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.

ThemeFuse: A Closer Look

About

“We Create Premium WordPress Themes. The Original Kind!” This tagline encapsulates everything ThemeFuse is about. ThemeFuse is a commercial WordPress Themes Shop co-founded by four guys from Bucharest, Romania: Bogdan Condurache (Art Director and Motion Graphics Designer) and Dimi Baitanciuc (co-founder) both of whom take care of the creative side, together with Alexandru Luncashu and Sergiu Bagrin (After Care Support) who, on the other hand are in charge of development and programming. ThemeFuse focuses on providing original high quality niche WordPress theme designs coupled with top aftercare support designed to meet the exact needs of customers in specific industries.

History

Dimi Baitanciuc and Bogdan Condurache started out selling HTML/CSS templates on ThemeForest in November 2009. They soon realized the huge potential in WordPress and started implementing their designs into the CMS. They were joined by Alex and Sergiu later on. After another 4-5 months on ThemeForest they decided to put up their own and the ThemeFuse WordPress theme club was birthed in 2010. The theme club includes 28+ themes (averaging a new theme every month) available to download which range from portfolio themes through to magazine themes for sports and fashion sites.

Product

The ThemeFuse WordPress theme club currently includes over 28 themes that cover a wide range of themes that include portfolio themes, magazine themes, blog themes, business themes, etc. that cover niche industries such as sports, fashion, travel, events, food, art, corporate, and so much more. The club membership is a subscription based product ($17 per month) where you get access to all themes (current and future) including PSD files. This is automatically renewed each month based on the date you signed up. The membership price includes a one-time only $199 sign up fee. If you decide to cancel your subscription, you will not be able to download the themes anymore. Themefuse enforces a no refund policy applicable to club members as well. Should you decide to reactivate your club membership and sign up again you need to pay the one time signup fee again. Themes are also sold individually to non-members.

Member Benefits

Aside from gaining access to the entire Themefuse theme collection, members get VIP Priority treatment in their Support Forum, members get access to a beautiful Member’s Area, members can also give input and suggestions on future themes. Aside from these, members also have the opportunity to earn via their improved affiliate program.

Income Opportunities

ThemeFuse’s affiliate program allows you to earn in several ways. Once you become an affiliate, all you need to do is put your affiliate link on a banner on your website or use ThemeFuse’s WP referral plugin. Once a person clicks on the link and makes a purchase on their website you earn 30% of the sale, every time. Their affiliate software sets a 60-day cookie that keeps tab of users who visit their website from one of your links. This means you still get a 30% cut on every purchase the user makes, even if the customer comes back at a later time. In addition, if the user joins our club you’ll also get 10% of every recurring payment he makes every month. Themefuse pays its affiliate partners once a month via PayPal. Affiliates can expect to receive their affiliate shares between 1st and 10th of the following month.

Recent Developments

ThemeFuse recently partnered with WebHostingBuzz to provide a new service targeted at WP beginners. The goal of the partnership is to deliver a hands-off service, where every client can get their WordPress site installed by a team of professionals on a quality hosting account, along with a well-designed WordPress theme. This service means that customers can pick a theme from ThemeFuse’s gallery and have it installed by their team, on an optimized hosting platform, and under a new domain (of your choosing).

The main strength of this new service is the no-supervision-required approach presented by both companies (ThemeFuse and WebHostingBuzz). All the client needs to do is pick a theme from the official theme gallery at ThemeFuse.com, choose the hosting pack (domain name included) at checkout and that’s it. All within a single checkout process.

For the client, the package includes: the domain (optional), the hosting, the website (WordPress theme), AND all the necessary installs will be taken care of by ThemeFuse. ThemeFuse also provides a dedicated support forum to handle the chosen theme’s issues as well as troubleshooting any problems that may come up.

Future Plans

According to Dimi Baitanciuc,

Talking about the longer term, we plan to release a brand new website as part of our ThemeFuse family, which will not be related to WordPress themes, but to web and graphic design in general. We have been collaborating with high-class designers from around the world the past few months and I think we’ve come up with awesome results.

Visit ThemeFuse today.

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.

WordPress Theme Clubs: 2013 Edition

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

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

Elegant Themes

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

StudioPress

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

ThemesKingdom

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

Organic Themes

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

ThemesTown

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

Foxy WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes Is Here

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

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

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

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

Features:

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

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

Get Foxy And 81 More Themes for $39

Photography WordPress Themes Roundup for April 2013

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

Modelish

Modelish is a unique modern HTML5+LESS fully responsive WordPress theme for presenting artwork or photography. This full-width photography/portfolio styled theme is also versatile enough to be used for any type of business as well. The stylish, yet clean and professional design is optimized with mobile first techniques and retina display support. Add some style and modern flair to your website with its customizable system that makes it easy to adapt to your favorite colors, fonts and style preferences.

Keres Full Screen Photography Theme

Keres is a cool fullscreen responsive WordPress theme built for a photography or portfolio website. It comes with many cool features like multiple slideshows (fullscreen Slideshow, Ken Burns Slideshow), a unique Image Flow Gallery, Skin manager, fullscreen Contact Map, fullscreen Youtube and Vimeo Video. This theme includes customizable elements (color, font, background image) with 50+ advanced shortcodes and a Shortcode Generator support to create the portfolio style you really want.

Photojax Minimalist Ajax Photography Portfolio

Photojax is a clean and minimal, grid styled WordPress photography theme. This sleek and modern theme features two color skins, beautiful galleries using the premium Royal Slider plugin ($20 value), an audio player, and a minimal blog (all you’ll need for a great photography portfolio). Although designed for photographers it can be a great theme for graphic designers, architects, and anyone else with an image based portfolio.

Sniper Premium Photography

Sniper is a sleek and powerful premium responsive + liquid WordPress theme built for photographers, creative agencies or portfolio website. All elements of this theme are liquid which makes it ideal for smartphone and mobile devices. This modern WordPress theme’s dynamic navigation system makes it fun and interesting to explore your website – from dropdown menus to toggled pages, everything is full of surprises.

Smarald

Smarald is an incredibly unique, highly interactive, retina ready, responsive WordPress Portfolio theme, suitable for all sorts of creatives, agencies and even blogs. Whether you want to showcase your work in a beautiful way, share your articles with your readers, or just to have a great interactive website for your agency, this premium theme is the perfect solution for you.

Interesting WordPress Themes April 2013

Academy (Online Education)

Turn your website into a functioning e-learning solution with Academy Learning Management Theme from ThemeForest. This premium wordpress theme takes the elegant form of an ecommerce site and tweaks it to meet the needs of the e-learning market. Share, sell and promote your knowledge online effectively. This powerful theme includes features and functions to help you manage course offerings, rate their popularity, and publish subscription plans aimed to reach your target market. This theme includes a powerful options panel that allows you to create courses and lessons.This theme provides awesome features for creating online courses, such as extended user profiles, rating system, questions system, file attachments, embedding self-hosted media, tracking course progress, WooCommerce integration and more.

Responsive Knowledge Base & FAQ WordPress Theme

For the business or website that exists to help people make the most of their computing experience, Responsive Knowledge Base is the perfect theme to use. This premium WordPress theme was built for support providers as a first line response solution for clients seeking answers to their problems, technical or otherwise. This theme acts as a knowledge base or depository where visitors can search your site for solutions to their issues. Users can browse through Q and A pages, articles and similar material or do a live search (jQuery TypeAhead powered) to help them identify their problems and find solutions.

Rescue – Animal Shelter Theme with Petfinder Support

Animal lovers unite! Rescue Premium WordPress Theme is a theme built with a specific purpose – to get animals adopted. Outstanding pet-related WordPress themes are few and far between that’s why Rescue is a special theme pet lovers can find a home in. What makes it more unique is the built in Petfinder API support that allows you to easily sync your pets from your Petfinder profile to your WordPress install. Petfinder is an online, searchable database of animals who need homes. It is also a directory of more than 13,000 animal shelters and adoption organizations across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

GymBoom (Fitness)

If you are in the fitness business or if you own a gym, a health club, or a wellness center, check out GymBoom, a responsive fitness theme with a built in dynamic calendar to manage training schedules for those serious health buffs and fitness addicts. This responsive theme also sports a unique diagonal slider created with the slider creation tool. It’s got useful shortcodes to post lists, highlight text, create multiple columns and more. You also get two homepage option styles: one with a slider and a page styles option. Gymboom includes a google map shortcode integrated in the widgetized footer section.

Explorable Now Available From Elegant Themes

How would you like to go around the world and explore it in a matter of minutes? Create the perfect travel blog that will transport readers and visitors to exotic and distant lands with Explorable Premium WordPress Theme. This location-based theme takes your readers on a journey through different locations as tagged in your posts. Be the ultimate resource for travel bugs and backpackers with Explorable – the ideal theme for travel blogs, travel agencies, local business directories and similar sites.

Explorable’s homepage backdrop is a full-width map where each post you make is pinned to a specific location. This interactive map is a fun way to introduce different places for people to visit and explore. Clicking on a pin opens a picture window on the left side of the page containing an excerpt about the location. Clicking the image opens into the page containing the full post content. Not sure what location to look for? Discover new places by just clicking the side arrows of the picture window to scroll through pinned locations. You can also filter the displayed pins to show posts according to specific posting type, location and rating.

Explorable also has other page templates that are available if necessary. The portfolio template can be used as an image gallery of trips, travel, and on location photos to share with users. The blog template can be used to document travel details, reviews, recommendations and even ratings to guide soon to be travelers. The advanced search template makes it easy to search through posts and pages or according to category. These templates can serve as tools to enhance user experience on your site.

As far as appearances and functionalities go, this responsive theme includes shortcodes to help you customize this theme and make it completely your own. From colorful buttons, content boxes, toggled or tabbed content, slide presentations, layouts with 1 to 4 columns, and even pricing tables. Create the ultimate destination website with Explorable Premium WordPress Theme.

Features:

  • Responsive Design
  • Shortcodes
  • Page Templates
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Complete Localization
  • Google Maps Integration
  • Visitor Ratings System
  • Filterable Listings Search

Explorable Premium WordPress Theme includes perpetual updates, unparalleled support, and access to 81 high quality WordPress themes included in every Elegant Themes subscription.

Get Explorable Now!

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!