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.

What I like about this theme is that it has very unique templates. For instance, you can create a portfolio site by choosing the appropriate template for your pages. The theme takes advantage of jQuery to give your visitors a more dynamic experience.

To sum things up, Block Theme is a very unique looking theme that is easy to deploy and customize. It’s pretty flexible and can handle your blog’s growth over the long-run. It certainly beats designing a theme from scratch.

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.

What I like about this theme is its simple design and user management features. It even allows you to have your own side-blog. So you can technically create a Q&A portal without relying on a sub-domain or sub-folder install to get it done. Answer Theme comes with multiple color schemes, which helps.

Overall, Answer Theme is a unique theme that lets you add yet another cool feature to your blog. Just like your forum and job boards, you will have to spend time to manage this section of your site properly. But it’s worth it all in the end.

In the past few months, I have written a series of posts on ways bloggers could go about evolving their blogs and taking them to the next level. Adding a job board, forum, and a chat room to your blog are all great things to do to make life easier for your visitors. But starting an online store can do that and give you a whole new way to make some revenue on the side (you are not planning to blog and starve, are you?). I am not suggesting you should start an Amazon.com-like store. A niche store that has items your visitors may find useful is a good way to start. You can sell your own products and branded items on the side as well.

Adding a store to your blog is not really that difficult. You can either do it with a third-party script or hire a web developer to do it for you. Hiring an e-commerce developer can be expensive for most folks. That’s why I love doing things with WordPress. There are just a ton of solutions out there for WordPress to get things done. WP Store is a killer WP theme that lets you start a store next to your blog. Whether you are planning to sell other people’s products or sell your own T-shirts, mugs, and other branded items, this theme can handle it.

I know what you may be thinking here. Who has time to go and set up a fully-fledged e-commerce store when you have your blog to run. WP Store is more than just a theme. It comes with everything one would need to manage a store with minimal effort. You can define shipping, tax, and other terms in the back-end and have the theme take care of the rest for you. You can even set up an affiliate program for your store and let others do the promotion and the selling for you.

The fact that WP Store comes with a sample catalog of products means you won’t have to spend too much time learning the ropes with this theme. Depending on the type of store you want to run, you may have to change the style of WP Store. You also want to have some products to sell (you can start with your branded products). If you already have an inventory of products to sell, you can mass upload them using a CSV file.

You don’t want to add a store for the sake of doing it. There is a reason I don’t have a store for this blog. Prior planning is a must before starting your own store. A store can bring a whole new dimension to your blog. Just make sure you don’t let it take away from your readers’ experience on your blog. With WP Store, you can at least save some time and effort, starting your very own store.

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.

The theme is ad ready and image friendly as well. You can easily add your images and other types of multi-media files to your website fast. What’s fun about this theme is the fact that it can be used to build a fully-fledged portal with your blog hosted on the side.

This theme won’t write your content for you, but it can save you time and effort when starting your green blog. A portion of your fee goes towards helping the earth as well. If you are ready to start your blog or give your green blog a new make over, Eco Pro is a good starting place.

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.

This may be very similar to the previous Wordpress apps that we have seen on iPhone. But you can’t underestimate the iPad effect here. The screen size does make a lot of difference. Typing on the device is much easier as well. The app works with both Wordpress.com and your hosted Wordpress website. It also supports geo-tagging but you will have to have an iPad 3G to take advantage of it.

The app is certainly a nice step for Wordpress to get involved with the iPad. It is still not perfect. The editor can certainly be improved. But the app does let you write down your blog posts and store them for later. So you can always note down your blog ideas when you are on the go. Considering that the app is free and young, only good things should be ahead for it.

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.

The theme comes with member pages, image slide-show, and report buttons to let you manage your board more effectively. Security is always going to be an issue with forum software, but since you are using Wordpress to power up your forum, you have plenty of security plugins that you can take advantage of to protect your forum.

The theme is pretty affordable and comes with the PSD files you need to customize the look and feel of your forum. The code is not hidden, so you can always change the code if you are not satisfied with what you get. So as it turns out, you don’t have to use vBulletin or PHPBB to start your very own forum. All you need is Wordpress.

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.

BusinessCard: a very simple and clean theme designed to help you create your online business card in form of a website. Makes it pretty easy to build a mini-site about you and your projects.

MyStream: a colorful Wordpress theme for anyone interested in starting a personal blog. Shows you streams from your popular social networking sites as well.

As you can tell, starting a personal blog couldn’t be any easier with Wordpress. So what are you waiting for? Just go and register your own name as your domain and get going!

In a perfect world, your readers will take the time to remember to submit your best content to all relevant social media services around. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if you got some exposure on those sites for all the work you have done without having to lift a finger. That’s actually possible as long as your content provides unique value to your readers. You also want to have the proper tools on your blog to make it easy for your readers to submit your posts to those sites. If you are running your blog on Wordpress, you are in luck. There are plenty of plugins that make it so easy for your visitors to share your content on top social networking sites.

Fixed Social Plugin is an amazing little plugin that is worth a try for anyone who’s looking to get more exposure for his/her content on sites such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other top sites. This plugin is very flexible. It lets you pick and choose the style of your buttons and also the ones you want to show on your blog.

You also have control on where your buttons show up. They can show up horizontally at the top of your blog or vertically on the right side of your screen. You can even no follow the links to avoid leaking PageRank.

I would have loved to have the option to customize the look and feel of this plugin further from the back-end. However, the plugin is pretty easy to install, and you can always change the settings if you know some coding. What I like about this plugin is the fact that it sits these buttons on the top of your page in a non-intrusive manner. It may not work for every blog, but it’s worth a try. Probably the easiest way to make your blog more social friendly.

Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform around. It’s not only free but can easily be enhanced through its huge database of plugins. But like every popular platform, Wordpress is susceptible to spam attacks as well. If you don’t believe me, just start a Wordpress blog with no security plugins and write a couple of posts on it. Once your site is crawled by Google and other search engines, you are going to see those nasty spammers make their way to your blog with their Viagra and other obscene plugs. That’s why you don’t want to abandon your Wordpress blog as far as its security is concerned.

reCAPTCHA is a powerful Wordpress plugin that helps you manage spam much more easily. Everybody who has been on the Internet for more than a few months has seen those annoying CAPTCHA systems. Yes. They can be annoying, but if you are getting a lot of spam comments on your blog, you’ll have to do something about it. I am sure your audience would understand. With reCAPTCHA, you can stop spammers in their tracks and make the process less convenient for them.

Installing reCAPTCHA is simple, especially if you happen to run your site using a popular CMS such as Wordpress. All you have to do is download its plugin, and you are all set. You do need to sign up for you free keys to get this plugin to work, but other than that everything else should be a breeze.

reCAPTCHA can not only protect your blog against spam comments, it can also protect the e-mail addresses used in your blog posts as well. That’s especially useful as there are many spammers who grab e-mails off web-pages and use them to further spam people.

If you are tired of spam like me and want to protect your Wordpress blog against spam attacks, reCAPTCHA is a good plugin to use. It doesn’t stop all attacks but does handle bot attacks very well. I do encourage adding Wordpress Hash Code plugin to your blog as well to cover all the bases. With the help of these plugins, you can focus more on writing great content and less on worrying about managing spam comments.

What’s your favorite anti-spam Wordpress plugin?

I don’t know about you, but I never realized I had so many posts until one day I stopped and noticed the actual number. On another blog of mine, I blog on a daily basis and have been doing it for 9 years. After a while, you stop focusing on the number of posts you have and spend more time adding quality to your posts. But posts add up quickly, especially if you write a new one everyday. If you happen to have many posts on your blog, you want to make sure you provide your readers with the chance to go through your other posts and spend more time on your blog. That’s where WDTGFH comes in. It’s a powerful Wordpress plugin that let you users discover new posts on your blog and get more out of it.

If you have bought anything from Amazon recently, you have probably seen the above message. Essentially, Amazon is trying to encourage you to browse through more of its products and spend even more money on the site. That’s exactly what WDTGFH does, except it focuses on your blog posts instead of actual products. It keeps track of what stories people click on and provides a link to them on the source page. So your readers can go through your posts and figure out what posts other readers have found interesting after viewing a specific post.

If you happen to use Wordpress, you are going to love WDTGFH. It not only makes it easy for people to find your other posts, it can help you retain your readers for a longer period of time. Of course, you can always combine this plugin with Random Posts or Popular Posts to get the most out of it.

The plugin is very easy to install and flexible at the same time. It allows you to change the look and feel of it from the back-end. If you know PHP coding, there are plenty of cool things you can accomplish with this plugin. Of course, you don’t need any knowledge of PHP to make basic changes to this plugin. If you happen to have many posts on your blog and want to get them the exposure they deserve, Where Do They Go From Here? is a handy plugin to try.