Over the last few years WordPress has emerged as a dominating weblog engine and has safely ensconced itself in virtual space. The main reason behind its overwhelming success is its ease of use. It is absolutely free and it has a huge worldwide community that continues to grow. But what is even more appealing is the fact that WordPress is an open source project. That means everything, from the documentation to the code itself, is being created by and for the community for free. Similarly, many WordPress themes and plugins have also been introduced at no cost.
Recently there is a growing trend towards choosing premium WordPress themes. These are themes designed by freelancers and design agencies. These premium WordPress themes are heavily advertised on popular weblogs and are offered for a fixed price. Why buy a WordPress theme when there are millions of free floating themes? The answer is quality. Amongst thousands of themes only few go beyond having some basic functionality within a customized design. Designing a professional WordPress theme takes time and effort and it cannot be just put together like a simple jigsaw puzzle.
Free themes do help a designer to gain a good reputation, however it’s very hard to find free and professional themes which can be employed for large websites, such as online magazines or corporate websites. Premium WordPress themes give WordPress users a chance to stand out from the regular crowd. Designers of Premium themes too get to design a unique theme once and later have a steady source of income trickle in. With a few premium WordPress themes tucked inside their portfolios they also stand the chance of bagging projects that involve designing custom made themes for individual clients looking for distinct designs.
Designers will be able to benefit from a premium WordPress theme only if it has something different to offer. There maybe users out there looking out for different ideas for their business or website. More importantly, these users will be willing to pay for them. Premium WordPress themes are less likely to be used for traditional blogs. They are considered only for projects of certain business value. Many beautifully designed themes are available at prices of around $100 or less. They seem to be well worth the minimal investment for those who are serious about building an online presence. There is a large population of people that are not willing or able to afford the services of developers. In such cases, premium WordPress themes are preferred over custom designed themes.
When WordPress made its entry on the internet it was merely a blogging platform. Today it has developed into a complete content management system. The number of website owners using WordPress for business purposes as well as for simple blogging continues to build up. Premium WordPress themes are also being used in many of these cases. With the affordability of premium WordPress themes, WordPress would definitely continue to grow and make place for more creativity and potential for improvement.
WordPress really does make blogging easy and as a member you are eligible for a number of pretty useful widgets. These are accessed from your WordPress sidebar and the most successful bloggers make full use of these sidebar facilities to make a more efficient job of popularizing their blogs and becoming better known in the blogging world. WordPress has a number of widgets which can be utilized to make yourself known and have your blog shown on the various blog advertising sites such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Meebo and many others. The best thing about WordPress widgets, however, is their drag-and-drop facility, meaning that you don’t need to juggle html or insert symbols or anything like that into your blog. You simply drag them and you drop them. The variety and quality of the widgets on offer is truly spectacular and they really do add that professional look to any blog page.
There is quite a range, including calendar, archives, links, a widget which records your recent posts, plus others. A particularly favorite widget of many is the Tag Cloud which gives a really professional finish to your WordPress page. All your most used tags can be rounded up and revealed in a cloud format; difficult to explain but very effective on your WordPress page. Other widgets include an RSS feed, a widget for Vodpod video, box.net file sharing and one of the most important of all the widgets, the Akismet widget which prevents all those irritating spammers from leaving unwanted and unwarranted messages on your WordPress blog. You also have widgets for Top Clicks, Blog Stats, Top Posts, Platial Mapkit, Flickr and an Authors’ widget. Some of these widgets are also available as plugins, such as the integral stats system and Akismet.
Akismet’s philosophy is to ‘restore innocence to blogging’ and that spam is the ‘underbelly of the internet’ and wastes too much of everybody’s time; a fact with which many will definitely concur. It is total anathema to most internet marketers and why people think they can make money from spamming is better left undiscussed. Akismet can actually be downloaded separate to WordPress and is free for personal use. Akismet has made API keys available for all personal blogs. However, Akismet does charge for commercial use if you are earning more than $500 a month from your blog, providing commercial API keys for commercial users. Akismet certainly rates as being a No.1 WordPress widget. Bloggers can focus on their own blogging instead of spending forever trying to get rid of unwanted rubbish sent to them by people who think the bloggers might have some use for their marketing efforts.
What other widgets would feature on the popularity list? Well, apart from all of those mentioned, there is a little widget which WordPress calls ‘pages’. Basically, this enables you to build additional web pages onto your basic WordPress.com blog page so you can have a separate links page, About Me page, Affiliates’ page or whatever other page you want to add. When you think of the cost of potentially hosting another separate website, you will fully appreciate why this little number is an all time favorite WordPress widget.
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