Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category:
5 Excellent WordPress Frameworks for Pro Bloggers
WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms around. It makes managing content and creating super dynamic blogs very easy. Most new WordPress bloggers get started with those free themes before graduating to premium and custom design themes. Not everyone can afford to pay thousands of dollars to a designer to develop a new WordPress theme for their blog. Thankfully, there are many powerful frameworks that you can take advantage of to save yourself time and money. These WordPress frameworks act as a skeleton for your blog. You can still achieve a unique look and feel for your website and do it much faster than you would with a custom design theme.
These 5 powerful WordPress frameworks can save you money and time when developing a new design for your WordPress blog:
Headway Themes: a very powerful framework that can be easily customized to fit your blog’s needs. It has a powerful back-end and is search engine friendly too.
Thesis: one of the most popular frameworks for WordPress. It has been getting a lot of heat recently for its stance on GPL. Still, it has a very powerful back-end that you can take advantage of to optimize your website for SEO, customize its look and feel, and change those small details without touching your code. Read more »
How to Add a LinkedIn Share Button To Your Blog
In the past few weeks, I have talked about how important it is for all bloggers to be involved on LinkedIn. Promoting your content on Facebook and Twitter is a must, but LinkedIn can help bring you more visitors and reach a whole new audience. While you can always hope for your visitors to submit your posts to LinkedIn, you can always tip things in your favor by adding a share button to your blog. There are plenty of places that you can pick up share buttons for Facebook and Twitter. That’s not the case for LinkedIn. LinkedIn Share Button is a decent WordPress plugin that does the job. It adds a LinkedIn button to your blog that your visitors can use to share your stories with their LinkedIn contacts.
This plugin is pretty simple to use and gives you enough options to customize its behavior. You get 3 designs to choose from for your button. You can add your own buttons if you know some coding. I personally use this button at the end of my posts (since there is no compact-style button available), but you can choose where you want your LinkedIn button to show up (pages, home-page, and …).
Start a Colorful Blog with Block Theme
There are millions of blogs on the Internet these days. A whole lot of people have taken a chance and started blogging about what they are passionate about. But there are so many of these blogs that use boring and plain themes. It does not help when people use free themes that are being used by thousands of other bloggers. Premium theme are not exclusive to you either. But the price tag does keep a whole lot of people away.
Block Theme is a colorful and very attractive WordPress theme that gives you the chance to start an attractive blog or portal in no time. Block Theme can handle your content easily, no matter how many photos or stories you have on your blog.
The theme is designed to handle images easily. You don’t have to jump through hoops to add your content to it. It has a very unique design that is modern and catchy. It’s pretty easy to make small changes from this themes options pages without making changes to your code.
DirectoryPress: Add a Web Directory To Your Blog
In the past, I have talked about ways you can add more features to your blog and provide more value to your readers, as a result. It’s all about finding ways to evolve your blog. Adding a web directory to your blog (as a resource for your visitors) is one way to do just that. DirectoryPress is a cool WordPress script that lets you accomplish that task in a flash.
Web directories may be the old school way of organization information, but it’s still very effective. No matter what niche you are in, you are not going to be the only player involved. It pays to do some research and find out about goods and services that your readers may find handy. DirectoryPress is designed to let you organize your information in a more effective fashion.
Answer Theme: Build a Question/Answer Portal with WordPress
As a blogger, you should always be on your toes to find ways to provide more value to your readers and get them more involved in your community. A good way to do that is by adding a Q&A portal to your blog. That way you can let your visitors get more involved and share their questions and experiences with others in your community. Designing such a portal from scratch can take a lot of time and cost you a bit. Thanks to Answer Theme, you can get the job done fast and in an affordable fashion.
Answer Theme is pretty straight-forward to use and comes with everything you need to give your readers the chance to discuss their questions and experiences with the world. The “Auto Install” feature will give you a head-start with your site. So you won’t have to set everything up from scratch. You get to display the latest questions by your community members on your home-page. The same goes for popular and unanswered questions. Read more »
Start Green Blogging with EcoPro for Wordpress
Wordpress is one of the best blogging platforms around (if not the best). It can save you a lot of time and effort and help you get started with your blog fast. Green blogging is one of the most popular niches in the blogging world these days. Everybody’s talking about green jobs, green revolution, and emerging green technologies. So there are plenty of opportunities to start a green blog today. Thanks to themes such as Eco Pro, you can get the job done without investing too much time and money. The theme is designed specifically for anyone interested in starting a green portal and can be easily customized to fit your needs.
For starters, the makers of Eco Pro will donate 10% of everything you pay to help save the environment. That’s a very noble way to run business. The theme comes with a featured section that you can use to push your favorite page or section of your website. You can also change the color and look and feel of your website by changing the color scheme in the back-end. You can have more than one featured story and even fit videos in your featured section.
Blog Like a Pro with Wordpress for iPad
Wordpress is one of the most powerful blogging platforms around, and it is being used by a whole lot of bloggers as their content management of choice. Wordpress platform enables bloggers to blog from their PC, Mac, and even their smart-phone. Thanks to latest upgrade made by the people behind Wordpress, you can now blog like a pro on your iPad as well. Since the iPad comes with a super large screen, bloggers are going to find it much easier to use it as a blogging tool for the road. Wordpress for iPad allows you to write posts, upload photos, and everything else you would do if you were behind your desktop computer.
Wordpress for iPad is a universal app. That means you can not only use it on your iPad but its smaller cousin the iPhone. The app is designed to help you manage your blogging life on the road much more effectively. It enables you to write posts on the go, manage your comments, and add photos to your posts as well. You can also preview your posts and make final changes before submitting them.
Top 5 Best Social Media Plugins For Wordpress
So you have decided to start a Wordpress blog? Maybe you have been using Wordpress for years and are now ready to drive more traffic to it through the social media. The good news is that you won’t have to know any programming or write a single line of code. There are plenty of powerful social media plugins that enable you to add buttons, widgets, and other tools to your posts to give you readers a chance to promote your top posts. As a blogger, you should pick and choose the communities that you want your readers to submit your posts too. Not every social networking site will work for your blog, so why not focus on those that do? I personally focus on Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Facebook. I have tested Google Buzz on a few of my websites, but my main focus is on those 4 services. If you too are interested in making your blog more social friendly and get more traffic from those sites, here are 5 top social media WP plugins you should look at:
Digg Digg: one of the best social media plugins for Wordpress platform. It covers almost any social network that matters. Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google Buzz, and Digg are all covered by this plugin.
Tweetmeme: a simple to use plugin that adds Tweetmeme buttons to your blog. Twitter is one of the best sources of traffic for blogs, which is why this plugin is worth a serious consideration. Read more »
Build a Forum Around Your Blog with gForums
I have talked about in the past about various ways you can improve your blog and take it to the next level. Adding a job board, a Wiki, and a forum to your blog are all great ways to solidify your community and make people want to come back to your blog for more. Many bloggers don’t want to use with too many scripts. They take time to master Wordpress but don’t want to do the same with a service such as vBulletin. It’s true that vBulletin has a lot of forum features not found in other packages on the market, but you don’t need ot use vBulletin to add a discussion board to your blog.
gForums is a pretty unique Wordpress theme that turns your blog into a fully-fledged forum. And you won’t have to touch vBulletin or any other piece of software to get it done. In order to take full advantage of gForums, you want to install it in a sub-directory or sub-domain of your blog. So you are going to need a new Wordpress install to start your own Wordpress forum. But the rest is pretty easy. The theme is very easy to customize and comes with standard features you would expect from a forum software.
4 Cool Wordpress Themes For Your Personal Blog
There have been many bloggers who have made a business out of branding their own names. If you happen to have had any success blogging or doing anything else for that matter, you want to make sure you build your domain name (e.g. [Firstname][Lastname].com) to help people find you more effectively and leverage the site to push your other endeavors. Personal blogs are also useful for those who just want to aggregate all their activities on social networking sites in one place. Even if you don’t have a plan for your domain name, you still want to take the first steps to make sure you get the proper credit from the search engines.
Thanks to Wordpress, anyone can put up a website in a matter of minutes. There are plenty of themes that you can choose from to give your website the look and feel you crave. But if you are interested in giving your visitors ways to contact you or follow your work online on your blog, these 4 personal blog Wordpress themes come in handy:
Social Life: integrates all your favorite social media services into one page. So essentially, you won’t have to do anything other than doing what you have been doing on Twitter and other social networking sites. This theme takes care of the rest.
AntiSocial: one of the best aggregator themes on the market. If you happen to be invovled heavily in the social media, you are going to love using this theme. It’s pretty flexible and makes it easy to create a website that your visitors can use to get in touch with your work. Read more »
