Top 5 Themes for Non-Profit Organizations

It’s now that time of the year when most of the world celebrates Christmas. It is the season when the Christian world reflects on the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ which ultimately leads to his sacrifice on the cross so people may live a much better life in Him. It is also during this time when people are reminded to think beyond themselves and work towards causes to make the world a better place to live in. In the spirit of Christmas, we are featuring top 5 best selling and well rated themes for non-profit organizations:

1. Churchope

Churchope is a WordPress theme designed for churches. The homepage features a great slider perfect for giving visitors a brief presentation on what the church mission and beliefs are. The theme has capabilities for embedding videos as well as playing audio tracks. It also has a great calendar system to keep church members updated on the next church event. Overall, whether it’s viewing or listening to the latest sermon online or catching up with the next church activities, Churchope meets those needs and so much more.

2. WP Church

This is another theme that’s perfect for churches. It has an amazing slider set on a wood finish background. WP Church also gives visitors the chance to watch videos and audio tracks, listen to preaching or testimonies, and keep track of event countdowns on a dedicated event page. It also has a special scripture tool that automatically adds scripture text when the scripture reference (e.g. Ps. 121:1) is typed.

3. Campaign

This is a special theme for individuals running for public office. Candidate updates and news may be posted as well as a schedule for campaign events & sorties. There’s also a special tool for capturing names & email addresses of constituents and supporters and even a special, easy to set-up donation button. This theme can also be used for fund raising, charity events and the like.

4. Earth

This premium WordPress theme is designed for today’s eco-warriors. The environmental movement relies heavily on images to tell the stories of how the planet’s resources are being depleted because of human and industrial factors. Earth has great multimedia presentation capabilities that can help tell that story. This theme has an amazing slider that capable of embedding powerful video presentations to stir up conservation. It also has great sortable portfolio pages perfect for documenting various conservation projects of any environmental organization.

5. Animal Care

Animal care is a theme designed for cause oriented groups or movements who want to establish an online presence. This theme’s home page has a beautiful slider that can be used to effectively communicate the organization’s mission. The theme has allotted ample space for images, blog pages, and there is also a special box for special news posts regarding the organizations activities. Interested parties are given an opportunity to donate via a special donation button on the homepage.

There are more themes out there designed for non-profits. Hat tip to all the designers and developers who have created these themes to help the advancement of great causes.


Specialty: Clean Business WordPress Theme

The main purpose of a business theme is to create awareness, generate interest, and convert casual visitors to engaged followers/clients/customers. For a business theme to be effective, it has to have the following elements:

  • Great SEO capabilities.
  • Great design recall.
  • Readable, well organized text and multimedia content.
  • Effective interactive feedback system.

WP Business Bundle just released Specialty, a responsive premium WordPress theme designed to present your business or your company in a clear and concise manner. Overall, the theme is clean, modern and generous with whitespace. It has a great, sizeable slider that can really grab attention of casual visitors. Visitors are given control over slider transitions which gives each slide the appropriate airtime based on visitor preference.

Content is definitely readable on this theme. Font size and spacing between text boxes are great, giving visitors an uncluttered, relaxed reading experience. Images are displayed in a clean, well organized portfolio grid style which can also be sorted according to category. There’s also the option to use a jQuery masonry layout for those who want that Pinterest look. Thumbnails are slightly bigger that typical portfolio pages giving visitors a better overview of the work. Pages containing detailed narratives include large images of the work. This theme can also handle video and it includes a large section where you can showcase a special video or image right on the homepage.

Specialty does have a responsive design giving visitors the chance to appreciate the site’s content on smartphones and tablets. Specialty includes a basic contact form, custom post types, an easy to use custom panel, and just the right amount of widgets and features to get your site up and running without much fuss.

More Features:

  • Import/Export Functionality for Theme Options
  • Seven Pre-Defined Color Schemes
  • Breadcrumb Navigation
  • Adjustable Footer Widget Area (1-4 Columns)
  • Custom Post Types: Slider | Portfolio |Testimonial
  • Engaging Portfolio Layout with jQuery Masonry
  • HTML5 Markup | CSS3 Effects

Specialty Premium WordPress Theme is part of a bundle of themes and business-tailored plugins at WP Business Bundle available starting from $79. This theme includes documentation, future updates. For an additional $9 per month, you also get the PSD files, XML files, and access to the theme’s support forum.

Join WP Business Bundle Now

Harmony Theme from Elegant Themes is LIVE

On Nov 29, Elegant Themes officially released Harmony, a versatile premium WordPress theme designed for musicians and bands. Its key features are its custom audio player for sampling music tracks, event manager features and eCommerce functionality. Visitors can listen to the band’s music, purchase concert tickets via the band’s ticket vendor of choice and purchase music/merchandise through the theme’s WooCommerce powered e-store pages. It’s a one-stop website both musicians and fans will surely enjoy.

Harmony is a well designed, well developed theme considering this is Elegant’s first step into music themes. A lot of expectation and inputs have been given by users since the theme’s announcement on Nov. 7 and these suggestions have been carefully woven into the theme as best possible. The theme continues to deliver that signature Elegant Themes look and upholds its reputation for simple yet sophisticated design that distinguishes it, specifically Harmony’s aesthetics, from other music themes in the market. In addition, its excellent event management capabilities make it convenient for fans to patronize the band’s latest gigs and concerts as seamless and as effortless as scrolling through the pages.

Harmony includes an integrated MP3 audio player which gives fans and potential fans the opportunity to listen to audio samples of upcoming or already released music tracks. The theme is also equipped to display music videos and concert previews as an effective marketing tool to attract the attention of this media savvy generation of fans. This theme is also responsive and will work well on handheld and mobile devices – a staple of every ear plugged music fan out there. This means that fans can enjoy their favorite band’s music anytime, anywhere – which is definitely music to any musician’s ears.

Features:

  • Responsive Design
  • Theme Options
  • Shortcodes
  • Page Templates
  • Perpetual Updates
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Browser Compatibility
  • Complete Localization
  • Unlimited Colors
  • Unparalleled Support

Harmony Premium WordPress Theme includes top-notch tech support provided by Elegant themes’ support staff to help you setup your site and get it running in no time.

Get 77 Premium Themes for $39

5 Excellent Resources for Free PSD Web Templates


The Internet is such a great resource for learning almost anything. You can practically start a whole new career based on all the free available information that can be downloaded online. Thanks to very generous people who don’t mind sharing their talent and resources for others to learn from. For those who want to try their hand at designing web templates, one of the best ways to learn is to mimic the good ones that are out there. Thankfully, there are excellent resources out there if you know where to look. Here are some of the best that’s out there today and the great thing about it is that these resources are absolutely free. Check them out:

Blaz Robar

Blaz Robar is a graphic designer from Melbourne, Australia and is part of a web design studio, Eleven Media that specialises in creating unique WordPress themes. Below is one of the many PSD templates available on his site Blazrobar.com and you can also find his work on www.thelayoutlab.com.

Luis Zuno

Luis Zuno is a full time web designer & developer spends his time creating themes and templates. Below is a sample of one of the free PSD files on this site were created by him. According to him, you are free to download, and use them in both your commercial and personal projects. Luis Zuno’s work can also be found at ThemeForest.

Martin Fabricius

Martin Fabricius is a young and talented web designer from Vejle Denmark and has won several awards in his homeland. According to him:

My big passion is usability and web and app design. I make web and app design on a freelance basis apart from my job as CTO to Ungarbejde.dk

Below is a sample of the kind of work that is available on his website:

Elemis Freebies

Cemile and Volkan are two graduate students at VCD in Istanbul and work as freelance web designer/developers. Currently they are working on creating user-friendly and clean website templates on Themeforest.
Below is a sample of their work which can be downloaded for free on their website:

Premium Coding

Premium Coding is an interactive multimedia design website that provides tons of resources for web developers, designers, and the web community. Below is a sample of one of the many free resources you can download from their site.

With all the free tutorials, templates, and design resources available out there, you can jump start your web design skills in no time. So bring out your text editor, your editing software and get started. All you need to add to the equation is your time.


17 Awesome Adobe air apps for designers

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

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

Technically speaking:

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

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

(more…)


The Basic Web Page Structure – HTML5 List of Tags


You can think of an HTML page as a series of containers. After an opening statement that defines the type of page to follow, there is one large element, the <html> tag, that contains the two primary structural elements, and <body>.

HTML documents consist of a tree of elements and text. Each element is denoted in the source by a start tag, such as “<body>“, and an end tag, such as “</body>“. (Certain start tags and end tags can in certain cases be omitted and are implied by other tags.)

Here’s how the basic essential code for an HTML5 web page looks:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title> Title of document goes here </title>
</head>
<body>
Visible text goes here…
</body>
</html>

Before we can fully appreciate what these containers or placeholders do to our webpage we need to know how they function. Below is a list of HTML5 compliant tags we can use to study and familiarize ourselves with as to the description and function of each tag. Let’s do a little exercise. As you go through the list, pick a web page (any, even this one) and right click on it. Select “view page source” and try to find the tags listed here and look for them in the page source. Try to classify which ones are basic tags, formatting tags, image tags, and so on. While you are at it, challenge yourself to decode the code. Have fun!

<bdi> Isolates a part of text that might be formatted in a different direction from other text outside it
<mark> Defines marked/highlighted text
<meter> Defines a scalar measurement within a known range (a gauge)
<progress> Represents the progress of a task
<rp> Defines what to show in browsers that do not support ruby annotations
<rt> Defines an explanation/pronunciation of characters (for East Asian typography)
<ruby> Defines a ruby annotation (for East Asian typography)
<time> Defines a date/time
<wbr> Defines a possible line-break
<datalist> Specifies a list of pre-defined options for input controls
<keygen> Defines a key-pair generator field (for forms)
<output> Defines the result of a calculation
<figure> Specifies self-contained content
<audio> Defines sound content
<source> Defines multiple media resources for media elements ( and )
<track> Defines text tracks for media elements ( and )
<video> Defines a video or movie
<nav> Defines navigation links
<command> Defines a command button that a user can invoke
<header> Defines a header for a document or section
<footer> Defines a footer for a document or section
<hgroup> Groups heading elements
<section> Defines a section in a document
<article> Defines an article
<aside> Defines content aside from the page content
<details> Defines additional details that the user can view or hide
<summary> Defines a visible heading for a details element
<embed> Defines a container for an external (non-HTML) application

Don’t forget that WordPress uses PHP but PHP is a server-side technology (runs on a server) that dynamically generates the HTML that will be sent to the browser (IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome). HTML is whatever you view on a website.


20 Useful Admin Plug-ins for WordPress

Do you know what makes WordPress the number one choice amongst bloggers? Although one can list many reasons but one of the most prominent in the list will be the number of plug-ins it supports. WordPress currently runs more than 20,000 plug-ins that have been downloaded more than 30 chore times! This is both good and bad news. Good news because you will have a lot to choose from. You will almost every time find what you need. Bad news because amongst such a vast ocean of plug-ins it is easy to get lost and drowned in the information overload. To help you out we present you with 20 WordPress admin plug-ins that we feel are the best in their niche. As the name suggests these are admin plug-ins i.e. they will help the administrator of the WordPress blog to operate the blog in a better and more efficient way.

For example, let’s say that you are fed up with all the clutter of the unnecessary and superfluous windows and bars that occupy your WordPress dashboard. Try Ad minimize, listed in the first position below. This plug-in allows you to compress windows to allow more content to be substituted in its place. Obviously different people have different priorities. So with Ad minimize you can customize your WordPress’s dashboard the way you like.

Besides Ad minimize, there are 19 other useful plug-ins that, I think, you should know of. Scroll down and check them out.

(more…)


Portfolio WordPress Themes 2013: Trends

Portfolio themes have always been highly influenced by the technical platforms the content is viewed on. Among the different theme categories, portfolios are probably the quickest to reflect new technological capabilities available. It is just fitting to consider what’s up around the corner at the end of 2012 as far as the Internet is concerned and how this will affect portfolio themes.

The main internet trend for 2013 and 2014 is the main streaming of mobile as an internet access device. It is strongly believed that smartphones and tablets will overtake desktops as the access device of choice. A lot of the conversions are expected to happen in developing countries where 3g is still the norm. A simple observation is to check what devices internet users use to upload content. More often than not it is through a handheld device, an iPhone, Android, or smartphone. To the user, it is all about convenience and accessibility. Designers and developers need to take note of this and need to consider creating themes that can handle images and multimedia content under these constraints.

The mobile effort should be done without sacrificing an emerging and equally important 4g LTE market. Designers should be cognizant of a significant growth of mobile and desktop users subscribing to internet connections much faster than a couple of years ago. Thus the access of devices to websites must be smart enough to be able to meet the seemingly opposite needs of these market segments. In a way, it is an expansion of responsive design into the backend of the website.

The emergence of new display technology such as Retina would be something to consider. Designers must be able to take multimedia content generated from any device and exploit the full capabilities of these next generation displays. Again, this should also be done in tandem with expected rapid growth in low capability areas.

Social media integration can not take a back burner as people are finding more and more ways to use this technology. Developers should take notice of the capabilities of Instagram or Pinterest and figure out how to incorporate such features into their themes. Their popularity is an indicator of sorts as to what people are viewing and how they are viewing it. It would be a pity to have a very beautiful portfolio website with very little traffic and only a handful of people enjoying it. Lastly, there is still much room to develop seamless integration with different resources available on the cloud – more exploration on how this can be utilized, maximized, and integrated into the ultimate WordPress portfolio theme.

We can’t wait to see what will emerge in 2013. Exciting times up ahead!


Harmony Theme: Coming Soon from Elegant Themes

It’s the age of the boy band, the rocker chicks, and the indie alternative rock group and fans have been stalking their favorite bands social network sites. But what if these bands had their very own websites to give them and their fans an online address where they can all converge and have fun?

Elegant Themes is coming up with its version of the music/band/artist WordPress theme and it looks quite exciting. We wonder how Nick Roach is going to combine elegance and swag all at the same time. No doubt, it will be something good.

Sneak peeks can be seen on the Elegant Theme’s blog page. A few features that’s been talked about are:

    The theme is compatible with the standard soundcloud plugin, and that you can add your soundcloud social media Icon in the header
  • Highly visual, clean and responsive experience
  • Includes an eStore / eCommerce compatible
  • Alternate color schemes
  • Major features: showcase songs, sell swag, cultivate fants, notify them of upcoming shows
  • Define your own background image for each location

Check out the Elegant Themes blog or even our blog regularly for the latest updates on the release of this new theme from Elegant Themes, Harmony theme.

Get 77 Premium Themes for $39