Category Archives: Wordpress
10 WordPress Plugins That Can Make a Huge Difference to Your Blog
WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world because of its open source capabilities. Anyone can program a plugin for WordPress, so there are thousands of options out there for any budding blogger. The list has been culled, and here are ten of the best WordPress plugins that can make a huge difference to your blog.
This is a great solution to interlink your blog posts, getting the most out of your SEO. SEO Smart Links will automatically take the keywords and phrases on your blog and link them to the relevant categories and tags. Increasing the number of links within your blog has a chance to boost your page ranking and page views.
Keep your readers informed with a link to subscribe to comments on your posts. Readers are notified by email about further entries to a post, enticing them to return to your page and respond to the response. Commenters have plenty of options available to them: they can block the notifications, unsubscribe to posts, and even change the email address to which they are notified.
Top Commentators creates a widget in your sidebar to show who is commenting the most on your blog. There are options and customizations for this plugin that make it even easier to use.
Mingle WordPress changes your WordPress blog into a social water water cooler. The plugin allows for Profile Pages, Friending, Friend Activity Pages and a Full Member Directory. Instead of having ‘just a blog,’ you can develop a full blown community with this plugin.
ShopperPress: Online Store WordPress Theme With 23 Awesome Design Options
For the last couple of months, I have share a lot of WordPress themes for online store as base on my observation, WordPress themes developers have started to develop more WordPress themes which outside the scope of magazine/blog styling to focus on more advanced WordPress themes such as online store, portfolio site, micro-blogging and Q&A site like Yahoo! Answers.
For example, WooThemes start to develop few WordPress themes such as Retreat and Cinch that will make your WordPress blog works like Tumblr which will come with iPhone app to make it easier for you to update your blog and share what is happening around you straight away.
And for ShopperPress which comes with the $79 price tag, has developed a really good WordPress theme for online store which I think the best among other online store WordPress themes. It is because Shopperpress is jam-packed with great features and comes with 23 great templates that come for free.
Among features that you will fall in love are:
- Sales Analysis & Tracking – You can view newly placed orders and exporting sales & customer data for use in a spreadsheet or QuickBooks.
- Inventory and Promotions - ShopperPress includes full inventory control, order management for viewing newly placed orders, “Out of Stock” Messages and discount coupon codes for gift certificates. It has also built in price variable options such as “buy 1 get 1 free” and a fixed cost mark-up on the entire store prices.
- Security – ShopperPress is a secure online system that supports hundreds of extra security plugins for WordPress as well as HTTPS/SSL secure page.
For today post, I would like to share 14 Shopper templates which have the best look from all 23 templates which are available for you to choose from.
Camera shopper is a very popular shopping cart theme for selling electronic products online such as TV’s and cameras.
This theme is popular among the animal lovers, this shopping cart theme is ideal for selling all sort of animal and pet products online.
30 Awesome ThemeForest Themes That Will Kick Your WordPress Theme’s Ass!
I am pretty sure that most of us have heard about ThemeForest as it is the biggest marketplace for website templates and CMS themes especially for WordPress. There are actually 610 WordPress themes for you to choose from at extremely reasonable price ($40 at most) for the quality that you will get.
However, one thing that you probably don’t know is ThemeForest is the first place you should visit if you are looking for WordPress themes that out of ordinary and have new features that most of WordPress theme developers don’t offer.
Need proofs?
One of the examples is the usage of CU3BER. At the moment, there is no other premium WordPress developers have used such great and awesome 3D slider tool except those in ThemeForest marketplace. Most of them still ‘stuck’ with the boring 2D slider.
Another example is ThemeForest is the first place where WordPress Theme with ‘one-page’ concept first introduced which I love so much. In case you have no idea what is the ‘one-page’ concept, you can check out the Shape Shifter and SOFA theme below. From these WordPress themes, you will get the idea on what is the ‘one-page’ concept is all about.
So, for this post, I would like to share with you top 30 WordPress Themes from ThemeForest from the 610 WordPress themes collection which I regard as the best among the best. I am actually impressed how great and well-built these themes. I am sure you will too.
Enjoy!
Hyperion
Hyperion is clean and stylish WordPress theme well suited for any business, portfolio, blogger, or anyone needing a beautiful website.
Minimalista
Minimalista is an Ajax WordPress theme, best suited for a professional and minimalist portfolio. It comes with 6 colors skins, and one custom file to put easily your own colour.
How to cloak affiliate links in your WordPress blog?
Affiliate program can be a great source of online income for a WordPress blog as most of online products from various types do offer affiliate program for WordPress bloggers to join. We simply have to use the links that are given to us to promote the product.
Whoever who buy the products through the given links will make us entitle for commission from the owner of the online products. If we know the best way to market the products, affiliate program can provide us decent income for out WordPress blog besides advertising.
Link Cloaking – Do not lose any money again
One of the tips that you should know about affiliate marketing is link cloaking. Basically, instead of using the given links to hyperlink words or images, you ‘mask’ those links with another links.
The importance of this tip is it will ensure that your potential buyer does not remove your ID which sometimes can easily be taken out from the given affiliate links. Another reason is it will make the links look pretty instead of filled with a lot of weird characters.
From
https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?cl=29717&c=ib&aff=44343
to
http://www.huzzer.com/recommends/WpClassipress- Online Classifieds WordPress Theme
For your information, there is always tendency for others, although not everybody to go straight to the online product’s website when those who are interested with the online products realised that we are using affiliate links. I also feel the same thing. How about you?
How can you cloak your affiliate link?
There are actually plenty of methods for you to cloak your affiliate links in your WordPress blog. The easiest method is through WordPress plugin such as Simple Link Cloaker and Affiliate Link Cloaker. However, through this method, it has the possibility to bring problems in future for example if the plugins are no longer been maintained by the developer.
In the end, the plugin may not be compatible with the latest version of WordPress. It will then affect the cloaked affiliate links in our old blog post as the links may probably will no longer working at that time.
Therefore, I will to give tutorial on simple way how can you cloak your affiliate links. The best part is this method will not affect your WordPress databases or systems and your .htaccess file. So, you will not have to worry as if something goes wrong, the worst thing that can happen is the cloaked links will not work. That’s all.
For your information, I learn this method from Keller Hawthorne from Fresheventure.com.
The simple steps are:
1) Open Notepad program.
2) The write below code in the program
<?PHP
Header("Location: PUT YOUR AFFILATE LINK OVER HERE");
Exit;
?>
3) Then, save the file as index.php and make sure that for the ‘Save as type’ section, you choose ‘All Files’ instead of ‘Text Documents’. In order to make it easier for the next steps, it is advisable for you to save it in Desktop.
4) You have to create a new folder in the new desktop to put in all of your index.php files as you have to create index.php file for any affiliate link you want to cloak.
5) However, to make the cloaked link to be more pretty like the one that I show you above, you have to create subfolder base on the category of the affiliate links. For example, for Huzzer Magazine, I make subfolder base on the developer of WordPress themes.
Example of the structure for the folder will be Recommends (main folder) > Templatic (subfolder) > eShop (sub-subfolder).
With this structure, you have to save the index.php file for the eShop theme under the ‘eShop folder’ and the links will look like www.huzzer.com/Recommends/Templatic/eShop.
6) After you have dove all of the steps above, you just need to upload the ‘Recommends folder’ into your WordPress blog’s folder in your hosting. If there is only one website that you host in your hosting, you simply need to upload the folder into public_html folder.
If not, you have to look for folder that you install your WordPress blog. The folder will have a lot of .php files starting with ‘wp-’ such wp-config.php and wp-register.php.
7) Then, after you have uploaded the folder, give it a try. Try to hyperlink any words in your WordPress blog and if you have properly followed the above steps, the link will bring you to the online products which you use its affiliate link in the Notepad just now.
If there is any error, please check back the link that you use and the spelling especially if there is any capital letter or ‘s’ at the end of your folders.
That’s all. Really simple right?
By the way, if you join new affiliate program in future, you just have to make new subfolder and upload it into the ‘Recommends folder’. You do not have to create another main folder again or to upload back all of the folders.
Which one do you prefer?
Which method of link cloaking that do you prefer? WordPress plugin or the method that I just taught you? For me, I prefer the above method as I find it more flexible and catchy as it is up to your creativity to make the cloaked links looks great.
What’s your say?
OnTheGo – Awesome Hand Drawn WordPress Themes by Elegant Themes
It can be really boring to have WordPress blogs that look like others especially in terms of design. Some of us including me can spent couple hours for the sake of looking WordPress theme that is not only looking good but unique.
One of my favorite types of WordPress themes is hand drawn WordPress theme. It is totally out of the box, looks great and creative plus it will make our WordPress blog looks more unique as compared to others.
In case you have missed my previous post, I have reviewed Left Handed, the first full hand drawn WordPress theme which is from Obox Design. However, if you have missed the post, you can check it out through below link.
Refresh WordPress Blog Design with Hand-Drawn WordPress Theme.
Now, there is another full hand drawn WordPress theme which I suspect the second of its type. However, for this time it is not from Obox Design but Elegant Themes. It is called OnTheGo.
OnTheGo comes with 5 elements that make it a great and well-functioning WordPress theme. They are:
Optional Blog Structure - Let you to use your WordPress as a normal blog as in default, the theme will be set your WordPress to be a CMS with a Page-Based structure.
Automated Thumbnail Resizing – Thumbnail plays crucial role for WordPress blog as it brings color to WordPress. With this feature, you do not need to resize your image to make the thumbnail feature to work.
In Depth Theme Option – This element is the most important thing that a WordPress should have as it helps WordPress bloggers especially those who have limited knowledge in web development to personalize their WordPress theme.
Advertising Management – There will be some point which we feel that we want to monetize our WordPress blog. With this feature, bloggers do not have to install external plugin. Your ad can be taken care from your theme option page.
4 unique color scheme – OnTheGo comes with 4 different color schemes which will give you some alternative in the color scheme of your WordPress blog.
Below are few screenshots from the theme.
My Verdict: OnTheGo Hand Drawn WordPress Theme – Yes or no?
Looks great right? The only thing that I think it should be better is the size and type of font that is being used. Personally, I don’t like the theme that uses small font especially. I love the size and the font of Huzzer Magazine. How about you?
The best part of this theme is that it is developed by Elegant Themes. That means, the cost of having one is pretty cheap as you only have to pay $19.95 per year and you will entitle to only this theme but all of themes from Elegant Themes including support.
Pretty good offer right?
If you are interested in knowing more about OnTheGo or want to buy this theme straight away, you may find below links to be handy.
Your Verdict: Left-Handed or OnTheGo?
Which hand drawn WordPress theme that you prefer? Left-Handed by Obox Design or OnTheGo by Elegant Themes? For me, I am more towards the theme from Obox Design. How about you?
How to Add Fancy Social Bookmarking Icons in WordPress Manually?
It can be pretty boring to have small social bookmarking icons which most of bloggers use at the end of their post. It will also not bring any excitement for our blog readers to click on them to help us to promote our blog post.
So, for today post, I would like to share a quick and straightforward tutorial on how can you use your preferred social bookmarking icons that you found in the internet and put them at the end of every blog post in your WordPress blog.
Here is the example of the effect that you will get when you use below tutorial on your WordPress blog.
If you bring your cursor on the icon, it will turn to grey.
Cool right?
The quick tutorial…
First, you have to open your CSS file and add below code into it. You can the code anywhere but it is advisable to put it after last code line in the CSS file so that it would be easier to delete if you want to in the future.
#share-container { background:url(images/horiz-borders.gif) repeat-x bottom; height:80px; padding:10px 0 25px 15px;}
|
For the image file that I have highlighted in red is for the horizontal grey line that you can find on the top and bottom of the social icons. While for the image file highlighted in yellow, it is the most important image that you need to have for this tutorial as it is the image of the social icons.
To personalize the social icons section for your WordPress blog, you can replace both images with your own but do make sure that the images that you are going to replaced have the same size with the previous ones. If not, you may need to adjust slightly the above code.
If you do not want to use your icons and want to use the same icons like the above, you can download the image from the link below. Then, you have to upload the image into the images folder which is located under theme that you are using. (Public html>WP Content>Themes>Your Themes>Images)
And for the icons, you can find the icons that you love by searching them in the internet. However, you may find the icons that you will love from the post that I have posted before.
Top 13 Perfect Designed Hand Drawn Social Bookmarking Icons
Then, after you have finished with your editing in the CSS file, you now have to open the single.php file for you to place social icons in every post of your WordPress blog.
You have to find <?php the_content(); ?> inside single.php as it represents your blog post. Then, if you want to have the social icons on top of your blog post, you have to add social icons code that I am going to give you in a moment before the <?php the_content(); ?>. But, if you want it after your blog post, you have to add the social icons code after the <?php the_content(); ?>.
Download below file:
Code – Social Icons for WordPress
After you have added the code, hit save button and refresh your blog.
Now, you will have your very own personalized fancy social bookmarking icons in your WordPress blog.
The ending…
Do you have your own personalized social icons for your WordPress blog or use the icons that you get by using WordPress plugin? Which one do you prefer and will work well with you?
For me, I prefer to have my own personalized social icons. How about you?
17 WordPress Themes for Musicians Which Will Make Them Sing All Day Long
Internet nowadays plays a really important role for the success musicians and bands. It is because those who are the target customers spend most of their time in the internet and prefer to download songs from the internet instead of have to go to music to store to get the latest album from their favorite singers.
* For your information on how big is the market for music industry in the online world:
While consumers bought more than a billion individual digital tracks in the United States, which accounts for a majority of online sales worldwide, they bought only 65 million digital albums in 2008.
Therefore, it is totally a waste to ignore this new environment for the music industry as if they (record labels and musicians) fail to cope with the change, they may lost in the battle with others who actively involved and built their present in the online world.
Among those who have succeeded to integrate in music with online world is ITunes and Radiohead.
For ITunes, in has managed to sell 9.9 billion songs from early 2003 to early 2009 which accounting for 70% of worldwide online digital music sales base on Wikipedia.
On the other hand, Radiohead switched their marketing strategy by letting their fans to set their own price they would like to pay for Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbow through online site. Then only, the band had the physical release of the album. The result – more than three million copies of the album were distributed in the first year, in digital and physical formats plus the album still made more money than either of the band’s previous two records.
So, if you are a musician or looking for WordPress themes that will help you to build website for musician, you will definitely happy with the themes that you are going to show you. For me, all the themes below looks great and will definitely suit for those who are planning to make website for musician through WordPress platform.
Backstage
Tribal
Grunge Life
Cold Stone
Lumin
Pop Life 56
Pop Life 76
Pop Life 84
TV Elements
Tubular
Church
BSocial
Toxy Music
Band Website
Office Space
Depth
Do you have anything else to add?
Do you know if there are still WordPress themes that you think will suit for musician? I am sure that I may have missed few of themes. It would be great if you can share them over here?
And, how about the above themes? Is there any theme that you think will not suit for those who are planning to use it as website for musician?
I would love to hear feedback.
Cheers!
8 Radically Simple Ways to Make Your WordPress Blog Runs Like A Cheetah
Ensuring our WordPress blog is at its optimum speed is crucial as it will affect the very first impression of our blog visitors as site loading is the very first thing they will have to face before they can enjoy our blog post.
If the loading time is terribly slow, it will definitely piss our readers off and most important thing if they are your ‘first-time’ site visitors. They will probably never come back or cannot find your blog whenever if they want to especially if they come from the search engines.
So, for today post I would love to share 8 really simple and basic ways to reduce your WordPress blog loading time. I have tried my best to reduce all those technical stuffs in the list so that you have no problem to understand the ways to improve the loading time of your WordPress blog.
Enjoy!
1. Upgrade to the latest WordPress version
This is pretty obvious. WordPress will never release any new version of WordPress if it will not make your WordPress blog better. Sometimes, it makes me wonder why some of us hesitate to upgrade their WordPress blog.
It is plain easy as you just need to click the update button and everything else will be done for you. It only takes less than a minute.
p/s: Have you upgraded to the latest WordPress version that has just been released?
2. Delete unused plugins
You must not used unnecessary amount of plugins for your WordPress blog and you have to deleted theme form the server. It is because it can dramatically affect the speed of your WordPress blog as it may contain tons of scripts and codes.
Remember this – blog with more features is not necessarily a blog that people will love. Sometimes, simplicity is the king.
Ask yourselves – do your blog need such great amount of plugins to be a better blog?
3. Install WP Super Cache Plugin
I am pretty sure that you have heard about this plugin as there are a lot of blogs out there that regard this plugin as a must have plugin for a WordPress blog.
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
In none technical words, it will use the ‘image’ of your site and use it each time your readers visit your blog instead of has to process same data each time your readers visit your blog. So, it will reduce the burden of your server and therefore, your WordPress blog can process faster.
4. Install WP CSS
With this plugin GZIP and strip whitespace from your CSS files. It allows you to confidently use @import inside a CSS file and not worry about what happens on the user’s end. It will look through your style.css file and put any @import files into it.
For those who are not familiar with the above technical stuff, may find it hard to understand. The important thing you should know is it can definitely make your WordPress blog faster.
(Tests were measured using a Firefox plugin called Firebug. Firefox was run a Mac Pro (2008) using OS X 10.5.3. Eight CSS files that were being included in this test: typography.css, form.css, list.css, special.css, skin.css, menu.css, other.css, sIFR-screen.css – all created to simulate an average size of a typical website.)
5. Rid Off Hotlinking
Hotlinking can a really huge problem if there are a lot sites hotlinked with your WordPress blog. They will drag down your WordPress blog as they will make your server load increasingly high.
For those who do not know about hotlink, hotlink is a term that is being coined when someone else/site uses data especially images from your site. So, although others are visiting the blogs that have hotlinked you, the images that come out in their blogs will be from your server. So, it will increase the bandwidth usage excessively.
Sometimes, hotlinking is called bandwidth theft.
Below is how you can prevent hotlinking in your site through .htaccess file:
|
#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option |
You just need update the .htacces file and change the domain name above with yours. The last line is an image that will display instead of the hotlinked image– how about an advert for your site?
6. Turn Off Post Revision
WordPress starts to have Post Revision feature after it launched the 2.6 version of WordPress. Although it has its advantages, it also comes with disadvantages.
One of the disadvantages is whenever a post is edited, a new row will be created in wp_posts table. Hence if your posts or pages got edited 10 times, you will have 10 new rows in wp_posts table.
In no time your wp_posts table will be filled up and the post ID will be huge.
To know how you can riff off this feature, Lester Chan has covered this topic in details.
7. Reduce Image Size
Images make our blog post looks great but it can also come with cost. Images that are in high resolution will use a lot of bandwidth and therefore affect your WordPress blog’s loading time.
With WP Smush.it, it will help you to reduce the size of images in your WordPress blog by reducing its quality with no obvious impact on the images.
8. Optimize Your WordPress Blog Database
Just like a computer, we have to defragment the database of our WordPress blog and to ensure in to be clutter free.
This process can be done manually and automatically through WordPress plugin.
For manual process, you have to locate the database of your WordPress in myPhpAdmin, select all the tables in the Check Boxes, select the Optimise Tables Option.
For automatic process, you have to install easy to use WordPress plugin called Optimize Database by Joost De Valk of Yoast.com. After you have downloaded it, just hit the ‘Optimize Now’ button.
This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated.
Do you have any suggestion?
Do you have any suggestion on the ways that you have used to increase the speed of your WordPress blog? I am sure that I have missed some of them. How about you help me out? I would really appreciate it.
Classifieds Theme – Professionally Designed Classifieds WordPress Theme
For those who knows Mark Fail, will definitely impress by him as he has developed many great WordPress themes especially ShopperPress, an online store WordPress theme. Base on m observation, basically Mark Fail’s WordPress themes design is more toward commercial website and tries not to have blog elements in the themes he created.
And to expand his portfolio in as WordPress theme developer, he has acquired an Classifieds WordPress theme and have totally redesigned the theme and make it looks unique and commercial as the theme originally looks identical to WpClassipress, pioneer in classifieds WordPress theme.
From
to
What do you think about this redesigned classifieds WordPress theme? Pretty cool and has the commercial looking right? If there is a WordPress blog uses this theme and I have not been told it is actually a WordPress blog, there is no way that I have any clue about the site is using WordPress to create such great looking online classifieds site.
The good site…
The good site of this WordPress theme is it come with 5 templates that you can choose from and it is well built with features that will you help to deal with Google as the this online classifieds WordPress theme is well integrated with Google Analytics, Google Adsense and Google Webmaster tool.
Instead of just Paypal, you can also have other method of payments if you decide to make paid online classifieds site instead of free. Classifieds Theme is built in with many different payment gateways allowing you to access different type of credit, debit and bank transfer payments on your shopping cart website.
The best part is the cost for you to have such great WordPress theme is pretty low for the features that this online classifieds site has to offer. This will only cost you $79 if you buy it right now as the original price is $179. This offer is only available for limited time.
You can buy this theme or check out the demo through below links:
Classifieds Theme ($79) | Demo
The bad side…
Everything in this world comes in pair. If there is good side, there will definitely bad side.
Unfortunately, the bad side of this theme is also the good side that I have just mentioned i.e. the 5 templates. Although it can give alternative to the users, I expect better design in terms of color scheme and better Featured Ad section.
You will know what I am trying to say with below images of all 5 templates.
Personally, I think only the first template that looks great and for the others, they are unacceptably dull and boring. To be honest, I prefer the design of the theme under the previous owner. I’m not sure what has gone wrong with Mark Fail on this project as for his other projects, they are look awesome and well designed.
What do you think?
For the Featured ad section, I think the problem is the type of font that is being used. It doesn’t look great and suit the theme. I think if other font is being used, the look and feel of this section will radically improve.
Will you buy this theme?
What do you think about the theme? Will you buy one if you are planning to have online classifieds site? For me, I will not as I believe that there is better option. How about you?
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