Back to Blogging Basics – Cool WordPress Themes for Your Blog

Even before it became the highly stylized content management system that it is today, WordPress has always been and still is the blogger’s choice platform for personal blogging. WordPress themes have come a long way since Kubrick as more authors and developers churn out beautiful themes to fit all types of users. Here are some of the latest WordPress themes for today’s modern blogger:

Clipboard Tumblog Style WordPress Theme

If you are into microblogging Twitter or Tumblr, check out Clipboard Premium WordPress Theme – an awesome tumblog style WordPress theme that comes chock full of style and customisation options. Customization and styling options is easy using the WordPress Live Theme Customizer. The Visualkicks theme translator allows you to translate a single line of text or the whole site. Clipboard’s intuitive and responsive Masonry design allows you seamless transitions while maintaining that minimalist look. Clipboard also supports all of the core WordPress post formats and has been built and designed with simplicity in mind.

Pilcrow Ajax Powered WP Blog Theme

Pilcrow Premium WordPress Theme is a simple yet elegant and responsive WordPress blog theme that will surely inspire you to write. This robust premium theme not only presents your content in an engaging way but because it is also powered by AJAX it provides users an enjoyable experience with its smooth transitions while reading your content. This theme supports custom WordPress post formats giving you maximum flexibility on how you can present your content. You also get several templates such as: a password protected posts template, comments template, and a template for pingbacks and trackbacks. All these and more AJAX powered goodness. Minimum clutter for maximum pleasure.

Keilir Responsive WP Blog Theme

Keilir Premium WordPress Theme is a bright, typographically bold, and beautiful responsive theme designed to make your blogging experience as pleasant as possible. Armed with superb visual design and great support for mobile and tablet devices you can easily reach all your readers wherever they are. This premium theme has 6 custom styled blog formats, 8 bootstrap shortcodes, 6 custom social media widgets (facebook, twitter, instagram, mailchimp, and more), 10+ specially made shortcodes, 600+ google fonts, and a customizable theme options panel, to make your blog your very own.

tdFuture WP Theme

tdFuture Premium WordPress Theme is a dynamic, responsive WordPress blog theme ideal for personal blogs where you can share your articles, images, videos, music, quotes and much more. The big bold design and typographic choices will definitely make your content stand out from the crowd. If you are a blogger who wants your readers to focus on your content without the clutter of sidebar widgets, etc., then tdFuture is the theme for you. This theme can also double up as a portfolio to showcase your creative work. This theme supports WordPress Theme Customizer that gives you an ability to do changes with a real-time preview. tdFuture is a fully responsive theme and will adjust to any screen size.

Literary WP Blog Theme

Literary Premium WordPress Theme is a beautifully crafted blog theme that will delight authors, writers, and publishers. If you’ve been publishing books and you’ve always wanted a place to compile them all for your readers, Literary is the blog theme that can do that for you. This premium theme comes with a post type for showcasing your books and even a post type for your portfolio. Literature often comes with specific illustrations made especially for specific books. Many times, it is the cover that entices people to buy a book. Now you can showcase both books and illustrations on your own website and give readers a chance to enjoy your work both visually and intellectually. Increase your market reach by adding all of your books and linking them to Amazon, iTunes, or wherever you sell them. This theme is built “mobile first” for speed and flexibility and looks great from mobile to large desktops.

Quickly Handcrafted WP Theme

Quickly Premium WordPress Theme is a beautifully handcrafted WordPress theme that focuses on user-experience, usability, and beautiful typography. This Masonry styled theme comes with four predefined color schemes, optional homepage sidebar, post formats and many more design options. This theme also allows you to: mix up content on the homepage with widgets and dynamic post formats, enable or disable sidebar in a click, choose from the predefined patterns and color schemes, change header position, change the thumbnail position, and choose from any of the theme’s predefined custom fonts. Quickly is fully responsive, touch enabled, and comes with a sleek and powerful theme options panel to help you set the blog without having to change any code.

Milli Responsive WP Blog Theme

Milli Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, graphic, 3D inspired WordPress Theme designed for professional or personal bloggers. Choose between light and dark styles, full-width or two column layout, 5 accent color schemes, and you can upload the background pattern of your choice. This premium theme also features super cool sliders with multiple slider effects that can be embedded within posts. Milli also supports custom WordPress posts. This fully responsive theme is designed to look beautiful whether you are using a desktop computer or a mobile phone.

Pravda WP Blog Theme

Pravda Premium WordPress Theme is a bold and colorful modern WordPress theme fit for today’s hip and cool blogger. This customizable, ultra responsive, retina-ready WordPress theme has got that young vibe, combining favorite features from Pinterest and Instagram with social networking features, that will appeal to digital millennials today. This premium theme can be configured for business/work, for blogging, or both. It was developed on Bootstrap and is powered by the SMOF Options Panel, which provides multiple options to manage and modify any aspect of the theme – for both beginners with no coding knowledge and also seasoned developers. Features include 10 custom widgets, 8 widgetized areas, 5 post formats (image, audio, video, gallery, standard), 6 Home page layouts, and tons of custom theme options.

Top Selling WordPress Themes Just for You

Want something new to add to your WordPress theme collection? Here are some of the most popular and top grossing WordPress themes to consider. Check out why these themes are doing so well in the marketplace:

Kallyas Responsive Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

Kallyas Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra-premium, modern, and highly-responsive WordPress Theme built for today’s websites. It’s super flexible, clean design clean code, and touts itself as one of the most complete theme ever created. This theme integrates most if not all of the major features you will ever need or want in a theme: customizable Page Builder, responsive layout, smart loader, SEO ready, WPML ready, WooCommerce ready, multiple modern sliders, MailChimp newsletter integration and adaptation, and so much more. You also get bonus headers (Christmas and Easter) as part of the theme package.

Enfold Responsive Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

Enfold Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, super flexible and fully responsive multipurpose WordPress Theme ideal for business websites, shop websites, and creative agencies or freelance designers portfolio website. The Theme is built using the Avia Framework. From layout modification, styling, color choices, font choices, predefined theme skins, support for the WPML MULTI LANGUAGE plugin – Enfold has everything you need and more. The theme also includes a dynamic template builder to help you create the website you need in no time.

Kutcher Studio

Create your dream design studio website with Kutcher Studio Premium WordPress Theme. What’s great about the theme is that the developers can install it for you as seen in the demo that way all you need to do is customize. The theme comes with more than 60+ useful and flexible shortcodes including a shortcode generator, optimized code, responsive and retina display ready shortcodes to build professional and complete layouts easily. Other features include a Layout Builder is fully compatible with plugins and is translation-ready with WPML (WordPress Multi Language Plugin) to build complex layouts easily with support translation of your content, a portfolio system that supports multiple stylesMasonry style, Grid Style, Videos, Images, among so many other features that will blow you away.

Tisson Premium WordPress Theme

Tisson is a fresh and modern multipurpose WordPress theme that can be used for any type of website. This premium theme allows you to build your website based on blocks and standard pages using the theme’s Page Builder. This theme is 100% retina ready and responsive, SEO ready (compatible with Yoast and AIO SEO), and it is WPML and translation ready. It includes a Drag and Drop content builder, the Revolution slider, and XML file with demo content – all to get your site up and running in no time.

Glider – Clean and Flat Stylish WordPress Theme

Glider Premium WordPress Theme is a stylish, multi-functional, responsive, ultra-modern theme with a flat UI that will fit all types of websites. From professional corporate to personal blog, this theme’s features can meet any website’s requirements. Easy to use options and features allow you to build and organize your content the way you want it: 7 splendid layouts, easy to use admin panel, 7 useful plugins (Visual Composer, Page Builder, 3 sliders, Mega Menu and Pricing tables), among the plethora of theme options.

Central – Versatile Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

CENTRAL is a dynamic and highly versatile multi-purpose WordPress theme that gives you the ability to create stunning animated pages that will make your website stand out. You have the option to: Choose between 4 fluid AJAX animations, create unlimited Parallax pages, take advantage of awesome Revolution Slider. Build your website: using a highly intuitive and friendly-to-use framework, mix full width and standard grid customizable headers, or get creative with modular shortcodes. Choose from two different animated types of infographics, and so many other features and functions to create the stunning website of your dreams.

Awesome New Themes for June 2013

Orange Core

If you’re looking for a theme that can do a lot to meet what a host of clients need then you definitely want to check out Orange Core. This multi-purpose theme is great for business and corporate sites although it does have excellent portfolio capabilities too. Awesome presentations may be done using the panoramic full-width homepage slider. Built in pricing tables, service pages, column variations and other page templates included are great tools necessary in building business and corporate sites. Orange core can be a great way for potential customers to get information about your business using these features. Orange Core is optimized for mobile and touch screen devices and is built on twitter bootstrap.

Vernum

Vernum is a clean, modern and powerful One Page Parallax theme that can virtually be what you want it to be. This theme has a drag and drop page builder to help you create the pages you want. Vernum also uses the parallax effect for added drama as you scroll down the page. In addition to these, Vernum uses retina ready graphics, is responsive, has great blog and portfolio capabilities, and uses CSS3 animations. It is flexible enough to meet the demands of websites of different kinds.

WP Education

WP Education is a premium theme designed for schools and educational institutions. Many educational institutions suffer from unimpressive websites. WP Education is a viable solution to add that professional air to any academic institution. Aside from the normal blog and gallery capabilities, schools can use this theme as an administrative and organizational tool to publish available courses, their descriptions and comments, and even process applications from prospective students.

Universfolio

Universfolio is a responsive multipurpose theme you can use for business or for pleasure. Whether it’s a corporate website, a personal blog or a creative portfolio, Universfolio has something for you. The theme uses the popular and powerful Revolution Slider to give you stunning slide transitions and layered 3d effects. This allows you to present eye catching slideshows to make casual visitors stay on your site longer. The theme also has awesome portfolio and blog page templates to showcase your work and keep visitors up to date with what’s going on. Universfolio is WooCommerce ready giving your site extra ecommerce capabilities.

JP Animated vCard Theme

JP is a cool and modern vCard WordPress theme for the creative professional. It’s got everything you need to create a good first impression on visitors, current clients, and potential clients. It’s simple and clean menu system allows you to navigate through the whole site without much fuss. It includes a great portfolio that allows you to showcase images, videos and other media projects on your site for interested parties to look at. You also have a blog page so visitors can get an insight on how you approach projects and tasks. This theme also has a Services Page and a Contact Page for those interested in hiring your services.

Lambo Photography Theme

If you are a photographer wanting to setup your own website or wanting to revitalize your existing one, check out Lambo. Lambo Premium WordPress Theme gives you special ways of showcasing your photos and images. This theme is perfect for the photographer or graphic artist who wants his/her work presented to potential clients artistically. The theme’s homepage slider is designed so that the graphic gives you the semblance that you are looking through a lens. The full screen slider presents your works in a choice of sliders including one with the popular Ken Burns effect.

Realia

Realia Premium WordPress Theme is a real estate and property rental theme ideal for real estate agents, brokers and professionals. This theme allows you to manage properties for sale or for rent so that potential buyers can go to your site and look for the property they desire and easily find it. This google map integrated theme allows visitors to search according to location based on defined filters like: number of baths, price, whether for sale or for rent. This theme has a dedicated page for each property with a description, an image gallery and a google map indicating its location. An inquiry form is conveniently located on the sidebar to facilitate contact with a broker. Property owners can submit their properties for sale. Theme supports IDX infrastructure trusted by professionals in the real estate industry.

Secret Selling System – Notes from Perry Belcher

Early this year, Perry Belcher spoke in the Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 and shared his Secret Selling System strategies during the seminar.

According to Perry, “Selling is not evil. Selling is power – a great skill to have”. Here are some of the highlights of what he shared during the event.

Important parts of selling:

Targeting

– getting in front of prospects who are most likely to buy

  • 60% of any successful promotion is in list selection
  • Getting leads – getting interest
  • Getting sales
  • Increasing profits per sale
  • Frequency

Know your buyer

– what you like is not necessarily what your customer likes.

  • Personal attention. Create a customer avatar ( Name. Age. Gender. Marital status. Children. Location. Occupation. Combined household income. Current business income. General info.) After you come up with your avatar, write your message to that person, not your whole audience.
  • Be talking to one person, not a group of people
  • Find out their demographics and where they hang out

Find the right list.

  • Wide and shallow – advertising (such as network TV) is difficult because it’s hard to localize the message to your audience, location, et cetera.
  • Narrow and deep – advertising is by far the way to go. List selection isn’t only about emails or direct mail, but it also applies to advertising.
  • Google ad planner – finding websites your niche visits and their interests. Enter in your competitor’s websites

Make them “glow in the dark”

– (From Dean Jackson – ilovemarketing podcast)

  • Use list-building bait- cheese or whiskers principle. Make those particular people in the market “glow in the dark”. (list building bait – followed by cheese or whiskers). Find out what their “cheese” is and use that instead of “whiskers” (Realtor example of standard ad that is all about the person vs. “Find out how much your home is worth for free”).
  • Offer lead magnet that resonates with potential customers.

Create an irresistible offer

  • Why people buy – gain, fear, pride, value (makes them feel smart), imitation (people want to imitate celebrity). No matter how good the offer is, if you send it to the wrong audience it isn’t going to work.

Sequence is critical

– mistake is selling too early.

  • Don’t be out of sequence, because if you are, people will mostly reject your offer.

Points of belief.

  • If your current sales message is not working, ask yourself how many things are you asking prospect to believe. If more than 4, it’s probably a failure. Ideally, you only want to make them believe 1 thing.

More Perry Belcher next week!

Creative WordPress Themes – May 2013

Portfolio, photography, and artistic WordPress themes are always popular. The ability to showcase images, videos, and text in one theme make it ideal for different web applications that can serve both artistic and corporate specifications. Here are some of the latest creative WordPress themes available in the market today:

Bloq

Create a lasting first impression with Bloq Premium WordPress Theme – a highly customizable theme with a fully responsive layout. The modern flat graphics and block layout format gives you that high-end graphic designer look perfect for creative agencies and freelance design professionals. This theme’s dedicated control panel allows users to configure the majority of the theme’s aesthetics and functionalities like color choices, page templates, and features such as post-formats, page templates, custom widgets, shortcodes, other theme elements that can help you create the look and branding you need.

PurePress

PurePress is a responsive and retina-ready theme that is packed with customization tools to help you create a multi purpose portfolio site. It is fully responsive and optimized for mobile devices. Features include slider choices, 6 skins, boxed and wide layout options, 8 layout options (with or without sidebar), tons of page templates. This theme is also capable of “password-protected” posts – a useful feature especially for professional photographers.

Awsm

AWSM is clean and simple, fully featured WordPress theme, perfect for creative people, freelancers or agencies. This unique theme reminds you of popular networking sites such as Facebook and Pinterest with a twist using familiar features such as the Facebook timeline and Pinterest’s masonry style grid layout. This theme is ideal for the creative freelancer who wants to display his work, projects, skills, services, and other interesting information (professional or personal). AWSM uses responsive design, stylish CSS3 and jQuery animations.

It is highly customizable with powerful theme options panel and many custom features. Another feature highlight is the option to use either a one-page layout which means your pages will scroll to its content, or the standard menu navigation which means that every page will open as a separate page on your website. You can even combine both without affecting any of your website content. AWSM is a unique and fresh take on the traditional portfolio styled theme.

Ideanosse

Create an impressive repository of your personal work using Ideanosse. Personal or creative websites need not be boring or look cookie cutter-ish with the usual predictable layout. If you are a little bit bored with what’s out there, check out this minimalist , responsive, single Page HTML5 WordPress Theme designed on Bootstrap Front End Framework. It is designed for specially small agencies to show their business online in more modern way with maximum coverage of clients. This theme can also be used for modern designers, developers & freelancers to show their works in a creative way.

The Barbershop

The Barbershop is a One Page Responsive WordPress Theme with a clean, unique retro/vintage design. The theme is packed with great Custom Post Types and Theme Options to display any kind of work on your website. Taking its playful design cue from the iconic Marx mustache, The Barbershop is a solidly designed theme that (although primarily designed for Barbershops) can be used for other website applications including your personal portfolio. This theme’s responsive development displays perfect on any tablet and mobile device and is easy to edit and maintain.

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.

WordPress Themes 2014? What Does the Future Hold?

Did you know that there are approximately 8 months and 2 weeks till January 2014? What?! 2014 already? You might think that’s still too far away but in reality, big businesses usually have 2-year, 3-year, and 5-year plans already pencilled in place. It’s not unusual for them to think beyond today and they probably already have activities and processes scheduled even beyond that time frame.

So what’s our fearless forecast for 2014? Is it too early to tell? Let’s take a few “wild” but calculated guesses on what we think is to come.

Mobile – The Handheld and Portable Desktop

This forecast is not new and developments in the past 2 years or so have all been pointing to this direction. Smartphones, tablets, androids, iOs devices are more and more in stiff competition with each other as people rely more and more on their devices to get everything done. As this trend continues, WordPress theme authors and developers need to think of ways, as early as now, not just adapt to the move but perhaps innovate something revolutionary that will inspire a fresh way of doing things. The move towards drag, drop, click one button, one size fits all types of themes is great but could always be better – more personalized, easier to customize and brand, and perhaps an easy to maneuver app-like admin panel – especially on a tiny 3.5” inch display using a tiny unwieldy touch keyboard.

Retina Display

Manufacturers of LCD, LED, HD and all the other display devices are probably well into production already filled with orders for the Christmas season and early next year and we bet that retina display is high up in one of their specs somewhere. What to do? WordPress authors and developers need to update, create, and optimize themes in anticipation of that. Apple is already set to require retina display in their iOS apps which means all current apps need to be updated and all future apps need to be designed with this in mind. Android phones are probably not too far behind. Mobile versions of WordPress themes need to anticipate this as well.

User Friendly Analytics

As Google continues to purge the SERPS from “spammy” and over “optimized” websites, perhaps more simple and built-in tools to help provide the average WordPress user the statistics needed to analyze and improve key aspects of his or her website. There are numerous plugins that add functionalities like performance and analytics to determine site speed, word frequencies, user interactivity, analytics and all those wonderful tools but it would be nice to have all these capabilities, in simple user friendly format, already built into the theme to reduce risks of compatibility issues.

Design

Simple and minimalistic designs will continue on till the next year with designs becoming more and more intuitive eliminating a lot of code fear and analysis on the part of the user. Features will still be consumer driven but will eventually be trimmed down to the essentials as more and more WordPress users become more educated and less “awed” by multiple sliders and 1000+ ways to change colors and backgrounds.

More Social

Social networking through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other similar websites have made it so simple for people to connect with each other. WordPress themes need features like these that make it as simple and as easy for the website owner to encourage more user interactivity within his website and his other social media networks. The flow from website to social networks needs to be seamless and streamlined to encourage more interconnectivity, engagement, and exchange. It’s part of the high quality ranking site Google equation.

Of course, nothing is carved in stone and anything can happen between now and then. These are fearless or fearful forecasts, you might say. It does help to understand how businesses move – whether they are aggressive or conservative in their strategies, and to keep abreast of what is going on in the whole web design industry in general. That way, your efforts as a WordPress professional will be more strategic and more deliberate.

Easy and Consistent WordPress Backup Helpers

You know you should but you sometimes don’t. And just when you are about to, something goes wrong and it’s already a little too late. It gets a little more complicated when you are handling more than one website, maintaining several eCommerce sites, or handling sites with years and years of content. You could rely on your webhost to do it for you, but, that’s a little too risky for comfort. It’s what every website owner, webmaster, web host should do. Backup. Consistently. Why?

If these statements sound familiar,

“My site got hacked.”
“I accidentally deleted some code and it wiped out all my data.”
“I changed my theme and it messed up all my content.”
“I activated a plugin but it wasn’t compatible and it corrupted a whole bunch of my files.”

you know that you could have avoided the consequences of procrastination if you had kept a backup file before implementing any changes. On a larger scale, systems can shut down, natural disasters can hit, web hosting companies can go bankrupt or close shop. Without your own personal backup system, you could lose themes, plugins, content, images, widgets, customization and a whole lot more. It just makes sense to be ready all the time.

Here are some highly recommended backup options for your peace of mind:

myRepono WordPress Backup Plugin

myRepono WordPress Backup Plugin is an easy-to-install WordPress plugin which automates the myRepono API setup process, enabling you to setup automated WordPress backups in a matter of minutes. myRepono is an online website backup service which enables you to securely backup your WordPress web site files and mySQL database tables using an online and web-based management system. The myRepono online website backup service allows you to automate the process of backing up your entire WordPress website and database, including all post, comments and user data, and your WordPress PHP, template and plugin files.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

WordPress Backup to Dropbox is a free plugin that keeps your website backed up to Dropbox regularly. The plugin’s simple interface lets you setup your backup cycle in minutes giving you peace of mind that your precious blog posts, media files and template changes are backed up. Simply choose a day, time, & frequency for your backup to be performed. In order to use the plugin you will need a Dropbox account.

BackWPup

BackWPup is a free plugin that creates flexible, scheduled WordPress backups to any location. The backup files can be used to save your whole installation including /wp-content/ and push them to an external Backup Service, if you don’t want to save the backups on the same server. With the single backup .zip file you are able to restore an installation. You can also purchase the pro version that has additional backup features.

VaultPress

VaultPress provides realtime, continuous backup and synchronization of every post, comment, media file, revision and dash­board setting across at least two separate cloud services in addition to the Automattic grid, ensuring no loss of content. Using WordPress hooks to receive alerts when information changes on your site, VaultPress immediately syncs all of your changes with their servers.

Snapshot

Make a quick and easy backup of all of your content, without fiddling with the server or signing up for an expensive backup solution, restore backups with one easy click, t backup all your regular WordPress stuff (posts, pages, comments, taxonomies etc.) and also every table of your database, for every plugin and theme you have with Snapshot, a premium plugin from WPMU Dev. With Snapshot you can create as many ‘Time Machine’ snapshots of your entire database (or individual tables) as you want, automatically schedule backups, save to Dropbox, Amazon S3 or by SFTP, and so much more.

The time, money and effort you exert in backing up your files is nothing compared to the price of losing all your website content, files, traffic and income, and the effort to recover (if possible) all of them. In this case, an ounce of prevention is indeed better than a pound of cure.