WordPress is the best CMS for news or magazine blogs. They come with an appealing and well thought layout to post news, images, to conduct polls, engage visitors with discussions and much more. All you have to do is get one of these themes and restyle them to your needs.
Here are a few of our current picks for awesome photography themes for 2013:
Modelish is a unique modern HTML5+LESS fully responsive WordPress theme for presenting artwork or photography. This full-width photography/portfolio styled theme is also versatile enough to be used for any type of business as well. The stylish, yet clean and professional design is optimized with mobile first techniques and retina display support. Add some style and modern flair to your website with its customizable system that makes it easy to adapt to your favorite colors, fonts and style preferences.
Keres is a cool fullscreen responsive WordPress theme built for a photography or portfolio website. It comes with many cool features like multiple slideshows (fullscreen Slideshow, Ken Burns Slideshow), a unique Image Flow Gallery, Skin manager, fullscreen Contact Map, fullscreen Youtube and Vimeo Video. This theme includes customizable elements (color, font, background image) with 50+ advanced shortcodes and a Shortcode Generator support to create the portfolio style you really want.
Photojax is a clean and minimal, grid styled WordPress photography theme. This sleek and modern theme features two color skins, beautiful galleries using the premium Royal Slider plugin ($20 value), an audio player, and a minimal blog (all you’ll need for a great photography portfolio). Although designed for photographers it can be a great theme for graphic designers, architects, and anyone else with an image based portfolio.
Sniper is a sleek and powerful premium responsive + liquid WordPress theme built for photographers, creative agencies or portfolio website. All elements of this theme are liquid which makes it ideal for smartphone and mobile devices. This modern WordPress theme’s dynamic navigation system makes it fun and interesting to explore your website – from dropdown menus to toggled pages, everything is full of surprises.
Smarald is an incredibly unique, highly interactive, retina ready, responsive WordPress Portfolio theme, suitable for all sorts of creatives, agencies and even blogs. Whether you want to showcase your work in a beautiful way, share your articles with your readers, or just to have a great interactive website for your agency, this premium theme is the perfect solution for you.
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?
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
Widgets are always plugins but not all plugins have widgets. Do you agree? Whether you agree or not, here are some great widgets you can use to supercharge your WordPress theme.
Freelancers will rejoice with this bundle. It’s got 7 great widgets: advertisement, biography, buy me a beer/coffee, contact widget, contact form widget, opening hours widget, and social links widget all in one big bundle. These widgets are highly customizable & can be modified easily. Freelancers like musicians, artists, designers, developers, creative professionals,etc. will find this widget a useful addition to their website.
If you’d like to provide your readers with an easy way to compile posts by a favorite author on your website, this powerful widget is what you need. Posts by author allows you to: compile, sort, show post excerpts, control number of posts to display, display thumbnails, in 15 configurable ways. This widget is especially useful for multi-author websites to help readers sort posts by their favorite authors.
User experience is key to getting repeat visits and one way to ensure that is to keep your navigation user friendly. Smart Navigation Widgets is a powerful widget ideal for websites with large archives. This Ajax-powered widgets allows the user to navigate deeper only when he needs to. Scouring and clicking thru long lists can get boring and make users bored waiting for content to load. This widget allows you to control the number of links displayed and speed up websites in the process.
This cool widget makes adding an accordion menu to your sidebar as easy as dragging and dropping. It’s a fresh way to combine menus on your sidebar. You can define: general settings, design and layout settings, thumb settings, excerpt settings, post settings, and the read more text settings to display the widgets you want to feature. Super cool and elegant space saving feature. It’s responsive too!
How would you like to manage your announcements and schedule them way, way, ahead of time? If you are handling an events website, an eCommerce site, or a business site that holds regular events, keep your users informed by scheduling your announcements automatically with this handy widget. Whether it’s a big sale, an important event, a greeting or any type of announcement you need, simply set it and forget it. This widget gives you 4 options for scheduling your announcements: weekly, annual, monthly, or using custom start and end dates.
Navigating your way around in the backend area of your WordPress website need not be complicated even if you are a beginner. The WordPress Admin Panel area found in the backend is a powerful and flexible area where you can manage your website content and other WordPress functions. It has continually evolved since 2003 and with the help of and contributions from the WordPress community has improved and become more and more beautiful and user friendly.
The Administration Panel provides access to the control features of your WordPress installation. Each Administration Panel is presented in sections:
The top portion of all Panels, the header, is featured in dark shading. The header shows the name of your blog as a link to your blog’s main page, comments awaiting moderation, +New to add new posts, pages, media, or users, a Search Engines Blocked message if you Privacy settings block search engines, a favorites menu, and links to your profile (shown as your user name), and Log Out. Just below the top shaded area are two hanging tabs, Screen Options and contextual Help, that can be clicked to expand them.
On the left side of the screen is the main navigation menu detailing each of the administrative functions you can perform. Two expand/collapse arrows just below the Dashboard and Comments allow the navigation menu to collapse to a set of icons, or expand (fly-out) to show an icon and description for each major administrative function. Within each major function, such as Posts, a pull-down arrow is presented upon hovering mouse hovers over the title area. A click of that arrow expands the menu to display each of the sub-menu choices. Clicking that arrow again collapses the sub-menu.
The large area in the middle of the screen is the work area. It is here where specific information relating to a particular navigation choice, such as adding a new post, is presented and collected.
Finally, in the footer, at the bottom of each Administration Panel in dark shading, are links to WordPress, Documentation, and Feedback. In addition, the version of WordPress you have installed is shown. Just below the menu tab section, if your version is NOT the latest version, you will see the message An updated version of WordPress is available. Please update now. Click on the provided link to navigate to the Updates SubPanel.
Below is a list of the submenu items you will find in your default WordPress Admin Panel main navigation menu. Some of them may or may not be included depending on the WordPress version you have installed.
The Dashboard tells you about recent activity both at your site and in the WordPress community at large and provide access to updating WordPress, plugins, and themes.
This sub panel gives you an easy method to update WordPress, plugins, and themes. Note not all hosts will allow the automatic update process to work successfully and will require you to manually upgrade by following the Upgrading WordPress instructions.
This sub panel is where you can publish writings, compositions, discussions, discourses, musings, and, yes, even rantings, of a blog owner and contributors. Here you can write new Posts, create new Categories, new Tags, and new Custom Fields. In addition, any Media (pictures, video, recordings, files) can be uploaded and inserted into the Posts.
This sub panel allows you to upload new media to later use with posts and pages. A Flash Uploader is provided and the ability to use a Browser Uploader is supplied if the Flash Uploader does not work.
A good example of a Page is the information contained in About or Contact Pages. A Page should not be confused with the time-oriented objects called Posts, nor should a WordPress Page be confused with the word page referring to any web page or HTML document on the Web. In this Sub Panel you can select the Page to edit or delete. Multiple Pages can be selected for deletion and for editing. As with Posts, a powerful bulk edit tool allows certain fields to be edited for a whole group of Pages. A handy in-line edit tool, called Quick Edit, allows you to update many fields for an individual Page. Various search and filtering options allow you to find the Pages you want to edit or delete.
Comments are a feature of blogs which allow readers to respond to Posts. In this sub panel you can edit and delete as well as mark comments as spam. Comments that are awaiting moderation can be marked as approved or previously approved comments can be unapproved. Multiple comments can be selected and approved, marked as spam, unapproved, or deleted. A section at the top of the Comments SubPanel displays the number of comments awaiting moderation and the number of approved comments. A search box allows you to find specific comments.
From the Presentation Administration Panel you can control how the content of your blog is displayed. WordPress allows you to easily style your site by either installing and activating new Themes or changing existing Themes. This sub panel includes customization controls for Themes, Widgets, Menus, Background, Header, and Theme Editor.
Plugins allow you to add new features to your WordPress blog that don’t come standard with the default installation. This sub panel allows you to view the plugins you’ve downloaded, add new plugins, modify the plugins and choose which plugins you want activated on your site.
Every WordPress site probably has at least two users: the admin, the account initially set up by WordPress, and the user account you, as the author/owner of the blog. This sub panel allows you to set up all of the user accounts you need, change user information, assign roles, or delete users.
WordPress Tools provide you the ability to speed up WordPress for your local machine, import content from other sources, export your content, or to upgrade your WordPress software to a new release. This includes the Import, Export, and Press This functions.
The Settings Administration Panel contains all of the settings that define your website as a whole: settings which determine how your site behaves, how you interact with your site, and how the rest of the world interacts with your site. This sub panel includes control settings for: General (basic configuration settings), Writing, Reading, Discussion, Media, Privacy, and Permalinks
(source: WordPress codex)
The backend or Admin Panel may vary from theme to theme. The look and appearance may vary depending on the customizations and tweaks done by authors and developers. Nevertheless, no matter how Admin Panel is tweaked, these basic functions are standard and generally remain the same no matter what WordPress theme you install.
I wanted to let you know about a site that has quickly become one of my favorites to visit. It’s one of those sites that once you know about it, you find yourself going back to it every day (or sometimes even a couple times per day) just to see what’s new.
In mid-2008 I stumbled across Theme Forest for the first time while searching for the best wordpress themes. At first I wasn’t that impressed, but I remember not spending very much time investigating just what this “Theme Forest” was. We all know there are a never ending supply of free and premium WordPress Themes online today, and at first glance this seemed to be just another choice in the virtually endless sources of WordPress wares. Thankfully, on closer examination, I realized that ThemeForest had not only addressed several of the major problems those of us face when “searching” for Premium WordPress Themes, they had done it in a very unique and inviting way. Well fast forward almost 5 years, and let me tell you about the Theme Forest of 2013.
ThemeForest is a marketplace in the Envato network that is specifically for WordPress Themes and HTML Templates. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering just where you could find high quality premium WordPress themes or website templates, Theme Forest was created just for you.
There are many of these so-called “marketplaces” for just about every type of product or service you may need when doing business online, but I’d like to explain why Theme Forest is different and why they have become the first place I turn for just about everything I need to run one of my many websites.
Simply put, they are a destination for WordPress and web developers to list their themes and website templates to people just like you and me. The reason this is so powerful is because it totally goes against the “norm” when it comes to purchasing a WordPress theme or html template.
Typically, you go to Company A’s website where they offer Product 1, 2, and 3. You can buy their work and their work only.
Now imagine if you had the opportunity to brows the work of hundreds and thousands of different web developers? Imagine if you could preview any website, template, or theme before you pruchased it? Imagine if you could read the comments from others who have purchased it, see which themes or templates are most popular, and even rate the work for even more transparency?
This is exactly what you get with ThemeForest, but there is so much more…
Not only can you browse, purchase, and interact with thousands of developers and customers from across the globe, you also have the chance to sell you themes and templates to a dedicated and growing community.
As proof to how large and powerful this community has become, there are several authors who have crossed their $1,000,000 in sales threshold. This is an astonishing achievement for both those authors and the concept of ThemeForest as a whole.
The Best Part About Theme ForestBut do you want to know what I love the absolute most about Theme Forest?
Envato (the company behind Theme Forest) has not only built the best marketplace for WordPress Themes and HTML Templates, they have created similar marketplaces for video files, pre-built coding solutions, web graphics, and flash files just to name a few.
Imagine being able to have just one account that let’s you buy and sell everything from stock audio to fully developed web templates that are both HIGHLY professional, focused on web standards and usability, and at absolutely rock-bottom prices!
Theme Forest closely examines each theme or template uploaded to the marketplace to ensure that only quality authors with quality products can list their work.
As the end user, you have the ability to quickly and easily access just about everything you need to run a website from a network of developers, coders, artists, and audio experts…and you can do it all from one account!
It is completely free to setup an account with Theme Forest, and this one account can be used to browse all of the other sites in the Envato Marketplace.
The Bottom Line: I’ve been doing business online for nearly 8 years now. Rarely have I been so impressed with a product that within a matter of a few weeks I can’t imagine doing business without it. This is just the type of marketplace Envato has created and one you simply can’t afford to miss.
If you are looking for professional, high-end products for your website at beyond reasonable prices, I encourage you to head over to ThemeForest and setup your free account today.
May, 2011: ThemeForest has made some slight changes to their site design, and we’re noticing a slight increase in prices for a few product lines. Perhaps this is the beginning of a rise in prices.
January, 2012: Some estimates we’ve heard put the Envato marketplaces at over 2 million members (and growing).
February, 2013: ThemeForest continues to be the largest WordPress Theme marketplace in the world. If you are an established author from ThemeForest, consider selling us your business.
Malware infestations, blacklistings, Google warnings, malicious software, infected domain, suspicious activity, phishing – not exactly the landing page you want to welcome your visitors with, right? But if you have experienced the dreaded Google warning splash page (just like the dreaded blue screen), it is a cause for concern.
Hackings and other website attacks are becoming more prevalent nowadays. Not that they weren’t before but these malicious activities never went away either. They’ve just become a little bit more sophisticated than before. Government websites, large hosting websites and the more popular and well-known websites seem to be a favorite target but the truth is – no website is immune from these attacks. It is projected that the total number of websites in 2013 will reach 1 Billion and 2 Billion in 2015. (source: toni.org) That’s a lot of www candidates right there. Of course, you can reason away that your website is totally insignificant compared to the 999 million other websites that can be targeted by a malicious attack. On the other hand, yours might just be THE one. Hopefully not.
The impact of a website attack can be devastating especially if it is an eCommerce or a highly monetized site. Not only do you lose a lot in terms of time, lost data, missed sales opportunities and potential business income due to messed up systems and lost traffic, these attacks also affect your site’s credibility and reliability which are the most important currencies any business can have online. Once the public becomes aware of the attack, caution sets in and transactions become paralyzed. The possibility of being blocked or blacklisted becomes a total nightmare. The website owner is now faced with an unnecessary battle of perceptions that could have been prevented in the first place. How can this battle be prevented and how can you, the website owner, protect your peace of mind from potential attacks?
Sucuri Security is a company that offers a security service that detects unauthorized changes to network (cloud) assets, including web sites, DNS, Whois records, SSL certificates and others. It is also heavily used as an early warning system to detect Malware, Spam and other security issues on web sites and DNS hijacking. Sucuri shot into the limelight when GoDaddy hosted sites were attacked and exploited. They were the company that conducted the cleanup operations for them. Sucuri is not a malware protection software to be installed on your site. The company provides a monitoring service to protect your website from any malware, threats of intrusion, infections, and the like. This extra layer of protection is an assurance for both you and your clients or customers that any information exchanged on your website will not be compromised.
You can get a free analysis for your website from Sucuri. Just visit their website and have your website checked anytime. They also have a free plugin that can be downloaded from the WordPress plugins page. This plugin is free but works best in tandem with their security service packages. To learn more about these service packages, check out their website to see which one matches your requirements. The investment you make today to secure your website can save you so much headache in the future.
Visit Sucuri.net to get your free analysis. Download the free plugin from WordPress.
Get Sucuri Now!
Drumroll please, Elvin Jones is in the house! WordPress house, that is. In keeping with WordPress code naming tradition, the latest WordPress update released – WordPress 3.5 has been named “Elvin” in honor of drummer Elvin Jones, and there is a lot to drum about.
Here are some of the new features that have been updated in WordPress 3.5:
The Drag and Drop feature is streamlined, fast and easy to use. Creating galleries is faster with inline caption editing capabilities and simplified controls. Insert multiple images at once with Shift/Ctrl+click or insert multiple galleries per post and independently order images as you like.
Twenty Twelve (2012) theme for WordPress is a simple, flexible and elegant theme with a gorgeous open sans typeface. It is currently the default theme for WordPress 3.5. It is mobile friendly, fully responsive and looks great on any device. This theme includes all the latest theme features including a front-page template with its own widgets which you can customize and also set up as a single page.
Mark all your favorite or often used plugins in the WordPress Plugin Direcotry and access all of them directly in the Admin Panel>Plugins> Install Plugins page using your WordPress.org user name. This pulls out all your favorite go to plugins and saves a lot of time especially when you are setting up multiple sites.
WordPress 3.5 sports a new Welcome Screen, simpler and easier to use even by WordPress beginners. All the basic tasks are accessible in this new interface – from Getting Started to Writing your First Blog Post to Managing Widgets – user-friendly indeed.
WordPress 3.5 is also Retina-Ready (HiDPI) where many visual elements have been updated and converted to CSS3 elements to support the new displays so that they look good on these higher resolution screens.
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Great news for Instagram, Soundcloud and Slideshare users as WordPress 3.5 supports these services and it is now easier to integrate them to your site without touching any code.
And its absence will hardly be felt probably. WordPress 3.5 hides the Link Manager by default for new installs but if you truly miss it, this feature can still be enabled via the Link Manager plugin. All sites with existing links are left as is.
This means better accessibility for screen readers, touch devices, and keyboard users. This feature is also for remote publishing/mobile and easier connection with mobile apps like the Official WordPress iOS app. Those who are using Atom will need to use a 3rd party plugin.
If you’ve been wanting to import your Tumblr content into WordPress for years now is the time to do so. WordPress 3.5 has now made this possible.
Another improvement in WordPress 3.5 which multisite developers will appreciate is the ability to install WordPress Multisite in the subdirectory and not in the document root.
There’s more under the hood goodness that can be further explored if you want to. Some people wait a while before they install the latest WordPress update to give plugin developers time to update their own plugins. Make sure to backup your files before you do any updates.