WordPress, Really? 5 Amazing WordPress Sites to Inspire You

Below are some amazing not so typical WordPress websites to inspire you to think out of the box:

1. Yoke by Jay Bigford and Alister Wynn

“Having the power to manage the content of your site and update it when you want gives you valuable autonomy and gives us more time with our colouring pens. We can provide simple elegant WordPress solutions to fully fledged e-commerce sites to get your online shop selling.” – co-founders Jay Bigford and Alister Wynn (eCommerce, Open Source, WordPress)

2. Girl with a Camera by Matt Brett

“This was my first venture into HTML5, and I took the opportunity to deck out Ashley’s photoblog with all sorts of CSS3 frills as well. One of the main challenges, was deciding on a colour scheme. Since each photo set could potentially have a dominant colour throughout, I came up with the idea of having the background colour change for each post (set).” – Matt Brett

3. Crack by DCOED

“We have created a fully responsive masonry-style website for Crack Magazine, designed by Fiasco. Mobile and tablet users can now enjoy a comfortable reading experience that does CRACK’s editorial and imagery justice.” – DCOED (WordPress, CSS3, HTML, Responsive Design)

4. Grind by Magic+Might and Co:Collective

“We leverage WordPress to manage content and templating for the site. WordPress is also used to manage the content for our members-area site, and our blog, the Grindist,” explains Josh Campbell. “We picked WordPress for a number of reasons. First we wanted a stable, feature rich platform but without a large investment, that would be able to grow with our needs.

“We also wanted a clean management interface for our writers and editors so they can focus on creating great content.” There is a fantastic community surrounding WordPress and the guys ?at Grind feel that this reflects on the kind of collaborative community that they are all about.”

5. Rodesk by Laurens Boex and Jasper van Orden

“WordPress is the best CMS for sites such as Rodesk, we’ve developed with it for quite some time,” explains Boex. “With a ton of plugins and extensions and a worldwide community of supportive developers it’s easy to work with and integrate quickly.”

78 Reasons To Join Elegant Themes

Since around 2008, Elegant Themes has been producing beautiful, and well designed WordPress themes. Each theme has always been a balance between beauty and function.We have always felt that for a website to have a substantial following on the web, it also has to look good on top of working well. Visitors are first drawn to the visual and each theme must be a feast for the eyes. After that initial encounter, they need to be able to find what they are looking for with ease. The experience must be pleasant as this will determine whether they will stay beyond the 30-second time frame and continue going through your content, whether it be reading text posts, watching videos or looking at images. By that time, these visitors need to be fully persuaded that they need to keep coming back for more or eventually subscribe to stay up to date.

Elegant Theme’s latest theme release, Origin, embodies this design and function philosophy. The visuals are indeed stunning and undoubtedly beautiful. As you go through the theme’s demo, it is as equally delightful to discover little design elements and functionalities carefully and thoughtfully dispersed throughout the theme.

Prior to the release of the Origin theme, Elegant Themes also released the business theme Nimble. Nimble’s bold and beautiful play on whitespace and typography created a very professional looking and yet creative theme. The mixture of bold fonts and mildly subdued colors provide a relaxed, calming effect even if the theme were to be used for a business website. Color coordinated sections on the homepage help direct readers to sections most important to them. What is most notable with this theme is the sophistication in managing the amount of detail presented to visitors. The home page does not cram all the information but rather presents design elements in samples, snippets and teasers to whet the appetite of the visitors.

These two themes are part of the growing inventory of 78 and are representative of the quality of themes that Elegant Themes churns. Not only are all 78 themes aesthetically outstanding but they are all also functionally excellent in keeping with WordPress code standards. Nothing pretentious. Just good design and honest code. More than a million and a half customers speak for itself.

If you are on the fence and still thinking of one good reason to sign up with Elegant Themes, you already have two – Origin Premium WordPress Theme and Nimble Premium WordPress Theme. Imagine having access to all 78 themes – 78 reasons to create stunning websites for you and your clients. Membership starts at only $39, approximately $.49/theme. Even a Happy Meal costs more. With Elegant Themes membership, you will definitely bring happiness to your clients and put a smile on their faces because they simply can’t help “Lovin’ It!”

Join Elegant Themes for Only $39

Magazine WordPress Themes 2013: Trends

One of the usual challenges of online newspapers or magazines is streamlining content in a more readable and user friendly format. Because of the verbose or content-heavy nature of these sites, careful thought needs to be made in creating a theme layout that employs clever typography skills and information management techniques to create content that is readable and easy on the eye. Visual cues need to deliberately designed and strategically placed to draw attention to the most important sections of the site despite being bombarded by tons of images and information all at the same time. Because we are living in the digital age, careful thought and consideration also needs to be given to the never ending technological race to release the latest device or gadget where these websites will be accessed.

In light of all that, we think that Magazine WordPress Themes will continue to see improvements and changes in the following areas:

Easy to Implement, Clean, and Streamlined Design with an Emphasis on Readability

A well organized layout eliminates clutter and confusion and creates a pleasant navigational experience for visitors. This creates the impression that the people behind the publication are professionals and consequently adds credibility to the magazine’s reputation. Carefully chosen fonts and font sizes also add to the overall readability of the site and will hopefully encourage casual readers to become loyal subscribers.

Drag and Drop Features

Every publication is different. Each one has specific requirements based on their own reader base. Some formats may work for a certain season but become dated in the next. Magazine WordPress themes should be flexible enough to handle different layout configurations without much ado. One viable solution is to integrate a Drag and Drop feature to give website owners flexibility to reconfigure their websites and switch design elements around easily.

Single Page Templates

One of the benefits and yet at the same time one of the disadvantages of a magazine styled theme is that more content is featured on the front page. The homepage is filled with images and content to gain maximum exposure and accessibility. Perhaps more and more Magazine WordPress Themes will be designed with alternative options to use infinite scrolling single page templates to ensure that all posts will be given equal amount of exposure. This also eliminates the need for more clicks from visitors.

Responsive Layouts

The mobile web revolution has forever changed the way people access the internet. Online publications hosted on WordPress should be responsive or have that option available to them. Devices and gadgets are constantly evolving therefore Magazine WordPress themes need to be in step or be able to adapt to these technological changes quickly.

Search Engine Optimized, Affiliate, and Ad Ready

The lifeblood of print publications is in advertising. The same holds true for online publications. As these websites increase in size and readership, more and more resources are required to maintain it like hosting space, multiple authors and contributors, maintenance costs, etc. Magazine WordPress Themes authors need to design with these considerations in mind and give WP theme users backend options to monetize the site. Provision for and management of ad blocks or affiliate links should be standard built-in features already.

Rating and Review System

People love to voice their opinions and having this feature built into a Magazine WordPress theme encourages interactivity. This helps increase site traffic and later on adds credibility and authority which is translates into higher ranking sites as well.

Translation Ready

The Internet is an international marketplace represented by people from all around the world. Magazine WordPress themes need to be translation ready to take advantage of the untapped global target market.

The digital revolution has already eaten up a great chunk of the print generation but there is still room for growth. Although there are some printed materials that digital can never replace, those that can, will definitely benefit from this paperless trend we are seeing.

The Basic Parts of a WordPress Theme

Language consists of words that are classified into different groupings depending on their function. The English language is divided into 8 parts commonly known as: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. These words can be used in combination with one another to express a complete thought – a sentence. Other languages may have different classifications but generally, each language is comprised of several word classifications which when combined with each other express a specific thought.

We have been slowly laying the basic foundation to understanding WordPress these past few weeks. Last week, we learned common phrases that you hear in and around the WordPress community that you might not fully understand but have become familiar with because of common use. This week we shall be a bit more technical and try to introduce a little bit more of what goes on behind a WordPress theme, its basic parts, and how it is put together to function the way we normally see it.

A WordPress theme is quite similar to a sentence. It is a combination of several parts to express a visual representation of a design thought. Let’s take a look at these basic parts (not necessarily 8) to give us an idea of what they are and how they function.

A WordPress theme is comprised of as few or as many template files as you like. These templates are PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) source files used to generate the pages requested by visitors and are output as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). (source: codex.wordpress.org) Each of these template files can be configured to function according to a specific design.

WordPress Themes use a combination of template files, template tags, and CSS files to generate your WordPress site’s look. If you are currently a WordPress user (self-hosted or not) you can familiarize yourself by checking out the templates listed below in the backend admin panel of your site. You can look for them under Appearance>Theme>Editor. These may all seem Greek for now and and hard to understand but the goal for now is to simply observe how the codes are written in these templates. Just make sure you don’t edit them by mistake.

Below are the basic templates that you will find among the many other templates in your WordPress theme:

style.css

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language for defining the formatting used in a Web site. This includes things like colours, background images, typefaces (fonts), margins, and indentation.

The basic principle of CSS is to allow the designer to define a style (a list of formatting details like fonts, sizes, and colours) and then apply it to one or more portions of one or more HTML pages using a selector. To every CSS style definition there are two components: the selector, which defines which tags the style will be applied to, and the attributes, which specify what the style actually does.

CSS allows you to store style presentation information (like colors and layout) separate from your HTML structure. This allows precision control of your website layout and makes your pages faster and easier to update.

index.php

index.php is a universal template, it is what any page (home, archive, single post, etc) will use if no other template is available for it. The index file controls what the homepage looks like.

For the visual learners out there, a very helpful visual resource you can check out is this infographic Anatomy of a WordPress Theme made by Yoast. More on this next week!

eCommerce WordPress Themes 2013: Trends

eCommerce has been around since the late 1990s and has been a steadily growing phenomenon over the last few years. As the Internet continues to grow in coverage and in technology, so will the number of consumers who utilize eCommerce tools as their main means of purchasing goods and services over the Internet. In a recent marketing study commissioned by Google, it was found out that 80% of shoppers today do preliminary research online before they actually do their purchase. In light of the rising dominance of eCommerce, here are some trends to watch out for in the next 12 months:

1. Mobile

In a previous article we mentioned that 2013 is likely the year mobile devices will take over. An analysis of 35000 Shopify stores predicts that 1 out of 4 eShoppers this Christmas will do so from a mobile device and this will grow to 43% next year. With 5 Billion mobile phone subscribers expected to convert to smartphones and other handheld devices, developers need to pay attention to truly responsive design with the use of flexible images. Developer also need to put focus on eCommerce engine optimizations for 3G networks found in developing countries where the bulk of smartphone conversions are expected to happen.

2. Shopify

Providers specializing in eCommerce infrastructure are gaining headway. One of the leaders is Shopify, providing its users with easily customizable and highly functional hosted web stores. For a monthly fee starting from $29, one can enjoy estore services without much hassle. WordPress theme developers need to deliver powerful themes with great eCommerce functionalities that are easy to use and available to the WordPress market at a competitive price.

3. Social Media and Viral Marketing

We cannot neglect the way social media has shaped the way people interact and experience the web. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have taken traditional word of mouth marketing to the next level enabling the emergence of the viral marketing phenomenon. With the continued popularity of Pinterest, Google+, and the recent premium ad services on Facebook, shoppers can easily share and appreciate product details as never before. Product features and price comparisons can be shared to thousands of consumers all in a matter of seconds. New WordPress eCommerce themes should be integrated with various social media tools as well as simple and easy to understand statistics and analytics tools that can provide usage information and statistical data as to how their businesses are doing in light of their social media efforts.

4. Google Shopping

Google has just completed converting Google shopping into a fully paid listing service of products and services. This means only stores who subscribe to Google’s pay per conversion scheme get in the list. WordPress eCommerce themes should be able to support various shopping and payment options while taking note of client demands to integrate the Google shopping system into their websites. Developers must be able to figure out how to generate price comparisons using regular Google search results and integrate these as they design and develop their WordPress themes.

eCommerce has a bright future ahead as the shopping experience becomes more and more digital. WordPress authors and developers have the unique opportunity to create the themes that addresses these developing trends that will make website owners choose WordPress as the eCommerce CMS of choice.

Upcoming WordPress Events – 4QTR 2012

2013 is just around the corner and it’s time to take stock of what you’ve accomplished the past year and what you can look forward to in the next. Keep abreast of the latest trends and participate in any one of these seminars or conferences to brush up on your WordPress, HTML5 and CSS skills to get you ready for 2013. Staying informed not just on WordPress matters alone but also web and business-related matters will keep you two steps ahead of your game.

Here’s a quick rundown of the latest WordPress events and other noteworthy conferences around the globe to help keep you on the cutting edge.

The Events:

  • Event: Pressnomics 2012
    Date: 8 – 10 Nov 2012
    Location: Phoenix, Arizona
    Description: The Economics of WordPress Conference.
  • Event: Visualized
    Date: 8 – 9 Nov 2012
    Location: Times Center Manhattan, New York City
    Description: VISUALIZED explores the evolution of communication at the intersection of big data, storytelling and design.
  • Event: HTML5 Mobile Mastery
    Date: 12 – 14 Nov 2012
    Location: London, England
    Description: Two-day HTML5 Mobile Workshop presented by Skills Matter.
  • Event: Handheld 2012
    Date: 19th Nov 2012
    Location: Cardiff, Wales
    Description: Big Ideas for Small Devices. Handheld is the conference for all things mobile, web and native.
  • Event: WordCamp Orlando
    Date: 1 Dec 2012
    Location: Orlando, Florida
    Description: One of the Largest WordPress Education Events.
  • Event: Trends Plus 2012
    Date: 4 Dec 2012
    Location: London, England
    Description: Consumer Behaviour | Marketing Strategy – A forum for ideas, creativity and a sprinkling of blue-sky thinking.

30 of the Best Shopify Themes (Free & Awesome)

Do you prefer to shop from shabby looking shops? Well, I am sure that all of us will be answering this question with a resounding NO. If that is the case, then why should shopping online be any different. It is imperative these days for a website owner to have an inviting, user-friendly experience lest you go the way of obscurity.

Application of a useful and at the same time beautiful theme in the website therefore becomes extremely important. Readily downloadable themes or templates compatible with different kinds of websites are available on the internet which can be used by designers as a starting point of their projects. Or it can be useful for novice designers who want to draw valuable inspiration from these examples thereafter start developing their own unique template. If you download a free shopify theme, then the work of the designer will be simplified and become much faster as well. These templates come with many useful features like ability to connect with the social networking sites, full customization features whereby the developer can amend it according to his own needs and all the latest technologies. With the use of these templates your website is surely going to stand out from the rest. It doesn’t end with having a unique template and features, its all depends on how well and different you do business. You can find experiences of popular ecommerce experts and help articles on blogs like Shopify ecommerce blog.

In addition to our article on some of the best ecommerce WordPress Themes of 2013, we have also created this detailed list of the 30 best and most diverse shopify websites for you designers out there. They can build up a unique, attractive and at the same extremely interactive platform with the help of these themes.

(more…)

Building Blocks to WordPress Grammar

The primary reason we learn a language is to be able to communicate more effectively. When we travel to new places or visit countries we’ve never been to before we usually buy one of those 15-minute language translation mini books and stuff them into our pockets, ready to be pulled out at any opportune time. We try to familiarize ourselves with the local translation of useful terms and phrases such as “Hello”, “Good Morning”, “How much?”, “Where’s the restroom?”, and other basic words to get us by. At this point, the primary goal is to understand and be understood. Sentence structure and rules of grammar are not the need of the hour just yet. Learning what these common and necessary basic words and phrases mean is the starting point to building your vocabulary and practicing your communication skills.

Similarly, we can learn to speak the language of “WordPress” by first simplifying our goals. Our goal at the moment is to understand and be understood. The semantics and structures can come later on as we first familiarize ourselves with the language and build our basic vocabulary.

Here are some of the most common words and phrases that you will encounter often as you begin to learn how to speak “WordPress.”

Content Management System (CMS)

A Content Management System, or CMS, is software for facilitating the maintenance of content, but not design, on a web site. A blogging tool is an example of a Content Management System.

WordPress

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. It is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system.

WordPress installation

Setting up WordPress for the first time is is a very simple process and takes less than five minutes to complete. Many web hosts now offer tools to automatically install WordPress for you. There are several installation guides on WordPress.org to guide you through the process.

Hosting Provider

A hosting provider is a company or organization which provides, usually for a fee, infrastructure for making information accessible via the web. This involves the use of a web server (including web server software such as Apache), and may involve one or more related technologies, such as FTP, PHP, MySQL, and operating system software such as Linux or Unix.

Web Server

A web server is a computer containing software for, and connected to infrastructure for, hosting, or serving, web sites written inHTML. The most common web server software on the internet is Apache, which is frequently used in conjunction with PHP, Perl, and other scripting languages.

Domain Name

A domain name is a name used for identification purposes on the Internet. In WordPress a domain name usually identifies a server where WordPress is installed. To make this work, the Internet’s domain name system (DNS) maps the domain name to a server’s IP apress. For example, the domain name example.com maps to the IP apress 192.0.43.10. Many domain names can map to the same IP apress, allowing a single server to run many websites.

cPanel

cPanel is a popular web-based administration tool that many hosting providers provide to allow users to configure their own accounts using an easy-to-use interface.

Site

In the WordPress user interface, a site can simply be the website created by WordPress, or it can be a virtual website created as part of a network by the multisite feature. A site in a network is virtual in the sense that it does not have its own directory on the server, although it has its own URL and it might have its own domain name. In WordPress code the site is the website created by WordPress. If multisite is in use, then the site is the network website and each virtual website is known as a blog.

FTP

FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, is rather predictably, a client-server protocol for transferring files. It is one way to download files, and the most common way to upload files to a server. An FTP client is a program which can download files from, or upload files to, an FTP server. You may need to use an FTP client to upload your WordPress files to your web server, particularly if you use a hosting provider.

HTML

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, is the W3C standard language with which all web pages are built. It is the predecessor toXHTML, but HTML is often still used to describe either one. It is often used in conjunction with CSS and/or JavaScript.

CSS

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a W3C open standards programming language for specifying how a web page is presented. It allows web site designers to create formatting and layout for a web site independently of its content.

PHP

PHP is a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a popular server-side scripting language designed specifically for integration with HTML, and is used (often in conjunction with MySQL) in Content Management Systems and other web applications. It is available on many platforms, including Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac OS X, and is open source software. WordPress is written using PHP and requires it for operation.

MySQL

MySQL is a popular open source SQL (Structured Query Language) database implementation, available for many platforms, including Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac OS X. WordPress requires a MySQL database to store all blog information, including posts, comments, metadata, and other information. WordPress also works with MySQL-compatible databases such as MariaDB and Percona Server.

XML

XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is written in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and essentially allows you to define your own markup language. XML is extremely useful in describing, sharing, and transmitting data across the Internet. Typically used in conjunction with HTML, XML defines data and HTML displays that data.

AJAX

AJAX is a technique that web pages use to have the server perform certain processing without reloading the web page. For example, when you approve a comment in a WordPress blog, WordPress uses AJAX to change the comment’s status, and you see the change without having to reload the Comments screen.

Script

Script is an automated series of instructions carried out in a specific order.

Theme

A theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog. A theme modifies the way the weblog is displayed, without modifying the underlying software. Essentially, the WordPress theme system is a way to skin your weblog.

Template

In WordPress a template is a file that defines an area of the web pages generated by a theme. For example, there is typically a template for the header area at the top of the web pages, a template for the content, a template for the sidebars, and so on. The templates are like building blocks that make up the complete web page.

Frontend

The front end is what your visitors see and interact with when they come to your website, www.YourSite.com.

Backend

The back end is the area that authorized users can sign into to ap, remove and modify content on the website. This may also be referred to as “WordPress,” “admin” or “the administration area.”

Sitemap

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for Web design, or a Web page that lists the pages on a Web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.

Perhaps these words are already familiar to you but for those who are taking this WordPress journey with us, a lot of these terms will sound Greek. As you encounter these words over and over again and see how they work in real life situations, your understanding will gradually increase. Everything, like pieces of giant jigsaw puzzle, will eventually fall into place and reveal the bigger picture. In this situation, the sum of parts is greater than the whole. More next week!

Get Your Free Themes from WPBusinessBundle.com

Have you seen the the all new and improved WP Business Bundle? If you haven’t then you need to check it out. If you have been bombarded with numerous WordPress themes in the marketplace and you are suffering from “choice overload” head on out to WP Business Bundle for select WordPress Themes specifically targeted to meet the needs of businesses, corporate portfolios, professionals and other types of business-related websites.

WP Business Bundle has gone through a makeover and the generous folks over there are giving away two great Premium themes for free. That’s right – FREE! By simply signing up with them you can download a stunning Business Theme (Prospect) and a creative Portfolio Theme (Digifoto) for zero dollars! You don’t even have to choose because you can download one or even both.

Prospect Free WordPress Theme is a vibrant and dynamic business theme with features like 10 pre-made skins, an attractive slider, clean and easy to use breadcrumbs navigation, high-end aesthetics and many more excellent features that will appeal to the elite business crowd you move in.

Digifoto Free WordPress Theme is a Portfolio theme with 2 built-in design options (dark and light), numerous custom widgets, unique sliders, drag and drop forms, and other essential features for you to create an impressive online portfolio at zero cost to you.

Once you register to create your free account, simply confirm your email and WP Business Bundle will email the themes to you right away. Unlike most free themes out there, what’s cool about WP Business Bundle free themes is that you can expect:

  • Theme Updates
  • Cool Resources
  • New Free Themes
  • No Cost – No Obligation
  • Cancel Anytime Policy

You can also find useful plugins at WP Business Bundle. Since these plugins are designed to complement all WP Business Bundle Themes. Together, WP Business Bundle Themes and Plugins make a truly winning combination.

Check out WP Business Bundle.com and Download your Free Themes Today!