WordPress world is full of great paid themes and it takes a lot of money to get an amazing blog magazine going. I know I have spent money on those. And, with so many themes being licensed only for one time usage, it can be a lot of money if you want to have a portfolio of websites or blogs. So, now I have gotten on the mission to find ways to have a top rate blog magazine using just free stuff. With that in mind, I have identified some amazing wordpress themes that you can use to get the blog magazine you want.
Get the latest 5 Amazing and Beautiful Free #Wordpress Magazine Themes 2015 #Blogging Click To TweetMy criteria are simple but important. The theme has to be unique, responsive, stable, and be easy on the eyes with a lot of white space. Here are my options.
1. TA Magazine
TA Magazine is decidedly one of the top free responsive magazine theme that I would recommend. No matter hat kind of website you are going for, whether news websites, online magazines, personal blogs or any type of editorial related website. Use this. Why? Here’s why.
Responsive / Bootstrap: It has been made with Bootstrap 3+ and the content adjusts automatically no matter what type of screen the user has.
Custom Widgets: It has a lot of amazing custom widgets. The kinds you would only get in a very expensive premium theme. Just this is good enough to make this theme a real winner. They are – Post Tabs, Ultimate Posts, Popular Posts with thumbnail support, Latest Comments, Silde Show, MailChimp Newsletter.
Theme customization: The theme has a ton of theme customizations. You can easily customize homepage modules and blog listing styles. So go ahead and try whatever you can do.
2. Hueman
Hueman is a fully featured, responsive high resolution magazine & blog theme. Believe me, it has a whole lot of options that will make this theme one of the best you have used. Here are some of the features.
Flexible Layout: You can use a left, right or both sidebars. And they are easy to configure.
Social Sharing: This is such a big problem with so many blogs I have created on WordPress. You never seem to get the right plug-in. So, am I glad that they have integrated Sharrre Which not only has high-res share buttons but also counts for each posts!
Related Posts and Navigation: It has an awesome way to show the Related posts under every article. Not just that, the theme also comes with navigation for links to previous and next article in the sidebar.
Post Formats: We have a number of Post Formats for this theme – Audio, Aside, Chat, Gallery, Image, Link, Quote, Status, and Video. That’s a lot of stuff for free!
OptionTree Framework: It has fully integrated OptionTree, a fantastic theme options framework. It helps to use Theme Options panel locally with an easy to use drag & drop interface.
3. Point
Point is a free theme with several premium functionalities. It has custom post meta information boxes and styled widgets. Point uses the Options Panel to tweak and customize the theme.
Flexible background: The theme offers the tool where you can set a variety of different backgrounds, from patterns to colors, and textures.
Related Posts: The theme comes with an excellent and clean “Related Posts” functionality.
Trending posts and Nice Header with Menu: The Header with the menu looks very nice and it has a Trending posts options as well for the posts.
We would highly recommend this theme for your blog.
4. Expound
Expound is very clean responsive theme with a lot of white space. It supports the post formats functionality. Although it is a WordPress.com theme, still it can be downloaded and used for your own wordpress site.
5. Photopress
Photopress is a beautiful magazine theme with a lot of amazing stuff. You can download the theme from here. It was recently released in March 2015.
- Responsive
- Retina Ready
- Featured Content Areas
- Main Slider
- 3d Slider
- Showcase Areas.
- Multiple Blog Layouts
- Built on Customizer for Live Editing of the theme.
- SEO Friendly
- Customizable Menu
WordPress has a modular structure. The three different types of pages rendered are broken down into different parts with separate php code. To properly understand WordPress (or any LAMP based CMS website) one needs to appreciate that it is after all a play between the php code, the CSS stylesheets (which control the theme components and look and feel) and the database (which stores everything – data, pics and other files).
The three types of pages that WordPress is divided into are:
- Front Page
- Single Post page
- Multi-post page (category page, archive page or search)
Now, each of these pages have typically these components within their code. Remember: We are taking of a plain and vanilla structure. We could get more complicated structures to do different things. But this is the basic minimum!
Front Page has:
index.php
header.php
sidebar.php
footer.php
Single Post page has:
single.php
header.php
sidebar.php
footer.php
comments.php
And the Multi-post page has:
index.php
category.php
404.php
search.php
header.php
sidebar.php
footer.php
All these are neatly structured in one whole via the WordPress code overall. The Rarst’s diagram explains the WordPress structure in the best possible way. Check this out.
Diagram courtesy: Tom Macfarlin
Also please check out the following links for more information:
Featured Image Courtesy: Flickr
Headlines is a tricky thing. The world of headlines writing is different from the normal world of writing and grammar rules for articles. Many new rules are invented and many established ones are trashed due to the punch needed and the paucity of space and characters. In fact, Headlinese is a special word coined for the language used in the headlines and the rules around it.
While many articles are out there for bloggers on how to write titles that work best with the searches and key words, it is also important to be grammatically consistent. Specially if you want your blog to carry weight in the minds of educated readers. After all, those who have learnt English properly will find your writing jarring even when it carries important information. Let us go through 8 important lessons in writing good headlines for maximum impact.
1. Keep ’em Short: Long Headlines hurt in many ways. Most importantly, they are truncated by several sites which may carry your articles. Also, it takes away the punch that may draw any reader to your article. As Ogilvy says, Headlines are 80% of the whole impact.
2. Don’t copy the lede: A lede is the introductory section of a news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story (or excerpt in the case of blogs). Don’t simply copy the words from the lede into the headline or it will be jarring and repetitive!
3. Should be here and now: The headlines should be direct, straightforward, in active voice, and in present tense. The idea is to make the headlines as powerful as they can be and not be “beating around the bush”.
4. Don’t be vague and inaccurate: Correct, consistent and factual headlines always help. Those which are inaccurate, inconsistent and vague having little or no relationship with the body of the article and the points therein or just plain inaccurate on their own show the writer in a very bad light!
5. Headlinese has its own rules: Headlinese is the word used for abbreviated writing style that is used in newspaper headlines. Some of the rules, contrary to normal grammar rules in similar sentences, have become the norm around the world. Editors have acknowledged the paucity of space and characters and the need to convey ideas in a short format. Some of the important and interesting rules of Headlinese are:
- Articles are usually omitted.
- Most verbs are in the simple present tense, e.g. “Governor signs bill”.
- The future is expressed as “to” followed by a verb, e.g. “Governor to sign bill”.
- In the US (but not the UK), conjunctions are often replaced by a comma, as in “Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap”.
- To save space, a long word is sometimes replaced by a shorter word with not quite the same meaning, e.g. “attack” to mean “criticize”.
- Country names are often used instead of their adjective form, for example “Belgium troops deploy to patrol streets” (instead of “Belgian troops…”).
6. Capitalize or not to capitalize: The jury is out there and it has become a matter of individual choice. Whatever you do, follow it consistently. So, the choice is – The first word in the headline should be capitalized as should all proper nouns vs capitalize the first letter of every word. But surely follow the following – Capitalize the first word, capitalize the proper nouns, and do capitalize the first word after a colon. If you choose to capitalize every word as per your choice, then follow it consistently.
7. Bring on the numbers baby: In the headlines, it is always recommended to use the numbers and not spelling them out. Even if that number is below 10, you don’t need tto spell it out.
8. To be or not to be is the question: Verbs like to be, is, was etc are not necessary and should be omitted. Unless it is absolutely necessary for clarity, these verbs shouldn’t be part of the headlines.
Image source: Flickr
Blogging is a creative pursuit, as is writing and advertising. For those who pursue it seriously… and full time, it is not just a creative expression, but also their livelihood. It is then something that needs to monetized.
In those two pursuits – Creativity and Revenue – lies a conflict at times. How do we create something awesome and make sure it sells? This has been the challenge for every advertiser for ages as it is now for every blogger.
So, to get some help, I thought it would be useful to go to that icon of advertising, David Ogilvy. In his book “Ogilvy on Advertising”, Ogilvy gives his top advise on how to do saleable creative work. Sometimes ruthless, sometime simple, but always looking at the end in question.
Ignore this great advise at your own peril if you want to make your blog BIG!
- Go Big or Go Home: Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.
- Do Your Homework Well: Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.
- Never Talk down to Your Customers: A consumer is not a moron. She’s your wife. Don’t insult her intelligence, and don’t shock her.
- The Headline is 80%: On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
- Don’t Get Distracted from Making the Sale: If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.
- Explain Why They Should Buy: The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.
- Your Copy Is Important. Treat It That Way: Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.
Image source: Flickr
Here is a very good list of tech blogs, social news, offline and online publications from US and other countries, which can be very useful in promoting one’s products and blogs. If you have an RSS feed reader then these may actually be great places to source your news from.
United States
Tech blogs
– Techcrunch.com
– Mashable.com
– Venturebeat.com
– Readwriteweb.com
– Arstechnica.com
– Businessinsider.com/sai
– Gigaom.com
– Webware.com
– Centernetworks.com
– TheVerge.com
– http://tech.yahoo.com/blo
– Allthingsd.com
– Techland.com
– Lifehacker.com
– Slashdot.org
– Boingboing.net
– Techdirt.com
– Technologizer.com
– Dailytech.com
– Paidcontent.org
– Inquisitr.com
– Makeuseof.com
– Techweb.com
– Sitepoint.com
– Techvibes.com
– Killerstartups.com
– Networkworld.com
– Infoq.com
– Building43.com
– Xconomy.com
– Techrepublic.com
– SiliconAngle.com
– Splatf.com
– BetaBeat.com
– TechCocktail.com
– Tech.li
– Pandodaily.com
– GeekWire.com
– Medacity.com
Social news sites
– http://news.ycombinator.c
– Digg.com
– Reddit.com
– Metafilter.com
– http://buzz.yahoo.com/
– Newsvine.com
– Fark.com
– Mixx.com
– Dzone.com
Online tech publications
– Wired.com
– http://news.zdnet.com
– http://news.cnet.com
– http://tech.yahoo.com
– Oreilly.com
– Eweek.com
– Huffingtonpost.com/news/t
– http://sciencedaily.com/n
– Discovermagazine.com/topi
– http://money.cnn.com/tech
– Osnews.com
– Infoworld.com
– Itworld.com
– Internet.com
Offline and online tech publications
– http://newscientist.com/b
– Technologyreview.com
– Informationweek.com
– Pcworld.com
– Pcmag.com
– Fastcompany.com/topics/te
– Scientificamerican.com/co
– Makezine.com
– Entrepreneur.com/technolo
– Popsci.com/technology
– Extremetech.com
– Computerworld.com
– Cio.com
General publications with tech sections
– http://online.wsj.com/pub
– http://bits.blogs.nytimes
– washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn
– ft.com/companies/technolo
– http://brainstormtech.blo
– usatoday.com/tech/
– newsweek.com/id/38590
– forbes.com/bow/b2c/catego
– businessweek.com/the_thre
– http://latimesblogs.latim
– sfgate.com/technology
– siliconvalley.com
– observer.com/tech
– idg.com/www/idgproducts.n
Twitter lists
Robert Scoble’s list:
– http://twitter.com/Scoble
Mario Sundar’s list:
– http://twitter.com/marios
TECH PUBLICATIONS AND BLOGS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES
United Kingdom
General publications with tech sections:
– guardian.co.uk/technology
– telegraph.co.uk/technolog
– theregister.co.uk/softwar
– theinquirer.net
– bbc.co.uk/news/technology (and bbc.co.uk/news/business-1
Blogs
– Silicon.com
– Thenextweb.com (UK/Netherlands)
– kernelmag.com
Spain
– wwwhatsnew.com
Germany
– T3n.de
– Gruenderszene.de
–
deutsche-startups.de
Deutsche-startups.de
– Basicthinking.de/blog
– Netzwertig.com
Ireland
– Siliconrepublic.com
India
– Pluggd.in
Israel
– Go2web20.net
Featured Image: photo credit: Jason A. Samfield via photopin cc
There are different styles of approaching a blog. Knowing how you propose to position your blog, you may want to treat it in different ways. Here is a very interesting presentation discussing the different styles of blogging.
Guest Blogging is a very useful way to popularize your own blog and create more and more visitors. Many people disregard this great way to market and promote one’s own blog. Bt what are the concrete benefits of Guest Blogging? Here is a great infographic that explains the usefulness of guest blogging.
Related articles from External Sites
Drupal is the most popular Open Source software for content management. On the other hand, Alresco is a top Open Source alternative for Document management. Although, both have features that can make them interchangeable in some scenarios, but their combination can be very powerful.
A little more on Alfresco for the uninitiated.
Alfresco is a free/libre enterprise content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems. Alfresco comes in three flavors:
- Alfresco Community Edition is free software, LGPL[2] licensed open source and open standards. It has some important limitations in terms of scalability and availability, since the clustering feature has been removed from the community repository and is only available in the enterprise edition.[3]
- Alfresco Enterprise Edition is commercially & proprietary licensed open source, open standards and enterprise scale. Its design is geared towards users who require a high degree of modularity and scalable performance.
- Alfresco Cloud Edition (Alfresco in the cloud) is the SaaS version of Alfresco.
I found a video on how to integrated both these applications and create a strong Document-Content Management platform for your company.
Related articles from External Sites
Crowdfunding for social programs and for start-ups is growing. In fact now, common public will be able to invest in the IPOs for crowdfunding projects. Using the WordPress, one can create a very useful website. Here are a few good themes to help you create one of those sites, if you want to start one of those websites.
Crowdfunding theme
Here are some of the features:
- PROJECTS: Users can submit projects to your crowdfunding site, embed media (videos, photo galleries, featured image), set fundraising goals, and post updates.
- SPONSORS: Sponsors can register their own account to submit and manage projects, track contributions, and interact with fundraising contributors.
- ACCOUNTS: Supporters can quickly and easily register an account via Facebook, edit their profile, view receipts for past contributions, and earn credit for referring friends.
- ACCEPT PAYMENTS: Crowdfunding site utilizes the GBS platform and comes integrated with PayPal Adaptive Payments, PayPal Express Checkout PayPal Website Payments Pro, Authorize.net, and NMI Payments. More GBS payment gateway integrations can be purchased in the GBS marketplace.
- FUNDRAISING REPORTS: From the dashboard the administrators and sponsors can see how many contributions have been made, if minimum and maximum contribution limits were attained, and the expiration date of the project.
- SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of your fundraising business. Search engines must quickly and easily locate and index your content so people can find it. Our fundraising theme for WordPress utilizes proper standards to improve your website’s visibility.
- INSTANT UPDATES: Updating to a new version is a dead simple process. You just click on the update link that appears with a new version is available and you’re done. There’s not need to launch your FTP client and upload anything.
- SUPPORT: As a member you have access to the video tutorials and documentation. Our members forum is an active community where users can interact with each other and seek assistance from our support team.
- FACEBOOK & TWITTER INTEGRATION: Users can register and login with their Facebook account, share projects on Facebook and Twitter, as well as automatically post to their Facebook and Twitter accounts via RSS feeds.
- EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION: Our crowdfunding theme comes with MailChimp and Constant Contact already integrated. You simply signup for an account with either service provider and enter your API key to being capturing email addresses from subscribers.
- WEBSITE BLOG: Our fundraising theme for WordPress allows you to run your own crowdfunding site and blog on the same website. Blogs are an effective tool for communicating with your customers, growing a following, and improving your site’s influence as a market leader.
- PROJECT BLOGS: Each project has its own blog where sponsors can post updates for a given project and include embeddable videos or photo galleries from Flickr. The project sponsors can also reply to comments and questions from their project supporters.
- UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES: Our crowdfunding software utilizes the GBS platform and WordPress so you can easily add new features through the numerous GBS add-ons and WordPress plugins that are available. What’s more, the software is unencrypted so you can add your own custom design or hire a proficient GBS developer to build any custom feature or design you need.
- EASY WEBSITE MANAGEMENT: Our crowdfunding software runs in combination with WordPress providing you with a fully functional and easy to use website. There’s no technical skills needed to creating a project, add a new page, or write a blog post. You can easily upload images, paste embed codes from YouTube or Flickr into any page/post/project, and quickly add and modify text using the WYSIWYG editor.
- CUSTOMIZATION: Crowd Funding Site can be used to create a traditional crowdfunding website or customized to serve a single organization (e.g. charities, churches, etc.) with multiple fundraising projects. Administrators can easily change the logo, add a background, select font types, and choose from several color schemes. An experienced WordPress developer, can apply custom CSS/code since the software is unencrypted.
Funder: Crowdfunding theme (UoU Apps)
This theme uses the Astoundify Plugin and Easy Digital Payments, uses the Bootstrap framework. The theme is very beautiful and user friendly.
Fundingpress: Crowdfunding
Fundingpress is a WordPress theme that allows you to create your own crowdfunding site.Users will be able to create projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others.
Fundify
This theme has many outstanding features and has multiple gateways to use.
- Front End Campaign Submission Form
- Embeddable Project Widget, Helps Gain Exposure For Your Campaign, Embed Anywhere On The Web.
- Split Payments Between Site Admin & Campaign Author (Using PayPal Adaptive Payments)
- Support For PayPal Standard Payments (Free Plugin)
- Supports Both Fixed Campaign Style & Flexible Campaign Style
- Custom Integration for WePay Pre-Approved Billing Gateway (Paid Plugin)
- Custom Integration for Stripe Pre-Approved Billing Gateway (Paid Plugin)
- Custom Integration for PayPal Adaptive Payments Gateway (Paid Plugin)
- XML Dummy Content Included For Easy Setup
- Responsive Design (Optimized for iPad and iPhone)
- Full Localisation Support (contains .po/.mo files)
- Full Design Customization i.e. Logo, Background, Text Colours See Here
- 4+ Custom Widgets
- WordPress 3.6+ Ready (Menus & Featured Images)
- Page Templates (Home, Archives, Full Width, Contact Form, Login Form)
- Built on the _s Theme Framework
- Compatible With Our Free Crowdfunding Plugin
- Extensive Documentation
- Supports 20+ Payment Gateways i.e. Stripe, Google Checkout, etc (From EasyDigitalDownloads.com)
Franklin Crowdfunding Theme
This theme is responsive, elegant, and light theme. The main features are: unlimited colours with 6 pre-set colour palettes, 8 background textures, 5 custom widgets (Campaign Updates, Campaign Video, Campaign Pledge Levels, Campaign Backers, Sofa Posts), widgetzied campaign page, blog section and more.
If you were thinking of starting a site like Yelp, then some of the WordPress templates provide some really excellent opportunities. Most of these themes are either called “Business Listing” or “Directory” themes.
Let us look at some of these.
Directory theme from Templatic
The Directory theme is by far the best alternative you have. Although, predictably, a bit expensive. Specially with all its add-ons, which make it extremely powerful! It is a true Yelp alternative in many ways.
The features are really excellent and include the following:
The Add-ons for this theme which make it really powerful are:
Event Manager: $49
Ad Manager: $39
Multi-Rating: $39
Admin Dashboard: $39
Prevent Duplicate Entry: $9
The theme is for $99. So the total of this entire package will be around $265.
Glocal Directory Theme
This is another excellent Directory theme. The Glocal Listing theme has the following features:
The site is available from Themeforests.
Atlas Directory and Listings Theme
One can use the theme to register, login, edit your profile, submit listings, change your membership and so much more from the front-end as well as has a built in membership system.
Business Finder Directory Theme
This is another beautiful theme with a lot of great features.
- Easy Login via menu button
- Ability to change map color
- Top rated items section
- Newest items section
- Special offers
- Reviews section
- Social icons on item detail page
- Gallery on item detail page
- Easy Admin – beautiful frontend-like access to listing registration and administration without distractions
- Claiming a listing
- Geolocate support
- Frontend registration for guests
- Guests can administer their own listings
- Paypal payments integration
- Paypal recurring payments support
- Interactive Ajax Search
- Ability to get pointer on the map from address
- Administrator can define packages and set the price
- Advertising spaces
- Custom built Rating system
- Contact form on listing detail page
- Listing by location or category
- Featured items
- Listing sorting
Geothemes
This theme has taken many avatars and now it is a real kick ass theme!
Portals are the future of interactive net option that individuals and the corporations have. This includes the ability to have social networking tools and blogging. Gartner recently came out with its analysis of the “Horizontal Portals” in the market and categorized the different options in different quadrants. First, let us understand what they mean by Horizontal and Vertical portals.
Gartner defines a portal as a Web software infrastructure that provides interaction with relevant information assets (for example, information/content, applications and business processes), knowledge assets, and human assets by select targeted audiences, delivered in a highly personalized manner. Enterprise portals face a range of audiences, including employees, customers and partners, and serve a range of business functions.
A portal product is a packaged software application used to create and maintain enterprise portals. These products can be used to design vertical or horizontal portals:
- Vertical portals focus on providing access and interaction with specific applications or business functions.
- Horizontal portals integrate and aggregate information from multiple cross-enterprise applications, as well as from various line-of-business tools and applications.
Here are the main guys:
- Leaders: IBM, Liferay, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP
- Challengers: OpenText, Red Hat
- Niche: DNN, Drupal, eXo, Temenos, United Planet
- Visionaries: Adobe, Backbase, Covisant, Salesforce
Drupal is the only major blogging / portal application used in the broader blogging market by regular bloggers.
This is what Gartner says about Drupal and its strengths and weaknesses.
Drupal is the most widely adopted open-source package for publishing and managing websites, active in over 800,000 websites, including the U.S. White House official site. Although the package is often categorized as a WCM system, it supports portal scenarios through an architecture that includes a hierarchical framework of components (modules) and database-backed content objects (nodes in Drupal 6, entities in Drupal 7). There is an ecosystem of add-ons and modules, which now number more than 20,000. Together with a sophisticated configuration mechanism, Drupal can be configured for a variety of scenarios, although it’s used most often for external-facing sites.
The Drupal ecosystem includes a large number of small to midsize system integrators and professional services firms. Among them is Acquia, a provider of Drupal technology and services that was co-founded by the author of Drupal (Dries Buytaert), that also offers Drupal-in-the-cloud services (Drupal Gardens).
Strengths:
- Drupal is very broadly adopted in external-facing scenarios among the government, education, publishing, and media and entertainment sectors.
- Drupal has a large and growing ecosystem of users, consultants, developers and module authors.
- Compared to many high-end commercial WCM and portal packages, Drupal is inexpensive and easy to deploy.
Which portal do you think is the better one?
When a blogger wants a great theme for her/his blog site, one always finds the regular theme sites. It is the same set of themes that one finds around. So, I wanted to look for theme sites which also have great themes but are not always high on the search for WordPress Premium Searches. The themes are beautiful and useful and can help any blogger. So here is the list.
The themes are responsive, clean and have some cool custom features. They have Medical oriented theme, Ecommerce, Business oriented theme, and one for blog/magazine, apart from others. The pricing seems reasonable. One theme for one site costs $35. And for a year, you can pay $45/year and have all the themes for unlimited sites.
This is another of the sites which offers a host of themes which are in genres across magazine, business, blogging, and ecommerce. It has some excellent themes for the portals – Video related, magazine related, PInterest type, Tech magazine style and much more. The pricing is extremely good. For $49, you can get all the themes at one go!
Themefuse themes are not by genre, but by use – for example – Car sales showroom, Churches, Businesses, Kindergarten, Ad Agency, Wedding for couples etc. The themes are responsive and full of great features. The one-site license for one theme is available at $49 and for unlimited sites it is $79.
Of all the themeshops out there, Apptheme comes out with the most innovative themes that are built not merely as themes but as applications. They have a theme for classifieds, a Job site theme, a Coupon management (like Groupon), a ticket management and a directory site. Each of these themes are built very smartly and with attention to detail.
Appthemes are bit more pricier than the others. But if you are looking for a great theme to build a certain kind of site for a specific purpose, then AppThemes is your destination.
iThemes site uses a special custom framework – Builder. The themes look decent and given the features they have for Builder framework, a lot of flexible features are available to customize the site. The pricing is very similar to other theme sites.
Many companies use social media – facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. But very few actually generate enough ROI to warrant all the effort and investment. Anheuser-Busch has used it well for its Budweiser campaign. Here is a very interesting video on how Budweiser used Social Media for its growth.
featured Image Credit: photo credit: Mark J P via photopin cc
The Lion King has become the first $1 billion Broadway show in history. That’s quite a bit of success for the show and its makers. It’s not as if there weren’t any shows as good as this earlier there were. Not as if this is the longest running or the one with the highest ticket money. Far from that.
Lion King‘s success can’t solely be attributed to its longevity — it will soon overtake Les Miserables as just the fifth-longest-running show of all time — nor to inflated ticket prices. Even with the adoption of premium seating a decade ago, Lion King pricing remains middle-of-the-pack, averaging $130 per seat with a peak price of $199, compared with $171 and $477 for The Book of Mormon.
Then what is it that has ensured the success of this show to be the first to gross over $1 billion?
Instead the family-friendly musical has been rewarded by consistency, playing to packed or standing-room-only houses and dipping below 80 percent capacity fewer than a dozen times in more than 6,600 shows (typical Broadway musical production costs are $600,000 to $700,000 a week). “This humbling milestone is a testament to the vision and artistry of [director] Julie Taymor,” says producer and Disney Theatrical Group president Thomas Schumacher. Taymor’s Tony-winning direction and the property’s worldwide recognition — the show has grossed $5 billion across 21 global productions — have made it very good to be King.
The success lies in consistently bringing in audience which loved the show, due to the great vision and artistry of the makers of the show. It brought to the audience, a quality and artistry on Broadway never seen before. Everyone, from a kid to an old person, could enjoy the show multiple times.
Secret of Lion King’s Success Applies to Blogging
The same applies to blogging as well. A Bloggers greatest gifts are:
Quality: One cannot succeed if one’s content doesn’t have any quality. If 200 people are writing on the same topic with the same perspective, then there is no incentive for anyone to really read your content. And the content needs to be correct grammatically and error free. Beyond the basic “dialtone” quality parameters, the content needs to be factual and original. That is what sustains it in the minds of the audience and get the Google search ranking.
Artistry: Even if everyone and his brother is using WordPress, the premium theme, and writing on the same topic, one could, with enough imagination and artistry make his/her post stand out in the blogosphere. Its not easy, but then high art is never so. The commitment to the ‘special extra’ on your blog has to be passionate. That much higher than that of the other bloggers.
Consistently: Quality, that too Artistic quality comes with its own share of whimsical ways. It is wild in its own way. It is not easy to tame a great visionary and artist down to being consistent day after day for years, nay decades! And, in there lies the rub. Greatness is not only in being great and doing it in style, but being all that and being crazily consistent!
Appeal: Bloggers keep looking for niches. Very essential. But, whatever your audience, your work should have the capacity to enthrall even those who weren’t your audience initially. Old and middle aged people needn’t have necessarily found the Lion Story very profound to read. But the show had enough innovation, beauty and profundity to bowl over even the most cynical. So, if you can win your “target audience”, then great. But if you can win over even those who aren’t your audience, then you have the shot at the absolute top!
Whole is newer than the ancient parts: The Lion King story is not completely a new one. It is original in its synthesis, but ancient in its genesis. The story takes place in a kingdom of lions in Africa, and was influenced by the biblical tales of Joseph and Moses, and the Shakespeare plays Hamlet and Macbeth. (link). Something that is based on Biblical stories and Shakespeare’s two most popular plays, can’t be that original, can it? But it is. It is refreshing, it is emotional, it is exhilarating, it is motivational, it has love, hatred, enmity, triumph and loss. Everything. It sews characters and stories in a beautiful story and gives voice to the animals like none other had. That is its greatness!
If a blogger can include these qualities in his/her blog content, then s/he too can make it big. Real big! 🙂
Featured Image: photo credit: moriza via photopin cc
Drupal themes are tough to find which are good, responsive and with plenty of options. I looked through the themes which are Responsive, Good Looking and great for a Blog or a Magazine. Best is that these are all FREE! Here is the list.
Mundus Magazine by valic is one of the best magazine style responsive theme for Drupal out there. And, it is totally free!
Features:
- Views responsive styles (Grid, Table, Unformatted and HTML list)
- Built in node gallery (slider gallery) – no need for additional modules
- Modal box for login
- 8 predefined styles
- Social profiles / block
- Modal box for social block
- Orbit slideshow / slider
- Font icons
- Google fonts
- Readers choice block
- Foundation tables, block grid and grid support
- Very well documented (28 pages PDF)
- Videos how to setup theme, views, fonts, etc..
Nexus theme by saran.quardz. These theme is great for a blog or a news magazine. Here are some of its features:
Features:
- Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Theme
- Simple, Minimal and Clean Design
- 1-column and 2-columns layout
- Mobile support (Smartphone, Tablet, Android, iPhone, etc)
- Flex Image Slideshow with Caption (Customizable)
- Multi-level drop-down menus (Multilingual menu)
- HTML5 & super clean markup
- A total of 12 block regions
- Drupal standards compliant and Supported standard theme features
- Google Font and nice typography
- Ideal for business, company and portfolio sites
- Detailed CSS rules for Typography, Forms Elements, Node Teaser, Comments, etc.
Here is a screen Shot:
Gratis by highrockmedia is a great theme for blogs and blog magazine. It is clean, nicely done minimalistic theme which we like a lot and it has a lot of great features!
Features:
- Elegant, clean look / Nice UX
- Several color palette choices: Turquoise Blue, Cool Purple, Pumpkin Orange, Olive Green, Pomegranate Red, Seafoam Green, Green Gray
- Responsive touch friendly mobile menu
- Up to three columns for layout (2 sidebars and a content area)
- Modern clean typography
- Image Captions using HTML5’s figcaption
- Font Awesome and Google Fonts (OpenSans) Integration
- Semantic mobile layout, left and right sidebars go below content
- Customizable layout width in the theme settings UI, go as wide as you want! It’s all percentage based within the parent container. That’s one of the drawbacks of Bamboo and there were a lot of feature requests for this.
- Toggle Breadcrumbs on or off
- Default logo changes for each color palette
- Theme local.css or custom path CSS file for your own customizations.
- Pinch and Zoom for Touch friendly devices, turn on or off
- Drop down menus (for desktop)
- Built in main menu block or toggle off to use your own third party contrib menu system
- No base theme is required
- Tertiary Menus – future support is planned
- “Sticky Footer”
Mayumi by JohnNoc is a Responsive theme for Feminine or “Girlie” blogs with again, a great set of features which makes configuration a lot of fun.
Features:
- HTML 5
- Responsive design (mobile-first) with configurable breakpoints. Defaults to 768, 960 and 1152
- Typography using modular scale.
- Web accessibility optimized with ARIA roles
- Bulletproof flexible grid system with 24 columns (units) as default.
- Configurable grid
- Configurable number of columns in the grid
- Configurable gutter width
- Horizontal login block if placed in topbar region
- Comes with its own special font “Noceda Font Pro”, a light, elegant and open sans-serif font built in with 304 Gwikons (Groundwork icons)
- Supports both sidebars
- 17 regions with a special “Aside” region visible only in nodes.
- Optimized typography for all standard elements
- Block source ordering per region
- Powerful layout engine provides unlimited layout possibilities
- Collection of preset CSS classes
- LESS CSS enhanced with loads of Drupal-specific mixins and bundles.
- HTML5 polyfill to support older browsers
- and many more.
Media Responsive Theme by shanidkv is a great theme for a Business related site. It is light weight with a clean layout.
Features:
- Media responsive theme
- HTML5 & super clean markup
- Social link
- Fixed Width
- 1-column, 2-columns and 3-columns layout
- Implementation of nivo slider
- Multi-level drop-down menus (Multilingual menu)
- A total of 25 regions
- Drupal standards compliant
- Custom front-page with 11 block regions
- Minimal design and nice typography
- Supported standard theme features: site logo, site name, site, user pictures in comments, user pictures in nodes
Fontfolio by israelshmueli is a great responsive theme for portfolio types of sites for photographers, artists and designers.
Features:
- Clean, grid based, 2 column theme
- Responsive (from version 7.2 )
- Easy setup for Multilingual websites:
- Links to frontpages in all Enabled languages will displayed at the end of main menu and will get slightly different styles.
- Full RTL support
- Views support. You can apply FontFolio default grid style, thrugh Views UI, to any view that use “Unformatted list” format.
- Theme settings options:
- Social networks Icons. Theme settings contain optional URL filed for each of enclosed Icons (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Dribble).
- Checkbox to Hide or display Page Titles on taxonomy term (category) pages
Malinis by JohnNoc is a nice responsive theme with modular scale typography, powerful grid-based layout engine and clean design. It is a sub-theme of Groundwork 2.x.
Features:
- HTML 5
- Responsive design (mobile-first) with configurable breakpoints. Defaults to 768, 960 and 1152
- Typography using modular scale.
- Web accessibility optimized with ARIA roles
- Bulletproof flexible grid system with 24 columns (units) as default.
- Configurable grid
- Configurable number of columns in the grid
- Configurable gutter width
- Comes with its own special font “Noceda Font Pro”, a light, elegant and open sans-serif font built in with 304 Gwikons (Groundwork icons)
- Supports both sidebars
- 17 regions with a special “Aside” region visible only in nodes.
- Optimized typography for all standard elements
- Block source ordering per region
- Powerful layout engine provides unlimited layout possibilities
- Collection of preset CSS classes
- LESS CSS enhanced with loads of Drupal-specific mixins and bundles.
- HTML5 polyfill to support older browsers
- and many more.
Featured Image – photo credit: xamanu via photopin cc
Related articles from External Sites
If you are a startup, there is always a question of how to blog such that you can relate to your customers and break through the clutter of thousands of blogs out there? Came across this very interesting questions and answers regarding this.
Of course, the common ones are – to create stories around your customers and to include customer feedback into your content. But some of the suggestion merit some thought. The one that stood out for me was “Creating an Actual Editorial Program”.
Consider an actual editorial program.
Take two startups as an example: Bundle and Of a Kind.
Bundle (personal finance) devised an attention-getting editorial program that dealt with consumer finance. They did interviews with people about their financial lives; they published actual journalism that addressed people’s very real concerns and behaviors about spending and saving. That was their audience for their services, so why not use those tools to draw people in?
More recently, Of a Kind (small-batch direct-sale fashion) decided that they didn’t want to just put up a product for sale; they saw that they wanted to inform and engage a community of potential customers, so they treat their ‘sales’ site like a magazine. This is smart. It helps people identify with the seller, with the product and with the company.
Actual editorial programs in all manner of service-related businesses bring attention, bring customers and bring value.
Another one that seems to suggest not directly focusing on the product per se is – where the writer suggests to claim the “space” and not just talk about the product. I agree.
Talk about your space, not about your own product.
If you are creating a task manager, write about productivity, workflow, etc.
This can go broader too, in this case, your target market is.. companies, startups. -> write about startups, about life behind your startup, how you decorated your office, what rules you live by, startup tips, … see where I’m going?
When you’ve done that, after you’ve “informed” your target market, you can take it one step further and teach them. Going from the example case again, teach them about productivity, teach them about running a startup, …
Your own product doesn’t matter, if you center your blog around your product, no-one will care. Base it around a space, a target market, now that’s another thing. And once you got them where you want, stealthbombing your product here and there is as easy as pie.
Finally, here are 10 succinct ways of making your voice heard via a blog and do well for your starup.
photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc
Related articles from External sites
Google’s new search algorithm update, Hummingbird is out. It is generating quite a buzz out there. Blogs and content sites are wondering how will this new change impact them. It will change fortunes of many. But how? And what direction should the bloggers and content marketeers work towards?
One important change is that most of the users these days come via Smartphones. So, it is imperative to have sites that cater to this audience. Also, in the end, the sites which deliver useful content will win. Nothing is more important than helping people out.
Here is a very useful Infographic discussing that.
Related articles from External Sites
Internet has grown in an incredible way in the last few decades. A rate that has been unprecedented in the history of business. No other product or industry has been adopted by so many people at such a fast clip. Here is a very interesting Infographic that gives the a good overview of the growth in internet since 1984.
It took the automobile nearly 130 years to break a billion units, and even after 95 years of a more-or-less constant love affair with television, today’s world has just under 1.5 billion television sets. Planned obsolescence and technological evolution notwithstanding, those numbers remain surprising when compared to the Web usage of 2.7 billion folks who use the Internet every single day(many of them for at least three hours at a time and on a variety of devices). And by 2020, says at least one leading technology expert, literally everyone will be online.
Here is the Infographic.
photo credit: mkhmarketing via photopin cc
Related articles from external sites
We have a new kid on the block of blogging platforms. Ghost. The site gives the following benefits of the new platform:
- Never stop writing, format on the fly
- No messing around with buttons everywhere
- No writing repetitive HTML markup
- Mobile friendly
It already has close to 300,000 users within a month. Ghost is Node.js-based and a minimalistic blogging platform. It still has a long way to go and has some basic features that still need to be added.
There are two major features still lacking from the platform: the fancy graphical management console and the hosted service. The graphical console with all of its fancy charts and graphs has been set aside temporarily while the core team focuses on making Ghost stable and functional enough for launch, but it should be making an appearance in an upcoming release.
Ghost is definitely going the WordPress way. They will come out with a hosted solution as well and later will throw in the custom domains as well.
The hosted option is also coming soon. Instead of needing to set up your own Web server, you’ll be able to sign up and create a working Ghost blog with only a couple of clicks. Custom domains will also be supported. The end result should be a service similar in scope to hosted WordPress.
One feels that the blogs does look nice.
Related articles from external sites
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