Best WordPress Themes 2021

UPDATED April 12, 2021: 2021 is sure to be another great year for WordPress Theme development. Like the millions and millions of people using WordPress, we eagerly await the Themes and Plugins to be released this year, and you can …


The WordPress Dashboard for WP Beginners

According to the WordPress,

The Dashboard is a tool to quickly access the most used areas of your blog’s Administration and to provide glimpses into other areas of the WordPress community. The Dashboard Screen presents information in blocks called modules. WordPress delivers eight modules: Right Now, Recent Comments, Incoming Links, Plugins,QuickPress, Recent Drafts, WordPress Blog, and Other WordPress News.

The first screen you see when you log into the administration area of your blog is your Dashboard. The main idea of the dashboard is to give you a place where you can get an at-a-glance overview of what’s happening with your blog. You can catch up on news, view your draft posts, see who’s linking to you or how popular your content’s been, quickly put out a no-frills post, or check out and moderate your latest comments.

The Dashboard acts like a cockpit with all the controls and switches you need to help your website function the way you want it to. This might seem basic to those who have been using WordPress for quite some time now but there are still quite a few out there who are still struggling to figure out how to find their way through the backend, scared to death lest they “break” their website beyond repair.

Getting to know your WordPress Dashboard

If you are a WordPress beginner, the Admin Section or backend can be quite intimidating at first, but once you become familiar with the different sections, everything will make sense. What do you see after you successfully login to your WordPress website? Here’s what you can expect.

The Dashboard contains the following default modules. These modules can be dragged, dropped, repositioned, or toggled on and off according to your preferences.

Right Now

This module, at its basic, gives you a concise overview of your what’s going on with your site. It contains information and stats about your content (posts, pages, categories, tags), discussions (approved, pending, or spam comments), the name of your WordPress theme and the number of active widgets you are using, users online, and the WordPress version installed. More information can be included in this module depending on any additional plugins you install. You can also customize your Privacy Settings if you wish to keep your site private.

QuickPress

This module is the best and quickest way you can create a simple post. You can add a title, content, media files, custom forms, tags, and save your post as a draft or publish immediately. It’s a great tool for capturing and publishing ideas without going through the “Add New Post” module.

Recent Comments

If you allow comments on your website, this module helps you moderate the discussions on your posts. You can approve (unapprove), edit, reply, mark as spam, or delete comments right on the dashboard.

Recent Drafts

This module displays saved drafts of posts and pages that you are working on which still needs to be edited or published.

Incoming Links

This module reveals the urls of other websites that has linked to your WordPress website. You may or may not find this module useful as it does not always include all the websites that link to you. You can also configure incoming links you allow by editing the RSS feed information ( url, number of items to display, item date).

What’s Hot

This module displays recent posts from the official WordPress Blog, Other WordPress News, Popular or Latest Posts from around WordPress. This keeps you updated on the latest WordPress related news such as version announcements, security notices, and general WordPress community posts and updates.

Plugins

This module lists the Most Popular, Newest, and Recently Updated plugins available. If you are adventurous and you want to experiment with how different plugins work on your site, this is the perfect resource to find plugins to play with.

Site Stats

This module is probably the one you need to pay most attention to. It shows you a graph of your website’s activities – views, visitors, traffic – per day, week, or month. It’s a great tool to find out how many visits you get, what your top posts are, top searches on your website, and overall statistics to help you improve, maintain, and optimize your site even further.

Knowing the functions of each of these modules will help you learn how to use them to manage your website. Take some time to go through each one of these modules and familiarize yourself with each of them. You’ll soon be mastering all of them and it’ll be instinctive later on.


Elegant Themes Working On Theme #81 (Ecommerce)

For those who have been waiting for the longest time for a fresh ecommerce theme from Elegant Themes, the wait will soon be over. Nick Roach has just released a sneak peek of Theme #81 to join the 80 stylish themes in the Elegant Themes pack and it looks smashing.

StyleShop, Elegant Themes’ upcoming ecommerce theme is estimated to be released in a couple of weeks, so those of you out there who have ecommerce projects on the wings better hold your horses for this one. The teaser images are exciting – dark styled at the moment but a light colored version might just happen too, according to Nick Roach.

StyleShop’s menu system looks clean and streamlined, the huge homepage slider looks amazing, the mini slider has great potential for lots of shop promotions, the homepage catalog is accessible and perfect for virtual window shopping, the footer is widgetized, the whole theme is responsive, and yes, best of all is the WooCommerce integration. Applause, applause!

According to Nick Roach,

“We will be opting to streamline the theme for WooCommerce, instead of coding it for a disparate collection of plugins. We believe that WooCommerce is the best option at the moment, and has a promising future.”

So far, the overwhelming response to this theme is excitement, and truly, with reasonable cause. So mark your calendars and start your countdown, for in a couple of weeks, StyleShop will be having its grand opening at Elegant Themes!

Get 80 Premium Themes for $39

2013 Is Here: Time To Update Your WordPress Theme!


New Year. New Look. Say goodbye to all the holiday trimmings and get ready to update the old. What better time to start the year with something new and something fresh! If you’ve been wanting to revamp your website and give it a makeover now is the time to do it. Design trends and the gazillion features have sort of settled, the fads have faded, while useful and relevant features have been embraced and integrated into the basic WordPress theme structure. It’s a great way to start 2013.

Take a look at all the gorgeous WordPress themes that have been released the past few months, read our reviews and see for yourself:

Fusion Theme from Elegant Themes

Specialty WordPress Theme

Harmony Theme by Elegant Themes

Origin WordPress Theme by Elegant Themes


You can also check out these articles on WordPress trends, plugins and other resources to beef up your site:


25 Very Useful WordPress Calendar Plugins for 2013

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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