Tag: RSS

Categories
Business Classifieds CMS Newspaper Small Business

Classifieds Theme

classifieds-mainClassifieds Theme is a complete classified ads system for WordPress. Meaning you do not need to adapt your current site using a wordpress classifieds plugin.

According to the publishers of the theme it ‘allows anyone to easily turn a standard wordpress blog into a powerful community driven classified ads serving platform’ its basically a piece of classifieds website software.

The look of the theme is very basic and if you are running a classified ads site or want to take your classifieds online then this is a very good thing indeed. You need the focus of your site to be your customers ads not the surrounding graphics and banners, this theme achieves this very well. The ads are nicely separated with alternating background colours, and can easily catagorised and tagged by the customer, making them easy to find by visitors.

The demo site which is viewable here
charges its users $3 per 99 days for each advert. You can easily change this to any amount you want, we would recommend using a $1 / £1 per 14 days ratio for maximum profit and affordability. All payments are collected via paypal and there is no need for your customers to go through the annoying join / sign up process before they can place an ad. However if you are an avid mailing list collector then there is plenty of opportunity for your customers to sign up.

Classifieds Theme. Simple layout. Maximum Profit
Classifieds Theme. Simple layout. Maximum Profit

The scope for this theme is huge. For example coupon code and promo code sites are becoming big business in the current economic climate and this theme is perfect for that use, it already looks very similar to a lot of the major players sites.

Free classified websites like Gumtree, Freecycle and Craigslist are some of the biggest in the classifieds market and although they offer many of their postings for free they make up the rest of their income from on site advertising. Why not use this theme for a similar use? It has built in adsense and plenty of banner space.

The developers of Classifieds Theme have paid a lot of attention to how other similar sites work. More importantly they have picked out the most important ‘pros’ of these sites while avoiding their ‘cons’ like the plague! This theme has far too many features to go into detail here but here is a list of just some of them:

Features

  • Paypal integration
  • Lightbox style gallery for product images
  • Ad Tagging
  • Auto pruning
  • Featured classifieds
  • Adsense integration
  • Ad rotation (avoid banner blindness)
  • Category specific advertising ready
  • Advanced ads management
  • Auto payments
  • Email notifications for newly submitted ads
  • Email notifications for payments received
  • Contact seller form
  • Email a friend button
  • Print view button
  • Custom login bo
  • Theme options panel
  • Theme support
  • Unlimited theme customization (open source)
  • RSS feed displays latest classifieds
  • All necessary plugins are included with the theme

See what we mean? This is a serious tool and it is very intuitive, for instance take a look at the individual ad page for an iPhone below.

Individual ad page. Note the Adsense banners and contact seller form
Individual ad page. Note the Adsense banners and contact seller form

See how the banners and Adsense have changed to be relevant to the product the seller is advertising without disturbing the look of the theme or becoming dominant over the sellers ad. The one thing we would change here is the positioning of the product images. They are too far down the page and need to be close to the top to become more of a feature. This is a big shame because when clicked the product images open full screen in a lightbox style gallery overlay with easy navigation to browse all the different angles and views the seller has uploaded. Note that this page also has an ‘ask the seller a question’ form as well as a comments form. Both very important when building a classifieds community.

If you do run a classifieds based business (or similar) then you really need to consider this theme if you want to maximise your profits and make usage easy for your customers. If you already have a website then this should be a big wake up call to upgrade if your existing site does not meet the full spec of this one.

Buying this theme reveals an interesting option. As well as the usual single license and multi user license (if you wish to install on more than one site). The developers also offer a reseller option. If you are a web developer, sell themes or simply have many clients who would be interested in this theme then you can pay a one off fee and then resell the classifieds theme for as much as you want and as many times as you want. You can also redevelop it and sell it with no comeback. Click here to see all the different options available.

If you are not a developer and simply need this theme installed for you then please click the ‘install’ link below.

Categories
Bands CMS Magazine Multi Media

Tribal

tribal1New kids on the block Gorilla Themes have released the monster wordpress theme Tribal. Mixing the dirty grunge theme feel with urban graff overtones this theme delivers in both looks and functionality.

Tribal has been developed to be used by anyone wanting to promote heavily within the music industry. It is intended to be used by artists, bands, record labels, radio stations, reviewers and industry news. With a little imagination though it could be used and developed for so much more.

Using the latest technology available the home page of this site presents your visitors with a nice and dynamic featured content section (jQuery) with full slide show of all your latest news / posts. This would look at home on any flash site but harnesses the power of wordpress and jQuery to be nice and SEO friendly, more importantly though it is simple to use with just a few options in the admin.

Click to see slideshow of Gorilla Themes monster creation 'Tribal'

The first thing your visitors will notice however is the beautiful jukebox style music player, here you can really show off with album art, as many tracks as you want played and minimal controls making for very easy use. This is one of the best music players on the web at the moment and its built into your theme!

Features

  • Jukebox music player with album art.
  • Flash titles system
  • Flickr Integration
  • Add your own Logo and Styles Easily
  • Featured Content Slideshow
  • Feedburner Integration
  • No Custom Fields
  • Gravatar ready
  • Widget ready
  • Adsense ready
  • Turn all-or-individual banners on/off
  • Full support and tutorials
  • Suitable for: artists, bands, press, promoters, labels, reviewers, magazines, industry and many more

This music wp theme also has a built in flash titles system which renders all your article headers in the themes grunge font keeping everything in style and looking one step ahead of your competitors (and still SEO friendly!).

Tribal also has a built in system for auto sizing your images and avoids the use of custom fields for ease of use.

With adsense built in (if you want it), feedburner, subscribe options (so you can quickly build a mailing list ), and search engine friendly design, this is a strong business orientated website masquerading as an urban graff street theme. Any hip-hop or similar label should be proud to have this as there front of house marketing portal. It can also be developed very easily to suit any branding.

We recommended Tribal very strongly if you are serious about expanding and promoting your business.

Categories
Multi Media Themes Video

High-Def

high-def-thumbailWe have only just discovered Graph Paper Press and are very impressed. They are a company who specialize in making WordPress themes and who put a lot of effort into helping their users with as much support as possible.

But what’s really important is ‘how good are their themes?’ Well lets find out!

The first wp theme from Graph Paper Press we have decided to review is the High-Def theme. Mimimal and stylish the name gives a big clue as to what this theme should be used for! High-Def features a built in HD video player with with full-screen capabilities, perfect for those who dont want to rely on others to host their content i.e. the good: vimeo, or the very bad: youtubes new HD player. But that not all its got! A well designed ‘mac’ style sliding content region and a powerful automatic thumbnail creator for posts (no more custom fields!!).

Features

  • A theme settings page with makes every element on the homepage optional and configurable
  • Five separate widget areas
  • Automatic thumbnail creator
  • HD player with full screen option
  • Advertising ready (if you want it)
  • RSS built in
  • Easy to change to your branding
  • Multi-media support
  • Free support forums
  • Suitable for multi-media use, magazines, review sites and too many more to list here!


Need an example of just how much support Graph Paper Press give you? Check out these screen casts:

>>Watch a brief introduction to the High-Def theme design<<

>>Watch a brief introduction to the themes admin interface<<

The minimal design ensures that visitors wont be lost on your site, and also makes it very easy for you to organise your content. The theme itself is very easy to brand and comes with

‘A theme settings page with makes every element on the homepage optional and configurable’

It is easy to monetize this theme aswell with a nice none intrusive space for adverts at the side. All in all a very nice theme and a great debut on our site from Graph Paper Press. Try it out with the theme demo below or go straight to the High-Def home page for more information, comments from other users and forums!

Categories
Gadgets Magazine Office Technology Themes

Revolution Office

Revolution Office comes from the creme de la creme of site designers Jason Schuller (of Revolution Two). Although this design is called ‘Office’ its use is pretty universal and is suitable for almost anyone. With Web 2.0 looks and beautifully crafted composition we cannot stress enough just how nice this site is, please go to the homepage and check out the demo to see for yourself.

Available as a WordPress theme only however Revolution WordPress themes are becoming very well known for supreme quality and an amazing level of after care support. Buts that enough about Revolution (as you can probably tell their a bit of a favorite of ours) lets check out Office theme and see if its any good!

Office is a pretty minimal site which means your visitors arn’t going to have any trouble finding their way around and getting to the information they need quickly. The homepage has an impressive image slider (please try this out in the demo it has such a cool smooth sliding action!!) with a link from the images to the appropriate page or featured article. The slider could be used in so many ways, it could be turned into a very dynamic looking menu or a showcase for photography or any products you are selling or reviewing, your imagination is pretty much the limit with this one. If you do go for this theme please post links and show off your sites below, we would love to see how you have developed this!

Features

  • Beautiful image scroller
  • Breadcrumb enabled
  • Gravatar enabled
  • Widget ready
  • RSS 2.0 enabled
  • Unlimited fast support
  • Suitable for almost any use

office-home
Click for homepage, categories and post page

When you do a search or click on catagories / featured content you are presented with a very nicely layed out page with thumbnails of each item with a text excerpt, rather than just a huge page to scroll down containing all the related articles, or worse a horrible built in google type search results page.

The articles or pages themselves are simple and effective, with a two column look, lots of room for your content and a content details section at the side. This allows visitors to see which sections of your site the article comes from for easy backtracking, and an RSS 2.0 feed. Here’s our only gripe with the design of office, below the content details is a recent content section showing the titles of all the latest storys or pages. This would be so much more effective as a related content section, this way if a visitor has not found exactly what they wanted then its easy for them to quickly get back on track.

So as you have probably guessed we love this design and cannot recommend it enough.

Now here’s the important choice you have to make if you want this site! Themes from Revolution Two are availible as free downloads directly from their site however, the free versions arn’t exactly easy to find and come with no support what so ever!! Not even an instructions.txt in the zip file! Worst of all its not always the most upto date version of the site. Speaking from experience this can be a very frustrating and time wasting way of trying to get their sites up and running quicly even for an expert. Googling dosen’t help either as their support forums are closely guarded and locked to anyone who hasn’t brought their support package. Although slightly pricey their support is unlimited across all their themes and very very quick so even a newbie can get the site up and running in a matter of hours. They even offer customization techniques and tutorials and all questions answered by experts. Their standard membership package only lasts a year however if you want lifetime option then there is a Revolution Pro Plus Membership available for not much more than the standard price! Quite frankly its the option we have gone for and haven’t (yet) regretted it! However if you carn’t afford it, or have a lot (months!) of time on your hands then plug for the free option.

Don’t forget to post and show off your versions of this site below!