Events and Entertainment WordPress Themes – December 2013

Get into the groove with these cool WordPress themes just in time for the most event-filled season of the year. Create a site for you or your clients that will surely stand out with these creative events and entertainment WordPress themes.

POLARIS – Responsive WordPress Theme

Polaris Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra responsive and modern one page WordPress Theme suitable for events or parties. This premium retina ready theme comes in 16 color styles and includes: Magnific popup, Font Awesome iconic font, parallax, easy to extend and much more. It is a great way to present your important events and activities all in one sweep.This premium theme is based on popular Twitter Bootstrap framework. This template uses the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technologies.

Clubix – Nightlife, Music & Events WordPress Theme

Clubix Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive theme designed especially for nightlife, events, and music related websites. Party goers,fans, followers, or nightlife club hoppers are always on the lookout for the latest happenings around town. A cool way to address the needs of this specific market is putting up an online calendar of events, concerts, gigs, tours, launches, and other events or nightlife activities that will keep them up to date. For music enthusiasts, Clubix has two custom post types ‘under the hood’ to help you create and upload new songs organised on albums and events. You can customize your background image and also the color of the main elements from the theme, add music players, sliders, WooCommerce, Google maps, and so much more.

Flycase – Complete Music Solution for WordPress

Flycase Premium WordPress Theme is a professional and easy-to-use Music WordPress Theme that is highly and easily customizable, ready for all devices, simple to set up, and even e-commerce ready. Specifically designed for music enthusiasts, professional or not, this theme includes all the features you need to present, promote and sell for your band or label. This edgy, modern theme has everything a fan wants and everything a music artist needs – from photo/video galleries, discography, tour dates, multiple playlists, etc. – all in one cool theme.

Amplify WordPress Theme

Amplify Premium WordPress Theme is not your typical band theme with its minimalist and clean design but still capable of managing music website requirement such as gigs, discography, and videos with ease using the AudioTheme plugin. The WordPress admin panel is transformed into your band’s ultimate management tool with an easy-to-use user interface. Add your own language and display RTL languages as intended. Upload your tracks and allow users to play clips or full songs on every page of your website with the custom audio player. It ties in directly to your AudioTheme tracks and offers an easy-to-use interface for selecting and updating tracks in the jukebox. This theme is powered by Foundation by Zurb and Sass, a powerful CSS pre-processor where you can either edit the CSS directly or use Sass to regenerate your theme CSS easily and quickly.

Applause – One-Page Responsive Music & DJ WP Theme

Applause Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive one page band & musicians theme, built using Bootstrap framework using HTML5 & CSS3. For all who love music or those who are in the music industry such as music bands, musicians, DJs, producers, labels or organizers of events and festivals, this theme is the perfect solution to organizing necessary information and media such as Events, Audio, Galleries and Videos. Applause can display each event on their own map with its location and venue, the price and availability of the tickets. It can display your latest audio tracks with awesome player and you can even add a remote link or upload your own mp3.

Niche WordPress Themes November 2013

Searching for a WordPress theme that fits you or your client’s specific needs can often be satisfied by multi purpose WordPress themes. The seed design can often be tweaked and twiddled with to create the whatever the desired website outcome intended. However, if you find a theme that already matches the type of website you need then a lot of design time can be saved and spent on optimizing other features of the website. Here are some of the latest niche WordPress themes that you might find useful for your website needs.

Organic Market Friendly eCommerce WordPress Theme

Organic Market Premium WordPress Theme is a fun and fresh eCommerce theme ideal for online stores and shops. The delightful and eye-catching colorful design has been tailored to an organic food store, but is highly customizable and can be used for anything else. This simple and no nonsense theme features the basic website necessities but is also equipped with WooCommerce integration and includes support for all WooCommerce product management, widgets, and shortcodes so you can add all your products and set up your storefront. It also includes Royal Slider and Layer Slider Support and support for custom shortcodes for product sliders, featured product sections.

Campus Premium Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

Campus Premium Multipurpose WordPress Theme is one of the newest WordPress themes for education and business. Based on the new Super Skeleton 2 Framework with the leanest and yet the most highly functional features maximizing all that WordPress has to offer. Significant features include: a brand new streamlined and simple to use theme options panel with simple visual cues, nested inline documentation, with the option to preload built in or user uploaded (Skin Builder) skins, the entire Google Fonts library, Drag & Drop Layout Builder, rock solid, compliant SEO friendly code, and the new WordPress 3.6 Post Formats UI, a ThemeForest first.

Medico – Medical and Health WordPress Theme

Medico Premium WordPress Theme is a feature-packed medical and health styled theme that is both stylish and functional. It features several important elements such as: a working appointment form, responsive HTML5 and CSS3 design, foundation grid using predefined HTML classes, Magellan – a style agnostic plugin, Clearing – a plugin that makes it easy to create responsive lightboxes with any size image, Joyride – an extremely flexible plugin that gives users a tour of your site or app when they visit, Visual Shortcode Generator, Styles manager – 1 click style change for many major elements, Portfolio with 2/3/4 columns support, pagination support with non-animated filtering, drag&drop item sorting, and so many other great features to get create a one of a kind medical/health website.

Metric Music Band Responsive WordPress Theme

Metric Premium WordPress Theme is a retro modern theme for all who love music, such as music bands, musicians, DJs, producers, labels or organizers of events and festivals. This bold and dynamic theme features a great way to present all the necessary information relevant to those in the music business such as Events, Albums, Galleries and Videos and even a Blog. This responsive and fluid theme can be displayed on all devices from mobile phones to desktop computers (smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops). The theme is also SEO optimized because of its highly semantic and well structured source code.

Agriculture – All in One WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Agriculture Premium WordPress Theme makes going organic look easy. This WooCommerce ready theme boasts of a simple to use custom user interface that can turn website management into a task even a child can handle. You can easily add products, arrange them into categories, schedule automatic sales periods, manage delivery and other options with ease. This premium theme is based on an extended WordPress admin panel, with many custom shortcodes and widgets that are so easy in use and customize that even WordPress beginners can handle. It includes: Layer Slider and Revolution Slider plugins, Woocommerce, Super Extended Shortcodes pack for easy content formatting and improved presentation, a powerful Form Builder Tool, customly developed by CMSMasters, lets you create an unlimited amount of forms of different types and complexity, from simple contact forms to complex questionnaires with numerous fields, radio-buttons, checkboxes and dropdowns, text areas, as well as set validation for these fields.

Booklet Personal Blogging Theme

Booklet Premium WordPress Theme is a fresh take on the way blog themes have always been done. The portfolio like homepage is fully responsive and images and layout will automatically fit the screen no matter which device you are using. Inspired by popular e-readers, Booklet is a sleek version of your online diary. Some of the best features into this personal WordPress theme include the ability to change the background color and font color from black to white, change the size of the font and even read in fullscreen mode. Overall, a great way to add that personal touch to stories you want to share to the digital world.

The Wedding Day Responsive Theme

The Wedding Day Premium WordPress Theme is an elegant and lovely responsive wedding theme couples are sure to fall in love with. It is suitable for users with zero programming skills as well as advanced developers. The theme is the perfect match for your wedding with predefined styles and features its very own VamTam drag & drop builder. This drag and drop tool will save you lots of time on building your pages or posts with the use of a simple interface with simple drag & drop actions. The VamTam drag & drop page builder is tightly integrated with tinymce editor and you can switch to visual or text editor at any time without losing any changes. Buyers will also receive a bonus print invitation template for free.

Atlas Directory and Listings Premium WordPress Theme

Atlas Directory & Listings WordPress Theme is a front-end online directory portal where you allow members to register, login, edit profile, submit and manage (delete/update) listings, change membership settings, and so much more from the front-end without having to log into the WordPress dashboard.
Set up an online directory portal of any type – companies, shops, restaurants, real estate, websites and so on. One of the core features of Atlas is its email notifications where every action taken on your website is notified to the site admin allowing you to have full control over what goes on in your website. This feature can be easily disabled through the theme options panel.

Best BuddyPress Themes May 2013

BuddyPress is an open source social networking software package owned by Automattic – essentially, a plugin that can be installed on WordPress to transform it into a social network platform. If you are considering to up the ante on your blog by being more socially connected, here are some of the best BuddyPress themes you can check out:

Flix BuddyPress Ready Team Blogging

Flix is a powerful and flexible community blogging theme for WordPress. you can use to start your own community in no time. This theme includes BuddyPress and bbPress as part of the many superb features of this theme. It also includes a SmartTab system where you can put authors in the spotlight. Easily order the front page by posts from a specific author a specific category without reloading the page. The team blogging feature is perfect for both small and big blogs that have multiple contributors. This responsive theme is also whitelabel enabled which means you can easily customize the theme to suit your business brand.

OneCommunity BuddyPress Theme

OneCommunity theme is a responsive WPMU compatible theme integrated with a BuddyPress plugin. This plugin allows users to register on your site and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups and much more. This theme is a social network in a box where you can build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community. The theme includes over 40 inner pages to manage profiles, activities, messages, group messages, invitations, subscriptions, and forums of both members and groups.

Razor

Razor is a responsive and clean, professional looking BuddyPress theme for WordPress. Built on a responsive layout structure and supporting Retina (HiDPI) enabled devices, this theme is packed with powerful modern features and the advanced controls such as Drag and Drop Layout Manager, Contact Form Builder, White Label Admin, Sidebar Manager and so much more. Building websites, communities, social networks is a breeze with this amazing looking theme. The possibilities are endless.

Social Buddy

Social Buddy is a responsive, flexible, BuddyPress and BBPress integrated community WordPress theme that is perfect for niche communities and social networks. Its fully fluid responsive design makes it work beautifully on mobile devices. This theme includes extensive documentation and an intuitive options panel making setup and customization a breeze. Theme support is excellent and top notch.

More Traffic Hacks – YouTube, Pinterest, and Linkedin

One billion unique Youtube viewers every month, 48.7 million pinners, 200 million linkedin members in over 200 countries – mind-blowing statistics and very difficult to visualize. You might as well be looking at the stars. But those numbers are real-time stats of real people who are interconnected, interwoven, and networked all across the world wide web. Wouldn’t you love it if all this traffic got sent your way? Of course, it could break your site but that can always be fixed.

Here are some of the traffic hacks shared during the last Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013:

YouTube

YouTube now allows you to create links to external pages

Enable monetization on external “clickable” link annotations. Send traffic to a squeeze page, Facebook page, or to your main money site.

Video Optimization:

Get more publicity to your videos by exposing it to a bigger market – the shared video loophole or use a paid service like shareyoutubevideos.com or videomarketingblaster.com if you are too busy to do it yourself.

Pinterest

Did you know that Pinterest outpaced Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined for share of referral traffic? Below is a sample on how you can get traffic followers, opt-ins, and sales from Pinterest:

Hold creative Pinterest Contests (sample below)

  1. Create 50 new images with quotes and the opt-in URL.
  2. Create a new page with all the images and the contest rules and prizes.
  3. Sendthe client’s list and FB fans (paid and organic) to the contest page.

When someone shares the images, they enter the contest and send their Pinterest followers to the opt-in page.

Conduct Teleseminars and uses memes like “Pin it to Win it” with urls linked to the squeeze page for the teleseminar</p

LinkedIn

Carl White shared a 5-minute agenda on how to monetize followings on big groups like LinkedIn:

What Carl does

  1. Find people with a big following or list (but aren’t currently monetizing it with continuity). Ex: go on Linkedin and type in a group (e.g. fitness, beer). Use lists available. If you can find them on Linkedin, try to find related group on Facebook. Compare fan numbers with involvement on Facebook (7.5% engagement is very high).
  2. Contact these people and see if they are monetizing their list. Ask the followers what they want to buy. Put the following post as a survey on the fan page, Linkedin page, send out an email, et cetera, “What is the one thing that you need the most help with?”
  3. Google it and find people that sell what the group wants to buy (e.g. white label solutions).

Take these hacks for a spin and see how it works out for you. We’d love to hear your results.

Useful WordPress Utilities to Start the Year Right


Give your WordPress site a tune up to keep it running smoothly with these helpful WordPress utilities. Remove forgotten spam comments, beef up your site’s functionalities, or simply improve the overall browsing experience of your audience, and give your website a little TLC. Check out these utilities to see which ones will work for you.

Smart Cleanup Tools

Smart Cleanup Tools is an easy to use, powerful plugin for database cleanup. With this plugin you can remove data that is no longer in use or not needed like trash, spam, or orphan posts and comments. It can help you restore database overhead and speed up database operations. This plugin supports WordPress multisites, and it has few tools designed for Network administration.

Easy Post Google Fonts

This plugin allows you to use over 600 Google fonts (even multiple fonts) in one post or page. You can specify every page element and tell it which Google font to use. No flash required.

The Countdown Pro

Add countdown functionality to your content or your sidebar area with The Countdown Pro powered by jQuery. Features and options include: date picker, expiry url, expiry text, date format, custom labels, custom callbacks, template styles, and so much more. It also comes with a shortcode generator and a multi-instances sidebar widget.

Interactive World Maps

Create as many interactive maps as you want (world, continents, countries, regions, states, metropolitan areas) with Interactive World Maps. Add and display colored regions and display them as regions or with colored markers. Useful for travel websites, multinational companies, NGOs, infographics and many other applications.

Ajax Translator Revolution Dropdown WP plugin

This user-friendly translator plugin is based on the highly rated AJAX Translator Revolution Lite jQuery plugin this time with an easy dropdown menu. Translate everything or select sections, show languages flags and names, remember visitor’s selected language.

Sugar Event Calendar for WordPress

This is a simple, lightweight event calendar plugin with just enough features you need for event management on your site. Neat way to keep visitors updated with scheduled weekly, monthly, yearly recurring, or new events and activities on your site.

22 Awesome jQuery Typography Plugins 2013

In today’s fast moving internet world every website owner is using all the tools that he can to make his website look more visually appealing and more attractive in terms of design. This makes sense because if you think that websites should only provide information then you should not consider starting up a website at all.

Now many different types of technological tools are available out there which can help you design better websites. In this article I have chosen to focus on jQuery plugins.

jQuery is a JavaScript library that simplifies HTML, document traversing, event handling, animating and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.

Below I have compiled 22 awesome jQuery typography plug-ins which you can use to enhance your site. To show one example how these plug-ins can help you, let’s take a look at the first plugin J Rumble. I am sure you know sites that change the link color when you move your hover over the link. This effect is known as “hover effect”. J Rumble takes this technology one step further. By using this plugin, as soon as someone chooses an element of your site, the element will rumble, vibrate, shake or rotate.

There are 21 other plugins that will make your life easier. So scroll down and take a look.

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Elegant Themes Shortcodes: Now Responsive!

With the advent of mobile platforms, WordPress themes have to adapt to the demands of this steadily growing user base. It can really be quite frustrating to read articles from any major newspaper’s website on iPhone or Android and get all the content mish mashed. Theme developers and web designers need to move more and more toward this emerging trend towards responsive themes.

It is a welcome development that Elegant Themes recently released its responsive shortcodes. While Elegant Themes has been churning out responsive themes for quite a while, the shortcodes were left out. It took 10 responsive themes before mobile friendly shortcodes were released. Great news, indeed!

So how do these new shortcodes, improve mobile browsing experience? Elegant Themes’ blog cites two examples of their improvement strategy. Tabs have always been an issue when websites typically viewed on a 960px wide screen to a 320px width. No matter what you do, having 10 tabs will alway come out cramped. Solution: Tabs turn into a slider when switching to mobile mode. It just makes sense to have sliders rather than have unreadable tab labels. Another example cited was the case of columns. As the content width gets narrower, text in columns become a bunch of flying letters. Solution: the new shortcodes convert columns into boxes when switching to mobile screens. Brilliant isn’t it? Regarding the new shortcodes, Elegant Themes has declared them to be fluid width giving them the capacity to shrink and expand according to screen size.

Web design and the emerging technology innovation and trends are accelerating even faster. More and more mobile users prefer to access the web through their devices and WordPress Themes providers need to step up their game. For loyal subscribers of Elegant Themes, these concrete steps towards updating and upgrading all Elegant Themes products is always welcome and appreciated.

Congratulations to Elegant Themes for taking WordPress theme development one step further and fully embracing the future of WordPress.

See Elegant Themes’ Responsive Shortcodes