cactusthemes, Author at CactusThemes Official blog

Create a Video Gallery using a Mesmerizing WordPress Theme for videos

September 16, 2015

Discover a selection of quality WordPress templates that will allow you to create a video gallery like YouTube. Enjoy reading and feel free to share your feedback or your advice if you have used one of the listed WordPress themes for videos and images.

1. Kinetic – WordPress Video Theme

Kinetic is a unique WordPress theme for videos which offers a highlighting for your videos in full screen. It is perfect for your visitors to immerse in your world. You can also easily imagine that this type of theme can be reused by fashion sites where video would be such a parade of filmed photo session.

Kinetic is also distinguished by its sober and refined side, thus leaving plenty of room to video. You will also love its vertical menu.

This responsive theme is based on bootstrap to offer users worthy experience of the largest sites.

2. DeTube – Mesmerizing WordPress Theme for Videos

DeTube is an ideal WordPress theme for videos and images built for all of you who wish to own an extensive collection of videos. Whether you want to create a similar site as YouTube, create an online magazine, or just a sophisticated blog, this theme will make you happy. Moreover, this theme supports BuddyPress, which will delight users who want to develop their own community. With the support of this WordPress plugin, you can leverage the use of this site by offering your visitors to come and create real personal spaces.

With nearly two years of existence and 4000 sales, this theme is one of the leaders in its field and has most followed and updated topics.

3. One – WordPress Theme for Video Sharing

Based on Bootstrap 3, this WordPress theme will satisfy both lovers of video and all professionals who wish to have a feature-rich site. We will find the video everywhere, including in the main slide on the site, but the content are also its place.

The utilities of this responsive WordPress theme also satisfy mobile user with highest quality experience.

4. ThisWay – WordPress Video Portfolio Theme

ThisWay is another WordPress theme for videos and images that offers a full-page interface for video. This theme is built with video in mind, ensuring that your video content will be highlighted.

Developed in HTML5 and CSS3, this WordPress theme provides many effects; hence, offer your visitors a more modern experience on both computer screen and mobile interface.

We also appreciate many updates of the theme since its launch. Indeed, the author of ThisWay tcontinues to improve it to make it increasingly competitive.

5. Zenith – WordPress Video Sharing Theme

We’ve selected multiple WordPress themes with the possibility of putting videos in full screen, and Zenith is part of this collection.

Thanks to its administration interface, this WordPress theme for videos allows users to access to the Revolution Slider plugin. Moreover, it offers users Google Fonts, more than 116 icons for social networks, and 420 GPs icons to decorate your site.

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tutorials

Masonry layout in designing educational WordPress theme

September 14, 2015

With the current trend, more and more WordPress websites use Masonry layout, which is favored by a lot of users. The name of this layout probably originates from the jQuery Masonry plugin which is developed by David DeSandro – a designer of Twitter.

Masonry Layout is initially used by Pinterest.com, a famous website that specializes in sharing images and other media content; so Masonry Layout is also known for the name of Pinterest Style Layout.

While Masonry layout is usually used on photography or creative websites, it is a good idea to build education WordPress sites owning this grid style. If you are a WordPress designer or developer, you should think about creating an educational WordPress theme with Masonry design. You can read the following section in order to know how to create this trending layout.

As we often see, elements in the classic layouts are often aligned with CSS floats. It means that to arrange these elements horizontally and vertically, their size will be ignored. This creates a lot of unnecessary gaps in the layout of many WordPress themes like WordPress education academy theme.

However, with the Masonry layout, elements will be arranged based on columns with no fixed height rows. In particular, it reduces the spaces and tries to fit the maximum number of elements into the rows and columns. Simply, you imagine a Masonry layout looks like the puzzle game Tetris.

Masonry layout in use

Masonry Layout can be well applied for a WordPress education academy theme to present classes’ images (Image Gallery) or online/onsite courses. This kind of layout is suitable with the websites using infinite scrolling. It is very wonderful.

How to create Masonry layouts

In order to create a Masonry layout is quite simple, you need to download and activate the jQuery Masonry plugin. Make sure that your parent folder has the following file and folders: css, js, img and index.html

This is the HTML code for a simple Masonry layout:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

        <title>Masonry Layout</title>

        <meta charset=”utf-8″ />

        <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=edge, chrome=1″ />

        <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, intial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no” />

        <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/normalize.css” />

        <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/main.css” />

</head>

<body>

        …

        …

        …

        <!—end header –>

        <section class=”container”>

                <ul>

                        <li class=”item red”>

                                <a href=”https://www.behance.net/gallery/Oscar-Wilde/9330545“>

                                        <img src=”img/1.jpg” alt=”1″ />

                                        <p>Dewald Venter</p>

                                </a>

                        </li>

                        …

                        …

                        …

                </ul>

        </section>        <!– end container –>

        <!– Javascript – Jquery –>

        <script src=”js/jquery.min.js”></script>

        <script src=”js/masonry.min.js”></script>

</body>

</html>

Next, use CSS code to style the layout:

*, *::after, *::before {

        -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;

        -moz-box-sizing: border-box;

        box-sizing: border-box;

}

a {

        display: block;

        text-decoration: none;

        color: #000;

}

ul {

        list-style: none;

}

img {

        display: block;

        max-width: 100%;        /* flexible image */

        outline: none;

        border: none;

        margin: 0 auto;         /* align center image */

}

.container {

        max-width: 1200px;

        margin: 100px auto;

        padding: 0 auto;

}

.container ul .item {

        text-align: center;

        border-radius: 10px;

        display: block;

        width: 32%;

        padding: 8px;

        margin: 7px 5px;

}

/* Responsive design */

@media screen and (max-width: 900px) {

        .container ul .item {

                width: 45%;

        }

}

@media screen and (max-width: 500px) {

        .container ul .item {

                width: 100%;

        }

}

Finally, use the below jQuery script so as to initialize the Masonry layout. Note that item selector must be elements in the container:

<script>

        $(document).ready(function() {

                var $container = $(‘.container’);

                $container.masonry({

                                itemSelector: ‘.item’

                });

        })

</script>

Conclusion

In general, it is easy to generate a masonry layout for using plugins. You can choose to use another plugin instead of jQuery Masonry plugin and create a Masonry educational WordPress theme as your liking.

WordPress Themes

5 WordPress Video Blog Themes That You Should Not Miss This Week

September 11, 2015

If you are reading this post, that means you are convinced that WordPress is an effective solution to manage your site. You are totally right. The reasons of using WordPress are: easy to use, responsive design, SEO Plugin Compatibility, etc.

This article will provide you a selection of the world’s best WordPress video blog themes. Whether you want to be the future YouTube partner or a Vlog creator, you will inevitably find your happiness in our selection of five video blog themes for WordPress.

01 – Mixed, WordPress video blog theme

Let’s begin our selection with Mixed, a theme designed for anyone who loves sharing videos. With Mixed, you can share videos with everyone from the largest streaming platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.

This responsive theme comes with retina ready graphics and wide range of features such as one-page layouts, mega menus and video background.

With a flexible design, Mixed will appeal especially to video bloggers.

02 – GoodWind, WordPress theme for videos and photos

GoodWind is primarily aimed at photographers. A full-screen slider allows you to add your favorite photos and videos, and track your movie collection. You will also find many interesting features, including album shift listing, AJAX albums, masonry rolls, ribbon gallery and much more.

Your users will also have the opportunity to view images in details, display large version and navigate through the set of images. Moreover, it is designed with vertical and horizontal sliding direction, powerful page builder, password protected gallery and many other features.

03 – NillPlay, WordPress video blog theme

Following is such a superb responsive theme: NillPlay. NillPlay is designed to satisfy your desire of sharing your videos. Indeed, this WordPress theme is developed to highlight music, events, and photos. The blog part is not forgotten with a dedicated section, allowing you optimize your WordPress site for SEO.

Whether by color or by the presence of a usable page builder, this WordPress theme is remarkably distinguished from a lot of video blog themes for WordPress. Based on BootStrap, your users will enjoy surfing on your site with pleasure.

04 – ViPress, WordPress video blog theme

ViPress allows you to share your videos, of course, but above all allow you to create a customizable website to infinity. They have no less than four different sliders, 12 widgets, a fully modular home page, 6 different templates for your tickets, 8 templates for your pages, a theme in white or black, over 600 fonts characters and more than 50 short code. With all this, no doubt, you will have enough to customize your future video WordPress site.

05 – Slimvideo, WordPress video blog theme

Do you need a WordPress theme that allows you to broadcast your own videos? If yes, the Slimvideo will interest you.

Slimvideo allows you to create a video sharing website by using its four single video layouts, custom widgets, more than 55 builder elements and so on.

For e-commerce, this theme supports WooCommerce plugin which is to create online shop and sell your video products.

Last but not least, this theme is compatible with WPML to make it accessible to the world.

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

Checklist for Choosing a Perfect WordPress Video Theme for Your Site

September 10, 2015

With so many WordPress themes on offer, you may wonder which theme is perfect for your video projects and match your content.

So, by spending a few minutes reading this checklist, you will understand what you need to look for. This helps you save lots of time and effort when filtering out the best WordPress video theme 2015 for your site.

List of Required Features

Before reviewing WordPress themes, you need to write up a checklist of features your video website will require and ensure that any theme that catch your attention include them. There are some features and functionality you should expect to see in a video WordPress theme. This could include responsive design, retina display support, video post format, YouTube video support, self-hosted video support and more.

Support for video plugins

While most WordPress themes and plugins should work well together, you can still save your time and effort by searching out video themes which are compatible with the most important plugins you plan to use.

For example, if you are video sharing website using Huge-IT Video Gallery, it can be helpful to look for a theme that is compatible with this tool. While most themes should work with this plugin, a video theme that lists compatibility with it will include full support for the plugin and allow you to take full advantage of Huge-IT Video Gallery.

Additionally, it’s worth checking the compatibility with the most popular plugins such as WooCommerce, WordPress SEO and WPML.

Free vs. Premium WordPress Video Theme

WordPress 2015 is content-focused; therefore, free video themes sometimes cannot meet your need of having unique video content in various formats. In that case, you should consider using a premium template for your website. When purchasing a premium WordPress video theme you can receive frequent updates and dedicated technical support.

Pre and Post-Sales Support

After making a shortlist of suitable WordPress video themes, you should investigate the pre and post-sales support that is available with these themes.

There are some WordPress theme stores and marketplaces which allow users to freely access to their customer communication areas or support forums. You may also get in touch with the theme’s support team via or even email, online contact form telephone.

Mobile Optimization

Since April 2015, Google has included mobile-friendliness as a factor to determine your website’s rank in the search results. Thus, it is necessary to install a fully responsive video theme on to your WordPress site. Though most of WordPress themes available are responsive by default, it would be better to check whether the one you choose is completely mobile friendly.

Site speed and performance

Site speed and performance play a large part in how usable your site is and how SEO friendly it is. In addition to choosing the right web host, it is critical to pick a fast loading video theme. You can test the theme speed by running its demo through an online performance testing tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

Conclusion

You may be easily distracted and overwhelmed due to the huge number of WordPress video themes on offer today. However, if you understand what you want, it would be much easier to find the the best WordPress video theme 2015 for your individual needs.

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

The common of SEO friendly education WordPress themes

September 9, 2015

Nowadays, not only shops and businesses but many education organizations also do SEO for your websites. And a significant part of them choose to use WordPress – a SEO friendly platform, in order to manage the website content.

Before doing SEO for your WordPress education website, you need to pick a search engine optimized theme and set up a SEO plugin. However, with so many themes available, it would be hard to know which features are important and which are not. This article shows you the features SEO friendly education WordPress themes need to have. It will help you to select a theme that is as search engine friendly as possible.

The common of SEO friendly education WordPress themes

Responsive Design

From an SEO standpoint, it is very important for a website to be mobile friendly as this can improve the site’s rank in the search engine results pages and attract more website traffic. And using an education WordPress theme with responsive design is an effective way to ensure your site is mobile friendly.

The number of premium and free responsive education WordPress themes increase everyday. So you can pick such a one with no difficulty.

No Homepage Sliders

Homepage sliders are a common feature of many popular premium themes available today. However, these content sliders are bad for SEO since they increase the number of H1 headings per page, as opposed to the use of just one H1 heading per page, which is common SEO best practice.

Additionally, while some search engines use site speed as part of their ranking criteria for a website, these sliders can slow down the page. As a result, homepage sliders may have a negative impact on your site’s rank.

Therefore, a SEO optimized WordPress education theme will have no homepage slider or allow you to choose whether to use homepage sliders or not.

Schema.org Markup Integration

Education WordPress themes that make use of schema.org markup can help you optimize your education website and increase the number of site visitors from search engines like Google.

You can use this markup to enable rich snippets for your site, including your school’s photo, links to social media profiles, ratings, address, location, video thumbnails and more.

The rich snippets helps search engines better understand your content. Also, this information can be displayed on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, making your content look more enticing when shared socially.

You can use a plugin to add rich snippets to your WordPress education site, or select an education WordPress theme which integrate schema.org markup.

SEO Plugin Compatibility

There are a lot of premium and free responsive education WordPress themes which are completely compatible with popular SEO plugins. This allows you to take full advantage of the SEO plugin you use and even enhance its functions.

Hopefully this article can help you to choose a suitable SEO friendly education WordPress theme for your site and get more students as well as sell more courses.

Featured, WordPress Themes

8 Free & Best WordPress Themes for Video Bloggers in September 2015

September 8, 2015

WordPress theme is a useful tool for controlling the look and presentation of the content on your site. However, there are many WordPress themes available and it’s hard to select the appropriate one. This article will introduce eight latest and best WordPress themes for video content on WordPress Theme Directory in early September, 2015. These free themes have many great features that are suitable for businesses, blogs, online shops and especially video-related websites.

Latest and best WordPress themes for video on WP Theme Directory

1. Novavideo Lite

Novavideo Lite is one of the free and best WordPress themes for video 2015. The theme supports video post format and has unique features for video blog and video portal.

2. Destin Basic

Destin Basic owns a lightweight and fully responsive design which can help you to create a truly unique website. The theme allows you to use Customizer to add your own page layouts and site width, etc. It provides eight post formats, including Video, Image, Audio, Gallery, Aside, Status, Quote and Link.

Destin Basic is compatible with Woocommerce, bbPress and BuddyPress. It also allows you to install JetPack plugin to display each of your galleries through a tiled view and jQuery carousel.

3. Identity

Identity is a WordPress theme with modern, bright and colorful style. It fits for bloggers who are young of mind and spirit. The theme supports Gravatar image, user descriptions and nine post formats (including image, video, audio, gallery and more).

4. Webvideo

This is also one of the free and best WordPress themes for video 2015 designed for video blog, video site and video portal. The theme supports full-width videos and is a great choice for photographers or designers who want to showcase their works online.

5. The Chameleon

Chameleon is a HTML5 video WordPress theme with large number of responsive designs and options for organizing content. In particular, it provides six page templates: full-width, right sidebar, left sidebar, double sidebars, double right sidebars and double left sidebars. Its powerful page builder allows you to insert your widgets many columns (from two to six columns). Especially, all post formats have featured video and audio options.

Chameleon theme’s design can be change completely by using an activation of the skins, which is provided by the theme author. It also includes Theme Options and Customize Options so that you can customize your site more easily.

6. Mamba

Mamba is a responsive masonry WordPress theme built on Zurb’s Foundation 5 framework. It comes with FitVids.js for responsive videos and a gallery post format using FlexSlider.

7. Photographer

This is a fully responsive WordPress video theme, mainly built for photographers, designers, creative agencies and video bloggers.

8. Photolab

Photolab owns a modern and flat design, perfect for blogs that require alluring design. It supports various types of content such as quotations, photos and videos. Each type of content can be placed in a separate block marked with a specific color bar and an icon on it. This WordPress video theme is responsive and user-friendly, which helps its viewers feel pleasant when visiting the site from different devices.

Featured, WordPress Themes

Three cogent reasons for choosing a responsive video theme

September 7, 2015

There is a saying that “You don’t have to know everything. You just have to know where to find it”. It is extremely right when we are living in the age of the Internet, a rich source of information that lets us find out everything we wonder easily. Since a lot of information on the Internet nowadays is available in the form of videos, the process of exploring new things has become more interesting.

If you make a large number of awesome videos and you want other people to watch them, what is better than showcasing all your amazing works on your own website? Thanks to WordPress, you can now feel free to do that in the easiest way, just with a click to pick one of the best responsive video themes for your site. Here are three convincing reasons why you should choose such a theme.

1. A strong commitment to the fame of your videos

As you create and run a WordPress website to present your drop-dead gorgeous videos, you certainly want your works to get popular, which means that they are highly ranked on search engines’ result pages. To do that, you need to optimize your video website for search, for example, by using a responsive video theme with SEO friendly structure and SEO features. Fortunately, most of the WordPress themes are SEO-friendly, so you only need to pick a suitable one and your video site will likely receive a lot of attention.

2. A firm promise of a unique appearance for your own website

Not only do you need to produce stunning videos but you also need to have your website where you show your works appearing glorious and notable so you can attract as many viewers as possible. The best responsive video themes now provide you with many customization options in order that you are capable of changing the themes to suit your works and please your target viewers. You can easily change the color scheme, layout, header style, or even add a bit of code for your favorite special functions or effects manually. Besides, if you have any difficulty doing this, you can find instructions in online documentations or contact support teams for help.

3. A reliable guarantee of bridging barriers between you and your visitors

When you upload your videos to your site, there are likely a lot of people around the world who can view your videos. Since almost all responsive video portfolio themes now are compatible with translation plugins, your website’s content can be displayed in various languages. Thus, the worry that people from other countries might not understand your content will vanish. Besides, those themes allow your videos to be presented in a neat portfolio, through which you can express yourself and your visitors can have a general opinion about you and your works before they start to watch your videos. This feature also helps your audience find what they want to see more easily. Additionally, most themes are now integrated with social network plugins that let you create forums right on your site, which can help you not only know what your visitors think about your videos but also discuss your videos with them so that you are able to improve your later works. In short, video themes can support you in crossing any barriers between you and your audience.

The three benefits mentioned above are just three among many reasons why you should choose a responsive video theme. You can gain a bunch of other advantages, depending on the theme you select.

WordPress Themes

University Review: An Education WordPress theme

September 5, 2015

If you are looking for an education WordPress theme with clean, unique design and a lot of great features, University by GavickPro is a good choice. The theme is designed for school, college or university sites. It is compatible with the latest version of WordPress and all popular browsers. In addition, it offers full BuddyPress support and a classic, customizable layout so you can get a community-led website with dynamic features.

Let’s take a look at some unique features of this education WordPress theme and decide whether it is suitable for your site.

Support BuddyPress plugin

With included BuddyPress plugin, teachers and students may communicate and share their thoughts with other people. Also, they can share their favorite photos by using the BuddyPress Gallery and BP Latest Photos widgets based on rtMedia plugin.

Excellent education event features

This online education WordPress theme offers an eclectic design to make it stand-out from the crowd. A lot of custom HTML elements you’ve got a treasure strove of style to draw from.

Event information can be displayed on the front page thanks to News Show Pro so no one misses them. Event details like venue, date, time left might be provided with specially-prepared elements.

Stunning parallax theme design

A stunning, dynamic parallax scrolling effect which brings visual depth to your website will attract visitor’s attention before they reach your content. GK Tweets widget allows you to display the latest tweets to keep everyone connected with school life. Besides, GK Comments widget makes your college community productive because it highlights the latest article comments and promotes discussion.

Additionally, University’s fully responsive design will help your education website to work across a large range of devices, form-factors, and screen sizes.

Extra pages and features for expanding your college’s online profile

This education theme for WordPress includes all crucial details such as contact forms, event listings, newsletters and special pages presenting teacher profiles, FAQ, fact sheet pages and About Us. The theme offers WPML support that helps create and runs a multilingual website easier than before.

Conclusion

Pursuing an education and finding a professional license, certificate or degree can change your future dramatically. The University WordPress theme combines between cutting edge graphics and sophisticated branding to make the right statement. The theme also offers the photographic accuracy you expect in top website designs. The students can browse course offerings easily with navigation elements.

You can experience a free sample template before making a purchase with this online education WordPress theme. You can examine the excellent applications that come with the theme. Sliders, customized options and free photographic only represents a small part of what we can offer. By using University, you can design a successful educational website that you want.

Older Posts

Newer Posts

Archives

1. Kinetic – WordPress Video Theme

2. DeTube – Mesmerizing WordPress Theme for Videos

3. One – WordPress Theme for Video Sharing

4. ThisWay – WordPress Video Portfolio Theme

5. Zenith – WordPress Video Sharing Theme

Masonry layout in use

How to create Masonry layouts

Conclusion

01 – Mixed, WordPress video blog theme

02 – GoodWind, WordPress theme for videos and photos

03 – NillPlay, WordPress video blog theme

04 – ViPress, WordPress video blog theme

05 – Slimvideo, WordPress video blog theme

List of Required Features

Support for video plugins

Free vs. Premium WordPress Video Theme

Pre and Post-Sales Support

Mobile Optimization

Site speed and performance

Conclusion

The common of SEO friendly education WordPress themes

Responsive Design

No Homepage Sliders

Schema.org Markup Integration

SEO Plugin Compatibility

Latest and best WordPress themes for video on WP Theme Directory

1. Novavideo Lite

2. Destin Basic

3. Identity

4. Webvideo

5. The Chameleon

6. Mamba

7. Photographer

8. Photolab

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