The Good And The Bad Of Free WordPress Themes

WordPress Themes

If you are building your first WordPress website, or if you are working on a very limited budget the option of using one of the thousands of free WordPress themes that are available can make a lot of sense. However, like anything which is free, there are going to be some positives and some negatives which you need to weigh up before proceeding. To help you, we have highlighted some of the pros and some of the cons of free WordPress themes.

To break with the norm, let’s start with the negatives first:

#1 No warranties: Because they are given away for nothing, free WordPress themes will not carry any warranties. This means that once you have built your website, if something goes wrong you have no comeback on the developer.

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5 Things To Think About When Choosing WordPress Plugins

Choosing WordPress Plugins

New WordPress users often underestimate the importance of WordPress plugins and add-ons for their website. Plugins are extremely useful, and can take your website from mediocre and not really successful to widely successful and very engaging.

However, you need to choose the right WordPress plugins if you want to do this. Some plugins are great, others aren’t so good. Some plugins will work with your website, others probably won’t. Below are our top five tips for choosing WordPress plugins for your website:

  1. Pay attention to user reviews:

Although this is probably pretty self-explanatory, it is one of the most important things when it comes to choosing a plugin. If you are tossing up between two or three different ones which do similar things, it is usually a good idea to choose the highest rated one.

However, make sure that you read the written reviews as well, as you can’t always get enough information from just looking at the number of stars a plugin has. Some people might give a poor review for strange reasons. This can cause a low number of stars, even if the plugin doesn’t deserve it – especially if there aren’t a whole lot of reviews.

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Agile

Agile is one of the most versatile, responsive, app showcase WordPress themes that is designed to serve multiple purposes. You can use it for a product or app launch, showcase a portfolio, or even use it for a web design business or a corporate website. You can either design the website as a single page or a traditional multiple pages depending on the need, and user configuration. Some of the Agile unique features include wide backgrounds, parallax scrolling, revolution slider, unlimited page and post headers, unlimited colours, bold typography among others that make is an outstanding theme in its category.

What Sort Of WordPress Theme Is Right For You?

Perfect-WP-Theme

If you are looking to build a new website using the WordPress platform you will be aware that you can use a WordPress theme to give your website the right look and feel for your target audience. Many people think it is a case of simply choosing the one that looks the best but the problem with this notion is that the theme you choose might not lend itself to the sorts of visual concepts and functions that your site needs to have.

As more and more themes have become available they have been categorised so that it is now easier to choose a theme within the correct sub-niche that your site is in, rather than ploughing through thousands of random themes, hoping to spot one that is suitable. Below we have outlined some of the most popular categories and what the themes within those categories should offer you in terms of your website.

Blogging: Given that WordPress was originally set up as a blogging platform, and today is still the most popular one, it shouldn’t surprise you that there are hundreds of themes designed for someone who wants to set up a blog. They are ideal for blog posting and encouraging readers to leave comments. Posts can be categorised within the blog, and there should be the ability to collect email addresses from visitors to your blog, in order to build a subscriber list.

ECommerce: The popularity of eCommerce as an online business model has rocketed in recent years, and therefore so has the number of themes designed for it. As the name suggests eCommerce web design themes allow for the sale of goods and services from your website so there will be a fair degree of setup and customisation required. Functions will include integration with payment processors, the ability to add products for sale and allow for the addition of plugins which help to promote sales such as automating email follow-ups for those customers who abandon their shopping cart without buying. Read More »

5 Features Your WordPress Theme Must Have

WordPress Theme

If you are looking for a WordPress theme for your website, as there are so many to choose from, it can be a daunting task. You must consider whether to go with a free one or a paid one for a start then after that, there are countless options. Regardless of the options available, there are several features that the theme you choose must have if you want your website to be successful. Here we have highlighted 5 of the most important and why your theme must have them.

#1 Mobile Friendly: We live in an age where there can be as many people online using their mobile devices to view your website than there are sitting at home on their PC or laptop. For this reason, your theme must be responsive in the sense that it adjusts its layout depending on the device or screen size it is being viewed on. If you already have a site, you can check if it is mobile friendly by visiting Google’s mobile friendly test page. Otherwise ensure you check prior to buying a new theme that it is mobile friendly.

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Natural Shop

Natural Shop is a WooCommerce enabled WordPress theme that is great for use on beauty, natural spa and thrifty of craft related products, but could also be used for a more commercial application such as for criminal lawyers or drug rehab facility. It comes with a wide range of handy theme  options that allow you to configure it effortlessly, while the options panel section is unbranded allowing you to brand it to your company’s specifications. Considering that it is WooCommerce ready, your shop will be ready in a few minutes.

Doberman: Magazine Related WordPress Theme

Doberman - Magazine & News theme for WordPress

If you are looking for some Magazine and News theme then search no more and keep reading to get to know more about what all is store in it. It is beautifully designed and very responsive web design theme which is also easy to use and install.

Once installed you get features like Trending as well as Popular articles with customizer options. Fresh articles, Mashshare integration,  Custom widgets, Drag & drop homepage, Instagram support and Social Integration, Contact Form 7 support, ability to control Typography, ability to SEO and also ability to ON/OFF sticky header.

The features list is long and if you’ve used this theme or have any query in mind, click here to know more.

X – The Theme

X – The Theme is a highly popular theme marketed under the taglines “The ultimate WordPress theme”, “the last theme you will ever need” among others. For this reason we decided to dig deeper and find out if the claims are valid. We found that one of its main selling points is what they call “stacks” which offers unlimited layout options plus many other features. Currently it has 4 main stacks namely Integrity, Renew, Icon and Ethos all of which offer different homepage layouts for different purposes. This is a great multipurpose theme that would suit a multitude of different business websites such as home removalists or landscaping website – but you would be doing it a disservice if you used it for a blog only, considering its functionality and price.

Renovate The Beautiful Renovation and Construction WP Theme

Renovate Renovation Construction Theme

Whether your business is in trading or you are a contractor, if you want more business you must have strong online business presence. Your business need to top search engine results, so to share your successful business projects with your prospective clients. You need to start with beautiful and powerful WordPress theme to step-up the ladder.

QuanticaLabs has built again a theme for professionals in the building & renovations, construction,  architecture, or engineering fields. Renovate is wonderfully WordPress theme, which is responsive as well, with clean and sleek professional design. Renovate is packed with Cost Calculator built-in tool – This tool aids your client by offering them an easy way to calculate estimated cost of constructions, additions, remodels, and repairs.

You also get Slider Revolution plugin in premium version, the page builder plugin, 12 page templates, as well as AJAX contact form, sticky menu, premium font icons, the sliders are touch friendly.

The7

The7 is a retina ready, fully responsive and SEO optimised, multipurpose WordPress theme. The theme fits almost any type of website, from upmarket law firms, modern building companies to financial planners – whether big or small, and can be used on corporate, business websites, but you would do it a disservice by using it on a simple blog.  Some of The7 theme’s features include a minimalist design, 240 out of the box professional designs, high res graphics, full width layouts, a visual composer among others.

ProDentist: The Best Dental WordPress Theme

Pro Dentist WordPress Theme

Dentist websites are unique and need special features related to dental professionals. Pro Dentist, as the name suggests, is a responsive WordPress theme best for dental websites. It has a built-in Live Customizer, which enables you to design your dentist website live to match your professional identity. The drag-and-drop page builder Power helps you create a layout unique to your needs without any coding.

  • Multiple Layout Option: There are huge set of layout options available making it easy and fast for even layman to build pages.
  • Appointment ManagerIn-built plugin that allows your customers to book an appointment right from home page of your website. Thus, save your time and increase your productivity.
  • Content Module: It enables you to choose various content types like buttons, contact forms, price tables, sliders, images, etc and add to your web pages. Each content module has extended options to choose and match your website style.

Tips On Choosing A Website Theme

Choosing Right Theme

There are plenty of easy things to do on the internet, but choosing a website theme is certainly not one of them!

There are thousands of reasons to create a website, and there are just as many themes to suit your needs. It can often be daunting, as you can sift through hundreds if not thousands of different website themes. Not every template is created equally. Some themes are better suited for different genres, if you will, of websites. The worst thing to do is pick the wrong theme. We have all experienced stumbling upon a website with the worst possible theme choice before. “What in the world is your knitting blog doing within a home improvements theme?”

What makes matters worse, is that sometimes, the more themes you see the more confusing the process becomes. On top of that, if you are not a designer yourself, you have no knowledge to go off of in terms of choosing the right theme. You could rely on your web designer’s assistance, in choosing the right theme, but you also want to take matters into your own hands as you craft your webpage.

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Developers and Designers Theme: Ultra Theme Review

Ultra-Flexible-Powerful-WordPress-Theme
Themify has brought a multi-purpose, powerful theme for WordPress websites: Ultra. Themify is marketing Ultra for WP developers but whosoever willing and aspiring to create modern WP site, this is a good go. So to say, it does not need any pre-acquired coding skills to work with Ultra. To know more about what you can do with such a wonderful theme, keep reading.

Theme Features

Ultra is full of wonderful features needed to build different varieties of websites, including ecommerce website. Being modern it is also multi-functional theme packed with untold customization options, multi-site demos, a drag-and-drop page builder and so many more.

This WordPress theme is very much suited to house and garden style websites, such as luxury lifestyle or home design.

Ultra has high standard, pre-built skins and demos for website building. It is user-friendly and backed by world-class support.

Jetpack

Looking to increase speed of your website or optimize your images? Also want to protect it from unwanted ailments like hackers? Want to check how many people visit your website and other traffic related stats? Jetpack is answer and it is free WP plugin.

Jetpack makes it easy to manage your WP sites and helps you build more powerful online presence with its tools like Publicize, Sharing, Related Posts as well as Enhanced Distribution. The plugin is always updated so to monitor downtime of your website and safeguard against unauthorised attacks. It optimizes images automatically and thus saves web hosting costs plus speed up images.

At Slinky Web Hosting, they highly recommend Jetpack to their clients as it complements their hosting services and enhances overall website performance and security.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the most popular free plugins that allows you to sell anything, effortlessly. The plugin is built to integrate with WordPress seamlessly, offers endless flexibility, access to hundreds of premium and free WooCommerce extensions essentially extending its functionality. The WordPress plugin allows you to sell both physical and digital products, in all shapes and sizes, offer multiple product configurations, instant digital downloads or even affiliate products from online marketplaces and ship wherever you like around the world. You can also use WooCommerce on non-ecommerce websites such as holiday websites like Bali Villas where you wish to display items or properties and manage it through the WordPress backend.

Google XML Sitemaps

A sitemap is one of the most important elements that you can install on your website to make it more search engine friendly. As a webmaster, you need a sitemap to help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask index your websites pages for better results. The plugin is easy to install and activate, and you don’t even have to change anything, but if you like you can change the settings. Actually, it is very hard to manually index any page or post, which makes this plugin beneficial for SEO. You can also set the time that you would like search engines to crawl your websites posts, author pages, static page, archives and tags, and you can even exclude the pages or posts you don’t want indexed using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

ROSA

ROSA is an interesting easy to use parallax WordPress theme designed to use on restaurant websites. It comes with well-designed menus, open table reservations, it highlights high resolution photography and allows you to tell your story of your restaurant in South Perth on your website effortlessly which makes ROSA WordPress theme perfect for eateries, restaurants, coffee shops, bars and bakeries.

Storefront Elegance

The Storefront Elegance theme is a popular minimalistic theme that uses a custom font so that the colour matches with whatever colour you choose from the theme options panel. You get full control of the logo, site background, colours, custom menus, templates and have the flexibility to build and organise your e-shop just the way you would like it. You also have the option of using the Nivo Slider on the homepage with 16 different effects. Not forgetting the google fonts API that give the theme a more customised look, and with 4 different templates, there will be at least one that is perfect for your website. If you are looking for an ecommerce theme this would be a great option. This theme would also suit a design style website such as a home design or construction industry website such as a stone cladding type of website.

 

Ultra

The Ultra WordPress theme by Themify is responsive, highly flexible and comes with some of the most powerful features that suit any business website. From an internet marketing company, the theme can be customised using the different layout features, from the header to footer, which makes it very popular among web developers seeking a multipurpose WordPress theme.

Akismet Plugin

akismet

Akismet is an anti-spam WordPress Plugin and a favourite with all digital agencies as it checks all the comments you get with their very own web service and filters out spam comments. The Plugin provide status history of each comment for the webmaster’s review. Any hidden or misleading URLs are also revealed in comment body. This Plugin automates filtering comments that appears to be spam while checking through all the comments received.

The personal blogs can use Akismet free API Key and the commercial and business site need to opt paid subscription. Now you can block the spam out of your website and thus save your disk space and enhance your website speed.

Read more here > Akismet

LuckyFolio Photographer

The LuckyFolio Photographer Theme is a great theme for both amateur and professional photographers but could easily be used for home renovation websites or a stunning kitchen design website. It comes with a photo portfolio presentation that you can manage via the WordPress admin section, but its greatest advantage is its functionality and ease of use, which means that WordPress management would be your last headache; you can focus on getting the best shots. It comes with 9 default backgrounds, social icons, logo title and several other features that make it easy to customise.

Music Pro

Music Pro is a great lifestyle blog theme or music oriented WordPress theme that would be perfect for a music label, a band or a webzine. It is easy to use, fully customisable, and can also be used for other types of websites. You can use a number of plugins to enhance it including Wolf socials, Wolf shortcodes among others, and can use the Music Pro custom player to manage your playlists, add links to iTunes and or Amazon and upload songs.

Obsidian

The Obsidian is a premium, natural looking theme with an inherent allure that’s both practical and aesthetically appealing, and is ideal for music and video. It comes with distinctive background options that are easily customisable, which makes it easy to create the ultimate online identity and would really suit a lot of different types of business websites from business marketing to home services such as a furniture removalists. The customizer allows you to add a business tagline, logo, website title, and comes with an optional Obsidian WordPress theme site wide player that rests at the bottom of the screen which allows you to add a custom audio playlist.

Appetite

Appetite is a responsive, elegant WordPress theme with a modern look and feel. It is ideal for eateries, restaurants, cafes and food bloggers. It comes with a full width grid page template, and three column layout without a sidebar, however, if you don’t want to use the full width feature you can have a sidebar. The Appetite WordPress theme menu template displays menus, it supports a custom header, custom backgrounds and a dedicated testimonial page which adds to your business credibility and help lead to online success.

Javo Directory

Javo Directory is a fully responsive WordPress theme whose purpose is to build directories. Based on the bootstrap framework, it works perfectly across all device screens including smartphones tablets and desktops. Some of its main features include a revolution slider, Google maps with Ajax, Javo Directory  is integrated with PayPal, has a visual composer, offers unlimited page styles and many others.

Blink

Blink is a beautiful, functional premium WordPress theme to suit such diverse uses as a digital agency or travel related website that will allow you to tell your story in a visually appealing way. It has been carefully designed with keen focus on the ease of use, good performance and is responsive offering users a seamless experience across multiple devices. In addition, Blink WordPress theme comes with four different custom layouts and you can choose the one that works best for your needs, and utilize the full screen feature images for more visual appeal.

Increat

Icreat by ProgressionStudios is a responsive, retina ready, multipurpose theme available on ThemeForest. The theme takes advantage of all new WordPress features including HTML5 CSS3, and supports high resolution screens. The Increat WordPress theme can be used on various websites including ecommerce, company websites, blogs and photography websites along with home services websites such as carpet cleaning like www.brilliancecarpetcleaningperth.com.au or a handyman website.

Avada Theme

Avada Theme

Looking for one-of-its-kind theme in market for your website, it none other than Avada. It is simple, varied and multi-purpose theme for WordPress. You might not even touch a single line of code and still achieve to build creative, unique as well as professional business site, using Avada. A lot of care and thinking is involved to make this theme easy to use. Avada theme is built using HTML5 with CSS3, thus operate beyond the boundaries. It is design tool with power to build responsive website which are equally beautiful.

Avada offer features from real world along with various user reviews for you to build great website. This WordPress theme works particularly well with design related designs such as landscape design or ecommerce layouts for fashion or outdoor furniture.

Build your Blog or business website or portfolio, ecommerce website or whatever type of website with well-packed Avada.