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.

WordPress News Roundup 2013 – The Year That Was

Here are some of the top WordPress stories that made 2013 one of the most exciting years in WordPress history:

  • The release of the Twenty Thirteen default WordPress theme. The 2013 theme for WordPress takes us back to the blog, featuring a full range of post formats, each displayed beautifully in their own unique way.
  • The release of the Twenty Fourteen WordPress theme. This default theme lets you create a responsive magazine website with a sleek, modern design, feature your favorite homepage content in either a grid or a slider, use the three widget areas to customize your website, and change your content’s layout with a full-width page template and a contributor page to show off your authors.
  • Automattic acquires Cloudup, a company founded to easily share videos, photos, music, links, and docs.

The release of the last few WordPress versions, particularly 3.8, marks the beginning of a new era using the plugin-first development process. The ongoing commitment of the WordPress community to come up with better and more responsive software raises the bar and expectations for a more exciting new year ahead.

Hello world. Hello 2014!

WordPress 3.6 and Beyond

Oscar is out of the can! No, it’s not a trash can and Oscar ain’t grouchy either. Named in honor of the great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, WordPress 3.6 Oscar is out of beta and has been officially released premiered with a cool video to go along with it. Matt Mullenweg introduced the latest version in WordCamp San Francisco and along with several other announcements. Versions 3.7 and 3.8 are close on its heels too with a tentative fall and end of the year release together with a book in the offing. It can only get better.

Here are some of the highlights of WordPress 3.6 Oscar to get excited about:

User Features

  • The new Twenty Thirteen theme inspired by modern art puts focus on your content with a colorful, single-column design made for media-rich blogging.
  • Revamped Revisions save every change and the new interface allows you to scroll easily through changes to see line-by-line who changed what and when.
  • Post Locking and Augmented Autosave will especially be a boon to sites where more than a single author is working on a post. Each author now has their own autosave stream, which stores things locally as well as on the server (so much harder to lose something) and there’s an interface for taking over editing of a post, as demonstrated beautifully by our bearded buddies in the video above.
  • Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds with no reliance on external services.
  • The Menu Editor is now much easier to understand and use.

Developer features

  • A new audio/video API gives you access to metadata like ID3 tags.
  • You can now choose HTML5 markup for things like comment and search forms, and comment lists.
  • Better filters for how revisions work, so you can store a different amount of history for different post types.

The Future: WordPress 3.7 & 3.8, WordPress The Book, and a whole lot more

Matt Mullenweg mentioned that the first chapter of WordPress The Book – a book about the history of WordPress – is currently being written in Github similar to the way the software itself started. They’ve also been working on security and stability features He also announced a developer resource dedicated to WordPress developers (developer.wordpress.org). He also mentioned the work they were currently doing on the MP6 plugin project and the development of WordPress 3.7 and 3.8 aiming for smaller teams, quicker iterations, less bottlenecks, and temporary hooks. In WordPress 3.7, all developments will be done as independent units or plugins while in WordPress 3.8 is targeted for release in December 2013. WordPress 3.8 will be similar to the 3.7 model. Another target is the release of Twenty Fourteen theme before 2014.

Matt also mentioned that there was a 96% attrition rate on those who start a blog and actually follow through (wordpress.com data) – a danger that needs to be addressed. The goal is to improve the numbers by next year in line with democratizing publishing on the web. The success of WordPress lies in the fact that the WordPress community is and has always been actively committed and involved in improving this open source software even after a decade later.

30 Different Content Slider Plug-ins for WordPress

When looking at websites, slideshows and carousels are the best way to present images and this is usually achieved using jQuery. To have jQuery slider galleries or other image presentation on your web page you have to code or download a jQuery slider plug-in and integrate it. Those sliders give effective looks and are very attractive to users.

Here you can see 30 Different content slider plug-in for WordPress. Hope these plug-ins help you…Enjoy!!!

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ThemeFuse: A Closer Look

About

“We Create Premium WordPress Themes. The Original Kind!” This tagline encapsulates everything ThemeFuse is about. ThemeFuse is a commercial WordPress Themes Shop co-founded by four guys from Bucharest, Romania: Bogdan Condurache (Art Director and Motion Graphics Designer) and Dimi Baitanciuc (co-founder) both of whom take care of the creative side, together with Alexandru Luncashu and Sergiu Bagrin (After Care Support) who, on the other hand are in charge of development and programming. ThemeFuse focuses on providing original high quality niche WordPress theme designs coupled with top aftercare support designed to meet the exact needs of customers in specific industries.

History

Dimi Baitanciuc and Bogdan Condurache started out selling HTML/CSS templates on ThemeForest in November 2009. They soon realized the huge potential in WordPress and started implementing their designs into the CMS. They were joined by Alex and Sergiu later on. After another 4-5 months on ThemeForest they decided to put up their own and the ThemeFuse WordPress theme club was birthed in 2010. The theme club includes 28+ themes (averaging a new theme every month) available to download which range from portfolio themes through to magazine themes for sports and fashion sites.

Product

The ThemeFuse WordPress theme club currently includes over 28 themes that cover a wide range of themes that include portfolio themes, magazine themes, blog themes, business themes, etc. that cover niche industries such as sports, fashion, travel, events, food, art, corporate, and so much more. The club membership is a subscription based product ($17 per month) where you get access to all themes (current and future) including PSD files. This is automatically renewed each month based on the date you signed up. The membership price includes a one-time only $199 sign up fee. If you decide to cancel your subscription, you will not be able to download the themes anymore. Themefuse enforces a no refund policy applicable to club members as well. Should you decide to reactivate your club membership and sign up again you need to pay the one time signup fee again. Themes are also sold individually to non-members.

Member Benefits

Aside from gaining access to the entire Themefuse theme collection, members get VIP Priority treatment in their Support Forum, members get access to a beautiful Member’s Area, members can also give input and suggestions on future themes. Aside from these, members also have the opportunity to earn via their improved affiliate program.

Income Opportunities

ThemeFuse’s affiliate program allows you to earn in several ways. Once you become an affiliate, all you need to do is put your affiliate link on a banner on your website or use ThemeFuse’s WP referral plugin. Once a person clicks on the link and makes a purchase on their website you earn 30% of the sale, every time. Their affiliate software sets a 60-day cookie that keeps tab of users who visit their website from one of your links. This means you still get a 30% cut on every purchase the user makes, even if the customer comes back at a later time. In addition, if the user joins our club you’ll also get 10% of every recurring payment he makes every month. Themefuse pays its affiliate partners once a month via PayPal. Affiliates can expect to receive their affiliate shares between 1st and 10th of the following month.

Recent Developments

ThemeFuse recently partnered with WebHostingBuzz to provide a new service targeted at WP beginners. The goal of the partnership is to deliver a hands-off service, where every client can get their WordPress site installed by a team of professionals on a quality hosting account, along with a well-designed WordPress theme. This service means that customers can pick a theme from ThemeFuse’s gallery and have it installed by their team, on an optimized hosting platform, and under a new domain (of your choosing).

The main strength of this new service is the no-supervision-required approach presented by both companies (ThemeFuse and WebHostingBuzz). All the client needs to do is pick a theme from the official theme gallery at ThemeFuse.com, choose the hosting pack (domain name included) at checkout and that’s it. All within a single checkout process.

For the client, the package includes: the domain (optional), the hosting, the website (WordPress theme), AND all the necessary installs will be taken care of by ThemeFuse. ThemeFuse also provides a dedicated support forum to handle the chosen theme’s issues as well as troubleshooting any problems that may come up.

Future Plans

According to Dimi Baitanciuc,

Talking about the longer term, we plan to release a brand new website as part of our ThemeFuse family, which will not be related to WordPress themes, but to web and graphic design in general. We have been collaborating with high-class designers from around the world the past few months and I think we’ve come up with awesome results.

Visit ThemeFuse today.

WordPress 3.6 Beta 1 Now Available

WordPress enthusiasts can start playing with the latest beta version (3.6. Beta 1) recently released. This new version is recommended to be run only on a test site and not in actual sites just yet. WordPress 3.5 was released a few months back and this new version has been in the development stage for the past 3 months. WordPress plugin or theme developers, authors, and host providers should start testing this new version before the official and stable version is released to make sure existing plugins and themes are compatible.

Here’s a summary of what’s new in WordPress 3.6:

Post Formats: Post Formats now have their own UI, and theme authors have access to templating functions to access the structured data.

Twenty Thirteen: We’re shipping this year’s default theme in our first release of the year. Twenty Thirteen is an opinionated, color-rich, blog-centric theme that makes full use of the new Post Formats support.

Audio/Video: You can embed audio and video files into your posts without relying on a plugin or a third party media hosting service.

Autosave: Posts are now autosaved locally. If your browser crashes, your computer dies, or the server goes offline as you’re saving, you won’t lose the your post.

Post Locking: See when someone is currently editing a post, and kick them out of it if they fall asleep at the keyboard.

Nav Menus: Nav menus have been simplified with an accordion-based UI, and a separate tab for bulk-assigning menus to locations.

Revisions: The all-new revisions UI features avatars, a slider that “scrubs” through history, and two-slider range comparisons.

Here’s a treat for the absolutely curious, the demo version of Twenty Thirteen! If you would like to participate, become a contributor, be a bug hunter, or a theme fixer, you are more than welcome to provide feedback to those awesome WordPress dev guys. Time to play!

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.

Finding and Establishing your own Niche WordPress “Channel”

The recently held digital marketing conference Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 was an eye opener to many. Many of the topics discussed were cutting edge and one of the main buzz words that came out of the conference was “channelization”.

The Channelization of Everything

What do we mean when we say “channelization”? Here’s an interesting way to look at it.

Rivers come in lots of different shapes and sizes, but they all have some things in common. All rivers and streams start at some high point. The high point can be a mountain, hill or other elevated area. Water from some source like a spring, snowmelt or a lake starts at this high point and begins to flow down to lower points. As the water flows down, it may pick up more water from other small streams, springs or or from rain or snow melt. These streams may slowly join together to form a larger stream or river. Small rivers and streams may join together to become larger rivers. Eventually all this water from rivers and streams will run into the ocean or an inland body of water like a lake.

River engineering is the process of planned human intervention in the course, characteristics or flow of a river with the intention of producing some defined benefit. People have intervened in the natural course and behaviour of rivers since before recorded history – to manage the water resources, to protect against flooding or to make passage along or across rivers easier.

Channelization of a stream may be undertaken for several reasons. One is to make a stream more suitable for navigation or for navigation by larger vessels with deep draughts. Another is to restrict water to a certain area of a stream’s natural bottom lands so that the bulk of such lands can be made available for agriculture. A third reason is flood control, with the idea of giving a stream a sufficiently large and deep channel so that flooding beyond those limits will be minimal or nonexistent, at least on a routine basis.
(source: Wikipedia)

In today’s digital market, how then, does this concept apply to finding or even creating your own niche WordPress stream or channel?

Let’s take a look:

Product distribution (or place) is one of the four elements of the marketing mix. Distribution is the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user, using direct means, or using indirect means with intermediaries. The other three parts of the marketing mix are product, pricing, and promotion. Distribution of products takes place by means of channels. Channels are sets of interdependent organisations (called intermediaries) involved in making the product available for consumption.

Today’s digital economy is shifting towards “channelization” – the way products are made available for public consumption. Because of the way business is evolving, what worked years ago may no longer work today. What was effective yesterday may already be obsolete today. Interestingly enough, starting your own business and distributing your own products has never been easier. However, the challenge of independent business owners or new players in the eCommerce arena is being discovered and being able to establish their own loyal market base. Creating your own stream or river from scratch is like pushing a boulder uphill everyday. This is where the shifting or the channelization occurs.

Today, the traditional trader can start off his business by taking advantage of these established “high starting points of distribution” like Amazon or Ebay, plug in to their channel, utilize their structure and distribution network to launch or introduce a new product or project.These powerful distribution channels have significant traffic and extensive networking connections to give your business a boost in the right direction. Once the channel is strong enough and the customer base is established, the business owner can spin off and establish his own business base according to his own terms. On the other hand, DIY-ers and boutique type businesses can create their own online stores in niche channels like Etsy. Other types of businesses can use other distribution channels such as KickStarter, AngelList, CafePress or Barkbox. How to get started? All it takes is to register.

What about digital goods such as WordPress Themes, Plugins and other types of digital products? New players in the WordPress themes business have found opportunities to introduce themselves and pool their work portfolio through established WordPress marketplaces or “channels” like ThemeForest with very little startup capital. The key, really, is to draw a loyal crowd or “traffic”, establish connections, and service them so that their conversion as long-term customers or customers for life will be cemented.

Bottomline, in today’s digital economy, having a good product is great, knowing your distribution channels is better, but having a good product + distributing thru the right channels + creating the media (email lists of customers) = the best starting point for you to build your own niche business and your brand.

40 Future City Art Illustrations for Inspiration

My physics teacher used to say – “Change is constant in nature. If change is not taking place then something is wrong.” We started from a Big Bang, life somehow evolved on earth, we learnt how to burn fire, we learnt the power of a wheel, we learned how to make machines, Franklin discovered electricity, Faraday discovered how to produce it in power houses, Bill Gates developed Windows and here we are in the twenty first century. But what if we try to go a little further? What if we try to envision the future? This is an interesting topic and the numerous popular science fiction movies and novels bear witness to this fact.

Stephen Hawking said on a Discovery Channel program that it may be possible to build a time machine with which we can go into the future but not back in history. Such a time machine has not yet been made and is only a subject of fiction. Science is too strict and limited by the laws of nature while art, in this respect, is limitless as it is free to imagine and inculcate anything and everything in its domain. Below I present you with 40 art illustrations which our artists have carefully crafted by imagining what the future of our world might look.

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