Awesome New Themes for June 2013

Orange Core

If you’re looking for a theme that can do a lot to meet what a host of clients need then you definitely want to check out Orange Core. This multi-purpose theme is great for business and corporate sites although it does have excellent portfolio capabilities too. Awesome presentations may be done using the panoramic full-width homepage slider. Built in pricing tables, service pages, column variations and other page templates included are great tools necessary in building business and corporate sites. Orange core can be a great way for potential customers to get information about your business using these features. Orange Core is optimized for mobile and touch screen devices and is built on twitter bootstrap.

Vernum

Vernum is a clean, modern and powerful One Page Parallax theme that can virtually be what you want it to be. This theme has a drag and drop page builder to help you create the pages you want. Vernum also uses the parallax effect for added drama as you scroll down the page. In addition to these, Vernum uses retina ready graphics, is responsive, has great blog and portfolio capabilities, and uses CSS3 animations. It is flexible enough to meet the demands of websites of different kinds.

WP Education

WP Education is a premium theme designed for schools and educational institutions. Many educational institutions suffer from unimpressive websites. WP Education is a viable solution to add that professional air to any academic institution. Aside from the normal blog and gallery capabilities, schools can use this theme as an administrative and organizational tool to publish available courses, their descriptions and comments, and even process applications from prospective students.

Universfolio

Universfolio is a responsive multipurpose theme you can use for business or for pleasure. Whether it’s a corporate website, a personal blog or a creative portfolio, Universfolio has something for you. The theme uses the popular and powerful Revolution Slider to give you stunning slide transitions and layered 3d effects. This allows you to present eye catching slideshows to make casual visitors stay on your site longer. The theme also has awesome portfolio and blog page templates to showcase your work and keep visitors up to date with what’s going on. Universfolio is WooCommerce ready giving your site extra ecommerce capabilities.

JP Animated vCard Theme

JP is a cool and modern vCard WordPress theme for the creative professional. It’s got everything you need to create a good first impression on visitors, current clients, and potential clients. It’s simple and clean menu system allows you to navigate through the whole site without much fuss. It includes a great portfolio that allows you to showcase images, videos and other media projects on your site for interested parties to look at. You also have a blog page so visitors can get an insight on how you approach projects and tasks. This theme also has a Services Page and a Contact Page for those interested in hiring your services.

Lambo Photography Theme

If you are a photographer wanting to setup your own website or wanting to revitalize your existing one, check out Lambo. Lambo Premium WordPress Theme gives you special ways of showcasing your photos and images. This theme is perfect for the photographer or graphic artist who wants his/her work presented to potential clients artistically. The theme’s homepage slider is designed so that the graphic gives you the semblance that you are looking through a lens. The full screen slider presents your works in a choice of sliders including one with the popular Ken Burns effect.

Realia

Realia Premium WordPress Theme is a real estate and property rental theme ideal for real estate agents, brokers and professionals. This theme allows you to manage properties for sale or for rent so that potential buyers can go to your site and look for the property they desire and easily find it. This google map integrated theme allows visitors to search according to location based on defined filters like: number of baths, price, whether for sale or for rent. This theme has a dedicated page for each property with a description, an image gallery and a google map indicating its location. An inquiry form is conveniently located on the sidebar to facilitate contact with a broker. Property owners can submit their properties for sale. Theme supports IDX infrastructure trusted by professionals in the real estate industry.

Tasty Food and Restaurant WordPress Themes to try this 2013

Mobile devices have changed the way people access the internet. More and more people use it to search for information relevant to their locations. As a result, mobile internet and mobile computing have helped boost local businesses that have an online presence. If your local business isn’t online yet, you need to be. Here are some delicious food and restaurant WordPress themes to help drum up some noise for your business:

Bistro Responsive Foodie App Theme

Bistro Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive theme that includes a great booking app system to help you monitor & manage customer bookings and reservations. It also features: a specials, promotions and event management system, a calendar system, photo galleries, google maps integration with driving directions, countless custom widgets, and is also translation ready.

Eatery – Responsive Restaurant WordPress Theme

Eatery Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive restaurant/cafe theme that includes: a flexible full menu system easily customizable using custom posts, a built-in 24hr-enabled reservations form template, shortcodes options for elegant text styling, image galleries & slideshows, numerous color theme options with 5 preset color styles to start with, and global currency support.

Elegantia – Restaurant and Cafe WordPress Theme

Elegantia is a rich and luxurious-looking premium WordPress theme for restaurants & cafes. It has many features specifically designed for a restaurant business like: ajax-based Reservation template, Food Menu Module, Events Module, sortable Gallery module, ajax based and Google maps-enabled Contact module, and an impressive Homepage with full width slider and services information.

Coffee Shop – Responsive WP Theme for Restaurant

Coffee Shop is an easy to install premium responsive WP template for cafes and bistros. This dark styled responsive theme is feature packed. It includes: custom post types and templates for menu, events, staff, it is fully localized, has numerous color options, custom widgets, and includes 5 layered PSD files for further customization.

Delicieux Restaurant WordPress Theme

Delicieux Premium WordPress Theme is a visually appetizing theme perfect for restaurants. It comes with a Drag and Drop Page Builder feature for managing different page elements in the theme. It features a menu system, a google maps enabled contact page, a widgetized footer with 6 layouts, a blog page with 8 layout options, and advanced theme options panel for creating custom theme changes like background image changes, sliders, and shortcodes management.

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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Cool WordPress Themes for Churches: 2013 Edition

Churches and other religious or advocacy centered organizations have very specific website needs. Most of them require a combination of magazine, events, multimedia, and community features rolled into one theme. Here are some great WordPress themes that have great features and functionalities that can address those needs:

The Good News

The Good News Premium WordPress Theme is a theme specifically designed for churches but it is flexible enough to fit other uses. This premium theme includes: custom posts (Events, Sermons, Media), custom templates (Events, Sermons, Media), custom widgets, a contact form, 11 PSD files, and a complete HTML version, everything you need to set up your church’s website. The Good News is also responsive.

Evolution

Evolution Premium WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes is a simple, clean, responsive multi purpose theme that can be used for any type of website but it can also work well for advocacy groups or church and religious blog sites. Pastors or church leaders can use this theme to publish regular preachings or inspirational articles to inspire their readers beyond the Sunday sermon. This theme includes several useful page templates such as an image gallery, portfolio, a blog feed, and a member login template, among others.

Peacemaker – The WordPress Theme for Churches

Peacemaker Premium WordPress Theme is an excellent church theme that incorporates all the elements of church related activities into one theme. A notable feature is its events countdown feature which is a helpful events management tool to inform people about upcoming events. This responsive premium theme also includes: four custom post types (Events, Videos, Audio & Galleries), custom widgets, a unique homepage slider builder with the Slider custom post type, layered PSDs for detailed customization, and extensive documentation for easy setup.

Genesis

Reaching your audience has never been simpler with Genesis Premium WordPress theme, a church theme that’s designed to help you create a dynamic and responsive church website easily. This premium WordPress theme includes a simple custom solution for events that other events plugins complicate. This responsive theme also includes an unbranded theme options panel, unlimited photo galleries (masonry style), video, MP3 streaming, PDF download capabilities, and other useful features to enhance your website.

Spurgeon

Sunday preaching time too short to say all you have to say? Not a preacher but inspired to write all your thoughts and insights from your personal devotionals? Write about it and take all the time you need in your very own website. Spurgeon Premium WordPress Theme is a great way to compile all your thoughts and share them to as many as you can on your website. This responsive premium theme is equipped with features to help you easily publish your messages to inspire people and encourage them in their faith.

Saving Grace

Saving Grace Premium WordPress Theme is a theme geared towards charities and non-profit organizations. What’s unique about this theme aside from its outstanding layout and typography is the built in donation facility, via PayPal, using its donation page template and donation button and progress bar. This functionality takes advantage of impulse donation and gives visitors the option to donate straight away. This theme also includes 5 alternative color styles for you to choose from.

Malachi

Today’s church generation is so much different from before. Technology has changed a lot of the traditional methods of reaching people and replaced it with multimedia and audio-visual systems. Malachi Premium WordPress Theme integrates these modern tools and gives you a theme that is in step with today’s demands giving you technical functionalities that include podcasts, streaming music, and music videos. These modern communication tools are seamlessly integrated within the theme so you can create a website that can effectively reach today’s tech savvy generation.

Check out the WordPress themes above to see which ones will match your needs.

17 Awesome Adobe air apps for designers

One fine day I was trying to fill in an important official form online on my Mozilla Firefox’s browser. After spending about half an hour I reached the last few questions of the form. One question there asked me to click a checkbox to answer but I could see no checkbox on the screen. After wasting a lot of time reading the instructions and every possible detail over and over again I asked for advice from my friends. One person told me that I should try to refill the form on Internet Explorer. I tried it and now the checkbox appeared and I successfully completed and submitted the form online.

The problem just described occurred because the form was designed to work especially for Internet Explorer. You see, designing an application for all systems is tedious as one has to tweak the runtime code again and again to make it compatible to work with different systems. Here is where Adobe AIR jumps in. If an internet application is designed using Adobe AIR then it will automatically work for all systems and browsers.

Technically speaking:

“Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash and Flex technologies, and Action Script to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on a broad range of devices including desktop computers, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, and TVs. AIR allows developers to use familiar tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver®, Flash Builder®, Flash Catalyst®, Flash Professional, or any text editor to build their applications and easily deliver a single application installer that works across operating systems.” – Adobe’s website.

Adobe AIR has a wide array of apps that can help designers design better applications. Below I have selected 17 of them.

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Free WordPress Themes 2013: Trends

Free WordPress themes have come a long way since Kubrick. Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven, and the latest – Twenty Twelve – is the newest Kubrick as far as Free WordPress themes go. Twenty Twelve is the current default WordPress theme.

Let’s take a look at some of the features of this free default WordPress theme:

  • Front Page Template where you can add text, images, video
  • Responsive, Mobile-first Layout
  • Custom ”Open Sans” Font
  • Custom post formats: links, quotes, asides, statuses, images
  • Widgets and No-sidebar layout
  • Custom menu, custom header image, custom background color and image
  • Multi columns
  • Sidebar
  • Flexible width
  • Editor style
  • Flexible header
  • Featured images
  • Full width template
  • Post formats
  • Sticky post
  • Theme options
  • Infinite Scroll

Those are a lot of features coming from a free WordPress theme, don’t you think? And most of these features are what you also get from a lot of Premium WordPress themes. If we use Twenty Twelve as our standard, what then can we expect in 2013, as far as Free WordPress themes are concerned?

  • All of the features listed above will become standard features
  • More Premium-like features
  • eCommerce options
  • Typography options
  • Drag and drop options
  • Page-builder options
  • More Single Page Themes
  • Free themes for email, mobile, etc.
  • HTML5 and CSS3 and adhering to WordPress Coding standards

Many WordPress themes authors, providers and developers give away free themes as samples of their work. These samples, albeit free, are not necessarily inferior to Premium themes being sold in the marketplace. In truth, some of them are even better (or Best – shameless plug). The fact that these free samples are marketing tools to introduce these new authors to the market should be a weighty incentive for them to release high quality products that will catch the attention of WordPress professionals who are always on the lookout for something fresh.

How To Make Your First WordPress Theme

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.