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Featured, WordPress Themes

Pros & cons of choosing premium WordPress education themes

October 16, 2015

Premium WordPress education themes have become a critical part of professional WordPress sites aimed at education. However, with a lot of premium theme authors and shops out there, it can be difficult for you to consider their products’ potential downsides. Hopefully the following pros and cons will help.

Pros of Premium WordPress Education Themes

Official Support

Most premium education WordPress themes come with official support via forum, email, or phone in a period of time. Some theme authors even offer lifetime support for their users. This is a huge bonus for users. Particularly, the users will have the theme author answer their technical questions about item’s features, as well as help to fix reported bugs and issues or to solve problems related to the included third party assets.

High Quality

Quality is one of the primary factors that consumers are interested in when reviewing a commercial product. Hence, the quality of premium WordPress education themes, whose aim is to make money, is much higher than free items. For the theme developers and marketplaces, high quality creates a positive feedback loop where their themes are continually getting better as more and more users come to use them.

Advanced Functionality

Premium education WordPress themes usually come with advanced functionality such as advanced plugins (Visual Composer, Revolution Slider, etc.) and advanced admin panels which make customization and site configuration much easier.

Better Design

WordPress education themes

The design of premium WordPress education themes is usually much better in every aspect, from page templates to widgets and back-end admin menus. An education site with clean and beautiful design goes a long way towards promoting your brand and attracting your potential students or customers.

Security

Security is a priority for premium WordPress education theme authors/shops. In order to get a foothold in the theme market, they have to invest in meeting the high security standards of their customers.

Frequent Updates

The update cycle with premium WordPress education themes tends to be tighter. This affects not only the theme compatibility but many other things, from small bugs to big security issues. There are a thousand little issues which can arise from an out of date WordPress theme. The only way to avoid them is frequent updates, which premium theme authors/shops tend to be better at.

Cons of Premium WordPress Education Themes

WordPress education themes

High Price Point

The price point for your favorite education WordPress themes may be quite high and yet still require further licensing fees. If you only run a small education site and not actually earn enough money to offset your theme costs, a premium theme with annual licensing fees can burn your wallet.

No Official Review Process

Currently, there is still no official review process for premium WordPress themes. This means that premium theme authors are able to ignore WordPress development best practices in certain areas. This sometimes causes minor annoyances, even costs a lot more.

Theme Bloat

Premium WordPress education themes have a higher potential for “theme bloat” than free ones. This is a trade-off to have more features and better functionality. Also, the theme bloat is more likely to drag your website speed into the gutter.

Item No Longer Available

When the theme that you purchased is taken down from the shop or the authors stop selling it, this means you no longer receive updates and support. Consequently, you may not only have to transition to another theme but also be out of your money.

WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes

Drag-drop plugins often packed with video theme WordPress ThemeForest

October 16, 2015

All of you want to design your site with ease and as fast as possible. That is the reason why, the drag and drop plugins are introduced. The advantage of those plugins is they do not require expertise to perform. Even a novice can create complex layouts and build a website with a professional look in seconds using drag and drop page builders.

Drag and drop plugins have become so popular that a significant number of WordPress themes on ThemeForest, especially video theme WordPress ThemeForest, are integrated with them.

In this article we will take a look at three of the popular drag and drop plugins that usually come packed with ThemeForest professional video WordPress theme.

3 drag-drop page builders often integrated with video theme WordPress ThemeForest

1. Aqua Page Builder

video theme WordPress ThemeForest 1

This is a free plugin which allows you to create custom page layouts.

You can see the plugin’s interface in the “Appearance” section of your WordPress Dashboard. It works in the same way as the interface of WordPress widget. So, you will feel comfortable when using it.

Aqua Page Builder provides you with six blocks: Text, Column, Widgets, Clear, Alerts and Tabs & Toggles. Also, you are able to add custom blocks if you want. In fact, several theme authors on ThemeForest have done this to enhance their own video theme WordPress ThemeForest (for example: Curvette).

This drag and drop builder is very easy to use; nevertheless, it is limited in features compared to some other plugins such as Visual Composer.

2. Visual Composer

video theme WordPress ThemeForest 2

This plugin has about 40 items of content to choose from, including social media sharing buttons, post racks, tables, sliders, image and more. Another plus is that all elements are optimized for mobile devices. Because of its amazing features and advantages, more and more developers include Visual Composer into their video theme WordPress ThemeForest.

What will fascinate you about Visual Composer is that it is easy to create designs quickly. There are several custom designs available for creating content that can be divided in several columns and rows, and can be added by dragging then dropping them in the areas of the page that interests us.

The designs can be saved as templates to reuse in other areas of the website. This makes it easier to create unique styles and duplicate similar pages. For example, you can create a unique design for reviews and another for news.

Another advantage of Visual Composer is the visual query builder. This is an easy way to create custom queries and display them on a grid.

3. Awesome Builder

video theme WordPress ThemeForest 3

Awesome Builder is also one of the drag-and-drop page builders that many developers use for their video theme WordPress ThemeForest.

The plugin enables the creation of pages with a visual editor or using short codes. There are more than 25 items to choose from including price table, boxes, videos, sliders and more.

Awesome Builder is somehow similar to Visual Composer; however, its interface is a little tidier and cleaner. One of the most outstanding features of this page builder is the ability to switch between the layout for desktop computer and mobile device. This allows optimizing the user experience for each time of visit.

Final Thoughts

The wants and needs of each person are different. A plugin that has dozens of items is not the best option if you do not need these extra features. You should get the right balance for your website.

Most plugin authors allow you to test their page builder before you purchase. This can be available through a free trial or a public demonstration. If none is available, you had better contact the author directly and request access to the plugin demo.

What you think about “Drag-drop plugins often packed with video theme WordPress ThemeForest”? Leave your comments!

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tutorials

Useful tutorials to build WordPress themes for education

October 15, 2015

If you want to build a custom education theme for WordPress with your limited coding knowledge but you do not know where to start from, then this writing will help. The article introduces easy-to-understand tutorials to create a WordPress theme from scratch, which can support you in the first step of developing your own WordPress themes for education.

9 tutorials to build WordPress themes for education

How to Create a WordPress Theme: The Ultimate WordPress Theme Tutorial

WordPress themes for education 1

This series includes 12 parts, starting with a look at structure of a WordPress theme before taking a deep look at the structure of template files. It gives you basic knowledge of creating a theme from scratch, ensuring that your future WordPress themes for education will have clean structure.

How to Create a WordPress Theme from Scratch

This tutorial was published on Tuts+ a few years ago. It looks at taking a HTML/CSS template and turning it into a functioning WordPress theme and describes the use of each template file with code samples. Just follow it step by step and you are able to develop simple WordPress themes for educational blog.

Designing for WordPress: Complete Series

Another useful instruction is Chris Coyier’s video screencast series.  This instruction takes a live look at developing a WordPress theme, which gives visual insight you do not get from a written guideline.

WordPress Theme Development Training Wheels

This tutorial series of theme development is written by Nur Ahmad Furlong and published on Tuts+. The series takes WordPress newbies who don’t have experience with HTML or PHP code through the basic steps to create a custom WordPress theme for education site.

Building custom WordPress theme

Chapter II of the “Complete WordPress theme guide” series on Web Designer Wall shows you how to create a custom theme. Part I and III cover the installation of WordPress and the way to export WordPress. This tutorial is also applied for the WordPress themes for education.

Developing your first WordPress theme

WordPress themes for education 3

This is another tutorial on Wptuts+. It not only covers the basic knowledge and steps to build a WordPress theme, but also gives you some tips to create a genetic theme to sell or give away. This helps you to save effort, money and time when developing your own WordPress themes for education.

How to Create WordPress Themes from Scratch

It can be considered one of the most extensive tutorial series of WordPress theme development. After reading this series, you may be surprised to know that developing WordPress themes for education is not very hard. The tutorial covers the whole process of building a WordPress theme, from structuring the theme layout, designing it in Photoshop and slicing, coding the layout into fully CSS based HTML to WordPress implementation.

Basics of WordPress theme design

This tutorial from WPShout takes a deep look at each of template files, from basic to advanced ones, and gives a simple description of how it works in “plain” language. It also gives you more knowledge about template tags, making your process of building WordPress themes for education easier.

How to Build a Custom WordPress Theme from Scratch

WordPress themes for education 2

The WordPress theme tutorial covers the basics of WordPress theme development and goes through the process that the author used when creating his ‘Sticky’ WordPress theme. Before building your own WordPress theme for education site, just read this example.

WordPress Themes

The advantages of responsive theme | WordPress site development

October 14, 2015

Responsive design is an approach to web design, which is aimed at crafting websites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience. It is easy reading and navigation with a minimum of panning, resizing and scrolling through variety of devices from desktop to mobile phones.

A responsive design adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, CSS3 media queries, flexible images and more.

So, what is a responsive education theme WordPress? It is a education theme WordPress that has responsive layouts and is able to display well on any device, from desktops and tablets to smartphones. With the recent trend of responsive web design, designers are creating more responsive education themes for WordPress.

education theme WordPress 1

Advantages of a responsive education theme WordPress

Excellent User Experience

While content is the foremost success metrics, user experience enable visitors to consume content on any site through the device of their choice and preference anytime. So a responsive education theme WordPress is to provide the optimal user experience irrespective of whether they use a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart TV. Using a responsive education theme WordPress will satisfy busy users and wide-awake college students who want to access to your site anytime, as well as any visitors who want to access your website from their favorite devices, which have no scrolling and resizing.

Cost Effective

By using a responsive education theme WordPress, you have no longer to maintain two separate web addresses for your school site (one for web and anther for mobile). It’s important to compare the advantages of having single site that conforms to the needs of all devices with having two separate websites. One website is cheaper than two and it’s important if you pay attention to saving.

Also, mobile sites do not offer advanced navigational techniques like traditional websites. This is not convenient for the site visitors; as a result, they leave your site and check out the competitors’ ones. Responsive WordPress theme for education helps you solve that problem and enhance SEO efforts by allowing your visitors to direct to a single site no matter what device they use.

education theme WordPress 2

Recommended By Google

According to Google, responsive web design is its recommended mobile configuration. Thus, using a responsive education theme WordPress will help to improve your site’s Google ranking.

In particular, a site with responsive design has only one URL and the same HTML regardless of device, which makes it more efficient and easier for Google to crawl, index and organize the site content. It is in contrast to a completely separate mobile site: the mobile site’s URL and HTML is different from its desktop counterpart, which requires Google to crawl and index multiple versions of the same site.

Furthermore, content displayed on one website and one URL is much easier for users to share, link to and interact with than content displayed on a separate mobile site.

education theme WordPress 3

Easy To Manage

If you have two separate sites for desktop and mobile, this means that you need to have two separate SEO campaigns. Obviously, managing one site and one SEO campaign is much easier than managing two sites or two SEO campaigns. This is an important advantage that responsive education theme WordPress brings to you.

With the development of education theme WordPress is taken to a new level and able to satisfy the needs ò almost educational organizations. So, it’s time for you to start!

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

5 tips to find the perfect WordPress video blog themes

October 14, 2015

 

While the number of premium and free WordPress video blog themes constantly increase, have you ever been so tired of searching for a design that meets your requirements?

So, how to find a suitable one among various WordPress video blog themes available on the Internet? This article will give you five tips to find out how and where to look for your ideal theme.

How to find the perfect WordPress video blog themes

1. Decide what you want and need

Never be in a hurry to find a nice theme. Decide exactly what you need. Do you want to start with a video portfolio, a video-related blog with lots of static information, a great video channel or just a combination? All small details you should have thought about before. Draw broadly on paper how you see the layout of your homepage. Common elements are a clear header, a menu, sidebar and footer.

2. Filter if you search within WordPress Dashboard

Within the WordPress Dashboard, you can use the filter function to specifically look for WordPress video blog themes. The effect is very much like the way you’re looking for hotel accommodation on websites of travel companies. For example you can specify which color the theme should have, choose the number of columns and requirements that you can simply adjust the header or background. WordPress then collects the themes that fit the needs established by you. These are usually fairly basic, but free.

3. Search by category and keywords on ThemeForest

ThemeForest is a huge resource for WordPress video blog themes. Therefore, always go straight towards your goal. In the corresponding submenu shows a useful categorization. If you want to start a video blog, firstly search within the Blog/Magazine category. Here you can search by keyword, such as “video”, or filter by tags. Next, you may want to visit other categories, such as eCommerce and Entertainment, for more video themes.

4. Check the ratings, live preview, comments and descriptions

WordPress video blog themes 1

You can control the order of the offering themes on ThemeForest by yourself. For example, you choose from the dropdown menu at the top for ‘Rating’; then all themes with a high evaluation will come to you. This evaluation is given by users. If a theme has tens or hundreds of ratings and four or five stars, then you do not have much to worry.

WordPress video blog themes 2

After make a short list of ThemeForest WordPress video blog themes, you should view their live preview by hover your mouse over their thumbnail. So you are able to see a photo and the summarized information of the theme. Then you can see whether the theme is suitable for mobile and tablet or not and its listed main functions.

In the comments tab on the theme’s product page, you can ask questions to the developers, as well as see the problems that purchasers or other users encounter when using theme and the answers of the developers.

Furthermore, it is of course very important that you read the description of the theme. This description is often clearly described the possibilities of the theme, which updates were performed, which browsers are supported and how many columns the theme have.

5. Search via Google

Perhaps an obvious tip: searching for WordPress video blog themes on Google. But remember to search the latest result, otherwise, you’re overloaded with suggestions and download links which many of them are not available.

Hope you find the most suitable video blog themes for WordPress!

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

6 Steps to speed up a WordPress theme for videos

October 13, 2015

A WordPress theme for videos offers significant flexibility in changing setting, adding or removing built-in plugins and modifying theme options to enhance page speed. Therefore, the owners of WordPress video sites should use the following steps to ensure a faster site performance.

6 Steps to make a WordPress theme for videos faster

Step 1: Enable gzip Compression

Enable gzip compression in WordPress can reduce load time by over 300%. So, you should compress the code of the used WordPress theme for videos if possible. If compatibility used to be an issue with earlier browsers, almost modern browsers can handle gzip compression out of the box with significant returns in site performance.

WordPress theme for videos 1

Step 2: Cut down on code bloat

Many free and paid WordPress themes for video portfolio are guilty of using excessive HTML/CSS elements, which adds up to site bloat and reduces page speed. After installing any WordPress video theme, you should remove all superfluous HTML and CSS elements, reduce unnecessary tags, optimize and combine CSS rules for maximum efficiency.

Step 3: Compress images in the WordPress theme for videos

Loading large images places significant strain on the server. You should ensure that every image of the WordPress video theme you use is optimized and compressed to consume as little bandwidth as possible.

Step 4: Minify CSS and Javascript in the theme’s files

WordPress theme for videos 2

“Minify” is an add-on to PHP 5 that combines multiple CSS and Javascript files, then serves them with gzip compression. It is integrated into W3 Total Cache and other plugins. It helps reduce code bloat, remove excessive whitespace and avoid redundant server connections to make faster page loading time.

Step 5: Avoid installing unnecessary built-in plugins

Almost every premium WordPress theme for videos comes with built-in plugins, which offer you more options and features. However, plugin bloat is one of the reasons causing slow site performance. Almost plugins create extra files to load and process which places strain on server and increase loading time. Therefore, you had better reduce the number of built-in plugins used on your video site as much as possible. In general, a WordPress site should not have more than five plugins, including built-in ones, and the ideal figure never exceeds 10.

Step 6: Remove default advertisements

Advertisements are often the last elements loaded on a webpage because they rely on external servers to host their media. Flash and image-based ads makes page loading time slower and they can push well-optimized site into slow loading category. You should remove default advertisements in the used WordPress theme for videos and images to see a noticeable improvement in performance and meet the demand of visitors.

WordPress Themes

WordPress Education Theme Collection for Online Courses

October 12, 2015

Knowledge just becomes value when it is shared and passed to other people or the following generation. And to make it easily comes true, online courses is a great creation that makes learning more convenient and reach a lot of people. Learners are willing to pay money for these courses if they want to gain desire knowledge. Yet building an online education system seems not simple. WordPress platform with WordPress education theme and plugin can solve this issue in convenient way and make your online site more professional.

Primary you need to install a WordPress site, and then install, activate a suitable WordPress education theme to manage efficiently your learning system and reach more learners. This checklist of WordPress education themes with great features and stunning design helps you to choose a best WordPress education theme to start building education online sites.

2015 WordPress Education Theme Collection for Online Courses

Invent

WordPress Education Theme 1

Invent is a unique WordPress online education theme designed for websites of any school, college or university. It comes with variety functions, for instance, unlimited colors schemes, custom sidebars, multiple page templates, layout settings, loads of Google fonts, 6+ custom post types and WooCommerce integration. This is a SEO friendly theme ready to help your website reach people around the world. Extensive tests on numbers of actual websites have done with it to make sure no unstable theme element messes up your site.

Academica Pro

WordPress Education Theme 2

Academica Pro is a clean, perfect and responsive WordPress education theme for any online courses. It offers loads of features, like dynamic homepage builder, easy color styling, custom widgets and a featured post slider. With several custom widgets you can adjust the home page or sidebars as your purpose. Responsive design helps your site work well in mobile and tablet devices.

Carry Hill School

WordPress Education Theme 3

If you want to have a beautiful look for your WordPress education site, Carry Hill School is the right choice. It is designed for child school, or children, art, craft and creative online site. Drag-and-Drop Page Builder offered with Carry Hill School allows you to customize the content of your site as you like. This multipurpose WordPress education theme also includes numbers of features, like 600+ Google fonts, responsive & clean design, boxed and wide layouts, and PSD support.

Statfort

WordPress Education Theme 4

Startfort, a modern WordPress education theme 2015, can satisfy your requirements of building any online course website. This responsive theme is designed with several main features, including: courses management, events management, media gallery, slider management, sidebar management, drag and drop page builder, WPML and Translation ready script, and powerful theme options. The theme helps you to easily create different color scheme by its built-in options panel.

Clever Course

WordPress Education Theme 5

This awesome WordPress theme is ideal for who desire to build an informative online course site.  With WPML-ready, you can translate this theme into different languages, which helps to raise the number of future customers. You are also able to easily create the desired content for your online learners by using Limitless Page Builder.

WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

[Tips] Choosing a video theme on ThemeForest: 5 things to look for

October 9, 2015

Sometimes, words are not enough. Thus, the recent years have seen many bloggers switching to a video blog or magazine to deliver their content. If you have ever had an idea of creating your own “vlog” on WordPress platform, ThemeForest theme marketplace will be a great support. The marketplace is actually a pool of well-developed themes available for your interest. Below you will be provided a number of tips to choose the most appropriate video theme ThemeForest.

How to select a WordPress video theme – ThemeForest

Mobile-friendly interface

video theme themeforest 1

Over the past years with the emergence of smart handheld devices, a large number of Internet users have a tendency to surf the internet on their mobiles. Your video website’s content should follow this trend to gain more visitors. This mobile-friendly feature should also be a top priority when choosing a WordPress video theme ThemeForest.

In addition, modern users also tend to utilize different browsers depending on which devices they are using. The browsers diversely range from Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer to mobile browsers. Thus, take a fully mobile-friendly video theme ThemeForest in order to make sure that all your video content is properly displayed on any platform.

Fast loading time

Loading time is quite an important consideration for web owners. In the case of WordPress video theme, this feature is utterly essential. As compared to other types of websites/blogs, video content requires more time to load, and a compilation of video can become a real burden on the internet bandwidth. For this reason, you should prioritize a video theme ThemeForest that supports video upload or has integrated plugins to optimize the loading speed.

Wide choices for customization

video theme themeforest 2

As a matter of fact, video theme is just a niche in this pool of WordPress themes; accordingly, the options are quite limited. Thus, it is rather common that some prominent themes are chosen by many web owners. Then it comes the problem that how to distinguish your site from numerous other video websites/blogs. The answer must lie in the customization of the chosen theme. When a WordPress video theme ThemeForest offers a wide variety of customization choices, you are freely to individualize your interface in accordance with your interest and convenience. By this way, the possibility of identical video websites/ blogs will be greatly reduced.

Short-codes

Short-codes are usually overlooked by web owners. However, in the case of WordPress video theme ThemeForest, this is particularly important. Short-codes are generally referred to WordPress-specific codes which let you do nifty things with very little effort. The short-codes can helps you, for example, quickly fetch audio or video data, embed Google maps and add other multimedia elements to the website. A video theme ThemeForest with well-developed short-codes will do a better job optimizing your video content.

Integration with social media

video theme themeforest 3

First, such social channels as Facebook or Twitter will definitely be a better communication channel leading to your website/blog. For this reason, many WordPress theme developers always integrate social sharing buttons into their themes. The second thing to pay attention is the video embedding feature that allows users to embed videos from third parties on their video site. For many reasons, web owners do not directly upload videos to their sites. Instead, they usually choose to embed them from other popular platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion. When choosing a video theme ThemeForest, you should also take notice of this feature, making sure that your theme is compatible with as many platforms as possible.

About CactusThemes

About CactusThemes

We are Power Elite Author on Envato. We specialized in WordPress Themes and Plugins development. Our products focus on User Experience and Business Solution, in many categories such as Video, Sport, Magazine, University, Blog...

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