What Features Do Most Commercial WordPress Themes Have in Common?

WordPress users enjoy many benefits not necessarily available in other content management systems. The plethora of high quality WordPress themes that users can choose from is more than enough to dress up any website. Whatever type of website you plan to put up, most likely, there is a WordPress theme for it. Here are some of the most common features present in some of the most popular WordPress themes in the market today.

A Great Slider

An effective theme must help create a steady following for your site. It must be able to captivate casual visitors and convert theme into followers that eventually become clients and customers. A slideshow is a great tool that can deliver quick, dramatic visual impact combining the use of images with taglines, spiels, or memes to hook visitor interest. This billboard-like effect gives casual visitors something to spark their curiosity and encourage them to examine and explore your site further. The short attention span this generation has, a slider is an indispensable feature for any website. Popular plugins like Slider Revolution, Layer Slider, Nivo Slider, and Flexslider make the job a whole lot easier.

Parallax and Animation

Once you’ve gotten the attention of visitors, the challenge shifts towards keeping their interest. Perhaps you’ve attended lectures were you came in with excitement about what you could learn only to be disappointed by a boring, uncharismatic instructor whose droning voice put you to sleep. This is analogous to going through great content in boring or even hard to read content. This actually narrows your followers to those who are actually already sold to your content. If your goal is to convert more people to your product or service, the presentation of your content has to facilitate easy reading and assimilation of information. Corporate presentations are often more effective when stats are represented as animated charts and bullets. These actually help executives focus on the items that need to be considered. Having animated bullets and content sections also give focus on items you want your visitors to remember.

Flexible Layout with Drag and Drop Capability

Presenting your content is important in developing your following. While animation helps your audience focus on key points of your content, a sound content structure is still required for visitors to make sense of your site as a whole. Being able to piece together key points into a cohesive body of knowledge will drive home a stronger message to your visitors that will keep them coming for more. To do this, your content has to be organized in such a way that visitors go through important sections in a natural, stress free manner. The natural flow of content will vary according to your audience. Recognizing this, themes that have been designed and devised to respond to the needs of various audiences will bring a higher conversion in terms of subscribers and followers. A lot of themes now include drag and drop page builder features allowing you to assemble your own pages from scratch. Some themes come with ready made layouts for almost any type of site which can be tweaked to meet specific audience needs. Most, if not all, of these themes have powerful options panels and shortcode generators for maximum customization flexibility.

Mobile Friendly

Mobile is a platform that cannot be ignored. Mobile gadgets are part of today’s lifestyle because of the convenience it provides its users. As such, theme designers and developers are forced to confront the peculiarities one encounters when using a mobile device. A theme has to be responsive. This means it has to be able to adjust to give the best possible display regardless of what device you use to browse your site. Theme pages need to have the capability to reorder and resize according to tablet and smartphone displays without sacrificing the beauty of the theme on desktop. In addition to this, special navigation menus for mobile devices must be able to facilitate the interface differences on these devices from desktop. Usually, the Bootstrap framework is a theme author’s go to option to ensure optimal performance on mobile platforms.

Good SEO

No matter how great your site is in terms of content or aesthetics, it must be found by your target audience. Great themes are coded in such away that is friendly to search engines to help land your site on the first few pages of search results. This is accomplished in a number of ways: meta and links, XML sitemaps, RSS Optimization, and Breadcrumb among others. There are numerous options to ensure your site is covered by good SEO measures. Clean code, SEO optimized images and videos, and installing reliable and tested SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, etc. are some of the many SEO practices you can integrate on your site.

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.

Best Corporate WordPress Themes May 2013

Here are a few of our current picks for awesome corporate themes for 2013:

Shift Flexibly Creative WP Theme

Time to make the big Shift from your cold and stiff corporate website into a highly creative, extremely customizable, responsive theme WordPress theme – Shift Premium WordPress Theme. This theme includes 12 homepage layouts to choose from. It’s drag & drop enabled feature also allows users to easily arrange, enable/disable sections according to their specific needs or tastes. Each section is customizable, with the option to change background colors, background images even the image position within each section. It is WooCommerce enabled, bbPress ready, retina ready, and fully responsive. This theme was built using the Bootstrap Framework.

Lounge

LOUNGE Premium WordPress Theme is a high quality professional WordPress theme for modern business or interactive creative use. Its clean and professional looking layout creates that sense of reliability and trustworthiness necessary in business. Amazing features include: 4 fluid AJAX animations (can be turned on or off), unlimited Parallax pages, unlimited sliders & slides to each page using two types of built-in sliders, fully responsive, modular shortcodes, and highly intuitive and friendly to use framework.

Co-Worker

CoWorker is a responsive flexible multi purpose theme built for a business, portfolio, corporate, agency or any other kind of website. Salient features include: fully responsive and retina ready design, 12 premium sliders, 30+ page templates, tons of shortcodes including a shortcode generator, 6 header options + menu styles, custom widgets, and many other features to help you redefine your website’s brand.

Moxie

Moxie Premium WordPress Theme is a blend of style, creativity and power. This powerful WordPress theme allows you to take control of your content and build the website you need with the content you want. Creating your own signature website is easy with features such as: Mega Menus, Dynamic animations with Slider Revolution, Drag and Drop feature using Visual Composer, Contact Form Builder, a built in Template System, and so much more.

Stark

Stark Premium WordPress Theme is a highly customizable multi purpose WordPress theme designed by 3 elite Themeforest authors (Damojo, Themepunch, Thunderbuddies) to give you a mega WordPress theme that leaves nothing else to be desired. Quality plugins such Visual Composer, Slider Revolution, Isotope Image Grid Plugin, and FancyBox 2 Lightbox plugin, are just some of the top-notch features included in the premium WordPress theme.

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.