Best WordPress Themes of 2011 (UPDATED) Best WordPress Themes 2014 Looking for the absolute BEST WordPress Theme of 2014? Get The X Theme (30+ Demos). Have you seen the new ULTIMATE WordPress Theme? Click Here to Purchase! UPDATED July 12, 2014: 2014 is sure to be another great year for WordPress Theme development. With tens of millions of websites powered by WordPress, programmers are constantly innovating their themes to keep pace with the development cycles of WordPress. To help you navigate the world of WordPress Themes, we are pleased to present you with the our 6th annual Best WordPress Themes – this time for 2014. Instead of creating a huge list of random themes, our 2014 Themes will be broken down by category. For your convenience, we’ve broken down the themes on this page by categories including: Responsive, Portfolio, Magazine, Business, eCommerce, BuddyPress, Frameworks, HTML5, Real Estate, Free, and Premium. Our top pick for an individual theme is the all new X Theme. Best Responsive WP Themes 2014 Join Elegant Themes
The New Rules For Winning the Blog Game Have you ever wished that you jumped into the social media game back in 2005? Back when Facebook was a college thing and people were intrigued by those quirky online journals called blogs. Early blog pioneers still had to bust their butts to succeed but they were able to appeal to an open and less cynical public. My Son's Blog :) Flash forward to 2010 and blogs are commonplace. Since the neighborhood is crowded, newcomers have to chart a different course to success. We need to dig deep and bring a whole new energy to the game. I call it hustling. So we’ll start there… Build an Empire (Even if it’s a small one) Your voice deserves to be heard. Promote like your life depended on it I don’t care how passionate you are – it doesn’t mean squat if your posts aren’t read. I know that marketing has a dubious reputation in social media circles but we need to take a different perspective. Do this: Click here for a list of tweetchats in almost every niche imaginable. Boycott the Echo Chamber
Taking the Guesswork Out of Design Creativity breathes life into successful websites. However, creative ideas and solutions can sometimes seem like guesswork—and guessing is risky business. So what can designers do to show clients they’re using a solid strategy and have the best intentions? The following exercises are a great way to start discussing and documenting aspects of design to help clients shed their fear of creativity and encourage them to join the design process. Set clear goals#section1 Some people feel they know why a website should exist, but struggle to create direct and measurable goals. A modified acceptance criteria exercise is the simplest and most effective tool I’ve found for setting clear and powerful goals. Example request: We’re redesigning our website because we need more traffic and an updated look, and want to become more respected in our industry. Example goal template: We want to __________ because ____________ so that ___________. Example goals: Organize the pages#section2 Example result:
40 Free Premium WordPress Themes In my opinion, one of the best ways to learn about wordpress theme development is to take one of the many clean and nicely layed out free themes and start customizing them yourself. With this hands on approach with a working model, you have the ability to see for yourself what is happening to the theme with each of the changes that you make. The guesswork becomes less guessy when you have an established functionable framework to start with, and then the tweaking teaching takes you through each step of the personalization process. With this practical application approach, the bits of theoretical learning that you may have acquired through reading and oral presentations fall into place and begin to make sense to you in a whole new way. Blogs Freemium The Freemium theme was designed by Paul Kadysz and developed by Dariusz Siedlecki. Features Download Freemium | Demo Elegant Grunge Elegant Grunge is an unwashed yet crisp WordPress theme designed by Michael Tyson and inspired by wefunction.com.
Genesis Theme Helps With SEO I’m at PUBCON right now, an event heavily trafficked by the Search Engine Optimization crowd. I am literally surrounded by people who can run circles around me with regards to that part of internet marketing. My only weak answer when I tell people what I do for SEO is broken into two things: Genesis (affiliate link) and Scribe(affiliate link). It’s one reason I use a premium WordPress theme. ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Genesis Framework The Genesis Framework empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress. With automatic theme updates and world-class support included, Genesis is the smart choice for your WordPress website or blog. Find out more about the framework features Check out the Genesis demo and the wide variety of child themes See example designs in the Genesis design showcase Become a StudioPress Affiliate
15 Excellent Corporate Blogs to Learn From This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Creating and maintaining a corporate blog, or a blog of any sort for that matter, isn't always the easiest of tasks and doesn't come naturally to most people. There are a lot of considerations to take into account — theme, topics, audience, content, design, writers, multimedia, promotion, writing style, comment policies, and so on. Above and beyond all of that, you also need to consider the blog's name and URL. Although the act of creating blog posts can be quite simple, forethought and planning must first go into the creation of a corporate blog in order to keep the processes running smoothly, especially if multiple bloggers are involved. We recently outlined 10 tips for corporate blogging for businesses hoping to focus on key elements of creating a blog in the corporate world. 1. 2. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
17 Stunning WordPress Portfolio Themes to Display Fullscreen Image Slideshow in Background - WPDressing.com Have you ever wanted to display eye catching fullscreen images in the background of your website and make a proper visual impact? Now is the time to turn your WordPress blog into a stunning online portfolio and present your pictures in the best way possible. Klix is a fullscreen WordPress portfolio theme that has two different color schemes included. Custom theme settings page with 50+ settings including changing fonts and easily allowing image uploads for making the site your own masterpiece. DK for Photography is a beautiful fullscreen theme with 4 different homepage styles, 10 page templates, 6 gallery page templates, 7 custom widgets, tens of built-in shortcodes, various fonts and many more layout building options. DK for photography uses Timthumb to adjust the size of thumbnails automatically. Delight is a powerful and professional WordPress theme with full screen background slideshow. Including a variety of options, King Size can suit any particular needs. More InfoPrice: $33
30 Incredibly Useful WordPress Hacks WordPress is without doubt one of the best publishing platforms available and it’s functionality and flexibility mean we have the ability to completely customize our installation and theme. However sometimes a plugin isn’t enough to give us the functionality we need, that’s where ‘hacks’ come in. This is a compilation of some of the best Hacks available to help unleash the full power of WordPress. 40+ Most Wanted WordPress Tricks and Hacks 14 WordPress bloggers share the hacks and plugins they are really looking for to enhance their blog in any aspect. 63 Essential WordPress Hacks, Tutorials, Help Files and Cheats A comprehensive list of the Best WordPress Tutorials, Hacks, Help Files and Cheat Sheets to make life easier and to help you expand WordPresses functionality. Excellent WordPress Theme Hacks Selection of WordPress tricks on how to make a better WordPress theme, focusing more on the frontend development. 10 Useful WordPress Hook Hacks 9 WordPress Hacks to Encourage User Interactivity
Create Local Websites With Ampps The majority of web developers develop their websites and services locally before they publish them on the Internet. This makes sense in a variety of ways, from saving a lot of bandwidth to faster updating or improved security. Even better, new technologies have made it a lot easier to setup a local web development system on any PC. Ampps, which stands for Apache MySQL PHP Python Softalicious, is a free web development environment for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems that can be installed with just a few clicks. Once up and running, it is up to the user to install web applications from the local admin interface. When you first start the program after installation you'll get into the admin console where you can configure Apache, MySQL and PHP, and start, stop and restart the services. Links in the form of icons open the local web administration interface or the apps that are currently up and running.
14 Superb Portfolio and Photoblog Wordpress Themes (Free) | Freebies Freebies by Bill Jones 2inShare Here are 14 portfolio and photoblog wordpress themes you can use to show off your latest images. Viewport Photo-Biyori Spotless Shutterbug WP Foto Work-a-holic Phloggin Fotofolio AutoFocus Nishita Infinity Reflection Sharpfolio Grace Like Our Site? 74 Comments Lalynn said:Beautiful! Leave a Reply Topics The Future of Blogging - a Collaborative Mindmap - The Steve Rubel Stream The Clip Report: An eBook on the Future of Media In the early 1990s when I began my career in PR there were clip reports. These were physical books that contained press clips. It seems downright archaic now but that’s how I learned about the press - by cutting, pasting up and photocopying clippings. My fascination with the media never abated. Today my role is to form insights into how the entire overlapped media landscape - the pros, social channels, and corporate content - is rapidly evolving and to help Edelman clients turn these learnings into actionable strategies. Today I am re-launching my Tumblr site with a new name, a new focus and a new format. It all kicks off today with a 15-page installment of The Clip Report.
YouTube Embedded Player Parameters - YouTube APIs and Tools - Google Code Overview This document explains how to embed a YouTube player in your application and also defines the parameters that are available in the YouTube embedded player. By appending parameters to the IFrame URL, you can customize the playback experience in your application. For example, you can automatically play videos using the autoplay parameter or cause a video to play repeatedly using the loop parameter. You can also use the enablejsapi parameter to enable the player to be controlled via the IFrame Player API. This page currently defines all parameters supported in any YouTube embedded player. Note: Embedded players must have a viewport that is at least 200px by 200px. Embed a YouTube player You can use any of the following methods to embed a YouTube player in your application and specify player parameters. Embed a player using an <iframe> tag The <iframe> tag below would load a 640x360px player that would play the YouTube video M7lc1UVf-VE.