Wordpress

Sky floats above the pack in style and its sense of whimsy is sure to leave your visitors surprised and refreshed. Sky is unique in the way its homepage operates, loading all of your content seamlessly using ajax. This means that no matter how many pages you have in the “slider,” your initial page load speed will be lightning fast as each page is only loaded when it is displayed (without a page refresh). We also added some fun parallax affects in the clouds, giving the design a great sense of movement.

 

Sky Features

1. Four Unique Colorschemes – Sky comes with four different colors to choose from. If blue isn’t your style, then try out the Red, Purple or Green options. You can change your colorscheme at any time from within the theme options page.

2. Portfolio Section – The Portfolio section makes it easy to feature photos. This is great for creative companies or individuals who wish to create a gallery of their most recent work. The gallery is paginated and includes a full lightbox view of each image.

3. Homepage Slider – The featured slider on the homepage makes it easy to feature prominent pieces of content to your first time visitors. You can populate the slider using posts or pages and adjust animations/animation speeds within ePanel.

4. Blog Layout - Sky includes a blog layout that allows you to feature a category of posts within the homepage feed, creating a seamless experience for your visitors.

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It’s been a long time since we last treated our readers with a good looking, professional wordpress theme, so we decided it’s high time to release a very cute WP theme with vanilla flavor — “Amalia”. Key Features of this magazine style theme:

1. AJAX powered drop down menu up to 3 levels
2. Inbuilt easy to manage slideshow gallery
3. Integrated with Twitter
4. Based on CSS3
5. Beautiful Web 2.0 Design with Classic cute colors scheme
6. Automatic thumbnails creation – script pulls the images from post and de-sizes them
7. Light and very fast loading
8. Nice organization of the comments section
9. Minimal SQL quires, optimized for busy blog
10. Magazine Style organization of the posts
11. Compatible with the latest version of WordPress 3.0
12. Compatible with all the recent versions of major browsers.

If you have any questions about the usage, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments section.
For thumbnails in posts please use the key “Thumbnail” (without quotes) while for images in the slider use the key “slide“. You will also need to download, install and activate the FeatureMe plugin: http://www.bioxd.com/featureme/. Enjoy!

Demo | Download

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WordPress themes are considered premium, regardless being free or so-to-speak “paid” themes. 2 years ago, we all could only dream about having a wordpress theme for our blog with Ajax and JavaScript features, where featured posts slide, portfolio items fade in and out, and, of course — the comments are posted without refreshing the page. All these things were sought after and cost a lot of money, requiring plenty of custom development. Could we guess back then that cu3er will be offered on free wordpress themes? Well, today I made a selection of best wordpress theme that make the neatest yet most powerful use of the javascript integration… enjoy!

Since late 2007 however an increasing number of WordPress theme developers have been offering premium WordPress themes – themes which are offered for a fixed price. These premium WordPress themes are usually sold for between $50 to $250. Originally only a small number of talented and well-known WordPress theme designers created paid premium WordPress themes which were well designed, highly functional, top-quality themes that transformed a WordPress installation from a simple blog into a powerful content management system. However as the premium WordPress theme business concept spread, more and more WordPress theme designers have hopped on the bandwagon trying to cash on the new trend filling up their portfolio with premium (paid) wordpress themes. However with greater variety and numbers of paid premium WordPress themes also comes varying levels of quality. So what specifically makes a premium WordPress theme premium? Some characteristics that should set a premium wordpress theme apart from a free theme are listed below:

Quality and Unique Design
Premium WordPress themes should be just that – Premium. They should look better and be of a much higher quality and unique design than compared to those available for free.

Features
While all themes are different, in general premium WordPress themes should have more “Features” than their free counterparts. What that means depends on the theme in question. However some features may include: “Featured Posts” areas, Multiple layout options for the home page, drop down menus, multiple customs templates for pages, custom field options, print style sheets etc.

Customization Options and Flexibility
People want options, so Premium WordPress themes should be customizable. Buying a premium theme will set you apart from the crowd significantly, but since other people will still be using the same theme, premium themes should be able to be easily customized further, whether it be for the layout, colours, images, or all of the above.

Live Preview or Demo
There should be a live demo or preview of the theme so you can test it and check it out before buying. If there is no live preview or demo that should be a warning sign. You should ask why don’t they want you to test the theme first? All reputable premium theme sellers will have a live demo full of content for you to test. Explore the live demo thoroughly, testing all pages to see that the theme works properly and there are no errors or mistakes.

Full Support
If you’re buying a premium WordPress theme it should also come with a certain degree of support from the designer. The level of support can vary however and will range from personalized individual support from the designer, to the provision of forums or blog comment sections for asking questions and obtaining support from the designer and other people who have purchased the theme.

Supporting Documentation
Premium WordPress themes should come with an instruction manual or document. This should explain how to upload and install the theme and how to manage any of the options that are built into the theme.

Free Updates
Wordpress is continually being updated and improved and a premium WordPress theme developer should be offering you free updates of the theme when required.

Well Coded
There should be no coding errors, misspellings, X images, etc in a premium WordPress theme. The theme has cross browser compatible and been tested to work properly on all the major browsers, plus the theme should have clean and valid code and adhere to strict XHTML and CSS standards.

Guest post by Preecha Saisaard from www.free-templates-design.com and Kathleen Mulder from http://webhostingstar.us

Typography on a web page is as important as it is in any other medium, it does not matter whether you are typing for packaging, publishing television or signage, and all designers must take into account the medium they are using and the techniques they will use to suit that medium. You want your work to be easily read and be pleasing to the eye.

This being said an example is that of an article written in a magazine compared to that of a poster. While a magazine is read at close distance and within arms length, the typeset can be small and still be easily read. Whereas a poster is larger and seen in a more oblique manner, you would want to space the words so they are easily discerned by the viewer.

When designing for a webpage there is a full set of new problems to overcome. You are dealing with an audience that has different screen sizes and platforms. There is a way a designer must work to take all of this into consideration while designing a page that it easily viewed in all different platforms. You can not assume that all of your viewers are using the same equipment you are; even the speed of connection should come into mind when you are designing.

Examples of Good Use of Typography in WordPress:

Depending upon your content you can change up the style sheets to best suit your needs. You can change heading and sub heading sizes as well as your body text sizes to best fit your page whether it is an informational site, children site or a more technical site. These type settings are simple to change and the style of your webpage should take into consideration your targeted audience. You would not use the same style on a children’s page as you would on a page created for business investors so it is important to keep your targeted audience in mind.

• Orientation - If you are reading a book and you see upside down type the first thing you do is flip the book, not such an easy task with a computer. Vertical type is not possible with HTML but it can be done by using a JPG, PNG or GIF. This can work for you if used sparingly. A heading of this type will grab the reader’s attention and if in a good balance with her things like color, weight and size can be beneficial. This type of heading calls for attention and when used alongside other material can unify this material and become very effective.
• Position - As a different type style used such as maverick, any line that is in a different position will quickly catch the eye of the viewer. Breaking up the natural flow of the page will simply get more attention. You can change any body of text by only changing one element such as font, color position and so on. Anything that looks different or out of place will automatically draw the eye to it. Just like the saying goes, rules are sometimes made to be broken.
• Space – If you type on a white page one word of 8 point type, your eye will be drawn to it. On the other hand if you’re working with a full page of 12 point type you will never notice it. So as you can see not just the type on the page is important, the space that is surrounding the type is just as important. You can easily learn this skill by playing with different type and space settings to get the most out of the idea you want to put across. This is not only a technique used in writing, it is used is painting, architecture and more.
• Priorities used in a creative manner - Typography means that you will also think about the importance of information and what you want the viewer to focus on, you can do this by easily deciding what is important and getting that important information to stand out. You can create a web page that is pleasing to the eye while still getting across what is most important. You will find it very rewarding when you take this important fact into consideration. You want the important content to stand out so the viewer can see exactly what point you are trying to make without having to read through pages of fluff.

Here are some tips for the use of different fonts in HTML:

1. Use the correct font style and case size to get your information processed quickly by the viewer. If your viewer is seeking information you will want the font to be something simple to read such as Arial or Veranda so they can easily read through and find what they are looking for. You should also keep in mind the color and size of the text.
2. When you are looking at your web page design always keep in mind the type, color and size of font, this is very important this can instantly add more value to your web page.
3. Choose a font that is simple to read. Using a font such as Times new Roman keeps everything in uniform, a font such as calligraphy is very distracting and too hard to read. The best thing for you to do is read through a few lines and determine if you can read it easily. If you can do it your viewer can too.
4. Do not fill you page with different font styles, if it is called for such as an artistic site, you may use different font styles but they should be used in the headings or sparingly throughout the text, do not fill your text with different fonts because it becomes distracting to the viewer and they will lose interest.
5. Most of your text should be between 12 and 14 points. This allows all readers the easy access because not all readers have perfect vision a small print may deter some viewers from your site and you do not want to loose viewers, the point is to make a site attractive to all. You should keep in mind that you will have many viewers and you should try to compromise for all viewers, and make sure your heading is in a larger font than the text.
6. The final tip deals with color, use a good contrasting color for type that will not be lost in background colors, the best choice is always black type on a light background, just be careful when choosing colors for your web pages, you do not want to put a dark background and dark type on the same background, it will be too hard to read and your viewer will be lost.

Wordpress is fun and blogging can, at some point, turn from a weekends hobby to a full time business online. Sounds familiar? But if you do consider making your blog a business, or at least taking it to a professional level, you will need to enhance your platform with some plugins. galleries to showcase your work, easy to manage contact form, and finally, ads management — plugins make the life so much easier, adverts will be removed automatically once expired and images will automatically be resized to optimize your blog for faster loading — that means YOU save a great deal of time and can us this free time to make more content or work offline. Here is a list of 100 Best plugins that you absolutely must have in order to smoothly run a creative, professionally looking WordPress blog. However, the great thing about the new wordpress version is that you can add these plugins even if you do not host your blog on a paid web hosting, i.e. WordPress.com hosted blogs can benefit just as well.

1. YouTube Videobox Widget

With Youtube Video Box Plugin you can add unlimited number of sidebar widgets to display Youtube videos in XHTML valid format.

This plugin also allows you to easily customize width and height of the videos directly in your widget panel. Optional function that enhances this plugin gives you the ability to chose colors in YouTube and enable or disable them in your widget panel. This plugin is ideal for those of you who wish to display several videos in easy-to-manage widgets, yet maintain a XHTML valid, SEO friendly website code.

Compatible with any java / ajax powered plugin, doesn’t affect the loading time and thanks to its’ lite structure, will not crash your site.

2. Akismet

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

3. WP Ajax Edit Comments

WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.5+) allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.

4. OpenID

OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account. XRDS-Simple is required for the OpenID Provider and some features of the OpenID Consumer.

5. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. I featured this plugin some time ago already, but this is totally related to comments.

6. Comment Rating

Allows visitors to rate comments in Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments are displayed differently.

7. Clicky

While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.

8. Twitter Avatars In Comments

Self explaining comment title, plug-in that uses Twitter to show avatars in comments in WordPress blogs.

9. SI CAPTCHA for WordPress

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or regiser, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WPMU and BuddyPress compatible.

10. Old Post Promoter

Old Post Promoter will choose posts at random from your published collection and change their publication dates so that they will appear on your front page and in your RSS feed.  Note that this does not work if your permalink structure includes dates.

11. TinyMCEComments

This plugin turns the comment field from a primitive into a WYSIWYG editor, using the internal TinyMCE library bundled with WordPress 2.0 or up, without the need of another separate installation. Functions that only available to writers like adding images were removed and will not show up in the toolbar.

12. CommentLuv

This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

13. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

14. Theme Options

This plugin manages theme customization. Everything is managed in the WordPress Backend. Code snippets can be activated, copied, created, deactivated, deleted, edited, and uploaded. For comments you can highlight different comments based who wrote them and where they are, also nice feature to automatically add “about author” section.

15. WP-Paginate

WP-Paginate is a simple and flexible pagination plugin which provides users with better navigation on your WordPress site. Starting in version 1.1, WP-Paginate can also be used to paginate post comments!

16. @ Reply

This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.

17. IntenseDebate Comments

IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!