Everyone loves a great photo. With high quality camera phones and DSLRs being cheaper than ever, photography is hugely popular. If you like to take out your camera and capture the moments of life happening around you, not just on family occasions, then photoblogging is for you!
Photoblogs, sometimes referred as “Phlogs” are, blogs that predominantly share photos. Text is often limited to describe the photo and set the stage. After all, a picture is worth a a thousand words.
We recently went live with some updates and changes to UpThemes.com, as well as a brand new members area that makes life easier for affiliates and members. I wanted to share some of the changes and improvements here.
Over the past few months, we’ve been working on a major update to the UpThemes Framework. Our goals were simple: a faster, more stable, secure, extensible options framework that falls in line with the WordPress Settings API and best practices. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve received is that a theme options framework should look like WordPress and use its Settings API to avoid reinventing the wheel in regards to the user interface.
With all the fuss over daily deals, we decided that we wanted to try our hand at building an awesome, simple Daily Deals theme. We just finished some of the creative for this theme and wanted to share it with all of you.
Last week saw the launch of WordPress 3.4, with its brand new theme customizer. WordPress users can now live customize their themes before making applying them to their website. We’ve made our Adriatica Theme compatible with the theme customizer so you can create your perfect blog before making it live on your website.
There are plenty of roundup posts for bloggers that talk about the best WordPress plugins for your blog. But what about the plugins specifically for blogging, for improving your posts, both how they look and how you write them. In this roundup I’ve been more selective, and picked out the plugins that will actually improve your blogging and blogging practice. Check them out, install them, and make your blog a better place.
Regular blogging can take up a lot of time and energy. It can be difficult to get creative every day, and to maintain that creativity over time. It’s especially hard when you’re staring at the screen, not sure what to do, or where to go with your writing. You can, however, make it easy for yourself, by integrating some things into your process and workflow. Keep these tips in mind to improve your blogging and help to unleash your creativity.
Garage Band is a feature-rich WordPress theme for showcasing musicians and their work. The theme gives you all the tools you need to create a beautiful website and promote your band.
There ís plenty of debate about the online music industry, and whether it helps aspiring musicians or makes life harder for them.
Either way, digital music has created more opportunities for unsigned artists to promote themselves. You may not get paid much (or anything at all), but distributing your work electronically is much easier than lugging around a box of demo CDs. That’s why we built the Garage Band Theme, to make it easier for bands to share their music with as many people as possible.
If you’re an up-and-coming band hungry for exposure, these are seven web tools that will help you to get your music online and into more ears.
WordPress is a great platform for musicians. Not only is it free for you to use, but there are plenty of plugins that provide functionality tailored towards musicians so that you can create the website that you need. Show off your band, list your gigs and tour dates, integrate with social media, post your music videos and plenty more. In this post, I’m going to take a look at some essential plugins for creating a complete website for your band.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been busy revamping one of our first themes ever released, Aperturious, which was a simple blog theme, great for tech and photo bloggers alike. We decided to completely revamp the guts of the theme and change its name, which resulted in the beautiful and extremely awesome Adriatica theme.
Adriatica Theme Details
Adriatica Theme Demo
At UpThemes, we value our customers and their needs when it comes to building websites with WordPress. We’ve put together a quick, 5-minute survey asking how you use WordPress themes. For completing the survey, we will send you a 50% discount code good for any product on our website.
Agency is a new WordPress business theme, built for professional designers who want their design website to reflect their skill and show off their portfolio.
Once the Agency theme is installed and activated, you’ll find a number of new panels on your WordPress admin menu.
Before you start adding content to your site, you’ll should customize the appearance to fit with your own branding. In your admin menu, under the Appearance panel, you can upload new images for the site header and background.
Under Appearance › Theme Options you can make some further design tweaks. This is also where you add the contact and social media details for your business. It’s important to give prospective clients as much contact info as possible, so don’t skimp here. Ideally, you should include your physical address, phone number, email address and social media profiles.
The theme uses a custom homepage template to showcase the most important aspects of your business.
You don’t have to use this custom template, but you’ll get the most out of the Agency theme if you do. To set it up, you need to create a new WordPress page entitled “Home”. (Call it something else if you like). You don’t need to add any text content.
Before you hit Publish, find the Page Attributes panel (to the right of the text editor) and select Custom Home Page from the drop-down template list.
Make sure that you’re using the “Post Name” permalink structure. In your admin menu open Settings › Permalinks and select the Post Name option. This ensures that your nav menu links will point to the right pages, and makes your URLs look neat and tidy.
The image slider is the centerpiece of the Agency theme. This is the first thing prospective clients will see when they land on your homepage, so it’s important to showcase your best work or promotional content here.
To add content to the slider, open Slides › Add New. You need to create a new slide for each image that you want to display. Upload your file and select Use as Featured Image. From this interface you can also add a title and subtitle, and link the slide to a specific URL, e.g. a page in your portfolio.
Setting up the Agency theme is easier if you add testimonials first, before portfolio items. If you’ve got your testimonials in place you can easily add them to your portfolio items using custom fields. In your admin menu, open Testimonials › Add New.
Adding a testimonial is very simple, much the same as creating a new WordPress post. Use the client name for the title, and testimonial text as the body of the post. If you have a large number of testimonials, you can use WordPress tags for easier categorization.
Tip: When you ask your client for a testimonial, try to get as much detail as possible. Aim for a short paragraph that specifies what you did and how it helped the client. This is more effective than a generic “Great work! kind of review.
You’ll need to create a new WordPress page entitled “Portfolio”. Once the page is published, you can start adding projects. Each project will be nested under the “Portfolio” parent page.
To add new projects, open Portfolio › Add New. Include a title and whatever content you want to describe the project. You can use WordPress categories to organize your portfolio.
Add additional information about your work using the custom fields below the main text editor. Here you can attach a project testimonial from the previous step. These custom fields are useful, but not essential.
You should include a featured image for each project in your portfolio. If you want to add more than one image, use the Portfolio Item Slides custom field. Any images you upload here will be displayed in a rotating slider on the project page. Your featured image is automatically included in the slider.
Tip: Go for quality over quantity. Two or three good images will have more impact than six or seven average ones. Try to encapsulate each project in as few images as possible.
The Agency theme lets you display a profile of the employees in your company. In your admin menu, open Team Members › Add New. Use the person’s name as the title, then add a short bio in the body of the post.
You can use the custom fields to add a job title and social media links for your team member.
Tip: Before you advertise your colleagues’ social media profiles, make sure they’re fit for public consumption. Keep it professional, and don’t link to any personal pages that you don’t want prospective clients to see.
The Agency theme includes a built-in contact form, offering a quick and easy way for customers to get in touch.
To add this form to your site, publish a new page and use the Contact Page Template. You can call the page “Contact” or “Get in Touch” or whatever you like.
Contact form messages will be emailed to the address that you specified in Appearance › Theme Options. If none was listed, the form defaults to your WordPress admin email.
The Agency theme includes the jQuery-powered Nivo Slider, which you can add to any post or page with a WordPress shortcode.
You also get the WordPress Creation Kit, which is a developer tool for adding custom fields, custom post types, and new taxonomies to your site.
We’ve had an incredible response to the Agency theme in its first 24 hours of being live, so we thought we’d sweeten the deal a bit. We’re giving away 5 copies of the Agency theme, a rad UpThemes t-shirt (pictured above), and a one-year Developer Club Membership.
All you have to do to enter is follow the instructions below. The more ways you enter, the more likely you are to win, so enjoy:
Despite stiff competition, WordPress is rapidly gaining popularity as a microblogging platform. If you already know and love the world’s favorite CMS, there’s really no reason to use another service. There are many good microblogging themes available these days, which let you create a Tumblr or Posterous-style blog, but with all the power and flexibility of good ole’ WordPress.
UpThemes is producing some of the highest quality themes I've seen. They are using some of the newest web technologies to really make these themes rock. Their themes are solid ... stylistically and technologically. These guys have an eye for detail and I think it comes out in how the themes look and behave. You simply cannot go wrong using one of their themes on your website.
