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.

Useful WordPress Plugins to Enhance Customer Support

WordPress professionals like theme and plugin authors, developers and other WordPress service providers constantly face the challenge of providing ample, quality after-sales support to their customers. It is a tricky area that even seasoned professionals need to constantly juggle. For those who are starting out new in the WordPress marketplace, it can be overwhelming to have a successful and highly-popular WordPress theme doing well as far as sales go because of the twin responsibility of providing high-volume customer support. Customer support can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back on any theme that sells like hotcakes which explains a lot of WordPress theme one-hit wonders. That’s why it is crucial to also include setting up a framework for addressing customer support during a WordPress theme’s development process and not be caught unprepared. Here are some useful tools and plugins to consider to address that need:

Live2support

Live2support is a leading live chat software with advanced features. Live2Support! Live Chat Software service is a simple plug and play hosted service and does not require any software installation or IT expertise.
You just need to place small code into your webpage to enable Live Support on your website. Live2Support’s flexibility and versatility allows you to tailor independent and separate chat windows for departments such as sales, product promotions, technical support, billing and customer service departments. Live2Support’s live support application generates detailed chat transcripts. This enables you to use these transcripts to conduct market research, develop customer profiles, train chat operators and evaluate chat operator performance.

WordPress Advanced Ticket System

WordPress Advanced Ticket System (WATS) is the ultimate ticketing system for all organizations looking at enhancing their customer relationship experience. This is a plugin that adds to WordPress the features of a complete ticket system: ticket numbering, ticket integration, ticket keys, ticket submission, ticket followup, ticket notification, et cetera. This allows users to submit tickets to report problems or get support on whatever you want. Users can set the status, priority, product and type of each ticket.

wpsc Support Tickets

wpsc Support Tickets is an open source WordPress support ticket system for WordPress using jQuery. It is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to offer support tickets to your website visitors & customers. It is lightweight, open source, Ajax enabled, and easy to use and administrate.

FAQ and Knowledge Base Plugin

Add a powerful FAQ & Knowledge Base on your WordPress Blog or Website with this plugin from Casengo. Casengo’s Cloud-based, affordable social customer support software brings the human touch back into customer service. Regardless of channel type, it simplifies real-time conversation by presenting a unique Hybrid Messaging Timeline.

Live Chat Casengo

Add live chat to your blog or website quick and easy with Casengo, so you can handle enquiries via email and live chat directly from your website. Casengo helps you to respond to customers faster than ever and improve their satisfaction with a groovy mixture of real-time chat and email. Casengo’s cloud application for customer support blends the best of email and chat. It empowers web shops and other small businesses to more readily deliver the right answer at once.

Zendesk for WordPress

Zendesk for WordPress allows you to bring your helpdesk, powered by Zendesk, into your blog or site. Zendesk offers: easy-to-use self-service options with knowledge-base and community features, one-on-one support through any channel (website, phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, chat) and turns it into a ticket, a ticketing system built for speed (simplified support team workflow) with streamlined systems for managing support content, access to all the info you need all in one workspace, efficient group conversations, and last, but not the least, portability through mobile apps on all devices.

SabaiDiscuss Plugin – CodeCanyon

SabaiDiscuss is a premium questions and answers plugin for WordPress. The plugin features the ability for users to ask and answer questions similar to Stack Overflow or Yahoo Answers. SabaiDiscuss is an ideal tool not only for building a community driven question-and-answer website but also for building a discussion forum, a knowledge base, or even a helpdesk portal for WordPress.

25 Excellent WordPress Tumblog Themes

Tumblr is a popular micro blogging platform where people can make small posts, share links and images with others, reblog the posts of others, etc. It is a platform that sort of combines the features of a blog with social networking.
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Beautiful WordPress Technology Themes For Inspiration

Imagine a world without technology. Difficult, isn’t it? No Internet, no computers, no cell-phones, no TV. Surely technology makes our lives easier and more technology makes our lives even easier. New inventions are made every now and then and they need the word to spread so that more and more people will know about them and may use them. In today’s world the Internet is one of the best options available to spread the word about anything. Other aspects like TV commercials, print media ads, posters, etc. are somewhat limited in the sense that they do not provide the “complete information” about a product.

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Creative WordPress Themes – May 2013

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

Bloq

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

PurePress

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

Awsm

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

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

Ideanosse

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

The Barbershop

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

Around the WordPress Neighborhood

The WordPress community is comprised of people from all over the world – developers, designers, experts, users, writers, volunteers, and everyone else no matter what skill level they are at – movers and shakers who collaborate and contribute to enrich this ecosystem we belong to. We enhance our own knowledge and grow and improve by learning from one another and by opening ourselves to different perspectives and different points of views.

Here’s a roundup of useful articles from contributors in and around the WordPress community that we think you will find useful.

A Conversation with Om – by Siobhan McKeown

Siobhan McKeown is in search of WordPress users to feature in her book about WordPress and blogging and Om Malik is one of the people on her list. She shares Om’s blogging journey and how it has evolved since the early days. Siobhan McKeown is editor in chief at WP Realm and runs Words for WP, a copywriting service dedicated to WordPress service providers.

Contributing To WordPress – by Siobhan McKeown

If you have been wanting to be more involved in the WordPress community but didn’t know how or where to start, this article opens up the doors to how you can take part. This article shares why you should get involved and enumerates the many ways you can contribute, no matter what your skill set may be. Find out where you can plug your self in and be a proactive member of this dynamic community.

The Future of UI – How Mobile Design Is Shaping The Web – by Sarah Cannon

In this slideshare presentation, Sarah Cannon shares valuable insights on how smart mobile devices have impacted the web. She discusses the influence of mobile on design, trends, and implementation methods, as well as how touch is changing our lives. She also touches on topics such as HiDPI graphics, UI/UX patterns, touch target sizes, gestures, and managing expectations. All the while not losing track of what’s important: Content.

5 Ways to Support High-Density Retina Displays – by Craig Buckler (SitePoint)

In this article, Craig Buckler gives a quick rundown on how to support high retina displays. As hardware manufacturers move towards HD Retina Displays in all sorts of devices, Craig Buckler gives some practical advice on how to manage images and resolution. Craig Buckler is a Director of OptimalWorks, a UK Consultancy dedicated to building award winning websites.

What is a WordPress Child Theme – WPBeginner

p>This article published by WPBeginner is a very good and solid introduction to understanding how WordPress Child Themes work. It explains in detail what a WordPress Child theme is, its use, its advantages and disadvantages, and what to look for as far as picking a good parent theme. WPBeginner is a free WordPress resource site that provides tips, tricks, hacks, tutorials, and other WordPress resources geared towards WordPress beginners.

Business and Solutions – by Thomas Griffin

If you are a WordPress developer, author, or designer, Thomas Griffin’s insights regarding the how the WordPress marketplace is affecting developers like him. Read about his thoughts regarding Avada, Envato, and Genesis and his shift from being a developer into a marketer. Thomas Griffin is an expert WordPress developer, creator of hundreds of themes and plugins, WordCamp speaker, and a valuable contributor to WordPress products.

Redefining My Website – by Brian Gardner

Brian Gardner is well-known in the WordPress community and is the man behind StudioPress and the popular Genesis Framework. He has released several WordPress child theme designs that are currently being used ii and around the WordPresseaommundty. on about his current website redesign and glean insights from his creative journey.

Owning Your Content – A WordPress User’s Guide – Alex Denning (WPShout)

Interesting read about protecting and “owning” your content on the web as Alex Denning shares about protecting images, licensing content, and how social networking sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook impact how your images and content are treated. Alex Denning started WPShout around 4 years agoa as a collection of WordPress tutorials.

Finely Tuned Consultant – Aaron Campbell (WPEngine Interview)

WordPress professionals will glean a lot and learn valuable lessons and insights from WordPress Consultant Aaron Campbell in this interview published by WPEngine. Aaron shares his experiences as a WordPress professional and how he deals with the challenges faced by every WordPress consultant on the job. You can find more of Aaron Campbell’s work at Ran.ge

Migrating a Website to WordPress Is Easier Than You Think – Jonathan Wold

If you need are a WordPress beginner and you want to migrate an existing website to WordPress, this article gives you basic and concrete steps you can take to accomplish this. From evaluation, to set up, to importing content, to the actual migration and publishing, Jonathan Wold guides you through each process using instructions, code, video, and images. Jonathan Wold is a full-time business consultant and WordPress developer specializing in basic and advanced WordPress migrations.

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.

Eye-Catching Retina Display WordPress Themes

The shift towards high-definition in gadgets and devices has been around for a little while. Today, software and digital products are often described as“retina” display read which simply means that these products are graphically ready, in terms of clarity, contrast, and sharpness, to be displayed in high definition devices without diminishing in quality.

Here are some of the newest retina-ready WordPress themes you can try on your HD devices:

Novelty (Portfolio)

This portfolio and blog theme’s clean minimalist look is a perfect complement to outstanding artwork and projects normally displayed in a creative professional’s website. Photographers, design agencies, freelance creatives, and corporate sites will love to show off their pieces in high definition and this theme is ready to do that. It is also 100% responsive replicating that HD experience even on mobile devices.

!LesPaul (Multipurpose)

A multipurpose user friendly theme equipped with Sharp Retina (high DPI) graphics that will look beautiful on modern high resolution displays. The crisp and sharp design elements incorporated in this theme will look great on handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Supreme Magazine (Magazine)

Subscribers will enjoy browsing through your online publication built using this theme. Supreme Premium WordPress Theme is a revolutionary Retina Responsive Magazine/Blog theme integrated with clean, modern, and crystal clear graphics that can be effectively displayed in retina ready modern devices.

Eagle Logistics (Logistics/Forwarding/Shipping)

This premium theme was designed with the logistics industry in mind. It was conceptualized to turn websites into an effective solution for logistic transactions. The retina-ready capability of this theme is most effective in the use of images and text used in promoting products and services related to your logistics business. These crystal clear elements add that attention to detail factor and communicates professionalism necessary in any business especially in this type of industry.

Slurp (Modern Creative Grid Portfolio)

Creative professionals will fall in love with the edgy and modern style of this theme. Images and graphics take center stage on the homepage with the unique organic and asymmetrical manner that they are displayed creating that cool and edgy look. This retina ready and responsive theme will surely wow your users, clients, and potential clients no matter what device they use to view you site.

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.