Themes Town Is The New Best Deal in WordPress?

Every once in awhile you stumble upon something pretty awesome that simply blows your mind away. Guess what? There’s a new WordPress site that just does that. It’s called THEMES TOWN. If you haven’t heard of Themes Town, you NEED to see it for yourself. There’s really nothing like it so far on Planet WordPress and we have seen most of what’s out there.

What’s Themes Town all about?

Before we get into that, we have to commend the designers who put this creative site together. From the first page to the last, the creativity you experience on the site is truly a delight. Every page is like a treasure hunt where you find little nuggets of gold tucked away in drop downs, arrows, and drawers. Reading through the information is like turning the pages of a storybook. Not a dull moment indeed even if you are simply browsing through the Pricing Table. Who says that websites should all look a certain way?

But wait, it gets better. Not only are you treated to this visual delight, you also get access to valuable WordPress resources you can use for your own website. We all know that many websites come out with their own daily or weekly listings of “20 Best Free Responsive WordPress Themes” or “50 Best Free Magazine Themes” and so many other great lists and roundups. The problem with this is that you have to go through their long lists just to find what you need scrolling endlessly and going back and forth between the list and the demo button (and then how are you supposed to know it’s code is good and free of malicious or encrypted links)? Themes Town has come up with a pretty cool solution that can be found in its Member’s Area.

Themes Town Member’s Area

Themes Town - Members

Say goodbye to endless scrolling and sorting through free WordPress themes post archives. Themes Town has done all the hard work for you.

From their site…

(We) have taken the world of WordPress and condensed it down to an amazing member’s area that is chalked full of the latest and greatest themes and plugins. Each has been painstakingly reviewed by our team to be of the highest quality, free to download, and ready to use right away. It is our goal to make your job as easy as point, demo, download, and use.

One of the many risks of downloading free WordPress themes is vulnerability to malicious code. It’s not hard to find free themes. There are thousands of them available out there. The challenge is finding the good ones that you’d actually want to use and that won’t hurt your website.

It’s nice to know that there is a place called Themes Town where you can download free WordPress themes without having to worry about installing unwanted code and knowing that each of the nearly 200 themes have been pre-screened by WordPress experts.

Another great feature of the Member’s Area is the ability to sort themes according to categories. This helps members narrow down their choices according to their specific theme needs. Each week, new themes and plugins are added to their growing members area, and we have never seen such a complete resource for WordPress.

But that’s still not all.

In addition to everything thus far, Themes Town kicks it into overdrive with their exclusive Themes (and soon to be plugins) that you can only get in the Member’s Area. These cutting-edge WordPress Themes are created with the latest trends in web development including being fully responsive, having clean code, and employing all the best practices for quick load time, SEO, and more. Reliability and convenience all in one awesome site for just $55 (one time). Not a bad deal at all, don’t you think?

Themes Town is not just a good product that offers good value to consumers. It is a great product that provides great service and valuable resources that will benefit many in the WordPress community. And we have to say, it is a really beautiful and creative site.

Don’t walk…RUN to Themes Town and get your membership today!

Visit ThemesTown

Themes Town: A MUST SEE For Anyone Who Uses WordPress

A site in the WordPress Themes space has recently launched that is pretty amazing. Not only from a product standpoint, but also due to the creativity of their website. Let’s start from the beginning.

What Is Themes Town?

Their homepage starts with an interesting statement…“Imagine never having to buy another WordPress Theme ever again?”

Themes Town

From there they take you on this very creative journey showing how they have pre-screened thousands of free WordPress Themes to list the only the best of the best (around 160 as of the writing of this article). On top of that they release a new premium Theme each month to their members. This is a pretty unique concept as finding good free Themes is not necessarily hard, it’s knowing whether they are actually free of malicious code and developed well that is the concern. Themes Town does all the research then organizes everything in a pretty cool members area.

According to the Themes Town site:

(We) have taken the world of WordPress and condensed it down to an amazing member’s area that is chalked full of the latest and greatest themes and plugins. Each has been painstakingly reviewed by our team to be of the highest quality, free to download, and ready to use right away. It is our goal to make your job as easy as point, demo, download, and use.

Creative Site

Given that we are a web design site, we are always on the lookout for the latest trends in web development. In this instance, we were very impressed by the totally responsive layout that Themes Town created. Navigating the site was like reading a story (by clicking next at the bottom right of each page when you were ready to go to the next), and everything stayed above the fold. Note the black arrows on the left/right at the bottom – simply click there to navigate around.

justthink

Another cool feature was the cloud “drawer” at the top. At any point along the way, you could click the plus button in the upper right hand side to have the clouds expand to present some simple navigation and the Join Button.

drawer

The site also looks great on tablets and mobile phones with it being touch enabled (so you can swipe your way through the different pages when on a mobile/tablet device). All in all, this is a truly creative web design!

Members Area

Upon joining, you are instantly taken to this very cool looking members area where all of the Themes are listed in one central place. Notice the different categories on the left hand side. As you click them, the Themes automatically sort themselves based on the category you selected. You can pick as many categories as you’d like and have the Themes instantly sorted.

Themes Town - Member Area

And this is really what is wonderful about the Themes Town product. Every week their team analyzes free WordPress Themes to list here. If they meet their strict criteria for approval, they are listed for their member’s to demo and download. In addition (if that weren’t great enough already), they create at least one new premium theme each month and make it available on the “Premium” tab of the image you see above. They do all of this for just $39 with no recurring billing or future charges. This is an amazing deal, and something that everyone who does anything with WordPress should check out. For an extra $16 (one time) you can also have access to a pre-screened list of many of the top Plugins. Similar to the Themes, each Plugin has been reviewed by their team and ready for your instant download.

All in all, Themes Town has done a really nice job creating a product for those of us who love WordPress but don’t have the time or maybe even expertise to sort through the thousands and thousands of different Themes out there to find the best.

Head on over to their site and check it out for yourself. http:themestown.com

Not Your Usual WordPress SEO Plugins To Try

WordPress as a Content Management System, in itself, is already a good platform for SEO goals because of the way it is structured. But you can always make a good thing better if you want to. Check out these fresh SEO plugins that you might not have heard of but might help make your SEO efforts yield even better results.

Premium SEO Pack for WP

This plugin in gives you a whole array of tools to help you optimize your site’s visibility in internet searches. The plugin includes monitoring tools like Google Analytics, SERP tracking, On-Page and Off-Page optimization tools, the premium Mass Optimization feature that allows you to optimize all your posts and pages at once. Another cool on page feature is Local SEO. This allows you to rank your pages based on the geographic locale. Other noteworthy on page features are: title & meta format, sitemap, SEO slug optimizer, SEO feature optimizer and google authorship. The SEO pack also includes Link Builders, Backlink Builder, Social Stats, Page Speed Insights, Smush It, and also an SEO code insert feature.

WordPress SEO Post-Optimizer

WordPress SEO Post-Optimizer plugin assists you in optimizing page rank posts. This plugin checks your posts againsts SEO criteria, checks for keyword density (the right amount of keywords in a post), and autochecks for the SEO score of your post every 15 seconds. The SEO scores are expressed in percentage. A real time check on the amount of words is also done in recognition of the fact that search engines usually prefer content with more than 300 words. The plugin also checks if the post has images or not and also if there are links to older posts on your blog to improve your internal content structure. The Post Optimizer plugin also checks for internal links, the usage of h-tags and alt-tags, and bold, italicized, or underlined keywords in your post.

Rankie

Rankie is a WordPress Rank Checker plugin that helps you keep track of WordPress rankings on Google keeping a close eye on each keyword position. The plugin allows you to track an unlimited number of keywords on Google and keeps updating these ranks daily. You can also check out ranking trends per week, month or all time. The plugin is also a great keyword research tool that helps you generate keyword lists by suggesting possible alternatives to keywords of interest. You can track unlimited number of keywords ranking on Google and keep updating these ranks daily as it works as a WordPress SERP plugin, generate ranking reports per month, per year or by all time letting you know how ranking is going up or down with details on every single position change for each tracked keyword, including many other helpful tracking functions.

Ultimate Video SEO Plugin

Ultimate Video SEO Plugin is an advanced stand alone plugin for WordPress which covers all aspects of Video SEO. It automatically fetches video SEO details from videos of all major video hosting providers and submit it to a video sitemap. What can it do? It supports self hosted videos in all WordPress supported video formats. It notifies search engines whenever a sitemap is updated or generated. It supports video embedded through shortcode or metabox (created by third party plugins or theme). It supports self hosted videos embedded using default WordPress media gallery. It adds schema.org video object markup to all your video posts/pages. It shows snippet preview of video search results within your post editor.

Meta Tags Optimization

Meta Tags are keywords used by search engines to find useful information. A lot of times the title and nature of the content may not be associated with the right meta tags. The Meta Tags Optimization plugin advices the admin whether the page is optimized correctly, by highlighting with green and red colors the Meta Tags that are found on the page. While the plugin will not tell us what tags to add or eliminate, it will highlight with red the incorrect inputs. This plugin gives useful information to the writer by highlighting meta tags on the page that may not be the best suited for the content. This plugin also lets you optimize meta tags for posts/pages by providing you clear instruction to repair your meta tags.

Top Themes Featured on Theme Forest

Every week, Themeforest features promising WordPress themes that are worth noticing. Here are some of the latest themes that have been featured on Themeforest you need to see. Check these out.

Forgiven – A Powerful WordPress Theme for Churches

Forgiven Premium WordPress Theme is a powerful parallax enabled church theme that includes major features such as: Visual Composer plugin, Slider Revolution, Envira Gallery, the unique and exclusive Blur Slider, support for Church Theme Content, WooCommerce support, Page customizer, Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7 support, Sermon functionality, The Events Calendar and the Events Calendar Pro plugin integration and support, and so much more.

FlatAds – Classified AdsWordPress Theme

FlatAds Classified Ads WordPress Theme is a super flexible and fully responsive Premium Directory/Listing WordPress themebuilt with HTML5 and CSS3. FlatAds is compatible with WooCommerce 2.1, bbPress, and MailChimp for WP plugin. Other key features include custom fields for categories and subcategories, interactive Google maps Geolocation support, integrated PayPal payments support, and WPML (multilingual) support.

Faculty – Responsive Academic WordPress Theme

Faculty Responsive Academic WordPress Theme is a magazine or personal blog styled page that can be used to build personal or professional websites specifically for academic people. This simple and yet well structured responsive theme is especially designed as an online cv of professors and PHD students. Key features include publications management, option to present research, teaching and blog pages, and provision for downloadable CVs for interested visitors.

KLEO – Next level Premium WordPress Theme

KLEO – Next level Premium WordPress Theme is an extremely flexible, fully customizable BuddyPress and bbPress compatible WordPress multipurpose theme to help you create a community, a corporate portfolio, or a membership website. This membership ready theme allows you to create membership levels and restrict content based on member access quite easily. key features include: WPML and Translation Ready, WooCommerce Ready, Google Maps integration, Contact Form 7 compatible, among others.

Time Travel – Timeline WordPress Theme

Time Travel – Timeline WordPress Theme is an ultra modern next generation premium theme developed with cutting edge technology and design. The built-in voice control makes it both revolutionary and at the same time super intuitive to use. You can set up your own language to be used in the voice commands control, so it is as easy as possible for your visitors. The design of the site is a 3D time travel path, ideal for displaying chronology data, posts flow by date, history info or just any type of timeline content in a modern and futuristic way.

It is ideal as a blog, a portfolio site, a corporate site aiming to display the history of company or brand, an artist’s portfolio to display albums / films / books in a chronological way, an agency website to showreel projects and team by date, etc.

Hooray – Premium WordPress Blog Theme

Hooray Premium WordPress Blog Theme is one of the most colorful and user friendly personal blog themes. Key features include: easy to use powerful Admin Panel, full Arabic RTL support, social counter integration, translation and multi language ready, page templates, review and rating system, unlimited colors and sidebars, and so much more.

Moustachey: A Blog theme with extra gusto

Moustachey Premium WordPress Theme is a fun, quirky WordPress blog theme playing on the moustache design. Key features include: Author support, social share enabled, typekit web fonts integration, adobe edge web fonts integration, Google analytics support, Google API v3 integration, configurable donate/message block at the top of the page, localization support, and so much more.

Happy Birthday WordPress!

WordPress celebrates its 11th year this May and it can only get better. It may be a bit more quiet than last year’s 10th year celebration but things have been equally if not more exciting than ever. Here are some interesting statistics you need to know about WordPress (.com and .org).

  • 11 Years
    It’s been 11 years since WordPress was first released – May 27, 2003 to be exact.
  • 22% Usage, 60% Market Share
    According to W3Techs.com, WordPress is used by 22.3% of ALL the websites, which translates to a content management system market share of 60.0%.
  • WordPress 3.9 – Downloaded 19.3 million times
    WordPress 3.9 which was released fairly recently has already been downloaded more than 19.3 million times (as of this writing).
  • 2,531 themes, 101,742,042 downloads
    – in the WordPress Theme repository alone with approximately more than 10,000 themes available in the marketplace.
  • More fun embed stats from partners and friends that their users have embedded WordPress short codes on their sites:
    Twitter – 32,978,750 (as of May 2014)
    YouTube – 12,933,230 (as of Apr 2014)
    Flickr – 14,952,725 (as of Apr 2014)
    Vimeo – 29,158 (as of May 2014)
  • WordPress localized in 140+ ways. Find your language here.

Happy Birthday, WordPress!

Best WordPress Plugins to Boost Your Business Site’s Performance

Most corporate websites are extensions of real-world businesses that want to create an online presence. In the real world, these companies most likely have real-time tools and metrics in place to determine how the business is doing at any given point. Reports and analysis are part and parcel of normal operations as is marketing campaigns and feedback. Does this apply to the company’s online presence?

The online address of a company serves as a virtual business card cum portfolio cum marketing tool which the company can use to expand their reach. It is not unusual for business owners to expect that the same measurables to be derived from their corporate website. The ability to track, measure, and analyze data extracted from online activities is one of the key things a business owner needs to be able to do to be able to asses the effectiveness of the corporate website.

Here are some of the best WordPress plugins and tools you can use to enhance the efficiency of as well as measure the viability your business website.

Site Security and Backup

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software. iThemes Security works to fix common holes, stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials. This plugin hides common WordPress security vulnerabilities, preventing attackers from learning too much about your site and away from sensitive areas like your site’s login, admin, etc. iThemes Security works to protect it by blocking bad users and increasing the security of passwords and other vital information. This plugin monitors your site and reports changes to the filesystem and database that might indicate a compromise, works to detect bots and other attempts to search vulnerabilities, and makes regular backups of your WordPress database, allowing you to get back online quickly in the event of an attack.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

WordPress Backup to Dropbox keeps your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes and on a regular basis. Simply choose a day, time and how often you wish your backup to be performed and just wait for your websites files and an SQL dump of its database to be dropped in your Dropbox account.

Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security is a free enterprise class security plugin that includes a firewall, anti-virus scanning, cellphone sign-in (two factor authentication), malicious URL scanning and live traffic including crawlers. Wordfence is the only WordPress security plugin that can verify and repair your core, theme and plugin files, even if you don’t have backups. Key features include: real-time blocking of known attackers, two factor authentication used by banks, government agencies and military world-wide for highest security authentication, includes a firewall to block common security threats like fake Googlebots, malicious scans from hackers and botnets, block entire malicious networks, etc.

Site Statistics and Analytics

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog. It supports Universal (analytics.js) and traditional analytics (ga.js), includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches, supports outbound link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress, and many other features to support Google Analytics on your site.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily with lots of metadata, views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews. This plugin uses the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the fastest and most reliable tracking code Google Analytics offers. It features simple installation through integration with Google Analytics API where its as simple as authenticating and selecting the site you want to track. You can also easily connect your Google AdSense and Google Analytics accounts.

Site Content Management

Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar plugin makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog and gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

Zedity™ The Easiest Way To Create Your Content

Zedity™ is an innovative Editor to create your posts or pages amazingly easily, quickly and hassle-free with no technical skills required. It gives you total flexibility and unprecedented possibilities to create any desired design, as easily as if done on a piece of paper. Key features include: content in posts and pages that scale down accordingly to your responsive layout, additional content boxes (color box, document box, HTML5 box), audio and video embed capabilities, snap and alignment positioning, and so many other features.

WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache plugin creates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Performance enhancement features include: Generating static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, Minify HTML (decrease the size of page), Minify Css (decrease the size of CSS files), All cache files are deleted when a post or page is published, Enable/Disable cache option for mobile devices, Leverage browser caching which reduces page load times for repeat visitors, etc.

SEO

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, designed and developed by WordPress Consultant Joost De Valk, is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

WordPress 3.9 – Jimmy Smith

If you haven’t updated your WordPress version yet, now would be the perfect time to do so. WordPress has just released WordPress 3.9 and as it has been tradition, this release was named after another music legend, jazz organist Jimmy Smith.

As was posted in a previous article, WP 3.9 includes many refinements that will improve the multimedia experience of both site owner and site visitors. Check out the features below:

WordPress 3.9 Key Features

Improved visual editing

The updated visual editor has improved speed, accessibility, and mobile support. You can paste into the visual editor from your word processor without wasting time to clean up messy styling.

Edit images easily

With quicker access to crop and rotation tools, it’s now much easier to edit your images while editing posts. You can also scale images directly in the editor to find just the right fit.

Drag and drop your images

Uploading your images is easier than ever. Just grab them from your desktop and drop them in the editor.

Gallery previews

Galleries display a beautiful grid of images right in the editor, just like they do in your published post.

Do more with audio and video

Images have galleries; They’ve added simple audio and video playlists, so you can showcase your music and clips.

Live widget and header previews

Add, edit, and rearrange your site’s widgets right in the theme customizer. Preview your changes live and only save them when you’re ready. The improved header image tool also lets you upload, crop, and manage headers while customizing your theme.

Stunning new theme browser

WordPress 3.9 comes with the beautiful new theme browser – Twenty Fourteen.

(source: WordPress.org News)

WordPress 3.9 is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard.
ETA: WordPress 3.9.1 update is now available

Web Design Trends WordPress Users Need To Know

WordPress is the most popular content management system existing today fetching 21.8% of the world’s total internet usage and capturing 60.3% of the market share as per W3tech’s latest market report. It comes as no surprise that the majority of the general web design trends predicted for 2014 are already common features available and/or integrated in most if not all WordPress themes being sold in the marketplace today. It makes you wonder whether WordPress is only a trend follower or it is actually THE trend setter to watch.

WordPress core developers, theme and plugin developers and authors, and the WordPress community in general are some of the most passionate people on the planet. With only ten years tucked into its belt, WordPress has emerged as one the most dynamic and cutting edge platforms today primarily because of the commitment of its community.

In a recent business article on eCommerce design trends for 2014, it lists trends that WordPress users already consider as familiar features. The trend list includes:

  • flat design
  • responsive design
  • less sliders
  • more user friendly navigation
  • more creative use of web fonts

These trends have actually appeared in most WordPress themes as common features in the last year or so. Even Forbes magazine, lists similar web design trends in an article that came out early this year. Although Forbes also adds “storytelling design” characterized by concise, compelling copy coupled with strong imagery as one of the significant web trends that will emerge in 2014. Guess what? A wonderful new WordPress plugin – Aesop Story Engine – in relation to the “storytelling” trend has already been generating a lot of interest lately.

For those who have been following the development path of the latest WordPress version that is to be released (April 16), there are several new features in WordPress 3.9 that could set off new “trends” in the web design world. WordPress 3.9 emphasizes more user friendly features and improved multimedia handling capabilities. A few of these significant features that are worth noting are listed below:

  • New features like live widget previews
  • a new theme installer
  • UI refinements when editing images and when working with media in the editor including the return of some of the advanced display settings for images.
  • audio and video playlists
  • new gallery support
  • The formatting function that turns straight quotes into smart quotes (among other things) underwent some changes to drastically speed it up.

More detailed features can be viewed on the WordPress core development website.

Having said all that, it is interesting to note that the thrust towards being more multimedia savvy while at the same time being more and more user friendly could be a significant WordPress feature that could set off a general web design trend. With WordPress gaining more and more influence over the whole internet population, it is possible that whatever developers, coders, designers, authors, etc. come up with to improve WordPress products and services could eventually be the standard that the web design community will use.

Who knows what WordPress will be like in the next 10 years. The innovations succeeding WordPress iterations will bring and the vast influence it will have in relation to the entire Internet population, mobile, tablet or what not together with the hardcore commitment of its core community will definitely create an impact on the way the world wide web looks and functions. Whatever it is, anything that goes on in WordPress is definitely going to be exciting and worth watching.