Top Themes Featured on Theme Forest

Every week, Themeforest features promising WordPress themes that are worth noticing. Here are some of the latest themes that have been featured on Themeforest you need to see. Check these out.

Forgiven – A Powerful WordPress Theme for Churches

Forgiven Premium WordPress Theme is a powerful parallax enabled church theme that includes major features such as: Visual Composer plugin, Slider Revolution, Envira Gallery, the unique and exclusive Blur Slider, support for Church Theme Content, WooCommerce support, Page customizer, Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7 support, Sermon functionality, The Events Calendar and the Events Calendar Pro plugin integration and support, and so much more.

FlatAds – Classified AdsWordPress Theme

FlatAds Classified Ads WordPress Theme is a super flexible and fully responsive Premium Directory/Listing WordPress themebuilt with HTML5 and CSS3. FlatAds is compatible with WooCommerce 2.1, bbPress, and MailChimp for WP plugin. Other key features include custom fields for categories and subcategories, interactive Google maps Geolocation support, integrated PayPal payments support, and WPML (multilingual) support.

Faculty – Responsive Academic WordPress Theme

Faculty Responsive Academic WordPress Theme is a magazine or personal blog styled page that can be used to build personal or professional websites specifically for academic people. This simple and yet well structured responsive theme is especially designed as an online cv of professors and PHD students. Key features include publications management, option to present research, teaching and blog pages, and provision for downloadable CVs for interested visitors.

KLEO – Next level Premium WordPress Theme

KLEO – Next level Premium WordPress Theme is an extremely flexible, fully customizable BuddyPress and bbPress compatible WordPress multipurpose theme to help you create a community, a corporate portfolio, or a membership website. This membership ready theme allows you to create membership levels and restrict content based on member access quite easily. key features include: WPML and Translation Ready, WooCommerce Ready, Google Maps integration, Contact Form 7 compatible, among others.

Time Travel – Timeline WordPress Theme

Time Travel – Timeline WordPress Theme is an ultra modern next generation premium theme developed with cutting edge technology and design. The built-in voice control makes it both revolutionary and at the same time super intuitive to use. You can set up your own language to be used in the voice commands control, so it is as easy as possible for your visitors. The design of the site is a 3D time travel path, ideal for displaying chronology data, posts flow by date, history info or just any type of timeline content in a modern and futuristic way.

It is ideal as a blog, a portfolio site, a corporate site aiming to display the history of company or brand, an artist’s portfolio to display albums / films / books in a chronological way, an agency website to showreel projects and team by date, etc.

Hooray – Premium WordPress Blog Theme

Hooray Premium WordPress Blog Theme is one of the most colorful and user friendly personal blog themes. Key features include: easy to use powerful Admin Panel, full Arabic RTL support, social counter integration, translation and multi language ready, page templates, review and rating system, unlimited colors and sidebars, and so much more.

Moustachey: A Blog theme with extra gusto

Moustachey Premium WordPress Theme is a fun, quirky WordPress blog theme playing on the moustache design. Key features include: Author support, social share enabled, typekit web fonts integration, adobe edge web fonts integration, Google analytics support, Google API v3 integration, configurable donate/message block at the top of the page, localization support, and so much more.

Top 5 BuddyPress Themes April 2014

BuddyPress ready themes enable you to create your own special social network centered around your website and content. This means that visitors can register as members and connect and network with other members who are part of your specific niche community. This is especially useful in creating and growing a social network where members share common interests. Here’s a rundown of the top 5 themes that have BuddyPress integrated into them.

WPLMS

WPLMS Premium WordPress Theme is a learning management solution for WordPress. It is designed to deliver and manage educational content for an online audience. WPLMS enables you to create and sell courses as single items, as subscriptions or as a combination of both. You can embed videos and other multimedia content into your courses, create your own question bank with multiple choice, single answer or essay type questions including quiz timers, timelines and auto submit with WPMLS’s built-in quiz and test capabilities. WPLMS includes an instructor dashboard allowing you to check submissions of students as well as your own course content. The theme also has a progress page for users to track progress and l badges and certificates earned and attained. This theme uses BuddyPress for collaboration and discussion with other learners.

Kleo

Kleo Premium WordPress Theme is a multipurpose theme designed to meet various requirements of most websites.This BuddyPress and bbPress ready theme gives you great flexibility to create a membership site with complete ease. Powered by the popular visual composer plugin, Kleo enables you to simply drag and drop elements into a single page. Kleo enables managing content according to membership level. The theme gives you the ability to restrict content according the type of membership one has. Kleo comes with key features such as an awesome option panel, shortcodes and templates for easy customization, 700+ Fontello icons, WPML ready, and so much more.

Xphoria

Xphoria Premium WordPress Theme showcases what BuddyPress and bbPress plugins are capable of doing. Xphoria gives you the ability to create display forums turning your site into a big social network exchange. Visitors can join groups, post messages, make connections and the like. Conversations are displayed in a neat tiled fashion showing the number of posts under each thumbnail. Groups are displayed on the homepage and may be viewed according to popularity, alphabetical order, activity or date created while each group has a separate page displaying member info and conversations. Essentially, a social network in a box, Xphoria can hel you build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community.

Plexus

Plexus Premium WordPress Theme is a multisite theme created especially for enabling your site to host a blog network within WordPress. This theme is fully integrated with BuddyPress and bbPress giving the social networking power fitting for a blog network. It comes with specific network settings that give you control over what blog admins can do with it. Aside from BuddyPress and bbPress full integration, the theme also includes: Visual Composer plugin for that drag and drop convenience in customization, Layer Slider plugin to create a responsive slider with hundreds of transitions, site wide widgets that display content across the blog networks, and so much more.

Klein

Klein Premium WordPress Theme is a powerful community theme that gives you the utmost power to maximize social networking. At the heart of this theme is the Gears core framework that enables you to integrate other plugins easily. This innovative WordPress theme was built to support BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce. It is ideal for a website that interacts with a lot of users. Members can create profiles, send messages, add connections, or simply share what’s happening. It also allows members to collaborate through forums or sell any products you require. Key features include: Visual Composer plugin for drag and drop layouts, paid membership pro features to manage subscription packages, supports Woocommerce to set up a vibrant private online ecosystem, etc. This theme works well with BuddyPress plugins such as Events Manage and Album Plus, extending the power of your site’s network.

Reaching your Target Market thru List Banking and Media Buying

Advertising has evolved in so many ways throughout the years. The leap of advertising from traditional print media to the blinking gifs during the early days of the internet to the more sophisticated video showreels of today has been an interesting journey.

Online or digital advertising first entered the scene in the mid 1990’s when HotWired launched the first banner ads from major companies like AT&T, Sprint, Volvo, MCI and others. (Check out this illustrated timeline.) This was followed by PPC (Pay-per-click) keyword advertising, keyword ads, mobile ads, pop-ups and pop-unders, Google Adwords, video ads, all the way to today’s technology-empowered “word-of-mouth” via social networking and viral advertising.

Spending on digital advertising has been steadily on the rise. Digital media advertising in the form of contextual ads, banner ads, cross platform ads, email marketing, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, etc. are already part of a big chunk of the advertising budget of major companies. In fact, global digital advertising spending broke $100 billion in 2012. That’s a lot of money spent on cyberspace billboards. Is it really worth it? How effective are your advertising efforts? How do you measure your R.O.I. on your advertising campaigns? What if you don’t have that kind of a budget? How much are you willing to spend to generate a lead? Where do you start?

Here are some simple steps to help you as you plan your own marketing strategies:

Determine the Leading Performance Indicator (LPI) of your Company

There are different kinds of performance measures. A Performance Indicator (PI) is a measure, which gives an indication of performance. Typically a performance indicator is an outcome measure and not an input OR in-process measure. Key Performance Indicators are the critical gauge of a site’s success or failure. Some sectors say that Cost per Lead is a good LPI, while others argue that there are other factors that need to be considered in determining the correct LPI.

Competitive Analysis

Know your “enemy”. Well not quite the “enemy” because they could later on be allies, affiliates, or partners in the future. The point is to be aware of your competitors, find out what’s working for them, the ads they run, where they run them, the affiliate programs they belong to. In short, learn from their successes and their mistakes. You can also use a paid service called WhatRunsWhere – a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online, where they are running ads, from who they are buying inventory, and what exact ads they are using. WhatRunsWhere allows you to see what is happening on any website: who is advertising there, who is selling the inventory for them, and what ads they are running. With data from multiple countries and actionable insights from the data, WhatRunsWhere quickly allows anyone to dissect advertising campaigns, resulting in reduced risk and a higher ROI for online advertising campaigns.

Plan your Ad Campaign and Test It

Start smart by starting small. If you’re still getting your feet wet in media buying you can start your campaign in little doses. Target web and mobile audiences, choose a frequency cap of when your ad is displayed, and choose a campaign max to a manageable number for you to study and tweak if necessary. There are self serve ad buying platforms like www.sitescout.com where you can create & manage your ad campaigns easily. Test ads and copy. Use copy that converts well on the website and utilize it throughout your campaign.

Identify What Works and What Doesn’t. Prune Campaigns

Analyze your data. After 5,000 to 10,000 impressions Identify performing banners. Your banner could be driving down your placement and overall site numbers. Display the best performer until it fatigues. Identify performing sites. A site left to run wild can ruin your campaign. Turn off banners with low CTRs.

Optimize What Works

Tweak your campaign basics for maximum optimization. Identify times when traffic runs best and run traffic during those times. Tailor your creative or your ad banner to match your audience. Focus on what works and improve on it some more.

Scaling

Now that you’ve gotten a little bit of experience, broaden your net. Retarget, add more sites, add more banner sizes, offer affiliate commissions, or go direct (www.buyads.com) The point is to take your marketing campaign up another notch.

Whatever evolution advertising goes through, the objective of advertising remains the same, that is, to draw attention to a product, service, or event to persuade an audience (viewers, readers, or listeners) to take some action in the form of sales or attendance. In other words, conversion. Try these strategies and share your stories. We’d love to hear from you.

The Panda Algorithm and Your Website


Kicked, slapped, penalized, pooped on – who would have thought that something as gentle as a panda could be so violent. In truth, Google Panda, the much dreaded update was actually named after one of Google’s engineers, Navneet Panda, the man who developed the technology behind the algorithm that has put everyone – SEO professionals, webmasters, and website owners alike, on their toes.

One Search Engine to Rule Them All

Many SEO people get flustered and panicky and a lot of them shake in their boots whenever a Google update looms on the horizon. That’s how much Google affects SEO professionals and webmasters. But believe it or not, there was a time when Google was just one of the many search engine players out there. How many of you remember Lycos, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, or MSN Search? Some of the older ones that you may be familiar with have already become inactive but a few others are still very much around like Baidu, Yandex, AOL Search, and the rebranded Yahoo! Search powered by Bing, the product of a deal between Yahoo and Microsoft. Check out this timeline on Wikipedia to see the rest of the search engines.

It was around 2000 when Google’s search engine rose to the top of the heap with its efficient, relevant, and lightning speed search results largely due to its patented algorithm called Pagerank. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Today, Google Search is the most used search engine indexing billions of pages and processing several billion queries each day leading the core search market in January 2013, according to Comscore, with a 67% market share. No wonder SEOs tremble. Of course, you could try other browsers like Bing and join the SEO Wars watercooler discussion between Google and Bing and add your two cents worth.

The Goal of Search

Larry Page, co-founder and Google CEO, once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” “…our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to find the information you need and get the things you need to do done.”

The relevance of the search results that a search engine returns dictates how useful it is to its users. Google Web Search, one of the many Google products and not to be mistaken with Google, Inc., a web search engine or a software code designed to search for information on the Internet has proven to be the most relevant search engine out there. By web crawling, indexing, searching, and returning authoritative results as seen in Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs, it has risen to the top of its game. Google crawls through millions of web pages for a particular word or phrase queried to provide the most relevant or popular results first and in what order or ranking the results should be shown in the SERPs. Of course, the most coveted spot is the top result on the first page. It’s the goal of every website owner. That’s also the reason why SEO exists.

The Business of Search

Businesses and even individuals invest heavily in SEO just to improve their rankings hoping to land in the first few pages of Google’s Search Engine Results Page. Black hat, grey hat, white hat – you name it – it’s all been tried in the quest for that number one spot on Google. Why do people want to top Google’s SERP? Studies show that users spend more time on the number one website imputing a level of authority and credibility to it, knowingly or unknowingly. This translates into higher click thru rate which translates into higher traffic, which further translates into higher income potential, especially if you are an eCommerce website. There is money in search thus the need for SEO in business. Enter the SEO professional.

The Race to the Top – Gaming the System

The race to the top of Google’s results page has become critical to many businesses to the extent that many have resorted to tactics and tricks to game Google’s search algorithm. There are many highly reputable SEO firms that follow Google’s best practices for Search Engine Optimization. Unfortunately, there have been a lot and there still are many who abuse the system to try to get ahead of the rest. Whatever color you want to call these techniques used to manipulate the search engine results, redirect users to false links or shortchange users on real content, the results are definitely short term and the risk of being penalized hangs like a guillotine waiting to drop on your head.

Google’s Response

Google Panda rolled out in February 2011 cracking down on: websites with thin, duplicate content, spammy sites, sites with excessive linking, parked pages filled with ads or keywords and no real content, content farms, and sites, generally in violation of Google’s Best Practices guidelines. Consequently, a lot of websites plunged from their top positions and even after two years since the update, several of them have yet to recover. These sites that got hit suffered loss of traffic, loss of income, and a whole lot more. Legitimate sites also suffered a lot of collateral damage much like those who got hit by Hurricane Sandy. The latest Panda update to hit happened in January 2013.
Embracing the Mighty Panda?

Obviously, these changes have shaken what is shakeable in order for the unshakeable to remain. As more and more people are bringing their businesses online, this means more websites will be created and the virtual highway will definitely be clogged with cyber traffic sooner than we think. The mobile web is already bursting at the seams with billions of people accessing the web through their handheld devices.The question is, is your site ready for all that traffic? will they find you or have you been stricken off the radar already? Out of sight and out of mind.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Although it is not the only search engine out there, Google currently dominates the search engine market. As a company, its goals, objectives, and activities will always be in pursuit and in line with their corporate mission. Knowing this, their updates to improve and innovate their products and services will always be part of the landscape and shouldn’t surprise anyone anymore. A Panda, a Penguin, a Poodle, or any update using any name is to be expected. The algorithms and the parameters may change but the push towards fulfilling their corporate vision remains. Who says you have to live up to Google’s standards? You don’t actually have to. There ARE other search engines out there. If, however, you decide to stay, then the best thing that you can probably do for your website is to “think like Google” to know and anticipate what Google wants.

How to Think Like Google

The answer is not a secret and it is actually quite easy to find. Google lists ten things that they believe in as a company. You may or may not agree with all of them and your methodologies and policies may differ from theirs. But, you can probably focus on three major areas you have in common in which, whether you like or not, Google affects and has a “say” in. These areas include:

  • The content on your website
  • The internal linking structure of your site.
  • The “user experience” on your site.

Creating a high-quality site that complies with the best web practices guidelines will benefit your website and more importantly, your users, in the long-term. As Google integrates more evaluations by real live users into their iterations, actual user experience will bear much weight as your website is evaluated. Users who enjoy your content and the overall experience of interacting with your website are your best weapons to help spread the word about you and help you rise to that most coveted top spot of Google’s search engine results page.