As a great cms platform WordPress has many examples for every work  like blogs, companies, portfolios, galleries etc. Magazine/Newspaper style themes are one of the most wanted WordPress themes and they are very useful for managing lots of posts on a page.

This type of themes are mostly liked by small and medium-sized teams who can produce actual content every day. It is easy to show many thumbnails and sliders on a page so you can push up your page views easily. But you need to choose right theme for your visitors. For example if your visitors are generally looking for galleries check out a more visual one, otherwise take a look for most text-based ones.

Premium newspaper style themes have great features and other professional ones are really satisfying. Here are mixed 28 new great Magazine/Newspaper style WordPress themes.

1. Transcript – Premium Magazine Style Theme

Transcript is a multi-purpose and stylish news/magazine theme.  Some features are

• A nice ajax support for featured entries
• Built in Banner Management
• Built in Media Gallery Module …

2. Eventina – Premium Magazine Style Theme

Eventina is a flexible magazine style theme.  Some features;

• Built-in Social Addon
• Featured Posts on Homepage
• Featured Posts in the Header …

3. Technologic – Premium Magazine Style Theme

Technologic is a flexible and unique magazine style theme.  Some features;

• 5 Color Styles
• Threaded Comments
• Featured Slideshows on Homepage …

4. HotGoss – Premium Magazine Style Theme

HotGoss is a magazine/news style theme which is easy to modify. Some features:

• Major Browser Compatible
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Valid CSS Level 2.1 or 3 …

5. SportState Theme – Premium Magazine Style Theme

Sportstate is a cool magazine/news style theme for good-working publishers. Some features;

• Integrated Content Rotator
• Optional Jquery Dropdown Menu

6. ColorMatic Theme – Premium Magazine Style Theme

ColorMatic is a variety of magazine/news sites theme. Some features;

• Four (4) effective website layouts
• Built-in Blog Navigator Widget
• Advertising management …

7. Magazine WordPress Theme – Premium Magazine Style Theme

Magazine WordPress Theme is a good designed magazine style theme with good features. Some features;

• 2 or 3 Columns
• Theme Options
• Threaded Comments …

8. The Theme Wars Magazine – Premium Magazine Style Theme

The Theme Wars Magazine is a good magazine style WordPress theme with a large featured-area on the homepage. Some features;

• Powerful Theme Control Panel
• Featured content sliding gallery (optional)
• No custom fields – built-in post extras …

9. LifeStyle – Premium Magazine Style Theme

Arthemia Premium is a detailed magazine theme. Some Features;

• 2 or 3 Columns
• Theme Options
• Threaded Comments …

10. Arthemia – Premium Magazine Style Theme

Arthemia Premium is a powerful magazine style wordpress theme. Also it has a free version. Some Features:

• Cross-Browser Compatible
• Analytics and Feedburner
• Banner & Adsense Management …

11. IndoMagz Magazine – Premium Magazine Style Theme

IndoMagz is a new style Magazine theme. You can choose one of many templates with different colors. Some Features:

• 1, 2 or 3 Column Templates
• RTL Text Direction
• Post Thumbnail Support …

12. Arash Theme – Free Magazine Style Theme

Arras Theme is designed for news or review sites with lots of customisable features. Some Features:

• Widgets Ready
• 5 News Layouts
• Alternate Styles Ready …

13. Obscure – Free Magazine Style Theme

Obscure is magazine wordpress theme. It build in any site niche and best fit for community based site.  Some Features:

• Built in Featured Content Gallery
• Feedburner RSS Subscription Ready
• Twitter Integration …

14. WP-Clear – Premium Magazine Style Theme

WP-Clear is a clean, minimalist design theme. It can be used as an online magazine or newspaper. Some Features:

• 2-Column or 3-Column Layout with Widgetized Sidebar
• Home Page Magazine Layout
• Featured Content Glider …

15. WP-Smooth – Premium Magazine Style Theme

WP-Smooth is a dark premium WordPress magazine theme. But it comes multiple color options and layouts. Some Features:

• Gravatar Integration
• Banner Ad Integration
• Built-In Post Thumbnails …

16. Hamasaki – Free Magazine Style Theme

Hamasaki is a white wordpress theme. It is really useful and good designed. Some Features:

• Page Comment Templates
• Contact Page with CAPTCHA Support
• Widget Support …

17. Ndadap – Free Magazine Style Theme

Ndadap is a uniqe Magazine Style theme. It contains minimum configuration to make it work. Some features:

• Auto Re-size Image
• Grid Based Layou
• Built in featured post area …

18. Advanced Newspaper – Premium Newspaper Style Theme

Advanced Newspaper is an exclusive Newspaper Style theme. Some features:

• Multilevel dropdown
• Category based advertisement
• Unique newspaper layout …

19. Zenko Magazine – Premium Magazine Style Theme

Zenko Magazine is a flexible magazine style theme. It is stylish & colorful. Some features:

• Threaded Comments
• Ads Management System
• Featured Posts on Homepage …

20. Yamidoo Magazine – Premium Magazine Style Theme

Yamidoo Magazine has a simple layout and can be easily styled to create the perfect look for your blog.  Some features:

• Feedburner & Google Analytics Ready
• Featured Content Section
• Ads Management System …

21. Inuit Types – Free Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

Inuit Types is a very useful theme for e-magazines. Some features:

• Multiple Layouts,
• Fully Widgetized,
• Excerpted Content …

22. Mimbo Pro – Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

Mimbo Pro is another premium Magazine style theme. It includes an image carousel and seems great. Some features:

• Animated Dropdown Menus
• Image Carousel With Variable Speed
• Image Thumbnail Resizing …

23. Newsport – Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

Newsport is a professional Magazine style theme with some unique features. Some features;

• 4 Widgetized Areas
• 5 Custom Woo Widgets
• 11 Great Colour Schemes …

24. HeadLine – Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

Headline Magazine style theme has s a flexible layout with lots of features. Some features;

• Featured jQuery Tabber/Slider Area
• Author Box Widget on Single Posts
• 15 Stylish Alternate Colour Schemes …

25. Studio Press News  – Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

Studio Press News theme is a simple and smart Magazine Style theme . Some features;

• 2 or 3-columns
• Fixed Width
• Threaded Comments …

26. One Theme  – Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

One Theme is Magazine style wordpress theme which has a 4 different versions. Some features;

• Numbered Comments
• Custom Control Panel
• Three Homepage Layouts …

27. WP-MediaMag  – Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

WP-MediaMag is a modern Magazine style WordPress theme. It is designed for publishers who like to upload media. Some features;

• Video Integration
• Theme Settings Page
• Featured Content Glider …

28. WP-Magazine  - Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

WP-Magazine is another professional and simple WordPress theme. Some features;

• Featured Article Glider
• Built-In Banner Ad Blocks
• Built-In Site Guide in Right Sidebar …

If you can not find a good one for you, look for the first post: 60 Free, Yet Premium Quality Wordpress Magazine News Themes

To handle a blog these days can be quite difficult if you are not well-organized and you don’t spend enough time managing it. That’s why there are plugins for WordPress. They literally make your job lot easier and if you work well with them you can put them to work for you.

Sounds cool I know, but you have to know which plugins are ment for your blog and when to use them. In my opinion, the administration plugins have one of the most important roles in your blog because they are the ones that help you to get: statistics, help you manage content and help you to generate content.

There are tons of plugins designed to do the job I’ve just mentioned and is pretty difficult to find the plugins you really need. That’s why, in today’s post I’ve selected some of the most powerful administration plugins I know. You should also check out the great article by Saad Bassi about WordPress plugins to change the outlook for Administrator Dashboard .

Keep in mind that you have to save lots of time in order to become more effective and I’m sure that using these plugins right will save you a lot of time.

1. FireStats and FireStats Charts

Firestats is without a dub my favorite plugin for gathering statistics about the traffic that comes to my blogs. It has a powerful monetization system so that you can get info about: user country, ip, browser, operating system and many more. Firestats and Firestats Chart can work separately as well, but I recommend you to use both of them in order to get a better idea about the traffic that comes to your site.

2. Custom Admin Branding

Many people consider this plugin not very useful, but I consider that once with your blog evolution there will be more people to write for you or just more people logging in to your blog and if you are like me you want your own logo to be the one that dominates your creation.

3. Post Video and Photo Galleries

Being able to create photo galleries and adding videos to your WordPress blog is just perfect for any type of blog you manage. This plugin helps you to easily do that and also integrates a small button in the visual editor of your post writer.

4. Login with Ajax

The combination between PHP and Java Script has always a good impact for your visitors. The Ajax Login system brings great login effects which will determine more people to register.

5. Google Analyticator

If you are a Google Analytics user this plugin saves you a lot of time but if you are not, than you should definitely go and start using it because is the best option for your website traffic statistics.

6. Admin Management Xtended

To save more time, Admin Management Xtended brings new Ajax forms to automatically change or add content to your blog without having to reload the page and lose time.

7. Admin Menu Editor

Easily customize the Admin Menu as you like.

8. Database Size WordPress Plugin

Displays a small and non disturbing message text which contains information about the size of your WordPress blog database.

9. Hide Admin Panels

If you are running a collective blog, this plugin will help you to restrict some permissions for different types of members of your blog. You choose who sees what.

10. Favicons Chooser

We all know how important a first impression is and without a dub, the favicon you have on your website is vital and probably the one that remains in your visitors head. Favicons Chooser helps you to easily add or choose a Favicon.

11. Post Ideas

This plugin stores your ideas about what you would like to write in the near future. When you are ready to post about one of your ideas in the “Post Ideas” just click on it and you will be redirected to the writing page.

12. Broken Link Checker

Is pretty messy to find out that the post or page you are looking for is missing or is broken. Broken Link checker helps you to solve this problem and warns you when you should change links.

13. Digital Raindrops Style Sheet

The admin can easily change the style sheet of each page from the theme directory.

14. AdRotator

Helps you to add any type of ad banner anywhere you want and also it helps you to keep a statistics page for them.

15. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a must have plugin for any respected website or blog. It generates static HTML pages for your every page and post so when you have tons of traffic the bandwidth will handle it and you will not have any problems.

16. Genki Pre-publish Reminder

This is very useful if you are that kind of guy who forgets what to do before posting a new article. If you forget to post an a category for your article or just need to add SEO tags you just have to add those into the Genki Pre-publish reminder.

17. WP Grins

Automatically adds clickable smileys for administrator area and also for users comment form.

18. WP Super Editor

Get more control over the styles of your blog and also emoticons and layouts.

19. Plugin Installer

This plugin helps you to get the content of other plugins and automatically installs it. All you have to do is to point the Plugin Installer to the source of the plugin and it will do the rest.

20. Batch Categories

Automatically adds a new page to category management which shows what posts are in that category so that you will be able to easily transfer them to other categories.

21. Ajax Spell Checker

One of the most powerful Spell Checkers created for Wordpress.

22. Custom Write Panel

This plugin helps you to select the way that your WYSIWYG panel looks like and choose what elements to show and which not.

23. Google Sitemaps Generator

Automatically generates xml and gz extension sitemaps for your blog which is very important for indexing your pages by Google.

24. Share This

Adds the social media links for every posts and pages.

25. Site Unavailable

Displays a message which alerts your visitors that your website is unavailable. The message is customizable.

26. Fluency

Changes the whole User Interface in Wordpress and creates a great experience for every user.

27. Simply Tags

Helps you to easily manage batch tags so that you will be able to save lots of time.

28. Adminize

Compress and hide unnecessary items in your wordpress blog.

29. Quick Menu

Create and customize your own menu in Wordpress Admin Area. You can add all kind of quick links in the menu section like: Google Analytics, Adsense account or just a simple other page.

30. Admin Notepad

Adds the Notepad in your Wordpress application. The Notepad panel can be hide or displayed by clicking one simple button.

I’ve personally tested all of these amazing plugins and I can confirm that they are great for every type of blogger. Hope it will help you too and stay with us to get more interesting articles about Wordpress and blog management tutorials.

I’m sure you have seen lots of articles named something like “best 30 plugins for WordPress” or “The coolest 60 plugins for WordPress” etc. In my post today I’m not going to make another collection of links but rather list just a few plugins that I’m using in my own blog. Of course, I haven’t added all of them from the very beginning. Depending on the task set before me I had to make some studies followed by experiments and make tests, tests and tests. I will explain why I find these plugins extremely useful as well as speak about some widgets that are worth using.

1. Akismet

Akismet is a perfect spam catcher. Not sure how they do this, but 99% of spam comments will get under I’ve had the problem with Akismet only once actually shortly after installation. For some reason it was recognizing uberVU – social comments (the post mentions on twitter) as spam but once I approved it, the Akismet learned the algorithm and now it’s saving me from hundreds of funky comments. There’s also a cool option to “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month” which means that spam comments for the early posts won’t even be added to the Spam” section of blog comments, they will be deleted automatically.

2. Google Analytics for WordPress

A simple plugin allowing to add Google Analytics to your blog pages and enjoy a variety of tracking options available at Google Analytics account. Once you upload and activate the plugin go to the Settings section in the main menu and look for Google Analytics. Here’s the place where you can make a Google Analytics WordPress Configuration. All you have to do is enter your Analytics Account ID and click on save. Now you can go to your Google Analytics account and track visitors, traffic sources, search keywords and most popular articles.

3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

As a blogger and project manager I know that it’s highly important to keep blog visitors on the website as long as possible, especially if you are selling ads and are going to earn something from them. This is where Yet Another Related Posts Plugin comes on arena. It allows to show links to related posts at the end of the article, and you can set this relatedness by a number of options, such as keywords in the text, titles, tags, categories etc. You can define the number of links to show and the period of time to check on related articles from your previous posts. You will find related posts section under the main Sections menu of the blog admin area.

4. SocioFluid

Seeking blog promotion and popularity I had to look for a nice plugin that would allow submission of the article to social networks on the fly. I might have tested around 10 plugins before I found and fall in love with Sociofluid. This plugin adds keen social network icons below the post that get bigger on roll-over. SocioFluid settings can be found under the main Sections menu of the blog admin area. There are 20 bookmarking site you can choose from (including my favorite Twitter, Digg, Facebook and Stumble) and you can also choose from the several icons sizes. You can define whether to display SocioFluid Bar for posts in home page or browse pages, to show it on the top of the page or after the article, whether the icons should open in the new window or not.

5. Dean’s Permalinks Migration

Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin helped me to stay on board once I decided to update the URLs structure of the links on my blog to more friendly ones. I’m sure all of us do this from time to time having read some cool articles about SEO friendliness or deciding to test this or that option and to test the results. When your articles have been indexed by search engines and there are other websites linking to you, it’s vital not to lose this audience. What Permalinks Migration plugin does is it changes your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website. The settings are quite simple and understandable. Once you have updated the permalinks structure in the General settings section just enter the old permalink structure and the plugin will be automatically sending visitors from the old urls to the new ones.

6. Banner Plugin

The reason why I needed the banner plugin is that I wanted to convert traffic from the blog into product purchases from the main website. I wanted to add the product pics, have them in rotation and link all of them to according product pages. If compared to the other multiple banner plugins I have tested, Banner Plugin doesn’t have many options like conversion and visitors tracking, multiple campaigns with multiple banners, deducting the cost per click from the deposit etc. But it’s extremely easy to work with, you don’t have to go to the blog code to update a single thing and it’s widgets supported. That means that having uploaded and activated the plugins you just add the pics and the links, save the settings and then simply drag and drop the banner widget into the sidebar. A perfect solution if the simple banner is enough for your needs.

7. All in One SEO Pack

All in one SEO Pack plugin is meant for advanced blog owners and allows to enhance your blog in terms of search engines friendliness. You may skip this one if you’re not into SEO yet as this one requires some basic SEO knowledge. One of the things that I like is that there’s a direct link to options configuration panel right from the plugins section and you don’t have to dive into the settings and check where they could have been added. All in One SEO Pack allows to set the titles structure of blog pages, use noindex attributes for the sections you’d like to close from the search engines and set meta title and meta description for the blog main page without going into the blog code.

Summing this up, I’d like to say that this is definitely not a full list of nice plugins and that I might need more in the future depending on the goals I set. But the factor that plays the most important role for me and makes me test tens of plugins is the simplicity. Since I’m not a programmer I always look for simple solutions that won’t require much of my time and where I wouldn’t have to go into the blog source code and perform significant changes. I hope this article will be useful even for those bloggers who have been working with WordPress for some time by now and will save you some time.

Good luck!

Images and photos are an integral part of almost every successful blog these days. If your text isn’t accompanied by images, few people are going to be interested in what you’ve got to say- it’s sad, but true. The problem is, with so many people uploading images to their blogs in interesting and unique ways, it’s hard to make your blog stand out unless you’re doing the same.

WordPress doesn’t make it easy for you to engage your readers with images. You’re going to have to look beyond core to the hundreds of image/photo based plugins available to make your blog highly visual. Below, you’ll find a score of solutions to all your image/photo problems in the form of the best plugins around. There are lazy loaders, gallery creators, slideshow generators, photoblog initiators and much, much more. You’ll soon realize that there’s more to WordPress than a few lousy thumbnails!

1. jQuery Image Lazy Loader WP

Lazy Loader is the perfect plugin for those who want to upload lots of images to their blog, but maintain a snappy site. Rather than loading all of the images on a page at once, which can take a considerable amount of time, Lazy Loader loads the images at the top of each page first and continues to load images further down as the user scrolls downwards.

2. Frontpage-Slideshow

This plugin does exactly what its name suggests: it lets you create a professional slideshow on the front page of your WordPress blog. Each picture is clickable, leading you to its related post, and information about four different slides can be displayed at a time. Transitions between slides are faded to look extra sleek.

3. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN is without question the best WordPress gallery plugin available and you should certainly try it out if you haven’t already. It’s comprehensive, with an easily understandable back-end. The only problem is that everyone’s using it. It does pretty much everything you’d want from a gallery plugin, looks professional and comes with a Flash slideshow option.

4. WP Photo Album

Unlike most of the plugins in this list, which focus more on user experience, WP Photo Album is made specifically for the blogger him- or herself. It makes creating and managing your photo albums easy, letting you move images between albums and adjust the sizes of thumbnails and full view pictures.

5. Flickr Photo Album

If you regularly upload photos to Flickr before transferring them to your WordPress blog, this plugin’s going to make your life a whole lot easier. You simply select Flickr photosets and display them on your blog as galleries, which you can customize to suit the look and feel of your site. It comes with a great widget which lets you display your latest Flickr photos in your blog’s sidebar.

6. FlippingBook

Use FlippingBook to add an extra element of interactivity to your blog and fully engage your visitors. Rather than displaying images in the standard way (a la NextGEN), FlippingBook displays them in Flash books, which can be flipped through with ease and great enjoyment. You can create these “books” in the administrator panel.

7. Cincopa: Post Videos and Photo Galleries

When it comes to displaying images, Cincopa does it all, creating polished image galleries and slideshows, not to mention videos, playlists and podcasts. It gives you access to 44 different skins to be sure that all Cincopa blogs retain a degree of individuality.

8. Lightbox2

Lightbox2 is simple, but devastatingly effective. Like all lightbox-type plugins, it lets you enlarge and overlay images on the current page, while dimming what’s left in the background. Unique to Lightbox2 is the ability to group related images and use numerous visual effects.

9. WordPress Content Slide

Use WordPress Content Slide to create jQuery slideshows anywhere within your WordPress blog. These slideshows fade in and out to add a touch of class to your site. Content Slide is fully customizable, even letting you link to another website if you like, to use the slideshow as an advertising banner.

10. Yet Another Photoblog

Far more interesting than its name suggests, Yet Another Photoblog (YAPB) is perfect for those who upload more images than text. It’s not a gallery plugin; it only lets you upload one image per post with a description. Using the YAPB Bulk Uploader plugin, you can mass upload images to your YAPB blog in an instant.

11. Lazyest Gallery

Lazyest Gallery is a powerful plugin with lots of great features. It rotates random images from your gallery, fading each one in and out. It’s fully customizable from the back end, letting you select the number of random images shown, portrait/landscape or both and various fading settings. It also allows comments on images and folders.

12. Shadowbox JS

Shadowbox is not only a great way to display images on your WordPress blog, it’s ideal for sharing videos too. Never again will you have to guide visitors away from your blog for them to view media as all images, audio files and videos, including YouTube videos will play directly on your site.

13. Sidebar Photoblog

14. Thumbnail For Excerpts

With this simple plugin, you can add thumbnail images to any excerpts you might have on your site, making it instantly more attractive and easier to navigate, improving usability and visitor experience.

15. Flickr Gallery

There are several plugins available which make uploading your photos from Flickr to WordPress easy, but this is one of the best. It lets you quickly create galleries of your most recent and most popular Flickr photos, view photos in gallery mode without leaving the page, display small images automatically in lightbox mode and embed Flickr’s Flash movie player.

16. Featured Content Gallery

Featured Content Gallery can transform your humble blog into a professional looking portfolio site. Besides other things, it creates a rotating image gallery of your posts or pages, which you can place anywhere on your blog. Each image can be overlaid with an extract from the text too.

17. Freebie Images

If stock images play a significant part in your professional (or personal) life, Freebie Images comes highly recommended. Search through a directory of thousands of regularly updated, free stock images which you can drag and drop into your posts.

18. Dynamic Content Gallery

Dynamic Content Gallery generates an image gallery with a shot for each of your latest or featured posts and pages (although default images can be added too.) What makes this plugin stand out from the rest is the slick look of the gallery itself.

19. SlideZoom

SlideZoom prides itself on its simplicity and quite rightly so. It’s particularly lightweight and straightforward. It lets you bulk or zip upload images to your blog, generating a HighSlide JS gallery that you can embed in WordPress or anywhere else you like, such as on another blog, eBay or a forum.

20. DM Albums

DM albums presents your photos in a really distinctive way, enlarging all images to perfectly fit the size of your blog, rather than showing them in a window half the size of your screen. You can add captions to individual photos and albums from within the WordPress Editor.

Let us know if we forgot some great plugin. We would love to hear your thoughts.

Just a few years ago only the most advanced Internet users knew what actually a blog is. Nowadays every kid hanging around seems to have a page on livejournal and you meet hundreds of websites hosted on Blogspot or say WordPress every other day in the search engine results or in the spam emails in your inbox. I would like to give you some insight into what actually a blog is and give a quick guide on starting a WordPress website.

Let’s get into work. First of all and when starting on a website, you should understand that WordPress is not just some place where you can post some kind of an updates. This is an amazing content management system that can be used to create any type of website of any complexity. What you usually see online is the 10% usage of the WordPress functionality and capabilities while most possibly you’ll be using only 5% if you just plan to post news from time to time.

The WordPress CMS is theme based which means that you can change designs any time you want while the content and the settings will remain the same in most cases. There are lots of free professional themes available online as well as template solutions by numerous companies. Apart from design changes, you can choose what functionality to have on your WordPress website. Thanks to various widgets and plugins you can create a real monster with the features that would cost tens of hundreds of dollars if ordered on a custom basis for a custom website.

There are lots of reasons why WordPress websites are so popular, I will list just a few why I personally like it so much.

1) For years and till now WordPress remains the cheapest solution to have a website built. It’s widely used by developers and web companies to create satellite websites (like the network of TemplateMonster websites devoted to different template categories) as well as by spammers (though as a rule they use free hosting or host at wordpress org). The system is free and there are lots of professional themes available online.
2) Creating a WordPress website is the quickest way to build an online presence for your company.
3) You will be able to manage your website in a convenient way on your own without paying the developer an hourly fee to carry out the updates.
4) WordPress system is SEO friendly by default (though of course there are enhancements that can be made). Google loves WordPress blogs.
5) You can change designs any time you’re up to. No additional fees and no special set-up.
6) WordPress capabilities are endless. There are thousands of free plugins available and you don’t need any special skills to use most of them.

When starting my first WordPress website I was feeling quite lost and could hardly understand what is all about. I found heaps of information in different places and was trying to put things together for hours. Now having a new WordPress website set-up takes me no longer than 30 minutes. This guide is made for beginners and those thinking of setting up their first WordPress blog. Don’t panic, there’s nothing you can’t do!

1. Registering Hosting and domain name.

You can either have your WordPress website set up on your server and thus show up for your domain name or host for free at WordPress and choose a website like “bestdesigns.wordpress.com”.I recommend setting up a separate domain name and hosting and this looks less spamy and more professional.

Most of the companies offer hosting and domain registration in one place. It may happen that you have a domain name registered in one place and the hosting account in the other. In this case all you have to do is ask your hosting provider to send you the so called name servers (ns) that you should email to your domain register.This will ensure your domain name is associated with your hosting and will show up the website you have uploaded to the server.

Now about hosting requirements. All you’ll need is PHP version 4.3 or greater and MySQL version 4.1.2 or greater running on the server. If you have no clue what is php and database, just send a following email to your hosting provider and see what they say:
“I’m interested in running the open-source WordPress blogging software and I was wondering if my account supported the following:
* PHP 4.3 or greater
* MySQL 4.1.2 or greater
* The mod_rewrite Apache module
Thanks!”

2. Downloading the WordPress.

To have the website running on the WordPress CMS first of all you’ll have to download the WordPress software to your computer. It’s highly recommended to use the latest version of WordPress that can be found here http://wordpress.org/download/ Once saved to your hard drive, unzip the files.

3. Adding your information.

Open the folder with the WordPress files and look for wp-config-sample.php. Rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and open it in any text editor. This is the place where you have to fill in your database details. Login to your hosting panel and look for MySql section. Create a new database and save the info on file. If you’re not sure how to created the database you may contact your hosting provider for help.

Fill in database details in the wp-config.php file, save it and close it. Now we are ready to move forward.

4. Uploading files to your server.

If you have never uploaded files to a server earlier you may find it a bit tricky, but it’s easy once you understand how it works. Uploading files to the server is almost the same as copying files from one folder on your computer to the other. The only difference is that you are copying the files to the remote computer and thus need the login and password to get access to it.

Login to your hosting panel and look for something like FTP accounts. Create a new user and put down the information: FTP name, user and password. Go to http://www.coreftp.com/ and download the so called FTP client. Follow the installation instructions. Once complete, add a new account and connect to your server with your FTP info.

In most cases, WordPress files have to be uploaded to www or public_html folders depending on your server settings. If you are not sure where to upload, contact your hosting company for help.

Finally, upload the WordPress files to the server.

5. Installing the WordPress.

Once the upload is complete you have to install the WordPress. Open the browser and go to www.mywebsitename.com/wp-admin/install.php That’s it! WordPress should now be installed. After installation you will be given a login and randomly generated password to the admin area. Save them on file.

6. Choosing the design theme.

After the WordPress installation you should be able to see your website at www.mywebsitename.com. The WordPress is installed with the default theme you most likely would wish to change and here’s how to make it.

As I have mentioned in the very beginning of this post, there are hundreds if not thousands of professional free WordPress themes available online. There are also multiple companies where you can buy a WordPress theme but I wouldn’t recommend doing that. First of all why spend money if you can get cool stuff for free? Secondly, there are special support forums for almost all the free themes where you can have all your questions answered by the users as well as theme bugs fixed as apposed to the template option where you just get it as is and get almost zero support. As a rule, free themes have more advanced functionality as they are created by real developers and not by a group of people taught to code certain number of things.

So where you can get the free WordPress themes? While there are lots of websites online, I recommend http://wordpress.org/showcase/. This is a 200% reliable resource with user recommendations and notes. There’s a list of categories available and you can also search by tags like white, clean, orange, minimal etc. Once you find the theme you like download it to your computer and unzip the files. Connect to the server as described above and upload the folder with the theme to ‘wp-content/themes’ directory.

7. Accessing your blog admin area.

To login to the website admin area go here www.mywebsitename.com/wp-admin/ and enter login and password you have received after installation. You’re in.

Once you login you will be prompted to the main page of the WordPress content management system. You might be overwhelmed by the number of buttons, links and other options but pretty soon you’ll get used to it. The main management menu is located on the left and there are lots of settings to play around with. You can hardly spoil anything, so let the researcher inside you do this exciting job for you.

8. Setting your theme and updating general settings.

To activate the theme you have uploaded in point 9 go to Appearance >>Themes in the left panel menu. You should see the list of themes available. Click on the theme you’d like to use and confirm your choice.

To set your website title and some of the main settings go to Settings>>General.

That’s it for today. By now you have your new WordPress website up and running online. You can play around with the admin area to see how to add new posts and create new text pages. In our next post we will tell you about some necessary and useful plugins as well as the settings that will make your blog both user and search-engine friendly.

WordPress out of the box comes SEO friendly, however there are many tweaks you can make to further optimize it for search engines.   We recently covered 10 important tips to optimize wordpress for search engines, however this post will go more in-depth and offering further optimization tips.

Here are a number of  advanced tweaks and WordPress plugins you can install to help with URL structuring, search engine crawling, handling duplicate content, optimizing title and meta tags, images and internal linking.

Setting Up the Permalink Structure

In WordPress:  Settings >> Permalinks

WordPress gives you a number of ways you can structure your post urls.  By default WordPress sets the urls like www.domain.com/?p=123. This is obviously not optimal because you are not gaining the benefits of having keywords in the url.

They also have options to set the urls organized by year/month/date, for example www.domain.com/2010/02/07/sample-post/. This is getting better, because you are able to add a unique post name in the url, however the post is four directories deep which can cause potential crawling issues.

The most effective way to optimize your urls is by using the custom permalink structure.  Choose “Custom Structure” and enter “/%postname%/ “.  By setting this custom structure your urls will look like www.domain.com/post-name/.  This puts your post directly off the root level and uses keywords based on your post title.

Setting Up non-www to www Redirect

In WordPress:  Settings >> General

The newer versions of WordPress make this extremely easy to do.  Simply change the Blog Address (url) to http://www.domain.com. WordPress will automatically update your htaccess file to redirect the non-www version to the www version.  If you have an older version of WordPress you will have to copy and paste the code provided into your htaccess file.  However I would upgrade to the latest version of WordPress before I manually add it.

Search engines treat the www and non-www version of a page as two different pages.  If not corrected, this can cause your blog to have hundreds or thousands of duplicate pages.  By fixing this you are minimizing potential duplicate content issues. 

Optimize Post Titles

In WordPress:  Settings >> All in One SEO Pack

By default WordPress creates page titles like “Blog Title >> Blog Archive >> Post Name”. This is ok, but not optimal.  Search engines will place more importance on the keywords at the beginning of the title tag so we will want to modify the tags so that the post name is at the beginning of the post and not the end.

To do this, make sure you install All in One SEO Pack.  This plugin will automatically set up your title and meta description tags the proper way.  Your page titles will now look like “Post Title | Blog Title“.  You will have the option to override a specific post title within the post if you would like.  Make sure you create a unique description after you have written your post.  All in One SEO Pack will not create meta descriptions, so when creating a post there is a section for adding unique titles and descriptions.

Block Certain File Directories in Robots.txt

There are certain directories that you should block from search engines.  Check out the Robots.txt guide I wrote that will show you exactly which directories you should block.

This will help with controlling which content you want search engines to crawl and not crawl.  There are many directories and files that are unnecessary for the crawlers to spider.  This will help the crawlers find the content you want spidered faster.

Install SEO Plugins

All in One SEO Pack

This SEO plugin is probably the best and most robust plugin for optimizing your blog for search engines.  This plugin will automatically optimize your blog category and post url structure, auto generate title tags, avoid duplicate content issue by restricting search engines from accessing pages that have duplicate content on them, and canonical tag integration.

Google XML Sitemap Generator

This plugin will automatically generate a XML sitemap of your wordpress blog that is formatted for Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.  Your sitemap will be sent to all of the search engines every time the plugin rebuilds your XML sitemap.  Having this plugin, ensures that the search engines are aware of all of your posts and will help with the overall crawling of your blog.

Google Analyticator

This plugin will add your Google Analytics tracking script to every page on your blog.  There are also other options and features which give you more accurate tracking.

• Disable Admin Tracking
• Enable Event Tracking
• Track Outbound Link Clicks
• Track Downloads (PDF, CSV, DOC)
• Google Adsense Integration
• Ability to Modify Tracking Script

SEO Smart Links

Interior linking will help with the overall crawling of your website, along with keeping readers engaged in your content.  You can also leverage your content by using keyword-rich anchor text and linking to other content within your blog.  This plugin does just that.  It will take keyword and phrases within your post and comments and link them to corresponding posts on your site.  This can significantly cut down on having to manually search for relevant posts on your site that you can link to within a post.

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images will automatically optimize all of your images by adding alt and title attributes.  If you do not have an alt or title attribute for your images, it will add one for you.

W3 Total Cache

Load time is becoming an important factor in search engine algorithms.  Not to mention a page that loads fast makes a visitor much happier and is more likely to stay on your site longer.  W3 Total Cache will help speed up the page load times by caching pages, removing white space and comments, and compressing css and js files.  Here are a few reasons why this plugin boasts it’s at least a 10x increase in site performance.

• Enable Page Caching
• Enable Minify
• Enable Database Caching

More SEO Quick Tips for Wordpress

• Allow commenting for user generated comment and higher engagement
• Use good categorization for usability
• Add compelling graphics and images in your posts
• Ask questions at the end of your posts to encourage comments
• Syndicate your content to your Twitter and Facebook profiles
• Social bookmark your best content

Share your tips and tricks with us via comments section.

If you are a regular user of WordPress like me then you might get bored of the default user interface of WordPress. Although the User Interface of WordPress is good but there is always room for improvement. Automattic the company behind WordPress has decided to go for Open Source Design Contests to make the User Interface of WordPress even better.

Are you ready to give it a try?

Default WordPress Dashboard

In the article we will take a look on some awesome plugins that can alternate the user interface of WordPress to make it more users friendly.

1. Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu

Admin Drop down Menu is one of the best WordPress plugins to change the default user interface of WordPress admin area. The plugin replaces all the admin links with super charged and beautiful horizontal CSS drop down menu. The plugin also saves you from unnecessary clicks to expand the menu and enhances your productivity.

Admin Drop Down Dashboard

The plugin comes with a comprehensive options page. You can change the color schemes of drop down menu and to make the plugin faster, you can also disable the supported icons for each admin link.

Admin Drop Down Options

An interesting feature is compact mode which only shows icons for top links and saves space in the drop down menu. The following screen shot elaborates this feature.

Compact Mode

2. Fluency Admin 2.2

Give your WordPress an attractive look with Fluency Admin. The plugin replaces all the admin links with splendid vertical CSS drop down menu. Fluency also adds support of Keyboard shortcuts to your admin links hence enables you to control your WordPress with keyboard only. You can switch between full menu view and icon-only view to save the space of your dashboard area with a single click.

Fluency Wordpress Dashboard

Fluency comes bundled with login page theme too which can be enabled from plugin options panel. For custom branding you can also use your own logo at the top of dashboard area and login theme.

Fluency Options Menu

Fluency Login Theme

3. Easy Admin Color Schemes

The default WordPress installation comes with two color schemes, grey and blue. This plugin adds two more color schemes for your admin panel. Moreover it also grants you to create your own color schemes. You can also export your custom color scheme to use it on other blogs. Depending upon the settings, each user can have its own customized color scheme. Have a look at the Green color scheme and the plugin’s option panel.

WordPress dashboard green color scheme

Easy admin color scheme options

4. Qwerty Admin Panel Theme

Qwerty Admin Panel Theme is a nice looking Admin Panel theme. The permits you to style the admin panel and login screen for all users. The WordPress logos can be swapped the with your own logo images for custom branding.

Qwerty WordPress admin panel theme

Qwerty WordPress admin panel options

A distinct feature of this plugin is ”

Limited Interface

” capability that helps you in hiding different admin panels from different users of your WordPress installation.

Qwerty Login theme

5. Pop Menus for WP-Admin

This simple plugin will be saving you time by creating quick and easy to use pop menus for your WP-Admin sidebar. Popup menus uses jQuery and CSS to popup animated admin-sidebar links. Moreover it makes the admin sidebar sticking with scrollable page that makes it a real time saver with the help of jQuery.

Pop-Menus Dashboard

6. Adminimize

Adminimize is a very comprehensive and advanced WordPress plugin that comes with a lot of features to customize your WordPress backend. The plugin has a lot of options to hide unnecessary items from the WordPress administration menu, submenu and even the ‘Dashboard’, with forwarding to the Manage-page. The plugin has more than 50 options to tweak the backend of your WordPress installation. The following screenshot shows the admin option panel of Adminimize.

Adminimize Option Panel

7. My Brand

Customizing your WordPress login page can’t be easier than this. Simply install this plugin and with the help of my brand option page you can select the background color or background image for your WordPress login page. You can also upload the custom logo for your login page with the help of my brand. The plugin is very useful for multi-author blogs and user contributed websites.

My Brand Options Panel

If you know more beautiful WordPress dashboard themes or ways to customize the admin panel of WordPress please share them with us.

If you need to complete quick project and you are ready to spend some money for it, this premium Wordpress portfolio theme showcase will definitely interest you! This is follow-up article to previous one about free themes, check it out – 24 Free Portfolio And Photo Gallery Wordpress Themes.

I think it’s okay to spend few bucks for great theme with full support and many features for fast projects. I just bought one as well, just because I needed to set up site rapidly fast, but I had specific requirements for that blog. I visited several premium theme sites and found good looking theme I was happy with in 30 minutes.

It was interesting experience for me and this research was quite exciting as well – when I went through these themes I found out several modern jquery features many sites do not offer just yet, interesting designs..really premium like! Even if I didn’t buy anything this time, I got a lot of inspiration and new ideas just while browsing! Enjoy and let us know which was your favorite theme?

1. Twicet (37.00$)

Theme Features (few of them):

• Valid XHTM Strict1.0 and CSS 2 .1, tableless Design
• jQuery support
• Fading Portfolio/Item slider
• Dropdwon Menu, improved with jQuery
• jQuery 100% unobtrusive wich degrades gracefully if javascript is turned off
• Gallery Page with lightbox
• Working ajax/php contact form
• Newsticker

2. Display ( 42$)

DISPLAY is a Wordpress Theme, best suited for Business and Portfolio sites. It comes with a fantastic 3D Image slideshow that can be controlled from your backend with a custom tool. The Theme has a huge wordpress custom backend (8 additional Admin Pages) that make customization of the Theme easy for those who dont know much about coding or wordpress.

The Theme also comes with a more subtle fading image slider. You can use this slider as your main slider, otherwise it will be used as a fallback if the users browser doesnt support flash.

3. Cubit (27$)

Cubit is a clean and flexible wordpress theme with 6 different cholor schemes(see preview Pics), which is best used for portfolio and business sites.

Main Features(few of them):

• The theme uses a javascript image transition at the mainpage only seen in flash before which suports an unlimted number of images. Take a look at the live preview and wait a few seconds for the image to transform
• Highly flexible admin area, you are able to edit every content from the wordpress backend
• 6 different cholor schemes
• Multilevel Dorpdown menu, Breadcrumb Navigation, Post Pagination
• jQuery Lavalamp for main menu
• Advanced comments with reply function

4. BlueLight (27$)

Bluelight is a mash-up of a 2.0 business website and a personal portfolio site. It can be used for either, or both. This template will get you up and running in no time!

Included Features(few of them):

• Installation Screencast!
• Theme Options Page (makes setup very easy)
• Quick Change Color Schemes (managed from theme options page)
• jQuery Graphic Slider (managed via theme options)
• Blog/Portfolio mash-up on Homepage
• Featured Project

5. Levitation Wordpress Business & Portfolio (37$)

Levitation is a Wordpress Template, best suited for Business and Portfolio sites. It comes with 5 sleek skins and 2 different front page designs (if the Wordpress Live Preview is not enough for you, please check out the html templates that are already available, the look stays the same in the Wordpress version).

Key features of the template (few of them):

• Valid XHTM Strict1.0 and CSS 2 .1, tableless Design
• Multiple Page templates
• 2 different Portfolio/Item slider, supporting unlimited items
• Dropdwon Menu, improved with jQuery
• jQuery 100% unobtrusive wich degrades gracefully if javascript is turned off
• Gallery Page with lightbox
• Working ajax/php contact form

6. Photo Nexus Wordpress Gallery Theme (27$)

Photo Nexus wordpress gallery is a 2 column , 2 color variation ( Bright and Dark) theme.
This theme is great for those who need a convenient way to publish and showcase a self managed Gallery of Photos, Artworks or Designs. The theme features modern yet minimalistic style so that your work will be guaranteed to be on focus. The theme comes added with Admin theme options so you won’t need to manually edit the files to get it running.

7. Concept ($32)

This theme is a complete Wordpress Theme, designed from the ground up to function as a comprehensive Wordpress theme that can be used for just about any site that needs a beautiful layout. While the frontend design has been popular as a HTML template, the real highlight of this template is a professionally built admin panel that let’s you edit every major content block in the layout quickly and easily without ever opening up a template file.

Theme features (just some of them):

• 6 uniquely styled themes (Blue, Green, Pink, Orange, Green, Dark Blue).
• All Core Page Templates (Home, Content Page, Image Gallery, Blog Post w/ comments styling, Search/Results, 404, and a Contact Form)
• Custom Admin Panel (Full CMS )
• Clean, commented code
• jQuery Lightbox
• jQuery Homepage & Gallery Slider

8. Sensor (69$)

Sensor is a Premium WordPress Theme suitable for photoblogs, portfolios, showcases, galleries, personal sites and other blogging topics!

Theme features (just some of them):

• 14 Awesome Color Styles
• Support for Threaded Comments
• Support for WordPress 2.8 and 2.9
• Widgetized Sidebar and Footer
• Dynamic image resizing for thumbnails (TimThumb script)
• 3 Custom Page Templates
• 4 Specially Developed Widgets

9. Professional (49$)

Professional is a theme which can be used as a CMS/Portfolio or as a blog.

The very light and flexible layout is based on the “Golden Ratio” principle, having 2 columns. The design mainly emphasizes the content.

Theme features (just some of them):

• Threaded Comments
• Support for WordPress 2.8
• Widgetized Sidebar
• Compatible with all modern browsers
• Theme Options Admin Panel
• Integrated Social Bookmarking Icons
• Featured Works on Homepage

10. Gallery (49$)

GALLERY is a premium WordPress theme which can be used for many purposes, including a Photoblog, Portfolio, Personal Blog, Product Reviews, and more!

Theme features (just some of them):

• Comes in 2 styles, 3 color styles each
• Threaded Comments
• Support for WordPress 2.8
• Widgetized Sidebar and Footer
• Custom Fields for Images are optional
• Dynamic image cropping for thumbnails (TimThumb script)
• 3 Specially Developed Widgets

11. Impulse ($49)

Impulse is a Premium WordPress Theme suitable for portfolios, showcases, galleries, photoblogs, personal sites, endless possibilities!

Theme features (just some of them):

• 3 Cool Color Styles: Blue, Dark, Silver
• Threaded Comments
• Support for WordPress 2.8
• Widgetized Sidebar and Footer
• Custom Fields for Images are optional
• Dynamic image cropping for thumbnails (TimThumb script)

12. Photoblog (49$)

PhotoBlog is an unique portfolio theme for Photographers, Graphic Designers, Architects, etc. With an intuitive layout and a fully widgetized sidebar, it offers the flexibility required in modern blogs.

Theme features (just some of them):

• AJAX Lightbox for viewing images in different sizes
• Featured Content on the homepage and in the Sidebar. Number of posts is controlled on the Widgets Page in the Admin Panel.
• Threaded Comments
• Support for WordPress 2.8
• Widgetized Sidebar
• Unique Widgets Developed by WPZOOM Team

13. WordFolio (37$)

Wordpress + Portfolio = Wordfolio, a wordpress theme which is suitable for graphic & web designers.

Theme features (just some of them):

• Valid CSS /XHTML Files (1.0 Strict)
• Commented and clean CSS /XHTML, and theme files
• Full layered PSD Files
• Jquery based kickass transparent showcase in homepage
• Easy showcase setup with custom fields
• Modern look dark style layout

14. London Creative (32$)

London Creative + comes with fully working contact form, awesome slider for your featured images, nasty spinning slider buttons (never saw them anywhere else, so you can call it unique), 2 message buttons under the slider and PrettyPhoto plugin (better clone of Lightbox).

You will also have user-friendly dropdown navigation with infinite dropdown levels where you can style every even list item via Jquery, so no more hassle, it’s automatic, you can just add posts and you are ready to go!

15. Folio Theme (27$)

Folio is a theme designed with the intent of being platform for your personal portfolio showcase as well as working blog. The themes homepage highlights your most recent featured project as well as posts in an easy to navigate format.

In the sidebar you will find flickr photos being syndicated, a widgetized sidebar allowing room for easy additions, as well as a brief about section highlighting yourself. You can tie in your flickr feed, and showcase your photos from your flickr account.

This theme comes with 5 different color accent options.

16. Pandora (32$)

Pandora is a WordPress Template, designed to promote anything from a corporate business to a portfolio site.
More than 10 professionally-designed and easy customisable themes comes as standard: Aqua, Crimson, Eco, Egypt, Modern, Mystery, Nebula, Ocean, Olive, Parquet, Podium, Startup.

Theme features (just some of them):

• Valid XHTML Strict 1.0 and CSS 2 .1, table-less layout, 960 Grid System
• jQuery Support:
• Windows7-like navigation light effects
• Gracefully degrading code (for older browsers, or javascript disabled case)
• 100% Workable right after Theme activation
• 6 Option Pages: General Settings, Mainpage, Portfolio, Blog, Footer, Contact
• Fully customizable (include 7 dynamic widgetbars)
• Slide & Portfolio PSD Helpers are included

17. Portfolious – Ultimately Extensive Wordpress CMS ($37)

Portfolious is the profesional Fulll Wordpress CMS functioning theme for, well anyone!
Because the name is Portfolious; it doesn’t mean you have to only use for portfolio blog, because you can change that in Portfolious!

Theme features (just some of them):

• Custom Layouts for categories and pages
• Tabbed Theme Options Page
• Animated and tabbed Theme options with color pickers, sliding content with conditional options, dynamic background switcher.
• Works in all major browsers including IE6 (png fix also added)
• Sliding Homepage Blog Posts, Twitter widget
• Option to choose whether or not use slider for homepage blog posts
• Option to choose whether to homepage intro content comes from a page or the admin entry

18. Goldmine (27$)

Previous Monofactor blog design, now Gold mine Wordpress theme. This theme stands out with it’s quality and it has been featured in most CSS Design galleries with highest rating before some time.

Theme features (just some of them):

• Post & Portfolio Item Thumbnails: Easily assign and attach thumbnails to your posts and portfolio items.
• Jquery Enabled: Flourished with jquery rounded corners and carousel, your blog and portfolio will look hot.
• Widget ready: Add or change what you want to show on your sidebar.
• WP 2 .7 ready: Also available for use in versions above 2.5
• Valid CSS & XHTML : Works nicely on most major browsers

19. Photo & Graphic Studio (27$)

This is a wordpress theme suitable for photographers and graphic & web designers.

Theme features (just some of them):

• Valid CSS /XHTML Files (1.0 Strict)
• Commented and clean CSS /XHTML, and theme files
• Full layered PSD Files
• All browser compatible
• Flash like, jquery based 2 type showcase (Easy setup with custom fields)
• Fullscreen background for photography and graphics
• Fixed size in content for web works
• Modern look WEB 2 .0 style layout
• Editable auto cycle and dotted pattern on background (showcase)

20. Business Professional Package ($37)

Theme features (just some of them):

• Clean & Valid Code
• SEO friendly – Search engines see the content before the navigation (in the code)
• NEW : Dashboard panel to notify you of any future updates
• Tested in all major browsers
• “Widget-Ready” with built-in custom styling (Calendar, Archives, etc.)
• All major page templates included, including the 404 page

21. Briefcase Portfolio Theme (27$)

This is a fun, bold, portfolio theme for WordPress. This theme allows you to showcase your work, while adding subtle personal touches. With a large billboard featured area on the homepage, to large bold, list and post views on the interior pages this theme will enable you to showcase the best of your work.
This theme comes with 4 color options available through the theme settings in the admin section, as well as the ability to post a project and determine whether you want it to be feature in the homepage Javascript billboard area.

Theme features (just some of them):

• JavaScript Based Featured Area on Homepage
• Tabless (CSS Layout)
• Valid CSS and XHTML
• Browser compatibility: All Major Browsers
• Homepage About Me Bio Section
• 4 Built In Selectable Color Settings

22. Blueleather WP Theme (32$)

Theme features (just some of them):

• CMS functionality
• Widget ready
• JQuery Slider for featured projects
• Easy featured projects setup using custom fields
• Easy general setup

23. StylemixFolio

Theme features (just some of them):

• CMS functionality
• Widget ready
• JQuery Slider for featured projects
• Easy featured projects setup using custom fields
• Easy general setup

24. Contrast (37$)

Contrast, a wordpress theme which is suitable for photographers, graphic & web designers, corporates with a kickass features.

Theme features (just some of them):

• Fullscreen Backgrounds!
• Kickass Portfolio Page
• Fullscreen Google Maps for your Contact Page
• Kickass Blog / List Sliders
• Unlimited Theme Colors
• Cool Navigation & Search Tab

25. Modern Portfolio (32$)

ourAgency WordPress theme is a fully customizable CMS theme – you can easily create a whole site with a homepage, subpages and a blog. I wanted to make it as user friendly as possible while still giving you full control over your content.

Theme features (just some of them):

• Well commented and clean CSS /XHTML Files
• tableless layout
• tested and working in all common browsers except IE 6 , so we wont give any support for IE 6 at the moment
• 6 x layered PSD Files (extra slider.psd for easy editing)
• jquery Start/Stop slider (Featured Category)
• jquery FancyBox (for images on work page)
• working PHP contact form with validation. (PHP MAiler)

26. ShapeShifter – One Page, Infinite Possibilities (32$)

This theme is perfect for anyone looking to launch a site right away. It’s perfect for businesses, creatives, and individuals who want to quickly publish their portfolio or image galleries, individuals who want a streamlined site without too many bells or whistles, and anyone else who’s serious about having a simple, well designed website with a full powered content manager.

Theme features (just some of them):

• Custom Admin Panel
• Unlimited Color Options (with 5 ready-made skins, see below)
• Installation instructions (with images!)
• Full PSD & pre-sized PSD ’s for skinning
• “Build Your Own” Contact Form
• Image Gallery Template
• jQuery Lightbox
• jQuery Footer Bar

27. Foliotheme (22$)

FolioTheme is a WP Portfolio Style Theme ideal for photographers, artists or designers.

Theme features (just some of them):

• Theme Changer with 7 Color Variations
• Gallery CMS Theme
• Content Slider for all Categories
• LightBox for all images
• Automatic Thumbnails
• NO Custom Fields! Just put you content right in the post – like magic!
• Gravatars if you allow comments

28. Gold Wordress – Blog + portfolio + cms (27$)

Theme features (just some of them):

• jQuery easy slider in home page
• jQuery fancybox, plugin to overlay images on the page with zoom animation
• JQuery Image slider panels on the portfolio page for featured portfolio entries.
• CMS functionality
• Widget-ready sidebar
• Fully working Php form with validation on the contact page
• Great design: beauty typhography and styling

29. Ambiguous (32$)

Ambiguous Portfolio WordPress theme was developed to showcase your work. Ambiguous has a large featured portfolio items area well placed on the homepage showcasing the best of your work. Also on the homepage are your most recent blog posts. In the sidebar there is a custom twitter feed feature, about widget displaying brief info about yourself, and a site search feature.

30. Gateway Studio ($32)

Gateway Studios, Simplicity Overhaul features a simple yet beautiful design, that will impress your visitors with its delicate form. The theme comes with many great features that just work out of the box, without the need for plugins, making Gateway a very smart decision with everything Integrated.

A lot of flexibility has been integrated into the theme, so you can use it from a Personal Site, to a Photography Blog to a complete Studio Website. You have an arsenal of Features and Customization at your disposal, and also a Clean Design created with usability and typography in mind.

ElegantThemes Theme Website

This is an excellent site also offering some nifty premium Wordpress themes, where you can pay 19.95$ and get access to all of their commercial themes for one year. Here I also find my own pick for personal project, so I am saying from personal experience, that I was positively surprised about their great admin panel with big list of modifiying features, so I didn’t even had a need to touch the code at first.

Okay, let me finish here and also share your opinions – do you need this type of  commercial articles, at least I don’t think anymore that the best stuff is for free, I don’t mind paying for quality and this article definitely proves it! If you buy something please use this site affiliate links to help us improve 1stwebdesigner blog quality! Thank you!

I got one fresh, small project, where I needed small portfolio site for a friend. It got me thinking and lead to research what Wordpress can offer to me, with its great CMS platform. I was a little bit surprised, because I got even better results than I expected- theres was a plenty of interesting portfolio, photo gallery themes, where homepage was static, but still you can tie together static with dynamic content and add blog as well. Maybe it’s nothing new or signifunt for most of you, but I wasn’t aware there is possible to get such theme so easily, where of course my friend could manually change it’s content without touching or learning any code knowledge.

It was commercial theme I tested, but since most of people look just for free stuff, I gave it a try and searched for free Portfolio, photo gallery type themes. Maybe results aren’t too bright, but those themes are completely free for using. Don’t worry, if you are searching for more quality and wider sortiment, I will follow up with Commercial Portfolio and Photo Gallery Wordpress Theme article in next few days!

1. ViewPort

Viewport, a free Wordpress theme created by Paul Bennett is focused around a clean and simple, content based layout. The aim is to grab the user’s attention and draw them straight into the content.

View Demo

2. WordPress The Unstandard

View Demo

3. Gallery 1.2

Gallery is a beautiful, free, gallery-style Thematic child theme for WordPress, designed by Christopher Wallace especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. It is extremely flexible and can be used as a starting point for design galleries and portfolios.

View Demo

4. wpFolio – Free CMS / Portfolio Wordpress Theme

View Demo

5. Blue Bubble

View Demo

6. Creative by Nature

View Demo

7. Linquist

View Demo

8. Work-a-holic

Work-a-holic is a free minimalistic two and three column WordPress theme that focuses mainly on showcasing portfolios for artists, web designers, photographers and illustrators. Work-a-holic separates your portfolio from your blog, enabling easy navigation for clients in a clean, intuitive fashion. It also has a separate sidebar for portfolio (shows recent projects) and a separate widgetized sidebar for the blog and pages.

9. Fotofolio Wordpress Theme

View Demo

10. Portfolio Wordpress Theme

“Portfolio Wordpress Theme” is a wordpress theme designed for web portfolios and (for now) just for web portfolios. It is coming with an Administrative Panel from where you can edit the head quote text, you can edit all theme colors, font families, font sizes and you can fill a curriculum vitae and display it into a special page.

View Demo

11. Irresistable

Use as a standard blog or use the customized homepage layout, as shown in our demo, that you can activate via our options panel

View Demo

12. Sharpfolio: Wordpress Portfolio Theme

Sharpfolio is a WordPress theme designed to enable Web Designers, Graphic Designers, Photographers, Motion Designers, Artists or any creative professional to showcase their work in a simple, clean, beautiful portfolio. Sharpfolio aims to focus primarily on your work, because after all, this is what’s most important.

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13. Portfolio Press

This is a dark-colored theme suitable for anyone who wants to create a quick portfolio or wants to showcase his work through WordPress. The theme is fully CSS/XHTML validated, WordPress 2.6+ ready and comes with easy to modify code.

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14. Desk Space

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15. Snapshot

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16. WP Coda

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17. Infinity

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18. AutoFocus

AutoFocus is a Wordpress theme specifically for photographers looking for a simple and elegant way to display their work online.

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19. FotoLog

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20. Free Photo Gallery

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21. Grace Photoblog

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22. Vivee Wordpress Theme

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23. Nishita – Free Photo Blog Wordpress Theme

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24. Fhi-Zin

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Toolbars used in Wordpress installations as plugins become more and more popular and effective. I am sure you noticed such toolbars on sites like Mashable.com, Abduzeedo.com etc and wondered how you can get one, why to use it and actually how good is sortiment. Maybe there are better toolbars available just for your needs?

I wondered and decided to create article about it – finding the most popular, interesting and eye-catching Wordpress toolbar plugins you could use daily to increase pageviews, comments, sharing, twitter followers, subscriptions and more. Some of these plugins even offer online chat with your readers, how cool is that? Enjoy, research and find your pick! Let us know your favorite toolbar plugin as well!

1.Extendy Toolbar

This plugin installs the Extendy toolbar to your blog without having to make edits to any of your template files. Note that you must have an Extendy account, available for free at http://extendy.com . Extendy lets visitors share their favorite pages, search your content, view your latest tweets and blog posts, connect with you across social networks, and more.

2. Meebo Bar

3.Gigya Toolbar

The Gigya Toolbar increases your blog’s traffic and provides an oppurtunity to make extra revenues.  Here are features Gigya offers:

• Get return traffic when users share and tweet from the toolbar.
• Supports 80 social destinations and includes a Facebook fan page and Twitter updates buttons.
• The toolbar does not affect page load time. It loads only after the page is fully loaded.

4. Wordpress Toolbar Plugin

Static Toolbar displays a static toolbar in the bottom of the page, which may contain last posts, rss feed, search engine, social network and sharing links.

5.Wordpress Toolbar

This Wordpress toolbar will automatically enable a toolbar for all outgoing links from your blog, it is similar as Digg or Stumbleupon. It helps to keep visitors coming back and write some comment or social bookmarking. Great tool.

6. mit3xxx.de Toolbar

Adds the mit3xxx.de toolbar to your website.

The mit3xxx toolbar allows you to add the following features to your site: navigate to the start pageintegrate a button to your rss-feed,let your users tweet your content, share your content to social network sites such as Delicious, Digg, Facebookanr more. It also provides more then 20 themes.

7. Wordpress Theme Demo Bar

Wordpress Theme Demo Bar is a plugin for wordpress (compatible up to WP 2.8.3) allowing to preview any wordpress theme without activating. Demo bar is customisable in admin panel, with several CSS style files as well. Very handy for theme developers or Wordpres theme related articles.

8. The Wordpress Bar

Editor’s description:

“Seen the DiggBar on Digg.com? Add a similar feature to your Wordpress blog. Use your blog as a short link service with Easy Link Creation. Feature any link on the internet with a custom URL such as http://www.internetriot.com/?bing. Also feature social network links such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg.”

9. WP External Links Bar

Maintain your external links (in posts and comments) in your site. Create a Link Bar like facebook, digg and google with share link as well.

10. WordPress Admin Bar

This plugin replicates all of the menu links in your normal admin area at the top of your main site for logged in users (i.e. you). You can go right to the “Write Post” or manage options pages in one click from anywhere on your blog. No more having to go to your dashboard first. You can even have it replace your admin area menus if you want.

11. WordPress Admin Bar Improved

Similar plugin to Wordpress admin bar but with several improvements – now even if you are not logged in you can – you will have top toolbar visible to login.

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12.Drag-To-Share eXtended

This plugin mimic the Mashable functionality where news stories and interesting articles can be shared to social networking sites. The functionality is driven by the images accompanying the articles, you click and hold on an image and can then drag it into a toolbar to share it. It’s brilliant and intuitive!

13. Snipi for Wordpress

Using the Snipi Toolbar, you can drag and drop images from anywhere on the Internet and have them appear automatically in your WordPress Media Library or NextGen Gallery. Interesting toolbar indeed. Check Youtube video for more.

14. Fixed Social Buttons

This plugin will add fixed social buttons on right side : twitter, facebook, myspace, reddit, delicious, technorati and rss feed buttons. Open social bookmarks links in a new or in the same window with “rel=’nofollow’” attribute or not.

15. WP Super Bar

A very simple bar for outgoing links in your posts.

16. Fixed Search Button

Looks promising plugin, with handy buttons. This plugin will add fixed buttons on right side :

• Home button
• Login button
• Contact button
• Search button
• Go to top button

17. Frame Breaker, aka Die Digg-bar die!

Something different – did you want sometimes to people visit really your page not digg-bars, different frames like you will see in this post also. Activate this plugin to get rid of such frames.

I could find fixed Twitter and Subscribe buttons, I see often on left or right sides of windows. If you know one, please share with me as well, so I would be able to create even more comprehensive list. If you know more such fixed toolbars, bars, buttons please do share!