here are a few attributes you can use to rate your theme choices:
- Flexible – A theme must have the ability to meet the needs of various users. You must be able to customize a theme for various applications. Ideally, the theme you use for your portfolio site, should work excellently on your wife’s personal blog site, your client’s e-commerce site, or any other website requirement you need. A multifunctional theme begets more users.
- Timeless – The best theme of all time should be ageless. It should demonstrate resilience in the midst of technology trends that come and go. The key to this is for code and other technical stuff under the hood to be easily upgradable and to be supported by a development team to keep it alive and updated. The theme’s aesthetic features should classic/timeless while being highly customizable to reflect emerging artistic theme movements or trends.
- Accessible – The theme has to be easily accessible to as many as possible. The pricing must be reasonable not only for 1st world countries but also in the emerging tech hubs of the developing world. Usage must be easy for persons of varied physical/mental abilities, age or educational background. How would the technically challenged or non-coders find using the theme? Is the theme available in many languages? Will the theme be accessible in varied devices of choice?
- Responsive – The theme has to should be responsive in every way. Mobile and handheld devices are changing the way we access information and creating websites that look good not only in traditional desktop computers but also on smartphones and tablets is the way of the future. If you want to create a website that responds to the needs of your clients, anywhere they are and everywhere they go – then being responsive is the way to go.
- Customer Support – The theme should have adequate support and provision for any WordPress updates. This is differentiates a good theme from a great theme. Customer support is paramount to any service oriented business and it will spell long-term success to anyone who puts that extra effort in.
There are many more attributes that can be added to this list. Feel free to share your thoughts and your choices. We’d really love to know which WordPress Theme you think is THE BEST WordPress Theme of ALL time.
Web design is not a stand alone activity. It is affected by several factors like technology trends, business trends, market trends, and consumer behaviour. It takes a studied effort in order to intelligently and accurately “predict” what the market wants in the future. No one can claim to make 100% accurate predictions but by taking stock of what goes on not just in the web design industry but in the related industries that affect it as well we can somehow make calculated “guesses” as to what trends may happen in the near future.
Here are some of our predictions on what’s currently hot and what will continue to be hot up to the early portion of 2013:
- Mobile Driven – WordPress themes will continue to be responsive, adaptive, fluid. Older but still popular themes will come out with mobile-friendly versions.
- HTML5 and CSS3 – Stricter adherence to W3C Valid code and significant decrease if not obsolescence of Flash.
- Simplified and uncluttered call to action buttons per page – Simple, minimal and uncluttered themes with lesser number of buttons to click.
- Big Typography – Big, bold and readable fonts.
- Single Web Page Design – Infinite scrolling (parallax style).
- Authentically Digital – Windows 8 style graphics (less shiny, more flat).
- Simplified front end customization – Backend customizations will move to the front making it easier to preview specific customization choices.
- Social Media Management – Integrating social media into the WordPress design template (Instagram, Pinterest, Dribble streams etc).
- Modular Template Layouts – More drag and drop options with less coding required for customization.
- Adaptive to new SEO trends – WordPress Themes will be adaptive to new SEO trends like Voice search, mobile search, humanized ranking, social media factors, etc.
If you a WordPress professional or developer, what emerging trends do you foresee in 2013? Share your thoughts. We want to know what you think.
Best Theme (v1.1) A Beautiful, Responsive Theme for WordPress Sites Make sure to check out our official post on the Best Theme for updates on recent and future releases! Take some time to check out the Best Theme demo …
