The holidays are almost here and what better way to spruce up your website than with some great eCommerce themes to improve the look and function of your e-store. Here’s a rundown of some of the best eCommerce themes to get you ready for holiday shoppers:
Sold! Premium WordPress Theme is an excellent mix of style and function. The clean, white space design does not distract and serves as the perfect backdrop to highlight choice merchandise. Sold has a beautiful slider where you can put your most interesting items on sale. You can even define points on the slide where you can add comments or even zoom images ala Flickr. This is perfect for highlighting detail on specific points of the product. Sold! uses two of the most powerful plugins – WooCommerce and Jigoshop – making it an effective eCommerce solution. Its multi-lingual capability, responsive features and easy customizability enables your store to service both local and global market.
Sold! Theme: $55 | Demo & Download
Another interesting theme worth mentioning is Mercor. Mercor Premium WordPress Theme gives you the look and feel of a department store or supermarket weekly catalogue. This responsive theme’s clean, fresh layout and white space styling creates an uncluttered look that’s easy on the eye even if there are numerous images and texts on the page. Mercor has a dynamic Nivo homepage slider to highlight store specials or to announce store events and sales. Mercor is fully responsive and uses WooCommerce to power e-commerce transactions. This powerful feature combination makes your site current, competitive and able to address the emerging mobile shoppers market.
Mercor Theme: $55 | Demo & Download
This latest eCommerce theme from CSSIgniter is bold and eye-catching. Intrigue Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive eCommerce theme that combines the power of WooCommerce and CSSIgniter’s straightforward theme design. This means that setting up a powerful eCommerce site need not be a complicated and tedious task to accomplish. With Intrigue, you can use a plethora of widgets to create the functionality you require. This theme comes out of the box in a hot red and black color scheme but you can also choose from the available 7 color schemes to create the look most appropriate to your market. Intrigue Premium WordPress Theme is not over the top and includes just the right amount of features and functionalities for whatever you need.
Intrigue Theme: $39 | Demo & Download
Mearishop Premium WordPress Theme is a great eCommerce solution that’s edgy and modern. The Lookbook-ish appeal makes it a perfect match for a fashion and accessories store. Customers can check out the portfolio or lookbook pages to determine the style that best suits them. Mearishop uses the powerful Hana panel combined with WooCommerce functionality to give you the power to control almost every aspect of the theme. With tons of options available, this features makes this responsive theme perfect for both WP noobs and experienced developers to use. Choose from unlimited color options, 7 backgrounds and 34 patterns to define your custom look. You can even upload your background image. With 7 sliders to choose from, Mearishop gives you the options you to reach your target market in style.
Mearishop Theme: $55 | Demo & Download
Xing Premium WordPress Theme is a modern and clean theme designed to meet the eCommerce needs of both small and large scale business alike. Xing is primarily an eCommerce theme but it is also flexible enough to be used for creative portfolios or for magazine/editorial blog type websites. Xing uses several jQuery powered features like the Flexslider and the jQuery Product Carousels(for WooCommerce recent/featured products). This highly customizable and responsive theme gives you tons of options to create the look you want. Xing is not wanting in anything – from shortcodes, to custom post formats, to custom widgets, to 8 portfolio layouts, to social sharing features and other features and functionalities to help you to create and customize your eCommerce site. Check out Xing today.
Xing Theme: $55 | Demo & Download
Keep your eyes peeled for more WordPress holiday roundups in the next few weeks!
Elegant Themes recently gave a sneak peak of their upcoming Nimble Theme. Nimble is a business theme described to be simple, flexible, and balanced. It will be interesting to see how Nick Roach pulls this one off – balancing bold and colorful design without going over the top. Nimble will also be responsive and will definitely be generously packed with features and functionality, as is characteristic of each and every Elegant Theme.
A quick look at the theme’s snapshot shows that this theme has a carousel style slider prominently placed on the homepage. Elegant themes has stated that this is to give business websites a platform to present a call to action. The slider can be enabled or disabled if so desired. The slider is followed by 3 sections and a footer. The first section is a place to put product and service summaries which lead to pages that describe business offerings in detail. The second section is for news and update summaries to give your visitors a good idea of how things are going in the business. The third section is a place to put projects that can be linked to portfolio or gallery pages.
The theme has been well received by most of those who left comments. There have be a handful who feel that Elegant Themes should veer away from themes that spend a significant chunk of the homepage on sliders or big images. Elegant Themes has responded that this design approach has been what business clients have been looking for and leads to greater conversion rates for the clients.
According to Nick Roach:
Most corporate sites do indeed need to convey a message, and it is important for that message to be big, bold and in front of the users right when he/she lands on the page. Giving a clear call to action with a single image, large header and a button is what I have found converts the best and results in the lowest bounce rates. It works because it is easy to understand. In almost every occasion, simplicity is what wins out over clutter. Having too much “stuff” in view when you land on the page can confuse the user. It’s better to lead them on a clear path.
Coming from someone who has been doing this for so many years, and who by now, knows and understands this market pretty well, it’s safe to assume that this new theme, considering all other factors, has been well-thought out and designed.
For now, we all just have to be content with twiddling our thumbs and waiting for Nimble to be fully released and then make our conclusions thereafter.
Check Out the Nimble Theme
ThemeFuse has recently launched its Monthly Club Membership. For a monthly fee of $17 a month + a one time fee of $199, members get all themes on the ThemeFuse inventory including future themes and updates over the course of your Club Membership. On top of this, Club Members enjoy additional perks such as VIP status on the support forum and can take special sneak peaks in the Members area of the ThemeFuse website with the privilege of deciding what themes to create next. In addition, extra money comes with every user that comes through a member’s affiliate link. Member gets 30% on the initial fee and 10% on every monthly fee of every user that joins through his/her affiliate link.
This scheme replaces the “All Theme’s Pack” product. As a special offer to purchasers of the old scheme, the initial $199 is waived. These members only need to pay $17 monthly fee. All you need to do is email your “All Theme’s Pack” transaction ID and ThemeFuse will email a voucher for the $199 initial registration fee.
Single themes at ThemeFuse cost $49 for standard single domain use and $79 for developer unlimited domain use. These prices do not give the user access to upgrades or new theme releases. A Club Membership takes care of upgrades and new themes. It also gives you access to all themes in the ThemeFuse inventory which is relatively reasonable at $17 a month compared to the single theme pricing if you see yourself using a lot of themes for a lot of websites. The one time fee is valid for as long as you keep your membership current. If you decide to cut your membership and re-continue your membership later, you will need to repay the one time fee.
While other developers offer lower priced membership ($39/$79 yearly), it all boils down to the question of how much are you willing to pay for ThemeFuse themes? If you consider these themes to be the perfect solutions to your clientele’s needs then price should not be an issue. To learn more about the new Club Membership at ThemeFuse, you can visit their blog and read about it.
Check Out ThemeFuse’s Monthly Membership
Time management is one of the biggest problems faced by business owners be they digital business or brick and mortar. There are too many things to do and when you do one thing you obviously can’t do something else (MBA programs call this the “opportunity cost”). Therefore, to manage your time properly and make the most out of the few working hours that exist each day, you must find the best tools to help you manage your time properly. Enter digital calendars.
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With the advent of mobile platforms, WordPress themes have to adapt to the demands of this steadily growing user base. It can really be quite frustrating to read articles from any major newspaper’s website on iPhone or Android and get all the content mish mashed. Theme developers and web designers need to move more and more toward this emerging trend towards responsive themes.
It is a welcome development that Elegant Themes recently released its responsive shortcodes. While Elegant Themes has been churning out responsive themes for quite a while, the shortcodes were left out. It took 10 responsive themes before mobile friendly shortcodes were released. Great news, indeed!
So how do these new shortcodes, improve mobile browsing experience? Elegant Themes’ blog cites two examples of their improvement strategy. Tabs have always been an issue when websites typically viewed on a 960px wide screen to a 320px width. No matter what you do, having 10 tabs will alway come out cramped. Solution: Tabs turn into a slider when switching to mobile mode. It just makes sense to have sliders rather than have unreadable tab labels. Another example cited was the case of columns. As the content width gets narrower, text in columns become a bunch of flying letters. Solution: the new shortcodes convert columns into boxes when switching to mobile screens. Brilliant isn’t it? Regarding the new shortcodes, Elegant Themes has declared them to be fluid width giving them the capacity to shrink and expand according to screen size.
Web design and the emerging technology innovation and trends are accelerating even faster. More and more mobile users prefer to access the web through their devices and WordPress Themes providers need to step up their game. For loyal subscribers of Elegant Themes, these concrete steps towards updating and upgrading all Elegant Themes products is always welcome and appreciated.
Congratulations to Elegant Themes for taking WordPress theme development one step further and fully embracing the future of WordPress.
See Elegant Themes’ Responsive Shortcodes
In September 2010, CSSIgniter started churning out Premium WordPress themes for the WordPress community. What was intended to be a side project to augment the founders’ day jobs didn’t bring in the cash they were hoping for.
Early this year, CSSIgniter put some focus and resources to keep its creative engines running consistently. In the last 7 months, this developer has released 16 new themes, half of its existing inventory of 29. A closer look at their last 7 releases show how they have significantly up their game by joining the responsive bandwagon and now this dynamic development team of 4 is now cooking up their 2nd responsive e-commerce theme.
CSSIgniter offers members a year’s access to its catalogue of themes for the price of $39. This brings them in direct competition with Elegant Themes who offers similar access to its members at the same price. What differentiates CSSIgniter is its willingness to give out PSD files to all its members. Elegant Themes gives out these files to its Developer members who pay $89 annually. While Elegant Themes continues to create stunning, highly functional, easy to use themes, CSSIgniter isn’t far behind. Considering the bold shifts in pace and design the Greek quartet have taken in the last few months, it would not be surprising to find their products standing toe to toe with Elegant Themes in the very near future. Their Aegean Resort Theme now offers visuals which can be developed to generate the stunning effect of Elegant’s Gleam.
CSSIgniter still has to master how to showcase their work on their website. A casual visitor, would probably find their Theme descriptions too concise in comparison the level of detail one finds on Elegant Theme’s website. To offset this, CSSIgniter may consider including video introductions as part of the live demo similar to the video introduction on their blog post to introduce Femme.
CSSIgniter appears to be beyond the stage of ignition and is now beginning to burn up really bright. We looking forward to the next releases of this rising star among the current WordPress premium theme providers community.
Check Out CSSIgniter
The Thesis Theme. Some people love it and swear by it. Some people hate it. But those who stand by it are extremely happy that they’ve stuck with it. For those who are unfamiliar, Thesis is the brainchild of one of the most respected and sought-after WordPress theme designers, developer and founder of DIYthemes – Chris Pearson. Although it is called and generally known as Thesis Theme it really functions like a powerful WordPress Framework.
Thesis has been around for quite a while and has since been updated several times. The latest update – version 1.8.5 – was in response to the WordPress 3.4 update. A lot of Thesis users have been waiting for a real major update from DIYthemes since Chris Pearson announced the soon to be released Thesis 2. When exactly is it going to be released? Here’s what Chris had to say:
We’ve got about 120 hours of development and testing left before the alpha (only available to DIYthemes staffers) will be ready. Based on experience, I think we’ll probably have another 60 hours of development on top of that plus a couple of weeks out in the wild before the beta is ready for release.
With that information in mind, I think Thesis 2 will probably make its world debut in August.
And it will be one hell of a debut.
So far it hasn’t been released (as of this writing) so the countdown continues. Meanwhile take a look at some of the features that will hopefully be part of Thesis 2 when it finally comes out.
What to Expect
- New Skins
- New Add-ons
- An updater that will allow you to update the new elements with the push of a single button in the admin panel
- Template editor will allow you to create custom pages much more quickly and in a much more organized manner than ever before
- Automatic updates
- Customization will be easier, more organized, easy to maintain and use
- Integrated page navigation
- API add-ons
- Drag and drop feature
There’s been a lot of anticipation and so much expectation ever since the announcement on this much awaited release. For Thesis fans,hopefully the wait will finally be over soon.
Check Out the Thesis Theme
Best Theme (v1.1) A Beautiful, Responsive Theme for WordPress Sites Make sure to check out our official post on the Best Theme for updates on recent and future releases! Take some time to check out the Best Theme demo …
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