How To Buy a WordPress Theme Like a Pro

Buying a WordPress theme is not something you should hurry into. It’s something that you need to do proper research before taking action on. The topic is very close to my heart as I have bought numerous themes in the past few years. While it’s fun to go through designing a custom made WordPress theme, you are going to save yourself a lot of money by buying a premium theme and modifying it.

Not all premium WordPress themes are created equal. And you do get what you pay for in most cases. So if you see a theme that is going for $20 and another that is going for $400, there got to be a difference. You just have to try and find it. After having bought numerous WordPress themes, here is what I look for in a good premium WordPress theme:

• Enhancements: not every coder codes the same way. If you are buying a theme to customize and enhance it, you should try to figure out if it’s easily customizable. After you buy a theme, you are going to figure out how a coder codes. But if you haven’t bought a theme from a specific coder before, you should try to ask on forums, blogs, and Twitter about his/her previous customers. Ask them questions about their themes and do your research before paying up for a theme.
• Graphics: not every coder provides you with Photoshop files that can save you time customizing your theme (ElegantThemes is one of those coders). Think about it. If you are not really that great with graphics and you get a theme with no customizable logo and images, you are going to have to do things from scratch yourself or pay for it. It really helps to get the files you need to customize your theme fast!
• Plug-ins: some themes come with a set of built-in plug-ins. You want to make sure you get all the information you need to get going without too much trouble.
• License: before buying a theme, you want to make sure what you are paying for. Some coders ask $100 to $500 more for you to have the right to remove the footer information. Also, just because you buy a theme for $300 doesn’t mean you can use it on an unlimited number of sites. Make sure you know your rights before paying up. (more…)

WordPress.TV: Your Resource For Everything WP

Great news folks. The good people behind WordPress have now launched WordPress.tv to help the WordPress community enjoy a better WP experience. You can find WordPress installation guides and all kinds of goodies on WordPress.tv. And let’s not forget about WordCampTV. That’s the place to catch various footages from Wordcamp events.

This is a great idea by WordPress to make the WP community even stronger. Now, you can have access to tutorials and everything you need to set up your own WordPress blog. And those Wordcamp presentations are priceless.  Well done guys!

Build a Movie Review Blog with Video Flick Theme

You got to love the WordPress community. That’s probably the biggest advantage of using a platform such as WordPress. These guys don’t sleep and keep innovating and designing new things for other WordPress users to use. Video Flick Theme is one of those things. The theme is designed by Press75 specifically for folks who dream of running a movie WordPress blog. Let’s say you want to build your own movie review site. That’s going to be a snap with Video Flick.

Video Flick comes in two colors. In essence you get two themes for the price of one. The front page of this theme allows you to show case your favorite movies. Of course, when someone clicks on any of the links, a separate page opens up that they can use to see the movie trailer in full-screen.

Video Flick is a hybrid WordPress theme, which means you can add your very own review on each post under each video. (more…)

How to Mask Your WordPress URLs

A few months ago, a very good friend of mine told me about the necessity of masking links on a blog. I own a SEO blog and I link to many resources on that blog. Some of those resources are frowned upon by Google, but I never thought that it would affect my blog if I no-followed the links. But the reality of the situation is, you should always mask your link not only to avoid any issues with search engines, but also to avoid folks from hi-jacking your links.

Thankfully, there are internal and external solutions that allow WordPress webmasters to mask links without too much trouble. Depending on your links, you should try a combination all these solutions to be on the safe side. (more…)

What Would You Add To WP 2.7?

WordPress 2.7 is finally here, and folks can’t get enough of it. I have talked about how the interface has improved. I can honestly say that as a result of using WP 2.7, I have become more productive. But I am a greedy guy and can’t stop asking for more features. I wish I could drag and drop the menus and their items to the front page and have them opened there. I also wish there was a way to add menu items on the interface and have the ability to program the code there. I am sure someday we will see some of these features, but right now these two features are on the top of my list.

What would you change about WP 2.7? What would you add? I am interested to see if you have had any major issue with the latest version of WordPress. Please share your thoughts. What would you like to see in WordPress 2.8?

FREEmium WordPress Theme Released

The good folks at FreebiesDock.com have released a cool free WordPress theme to those who are looking for a new theme in 2009. Here is what you get with Freemium:

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• jQuery menu
• quick submitting to web2.0 websites support
• flickrRSS plugin support
• threaded comments support
• feedBurner subscribe via email support
• a lot of advertising spots (125×125, 120×600, 300×250)
• 2 widget ready sidebars
• free for commercial & non-commercial use

You can download it here. Don’t forget to share your experiences here.

FaceBook Connect WordPress Plugin

If you are a heavy Facebook user, you have probably heard of FaceBook Connect. It’s an amazing way of bringing the power of Facebook to your blog. Think about it. People being able to comment on your blog with Facebook tracking your latest Facebook visitors. And talk about your visitor’s network. Facebook connect can explode your traffic by leveraging Facebook’s power.

Now, if you are an aspiring developer, you can use the sample code provided by Facebook to implement FB Connect on your WordPress blog. But thankfully, the good guys at Socialable have developed a Facebook WP plug-in that makes things so easy for WordPress users. The plug-in is very easy to use. But you need to watch the video provided by the developers to set up the Facebook side of things. In essence, you need to create an application per blog and use the application and secret keys per application to activate the plug-in.

Once you activate the plug-in, you are going to see the latest visitor from Facebook, and your visitors get to comment on your blog without having to log in. This is a very innovative feature and something that you need to jump on before everyone else does.

Questions? Comments? Share your thoughts.