WordPress 3.7 – Give it up for Count Basie

WordPress 3.7 is out and it’s a pretty cool front act to upcoming WordPress 3.8. Baptized with the name Basie, in honor of jazz legend Count Basie, WordPress 3.7 is now available for download in your dashboard. This release features important architectural updates and the introduction of the new plugin-first development process. This new development cycle will continue on into version 3.8 scheduled to be released December 2013.

Some of the salient features of WordPress 3.7 or Basie include:

Updates while you sleep: With WordPress 3.7, you don’t have to lift a finger to apply maintenance and security updates. Most sites are now able to automatically apply these updates in the background. The update process also has been made even more reliable and secure, with dozens of new checks and safeguards.

Stronger password recommendations: Your password is your site’s first line of defense. It’s best to create passwords that are complex, long, and unique. To that end, our password meter has been updated in WordPress 3.7 to recognize common mistakes that can weaken your password: dates, names, keyboard patterns (123456789), and even pop culture references.

Better global support: Localized versions of WordPress will receive faster and more complete translations. WordPress 3.7 adds support for automatically installing the right language files and keeping them up to date, a boon for the many millions who use WordPress in a language other than English.

(source: WordPress News)

This means better security features, automatic updates, and a more globally responsive platform to service approximately 18 – 20% of the Internet being powered by WordPress.

Check your dashboard to update. Don’t forget to backup your files.

WordPress 3.7 Beta is out!

WordPress fans will be pleased to know that the latest iteration of WordPress – WordPress 3.7 has been released. If you are a developer or simply a certified WordPress geek you might be interested to test the beta version. The scheduled release for the final version is October as they have decided to shorten the development cycle and focus on a few key improvements.

Here are some of the features that have been updated in this latest beta version that you can test out:

  • Automatic, background updates. 3.7 Beta 1 will keep itself updated. That’s right — you’ll be updated each night to the newest development build, and eventually to Beta 2. We’re working to provide as many installs as possible with fast updates to security releases of WordPress — and you can help us test by just installing Beta 1 on your server and seeing how it works! When you go to Dashboard ? Updates, you’ll see a note letting you know whether your install is working for automatic updates. There are a few situations where WordPress can’t reliably and securely update itself. But if it can, you’ll get an email (sent to the ‘Admin Email’ on the General Settings page) after each update letting you know what worked and what didn’t. If it worked, great! If something failed, the email will suggest you make a post in the support forums or create a bug report.

  • If you’re running WordPress in another language, we’ll automatically download any available translations for official WordPress importers and the default themes.

  • Our password meter got a whole lot better, thanks to Dropbox’s zxcvbn library. Again, subtle but effective. Strong passwords are very important!

  • Search results are now ordered by relevance, rather than just by date. When your keywords match post titles and not just content, they’ll be pushed to the top.

  • Developers should check out the new advanced date queries in WP_Query. (#18694)

(source: WordPress News)

If you’d like to be more involved in the development and help test WordPress 3.7 beta, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. Just make sure you don’t do it on a live site.

eCommerce WordPress Themes for the Shopping Season

It’s almost that time of the year where people are just willing to spend, spend, spend. What better time than now to set up your own eCommerce site or simply update your existing one and get your visitors into the shopping season groove – all within the comforts of their own homes. Check out these cool eCommerce WordPress themes to help usher in that holiday cheer.

Barberry Responsive WooCommerce Theme

Barberry Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, fully responsive, retina ready Woocommerce theme built on Twitter Bootstrap. This slick eCommerce theme features dynamic animations that will set your eStore apart from the competition. This premium WPML ready theme is also equipped with MegaMenu, Revolution Slider, Sticky Header, Catalog Mode option, CloudZoom, a powerful Store Management and Reports feature, a filterable Portfolio, preset Shop page templates, Shopping Cart, and so many other features to help you start your store right away.

Roe | Dok WooCommerce WordPress Theme

RoeDok Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra modern WordPress fashion template especially designed for fashion stores carrying clothing, accessories, shoes, jewelry and other fashion related items. Its modern design style is clean, streamlined, and organized as to highlight each product without looking cluttered. This responsive theme has powerful built-in features such as: Mega Menu for categorizing huge amount of products with multi-column (add up to 6 columns), several sliders (Flex Slider, Revolution Slider, Nivo Slider), custom widgets, ad space for promotion and featuring important announcements, boxed and wide layout styles, predefined page layouts, a drop down shopping cart, and many other awesome features.

Retail Therapy – Multipurpose eCommerce Theme

Retail Therapy Premium WordPress Theme is a bold and elegant ecommerce WordPress theme that features the Hero Widget aimed at being able to list items on sale, categories, featured products and recent products or collections. You can also feature specific categories in a three block layout and add a call to action button in your footer. The
typography is beautiful and easy on the eye. It comes packed with 12 page templates including: a portfolio template which can show your portfolio in a two, three or four column view, a services template including service icons to visually describe your services, a shop template to display your products beautifully, a team page template and share their social links, and a features template for a product or service company

Cosmetico Responsive eCommerce WordPress Theme

Cosmetico Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and beautiful ecommerce theme that looks sleek, professional, and very high end. This retina ready responsive multi purpose theme includes features like: Page Builder with 34 web elements, animated floating menu option, Slider Revolution, CloudZoom, WooCommerce, full or boxed layout options, 300+ vector icons, portfolio variations (full screen, ajax, pretty photo), custom widgets, grid gallery with black and white effect, and many other features that will surely make your online store look amazing.

Shirtbox Flat WooCommerce Multi Purpose Theme

ShirtBox Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive multi purpose WooCommerce theme with a unique square look applying the latest flat-design style trend. It is perfect either for an ecommerce site, an online boutique, or creative business website. Outstanding features include Revolution Slider, FlexSlider, and Camera Slider, Live Chat, WooCommerce Catalog mode and compatible with WooCommerce extensions (zoom magnifier, ajax search, wishlist), advanced top menu type, and many other features to help you get your eCommerce site up and running.

Bistro Store eCommerce WordPress Theme

The Bistro Store Premium WordPress theme is a clean, stylish, custom-designed, modern eCommerce WordPress theme built using the latest technologies in HTML5, CSS3 and Bootstrap 2.3.2. This flexible premium theme comes with custom page templates, unlimited sidebar and color customization combinations, is fully responsive (compatible all mobile devices like: tablet, mobile phone, laptops etc.), with an advanced theme option panel, built-in Revolution Slider, custom product sliders, custom single product and portfolio pages, is social media and search engine optimized, has a special offers module (daily deals), 10+ custom widgets, special footer modules, and even a social media friendly newsletter module.

Elegant Themes Releases First Ever Free WordPress Theme

Great news from Elegant Themes! Elegant Themes just released it’s first ever FREE WordPress theme and it is a gem. Check out Serene – a clean, minimalist and absolutely beautiful blogging theme that will surely inspire your writing muse. Its modern and yet elegant design create that easy to read feel that will make visitors want to linger a little longer.

Customizing is definitely easy using the Theme customizer giving you freedom to be creative with it and match your blog to your personality and writing style. Capture your every mood in every post with the use of any of the available 6 post formats to choose from (article, gallery, audio, link, video, and quote). Post on the go and be confident that your blog will look amazing on any mobile or handheld device because of this theme’s responsive design. Organize your posts and color code each section or post type with custom colors and select fonts. The theme’s overall typographic style is clean and conducive to encouraging reading. Prefer some other type of font? You can easily change it to any of your font preferences in the theme’s admin panel. Social networking is also a breeze with the built in social networking buttons that can easily be configured in the Customizer panel.

Overall, you get the tried and tested Elegant Themes quality with all the basic things you need to set up an amazing looking blog at absolutely zero cost. This free WordPress theme includes features such as:

  • nElegant Design
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • 6 Different Post Formats
  • Browser Compatibility
  • Unlimited Colors
  • Unparalleled Support

Serene Free-mium WordPress Theme is available for download in the WordPress.org WP theme Directory. An exclusive version with additional bells and whistles will soon be made available to Elegant Themes members and subscribers.

Get Serene Now For Free!

Take it Nice and Easy With These Business and Leisure WordPress Themes

Good food and exotic travel destinations – the stuff that we plan for and dream about. Trying out new dining places and taking on new travel adventures will always be a favorite activity to do after work or during vacations. The good news is your restaurant or your boutique hotel need not be so obscure anymore with the help of the internet. Creating your own website not only to advertise your business but also to process business transactions has never been more convenient. If you are in the food or travel industry, check out these awesome WordPress themes to showcase your gourmet creations or your luxurious travel and tour packages:

Tour Package – WordPress Travel/Tour Theme

Tour Package Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and organized premium theme especially designed for those in the travel industry. This theme is equipped with a custom package post type that allows you to feature different travel and tour packages your customers can easily browse and choose from. This theme also comes with a booking form (Contact form 7 required) and a package filtering system to help customers find packages by location, price, available dates, etc. Tour Package also includes Page Builder, Layer Slider, Drag and Drop manager, WPML Support, WooCommerce support and many other features. It includes several page templates like gallery, sitemap, portfolio, pricing, etc. It is responsive, retina ready, and SEO optimized as well.

Iron Bull Restaurant WordPress Theme

Show off your gastronomic delights and mouth watering dishes with Iron Bull Premium WordPress Theme – a responsive WordPress restaurant theme that will surely make your visitors hungry for more. This bold and modern theme is the perfect theme to showcase your signature dishes and unique cuisine to stand out from the rest. You can customize this interactive theme anyway you like or choose from two predefined schemes (Sunfire or Victory Blue) to get started right away. Features included are: google maps, a sticky navigation with scrollspy, menus that have prices and calorie counts, food menu treatment, page templates (careers, polaroid inspired image gallery), and so much more. This premium WordPress theme is also available in HTML version.

Royal Gold WordPress Theme

Give your visitors that luxurious experience on your website with Royal Gold WordPress Theme – a unique WordPress theme especially designed for luxury hotels, exclusive resorts, posh restaurants, and spa/beauty centers. This premium theme features the easyReservations plugin, Contact Form 7, and Responsive Lightbox plugin to give your clientele the comfort and convenience of booking or making an online reservation with you. This mobile first premium theme is capable of optimizing bandwidth for smaller screens. This theme also features the 360º Panoramic viewer plugin which is quite useful for showcasing a panoramic view of rooms and accommodations.

Savory Responsive WordPress Theme

Savory Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, responsive WordPress theme for restaurants, diners, bars, pizzerias, coffee shops, etc. This no-frills theme comes in three skin types (Modern, Rustic, Classic), 4 custom widgets, a shortcode generator, a Retail Menu Cards plugin, all bundled in a simple, straightforward designed theme. You also get everything you need like: menu, contact information, map, opening hours, daily specials and other design elements necessary in setting up your restaurant’s online home.

Sweet Cake Responsive WordPress Theme

Sweet Cake Premium WordPress Theme is a one page Responsive HTML5 CSS3 Theme for WordPress perfect for your business. The graphic is very sweet and creative – ideal for bakeries, ice cream shops, restaurants and cake designers but if you want you can change the colors to adapt the theme for all activities. In the package you will also find sweet icons in vector format. The theme has been designed using the 1200 px grid system with 12 columns.

Soho Hotel Responsive Booking WP Theme

Soho Hotel Premium WordPress Theme is an organized and easy to navigate WordPress theme designed for hotels, hostels, service apartments and any other kind of accommodation which requires a booking system. This theme includes 4 preset and ready to use colour schemes that you can choose from or you can also choose to create your own colour palette using the colour picker in the theme options panel. This premium theme also includes a fully functional booking system and room availability plugin allowing visitors to conveniently book and make reservations without the hassle of overlapped or double booking. This fully responsive and translation ready premium theme currently supports PayPal.

Tips To Maximize Marketing To Your Local Mass Traffic

A panel of experienced resource speakers including Mike Cooch, Kevin Wilke, Jack Mize, Martin Maybruck among others shared valuable insights and wisdom (T&C Summit 2013) on how to handle local traffic.

Here’s a summary of some of the key points these experts shared and see how it applies to your own local marketing targets.

The top 3 strategies for getting clients are:

  • networking at local events
  • speaking at local events
  • direct mail

The top 3 online strategies for clients are:

  • videos (get ranked quickly) Tip: put your business phone number in the title
  • directories
  • social media

Effective Facebook Page contests include the ff. elements that can contribute to your list building efforts, free referrals, viral reach, etc.:

  • name – for brand positioning
  • video – builds trust
  • prizes – aligns with market and doubles attendance
  • fan gate – increases “likes”
  • webinar – adds value

Follow up with people over the phone and offer your services

Build your business eventually to be sold

  • build assets instead of just a source of income
  • keep your financials clean
  • document systems and processes
  • target margins to be at par or better than industry standards
  • think of transferable contracts
  • recurring revenue
  • proven sales model

Your number 1 job is to sell

  • Small businesses are not actively looking for someone to market for them. You have to sell to small businesses.
  • Focus on one vertical to start. It is the biggest secret to growing fast
  • Leverage channels (conventions, webinars, newsletters, trade shows)

Use tools and resources to help you find leads

  • Smartwebinar – automated prospecting webinar for local marketers
  • Localizer lead tool – find local prospects fast
  • Lead kahuna – find leads with bad online reputation and turn them into prospecting material to target them

Fast local lead copy works for landing pages, video scripts, online classifieds, biz listings, social media properties.

Small businesses want mainly is fast sales. Mobile consumers are among the highest percentage of searchers for local businesses but not all local businesses have websites.

If you are running a small business your local business must be listed in apps such as:

  • Google maps
  • Yahoo
  • Mapquest
  • Yelp

Local businesses owners need to build a custom mobile landing page catered to their target audience.

Your friendly neighborhood shop could be the next big thing to happen. Check out opportunities to connect and network.

Update For Best Theme Coming Soon

Good news for all you Best-ies out there! We’ve heard you and we are coming up with an update to our Best Theme soon. We’ve added a lot of features and functionalities based on what we think will make the theme better integrating and incorporating many of your suggestions and input. We’d like to thank all those who have downloaded the theme as you have inspired us to push a little more. But wait there’s more!

Lots of exciting things are in the offing here in Blogex and we are working on many cool developments to serve you better. Don’t forget to bookmark our page, subscribe, or add us to your social networks to get the latest news on Blogex.

Great things up ahead!

Flat Design WordPress Themes You Can Flaunt

Design trends come & go. Some rise to the top like a shooting star and stay there with the rest of the stars while others burst like comets and fade into the night sky. One so called design “trend” that has actually been around for the longest time has been getting much attention only recently. In fact, even Apple has finally embraced it and has incorporated it in their latest iteration of the iOs. Say hello to the flat design. And it has found its way in many of the newest WordPress themes being released. Here are some examples of WordPress themes that have gone “flat”. Check these out.

Nova Flat & Clean Responsive Theme

If you are looking for a WordPress theme that can be used for multipurpose applications and for diverse types of websites, check out Nova Premium WordPress Theme, a clean, flat design multipurpose premium theme that will surely amaze you. It’s got a sample content importer, 14 homepage options, 9 premium sliders, unlimited header options, a page builder, fluid layout, a skin manager, and a short code editor just to name a few. The flat graphics are integrated nicely and they add to the overall professional look of the theme.

Showy Bold and Flat Portfolio

Impress your clients with this ultra minimalist, boldly simple, flat design WordPress portfolio theme, Showy. Design agencies, creative professionals, and freelance artists will love the simple, uncluttered look of this premium theme that will surely put their creative work in the spotlight. Less is more, indeed. And if it’s a portfolio showcase you want, you have everything you actually really need in this excellent theme.

Flat Responsive Portfolio Theme

If your’re looking for a fresh new way to present your portfolio in step with the latest flat design trend, Flat Premium WordPress Theme is worth a peek. The horizontal scrolling action gives visitors the feeling that they are going through a glossy high end design magazine. You get a choice of 2 homepage options, flat design interactive social media buttons, AJAX pagination for quicker load time, collapsible side menu, tons of other features, plus it is retina ready (great for images) with an optional retina logo upload field feature.

Revusion Flat Corporate Theme

Revusion Premium WordPress Theme is a flat responsive, modern and very professional looking corporate theme packed with features for today’s modern business. Revusion integrates Pixeden flat icons into its design as inspired by the current flat design UI trend. This premium theme gives you several different layout options via its page templates. You can choose to add a testimonial page, a team page, a services page, an FAQ page, a gallery page, aside from the usual blog, portfolio, and contact pages to ensure you can pick exactly what you want to add to your site. This retina display ready theme also comes with the Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Plugin.

Sistina Flat Multipurpose Shop Theme

Sistina Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern WooCommerce theme, designed with a fresh flat style and with a great responsive and retina-ready design. The cool flat graphic elements, modern typography, and streamlined layout give this theme that modern flair that will appeal to today’s modern shopper. This WordPress theme includes several premium features like the Wishlist and the Compare Products features, the Product Enquiry form (for catalog use sans the shopping cart), the Ajax layered filter, and also a Popup plugin to show offers and news.

Nexus WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes

Stories are an important part of our identity as humans and as a society. More often than not, we go through magazines and newspapers looking for stories to inspire us, inform us and the like. It is easier for us to appreciate a situation if we read the experiences of people involved and see pictures as opposed to a detached report with just facts and figures. This gives the user a more concrete appreciation of what really transpired. Websites must be able to present content as stories that engage users to interact more. There must be a good balance between text and media content to achieve this. At the same time, the website design needs have the flexibility to be able to arrange content in such a way as to effectively create a synergy between text and media content.

Nexus Premium WordPress Theme is a theme created to give you the power to organize content and maximize your capability to tell your stories in an engaging manner. The theme’s homepage builder allows you to set-up content modules and arrange and organize them in such a way as to create an effective narration of your content. The theme’s overall design approach using a strict grid together with a typographical hierarchy and a clean layout gives your elements the ample space to breathe. This gives your visitors a pleasant and enjoyable experience browsing through readable, accessible content.

This premium theme is quite easy to customize according to personal specs and preferences using the theme’s ePanel. There are also tons of shortcodes and widgets available to expand the the look and function of your site. Nexus is built on HTML5 and CSS3 for fast, efficient loading of your website. The theme is also responsive allowing your site to look good on both mobile and desktop devices.

Features:

  • Perpetual Updates
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Browser Compatibility
  • Complete Localization
  • Advertisement Areas
  • Homepage Builder
  • Unlimited Colors
  • Custom Widgets

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

Get 85 WordPress Themes For $39!