cactusthemes, Author at CactusThemes Official blog

WordPress themes for education are trending on ThemeForest this week

September 4, 2015

This article rounds up ten trending WordPress themes for education, event and course on ThemeForest in early September, 2015. You can visit the online marketplace for more themes.

1. Clever Course – Learning Management System Theme

Clever Course is currently one of the top trending WordPress themes for educational website on ThemeForest. It is built for school, college, university and educational institutions. The theme especially supports users to create and sell online and onsite courses.

Also, Clever Course supports many different payment methods foe learners, such as Paypal, Stripe, PayMill, Authorized.net and bank transfer. In addition, the theme features a course certificate, course badges, course rating, master slider, unlimited page builder and so on.

2. Carry Hill School – Responsive WordPress Education Theme

Carry Hill is a fresh and customizable theme for elementary school and creative website. It comes with flexible design, Visual Composer and LayerSlider plugins, timetable schedule, 2086 icons, more than 700 Google fonts, 9 color schemes and color picker, etc.

3. The Keynote – Conference / Event WordPress Theme

This is one of the clean and responsive WordPress themes for educational website, conference and event. It comes with speaker post type, speaker list, program schedule, PayPal payment system for ticket, master slider, unlimited page builder, parallax section and WPML ready, etc.

4. University – Event, Course & Education WordPress Theme

This multipurpose WordPress theme is built for events, courses, learning management system and business. It allows users to create and sell courses and tickets. The theme is also featured with 7 homepage demos, LearnDash and bbPress supports, course enroll and payment, Visual Composer page builder, Revolution Slider, translation and much more.

5. Happy Kids – Children WordPress Theme

Happy Kids is a simple and clean WordPress education theme for kindergartens, preschools and other children-related activities. It comes with CWS builder, Slider Revolution, unlimited color schemes, 9 lovely background patterns, WooCommerce support, simple multi-gallery, portfolio pages and unlimited sidebars, etc.

6. EduLMS – WP Learning Management System Theme

EduLMS is one of the stylish, simple and customizable WordPress themes for educational website. It provides full features to create unlimited courses, quiz, lessons and topics.

The theme is packed with unlimited educational home pages, Revolution Slider, SEO support, skin options, certificates, short-codes, a child theme, parallax effect, Envato Toolkit plugin and much more.

7. ETHIC – Event, Course & Education WordPress Theme

This education WordPress theme will be a suitable choice for schools, colleges, universities or other educational institutions. It comes with Revolution Slider and Visual Composer premium plugins, Max Mega Menu, Huge-IT slider, BuddyPress and bbPress.

Moreover, the theme offers powerful admin panel, 7 home pages, the events calendar, LearnDash LMS plugin support and a lot of other features.

8. Little People – Kindergarten WordPress theme

Little People is designed to deliver an easy to use kindergarten, nursery or child care WordPress site. This responsive theme is packed with boxed/full-width layout options, Slider Revolution plugin, Visual Composer plugin, Essential Grid plugin, translation support, parallax image/video scrolling sections and more. Also, it features video tutorials, detailed documentation and full technique support.

9. Fable – Children Kindergarten WordPress Theme

Fable is a responsive WordPress education theme best suitable for kindergarten, preschool, primary school, elementary school and child care center. This is also one of suitable WordPress themes for education related projects such as babysitting, summer camp, or art school.

This theme offers Slider Revolution and Timetable plugins, built-in drag and drop page builder, short-code generator, theme options panel, theme styles panel, five home page layouts, WooCommerce and much more.

10. Masterstudy – Education Center WordPress Theme

MasterStudy is one of the responsive WordPress themes for education business, which helps users easily setup a stunning WordPress site to sell online courses. In particular, it allows you to create courses with categories, splits into classes and sell theme.

The theme is customizable using Visual Composer, theme options, Revolution Slider, more than 630 Google fonts and many other powerful features.

Featured, WordPress Themes

5 supporting tools for designing WordPress education theme

September 3, 2015

When the WordPress appears as a boom to webmaster as it is currently because of its responsiveness and friendliness to the “giant” Google, the demands for designing a WordPress site with the individual remarks are no longer luxury. The number of WordPress users in the world is more and more increasing. More and more companies and individuals are running the WordPress theme design services and thus, you can ask them to design for you a WordPress theme, the WordPress education theme as an example. However, it costs an arm and a leg as it ranges from $300 to $1500 depending on the complex level. Moreover, there are many disadvantages to hire other people to design a WordPress theme for you. Firstly, it does not ensure that your theme will not be used by other users. Secondly, the expense is obviously high. Additionally, it takes you too much time since the design process needs much time to exchange ideas and get the common standards for the theme. This is likely possible that the WordPress theme will not meet your demands completely. Therefore, it would be great if you can design a website by yourself without hiring a design company or professional designer.

The problem is that how a WordPress theme like WordPress education theme can be built by a person who does not have much knowledge about theme?

If you have ever heard about the software or online tools that can help you design a simple website with some manipulations such as dragging, dropping and clicking. So does the WordPress, meaning that it also has such these tools and even does better. Obviously, you need to pay a certain amount of fee. We advise you to accept the fee if you want to use something with high quality.

Let’s look at 5 supporting tools for designing WordPress themes in general and WordPress theme for education portal in particular.

WP Theme Generator

This is the first suggestion as it is the best option for those who do not have much knowledge about designing WordPress theme. It will help you design a WordPress theme by yourself basing on more than 300 different templates. After choosing the template, you will edit its color, font, layouts and so on. Next, save your own theme and download it.

Besides, it provides numerous elements for designing a theme, including more than 1000 pre-designed objects, fully functional shopping cart, more than 50 fonts, 20 Different sliders/slideshows and much more. You can use it with the free account but limited. If you pay $29, you will have the right to use all notable functions of WP Theme Generator. You will find it worthy paying that amount of money.

Ultimatum

This is one of the most feature rich WordPress theme builders. It comes with a drag and drop layout builder which helps the users easily design professional WordPress theme by themselves. Ultimatum also allows users to use free plugins on wordpress.org and many popular premium plugins, create responsive sites, choose unique styles, build Bootstrap Powered WordPress themes, and more.

Elegant Themes Builder

If you used to love the elegant design of the themes released by Elegant Themes, you should use this plugin in order to design a WordPress theme like the WordPress education theme with such the style. Elegant Themes Builder offers powerful tools for structuring page content and a drag-drop canvas where users can re-size and rearrange theme elements, including header, logo, sliders, buttons, pricing table and so on.

Especially, you only need to pay $89 in order to download this plugin and other 87 themes. This supports you to create WordPress themes for any purpose, for example, a WordPress theme for education portal. Therefore, the price is not expensive at all.

iThemes Builder

As one of the premium theme providers, iThemes is no longer a strange name to the WordPress users. It was always among the top of theme providers. However, from WordPress version 3 and higher, iThemes gradually became uninteresting as its structures had nothing remarkable. Therefore, iThemes decided to develop a framework theme called iBuilder to give breakthrough.

Although it is not the most impressive, iBuilder can help the WordPress beginners design a unique WordPress theme for any website, for instance, a WordPress theme for education portal site. In particular, it allows users to edit theme layout by inserting modules such as header, navigation, content area, widgets and footer. Furthermore, iThemes Builder offers blocks which are special functionality add-ons for specific content types.

Headway Framework

Headway Framework becomes one of the well-known theme frameworks thanks to its SEO friendliness. Besides, it allows you to pick your own colors, import/export blocks, edit element parents, select Google fonts, create any layout you want, and much more. Whether who you are, Headway can help you build a unique theme for any purpose in minimal time. For example, if you are an educator and want to have an original WordPress education theme for your site, then you can do it yourself by using this framework.

Hopefully, you will succeed in designing an impressive WordPress theme for yourself. Share with your friends if you find this article useful!

Featured, WordPress Themes

5 wonderful WordPress themes for videos and photos

September 1, 2015

It seems that you are still in the vicious circle of searching the suitable video themes for your WordPress site. Actually, there are a wide range of WordPress themes for videos and photos on the market. What you need to do is looking for the right one but you will find a little bit difficult to choose. Hence, today, in this article, we will introduce to you five WordPress themes for video and photo built to create portfolio websites. These themes are designed for the aim of supporting designers, photographers and design companies. The common feature is that they support self-hosted videos and allow you to introduce the products and yourself in the professional way to the recruiters, customers or anyone you want to impress.

5 creative WordPress themes for videos & photos

1. Lobo v2.4 – WordPress theme for Freelancers

Lobo is a new WordPress video theme that many design companies and freelancers are using for their WordPress website. It is very wonderful for graphic designers, artists, photographers or any kinds of arts. You can create a video or photo portfolio quickly and easily to introduce your work and sell the products with this WordPress themes for videos and photos.

2. Vignette – WordPress Video Theme

Vignette looks great on a wide range of devices. It can also add powerful features of Jetpack to your site. In addition, it allows you to harnesses the power of Jetpack to show your photos and videos in awesome gallery styles and carousels. Moreover, Vignette has a minimalistic full width layout and design, which contributes to make your work stand out.

3. Bosphorus – Powerful WordPress theme for designers

Bosphorus is a powerful theme for creative artists and photographers with the customizable fonts and colors. It allows users to display their products using portfolio and unlimited post formats, including gallery, image, video, audio, quote and more. The theme supports full-screen videos, full-screen slider background, audio player, translation, Timthumb and many other features.

4. Phoenix – Photography WordPress theme

Phoenix is one of the great WordPress themes for videos and photos that can display well on mobile phones. Thus, the theme is suitable for photographers and users who want to introduce their work on the website. Its features include audio player, full-screen videos, full-screen slider background, translation, Timthumb, and much more.

5. Rangefinder – A great WordPress theme

Rangefinder is a polished portfolio WordPress theme for photographers and designers. It features responsive design, fully filterable portfolio, many built-in widgets, SEO settings and so on. This WordPress theme will satisfy all requirements from designers.

Hopefully, with these above mentioned WordPress themes for video/photo portfolio, you can find the right one for your purposes and needs. Each theme will have its strong and weak points, let’s give it a try and feel the difference.

Featured, WordPress Themes

Top 5 key features of an impressive WordPress university theme

August 31, 2015

Almost everyone spends a significant amount of time learning no matter what it is, from academic writing, advanced mathematics, biology to life skills or how to play a musical instrument, etc. In recent golden years of technology and Internet, it has never been easier for people to study anywhere at any time, as long as they have a computer, a laptop, a tablet or even a smartphone connected to the Internet. Therefore, it is not so strange when the number of education websites on the Internet has been mushrooming in the past few years.

The most important thing for you to consider before creating an education site is the content of your instructional units as people often have the inclination to learn from trustful sources. However, in order that learners pay heed to your amazing content, it is recommended that you set up a stunning website, which means not only does your website need a drop-dead gorgeous appearance but it also have to be user-friendly. Fortunately, setting up such a website will not be a worry for WordPress site owners provided that they choose a university theme for WordPress treasuring the following features.

Key Features of a University Theme | WordPress

1. Integrated with a Powerful Learning Mamagement Plugin

Your website is an education one; therefore, online courses play a vital part in its success. There is nothing that can help you with the content of each lesson, but there are good plugins that can support you in making impressive multimedia units and managing e-learning projects. Your content can be displayed in the form of images, audios or videos. You are also able to make interesting questionnaires with many types of questions to help your students revise what they have learnt and self-evaluate what they have gained for themselves. In addition, such plugins can let you track each learner’s progress so that you can make changes in your content to suit their level.

2. Easy to Customize

Differentiation is one of the most important factors leading to success, which is the reason why you ought to choose an education theme that offers a bunch of personalization options. Those options can range from simple ones such as changing the color scheme to complicated ones like manually adding bits of code for special functions or effects that you like.

3. Responsive Design

Since there are a lot of devices that allow people to learn online, you should choose a responsive WordPress university theme for your education website. This is also your commitment to your customers that no matter what device they use, they will always get access to your site.

4. Compatible with Popular WordPress Plugins

When setting up an education website using a university theme for WordPress, you certainly want to attract as many learners as possible and to sell your online courses well. In order to reach these goals, you need to choose a theme compatible with plugins for translation, e-commerce and social network, etc. This will support you to build a multilingual site for students from various countries, sell your courses online, establish your students’ community to help them discuss what they have studied, and more.

5. Full Technique Support

Since you choose a readily-designed theme to set up your education website, you will likely find it difficult to use the theme sometimes. Therefore, you should select one that has a full documentation online as well as provides you with free support. Also, an education WordPress theme that is updated automatically is a perfect choice to help you avoid bugs and enjoy the latest development.

There are currently many education themes for WordPress that treasure all the important features mentioned above and one of them is University designed by CactusThemes. With the University theme, WordPress site of your university will become amazing one for e-learning. Review the demo immediately to experience its great features.

Featured, WordPress Tips

Four useful tips to optimize images in an education theme | WordPress

August 29, 2015

Images are often considered one of the best parts of WordPress sites, including educational ones. They set the mood, catch the eyes and even invite emotions.

However, images are often the biggest files on a server so they may affect the loading speed of the site. To solve this problem, this article introduces four favorable tips to optimize all images uploaded to your site as well as used by your WordPress education theme, WordPress plugins.

1. Choose the Suitable Image Format

JPEG format is usually the best choice for photos when you’re on a bandwidth budget. In fact, you can see almost no visible difference between PNGs and JPEGs. However, the PNG is much larger than the JPEG. Also, remember that every time you edit and save a JPEG image, you lose a little bit of the original image quality.

If an image contains typography, or is a screenshot or any other form of computer-generated images, then it is better to choose PNG or SVG format. Besides, GIF format is the good choice for animated images.

2. Keep the Original Image File

To optimize images in education center WordPress theme, it would be better if you experiment with different compression options. Nevertheless, always remember to keep the original images safe as some time when the file is compressed, you cannot undo the change. This might be a simple tip that helps you save time.

3. Use the Best Retina Format

Retina technology displayed huge picture quality benefits but created a couple of problems for us. Typical monitors use 72ppi while a Retina display ranges 150 to 300 ppi. This makes images and fonts more beautiful and makes larger image files and reduces page loading time, especially with mobile devices.

The good new is that the human eyes actually pick up different in quality on Retina devices after compression. A huge JPEG saves at a high compression rate that can look better than smaller image at reduced compression when you resized your page.

Another way to solve the problem is to create a second version of your image file at double size. For example, a 100 x 100 px image at 80ppi will need to become 200 x 200 px, then resized back to 100 x 100 in your page, or increased to 160ppi.

4. Use a Compression Tool or Plugin for WordPress

There are some choices for education center WordPress theme when you think about automating image compression. Here are a few of many great compression tools available on the Internet.

TinyPNG

This is the best tool to take the hard work out of compressing PNG images. You just need to upload your images and download the free compressed version. You can upload 20 images with maximum size of 5MB. There are some great TinyPNG plugins for WordPress.

WP Smush.it

This is a great WordPress plugin that helps to reduce image sizes and speed up page loading time.

EWW Image Optimizer

This is also a good plugin but you need to take note of the warnings. For example, when you have compressed a GIF, you can’t edit it again.

Featured, WordPress Themes

Creating education websites with university WordPress theme

August 28, 2015

Currently, WordPress is increasingly popular with millions of websites using this platform. The education is not exceptional. There are thousands of websites that have been run on WordPress, including schools’ and universities’ websites. In this article, we will talk about what WordPress users can get from a university WordPress theme and why they should use the theme to create educational websites.

What can users get from a university WordPress theme?

A WordPress theme for university provides different features for blogs, events, courses, students’ profiles, announcements and more. It usually comes with popular plugins such as WooCommerce, Page Builder, Revolution Slider, WPML, bbPress and BuddyPress. This allows universities to introduce themselves, share knowledge, sell online courses, translate their site into different languages, create online events, support students online and much more.

Moreover, a WordPress theme for university allows users to turn their site into a learning management system for the documentation, administration, tracking, reporting and delivery of e-learning, training programs or education courses.

If you want to create a website for your university and don’t know where to start from, then a university WordPress theme can help. Every theme has site demos and you can review them to get ideas for your site. You are also able to have a website like the theme’s demo by importing its sample data to your WordPress site. However, you should keep in mind that images used in demo may be not included in sample data.

Besides, some university WordPress theme provides users with additional features to create quiz, certificates, badges, and so on.

A few university themes are even packed with child themes. This allows users to modify their site’s appearance and functions without making changes in parent theme and preserve these modifications when the theme is updated.

Why should universities create education sites with a university WordPress theme?

It is essential and sufficient for universities to create their own site in the current technological advancement: A huge amount of households from all over the world are using the Internet and the smart devices that can connect with the Internet. Everyone can have access to the Internet at any time and everywhere. Under that circumstance, using an impressive education theme for their WordPress site may attract both parents and students to visit their site.

Also, WordPress theme designed especially for education-related purposes can help universities save their time, money and effort since they will not have to spend too much time making their website look and feel like a professional education one.

Final thought

Building an education site on WordPress is not difficult if universities choose a suitable theme which match their content and purposes. If you need to pick a university theme to develop such a site, think about why you use the theme and what you can get from it first.

Featured, WordPress Themes

Sahifa Theme Review: A Responsive Blog Video Theme | ThemeForest

August 27, 2015

According to CodeGuard’s State of the Web Report (May, 2015), about 78.8 percent of site owners use WordPress to manage their content. Clearly, WordPress is dominating the content management field and is expected to continue to develop in the foreseeable future.

In line with that trend, the number of WordPress themes also increase rapidly. There are a lot of beautiful themes related to education, business, blog, marketing and more, which can satisfy the demand of any user.

One of such great themes is Sahifa. If you want to create a blog or video-related website, then Sahifa will help you.

About Sahifa blog video theme | ThemeForest

The theme was developed by TieLabs and released on ThemeForest market in 2012. It is being used by more than 16,890 site owners and gets the rating of 4.81 out of 5 stars for customers.

Being one of ten most popular WordPress themes, Sahifa is packed with elegant design, clean code and numerous powerful features.

Source: CodeGuard, 2015

Key Features of Sahifa WordPress video theme | ThemeForest

Fully Responsive and Retina Ready
Mobile Friendly
Amazing Admin Panel
3 Theme Layouts, 5 Homepage Layouts and 6 Footer Layouts
5 Homepage Sliders with Options to set the Animation Type, Slide Time, Speed and the Query
Self-hosted Video Support
Self-hosted Audio Support
Translation Ready with WPML Support
TiePage Builder: A built-in drag and drop home page builder allowing you to customize your homepage with lots of Blocks Layouts
Multiple Homepage Blocks, including Videos Blocks
WooCommerce Ready
Buddypress and bbPress Support
Social Media Users Profiles Support
Responsive Google AdSense
6 Premium Plugins Included
RTL Support
Built-in Review System
Post Views System
SEO Rich Snippets

Final Words

Sahifa contains all you need to build an amazing website, from video, blog and news to e-commerce features. However, beginners who lack experience about configuring WordPress may feel challenged when using this sophisticated blog video theme because of its huge amount of features.

In general, Sahifa deserves to be one of the best blog video themes for WordPress.

Featured, WordPress Themes

Best education WordPress themes for kindergartens and primary schools

August 26, 2015

It is the fact that self-hosted WordPress is more and more popular in education. Not only universities and colleges but also kindergartens and primary schools have the demand for creating their own website.

However, some education institutions don’t want to hire a developer to help them build their WordPress site. In that case, an education WordPress theme will be a good choice since it allows users to configure and customize their website even without any coding knowledge. And this article will introduce you best education WordPress themes which are suitable with kindergartens and primary schools’ websites.

Best education WordPress themes for content related to kids

1. Baby Kids

Baby Kids is a beautiful education WordPress theme suitable for elementary, primary schools, kindergartens and educational activities related to children.

Key Features

Visual Composer Ready
Unlimited Colors
Revolution Slider Included
WooCommerce Support
WPML Multilingual Support
Gravity Form Support
Time Table for WP Ready
School Dedicated Pages
Typography Options
Forum Support

2. Caresland Lite

Caresland Lite is one of the free and best education WordPress themes designed for kindergartens and other websites related to activities with children.

Key Features

Clean & Validated Code
Responsive Design
Cross-Browser Compatibility
Localization
Theme Options Panel

3. PeachClub

This responsive WordPress education theme is appropriate for child care centers, kindergartens and preschools.

Key Features

Unlimited Colors
650+ Google Fonts
Manage Members
Manage Classes
Manage Time Table
Unlimited Sidebars
Drag – Drop Page Builder
WPML Included
Revolution Slider Ready
Advanced SEO Options
1-Click Demo Install
Super Support

4. Kindergarten

This is a free WordPress theme for preschool, nursery, child care center and small businesses.

Key Features

Responsive Design
Custom Widgets
Drop-Down Menus
Javascript Slideshow

5. Education Center

Education Center is one of the best education WordPress themes for schools, trainings and courses. It focuses on typography with colorful and responsive design.

Key Features

Built with CSS3 and HTML5
Cross-Browser Compatibility: IE9+, FireFox, Chrome and Safari
Child Theme
WooCommerce Ready
10+ Blog Styles
40+ awesome Hover Effects
Google web fonts
Parallax and Video Background
Swiper Slider for Galleries and Posts
Revolution Slider for Home page
1-Click Demo Import
Online Documentation Ready
Professional Support
Frequent Updates

6. Kids Care

This education WordPress theme is suitable for any content related to kids. It has responsive layouts and is easy to customize.

Key Features

Mobile Friendly
4 Topic Skins
11 Custom Widgets
Cross-Browser Compatibility: Chrome, FireFox, Safari and IE9+
Child Theme
WooCommerce Ready
Revolution Slider Support
Visual Composer Support
Parallax Background
Ajax Search
SEO Friendly
Google Fonts Support
1-Click Demo Import
Online Documentation included
Frequent Updates
Great Technique Support

7. School

School is another free education WordPress theme. It is suitable for schools which need to have an online presentation.

Key Features

Responsive Layout Built on Twitter Bootstrap
Multiple Columns
Recommended Short-Codes
Full Width Pages
Pages With Sidebars

Older Posts

Newer Posts

Archives

1. Clever Course – Learning Management System Theme

2. Carry Hill School – Responsive WordPress Education Theme

3. The Keynote – Conference / Event WordPress Theme

4. University – Event, Course & Education WordPress Theme

5. Happy Kids – Children WordPress Theme

6. EduLMS – WP Learning Management System Theme

7. ETHIC – Event, Course & Education WordPress Theme

8. Little People – Kindergarten WordPress theme

9. Fable – Children Kindergarten WordPress Theme

10. Masterstudy – Education Center WordPress Theme

WP Theme Generator

Ultimatum

Elegant Themes Builder

iThemes Builder

Headway Framework

5 creative WordPress themes for videos & photos

1. Lobo v2.4 – WordPress theme for Freelancers

2. Vignette – WordPress Video Theme

3. Bosphorus – Powerful WordPress theme for designers

4. Phoenix – Photography WordPress theme

5. Rangefinder – A great WordPress theme

Key Features of a University Theme | WordPress

1. Integrated with a Powerful Learning Mamagement Plugin

2. Easy to Customize

3. Responsive Design

4. Compatible with Popular WordPress Plugins

5. Full Technique Support

1. Choose the Suitable Image Format

2. Keep the Original Image File

3. Use the Best Retina Format

4. Use a Compression Tool or Plugin for WordPress

What can users get from a university WordPress theme?

Why should universities create education sites with a university WordPress theme?

Final thought

About Sahifa blog video theme | ThemeForest

Key Features of Sahifa WordPress video theme | ThemeForest

Other Features of this video theme | ThemeForest

Final Words

Best education WordPress themes for content related to kids

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