Tech WordPress Themes July 2013

Technology has one of the fastest turnovers in terms of design and features. If you are into technology and the latest tech products out there, show them off on your website on an equally tech-savvy looking theme like these WordPress themes we’ve found:

Host Depot

Host Depot is a theme designed for modern hosting and server services. It has a built-in layer slider that allows you to do 170 3D and 2D hardware accelerated transitions to catch the eye of visitors. The theme also has a hassle-free and easy to use pricing table editor. Host Depot integrates well with WHMCS to give you seamless processing of your financial and logistic transactions. You can easily set-up forums on your site with the bbPress plugin. HostDepot is indeed a great solution for those in the web hosting business.

Elegant Hosting

Elegant Hosting is a sleek WordPress theme designed for web hosting services. The main strength of this theme is the easy to manage hosting plan tables. This theme has a special feature to add hosting plans right at the admin panel. With the plans displayed side by side, comparison may conveniently be done by potential customers. You can customize the theme with shortcodes to create the look most appropriate to your marketing efforts. Theme also comes with a slider which will be useful in marketing.

Appland

Appland Premium Theme is a WordPress theme designed for promoting your hottest app. Built on the powerful Twitter Bootstrap, this theme is designed to work well on mobile devices incorporating touch gestures that works even on the Flexslider. Appland also has amazing eye-catching 3D parallax effects to help you keep visitors glued to your site. Customization is easy with the plethora of design options and features such as using the shortcode generator, available Google fonts, the quick uploader feature, awesome icons, and so much more. Appland is responsive fitting for a theme designed for mobile.

Mega Host

Mega Host Premium WordPress Theme is an impressive and modern theme designed for virtual hosting services. Although primarily designed for web hosting, this theme includes all the necessary features to build a corporate website as well. A notable feature of this theme is that it is built on twitter bootstrap, making it more mobile device friendly. Its advanced admin panel and its CSS design make it easy to customize. Mega Host is also built for retina-ready devices giving you sharp stunning images on these devices.

Rocking Parallax

Create that interactive effect with this stunning WordPress Theme – Rocking Parallax a WordPress theme especially designed to showcase your iPhone apps. This theme makes a great one page solution to your marketing needs. This theme’s awesome parallax 3d effects will definitely make your apps shine. It features many design elements that allow you to create countless mix and match combinations and layouts that will match your design aesthetics. Rocking Parallax Premium WordPress Theme is the perfect tool for marketing and promoting your iPhone apps.

Apley

Mobile apps are one of the hottest ways to make it big in the market. The influx of free and paid apps flooding the market is an indicator of what people are interested in nowadays. Apley Mobile WordPress Page is a clean and modern theme designed to showcase mobile apps. The elegant black, minimalist features suggests the theme’s affinity to most mobile devices. It has an easy to use WordPress customizer to help you tweak the theme according to your preferences. Apley also has a fully working blog, a custom homepage, a custom subscribe form, a shortcodes plugin to help you customize in minutes, and many more features.

Cloud Hoster

Cloud Hoster is a professional looking WordPress theme designed to promote your web hosting and server services. This theme is equipped with the popular Revolution Slider so you can create stunning slideshows with different and customizable transitions to grab the attention of casual visitors. Cloud Hoster also has a unique two color blog which can be configured at the backend. Shortcodes give you the power to customize and stylize this theme with ease.
This responsive theme is also built on twitter bootstrap with advanced API features to help your site look good on mobile devices and ensure a pleasant browsing experience for your users.

Decoding WordPress Shortcodes

A shortcode is a WordPress-specific code that lets you do nifty things with very little effort. Shortcodes can embed files or create objects that would normally require lots of complicated, ugly code in just one line. Shortcode = shortcut. (WordPress.com)

WordPress shortcodes were introduced in version 2.5.They are a simple set of functions for creating macro codes for use in post content. It enables plugin developers to create special kinds of content (e.g. forms, content generators) that users can attach to certain pages by adding the corresponding shortcode into the page text.

According to WPBeginner,

“…a shortcode is a special tag that you can enter into a post that gets replaced with different content when actually viewing the post on the website.

…a shortcode looks similar to an HTML tag, but is enclosed with square brackets instead of angle brackets. This code gets replaced with some other code when the page is actually loaded in a web browser. The really cool thing is that WordPress allows you to create your own custom shortcodes to display pretty much anything. You could use it to output a Youtube video, show your latest tweets, or even customize it however you like.

An excellent article How to Use Shortcodes in WordPress by Lucy Beer demystifies shortcodes and breaks it down in chewable chunks quite nicely.

Simply put, shortcodes are useful because:

  • shortcodes are easy to use
  • shortcodes are easy to create
  • shortcodes simplify repetitive tasks

Commonly used shortcodes include:

  • buttons
  • content boxes
  • icon lists
  • columns
  • drop caps
  • quotes
  • pricing table
  • author info
  • contact forms
  • tabs

Today, WordPress developers are coming out with simpler and easier to use shortcodes that help even beginners to achieve professional looking websites without touching a single code. These shortcodes allow you to create custom design elements that are unique to your own website without having to use complex coding skills resulting in better looking and functioning websites.

Top Selling WordPress Themes Just for You

Want something new to add to your WordPress theme collection? Here are some of the most popular and top grossing WordPress themes to consider. Check out why these themes are doing so well in the marketplace:

Kallyas Responsive Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

Kallyas Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra-premium, modern, and highly-responsive WordPress Theme built for today’s websites. It’s super flexible, clean design clean code, and touts itself as one of the most complete theme ever created. This theme integrates most if not all of the major features you will ever need or want in a theme: customizable Page Builder, responsive layout, smart loader, SEO ready, WPML ready, WooCommerce ready, multiple modern sliders, MailChimp newsletter integration and adaptation, and so much more. You also get bonus headers (Christmas and Easter) as part of the theme package.

Enfold Responsive Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

Enfold Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, super flexible and fully responsive multipurpose WordPress Theme ideal for business websites, shop websites, and creative agencies or freelance designers portfolio website. The Theme is built using the Avia Framework. From layout modification, styling, color choices, font choices, predefined theme skins, support for the WPML MULTI LANGUAGE plugin – Enfold has everything you need and more. The theme also includes a dynamic template builder to help you create the website you need in no time.

Kutcher Studio

Create your dream design studio website with Kutcher Studio Premium WordPress Theme. What’s great about the theme is that the developers can install it for you as seen in the demo that way all you need to do is customize. The theme comes with more than 60+ useful and flexible shortcodes including a shortcode generator, optimized code, responsive and retina display ready shortcodes to build professional and complete layouts easily. Other features include a Layout Builder is fully compatible with plugins and is translation-ready with WPML (WordPress Multi Language Plugin) to build complex layouts easily with support translation of your content, a portfolio system that supports multiple stylesMasonry style, Grid Style, Videos, Images, among so many other features that will blow you away.

Tisson Premium WordPress Theme

Tisson is a fresh and modern multipurpose WordPress theme that can be used for any type of website. This premium theme allows you to build your website based on blocks and standard pages using the theme’s Page Builder. This theme is 100% retina ready and responsive, SEO ready (compatible with Yoast and AIO SEO), and it is WPML and translation ready. It includes a Drag and Drop content builder, the Revolution slider, and XML file with demo content – all to get your site up and running in no time.

Glider – Clean and Flat Stylish WordPress Theme

Glider Premium WordPress Theme is a stylish, multi-functional, responsive, ultra-modern theme with a flat UI that will fit all types of websites. From professional corporate to personal blog, this theme’s features can meet any website’s requirements. Easy to use options and features allow you to build and organize your content the way you want it: 7 splendid layouts, easy to use admin panel, 7 useful plugins (Visual Composer, Page Builder, 3 sliders, Mega Menu and Pricing tables), among the plethora of theme options.

Central – Versatile Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

CENTRAL is a dynamic and highly versatile multi-purpose WordPress theme that gives you the ability to create stunning animated pages that will make your website stand out. You have the option to: Choose between 4 fluid AJAX animations, create unlimited Parallax pages, take advantage of awesome Revolution Slider. Build your website: using a highly intuitive and friendly-to-use framework, mix full width and standard grid customizable headers, or get creative with modular shortcodes. Choose from two different animated types of infographics, and so many other features and functions to create the stunning website of your dreams.

WordPress Themes for Mobile and Tablet

Majority if not all of the recent WordPress theme releases have included responsive design as a staple feature. This ensures that these themes will display well on mobile and handheld devices. Below is a list of WordPress themes that have been created and designed primarily for mobile and handheld devices. These themes are meant to cater to a mobile audience but some of them can also function quite well even on desktop browsers.

Here’s a roundup of the latest WordPress themes for mobile and tablet:

Provocateur°

Provocateur° is a cool and interesting theme built using jQuery Mobile, HTML5 and CSS3, especially for mobile phones and particularly optimized for Apple devices. Main features include a portfolio, a blog, a customizable main page, custom menus and widgets, shortcodes (accordion, portfolio, contact form, tags, YouTube), and even a QR-code sharing option. This theme has a unique slide down menu, email and social networking sharing (twitter & facebook) options, and a changing flip animation.

Touch

Touch is a “lighter than air” WordPress theme that shows power can be packed in a light mobile theme. You get a straightforward blog, an optional static front page, a touch gesture-enabled gallery, a portfolio, a unique comment form along with a validation-enabled contact form, plus sliders, short codes etc. all in one neat, little package. This theme has been thoroughly tested on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, including desktop browsers.

Brave

Brave is an elegant and feature- rich dark theme created for mobile devices. This awesome theme has everything your desktop theme offers and can be used alongside your desktop site. it is ready for localization, can ‘install as web app’ on iOS, contains a beautifully unique menu, comes with comment/contact forms, has a touch/swipe enabled gallery, comes with multiple color schemes, and a variety of extremely customizable short codes to design the mobile website you need.

Resans

Resans is a highly advanced WordPress theme for creatives designed especially for tablets and mobile devices. On larger devices, Resans presents posts on a 4 column grid (Masonry style). As display sizes shrink, the number of columns reduce until a lone column is displayed mobile-style. Resans supports several features such as swipe gestures, responsive layout, 5 page afterload animations, animated loading of new pages, unlimited colors for fonts and backgrounds (header, footer, content, menu), and so much more. Resans can be used alongside with your desktop template and can be set up using Resans AP.

Hero

Hero is a super clean, feature packed WordPress theme built for websites with lot of mobile following. This theme has the power of a regular desktop theme adapted to the smaller devices. Hero gives you impressive blog and portfolio pages similar to a regular desktop version in a more compact form to encourage interaction from your mobile visitors. Theme features include: provisions for two different slider plugins, tons of shortcodes, 9 post formats (Aside, Quote, Image, Video, Audio, Gallery, Status, Link, Chat), translation ready, “install as web app” functionality, and so much more.

Spartan

Spartan is a fully featured WordPress theme for mobile devices created with the goal of being flexible enough to adapt to any and all types of WordPress sites and yet still function as a stand alone theme. One of the many cool features tucked into this theme is the menu that goes beyond just listing a number of links in predetermined styles. This feature allows you to build and color a unique navigation system of your choice. Other cool features include: the comment button that also serves as a visual indicator (grayed out when comments for a given post are disabled, or shaking itself ever so gently to remind the user to read and leave comments when comments are enabled), and also the amount of customization available via shortcodes.

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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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.

Best Corporate WordPress Themes May 2013

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

Shift Flexibly Creative WP Theme

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

Lounge

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

Co-Worker

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

Moxie

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

Stark

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

WordPress 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