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15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:11:03 +0000

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

Favicon

A favicon brands the tab or window in which your website is open in the user’s browser. It is also saved with the bookmark so that users can easily identify pages from your website. Some browsers pick up the favicon if you save it in your root directory as favicon.ico, but to be sure it’s picked up all the time, include the following in your head.

<link rel=“icon” type=“image/x-icon” href=“/favicon.ico” />

And if you have an iPhone favicon:

<link rel=“apple-touch-icon” href=“/favicon.png” />

Titles And Meta Data

Your page title is the most important element for SEO and is also important so that users know what’s on the page. Make sure it changes on every page and relates to that page’s content.

<title>10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS | How-To | Smashing Magazinetitle>

10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS | How-To | Smashing Magazine

Meta description and keyword tags aren’t as important for SEO (at least for the major search engines anyway), but it’s still a good idea to include them. Change the description on each page to make it relate to that page’s content, because this is often what Google displays in its search result description.

<meta name=“description” content=“By Paul Boag Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look” />

Cross-Browser Checks

Just when you think your design looks great, pixel perfect, you check it in IE and see that everything is broken. It’s important that your website works across browsers. It doesn’t have to be pixel perfect, but everything should work, and the user shouldn’t see any problems. The most popular browsers to check are Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Chrome, Opera and the iPhone.

Proofread

Read everything. Even if you’ve already read it, read it again. Get someone else to read it. There’s always something you’ll pick up on and have to change. See if you can reduce the amount of text by keeping it specific. Break up large text blocks into shorter paragraphs. Add clear headings throughout, and use lists so that users can scan easily. Don’t forget about dynamic text too, such as alert boxes.

Writing for the web

Links

Don’t just assume all your links work. Click on them. You may often forget to add “http://” to links to external websites. Make sure your logo links to the home page, a common convention.

Also, think about how your links work. Is it obvious to new users that they are links? They should stand out from the other text on the page. Don’t underline text that isn’t a link because it will confuse users. And what happens to visited links?

W3C Link Checker

Functionality Check

Test everything thoroughly. If you have a contact form, test it and copy yourself so that you can see what comes through. Get others to test your website, and not just family and friends but the website’s target market. Sit back and watch how a user uses the website. It’s amazing what you’ll pick up on when others use your website differently than how you assume they’d use it. Common things to check for are contact forms, search functions, shopping baskets and log-in areas.

Silverback – guerrilla usability testing

Graceful Degradation

Your website should work with JavaScript turned off. Users often have JavaScript turned off for security, so you should be prepared for this. You can easily turn off JavaScript in Firefox. Test your forms to make sure they still perform server-side validation checks, and test any cool AJAX stuff you have going on.

Validation

You should aim for a 100% valid website. That said, it isn’t the end of the world if your website doesn’t validate, but it’s important to know the reasons why it doesn’t so that you can fix any nasty errors. Common gotchas include no “alt” tags, no closing tags and using “&” instead of “&” for ampersands.

RSS Link

If your website has a blog or newsreel, you should have an RSS feed that users can subscribe to. Users should be able to easily find your RSS feed: the common convention is to put a small RSS icon in the browser’s address bar.

Put this code between your tags.

<link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“Site or RSS title” href=“link-to-feed” />

Analytics

Installing some sort of analytics tool is important for measuring statistics to see how your website performs and how successful your conversion rates are. Track daily unique hits, monthly page views and browser statistics, all useful data to start tracking from day 1. Google Analytics is a free favorite among website owners. Others to consider are Clicky, Kissmetrics (still in closed beta yet), Mint and StatCounter.

Sitemap

Adding a sitemap.xml file to your root directory allows the major search engines to easily index your website. The file points crawlers to all the pages on your website. XML-Sitemaps automatically creates a sitemap.xml file for you. After creating the file, upload it to your root directory so that its location is www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.

If you use WordPress, install the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in, which automatically updates the sitemap when you write new posts. Also, add your website and sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. This tells Google that you have a sitemap, and the service provides useful statistics on how and when your website was last indexed.

Defensive Design

The most commonly overlooked defensive design element is the 404 page. If a user requests a page that doesn’t exist, your 404 page is displayed. This may happen for a variety of reasons, including another website linking to a page that doesn’t exist. Get your users back on track by providing a useful 404 page that directs them to the home page or suggests other pages they may be interested in.

Another defensive design technique is checking your forms for validation. Try submitting unusual information in your form fields (e.g. lots of characters, letters in number fields, etc.) and make sure that if there is an error, the user is provided with enough feedback to be able to fix it.

404 error pages reloaded

Optimize

You’ll want to configure your website for optimal performance. You should do this on an ongoing basis after launch, but you can take a few simple steps before launch, too. Reducing HTTP requests, using CSS sprites wherever possible, optimizing images for the Web, compressing JavaScript and CSS files and so on can all help load your pages more quickly and use less server resources.

Besides, depending on the publishing engine that you are using, you may need to consider taking more specific measures – for instance, if you are using WordPress, you may need to consider useful caching techniques to speed up the performance.

Back Up

If your website runs off a database, you need a back-up strategy. Or else, the day will come when you regret not having one. If you use WordPress, install Wordpress Database Backup, which you can set up to automatically email you backups.

Print Style Sheet

If a user wants to print a page from your website, chances are she or he wants only the main content and not the navigation or extra design elements. That’s why it is a good idea to create a print-specific style sheet. Also, certain CSS elements, such as floats, don’t come out well when printed.

To point to a special CSS style sheet that computers automatically use when users print a page, simply include the following code between your tags.

view plain copy to clipboard print ?

<link rel=“stylesheet” type=“text/css” href=“print.css” media=“print” />

Download the Ultimate Website Launch Checklist!

Just recently Dan Zambonini has published a very detailed checklist that covers both the pre-launch and the post-launch phase of the web site life cycle. Among other things his Ultimate Website Launch Checklist contains checks related to content and style, standards and validation, search engine visibility, functional testing, security/risk, performance and marketing.

The pdf-version is available as well. The checklist is a very useful reference that may help you in your daily projects and will help you to prevent errors and mistake once the site is released.

You may also want to consider the Quick Usability Check List by David Leggett that highlight some of the more common problems designers should address on their own sites in a Usability checklist of sorts. Not all of these items will apply to every website, these are just suggested things to look for in your own site design.

What other checks would you list?

Make yourself a to-do list and keep it handy to check over before making any website live. Are there any other points you would add? Share them in the comments!

About the author

Lee Munroe is a freelance Web designer from Belfast. You can see his other writings on Web design on his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

88 Unmissable Wordpress Links: Theme Thursday

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:03:16 +0000

Here is the compiled list of all the Theme Thursday links:

Avoid Bad Blog Posts With These 3 Writing Tips

admin — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:10:47 +0000

Nearly every article I’ve ever read about Professional Blogging has mentioned these fairly obvious tips for writing better blog posts:

“Proof-read for typos and grammatical errors.” — “Create original content. ” — “Write short and lively posts.”

In this article, I’ll be discussing three writing tips you may have never thought about before.

I kept a blog while attending college. In it I almost daily recorded my trials and triumphs as a college student. The blog gained an impressive audience during the two years I authored it, and I believe it was due in part to the “rules” I made for myself when creating blog posts.

The “rules” that I kept secret throughout my first blog’s existence worked well for me, so I’m revealing them now as the following “tips” below:

Tip #1 – Never Mention Your Posting Frequency (or Infrequency)

“Sorry I haven’t updated my site in a while.” — “It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything on here.” — “I know I haven’t been giving this blog much attention lately.”

Do you know what all of these phrases have in common? They are all bad ways to open a blog post. Regardless of this, I frequently read blogs that make a habit of opening a post in this manner.

When you open a blog post with an apology about or reference to your recent lack of new material, you are not earning the sympathy of your readers. What you’re really doing is:

Placing emphasis on how your blog is not updated regularly.
Pointing out how you lack interesting things to write about.
Failing to capture the interest of your readers immediately.

In other words, you’re wasting your readers’ time.

How To Break This Habit: Open every blog post as if the reader has never visited your site before. Every blog post should be able to be read as a single, timeless, and complete story that makes a valuable point. In the event that a blog post is a part of a series, then open the post identifying it as such with links to the previous parts.

Tip #2 – Never Copy Another Blog’s Content

Not only because it’s impolite, but because it won’t accomplish what you think it will. You may believe that you can easily disguise someone else’s content as your own, or that a popular post from someone else’s website will achieve similar success on yours — but the reality is:

The site that originally created the content will always be ranked highest since it was indexed first.
Search engines like Google will lower your site’s ranking when it detects the duplicate content.

You’re Only Hurting Yourself: If you’re desperate to add content to your site, don’t resort to copying someone else’s. Each time you use something someone else has created, you’re losing out on an opportunity to enhance your own writing skills. Creating consistent, original, quality content is the key to creating a successful blog — you’re best off writing things of your own.

Tip #3 – Never Post Without Something Meaningful To Say

It’s good to get in the habit of writing every day, just for the sake of writing. It is not good, however, to publish a post that contains nothing meaningful.

When you force yourself to write something just so you have new content to publish, it will likely sound forced. Don’t lower the quality of your writing just to increase your post quantity.

Ask Yourself: What response would you rather receive from your readers? They visit your site, and are disappointed you haven’t written a new post — or they read your latest post, and are disappointed it was a waste of their time. In every instance, I would rather have the former, because the latter may cause a reader to leave your site with no intention of returning.

Once you’re aware of which writing trends can cause readers to lose interest in your posts, you stand a much better chance of avoiding these bad blogging habits. When you know how to recognize a bad blog post, you can choose not to publish it. This doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer, it just means you’re saving space on your blog for when you’ll write something better.

Remember that every writer has his or her own style. This article is not meant to be a “cheap shot” at all bloggers that do the things I recommend against. I mean only to offer some constructive criticism — and if you find that you are having trouble maintaining a persistent audience, perhaps the tips outlined in this article will help you change that.

By Shaun Boyd
http://www.lifereboot.com/

20+ Great WordPress 2.7 Compatible Plugins

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:46:16 +0000

WordPress 2.7 has finally hit, and the first thought on most people’s minds might be, “Will my favorite plugin work with it?” What follows is a list of over 20 great plugins that have already shown to work with 2.7 without any problems.

Some of these you are sure to have heard of, others may be new to you, and that shouldn’t stop you from trying them out. This is the perfect opportunity for you to explore new plugins that may improve your audience’s experience on your site.

What 2.7 compatible plugins are your favorite?

Add to Any – Social bookmarking, saving and subscription buttons optimized for WordPress, featuring Google Analytics integration, automatic updating and more.

Akismet – The most well known of the anti-spam plugins always comes packed with the latest version of WordPress, so it is always a given it is ready to go.

cforms II – An easy tool for creating submission forms on your site that can be inserted into posts and pages alike by just inserting a line of code.

Entries On Page X – Adds a link on your posts to the archive page so that people can look through your blog in a more chronological order.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – The essential plugin for anyone who wants to use FeedBurner to monitor their number of RSS subscribers.

Google Analyticator – Google Analyticator takes all the work out of adding Google Analytics to your site. Install the plugin, enter your tracking code in the settings, and this handy plugin will place the code where it needs to be no matter which theme you switch to.

jQuery Lightbox – A lightbox plugin that enlarges the image while darkening the background so you can see the picture better.

Google XML Sitemap – An essential plugin for bloggers to generate XML enabled sitemaps to aid with indexing by search engines like Google, MSN, Ask and more. This plugin has said 2.1 compatible for ages now, but it continues to work with the various updates.

MyAdsense – Allows you to manage your AdSense placement in your theme or posts from a centralized settings page.

Peter’s Case Insensitive Usernames – Tired of remembering if you created your account with Sean or sean? This plugin will let you sign in any way you want once it is installed.

PHP Code Widget – This plugin will allow you to post PHP snippets in your post and execute them.

Smart YouTube – Allows you to easily insert YouTube videos into posts, comments, RSS feeds, and gives you numerous options for customizing their display.

Podcasting – Gives you full podcasting support inside of WordPress with tools such as iTunes distribution, support for multiple formats, a built-in player and more.

@Reply w comment preview -This plugin gives your comments a Twitter-like “@” reply system so that you can see with ease who is talking to who.

SendFeed – SendFeed reads your RSS feed and converts your posts into text and HTML emails to be sent out to your mailing list.

SEO Friendly Images – Assists with the automatic adding of ALT and TITLE tags to your images for better search engine placement.

WP Super Edit – Allows you to add even more features to the WordPress visual editor so you can have an easier time inserting even more HTML code into your posts.

Share This – ShareThis still leads the way in social media sharing, and while the little green button does not yet say it is 2.7 compatible, it is working none the less.

Site Maintenance -A handy plugin that puts up an “Under Construction” notice while you’re undergoing site maintenance or getting ready to release a new theme.

SMS Text Message – You can add a widget to your sidebar where users can enter their cell number to receive infrequent text message updates about what is new on your blog.

WebComic – Ever had a desire to create your own Web comic, but didn’t know how to build a site for it? WebComic will turn a WordPress site into your perfect answer complete with strip directory, character pages and more.

by Sean P. Aune

20 Great Free WordPress 2.7 Themes

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:42:39 +0000

We recently compiled a list of 10 of the best WordPress 2.7 compatible themes, but it left some commenters asking, “Where are the free ones?”

We’ve gathered up 20 great free WordPress 2.7 compatible themes that are ready for you to download. These themes cover a wide variety of needs, layouts and customization, so this small sampling could provide you with hours of fun!

What are some of your favorite free WordPress themes?

2-Column WordPress 2.7 Themes

AdsPress – A Google AdSense friendly theme in a clean, fixed width design that has two banner placements and a text area for the ads. Has two columns and is widgetized and gravatar ready.

Artificial Intelligence – Fixed width, gravatar and widget ready, this theme changes it up a bit by putting the widget column on the left side of the content column with a header area for informational text.

Connections Reloaded – One of the best known WordPress themes out there as it has been around forever, Connections has been “reloaded” to work with 2.7, but is compatible with every version of the blogging platform since 1.5.

Deep Red – A very narrow fixed width theme, but has a really large emphasis on the categories by allowing them to take up a huge amount of the right column.

Google Chrome – Google Chrome has certainly become a popular web browser, and now you can carry that look and feel over to your blog with this Chrome inspired 2-column theme. A nice clean design, but probably not a good idea to load it up with a lot of flashy widgets in the sidebar.

Internet Sharing – While a fairly standard 2-column theme on its main page, the individual post pages is where it’s a bit different with a nicely contained and highlighted area for information about the post, social links and other information.

NewBlue – A fixed width theme with a clear, open design and a very unobtrusive blue motif. Has full Feedburner integration and really clear typography.

Premium News – A 2-column theme with a featured article panel at the top, two locations for 125X125 ads, slide out area for categories and archives. A fairly involved theme available for free.

Retrospective – A very open 2-column theme that has no visible boundaries between columns giving you the illusion of complete openness.

Typebased – A free 2-column theme with large, readable areas, four 125X125 ad spots, Flickr photo stream integration and other various goodies.

3-Column WordPress 2.7 Themes

AquaBlue – A 3-column with a bit of 2-column feel by the placement of four 125X125 ads in the top right corner, above the 2 sidebar columns.

Blog Oh Blog – While there has been a lot of debate if 3-columns is still a good idea, this one still has a feeling of some openness without overwhelming you. Widget-ready and includes a PSD file for changing the header.

Blue Grace – A nice wide-open content column is complimented by the two side columns that, while holding a lot of information, don’t overwhelm you. Colors can be customized by playing around with a PSD file, and it is released under the GPL license.

ClearPress – ClearPress may be the most unconventional 3-column I’ve ever seen. Not only is it bright, but the posts are divided over all three columns with widgets such as categories and recent posts being in a dropdown pullout that fully retracts into the header when not in use.

Fashionista – A fluid width 3-column which is unusual in this day and age of so many fixed width themes popping up around the web.

GenkiTheme – A 3-column theme that has a mix of fluid width for the content column, but both widgetized columns are fixed width. On the far left you have a sliding tab menu that is static when Javascript is turned off.

Limau Orange – When you think “orange,” you don’t always think of the most pleasing of web themes, but this one keeps it as a nice accent that never gets on your nerves. The two sidebars sandwich the content column on both sides, but it is still very readable.

Royale – Black themes aren’t always easy to carry out, but the Royale theme does it while still being very readable. The content column is fluid width while the sidebars are fixed, and highlight colors are easily changed. Overall, a lot of customizable features.

Miscellaneous WordPress 2.7 Layouts

Mandigo – Available in seven colors, 38 languages, customizable as 1-column, 2-columns and 3-columns, optional layouts of 800 wide or 1024 wide and several other options.

Wicked Lemon – While Wicked Lemon appears like your standard 2-column theme, which it is, it allows the reader to switch the color of the background using the colored boxes in the top right corner without any page reloading.

by Sean P. Aune

10 of the Best WordPress 2.7 Compatible Themes

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:36:52 +0000

WordPress 2.7 completely overhauled the admin area of your blog, so isn’t it time you treated yourself with an overhaul of the front end also?

Why not pick something radically different than the usual blog look? Not only can you have a blog that stands out, you can completely change the function of WordPress to be a photoblog or a CMS, the possibilities are pretty much limitless with this powerful program. Here are 10 of the best themes to choose from.

What are some of your favorite non-traditional themes?

Album

Album – The perfect theme for any artist, photographer or designer that wants to display their work. Has seven different color schemes to better match your work. Cost for an individual license is $59.95.

Blue Grace

Blue Grace – A 3-column theme that has the unusual distinction of not making you feel crowded as you read it. Colors can be customized by playing around with a PSD file, and it is released under the GPL license.

Celebrity Gossip

Celebrity Gossip – Despite the name, Celebrity Gossip can be used for just about anything. Thumbnails of images are auto generated from the first image in a post, but you can also override the selection manually. Has 3 different color styles, widgets, 125×125 ads and more. Cost for an individual license is $35.00.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome – Can’t get enough of Google Chrome? Well, you can now carry it over to your blog in a surprisingly effective translation. Very open and clean, but we would warn to be wary of adding too many widgets as they would be very noticeable. Released under the GPL license.

iQ2

iQ2 – A photoblog theme built around the PhotoQ Photoblog Plugin which gives you choice of colors for the theme, the ability to batch upload photos and a whole lot more. No license is listed on the page, but seeing as there is an easy download link handy and donate button, one assumes it is free.

Over Easy

Over Easy – A CMS theme that features lots of highlighting for various articles with a really interesting sliding header to feature multiple pages. Also has a blog hidden away in it so you can do normal blogging if you choose. Cost for an individual license is $70.00.

THiCK

THiCK – A highly customizable theme built with the social media minded individual in mind. Shows your latest Tweets, your social profiles, a LifeStream section for all of your latest activities, and has over 20 styles and colors available. Cost for an individual license is $70.00.

TimesCafe News

TimeCafe News – This mixture of magazine style and CMS comes in three colors and caters heavily to those that use a lot of pages on their site. Has lots of ad slots, video coding ready, FeedBurner options and more. Cost for an individual license is $79.95.

Vigilance

Vigilance – A highly customizable theme that allows you to make all sorts of changes to the top image. Highlight box in posts, Google Analytics ready, multiple sidebar configurations and numerous changes allowed to the design. Best of all it’s small in size and free to use.

WP Remix

WP Remix – A theme built around the idea of your WordPress site being used as a CMS, WP Remix comes bundled with 50 different page layouts allowing you to quickly change the look of your site, or even of a single page. They also offer a magazine module separately. Cost for an individual license is $75.00.

by Sean P. Aune

Most Desired WordPress Hacks: 11 Common Requests and Fixes

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:46:28 +0000

This is the first article in our new three-part WordPress series. I want to share with you some hacks that i found to be very useful when i was working on the redesign of Noupe and during the design of my other site Devsnippets. Throughout this article, we’ll be focus on many WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites.

Using Custom Fields to Display Post Thumbnails

One of the most interesting features in WordPress is using Custom Fields, which can turn your WordPress blog into a fully customizable CMS website. I use custom fields to create image thumbnail for each post here on Noupe and on Devsnippets as well and display the thumbnails on the home page and the Archive page.

Follow the steps below and you will get it ready

You need to be able to upload images to your server in order to do this. You can do this using your FTP Client or any WordPress plugins to help you upload your images through the admin area.
Open a new post and scroll all the way down to the bottom where it says Custom Fields. Click on the plus button to expand it.
Enter the word “image_thumb” in the “key” field, and enter the fill path of the image that you uploaded in the “Value” field.
Do what you usually do in every post: add title, post text, choose a category and publish.
Now open your index.php file that is in your current theme folder, search for this line:view plaincopy to clipboardprint?
1. ‘Read the rest of this entry »’); ?>
Add the following code above that lineview plaincopy to clipboardprint?
1. “” title=“”>
```
" alt="" />
```

Avoiding Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to two or more web pages that have the same, or almost the same, content. We must avoid duplicate content to not get penalized by search engines. But sometimes we need to show two (or more) lists of posts on one page, we usually do this by using Multiple Loops (one standard loop and one from a certain category). This is done when you want to feature not only the very latest post written, but also posts from a certain category.

view plain copy to clipboard print ?

$my_query = new WP_Query(‘category_name=featured&showposts=1′);
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;?>
endwhile; ?>
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
if( $post->ID == $do_not_duplicate ) continue; update_post_caches($posts); ?>
endwhile; endif; ?>

have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
  $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;?>
    
  
    
  ID == $do_not_duplicate ) continue; update_post_caches($posts); ?>

Login Box in your sidebar

When i was designing DevSnippets, i wanted the users to easily login through the front page and skip the login page. Many solutions are out there and i found a good one at WPdesigner, i will add the code here just in case we don’t find it in the future.

view plain copy to clipboard print ?

global $user_ID, $user_identity, $user_level ?>
if ( $user_ID ) : ?>
Control panel
- Identified as echo $user_identity ?>.
- - “/wp-admin/”>Dashboard
  - if ( $user_level >= 1 ) : ?>
  - “/wp-admin/post-new.php”>Write an article
  - endif // $user_level >= 1 ?>
  - “/wp-admin/profile.php”>Profile and personal options
  - “/wp-login.php?action=logout&redirect_to=”>Exit
elseif ( get_option(‘users_can_register’) ) : ?>
Identification
- “/wp-login.php” method=“post”>
- for=“log”>“text” name=“log” id=“log” value=“” size=“22″ /> User
- for=“pwd”>“password” name=“pwd” id=“pwd” size=“22″ /> Password
- “submit” name=“submit” value=“Send” class=“button” />
- for=“rememberme”>“rememberme” id=“rememberme” type=“checkbox” checked=“checked” value=“forever” /> Remember me
- “hidden” name=“redirect_to” value=“”/>
- “/wp-register.php”>Register
- “/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword”>Recover password
endif // get_option(’users_can_register’) ?>

                
		
		
		Control panel
		
			Identified as .
			
				Dashboard

				= 1 ) : ?>
				Write an article
				= 1 ?>

				Profile and personal options
				Exit
			
			
		

		

		Identification
		
			
			
				
				 User

				 Password

				
				 Remember me

				
				
			
			

			Register
			Recover password

Of course later i wanted to make it even more easier and prettier to register and login through the front page and skip the login and register pages, so we coded a small widget using Prototype to switch between the login and registration box all on the front page. I will write a tutorial about this very soon.

Creating a menu Showing Certain Categories

If you would like to have a menu like the one we have here at noupe, to show certain categories, just add the line of code below and style it as you wish.

view plain copy to clipboard print ?

- ‘orderby=name&include=7,72,23,16,1,7,17,26′); ?>

The template tag, wp_list_categories, displays a list of Categories as links. You can Include or Exclude Categories as you wish, just enter the category id and don’t forget to add the “include” or the “exclude” parameters to manage it.

By default, wp_list_categories() generates nested unordered lists (ul) within a single list item (li) titled “Categories”. You can style that list item with a CSS selector.

Display Categories in a Dropdown box

Sometimes you want to displays a list of categories in a select (i.e dropdown) box with no submit button. The easiest way to do this is use the wp_dropdown_categories template tag.

view plain copy to clipboard print ?

“/” method=“get”>
$select = wp_dropdown_categories(’show_option_none=Select Category&show_count=1&orderby=name&echo=0&selected=6′);
$select = preg_replace(“#]*)>#”, “”, $select);
echo $select;
?>


    ]*)>#", "", $select);
	  echo $select;
	?>

Most Wanted Posts and Categories hacks

How to exclude certain categories from being displayed in the loop.

view plain copy to clipboard print ?

if ( have_posts() ) : query_posts($query_string .‘&cat=-13,-26′); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

Advanced Category Excluder- The main goal of this plugin is to enhance WordPress’s functionalities by hiding some unwanted categories, from defined parts of the blog like: your search results, your RSS feed listing, your category listing, and also your entry page, if you want to.

How to display posts from a certain category

If you want to display certain posts from a certain category like the one i am using for the news section on Devsnippets.
view plain copy to clipboard print ?

- ‘cat=6&showposts=5′); ?>
- if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Post Author Related Solutions

Having multiple authors on your blog is really fun, we need to have good solutions to have nice custom author pages, show their latest posts, highlight author Comments in WordPress posts, show their avatars and author bio below every post.

Getting Author Page on your WordPress blog

By default WordPress will use the author.php then the archive.php file then your index.php file to display the author info. That is, if you do not have an author.php file, WordPress will check for archive.php, and so on.

So, if you want to change the look of your author pages, you need to create an author.php file if it doesn’t exist, by copying archive.php if that file exists, or index.php if it doesn’t.

If you want to show the author’s main website, email contact, and biography, helping readers learn more about the author.

Articles by
Author Website:
Author Email:
Author Bio:

Articles by 
Author Website: 
Author Email: 
Author Bio:

Solution

How To: Adding An Author Page To Your WordPress Blog
Using Author Template Tags Outside of the WordPress Loop
Kafkaesquí’s Get Author Profile Plugin- Access the author information and allows you to provide author information outside of the Loop, such as for a sidebar intro of the blog owner or to list contributors to your blog.

Display Author Bio below each Post

If you want to have that handy little author bio box at the top of the article with an author photo, you can do the following:

Solution

Doing more with gravatars: Part 2- How to put together a very basic “About the Author” section on your single posts and show a gravatars for every author.
How To Add Bio Info To Your WordPress Blog Posts
Display Author Profile with Author Exposed

Separate Author comments from other comments

When you have multiple authors on your blog, you will need to style the author comments differently, here is how you can do it:
view plain copy to clipboard print ?

class=“comment_author_email == “authorname@domain.com“) echo ‘author’; else if ($comment->comment_author_email == “anotherauthorname@domain.com“) echo ‘author2′; else if ($comment->comment_author_email == “thirdauthorname@domain.com“) echo ‘author3′; else echo $oddcomment; ?> item” id=“comment-”>

comment_author_email == "anotherauthorname@domain.com") echo 'author2'; else if ($comment->comment_author_email == "thirdauthorname@domain.com") echo 'author3'; else echo $oddcomment; ?> item" id="comment-">

Display Twitter Messages on your blog

If you want to display your Twitter status on your blog instead of using Twitter-hosted scripts to save loading time.

How to

Twitter Tools- Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
twitterRSS- This plugin allows you to pull in an rss feed from your twitter account and display it on your site.

Source: http://www.noupe.com/

60+ Unusual WP Blog Designs

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:12:31 +0000

Source: http://www.noupe.com/

Powerfull List of WordPress Lifesavers Plugins

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:08:23 +0000

Post related Plugins

1) WP-Sticky WordPress Plug-in - Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog where you can choose to “stick” certain posts at the top of your blog.

Live Demo View it Here | Download

2) Daily Top 10 Posts- Tracks the number of pageviews per blog post for the current day and cumulatively with options to display sidebar widgets for both. You may also display sidebar widgets containing a list of the most popular posts for the day and most popular posts overall.

Download Plugin: Here

3) Popularity Contest- This Plug-in will help you see which of your posts are most popular. Views, comments, etc. are tracked and given configurable point values to determine popularity.

Download Plugin: Here

4) Homepage Excerpts- A must have plug-in. If your blog uses full posts on the homepage, it makes it more search engine friendly. Also it gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

Download Plugin: Here

5) Related Posts Plugin- WordPress Related Posts Plug-in will generate a related posts via WordPress tags, and add the related posts to feed.

Download Plugin: Here

User related Plugins

6) WP-Polls- Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog where you can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

Download Plugin: Download

7)Gravatar- The Plug-in makes available a tag called gravatar that, when used inside the Comment Loop, outputs the correct gravatar URL based on the commenters email address.

Download Plugin: Download

8 )AJAX Shoutbox- Realtime conversation with sound to alert of new messages.

Download Plugin: Download

Stats

9) Google Analytics for WordPress- This Plug-in easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code to all pages within your blog. That’s it’s main functionality, it also Tracks outgoing links, tracks downloads, Tracks AdSense clicks, Tracks image search keywords and tracks extra search engines.

Download Plugin: Here

10) ‘Subscribe to Comments’ Report and Stats- If you are wondering how many people where actually using “Subscribe to Comments” checkbox on your site, you can use this Plug-in to give you a list of users and their subscriptions and the posts they are subscribed to.

Download Plugin: Here

11) WassUp Plugin- WassUp is a WordPress Plug-in to track your visitors in real time. It has a very readable and fancy admin console to keep tracks of your blog’s users visits.

Download Plugin: Here

Contact Form Plugins

12) cforms- cforms is a Plug-in for WordPress, offering deployment of multiple contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page. The form submission utilizes AJAX, falls back, however, to a standard method in case AJAX/Javascript is not supported or disabled.

Download Plugin: Here

13) Secure and Accessible PHP contact form + multi-user version - Designed to make contacting you from your website easy, accessible, and secure. Deter spam emails from arriving in your mail box with a multi-user plugin.

Live Demo: Here
Download Plugin: Here

14) intouch- A customizable contact form Plug-in which allows you to insert a custom build contact form, which on submission will send the information via email, with the ability to specify mandatory fields, Ajax submission.

Download Plugin: Here

Photos Plug-ins

15) Photo Dropper WordPress plugin- This new Plug-in searches flickr for Creative Commons licensed photos for you to add to your WordPress blog.

Download Plugin: Here

16) Lightview for WordPress- Lightview is similar to Lightbox and has been able to overlay not only images but also videos, iframed webpages, and almost anything!

Download Plugin: Here

17) NextGEN Gallery- Adds a powerfull image gallery to your control panel. Features: Sortable Albums, Upload a Zip-File with pictures, Watermark function, Slideshow…

Download Plugin: Here

Navigation

18) Creating a drop down navigation menu using jQuery- Create a navigation menu with drop down menus for you WordPress blog, with a slick jQuery animated sliding down for menus and fading out.

Download Plugin: Here

19) WP Digg Style Pagination- Allows to add or replace the WordPress pagination by one easy and more comfortable paged navigation like Digg website. You can choose one CSS Style for your pagination from those of this list and append the CSS to your theme CSS sheet.

Download Plugin: Here

The site of this plugin was working 2 days ago, but today it is a parked domain. Until the owner of the site fixes this issue, you guys can download this plug-in from Here

20) WP PageNavi- Adds a paging navigation your WordPress blog.» Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »

Download Plugin: Here

21) In Series- Provides navigation controls for “next” and “previous” links within a connected series of posts.

Download Plugin: Here

22) CustomNav- CustomNav is a Plug-in for WordPress that allows the administrator to easily create and add a horizontal navigation menu or even a vertical navigation menu.

Download Plugin: Here

Administrative Plugins

23) Dashboard Editor- Allows you to add or remove whatever you want from the WordPress dashboard to be more useful to you.

Download Plugin: Here

24) Fluency Admin- One of the best interfaces ever created for WordPress. Works with WordPress 2.5.

Download Plugin: Here

25) Lighter Admin Drop Menus- Provides css-enabled drop down menus to speed the use of the WordPress dashboard.

Download Plugin: Here

26) WP Admin Bar Reloaded- Displays links to the Administration Panel at the top of a blog’s page – but only for users who are logged in and have permission to view the given functions.

Download Plugin: Here

27) Wordpress Themed Categories Plugin- The ability to assign different themes for each category.

Download Plugin: Here

RSS

28) From RSS- If you want to give your RSS subscribers a little bit of extra content, or simply leave out some annoying footer about subscribing to the RSS feed.

Download Plugin: Here

29) What Would Seth Godin Do- New visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 3 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.

Download Plugin: Here

30) Feed Count- If you don’t like the feedburner chickletd, You can use this Plug-in to display the number of subscribers to your feedburner feed by using your own taste.

Download Plugin: Here

31) Feedburner Feed Replacement- Created by Steve Smith, it’s a reliable way to track your entire feed-reading audience by redirecting all your subscribers to using your feed from Feedburner so you could keep track of the actual number of subscribers.

Download Plugin: Here

32) Full Text Feed- WordPress will truncate your feed’s content anywhere you insert a tag. Full Text Feed undos this functionality, allowing your feeds to contain the full text regardless of usage.

Download Plugin: Here

Full Text Feed is no longer required for WordPress 2.5.

33) Subscribe-Remind- An effective way to turn visitors into subscribers by adding some text at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Download Plugin: Here

Database and Server

34) WordPress Database Backup- This popular Plug-in allows users to schedule automatic database backups by creating backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

Download Plugin: Here

35) 404 Notifier README- Log 404 (file not found) errors on your site and get them delivered to you via e-mail or RSS.

Download Plugin: Here

36) WP-phpMyAdmin - Allows to access your PHP databases directly from the WP admin area without having to login to phpMyAdmin.

Download Plugin: Here

Comments

37) Subscribe to Comments 2.1- Allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments on the subscribed post. It is one of the most popular WordPress Plug-ins out there cause it helps encouraging the commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.

Download Plugin: Here

38) Live Comment Preview- Live Comment Preview is the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site.

Download Plugin: Here

39) Get Recent Comments- This Plug-in shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar.

Download Plugin: Here

40) Show Top CommentatorsThis Plug-in encourages discussion from your readers by displaying their name (linked to their site without a nofollow tag if desired) and number of comments on the sidebar.

Download Plugin: Here

41) NoFollow Free NoFollow Free removes the “nofollow” attribute from your WordPress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links to encourage your users to submit comments.

Download Plugin: Here

CMS

42) Advanced Category Excluder- The main goal is to hide some unwanted categories, from defined parts of the blog. It can override your search results, your RSS feed listing, your category listing, and also your entry page, if you want to. This is great, for SEO reasons, for content separation, for grouping information, and handle them as real sub pages.

Download Plugin: Here

43) Filosofo Home-Page Control- This plug-in lets you put pages on the same Permalink level (or higher) as the blog’s directory and set which page you want to be the “home” page.

Download Plugin: Here

44) Search Everything - Search Everything increases the ability of the default WordPress Search, to search Every Page, Every Tag, non-password protected pages only, Search Every Comment, Search only approved comments, Search Every Draft, Search Every Excerpt…

Download Plugin: Here

45) Custom Query String- After installing this plug-in you will be able to set the number of posts (custom queries) for every single page on your website. Here are some of the pages that you will be able to customize: author, archive, category, year, month, day, home, feed, search.

Download Plugin: Here

46) Manually order your Pages with My Page Order WordPress plugin- Gives you additional Page flexibility by allowing you to manually order your Pages without coding.

Download Plugin: Here

Social bookmarking Plugins

47) Sociable- Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Facebook, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Digg and many many others.

Download Plugin: Here

48) Share This- This Plug-in will allow your visitors to share your content via social bookmarking sites and/or e-mailing the post to a friend.

Download Plugin: Here

49) Digg This- Digg this WordPress Plug-in is a Plug-in that detects incoming links from Digg.com to your WordPress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story.

Download Plugin: Here

50) Socialize Me!- Socialize Me! will identify where the visitor is coming from, and in the case that the source is a social site where you have a profile on, it will display a tailored message. Imagine if you could reach out to all those visitors from StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious et cetera, right from your articles…

Download Plugin: Here

SEO

51) All in One SEO Pack- Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines by automatically optimizing your titles for search engines , generating META tags automatically and avoiding duplicate content found on WordPress blogs.

Download Plugin: Here

52) Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator- This Plug-in generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog to help google crawl your site.

Download Plugin: Here

53) Meta Robots- This Plug-in allow you to manage your meta robot tags.

Download Plugin: Here

54) Head META Description- Head Meta Description provides an automatic meta description tag for your blog, inserting a dynamic description depending on the query-type (i.e. page you’re on). Some search engines are supposed to love this tag.

Download Plugin: Here

55) Enforce www. Preference- This Plug-in will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/). Most search engines treat those addresses as two different domains.

Download Plugin: Here

Speed up Your WordPress Plugins

56) WP-Cache- WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database.

Download Plugin: Here

Fignting Spam, Splogs

Splogs are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/ or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Splogs (spam blogs) scrape content from others and re-post the material as their own in order to earn money.

57) Digital Fingerprint — detecting content theft- To combat splogs use of your content, this Plug-in will place a digital fingerprint into blog posts. Once embedded in your post, the Plug-in allows you to quickly and easily search the blogosphere for references to the digital fingerprint.

Download Plugin: Here

58) Akismet- Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not.

Download Plugin: Here

59) RSS Feed Signature- Provide a simple administration interface to allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or © copyright message to the WordPress generated rss feeds to protect your content from splogs (spam blogs).

Download Plugin: Here

60) Simple Trackback Validation Plugin- This Plug-in performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam.

Download Plugin: Here

Advertising Plug-ins

61) Got Banners- Got Banners is a simple banner rotating Plug-in for WordPress that displays all the banners provided simultaneously. But, in a different random order each time.

Download Plugin: Here

62) AdSense Deluxe- For quickly inserting Google or Yahoo! ads into your blog posts, and managing when and where those ads are displayed.

Download Plugin: Here

63) WPAds- WPAds is a WordPress Plug-in for showing and rotating ads in your blog. You only have to define the ad positions and the ads you want to rotate in each position, and WPAds will serve your ads randomly.

Download Plugin: Here

WordPress Developer’s Plug-ins

64) Code Markup- Code Markup is a WordPress Plug-in that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. You can even include HTML markup in the code sample; Code Markup magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML

Download Plugin: Here

65) Clean Options- Cleans up your blog after removing unwanted plugins.

Download Plugin: Here

66) Theme Test Drive- Theme Test Drive WordPress Plug-in allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one.

Download Plugin: Here

67) runPHP- runPHP is a WordPress plug-in that enables users to embed PHP code directly into their posts.

Download Plugin: Here

68) AJAX CSS Switcher- This WordPress Plug-in allows you to add CSS switching to your theme without any reload. It also stores the users selection for future visits.

Download Plugin: Here

Tags Plug-ins

69) Category Cloud Widget- The Category Cloud Widget is a widget that displays your categories as a tag cloud in your sidebar.

Download Plugin: Here

70) Heat Map plugin- Provides you with two new template tags for displaying a heat map (aka weighted list) of your categories and your monthly archives, can be indicated by varying font sizes, color intensities or both.

Download Plugin: Here

71) Recommended Tags- This is a Plug-in for WordPress 2.3+ that utilizes the built-in tag system for recommending and displaying a list of your current tags. It avoids the troubling issue of creating duplicate tag names that are nearly identical, such as “download” and “downloads.”

Download Plugin: Here

Archive Plugins

72) Extended Live Archive- This Plug-in creates dynamic archive page that helps your readers to easily navigate your archive, has the ability to sort posts by tags, categories, date and popularity.

Download Plugin: Here

73) SRG Clean Archives- This Plug-in is designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion that’s Search Engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar. It lists the Month / Year, shows total post count for the month, the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article and the number of comments that have been made on each article.

Live Demo: View it Here | Download Plugin: Here

Worth Checking Plugins

74) Author Exposed- Author Exposed is a simple WordPress Plug-in that allows your visitors easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author.

Download Plugin: Here

75) PodPress- This Plug-in makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple and supports unlimited number of media files.

Download Plugin: Here

76) WP-Print- Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

Live Demo: View it Here |Download Plugin: Here

77) Comment relish- Developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before.

Download Plugin: Here

78) wpSEO- Have more than 50 different settings for SEO your blog.

Download Plugin: Here

Source: http://www.noupe.com/

45+ Must See WordPress themes

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:01:45 +0000

Minimalist WordPress Design Themes

Upstart Blogger Minim- Designed by Robert Ellis to be Minimalist, Fast: Lightweight, for speed, Ad-friendly: The columns are sized specifically to accept standard ad formats.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

WPCandy v1 WordPress Theme- WPcandy created simple and clean WordPress theme with Scrollovers navigation, Widget-ready sidebar.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Grunge WordPress Theme

Grunge Web 2.0- Includes 4 pre-built color schemes to choose from. Designed specifically for artists, photographers and designers. Has 4 color styles to choose from, Change header images easily through WP Dashboard, Integrated blog component and Widget ready sidebars.

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Purchase

GrungePress- Eye catching grunge style theme, with a clean 2-column layout, Widget ready sidebar, 3-column seperate footer and Layered Photoshop file (header or full).

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Purchase

Music WordPress Theme- Music is a red, 2 column, widget ready WordPress theme with an optional featured band template. Tested in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera.

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Purchase

News and Magazine WordPress Themes

Mimbo Pro Magazine Theme- Developed by Darren Hoyt and Ben Gillbanks

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Purchase

Live Wire Series- Live Wire is a feature-rich 3 column magazine/newspaper layout, has automatic Image Resizer, Custom Page Templates for Archives, Sitemap & Image Gallery, Featured news section, Navigation Dropdown Menu’s…

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Purchase

WP Remix- Is customizable, quality coded & comes bundled with many layout options that helps create custom websites , has multiple page templates, 20+ Custom Layouts, Pre-styled HTML elements, Widget Ready…

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Purchase

BranfordMagazine- The main tabbed area in the home page features a lead story with a photo. It has featured articles with image, title and excerpt.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Revolution WordPress Theme- This theme was built mainly to be used as a static website or CMS. It’s a great solution to use WordPress for small businesses, portfolio sites and more.

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Purchase

Wordpress Magazine Theme- A fresh and clean magazine theme, worth checking.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Mobile WordPress Theme

PocketT for WordPress- Is a nice theme for personal blog that uses custom styles to separate different parts of the post and has different Header Images.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

The Massive News “Mobile Edition” WordPress Theme- iPhone and iPod Touch are on the rise, and this theme is built entirely for optimized viewing on both devices.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Unique Theme Ideas

LaunchPad Domain Parking Theme- An easy way to park your site while it’s still underdeveloped. The main feature is to allow visitors subscribe through RSS and e-mail.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Prologue- Released by the WordPress team, to act like a Twitter-like system for teams of bloggers who need to be able to communicate brief messages while working in various locations..

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

CSS Gallery Theme- For webmasters who want to build CSS showcase or web gallery. Packed with built in Tagging, Google ads and a sidebar block with 125 x 125 banner ads.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

WP Contact Manager- Turns WordPress into a contact manager. You can add contacts through the regular admin interface, tag contacts, search them and more.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Time Manager- Time Manager is a free, tableless, W3C-compliant web design layout by Template World.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Facebook WordPress Theme- With different colours (Blue, Green, Red, Black, Grey, Brown, Pink, Yellow, Light Blue and Purple) available. As simple as the Facebook design itself, this theme brings it all together. It looks good and works great. Incorporating all of the best design elements on the Facebook layout.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Personal WordPress Theme

Personal WordPress Theme- Personal is a blue, 3-column WordPress theme with two widget-ready sidebars, custom templates, a banner switcher, custom text styles, integrated plugins, and a unique way to display entry dates and comment-number links.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Rihanna- Rihanna is extremely lightweight, versatile and widget-ready theme.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Minyx- This theme has a small panel configuration to choose whether to display various elements of the theme, as well as being compatible with a lot of plug-ins, supports AdSense.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

3Column WordPress Themes

BlogBus WordPress Theme- Theme requires WordPress 2.3 or above, tested in Firefox / IE6 / IE7 / Safari and it is widgets-friendly.

Type:Free Theme
Download

Brilliance- This is a 3-column, widget ready theme with soothing colors and design. The theme also has provision for an adsense block in the third column where you can put your adsense code

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Xplosive- It is a fully XHTML complaint, Web 2.0 theme meant for modern bloggers. Xplosive has two sidebars (both on the right side) and has a very pro look to it. It comes with a Blue-Orange color schema.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Free “WP Premium”- Is an elegantly designed, 2/3 column, feature packed, widget ready theme that comes with three color-scheme options

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

2Column Themes

Cutline 2.0- One of the most-used themes around. It provides a clean, simple layout that is easily customizable.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Unsleepable- It is a stand-alone theme for WordPress and is mostly K2 with some fairly significant design tweaks here and there.

Type:Free Theme
Download

iTheme- Designed for the Mac lovers with a truly customizable sidebar. You can customize your sidebar’s contents without modifying the source code using WordPress widgets.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Blue Zinfandel- 2 or 3-column Widget-ready theme, made especially for online newspapers or magazines.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Forte- This is actually a 3-in-1 theme where you will be able to select you layout of choice from your theme admin panel, the choices are a (normal) blog layout, a Magazine styled layout and a List styled layout, you’ll get what i mean once you’ve uploaded and activated the theme.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Photo Blog Themes

Photopress- Created by Brian Gardner, perfect for Photo blogs.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Photoblog Theme- Simple theme for a photo blog WordPress theme. This theme uses jQuery.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Polaroid

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Nishita- A simple, sleek and minimal (quick and simple install/setup) Photo Blog theme for Wordpress.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here |Download

Artistic Themes

PolaroidPress- PolaroidPress is a light, cloudy and artistic theme for WordPress with image randomizer.

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Purchase

Dilectio WordPress Theme- A fresh, clean, user-friendly and playful WordPress theme- presented by Smashing Magazine’s and designed by Designdisease.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Gossip WordPress Theme- Gossip is a three column WordPress theme, created for gossip and celebrity related blogs.

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Worth Checking Elegant Themes

The Unstandard WordPress theme- Farewell to the blase reverse chronological text heavy front pages, and hello to visuals & imagery to lure visitors deeper into your website / blog.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Theseus Theme- Theseus prominently features the latest post in a “feature” category of your choice (conveniently set on the theme options page) and moving all non-essential stuff (you know, widgets) to the page footer. Also it is optimized for Search Engines

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Plain Box V2- Very impressing and professional design. Has Custom image Header, Live Search, Sidebar Manager, Advanced Navigation, Asides and Post thumbnail. Download link will be available this March.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here

SpringLoaded theme- Chris Garrett, has released a nice looking WordPress theme that support Widgets, Gravatars and a handful of other nifty plugins

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Options WordPress Theme- This theme comes packaged with two different stylesheets, Dark and Light, includes customizable, widget-ready sidebars. There are five sections, or blocks, on the home page layout. From the theme options page, you can choose from 14 different options for each of the sections.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Organic Premium WordPress Theme- Has Trackbacks/Comments Separated, Highlighted Author comments, Widget Ready, SEO Friendly…

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Purchase

EliteByDesign Theme- Is the ultimate theme when it comes to functionality and reader-friendliness. The clean, structured coding makes managing this theme all the easier.

Type:Premium Theme
Live Demo View it Here| Purchase

Recycled Canvas- This theme was an experiment. Not just in design, but in experimental methodology, sharing, and process.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Blog Oh Blog V2.0- Double sidebar, multi column and widget ready. Simple, clean and easy you to modify. Sitemap and Sifr ready.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Hello D- The style sheet is based on Blueprint CSS Framework, W3C-compliant.

Type:Free Theme
Download

SilveRay- 3-Column Layout, Validated XHTML and CSS, Ads friendly, Widget-ready on both sides, SweetTitle tooltip installed, LiveClick installed, Serach bar at the top.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

StudioPress- Very clean theme, and it comes with the possibility to integrate several AdSense units, Widget-ready, Comments alternate with a different background.

Type:Free Theme
Live Demo View it Here | Download

Further Resources

WP-Premiums WP-Premiums showcases attractive customizations of WordPress Premium Themes and provide screenshots of some of the best of these themes.
980+ Free Wordpress Themes- Comprehensive list of 980+ Free WordPress 1.5 and 2.0 Themes / Templates available for download
A collection of collected Wordpress themes at Witty Sparks- A collection of thousands of Wordpress Themes.

Source: http://www.noupe.com/

All Amazing Articles » Blogs

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Favicon

Titles And Meta Data

Cross-Browser Checks

Proofread

Links

Functionality Check

Graceful Degradation

Validation

RSS Link

Analytics

Sitemap

Defensive Design

Optimize

Back Up

Print Style Sheet

Download the Ultimate Website Launch Checklist!

What other checks would you list?

About the author

88 Unmissable Wordpress Links: Theme Thursday

Avoid Bad Blog Posts With These 3 Writing Tips

20+ Great WordPress 2.7 Compatible Plugins

20 Great Free WordPress 2.7 Themes

2-Column WordPress 2.7 Themes

3-Column WordPress 2.7 Themes

Miscellaneous WordPress 2.7 Layouts

10 of the Best WordPress 2.7 Compatible Themes

Album

Blue Grace

Celebrity Gossip

Google Chrome

iQ2

Over Easy

THiCK

TimesCafe News

Vigilance

WP Remix

Most Desired WordPress Hacks: 11 Common Requests and Fixes

Using Custom Fields to Display Post Thumbnails

Follow the steps below and you will get it ready

Other great Solutions

Avoiding Duplicate Content

Other Solutions

Login Box in your sidebar

Control panel

Identification

Control panel

Identification

Creating a menu Showing Certain Categories

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