Best BuddyPress Themes May 2013

BuddyPress is an open source social networking software package owned by Automattic – essentially, a plugin that can be installed on WordPress to transform it into a social network platform. If you are considering to up the ante on your blog by being more socially connected, here are some of the best BuddyPress themes you can check out:

Flix BuddyPress Ready Team Blogging

Flix is a powerful and flexible community blogging theme for WordPress. you can use to start your own community in no time. This theme includes BuddyPress and bbPress as part of the many superb features of this theme. It also includes a SmartTab system where you can put authors in the spotlight. Easily order the front page by posts from a specific author a specific category without reloading the page. The team blogging feature is perfect for both small and big blogs that have multiple contributors. This responsive theme is also whitelabel enabled which means you can easily customize the theme to suit your business brand.

OneCommunity BuddyPress Theme

OneCommunity theme is a responsive WPMU compatible theme integrated with a BuddyPress plugin. This plugin allows users to register on your site and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups and much more. This theme is a social network in a box where you can build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community. The theme includes over 40 inner pages to manage profiles, activities, messages, group messages, invitations, subscriptions, and forums of both members and groups.

Razor

Razor is a responsive and clean, professional looking BuddyPress theme for WordPress. Built on a responsive layout structure and supporting Retina (HiDPI) enabled devices, this theme is packed with powerful modern features and the advanced controls such as Drag and Drop Layout Manager, Contact Form Builder, White Label Admin, Sidebar Manager and so much more. Building websites, communities, social networks is a breeze with this amazing looking theme. The possibilities are endless.

Social Buddy

Social Buddy is a responsive, flexible, BuddyPress and BBPress integrated community WordPress theme that is perfect for niche communities and social networks. Its fully fluid responsive design makes it work beautifully on mobile devices. This theme includes extensive documentation and an intuitive options panel making setup and customization a breeze. Theme support is excellent and top notch.

ThemeForest Theme Sells Over 800 Copies In One Week

One WordPress theme, 7 days, 800 copies, $36,000 grand. A lot of WordPress authors and developers on Themeforest would love to achieve even a fraction of that and most of them are probably scratching their heads wondering why. This popular theme has even dislodged U-Design from its top spot for the past few weeks and to think it’s the only item in this author’s Themeforest portfolio. If you are wondering what theme achieved such a feat check out AVADA, a responsive multi purpose theme created by ThemeFusion.

Let’s dissect this theme a little bit further and try or simply attempt to figure out why the market is loving this theme.

Overall aesthetic

Avada’s layout can be classified as clean, straightforward, and professional-looking with very neutral colors and lots of white space. If you are familiar with real estate open houses, real estate professionals really spend a lot of time to “stage” a property before “opening” it up to the market. Care is taken to display only enough design elements to highlight the property’s unique and outstanding features, pulling back from adding unnecessary and distracting clutter. This deliberate “staging” is intended to give the potential buyer the room to imagine what he can do with it to meet his own needs. The focus is on its potential and what it can become. Avada is like that, a well-staged theme with lots of potential for all types of buyers. The demo is clear and easy to maneuver, giving customers a taste of all that it can be for whatever need they have.

Features & Functions

This premium theme is not just a pretty face. It has enough built in features and functions to create the website you need for yourself or for your clients. Everyone wants to create a website that is unique and representative of himself or his brand. Avada has a plethora of feature and function choices that, when mixed and matched together, with the client’s own images and content, can create a one of a kind and totally different website every time. Here are some of Avada’s easy to customize features that you can “play” with:

  • Homepage – 10 versions
  • Sliders – 6 styles
  • Headers – 5 versions
  • Page Templates
    • About Us – 2 versions
    • Services – 2 versions
    • Pricing Options
    • Meet the Team
    • Side Navigation
    • Contact Page – 2 versions
    • FAQ – 2 versions
    • Sidebars – Left and Right
    • Full-width page
    • 404 page
  • Portfolio – 6 layouts
  • Blog – 4 layouts
  • Custom Posts, Custom Widgets,
  • Shortcodes for Elements, Icons, Media, Pricing Tables & Typography
  • Responsive
  • Retina-ready

Support

Aside from the extensive, detailed documentation and easy to follow HD narrated video tutorials, Avada generously includes the entire set of PSDs (20+ files) for those who want to customize the theme even further. Buyers get 100% free support via their support forum. Customer feedback has been, overall, favorable so far. Providing WordPress theme support is not an easy task especially if you are servicing thousands of buyers. To receive favorable feedback regarding their theme support indicates that they have a support system that really works. This translates into higher buyer confidence which translates further into higher sales.

Avada has sold almost 15,000 copies to date and has received more than a thousand 5-star ratings which is something worth noting. Receiving a 5-star rating from 2 or more people can be easily dismissed but 1,000 or more satisfied customers can’t be ignored.

Fluke or luck? We think not. A good product with a lot of hard work backing it up sounds more like it. If this is the trend that the market is supporting as far as WordPress themes are concerned, then it is good sign that the market and the industry are headed for better days.

Get Avada Now!

Panda Proofing Your Website

If your website has been hit by Panda and like most, you’ve began making improvements and implementing changes to your website immediately after, you might not be able to see the effects right away. It might take a while but it is possible to reverse the fall and recover from Panda.

Eric Lancheres, SEO Guru and sought after speaker, shared, in the recently held Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013, a few tips and tricks on how to Panda Proof your website.

Here are some of them:

  • Include Date Posted and Last Updated when posting articles/content.
  • Have pictures cut right at the fold. Try to tweak landing page pictures at the fold.
  • Plant 2-3 comments to get the ball rolling. Encourage comments from users.
  • Add social media buttons and ask friends to add comments votes and likes.
  • Manually add relevant or recent articles in the sidebars.
  • Improve bounce rate by using Pagination + Table of Contents. More pages lead to more pageviews. Easy to read pages encourage user engagement and interactivity which translates to spending more time on your website. More activity and more action from users translates into high quality perception for Google.
  • Increase visitor engagement by interlinking your articles. A good example of proper internal links execution is Wikipedia.
  • An intuitive dynamic navigation is key to having a high quality score. If supplementary content is not available, you CANNOT have a high quality ranking Sidebar navigation is your supplementary content.
  • Speed improves everything. Site load under 4 seconds load time is acceptable. Server load speed will increase all your metrics by about 1%-5%. Check your page load speed. If it too slow, you need to start optimizing your site. Try resizing your images, or, if necessary, consider moving to a better server.

Implementing all these changes plus improving the quality of your content will help you recover whatever lost ground your website experienced because of Panda. Of course, there will always be a lag in seeing the results of these changes between the time you implement them and the next Google update. Panda is here to stay so you need to work on improving your site including your business model. Keep working at it. Eventually, your traffic will improve, visitors will have a better experience on your website, and you should be able to earn more money than when you started.

ThemeGrade Gets A Facelift

ThemeGrade loyal subscribers will be delighted to hear the great news about their favorite review site. This great WordPress resource that started in 2009 just went through a design overhaul and what was already a great website has now become even better. In our previous article about ThemeGrade, we touched on the unique services this website offers the WordPress community. The information and reviews of different WordPress themes and WordPress providers have helped guide hundreds if not thousands of WordPress buyers and users in making informed WordPress purchase decisions saving them time and money in the process.

What’s great about the upgraded and updated ThemeGrade?

Overall Design

ThemeGrade has switched from a dark theme design and opted for a more minimalist, white spaced design making it easier for users to find reviews of different WordPress Providers and WordPress Themes. Below are some of the design improvements implemented in ThemeGrade’s new look:

  • Clean and Minimalist Design
  • Simple, Easy, and User-Friendly Navigation
  • Streamlined, Organized, and Easy to Access Information
  • Easy to See Ratings
  • Improved Readability

Grading System

ThemeGrade provides an easy to understand grading system for both WordPress Themes and WordPress providers. WordPress themes are graded in 2 categories and are awarded a Bronze, Silver, or Gold award based on the combined score of both tests:

General Test – these tests focus more on coding and W3C compliance(HTML & CSS), browser compatibility, support from designer, post area tests, nested/threaded comments, sidebar link hierarchy, and other special effects.

SEO Test – these tests give you an idea how well a theme has been optimized for search engines. Tests are done for off-page and on-page optimization. Review scope includes coding and W3C compliance for SEO. SEO testing for home page heading, post and page heading, post and page title tag, and content code position.

WordPress Providers, on the other hand, are graded and are awarded Gold, Silver, or Bronze Awards based on the following:

Functionality and Usability – these tests focus more on the user’s experience regarding features of themes offered by the WordPress provider usually targeting usability, ease of use, and seamless integration to a theme design.

Graphic Design – these tests focus on the overall look and design of themes offered by the WordPress provider. Page design on header image, color, contrast, font and readability, and element placement are all taken into consideration in the review.

Coding – the General Test and SEO Test are also applied to the themes offered by the WordPress Provider. Test results are then added and averaged to arrive at an overall coding score of the theme provider.

Overall Best Score – The overall score of each developer is based on the sum of the providers’ score in each category. Theme providers with the highest overall score will be rated as the TOP WordPress Theme providers.

Search Functionality

ThemeGrade has made searching for WordPress reviews and ratings so much easier. These search filters are simple, easy to use and are categorized as follows:

Efficient Search Filters are grouped according to:

  • Theme Price
  • Theme Structure
  • Theme Category
  • Theme Ranking
  • Tags

ThemeGrade’s current facelift removes all the unnecessary clutter and information overload that distract from the more important information contained in the reviews. Finding the information users need is now more pleasant and user-friendly. With all these improvements implemented both on the design front and the functionality side, we give ThemeGrade an overall score of A+.

Check out the new look of ThemeGrade.

Turbo Charge your Website with WordPress Widgets

WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems around. Not only is it powerful and feature laden, it is also has some of the most beautifully designed themes available out there. Even if you do compare other platforms, you can tell a WordPress site apart. The great part about building your site using WordPress is that you can make a great product even better. One way to do that is by adding widgets to your theme.

Widgets are a quick and easy solution to add a little more “oomph” to your website. These small pieces of content or tools can be placed in any of the widgetized areas of your WordPress theme. Widget areas are the predefined blocks or sections of your theme where you place widgets. These widgets can be added, removed, arranged, reordered any way you want in areas such as your sidebar, header, footer, the homepage, or any other defined area in the WordPress theme’s design.

Widgets can either be static or dynamic. Some of the default WordPress widgets include “meta” data, categories, popular posts, archives, and so many others. You can also add 3rd party widgets like subscriptions forms, advertisements, dynamic content such as RSS feeds and social networking feeds, custom code, Javascript, etc. to boost the functionalities and features of your theme. Some of these widgets may also come built-in with the theme you choose to install. Below is a sample of how the Widgets section appears in the admin panel of your WordPress theme.

The left side of the screen is where you have a listing of your available widgets. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping any widget you like into the sections on the right. These widgets will appear live on your site in as soon as you drop them in place. You can access your widgets from the Appearance ? Widgets screen in your Dashboard. From here you can: add, configure, remove, delete, enable accessibility mode, or troubleshoot your widgets if necessary.

Adding widgets require no coding skills at all. Even a WordPress beginner can do it. You don’t need to be an expert to install a widget. Sometimes, you may need to copy and paste scripts or codes from 3rd parties if you find a widget you really like. Otherwise it’s a very simple and easy way to improve user experience and the overall aesthetics of your WordPress theme.

Top 5 Widgets to Supercharge your WordPress Theme

Widgets are always plugins but not all plugins have widgets. Do you agree? Whether you agree or not, here are some great widgets you can use to supercharge your WordPress theme.

Freelancer Widgets Bundle

Freelancers will rejoice with this bundle. It’s got 7 great widgets: advertisement, biography, buy me a beer/coffee, contact widget, contact form widget, opening hours widget, and social links widget all in one big bundle. These widgets are highly customizable & can be modified easily. Freelancers like musicians, artists, designers, developers, creative professionals,etc. will find this widget a useful addition to their website.

Posts By Author Widget Pro for WordPress

If you’d like to provide your readers with an easy way to compile posts by a favorite author on your website, this powerful widget is what you need. Posts by author allows you to: compile, sort, show post excerpts, control number of posts to display, display thumbnails, in 15 configurable ways. This widget is especially useful for multi-author websites to help readers sort posts by their favorite authors.

Smart Navigation Widgets

User experience is key to getting repeat visits and one way to ensure that is to keep your navigation user friendly. Smart Navigation Widgets is a powerful widget ideal for websites with large archives. This Ajax-powered widgets allows the user to navigate deeper only when he needs to. Scouring and clicking thru long lists can get boring and make users bored waiting for content to load. This widget allows you to control the number of links displayed and speed up websites in the process.

M7 Easy Accordion Menus Widget for WordPress

This cool widget makes adding an accordion menu to your sidebar as easy as dragging and dropping. It’s a fresh way to combine menus on your sidebar. You can define: general settings, design and layout settings, thumb settings, excerpt settings, post settings, and the read more text settings to display the widgets you want to feature. Super cool and elegant space saving feature. It’s responsive too!

Announcements!

How would you like to manage your announcements and schedule them way, way, ahead of time? If you are handling an events website, an eCommerce site, or a business site that holds regular events, keep your users informed by scheduling your announcements automatically with this handy widget. Whether it’s a big sale, an important event, a greeting or any type of announcement you need, simply set it and forget it. This widget gives you 4 options for scheduling your announcements: weekly, annual, monthly, or using custom start and end dates.

Voyage: Travel WordPress Theme 2013

We all love an adventure. Who doesn’t dream of traveling or going on that dream vacation? According to the Global Online Travel Report for 2012, some of the key findings and statistics featured in their report listed below are:

  • The trend of booking trips online is expected to grow further in 2012, especially in emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil.
  • In 2012, the “Online Travel Segment” is forecast to represent almost a third of the total global travel market value.
  • Online travel sales in the US are forecasted to increase by more than +10% in 2012 compared to 2011.
  • The UK is projected to remain the largest share of Europe’s online travel market in 2013, followed by Germany and France.
  • Gross bookings on the Asia Pacific online leisure/ unmanaged business travel market are expected to increase by more than +30% in 2012 compared to 2010.

Meanwhile, according to US Travel.org,

“Activities with the greatest level of interest among U.S. adults are, in order, visiting friends and relatives, sightseeing, beaches/waterfronts, visiting zoos/aquariums/science museums, national parks, visiting a state park, going on a cruise, theme parks, visiting a city and visiting a mountain area. Interest in the engaging in the activities varies by generation, household income, gender and most other demographic characteristics of leisure travelers.”

Based on these statistics and findings, barring local and international security issues and safety, people WILL travel. Perhaps it is also safe to say that the travel industry, at present, is definitely a viable industry. It may be also safe to say that the internet has contributed a great part to making travel reachable and accessible to a lot of people all around the globe. Access to online airline e-ticketing, booking and reservations, destination packages, hotel reviews and ratings have made people bolder in making travel decisions. Even if only a fraction of the 7 billion world population have the means to travel, travel agencies have not fully saturated this market. So, if you are considering putting up your own online travel agency, this is great news. The next step is to setup your own website and what better way to do it than through WordPress and with a theme that’s specifically tailored for travel agencies.

Voyage Travel WordPress Theme is a gorgeous feature packed premium WordPress theme built for this specific niche. The responsive theme’s highlights include an extremely powerful search and filter option that clients can use to find the travel package of their choice. The theme also includes lots of pages for showcasing a variety of holidays, special prices and latest promos, packages according to destinations, and a whole lot more. It also comes bundled with a Blog and Contact Page and tons of shortcodes you can use to customize or tweak the theme according to your needs. A lot of these powerful functionalities are based on one of Themefuse’s best and most complex theme, Homequest. Another great thing about Voyage is that you can actually play with it for 14 days, using Themefuse’s test labs feature, before you decide to purchase.

Features:

  • Responsive
  • One click auto install
  • Best for a travel agency website
  • Powerful search and filter options
  • Dynamic Sidebar Widget Creation
  • jQuery Image / Video Light box

Voyage Premium WordPress Theme includes video tutorials, theme documentation, and access to an AfterCare Forum for theme issues, questions, and support.

Voyage: $49 | Demo & Download

P.S. – Don’t Forget Your WordPress Footer

Save the best for last, so they say, and you can very well do so by optimizing your WordPress footer. The footer, more or less, is an indicator of your website’s personal style. Not all people like flooding their footer with links. Those who subscribe to the minimalist approach prefer a couple of links or so as a subtle reminder to users that they are at the bottom of the page. Others prefer to engage and encourage users to explore a little bit more. Whatever your style preference is, the footer is a useful navigational tool you can use to highlight important content that you would like users to know about.

The footer is essentially another sidebar that can be filled with widgets, secondary information, or even a simple copyright notice if that’s all you prefer. It frees up your sidebar to contain the more urgent call to action items or important links your users need to be aware of. Nevertheless, it is still prime real estate on your site as it is the last thing the user sees when he scrolls all the way to the bottom of the page. The WordPress code for the footer can appear like the one below. Use a wp_footer() call, to appear just before closing body tag:

<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>

Below is a list of content that you may or may not add to your footer:

  • Social Network Links
  • Recent Posts | Pages
  • Categories
  • Feeds | Feed Links
  • Newsletter Subscription
  • Designer Credit(s)
  • Random Quotes
  • Advertisements
  • About
  • Links to Recommended Resources
  • Pictures | Flickr feed
  • Credit and Thanks
  • Popular Posts within your blog/site
  • Links to tutorials or “must read first” articles
  • Calendar
  • Tag List or Tag Cloud
  • Copyright

If you choose to optimize your footer with SEO techniques be sure to take into account recent Google Panda and Penguin updates to make sure your website will not be penalized for “over optimizing” and simply stick to links that are really useful.

Index.php, The Loop and your WordPress Content

We have already discussed the header and the menu in our previous articles. In continuation of our series, we will now take a look at the Content section of the WordPress theme or the index.php. Here’s a recap of what we wrote:

Content Column (index.php)

The content container in WordPress plays the most important role. It holds the WordPress Loop which dictates the generation of content on the page depending upon the request by the user.

Content, on the other hand, consists of text, images, or other information shared in posts. This is separate from the structural design of a web site, which provides a framework into which the content is inserted, and the presentation of a site, which involves graphic design.

Now, let’s take a look at what a Loop is. According to the WordPress Codex:

“The Loop” is the main process of WordPress. You use The Loop in your template files to show posts to visitors. You could make templates without The Loop, but you could only display data from one post. The Loop should be placed in index.php and in any other Templates used to display post information.

The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post.

Before The Loop goes into action, WordPress verifies that all the files it needs are present. Then it collects the default settings, as defined by the blog administrator, from the database. This includes the number of posts to display per page, whether commenting is enabled, and more. Once these defaults are established, WordPress checks to see what the user asked for. This information is used to determine which posts to fetch from the database.

If the user didn’t ask for a specific post, category, page, or date, WordPress uses the previously collected default values to determine which posts to prepare for the user.

After all this is done, WordPress connects to the database, retrieves the specified information, and stores the results in a variable. The Loop uses this variable’s value for display in your templates.

Below is a visual of how all these php files and templates work together. It shows which template files are called to generate a WordPress page based on the WordPress Template hierarchy.

And here’s a sample code of a simple index page:

<?php
get_header();
if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) :
the_post();
the_content();
endwhile;
endif;
get_sidebar();
get_footer();
?>

For beginners out there, it’s like telling WordPress to do certain functions based on a set of defined parameters – an “if”-“then” scenario. “IF” (parameter A) is true, “THEN” (execute this action). “IF” (parameter A) is false, “THEN” (execute this action instead).

For the more advanced and those who would like to sink their teeth into something more “meaty”, here are some excellent references and tutorials you can check out: