24 Impressive Blog Plugins You Should Consider One of the great things about blogging is how easy it is to set up a blog on any of the multitude of blogging platforms. While there are many options for building your blog, one of the most popular platforms is WordPress.org. However, what you get when you set up a WordPress blog can be pretty basic depending on the theme you choose. Photo credit: Shutterstock.com Plugins extend and expand the functionality of your WordPress blog. Which Plugins Should You Use? When it comes to plugins, how do you choose which to add to your blog? To come up with this list, I asked my Facebook fans for suggestions. Popular plugins fall into a couple of categories: those that enhance your readers’ experience, and those behind the scenes that help you with blog management and optimization. How to Install Plugins For the sake of brevity, I picked a finite number to feature. To install any of these plugins, log in to your WordPress admin dashboard, click on Plugins and then search by name (see figure below).
10+ Resources For Free Professional Wordpress Themes The following list features some of the best WordPress designers, with free portfolio, magazine and minimalist themes, amongst many others, available for download. Woo Themes Woo Themes have some of the best premium themes out there, and every now and then they generously release a theme for free. One of their best free themes of all times is Irresistible, which is perfect for those of you looking for a life-streaming WordPress theme. Their other free themes include magazine themes, and straightforward minimalist blogs. Graph Paper Press Graph Paper Press has a small collection of free WordPress themes, which are the perfect choice for those of you looking for a stunning portfolio theme. Press 75 Press 75 releases one new, free WordPress themes theme every now and then. FrogsThemes FrogsThemes showcases some of the best in portfolio WordPress themes, and they always have a couple of free themes on display. Templatic Moon Themes Theme Junkie ThemeShift Shaken & Stirred Padd Solutions
Top 100 Most Beautiful Wordpress Themes WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. It is a very powerful tool with which some people exercise their right to speech, others just as a hobby or as a source of income. However, the first impact is provided by the site’s design so is important that the theme will be good and appropriate to site content. Below you can see the most beautiful 100 WordPress themes that we have gathered. Cumulus Imbalance Shaken AutoFocus+ Fotofolio Landscape Mansion SimpleFolio Smashing Multimedia Fullscreen Brave Zeenat Monokrome Portfolio – WPESP Theme Selecta Work-a-holic BlueBubble Lap of Luxury Katana Koi Bueno Notepad Theme The Seven Five Simplo Galaxy Aparatus Zexee Obscure Designpile Obscorp The Side Blog Theme Dangdoot Blissful Blog Voidy Delicate Boldy Titan Theme Simple Organization Neutra The Columnist Aurelius The WhatsUp WPCount Maimpok Reptile Satoshi Ulap Theme MiniCard LiveTwit Irresistible WildDreams Masinop
Top 10 Free WordPress 3.0 Ready Themes Just a few ago ago, WordPress introduced there 13th major release, the much anticipated ‘Thelonious’ (WP 3.0). As with every other major release, to accommodate all of the new features there has been some (mostly minor) compatibility issues with a number of themes. As such, the WP community has been working hard to update all of there themes and plugins to make them WP3.0 ready and to make best use of all of the exciting and new features. After some extensive research from todays author (Sven Salmonsson ) we have a list of his top ten favorite free WordPress 3.0 fully compatible themes. 1. Morning After is perhaps the original WordPress magazine-styled theme, with more than 100,000 downloads to date it is also by far the most popular. 2. Structure is a WP 3.0 theme available in four variants, all based on an attractive and effective minimalist style. 3. Mansion is a distinct theme geared toward photobloggers. 4. 5. The premium quality Magazeen theme oozes functionality and style. 6. 7.
Beautiful "Wordpress 3.0 Ready" Themes WordPress was once a simple blogging platform but it has now evolved. Today, WordPress is used as foundation of corporate website, photo gallery, portfolio site or Content Management System (CMS) and its undertaking in the future is limitless. As a WordPress user, we understand that it is important to keep up with its latest version. On 17th June 2010, WordPress launches 3.0 and took a significant leap from its previous 2.9. It has made tons of changes and added new features such as custom fields, custom post type, taxonomies and a lot more. If you are hosting your own WordPress blog, to ascertain your theme is WordPress 3.0 ready is necessary because it is stressful and extremely agitating to know that the plugin you intend to install is not functional or incompatible. Company Style Corporate style theme for your corporate website. The Morning After From banner to templates, everything is strategically placed in this theme. Mystique Orsted Theme AnimeStar Black Motion AutoFocus Gadget Akylas
10 Excellent WordPress Themes for Portfolios and Galleries Themes can extend WordPress into much more than just a blogging platform, and it’s common for theme developers to create themes with a focus on specific niches. For example, a few weeks ago we posted a collection of business WordPress themes that were aimed at giving business owners an easy way to get a great looking site online. So for this post, the focus is on portfolios and galleries. Work Work is an elegant portfolio theme built for showing off your work. On Assignment On Assignment is primed for photographers, videographers and journalists who need to feature their portfolio and connect with followers and potential clients with status updates and news/blog posts. Photography Photography is a theme built for photographers. Portfolio The Organic Portfolio Theme offers a clean, professional way of displaying artwork, design, photography and more. Blogfolio Blogfolio is an advance theme that provides unique layout options to display your portfolio and blog posts. Photolist Widescreen
Building a Stylish Blog Design Layout in WordPress Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been through the process of creating a stylish blog design in Photoshop, coding it up into a static HTML and CSS concept, and now we’ll put the whole thing together as a fully working WordPress theme. Follow this step by step walkthrough of the various WordPress theme files, and see how the HTML is split up and injected with PHP tags to provide the complete blogging functionality. At the end of the last tutorial, we were left with a working HTML and CSS concept of the blog homepage. A WordPress theme consists of multiple PHP files. The first step when creating any new theme is to create the series of files and copy across any image, Javascript or CSS assets your design uses into a new folder. /* Theme Name: Chris Spooner V3 Theme URI: Description: Chris Spooner WordPress Theme Version 3. At the top of the CSS file, you’ll need to specify some details about your theme in order for it to be detected by WordPress.
10 Basic Tips for Improving WordPress Themes A lot of people use WordPress as their blogging platform. After installing WordPress, newly christened WordPress users will usually try to find and download WordPress themes that they can use so that their site looks different from the default theme. Whether a WordPress theme is free or premium, there are plenty of ways to improve them. The following WordPress theme tips cover basic customization, styling and optimization. 1. Reduce the Size of Theme Images Images are an important part of every WordPress theme, yet WordPress theme developers sometimes forget about optimizing them. Optimizing images can save you in bandwidth consumption and can improve page response times for your blog readers. Photoshop, for example, offers a Save for Web feature that optimizes images for the web. Furthermore, you can use a lossless image optimization tool like Smush.it that will squeeze out excess file size without loss in image quality. Yahoo! 2. The Design Instruct favicon displayed in Firefox 3.6. 3.