Elegant Themes Releases Their 84th Theme

Never underestimate the impact of a good story. Better yet, the impact of great visuals to enhance a good story and make it as engaging as possible. Elegant Themes has done just that with its 84th premium WordPress theme, Fable.

Fable Premium WordPress Theme is every writer’s delight. If you’ve ever wanted to publish your own writings to reach and influence an audience with your ideas and thoughts in a way that will engage them, Fable is the ideal theme for you. This latest theme from Elegant Themes is beautifully designed with its carefully chosen color styles and typography that will magically frame each post or article. Professional bloggers and serious writers will enjoy the way their posts are put in the spotlight and brought to the fore. Telling a story has never been as easy and as beautiful.

Fable was built with a Post Formats UI that’s a breeze to use. Its minimalist approach, wide and spacious layout, full width and long-format style, and overall relaxed design aesthetic makes for easy reading. Tablet and mobile users can simply grab a cuppa Joe, sit back and relax as they scroll through every post and get lost in your stories.

Fable is more than just fluff. This theme also contains other powerful features like a portfolio, an image gallery, shortcodes, and more. It comes with 4 different post formats – Article, Video, Gallery, and Quote – to support whatever literary whim you have at the moment. These different post types are individually designed to bring prominence to your post by giving it the “stage” that it needs. Its carefully chosen typography sets the tone of the whole theme, however, users can also select from the many font options to give their own sites the character that they want.

Features:

  • Responsive Design
  • Theme Options
  • Shortcodes
  • Page Templates
  • Unlimited Color Schemes
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Complete Localization

Fable Premium WordPress Theme includes perpetual updates, unparalleled support, and access more than 80+ high quality WordPress themes included in every Elegant Themes membership.

Get 80+ WordPress Themes For $39!

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 Theme Clubs: 2013 Edition

If you’ve been around the WordPress community for quite some time, you surely are familiar with WordPress theme clubs, popular or otherwise, and how they work. For those just getting their feet wet regarding everything WordPress, check out our previous article, What is a WordPress Theme Club for a quick run through on theme club basics.

For the WordPress newbie, here are some of the more popular and still active WordPress Theme Clubs to explore.

Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes is one of the most popular WordPress theme clubs, with over 170,000 customers. They currently have more than 81 themes, releasing new themes regularly. Elegant Themes offers its members access to a variety of themes that range from portfolio themes, to business themes, to blogging/news themes, to eCommerce themes, to personal themes. Their themes have a distinct style that combines aesthetic and function seamlessly. Elegant Themes offers 3 different membership packages: Personal, Developer and Lifetime options with access to more than 81 themes, shortcodes, and other benefits.

StudioPress

The Genesis Framework and child themes by StudioPress have been around for quite some time as well. Founded by Brian Gardner (Copyblogger), StudioPress has been churning high quality coded WordPress themes for years. StudioPress is different from Elegant Themes in that they sell themes individually in addition to the club membership. With over 86,000 members and 43 themes for a one-time fee of $349.95 which includes lifetime access to all of the current StudioPress themes, all future themes, and updates to all themes as they become available.

ThemesKingdom

Themes Kingdom offers all of their themes (currently 47 themes), plus 1 plugin (Scebo, for a customer support system) for $50 per year. Members can use the themes on an unlimited number of domains, including on client websites. Themes Kingdom members get access to attractive themes in a wide variety of categories, including portfolio themes, business themes, blog themes, news themes, and more.

Organic Themes

Organic Themes was founded in 2009 by David Morgan and Jeff Milone and was developed as an expression of their personal lifestyles. Their design approach lean towards the more professional look sans the excessive flashy effects, gradients, drop shadows and other bells and whistles commonly seen in the web design world. They are committed to clean code, with just the right amount of theme options which translate into faster load times, setup and customization. Organic Themes offers a variety of premium WordPress themes for artists, businesses and bloggers.

ThemesTown

ThemesTown is one of the new kids on the block that’s worth watching. If their impressive and creative website design is a gauge of what can be expected from them, then there is much to look forward to. Right now, they are building up their depository of homegrown exclusive premium themes but while you are waiting, you can also check out their huge list of the best free WordPress themes that have been culled from what’s out there. Membership rate is pegged at $55 one-time fee, with no monthly dues and no future charges.

Foxy WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes Is Here

Foxy Premium WordPress Theme is one of the latest releases by Elegant Themes and it is foxy indeed. This theme combines beautiful design with powerful function all in one neat little package. With all the features this premium theme has, it could very well be your one stop shop WordPress theme for business websites.

Whatever you are looking for in a WordPress theme, this one has it with a little bit more. You get all the page templates you need to set up great portfolio pages, a blog, an image gallery, a sitemap, an advanced search page, and a contact form. Not only do you have all these flexible and customizable templates useful for corporate or portfolio websites, you also get built-in e-commerce capabilities that take your website up another notch.

What’s in the box? A look at the homepage and you can tell the well thought out design process that the theme went through. The use of vibrant colors and elegant text layout are enticing and encourage interactivity. The homepage slider beautiful and functional and gives you a platform to throw out your message and get casual visitors to stay a bit longer. Text boxes for summaries are adequately spaced and can be used as tools to develop interest in your business and your products. A strategically located sign-up button is useful in building a loyal customer base. Built in shortcodes also give you flexibility to customize the theme even further with design elements such as tabs, columns, colored boxes, etc.

Foxy Premium WordPress Theme fully integrates ecommerce functionality and is compatible with the WooCommerce plugin, giving you an elegant yet fully functional e-commerce solution right out of the box. This theme runs on HTML5/CSS3, is also localized for easy translation, is responsive and looks beautiful even on handheld devices.

Features:

  • Responsive Design
  • Theme Options
  • Shortcodes
  • Page Templates
  • Unlimited Color Schemes
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Complete Localization

Foxy Premium WordPress Theme includes perpetual updates, unparalleled support, and access more than 81 high quality WordPress themes included in every Elegant Themes membership.

Get Foxy And 81 More Themes for $39

Themes Town Is The New Best Deal in WordPress?

Every once in awhile you stumble upon something pretty awesome that simply blows your mind away. Guess what? There’s a new WordPress site that just does that. It’s called THEMES TOWN. If you haven’t heard of Themes Town, you NEED to see it for yourself. There’s really nothing like it so far on Planet WordPress and we have seen most of what’s out there.

What’s Themes Town all about?

Before we get into that, we have to commend the designers who put this creative site together. From the first page to the last, the creativity you experience on the site is truly a delight. Every page is like a treasure hunt where you find little nuggets of gold tucked away in drop downs, arrows, and drawers. Reading through the information is like turning the pages of a storybook. Not a dull moment indeed even if you are simply browsing through the Pricing Table. Who says that websites should all look a certain way?

But wait, it gets better. Not only are you treated to this visual delight, you also get access to valuable WordPress resources you can use for your own website. We all know that many websites come out with their own daily or weekly listings of “20 Best Free Responsive WordPress Themes” or “50 Best Free Magazine Themes” and so many other great lists and roundups. The problem with this is that you have to go through their long lists just to find what you need scrolling endlessly and going back and forth between the list and the demo button (and then how are you supposed to know it’s code is good and free of malicious or encrypted links)? Themes Town has come up with a pretty cool solution that can be found in its Member’s Area.

Themes Town Member’s Area

Themes Town - Members

Say goodbye to endless scrolling and sorting through free WordPress themes post archives. Themes Town has done all the hard work for you.

From their site…

(We) have taken the world of WordPress and condensed it down to an amazing member’s area that is chalked full of the latest and greatest themes and plugins. Each has been painstakingly reviewed by our team to be of the highest quality, free to download, and ready to use right away. It is our goal to make your job as easy as point, demo, download, and use.

One of the many risks of downloading free WordPress themes is vulnerability to malicious code. It’s not hard to find free themes. There are thousands of them available out there. The challenge is finding the good ones that you’d actually want to use and that won’t hurt your website.

It’s nice to know that there is a place called Themes Town where you can download free WordPress themes without having to worry about installing unwanted code and knowing that each of the nearly 200 themes have been pre-screened by WordPress experts.

Another great feature of the Member’s Area is the ability to sort themes according to categories. This helps members narrow down their choices according to their specific theme needs. Each week, new themes and plugins are added to their growing members area, and we have never seen such a complete resource for WordPress.

But that’s still not all.

In addition to everything thus far, Themes Town kicks it into overdrive with their exclusive Themes (and soon to be plugins) that you can only get in the Member’s Area. These cutting-edge WordPress Themes are created with the latest trends in web development including being fully responsive, having clean code, and employing all the best practices for quick load time, SEO, and more. Reliability and convenience all in one awesome site for just $55 (one time). Not a bad deal at all, don’t you think?

Themes Town is not just a good product that offers good value to consumers. It is a great product that provides great service and valuable resources that will benefit many in the WordPress community. And we have to say, it is a really beautiful and creative site.

Don’t walk…RUN to Themes Town and get your membership today!

Visit ThemesTown

Explore Your WordPress Settings for WP Beginners

Getting to know your WordPress Settings is like learning to drive a car. You don’t necessarily have to know how everything works under the hood but you do have to get to know all the knobs, dials, buttons, and controls that will make it start up and run before you can get anywhere. Exploring the different WordPress Settings and functions on the left hand side of your admin panel will help you direct and control the way you want to run your WordPress website and how far you can take it.

If you are a WordPress beginner eager to post and publish content you need to get to know the Settings Administration menu in the Admin Panel.

Here are the default options you will find when you click on the Settings menu.

General – This is the default screen and controls the most basic configuration settings for your site such as:

  • Site Title – the name of your site or blog
  • Tagline – a catch phrase or short description of your site
  • WordPress Address – the full url of the directory containing your WordPress core application
  • Site Address – the address you want people to use when searching for your website
  • Email address – the email address where you want communication sent
  • Membership (if you want to open registration to other users)
  • New User Default Role – the default status or position of new users
  • Timezone – choose the timezone of your location
  • Date format
  • Time Format
  • Week Starts on – choose your preferred day to start your week

Writing – control the way you write and publish your posts

  • how you add new posts
  • adjust the post box size
  • set your post format and how you want graphics like emoticons are displayed
  • set your default post category
  • set how you want “Press this”
  • set remote posting permissions – via email or mobile

Reading – this module allows you to:

  • set how the front page displays your posts
  • set a static page for the front page and the posts page
  • set how many blog pages to display
  • set how many posts to display on syndication feeds
  • show full text or excerpts of blog posts
  • set search engine visibility
  • preset email acknowledgments and replies to recent followers and commenters

Discussion – this module allows you to define

  • default article notification settings like pingbacks and trackbacks
  • moderate and manage comments, permissions, approval, blacklists
  • email notifications for comments
  • manage user avatars

Media – this module allows you to set by default how images, documents and other media files included in a post will be processed and organized. You can also preset the image dimensions (thumbnail, medium, large) in this section although you can still do further edit while adding a new post.

Privacy – this option has been moved to the Reading module in WordPress 3.5 under Search Engine Visibility.

Permalinks – are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Because others may link to your individual postings, the URL to that article shouldn’t change. Permalinks are intended to be permanent (valid for a long time). There are several third party plugins you can also install to customize the structure of your permalink to optimize your SEO visibility.

This list gets longer once you install new plugins or other third party functions included in other WordPress themes you choose to install. Once you have decided on how you want your site to function you can define and select all your parameters, save your Settings and enjoy publishing your content the way you want and as much as you want.

5 Great Resources for Stock Imagery for your WordPress Themes

Choosing the right photos for your WordPress theme demo is key. It’s what catches your visitor’s eye when they arrive at your website and hopefully it is interesting enough to sustain their attention and make them stay. Poorly chosen photos can spell disaster for your excellently coded theme and wastes golden opportunities to close a sale. The multiracial corporate group shot and the guy or girl in corporate attire with a headset are unexciting and kinda cliché.

Here are some excellent sources for stock photos or graphics you can use to enhance your WordPress theme.

Photodune

Photodune is a huge marketplace of royalty-free high quality photography. Photodune is part of the highly creative Envato community of which Themeforest is a part of. File prices range from $1 up.

Licenses:

  • PhotoDune Regular License allows use of the item to create multiple (more than one) end products, which are distributed free to end users by you or by one client. Unlimited copies are permitted for websites, and for other uses there is a limit of 250,000 copies across all products. If you are a freelancer, one license is needed per client.
  • PhotoDune Extended License allows use of the item to create multiple (more than one) end products, which you or one client may sell to end users. Unlimited copies are allowed. If you are a freelancer, one license is needed per client.
  • Other licenses include Tools license, Logo license, T-shirt license (regular or extended), App license, Personal license

500px

500px is a premier worldwide photo sharing platform for aspiring and professional photographers who get to discover new photographs, share their own images, buy featured photos, and also sell the best of their own portfolio to thousands of subscribers. Browse through thousands of images from all types of content neatly categorized by subject. Settings can be adjusted to restrict displaying photographs classified as adult content. Downloads are all HD digital files and can be sold as downloadable hi-res files or canvas prints. Transactions are handled via the website or an iPad app. Download costs start at around $3 for hi-res files and $120+ for canvas prints. You can signup as a member. Membership starts from $0 (free account) to $49.95/year.

Shutterstock

Shutterstock is a stock photography agency and global image marketplace that maintains a library of royalty-free stock photos, vectors, illustrations and footage available by subscription or per item.

Plans and Pricing

  • Standard License – 25-a-day Subscriptions allows you to download 25 images everyday including access to all JPEG and Vector sizes (starting at $249 up to $2500+)
  • Standard License – Images on Demand allows you to download images (jpgs and vectors) any time for up to one year (starting at $49/5 downloads to $229/25 downloads)
  • Enhanced Subscriptions allows you to download images (TIFF, jpg, vector) any time for up to one year (starting at $199/2 downloads up to $1699/25 downloads)

Fotolia

Fotolia is a community of artists, graphic designers, creative agencies devoted to offering affordable creative royalty-free images, vectors, illustrations and video footage clips which can be used for any design project or document with no time limits or restrictions on the number of printed copies.

Subscription Plans:

  • Daily – Daily Subscription plans allow members to download from 25 to 250 creative files per day. Download high-res images, vector illustrations and video footage every day from $0.16 per file.
  • Monthly – Monthly Subscription plans allow members to download each month from 5 to 5000 creative files without daily limit. The monthly Subscription plan allows you to download high-res images, vector illustrations and video footage from $0.84 per file. If you don’t use all of your downloads within that month, these unused downloads rolls over to the next month for as long as your subscription is active or renewed.
  • Individual – Individual Subscription option allows one user to download images daily or monthly, according to the Subscription plan purchased.
  • Multi user – Multiple Users Subscription option allows a company to share access to Fotolia’s images, vectors and videos within its company.

Stock.XCHNG

Stock.XCHNG is the world’s leading FREE stock photography site. SXC was launched in February 2001 as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. It is now wholly owned by Getty Images. Images are totally free as long as you stick to the rules in the Image license Agreement. Also, in some cases you may need to notify the artists about using the images and sometimes you need to give credit to them.

WordPress theme demos need not have the same stock photos, images, or vectors. Take your pick from premium or free images to make your demos less predictable and boring. Spice up your demo pages and make them as interesting and as eye-catching as you can with the right image. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

80 Reasons To Join Elegant Themes

According to Leonardo Da Vinci “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” True. If you observe a lot of the high end designer brands, there is a common thread among all of them – simple sophistication. Elegant, timeless, classic designs that stand the test of time always wins over outlandish, over the top fads that shine bright like a falling star only to fade later on. Perhaps this is why Elegant Themes continues to remain strong. Their commitment to elegant, classic design gives their themes that timeless appeal. That doesn’t mean that their designs are dated and irrelevant but instead, their consistency, as far as delivering beautiful and highly functional themes, is constant.

Their recently released WordPress Theme, Fusion, is a good example of the quality of design work they put out. Fusion Premium WordPress Theme is just one of 80 high quality themes Elegant Themes members enjoy. That’s 80 good reasons to join Elegant Themes today. Imagine owning 80 beautiful themes for the price of mere pennies for each theme. That’s cheaper than buying an upsized or Big Soda – and hey, no calories too! For WordPress professionals who create websites for clients, that’s a great investment indeed. It’s better to upsize your business rather than your waistline.

There are many other reasons why you should seriously consider joining Elegant Themes. A good sign that a company is healthy and thriving is its growth rate. Elegant Themes membership has grown more or less 30% in a span of 6 months. From 120,000+ members last year they jumped to 160,000+ at the start of this year. The numbers tell the story and that is really worth noting.

If you haven’t heard of Elegant Themes yet or if you are a WordPress beginner still trying to find your way around the WordPress community, check out our recently updated article – “Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes Review”. It’s a great resource with lots of information and samples  for anyone who wants to find out more about Elegant Themes. Click on the title “ Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes Review” to read.

Get 80 Premium Themes for $39

Black Friday & Cyber Monday WordPress Deals 2012

WordPress: Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals 2012

We like to keep our pulse on the latest and greatest in the world of WordPress, and we wanted to bring you a list of some of the biggest and best WordPress deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2012.

Bluehost: You can join Bluehost hosting at the bargain basement price of $3.95/month starting Friday November 23, 2012 – Monday November 26, 2012. Get the Bluehost Promo here.

HostGator: Get 50% off your hosting order on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This includes shared, VPS, and even dedicated accounts. Get domains for $1.95 (this is the lowest price HostGator has ever had on domains). Get the HostGator Promo here.

Themify: Starting now until November 26th, 2012, you can use the coupon code BLACKFRIDAY to get 40% off on all of our Themify WordPress Themes including the Club membership! This is a great opportunity to join their developer club at a fantastic price. You can get all 33 themes (Photoshop mockup files included) for just $53.40 (normally $89). That is $1.62 per theme! If you are an existing member, this is a good time to buy more themes or upgrade to the Club membership. Get the Themify Promo here.

ManageWP: Subscribe to a premium subscription and you’ll receive a 30% life-time discount for any ManageWP package or configuration, which will remain active for as long as you remain a customer, even if you upgrade or downgrade in the future! Get the ManageWP Promo here.

Theme Junkie: This year, Theme Junkie is offering a promo code that allows you to get 40% off with the promo code BLACK. This brings the lifetime membership to $119.40, the 1-year membership to $41.40, the 6-month membership to $29.40, and the single purchase (which lets you get 3 Themes for the price of 1) to $23.40. Get the Theme Junkie Promo here.

Obox-Design: Obox has put together two bundles for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion this year. The Classic Bundle gives you 4 overhauled classic Themes + 1 Plugin for just $25. The Super Premium Bundle gives you 6 amazing Premium Themes + 2 Plugins for $50 (an incredible savings of $610). Get the Obox Design Promo here.

Solostream: Get 20% off your Solostream purchase with promo code: 5084BE. The promotion is valid through Monday November 26, 2012. Get the Solostream Promo here.