WordPress Slider Mania

Sliders are staples in websites nowadays. A homepage without a slideshow seems an oddity considering the media intensive content this generation craves for. For all the benefits sliders give website owners, there are indeed some sliders that really standout from the rest. Below is a listing of 5 of the most popular sliders available in the market today:

Slider Revolution

Considered the most popular plugin in the Envato marketplace, Slider Revolution is a slider definitely worth considering. This plugin features tons of unique transition effects, an image preloader, video embedding, autoplay that stops on user interaction and lots of easy to set options to create your own effects. This plugin is one of the few that offers full screen slideshows, it is also noted for enabling almost any type of content that can be put in a slideshow, and, it is quite popular for its responsive feature as well. The plugin also enables easy slider creation using Visual Builder. Using its animation builder, you can conveniently drag and drop captions, and, create your own custom animation easily. Slider Revolution also allows you to integrate SEO optimization measures on your slides thus further improving your page’s performance on search engines.

Royal Slider

This slider plugin was created especially for mobile devices. What makes Royal Slider standout is its affinity toward touch screen interfaces. Create your own custom slideshows and css3 banner rotators with images, videos or HTML content in slides, allow dynamic population of data from Flickr, Instagram, Featured posts and even WooCommerce products, display vertical or horizontal thumbnails with the plugin’s photo gallery. While it doesn’t have much of fancy transition effects, Royal does guarantee a stable, accessible, high performance slider experience on any device. RoyalSlider is tested on Mac, PC, iPad 2, iPhone 4, HTC Desire, Lumia 920, Surface, Blackberry PlayBook and even on Kindle Keyboard

Layer Slider

Layer slider is most noted for its use of cutting edge technology to give you more than 200 preset 2D and 3D slide transitions to give you the smoothest slideshow experience available. At the very heart of this slider is its layered design that enables you to have 3D like slideshows. Easy to use interfaces enable you to create your slideshows in a WYSIWYG manner which include live previews, drag and drop slider builder, etc. The plugin supports responsive layouts, multiple layouts and touch screen gestures to ensure that your slideshow experience is the same regardless of device. Layer slider is SEO friendly allowing you to build semantic markup with custom attributes that search engines can index easily.

Slider PRO

This fully responsive and mobile ready slider plugin in comes with 150+ options to help you set-up your very own slideshow. The plugin allows you to dynamically load content from your content. Slider PRO also enables you to add animated or static layers into your slideshows to create 3D like slides. The plugin uses a user friendly media loader to enable easy population of content into your slideshows. Slider PRO offers 100+ transition effects which can be optimized into hundreds of possible variations.

Touch Carousel

This slider plugin was created with mobile devices in mind. Touch carousel enables touch navigation on iOS, Android and Blackberry devices. Over 20 settings are available to control speed, layout and slideshow. Touch carousel allows you to slide any post type including WooCommerce and Jigoshop content. You can select content based on taxonomy, popularity or date.

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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WordPress Music Themes April 2014

Music fan sites are a great way to bring together people who have a common interest in a specific musician, a music genre, bands, etc. If you are thinking of putting up a website for that type of audience, here are some of the latest music themes you can check out:

Dubstep – Premium Music WordPress Theme

Dubstep is a WordPress theme for bands, musicians, DJs, clubs and everyone involved in the music or entertainment business. This theme supports every post type that a music & entertainment theme would need such as: intuitive Events Management (ability to set date, time, venue, location, and map coordinates; provision for normal and recurring events, tickets support); Discography Management (ability to share your music with fans using either self hosted audio files using the powerful soundManager2 or embedded sounds from SoundCloud); Artists Management (display an infinite number of favorite artists, colleagues, or band members (their albums, tracks, or playlists) and categorize them easily; Media Management (share videos either self-hosted or from services like Youtube, Vimeo etc. and create endless interactive custom photo galleries from your events using templates or sliders).

SoundBlast – Music Band WordPress Theme

Sound Blast Premium WordPress Theme is a WooCommerce ready theme especially designed for bands and music websites. This easy to modify theme features include: Album + Track Management (options include Now Playing, Download, Play Only, and Buy Now), Slider Management, Event Management, Gallery Management, Sidebar Management, Powerful Theme Options + Page Builder, 2 pre-made color variations.

MusicVent – Premium Music & Event WordPress Theme

MUSICVENT Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, responsive, and a well-thought out HTML5 WordPress Theme for Music & Event related Personalities/Studios. The theme’s clean Lines & minimal design approach truly highlights the artist(s) and the work(s) showcased. Its unique design and streamlined navigation makes it easy for fans, music aficionados, potential producers, talent scouts, etc., to go through the website get the information needed and take the necessary action after. The 6 built-in page templates (Albums, Artists, Events, Gallery, Bloglist, Contact) are organized and give you or users everything that is needed. Transition and animation effects like black and white photos display their full colors when hovered over. It also includes 2 homepage layout options (fullscreen image slider and fullscreen video background) to choose from according to the audience you are targeting.

RockOn – Multipurpose Music WP Theme

RockOn! Premium WordPress Theme is a WooCommerce ready multipurpose music theme for singers, artists, music bands or musical events created using Twitter Bootstrap, with a responsive design which makes it a perfect fit for all devices. This theme includes features such as: Event Management using one of the best event management plugins – WP Event Manager, 100% responsive 3D Layer Slider, Sidebar Managerusing CrunchPress “CP” framework, WooCommerce Shop Catalog Grid OR Full Layout also Masonry (Filterable), and so many other features.

NOISE – Onepage DJs & Band WordPress Theme

NOISE Premium WordPress Theme is a cool, creative and modern theme perfect for musicians, DJs, bands and other music related professionals or businesses. Built with smooth and sleek CSS3 and AJAX animations including a unique spectrum analyzer to help you visualize music automatically on every single track. You can easily manage and display your artists, albums, audios, images, videos, events dates and sell your items (tickets etc.), allow users to rate music, and share instantly on their social networks. It also comes with 2 different players (SimplePlayer widget and Extended Player) to give users control over every single track played.

Music Club – Music/Band/Club/Party WordPress Theme

Music Club Premium WordPress Theme is the best WordPress theme for music, club, party, radio station, bands or even entertainment magazine. It comes with great features for music such as: a floating music player at the bottom of the page, a traditional boxed player for those who prefer something familiar, an Event post type that come with a ticket button with 5 tickets status, a Music Album feature which when clicked, automatically fetches all songs in an album to the floating player. Other outstanding features include a Page Builder, Revolution Slider, GoodLayers Importer, and other great music tools, to help you build a power music website users will truly enjoy.

Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes Review

Updated: April 12, 2021 – 2021 is nearing the middle of the year, and now is a good time to update one of our most popular articles here on Blogging Experiment. For several years we have been singing the praises of Elegant Themes, and 2014 is shaping up to be no different. In a day and age where companies and websites come and go, Elegant Themes has not only stood the test of time, they have continued to innovate by creating massive value for their over 250,000 customers! In the following article, we’d like to give you a detailed overview of just why we call Elegant Themes the Best Deal in WordPress!

After all, having the right WordPress Theme is crucial to your websites’ success. It’s kind of like the study that showed how people looking to buy a home can make up their mind within 8 seconds of walking in the door whether they like it or not – by not giving your visitors the right first impression (your design) – you’re literally inviting them to hit the back button.

The Dilemma

As a blogger your focus should be on content. Blog design is important, but when you think about it, do people go to Craigslist because it looks pretty? Absolutely not. They use it because they’re the best in the field.

Since we’re not all Craigslists, we must merge the design and content aspects together in as seamless a manner as possible. You want to have a nice looking design, but you most likely are not strong in design itself (much less coding that pretty design). You want a unique, impressive look that conveys professionalism and passion about your craft, but you’re probably not an expert at usability (how “usuable” your site is to visitors). And finally, you want to do all this in the cheapest, most cost effictive way possible (nothing wrong with that).

Elegant Themes

Have you ever spent any length of time browsing around countless free wordpress theme sites only to be left feeling unsatisfied? Does it seem like most of the free themes are … well … free for a reason? Where are all the best wordpress themes? After going through these motions for a period of time, I decided to take a look at some premium wordpress themes to see if they were really that much better than the free ones. Shortly thereafter, I discovered Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes, and that changed everything for me.

I knew I could hire a web designer to create a nice looking website as I’ve done countless times in the past. But at $800 to $3500/pop, designers can be expensive. I was interested in finding a nice looking design that I could learn to tweak and modify myself to make it more personalized and customized to my liking.

As a website and blog developer, I am frequently developing new sites, and aside from the content itself, I want each design to be unique and professional. Enter ElegantThemes.

Elegant Themes Premium WordPress Theme Club

Forget $200 to $500 like many other premium theme clubs, for $69…YES, $69 – members get unlimited access and unlimited use to all of Nicks’ premium WordPress Themes. To date there are 80+ elegant WordPress Themes.

I’m going to get out of the way and let Nick’s design speak for itself. As you will see, these are top notch designs that would normally run you several thousand dollars a piece (I’ve researched hiring a good WordPress theme designer, and that is the going rate – typically the floor of their going rate).

Without further ado, here are some of the premium WordPress themes from Elegant Themes:

Nexus WordPress Theme

Nexus Features:

Magazine style
Responsive design
Unlimited color schemes
Secure and valid code
Complete localization
Browser compatibility
Perpetual updates
Unparalleled support
ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
ADVANCED: shortcode collection
ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Nexus Theme (Showcase):

Email us if you are using the Nexus Theme, and we’ll list you here.
Language Mastery

More Information On Nexus From Elegant Themes:

Demo Nexus

Vertex WordPress Theme

Vertex Features:

Responsive design
Unlimited color schemes
Secure and valid code
Complete localization
Browser compatibility
Perpetual updates
Unparalleled support
ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
ADVANCED: shortcode collection
ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Vertex Theme (Showcase):

Email us if you are using the Vertex Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Vertex From Elegant Themes:

Demo Vertex

Fable WordPress Theme

Fable Features:

Responsive design
Unlimited color schemes
Secure and valid code
Complete localization
Browser compatibility
Perpetual updates
Unparalleled support
ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
ADVANCED: shortcode collection
ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Fable Theme (Showcase):

Email us if you are using the Fable Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Fable From Elegant Themes:

Demo Fable

Foxy WordPress Theme

Foxy Features:

eCommerce
Responsive design
Unlimited color schemes
Secure and valid code
Complete localization
Browser compatibility
Perpetual updates
Unparalleled support
ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
ADVANCED: shortcode collection
ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Foxy Theme (Showcase):

Email us if you are using the Foxy Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Foxy From Elegant Themes:

Demo Foxy

Explorable WordPress Theme

Explorable Features:

Location based directory
Responsive design
Unlimited color schemes
Secure and valid code
Complete localization
Browser compatibility
Perpetual updates
Unparalleled support
ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
ADVANCED: shortcode collection
ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Explorable Theme (Showcase):

Email us if you are using the Explorable Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Explorable From Elegant Themes:

Demo Explorable

StyleShop WordPress Theme

StyleShop Features:

eCommerce
Responsive design
Unlimited color schemes
Secure and valid code
Complete localization
Browser compatibility
Perpetual updates
Unparalleled support
ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
ADVANCED: shortcode collection
ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the StyleShop Theme (Showcase):

Email us if you are using the StyleShop Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On StyleShop From Elegant Themes:

Demo StyleShop

Fusion WordPress Theme

Fusion Features:

Responsive design
Unlimited color schemes
Secure and valid code
Complete localization
Browser compatibility
Perpetual updates
Unparalleled support
ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
ADVANCED: shortcode collection
ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Fusion Theme (Showcase):

Email us if you are using the Fusion Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Fusion From Elegant Themes:

Demo Fusion

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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.

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Best WordPress Themes 2021

UPDATED April 12, 2021: 2021 is sure to be another great year for WordPress Theme development. Like the millions and millions of people using WordPress, we eagerly await the Themes and Plugins to be released this year, and you can …

What Features Do Most Commercial WordPress Themes Have in Common?

WordPress users enjoy many benefits not necessarily available in other content management systems. The plethora of high quality WordPress themes that users can choose from is more than enough to dress up any website. Whatever type of website you plan to put up, most likely, there is a WordPress theme for it. Here are some of the most common features present in some of the most popular WordPress themes in the market today.

A Great Slider

An effective theme must help create a steady following for your site. It must be able to captivate casual visitors and convert theme into followers that eventually become clients and customers. A slideshow is a great tool that can deliver quick, dramatic visual impact combining the use of images with taglines, spiels, or memes to hook visitor interest. This billboard-like effect gives casual visitors something to spark their curiosity and encourage them to examine and explore your site further. The short attention span this generation has, a slider is an indispensable feature for any website. Popular plugins like Slider Revolution, Layer Slider, Nivo Slider, and Flexslider make the job a whole lot easier.

Parallax and Animation

Once you’ve gotten the attention of visitors, the challenge shifts towards keeping their interest. Perhaps you’ve attended lectures were you came in with excitement about what you could learn only to be disappointed by a boring, uncharismatic instructor whose droning voice put you to sleep. This is analogous to going through great content in boring or even hard to read content. This actually narrows your followers to those who are actually already sold to your content. If your goal is to convert more people to your product or service, the presentation of your content has to facilitate easy reading and assimilation of information. Corporate presentations are often more effective when stats are represented as animated charts and bullets. These actually help executives focus on the items that need to be considered. Having animated bullets and content sections also give focus on items you want your visitors to remember.

Flexible Layout with Drag and Drop Capability

Presenting your content is important in developing your following. While animation helps your audience focus on key points of your content, a sound content structure is still required for visitors to make sense of your site as a whole. Being able to piece together key points into a cohesive body of knowledge will drive home a stronger message to your visitors that will keep them coming for more. To do this, your content has to be organized in such a way that visitors go through important sections in a natural, stress free manner. The natural flow of content will vary according to your audience. Recognizing this, themes that have been designed and devised to respond to the needs of various audiences will bring a higher conversion in terms of subscribers and followers. A lot of themes now include drag and drop page builder features allowing you to assemble your own pages from scratch. Some themes come with ready made layouts for almost any type of site which can be tweaked to meet specific audience needs. Most, if not all, of these themes have powerful options panels and shortcode generators for maximum customization flexibility.

Mobile Friendly

Mobile is a platform that cannot be ignored. Mobile gadgets are part of today’s lifestyle because of the convenience it provides its users. As such, theme designers and developers are forced to confront the peculiarities one encounters when using a mobile device. A theme has to be responsive. This means it has to be able to adjust to give the best possible display regardless of what device you use to browse your site. Theme pages need to have the capability to reorder and resize according to tablet and smartphone displays without sacrificing the beauty of the theme on desktop. In addition to this, special navigation menus for mobile devices must be able to facilitate the interface differences on these devices from desktop. Usually, the Bootstrap framework is a theme author’s go to option to ensure optimal performance on mobile platforms.

Good SEO

No matter how great your site is in terms of content or aesthetics, it must be found by your target audience. Great themes are coded in such away that is friendly to search engines to help land your site on the first few pages of search results. This is accomplished in a number of ways: meta and links, XML sitemaps, RSS Optimization, and Breadcrumb among others. There are numerous options to ensure your site is covered by good SEO measures. Clean code, SEO optimized images and videos, and installing reliable and tested SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, etc. are some of the many SEO practices you can integrate on your site.

Web Design Trends WordPress Users Need To Know

WordPress is the most popular content management system existing today fetching 21.8% of the world’s total internet usage and capturing 60.3% of the market share as per W3tech’s latest market report. It comes as no surprise that the majority of the general web design trends predicted for 2014 are already common features available and/or integrated in most if not all WordPress themes being sold in the marketplace today. It makes you wonder whether WordPress is only a trend follower or it is actually THE trend setter to watch.

WordPress core developers, theme and plugin developers and authors, and the WordPress community in general are some of the most passionate people on the planet. With only ten years tucked into its belt, WordPress has emerged as one the most dynamic and cutting edge platforms today primarily because of the commitment of its community.

In a recent business article on eCommerce design trends for 2014, it lists trends that WordPress users already consider as familiar features. The trend list includes:

flat design
responsive design
less sliders
more user friendly navigation
more creative use of web fonts

These trends have actually appeared in most WordPress themes as common features in the last year or so. Even Forbes magazine, lists similar web design trends in an article that came out early this year. Although Forbes also adds “storytelling design” characterized by concise, compelling copy coupled with strong imagery as one of the significant web trends that will emerge in 2014. Guess what? A wonderful new WordPress plugin – Aesop Story Engine – in relation to the “storytelling” trend has already been generating a lot of interest lately.

For those who have been following the development path of the latest WordPress version that is to be released (April 16), there are several new features in WordPress 3.9 that could set off new “trends” in the web design world. WordPress 3.9 emphasizes more user friendly features and improved multimedia handling capabilities. A few of these significant features that are worth noting are listed below:

New features like live widget previews
a new theme installer
UI refinements when editing images and when working with media in the editor including the return of some of the advanced display settings for images.
audio and video playlists
new gallery support
The formatting function that turns straight quotes into smart quotes (among other things) underwent some changes to drastically speed it up.

More detailed features can be viewed on the WordPress core development website.

Having said all that, it is interesting to note that the thrust towards being more multimedia savvy while at the same time being more and more user friendly could be a significant WordPress feature that could set off a general web design trend. With WordPress gaining more and more influence over the whole internet population, it is possible that whatever developers, coders, designers, authors, etc. come up with to improve WordPress products and services could eventually be the standard that the web design community will use.

Who knows what WordPress will be like in the next 10 years. The innovations succeeding WordPress iterations will bring and the vast influence it will have in relation to the entire Internet population, mobile, tablet or what not together with the hardcore commitment of its core community will definitely create an impact on the way the world wide web looks and functions. Whatever it is, anything that goes on in WordPress is definitely going to be exciting and worth watching.

Must Have Features in Choosing a WordPress Theme for your Website

WordPress theme trends come and go. Some popular features a while back have faded away while others went mainstream and have become basic and essential features integral to a WordPress theme. A lot of the WordPress themes in the marketplace today are feature-packed and sometimes it gets overwhelming to choose the perfect one. Website owners need to be able to sort through long menu of features, pull out those that are relevant to their own specific website needs and goals, just to make sure they don’t get an over bloated and slow-loading website. Here are some basic features to look for in selecting a WordPress theme to fit your website needs.

Flexibility and Ease of Use

User experience is a key factor in web design. WordPress themes must be flexible enough to adapt to the user’s needs and provide way for customization to be simple and easy. A popular feature nowadays is the drag and drop feature where layouts can be configured and reconfigured by simply dragging and dropping elements into specific areas. WordPress themes that include this feature already have a fan base as it makes customization convenient and friendly even for WordPress beginners.

Responsive (On or Off feature)

The emergence of mobile platforms in internet usage makes its users a population that shouldn’t be ignored. A lot of people think that mobile might eventually displace desktop as the dominant platform for internet access. In light of this, website owners need to consider WordPress themes that are 100% responsive enabling content to be presented efficiently on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile or handheld devices. Themes that include features such as menus especially designed for mobile devices, responsive sliders, and responsive images are also a plus factor. Some also prefer that they have control over whether they want the responsive feature turned on or off which means that WordPress themes that have this option will appeal to this type of web user.

Search Engine Optimization

It would be a pity for a site with amazing content to be left to obscurity because search engines can’t find it. According to Joost de Valk, creator of the popular SEO plugin Yoast,

“Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there are a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.”

WordPress themes that are built according to best code practices and are integrated with sound SEO measures will do well as far as search engine visibility and ranking are concerned.

Multi Media Handling Capabilities

Gone are the days where people are merely content reading stuff on the web. Today’s generation of internet users seek more interactive and media heavy content. Website users tend to lean towards WordPress themes that are flexible enough to handle all types of media formats (audio, video, images, etc). Support for self-hosted videos, Youtube, Vimeo and SoundCloud, and other third party multi media content hosts is always a plus as internet users today.

Animations, Parallax, Sliders, etc.

Some people detest sliders and other visual eye candy. Some don’t even think that it helps a site at all while some consider these visual effects necessary features in a website. When people get to your site, you want to ensure that they get enough interest to go through your content. The use of all these visual effects can go from cheesy to spectacular depending on how it is presented. Today’s media bombarded user can benefit from well-thought of and creative visual presentations that feed both the eyes and the mind.

Translation or Multi Lingual Ready

WordPress already powers more than 21% of the Internet and will continue to increase even as of this writing. This means that more non-English speaking users will be thrown in the mix of users and will need themes that can be translated into their own languages and with RTL (right to left provision). This segment of WordPress users will be more attracted to themes that are easier to adapt to their local audiences.

These features listed here may or may not be on the top of your list. If you do have some suggestions, feel free to leave us a comment and tell us why you think so. We’d love to hear from you.

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