Five Drag and Drop WordPress Plugins To Try

The drag and drop feature has become one of the most popular features in WordPress themes lately. We remember how everyone clamored for responsive themes and multiple slider options. Now it’s all about drag and drop. Below are some of the available drag and drop plugins in the marketplace today.

Visual Composer

Visual Composer for WordPress is a popular drag and drop page builder plugin that will save you tons of time working on the site content. Take full control over your WordPress site. Add columns, rows and choose from 40+ predefined elements divided in logic groups with single click, by using intuitive and handy UI. Then simply use your mouse to drag elements around to re-arrange them. You can also use your creativity and skills to extend Visual Composer with unique elements by using the developer API. Outstanding features include: intuitive drag and drop interface, object oriented code, template system, responsive grid, custom post types, WordPress user access support, 40+ built in content blocks, and so many other features. Create totally unique websites with no programming knowledge required with Visual Composer.

Aqua Page Builder

Aqua Page Builder is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to create an unlimited number of template variations for use in your WordPress themes. It follows the same user interface used by the Menus & Widgets admin pages – making you feel right at home with the UI. Similar to the Widgets &amps Menus, Aqua Page Builder features the drag and drop interaction to build its templates.This free open source plugin blends seamlessly with the WordPress admin interface making it familiar and easy for users to get used to it. Aqua Page Builder was also designed to reside on a completely independent page, instead of cluttering the post editor. The idea was to offer the freedom to build content outside of the editor, and use it anywhere they like at all. The “template” doesn’t have to be a complete page at all, it can be part of a page that can be re-used on a unlimited amount of pages/post they like.

Themify Builder

The Themify drag & drop Builder for WordPress helps you build any page layouts with a live, frontend preview. Layouts are completely responsive, and what you see is what you get. Easily create complex grid layouts by dragging and dropping on Builder’s intuitive user interface. Content can include static text, images, videos, sliders, galleries, tabs, maps, etc. or dynamic content, such as posts, menus, and even sidebars + widgets. It works on desktop, tablet, and mobile. The Builder comes with any Themify theme as part of the Themify framework. You can also purchase the Themify Builder plugin to use in a non-Themify WordPress theme.

Elegant Themes Builder

The Elegant Themes Builder is a plugin that provides some incredible tools for structuring the content on your page. These tools were previously only available in our Convertible theme, but now they have been added to a new plugin that will work with any theme. The plugin creates a visual drag-and-drop canvas where you can add, arrange and re-size advanced elements on your page. This builder appears below the normal text editor when you create a post or page, creating a unique canvas for each. The builder allows to you quickly create columns, sliders, tabs, buttons, toggles, boxes and so much more. This plugin will work with any theme, not just Elegant Themes but is can be purchased if you are an Elegant Themes member.

Page Layout Builder

Page Layout Builder plugin is a Drag and Drop Page Builder – Layout Builder – Content Builder for WordPress. Building custom WordPress page layout using Page Layout Builder is as easy as dragging-and-dropping. No need to learn HTML or find a coder/designer to change a page layout, modify sidebars, etc. You can directly use more than 3000+ widgets from wordpress.org to place anywhere inside your page content. Modules like sliders, galleries, images, drop-down menu, progress bar, timeline, testimonials, message box, warning box, notification box, loop for custom post type, post loop with various templates, sub-pages, heading, regular html etc. are currently under development. This plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository.

Miscellaneous WordPress Themes January 2014

Start off the year in style with these miscellaneous WordPress themes to match your online business:

Cafeteria Responsive WordPress Theme

Cafeteria Responsive WordPress Theme is a premium theme designed for a cafeteria web site, a restaurant web site, or any other types of food service website such as bistros, bars, fast foods, bakeshops, etc. The sweet and deliciously saccharine design appeal of this theme will surely put a smile on your clients’ faces. The template is adaptive and very easy to customize sporting a semi retro style complete with parallax effects to help make your site simply irresistible.

Mercy NGO Charity & Environmental/Political Theme

Mercy Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and elegant theme, developed mainly to setup NGOs, non-profit organizations and corporate websites. It is easy to fully customize the layout, colors and style within minutes due to the superb flexibility of its framework. You can also create unique websites for other purposes like magazine, blog, creative or business. Use the color picker to create your own color scheme and make it as elegant or as high impact as you want. This theme is most suitable for small to large NGO organizations’ website. This clean and minimalist PayPal integrated theme allows you to add as many causes as you need, is translation ready with built in RTL support, and is also WooCommerce ready.

Humbleshop Minimal Easy Digital Downloads Theme

Humbleshop Premium WordPress Theme is a Bootstrap based framework theme designed for the Easy Digital Downloads Plugin. This simple and straightforward responsive theme comes with a real-time theme customizer, related product function, and is additional product image ready. It also includes scripts and plugins: Flexslider, Magnific Popup, Fitvids, Equalize, and Selectnav, to give you more customization options.

Party Night Night Club WordPress Theme

Partynight Premium WordPress Theme is a sleek and modern club and party WordPress Theme for night clubs, parties, night events etc. Its flat, clean, and tidy graphics create a classy vibe sans the usual garish and screaming designs typical of night club or events themes. Enhanced functionality allows users to easily customize the look of the theme. Main Features include: Revolution Slider, Events booking support, Table reservation support, Advanced Events organizer (tickets, event builder), WPML support, News Management, and Blog Management.

Actority WordPress Template for Casting Agencies

Actority Premium WordPress Theme is a professional responsive casting agencies’ WordPress template especially designed for those in the entertainment or theater industry. If you’re a producer looking for background talent, or a background actor looking for work, create your own online portal with Actority. This premium theme can also be for other kinds of agencies like real estate or a travel/tourist agency. This fully responsive theme includes several pages like: For Actors page, Application List page, Contact page, Portfolio page (filterable), and other additional page templates. Actority fits any screen, from the largest desktop screens, to any tablet size, down to the smallest smartphones and is very intuitive on any device.

Niche WordPress Themes November 2013

Searching for a WordPress theme that fits you or your client’s specific needs can often be satisfied by multi purpose WordPress themes. The seed design can often be tweaked and twiddled with to create the whatever the desired website outcome intended. However, if you find a theme that already matches the type of website you need then a lot of design time can be saved and spent on optimizing other features of the website. Here are some of the latest niche WordPress themes that you might find useful for your website needs.

Organic Market Friendly eCommerce WordPress Theme

Organic Market Premium WordPress Theme is a fun and fresh eCommerce theme ideal for online stores and shops. The delightful and eye-catching colorful design has been tailored to an organic food store, but is highly customizable and can be used for anything else. This simple and no nonsense theme features the basic website necessities but is also equipped with WooCommerce integration and includes support for all WooCommerce product management, widgets, and shortcodes so you can add all your products and set up your storefront. It also includes Royal Slider and Layer Slider Support and support for custom shortcodes for product sliders, featured product sections.

Campus Premium Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

Campus Premium Multipurpose WordPress Theme is one of the newest WordPress themes for education and business. Based on the new Super Skeleton 2 Framework with the leanest and yet the most highly functional features maximizing all that WordPress has to offer. Significant features include: a brand new streamlined and simple to use theme options panel with simple visual cues, nested inline documentation, with the option to preload built in or user uploaded (Skin Builder) skins, the entire Google Fonts library, Drag & Drop Layout Builder, rock solid, compliant SEO friendly code, and the new WordPress 3.6 Post Formats UI, a ThemeForest first.

Medico – Medical and Health WordPress Theme

Medico Premium WordPress Theme is a feature-packed medical and health styled theme that is both stylish and functional. It features several important elements such as: a working appointment form, responsive HTML5 and CSS3 design, foundation grid using predefined HTML classes, Magellan – a style agnostic plugin, Clearing – a plugin that makes it easy to create responsive lightboxes with any size image, Joyride – an extremely flexible plugin that gives users a tour of your site or app when they visit, Visual Shortcode Generator, Styles manager – 1 click style change for many major elements, Portfolio with 2/3/4 columns support, pagination support with non-animated filtering, drag&drop item sorting, and so many other great features to get create a one of a kind medical/health website.

Metric Music Band Responsive WordPress Theme

Metric Premium WordPress Theme is a retro modern theme for all who love music, such as music bands, musicians, DJs, producers, labels or organizers of events and festivals. This bold and dynamic theme features a great way to present all the necessary information relevant to those in the music business such as Events, Albums, Galleries and Videos and even a Blog. This responsive and fluid theme can be displayed on all devices from mobile phones to desktop computers (smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops). The theme is also SEO optimized because of its highly semantic and well structured source code.

Agriculture – All in One WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Agriculture Premium WordPress Theme makes going organic look easy. This WooCommerce ready theme boasts of a simple to use custom user interface that can turn website management into a task even a child can handle. You can easily add products, arrange them into categories, schedule automatic sales periods, manage delivery and other options with ease. This premium theme is based on an extended WordPress admin panel, with many custom shortcodes and widgets that are so easy in use and customize that even WordPress beginners can handle. It includes: Layer Slider and Revolution Slider plugins, Woocommerce, Super Extended Shortcodes pack for easy content formatting and improved presentation, a powerful Form Builder Tool, customly developed by CMSMasters, lets you create an unlimited amount of forms of different types and complexity, from simple contact forms to complex questionnaires with numerous fields, radio-buttons, checkboxes and dropdowns, text areas, as well as set validation for these fields.

Booklet Personal Blogging Theme

Booklet Premium WordPress Theme is a fresh take on the way blog themes have always been done. The portfolio like homepage is fully responsive and images and layout will automatically fit the screen no matter which device you are using. Inspired by popular e-readers, Booklet is a sleek version of your online diary. Some of the best features into this personal WordPress theme include the ability to change the background color and font color from black to white, change the size of the font and even read in fullscreen mode. Overall, a great way to add that personal touch to stories you want to share to the digital world.

The Wedding Day Responsive Theme

The Wedding Day Premium WordPress Theme is an elegant and lovely responsive wedding theme couples are sure to fall in love with. It is suitable for users with zero programming skills as well as advanced developers. The theme is the perfect match for your wedding with predefined styles and features its very own VamTam drag & drop builder. This drag and drop tool will save you lots of time on building your pages or posts with the use of a simple interface with simple drag & drop actions. The VamTam drag & drop page builder is tightly integrated with tinymce editor and you can switch to visual or text editor at any time without losing any changes. Buyers will also receive a bonus print invitation template for free.

Atlas Directory and Listings Premium WordPress Theme

Atlas Directory & Listings WordPress Theme is a front-end online directory portal where you allow members to register, login, edit profile, submit and manage (delete/update) listings, change membership settings, and so much more from the front-end without having to log into the WordPress dashboard.
Set up an online directory portal of any type – companies, shops, restaurants, real estate, websites and so on. One of the core features of Atlas is its email notifications where every action taken on your website is notified to the site admin allowing you to have full control over what goes on in your website. This feature can be easily disabled through the theme options panel.

Google Hummingbird – The Latest Algorithm Update

In case it slipped by you, Google announced its latest algorithm update last September – the Hummingbird – in celebration of its 15th anniversary. The announcement, held in the garage where Google was born, includes several major improvements on its answering system technology since its last Caffeine update in 2010.

One of the many new types of search activities in Hummingbird is what Google calls “Conversational Search“. This update is more than just typing in keywords to search for results. It encourages you to “have a conversation with Google” where you can post questions as if you were having a normal conversation.
Here are some of the latest changes included in this update:

Knowledge Graph

  • Use the Knowledge Graph to answer questions you never thought to ask and will help you discover more.

  • Knowledge Graph Carousel at the top of the results page gives you a more complete picture of what you’re curious about. Explore collections from the Knowledge Graph and browse lists of items, that help you research a topic faster and more in depth than before.

  • The Knowledge Graph can understand language differences, helping you more precisely express what you mean as you enter your search.

  • Information from the Knowledge Graph is available on desktop, tablet, and your smartphone.

Voice Search

  • Ask your questions out loud and get answers spoken back whether you are out and about or sitting at your desk. Just tap the mic on the Google search bar and speak up. This works on the Google Search App for iOS, Android and Chrome browsers for laptops and desktops.

  • Search without typing. You can ask anything, anywhere. Use it in the kitchen, on the couch or anytime your hands might be full. Plus, searching with your voice makes searching words you’re not sure how to spell quicker and easier.

Google Now

  • Gives you the right information at just the right time using helpful cards with information you need like: boarding passes, appointments, weather, flights, hotels, restaurant reservations, events, reminders, traffic, etc.

According to Amit Singhal, SVP, Google Search

“We’ll keep improving Google Search so it does a little bit more of the hard work for you. This means giving you the best possible answers, making it easy to have a conversation and helping out before you even have to ask. Hopefully, we’ll save you a few minutes of hassle each day. So keep asking Google tougher questions—it keeps us on our toes! After all, we’re just getting started.”

eCommerce WordPress Themes for the Shopping Season

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

Barberry Responsive WooCommerce Theme

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

Roe | Dok WooCommerce WordPress Theme

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

Retail Therapy – Multipurpose eCommerce Theme

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

Cosmetico Responsive eCommerce WordPress Theme

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

Shirtbox Flat WooCommerce Multi Purpose Theme

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

Bistro Store eCommerce WordPress Theme

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

Creative WordPress Themes September 2013

The latest crop of new WordPress themes that are coming out are all inspiring and filled with features and functions all wrapped in pretty packages. Here are the latest WordPress themes to whet your creative juices:

Gridstack Responsive Agency Theme

GridStack Premium WordPress Theme is a unique and beautiful easy to use portfolio theme for agencies, artists, graphic designers, and freelancers. The theme’s extra wide and parallax-style media complemented by the clean and modern title rotator make it a perfect solution for showcasing photos, illustrations, videos and audio. It is responsive and automatically resizes to accommodate a variety of devices – computers, tablets and mobile phones.
It is also Ajax-enabled, allows you to display your brand logo on screen, and is SEO optimized, ensuring a consistent user experience while maintaining best practice SEO standards.

Big Gallery Photography/Portfolio WP Theme

BIG Gallery Premium WordPress Fullscreen Photography Portfolio Theme is an impressive way to showcase your photos on a grand scale made possible with the creative use of CSS3 and Javascript. Fullscreen WordPress themes are tricky especially when showcasing photographs that highlight the photographer’s composition intent. Some themes make photos look cut or stretched and lose their original intent. You have 4 full screen slideshows to choose from where you can fill the screen with the whole image, or automatically adjust images to prevent them from being cut. You have the option to change the slideshow type for every page and even play music or turn it off if you prefer.

Jarvis One Page Parallax WP Theme

Jarvis Premium WordPress Theme is a one page parallax WordPress theme for corporate, agency, nonprofit, freelancer or general business that includes features such as: MailChimp subscription support, 12 homepage variations, stunning parallax effect sections, Premium Revolution slider, background video support, ultra-responsive (including sliders), 6 navigation styles, advanced styling customization features with tons of customizable backgrounds for each section (unlimited colors, images, built-in patterns), ajax contact forms, Font Awesome icons, unlimited skins, awesome extensive theme documentation and help support, and other functions and features.

Craft Responsive and Retina-ready WP Theme

Craft Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern theme designed for creative agencies, design professionals, graphic designers, and freelancers dabbling into creative design. This retina-ready flat designed theme built with HTML5 and CSS3 includes many modern features such as graphically intuitive shortcodes, ultra high resolution graphics, advanced theme options panel, mobile ready sliders (FlexSlider 2), classic and masonry blog styles, paginated/ajax portfolio pages, and several page templates applicable to other business or web applications.

Storyline Board WP Theme

Discover Storyline Board Premium WordPress Theme – a different, creative, innovative and user friendly theme to present your portfolio, blog, online magazine, personal site or anything you may think of in a not so typical fashion. From innovative post styles (circle, square, image, text, sidebars,etc.) to unique design elements that will make your website truly stand out. This trendy and progressive product is a perfect vehicle to display your creative work/portfolio/photography gallery and amaze your visitors with an unusual new generation blog. This premium theme comes in three styles: colorful, glass, and facebook tabbed version.

Frame Photography WP Theme

Frame Premium WordPress Theme is a photographer’s virtual playground chock-full of features and options for portfolio and image gallery presentations. This premium theme HTML5 & CSS3 valid, responsive, retina-ready, comes in dark and light skin versions, has a powerful admin panel, includes a full screen, grid, and masonry style gallery/portfolio page, a working Ajax contact form, easy color management options, tons of options, and extended documentation to get your photography site up in no time.

30 Different Content Slider Plug-ins for WordPress

When looking at websites, slideshows and carousels are the best way to present images and this is usually achieved using jQuery. To have jQuery slider galleries or other image presentation on your web page you have to code or download a jQuery slider plug-in and integrate it. Those sliders give effective looks and are very attractive to users.

Here you can see 30 Different content slider plug-in for WordPress. Hope these plug-ins help you…Enjoy!!!

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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.

How to Publish A Book – 10 Key Points by Guy Kawasaki

Have you ever dreamed of publishing your own book but just don’t know where to start? Here are some of key points shared by well-known author, Guy Kawasaki, during the Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 held early this year.

Write for the right reason

Wrong reasons – make money (probability to make lots of money is very low), increase consulting, increase speeches. Not to say these won’t be the result, but they shouldn’t be the core reasons

Right reasons – enrich people’s lives, further a cause, meet an intellectual challenge

Use Microsoft Word to write

Use “styles” feature to keep book consistent

MS Word is the standard among editors, testers, designers, and resellers

Write every day – 1-2 hours per day

Most people’s idea of writing is too idealistic. Writing is the process of vomiting out your knowledge then refining everything later.

Build your marketing platform – do this from the very start

Earn the right to market to your audience by constantly providing value. This will trigger reciprocation.

Take the curator role and share topics in your niche. This will establish yourself as an expert.

Start with the simplest path – start with a Kindle eBook

Amazon has 51% of eBook market share

If it’s successful on Amazon, it will also be successful on other platforms, guaranteed

Tap the crowd – don’t tell your publisher this:

Guy’s 3 step writing process: Outline, manuscript, PDF

Outline – spend 2 months outlining book. Share outline and ask for feedback on social media. Edit for another 2 months

Manuscript – Gives his friends to read manuscript to get feedback and comments via social media

PDF – Right before it’s done, he asks his social media followers with blogs to review it

Hire a copy editor

Hire a great cover designer

Very important to have a good cover on the books (people judge books by their cover)

Test your eBook

Test your book on various devices – tablets, apps, cloud readers, nook, kobo, ibooks

Some people think they only have to read a Kindle book on Kindle tablet. They don’t know about other apps.

Never, ever give up

Stephen King, George Orwell, and Kerouac were all rejected

Self – publishing stigma (self publishers can’t get picked up by publishers) is a MYTH nowadays

No one even knows who published a book on Amazon. People just look at # of stars and read a few reviews

Artisanal publishing – giving author control of everything

Hall of Fame self publishers:

  • Birds of America – James Audobon
  • Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
  • 50 Shades of Grey

Guy Kawasaki is an author, publisher, entrepreneur and was recently a guest speaker at the Traffic and Conversion Summit held earlier this year (2013). Guy Kawasaki is the author of APE, What the Plus!, Enchantment, and nine other books. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web.