StyleShop – Elegant Theme’s 81st (And It’s an eCommerce One)

Elegant Themes has just released its 81st theme – the robust and beautiful eCommerce theme StyleShop – and it’s worth the wait. Say goodbye to the glossy mail order catalogues and get your glossy magazine fix with StyleShop Premium WordPress Theme.

StyleShop is glamorous and edgy and not your typical and functional looking eCommerce theme. You can tell the difference from the way the design elements have been seamlessly integrated into various sections of the theme. The attention to detail and the thoughtful process of making sure the user experience is pleasant and enjoyable is a trademark of Elegant Themes. The homepage is clear and easily navigable. It greets you with an impressive dynamic slider you would love to showcase your products with. It also includes a mini slider you can use to feature specials or specific product categories you want to bring attention to. You can also set up a mini gallery of your hottest, latest, most popular products as a teaser to the rest of your inventory. The great thing about this theme is the integrated WooCommerce plugin that handles the whole checkout process ensuring a seamless handling of transactions with popular payment methods.

Styleshop Premium WordPress Theme looks great on smartphones and tablets with its fully responsive design. It even has a side menu especially designed for smartphones to facilitate a faster shopping experience. This responsive theme can be easily customized with the powerful Theme ePanel that allows you to tweak and adjust design features as you please. In addition, the theme comes with lots of shortcodes you can use for more detailed control over the theme.

Features:

  • Responsive Design
  • Theme Options
  • Shortcodes
  • Page Templates
  • Perpetual Updates
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Browser Compatibility
  • Complete Localization
  • Unlimited Colors
  • Unparalleled Support

StyleShop Premium WordPress Theme includes top-notch tech support provided by Elegant themes’ support staff to help you setup your site and get it running in no time.

Get StyleShop And 80 More Themes for $39

WooThemes Shuts Down Their Affiliate Program

It’s true. Disappointing but unfortunately true. For what reason? Here’s what WooThemes posted on their website:

We’re sorry to say that we are discontinuing our referral program because of lack of traction for the program. Access to signup and login has been removed for the time being. We will be in touch with all existing affiliates prior to discontinuing the program with further details. Thank you for your patience in this regard.

In a newsletter addressed to Woo affiliates, Adii wrote:

I’m in the unfortunate position to let you know that we will be closing our referral program on Friday, 8 February 2013. In the last couple of months, the costs to maintain the referral program have exceeded the benefit of keeping it around. We have also experienced so much fraud & abuse on the referral program, which means it is currently losing money for us.

This seemingly drastic decision has left hundreds and thousands of affiliates hanging in mid-air wondering what hit them. For long-time affiliates, all the years of plowing and link building efforts have gone down the drain and all for naught. For whatever internal reasons WooThemes might have for shutting down their affiliate program, the “lack of traction” reason for public consumption seems rather lame and lacking in substance.

Many of their affiliates, especially those who have been around for quite some time, understand business cycles, seasonality, and the normal ups and downs of business operations. To say that it was mainly because of prevalent fraud and abuse of the referral program that has caused them to lose money more than generate income puts a shadow on their management policies and practices. Even if it were so, legitimate affiliates should not be punished for that. In the broader picture of all that has happened, this incident also casts a longer shadow and raises doubts even on the way they handle their WordPress themes program.

Of course, everyone is entitled to benefit of the doubt but the way that WooThemes has been handling it so far has been wanting. What is to happen to all those who have already put in the work and are waiting to receive their commissions? The work is already done and the service has been rendered but what remuneration can these affiliates expect? Not to mention all the admin work and backend hassle. Affiliates are still sending traffic to WooThemes through their affiliate links but now they are simply not getting paid. Online business relationships are based heavily on trust and unless the issues at hand are addressed head on, the consequences could cost WooThemes more than the loss they incurred from their affiliate program. We hope not.

Theme Forest: The Ugly Truth About ThemeForest.net

ATTN: If you are a ThemeForest author and are interested in selling your business or profile, let us know.

I wanted to let you know about a site that has quickly become one of my favorites to visit. It’s one of those sites that once you know about it, you find yourself going back to it every day (or sometimes even a couple times per day) just to see what’s new.

In mid-2008 I stumbled across Theme Forest for the first time while searching for the best wordpress themes. At first I wasn’t that impressed, but I remember not spending very much time investigating just what this “Theme Forest” was. We all know there are a never ending supply of free and premium WordPress Themes online today, and at first glance this seemed to be just another choice in the virtually endless sources of WordPress wares. Thankfully, on closer examination, I realized that ThemeForest had not only addressed several of the major problems those of us face when “searching” for Premium WordPress Themes, they had done it in a very unique and inviting way. Well fast forward almost 5 years, and let me tell you about the Theme Forest of 2013.

ThemeForest in 2013

ThemeForest is a marketplace in the Envato network that is specifically for WordPress Themes and HTML Templates. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering just where you could find high quality premium WordPress themes or website templates, Theme Forest was created just for you.

There are many of these so-called “marketplaces” for just about every type of product or service you may need when doing business online, but I’d like to explain why Theme Forest is different and why they have become the first place I turn for just about everything I need to run one of my many websites.

The ThemeForest Difference

Simply put, they are a destination for WordPress and web developers to list their themes and website templates to people just like you and me. The reason this is so powerful is because it totally goes against the “norm” when it comes to purchasing a WordPress theme or html template.

Typically, you go to Company A’s website where they offer Product 1, 2, and 3. You can buy their work and their work only.

Now imagine if you had the opportunity to brows the work of hundreds and thousands of different web developers? Imagine if you could preview any website, template, or theme before you pruchased it? Imagine if you could read the comments from others who have purchased it, see which themes or templates are most popular, and even rate the work for even more transparency?

This is exactly what you get with ThemeForest, but there is so much more…

Not only can you browse, purchase, and interact with thousands of developers and customers from across the globe, you also have the chance to sell you themes and templates to a dedicated and growing community.

As proof to how large and powerful this community has become, there are several authors who have crossed their $1,000,000 in sales threshold. This is an astonishing achievement for both those authors and the concept of ThemeForest as a whole.

Other Envato MarketplacesThe Best Part About Theme Forest

But do you want to know what I love the absolute most about Theme Forest?

Envato (the company behind Theme Forest) has not only built the best marketplace for WordPress Themes and HTML Templates, they have created similar marketplaces for video files, pre-built coding solutions, web graphics, and flash files just to name a few.

Imagine being able to have just one account that let’s you buy and sell everything from stock audio to fully developed web templates that are both HIGHLY professional, focused on web standards and usability, and at absolutely rock-bottom prices!

Theme Forest closely examines each theme or template uploaded to the marketplace to ensure that only quality authors with quality products can list their work.

As the end user, you have the ability to quickly and easily access just about everything you need to run a website from a network of developers, coders, artists, and audio experts…and you can do it all from one account!

It is completely free to setup an account with Theme Forest, and this one account can be used to browse all of the other sites in the Envato Marketplace.

The Bottom Line: I’ve been doing business online for nearly 8 years now. Rarely have I been so impressed with a product that within a matter of a few weeks I can’t imagine doing business without it. This is just the type of marketplace Envato has created and one you simply can’t afford to miss.

If you are looking for professional, high-end products for your website at beyond reasonable prices, I encourage you to head over to ThemeForest and setup your free account today.

May, 2011: ThemeForest has made some slight changes to their site design, and we’re noticing a slight increase in prices for a few product lines. Perhaps this is the beginning of a rise in prices.

January, 2012: Some estimates we’ve heard put the Envato marketplaces at over 2 million members (and growing).

February, 2013: ThemeForest continues to be the largest WordPress Theme marketplace in the world. If you are an established author from ThemeForest, consider selling us your business.

Simple SEO Tips for Startups

Hello World! That’s the first thing that greets you see when you start a new website. You’ve successfully created your first post and you’re ready to fill it up with more content but you are probably wondering if anyone at all will get to read what you have written.

Here are some simple Google-approved SEO tips for Startups:

To WWW or not

  • use a 301 to consolidate indexing signals because it is a permanent redirect and signals to search engines to transfer all the indexed properties from your non-preferred (www) to your preferred version (non-www) or vice-versa

Verify ownership in Google’s Webmaster tools

  • enable email forwarding to receive critical messages from Google in case of hacking, malware, or crawling issues

Domain background check

  • check for previous ownership (spammers), unwanted keywords and index results – inform Google for any penalties or reconsideration requests

Use the Fetch as Googlebot Webmaster Tool

  • to tell Google to crawl and submit the url to index making it available to searchers even faster.

Include Analytics Code to gather data

  • see which pages are popular and which are not

Site Design Strategy and ideas

  • utility
  • navigation
  • focus

Define your conversion or call to action

  • what you want your visitors to do
  • newsletter signup
  • contact you for a business lead
  • buy
  • try
  • share

Smart copy

  • Include query terms normally or commonly used to find your products.

Every page should be unique

  • unique topic
  • unique title
  • unique meta description
  • for non-dynamic sites – keywords in the filename (lowercase and hyphen separated)
  • descriptive anchor text for every link

Page load time or speed

  • the longer the page loads the more likely the user will leave the site
  • customer acceptability for ecommerce sites = 2 seconds
  • Google = under half a second
  • Ranking – find your audiences and interact with them
  • provide an awesome product or service
  • natural links
  • +1s
  • likes
  • follows
  • shares

Social Media Marketing

For more information and tips, check out the GoogleWebmasterhelp video on YouTube. For those who want to know how to do this, WPMU.org has a quick and easy tutorial on how get started using Google Webmaster Tools for WordPress.

Links: February 19, 2013

Let’s face it…the interwebs are big and only getting bigger. Here are 5 WordPress links you need to know about.

  • Microlancer – If you love any of the Envato marketplaces, this upcoming service will allow you to become a service provider. Still in beta.
  • WooThemes Shuts Down Affiliate Program – Out of nowhere, WooThemes shut down their entire affiliate program citing “lack of traction.” No blog post, no detailed explanation. Lots of frustrated affiliates.
  • Community – We discuss the free/premium debate often here at Blogex. WPDaily suggests it’s all about community.
  • Why Free? – With the recent dust up between Automattic and Envato, the age ol’ Why Free debate is front and center again.
  • WordPress CDN – Get the skinny on content deliver networks (free and premium) from our buddies at WPLift.

Elegant Themes Launches Lifetime Option

For business people, time is a precious commodity. The busier they are the more deliberate they are on how they spend it. Most of the time they do not want to waste their time on business decisions like necessary recurring business expenditures that can be dealt with once and for all. Why? Because they already know that these activities are necessary to their business and they know that they will repeat themselves over and over again and . So instead of spending time repeating something that can be done once they opt to get rid of this tick list item so that they could spend their time on other things that need more of their attention.

If you are a busy WordPress professional building, servicing and handling several website accounts and you want to save yourself time doing admin stuff and spend more time marketing, developing, or providing support to your clients, you might want to check out one of Elegant Themes’ licensing options – the Lifetime Access license. What’s great about it?

Aside from the affordable Personal License for the average user and the extremely Popular Developer License for experienced designers, Elegant Themes also offers Lifetime Access for a one time fee of $249 which is perfect for the busy WordPress professional who wants to maximize his working hours. What does the Lifetime Access License include?

You get:

  • Complete Access To Every Theme – around 81 beautiful and functional themes as of this writing
  • Perpetual Theme Updates
  • Premium Technical Support
  • Complete Access To Every Plugin
  • Layered Photoshop Files
  • NO YEARLY FEES

If we do the math, for $249, it will cost approximately more or less $3 (as of this writing) for each theme, plugin, not counting the psd files, updates, support, and, not including all future themes and plugins yet to be released. At the rate Elegant Themes is releasing new themes, the cost per theme will go down even more. Not only that, you don’t need to pay yearly fees ever, you lessen your admin load, and save time which you can use to do something else. Sounds like a good investment, don’t you think?
Check out Elegant Themes today.

Get Elegant Themes Lifetime

Elegant Themes Working On Theme #81 (Ecommerce)

For those who have been waiting for the longest time for a fresh ecommerce theme from Elegant Themes, the wait will soon be over. Nick Roach has just released a sneak peek of Theme #81 to join the 80 stylish themes in the Elegant Themes pack and it looks smashing.

StyleShop, Elegant Themes’ upcoming ecommerce theme is estimated to be released in a couple of weeks, so those of you out there who have ecommerce projects on the wings better hold your horses for this one. The teaser images are exciting – dark styled at the moment but a light colored version might just happen too, according to Nick Roach.

StyleShop’s menu system looks clean and streamlined, the huge homepage slider looks amazing, the mini slider has great potential for lots of shop promotions, the homepage catalog is accessible and perfect for virtual window shopping, the footer is widgetized, the whole theme is responsive, and yes, best of all is the WooCommerce integration. Applause, applause!

According to Nick Roach,

“We will be opting to streamline the theme for WooCommerce, instead of coding it for a disparate collection of plugins. We believe that WooCommerce is the best option at the moment, and has a promising future.”

So far, the overwhelming response to this theme is excitement, and truly, with reasonable cause. So mark your calendars and start your countdown, for in a couple of weeks, StyleShop will be having its grand opening at Elegant Themes!

Get 80 Premium Themes for $39

Secure Your Interwebs With Sucuri

Malware infestations, blacklistings, Google warnings, malicious software, infected domain, suspicious activity, phishing – not exactly the landing page you want to welcome your visitors with, right? But if you have experienced the dreaded Google warning splash page (just like the dreaded blue screen), it is a cause for concern.

Hackings and other website attacks are becoming more prevalent nowadays. Not that they weren’t before but these malicious activities never went away either. They’ve just become a little bit more sophisticated than before. Government websites, large hosting websites and the more popular and well-known websites seem to be a favorite target but the truth is – no website is immune from these attacks. It is projected that the total number of websites in 2013 will reach 1 Billion and 2 Billion in 2015. (source: toni.org) That’s a lot of www candidates right there. Of course, you can reason away that your website is totally insignificant compared to the 999 million other websites that can be targeted by a malicious attack. On the other hand, yours might just be THE one. Hopefully not.

The impact of a website attack can be devastating especially if it is an eCommerce or a highly monetized site. Not only do you lose a lot in terms of time, lost data, missed sales opportunities and potential business income due to messed up systems and lost traffic, these attacks also affect your site’s credibility and reliability which are the most important currencies any business can have online. Once the public becomes aware of the attack, caution sets in and transactions become paralyzed. The possibility of being blocked or blacklisted becomes a total nightmare. The website owner is now faced with an unnecessary battle of perceptions that could have been prevented in the first place. How can this battle be prevented and how can you, the website owner, protect your peace of mind from potential attacks?

Sucuri Security is a company that offers a security service that detects unauthorized changes to network (cloud) assets, including web sites, DNS, Whois records, SSL certificates and others. It is also heavily used as an early warning system to detect Malware, Spam and other security issues on web sites and DNS hijacking. Sucuri shot into the limelight when GoDaddy hosted sites were attacked and exploited. They were the company that conducted the cleanup operations for them. Sucuri is not a malware protection software to be installed on your site. The company provides a monitoring service to protect your website from any malware, threats of intrusion, infections, and the like. This extra layer of protection is an assurance for both you and your clients or customers that any information exchanged on your website will not be compromised.

You can get a free analysis for your website from Sucuri. Just visit their website and have your website checked anytime. They also have a free plugin that can be downloaded from the WordPress plugins page. This plugin is free but works best in tandem with their security service packages. To learn more about these service packages, check out their website to see which one matches your requirements. The investment you make today to secure your website can save you so much headache in the future.

Visit Sucuri.net to get your free analysis. Download the free plugin from WordPress.

Get Sucuri Now!

20 Combat Photography Examples which will Blow your Mind

The word combat stands for fight against or Oppose in battle, Combat photography carries the real mood, its not a real planned Photography. Its nothing but capturing the stunning live moments of soldiers during live action. Here I have collected 20 Combat photography examples, Enjoy…..

(more…)