Chronicle

Demo Theme Info

Responsive Design

Chronicle automagically adapts to fit any screen resolution, including tablets and smartphones such as iPhones and iPads. The theme is also touch enabled, meaning on devices with touchscreens, you’re able to swipe through the theme’s video slider very easily.

Responsive design is about ensuring your site’s visitors have a great experience visiting your website regardless of which platform they’re on. Chronicle does that by offering more than just a design which shrinks when you visit it on a smartphone or tablet.

Video-enabled slider

The footer slider in Chronicle supports embedding video right into the slider, meaning you can show off video content right from your site’s homepage. The slider, of course, also supports images and lets you easily feature posts.

If you’d prefer to feature content in the carousel which doesn’t have videos, then Chronicle handles that beautifully too. We’ve got your content covered.

Ad Ready Theme

Chronicle includes 3 ad locations, in which you can easily insert your banners via Theme Options.

For more detailed features, see the theme’s page or check out the live demo of this theme.

Chris Coyier started the ball rolling back in October last year, with a list of all the “web developer-y services” he pays money for every month. I’ve done the same, and with Pavel’s help, this is a list of all the web services that WPZOOM pays for every month.

This doesn’t include things like salaries or office costs; it’s just web services we pay for. Intrigued? Here goes!

Hosting

VPS Hosting – $149.95/month

This is the obvious one to get started with: our VPS hosting which keeps the whole site online. With hosting you really do get what you pay for, so for us it’s worth paying for quality hosting.

Vimeo Plus – $59.95/year

Vimeo Plus is the upgrade to the standard Vimeo account, allowing Unlimited HD videos, HD embeds and customisation of the Vimeo Player. It’s a solid, professional service and we use it for embedding our video tutorials onto our documentation pages.

There are notable free alternatives here — specifically, YouTube — but the Vimeo player just gets out the way and lets you the content, and it’s worth paying for that experience.

Premium plugins

BackupBuddy - $75/year

iThemes’ BackupBuddy is  fantastic plugin which gives us piece of mind that WPZOOM.com is safe if anything were to happen to it. There are tons of WordPress backup solutions available, including Automattic’s VaultPress and various plugins, but BackupBuddy still holds court, with the option to regularly back up sites to FTP, email, Dropbox or a host of other services, including Amazon Web Services.

As WPZOOM is just one site, we’re using the “Personal” plan, which offers two licences.

GravityForms - $39/year

GravityForms is another fantastic plugin we’re using; it’s quite probably the best contact form plugin around. We looked at a number of contact forum solutions, and the attraction to GravityForms is the ability to keep everything on our database, meaning our customers’ queries aren’t going anywhere else and we can be sure messages aren’t slipping through the gaps.

As with backup plugins, there are a ton of contact form plugins around, but GravityForms is still the most flexible. As with BackupBuddy, GravityForms is only installed on WPZOOM.com, so we’re rocking the one-site “Personal” plan.

Project management/accounting

FreshBooks – $29.95/month – evergreen plan

We use FreshBooks, for all the boring accounts stuff; managing invoices, sorting expenses and doing taxes. The $29.95/month “evergreen” plan offers unlimited clients, unlimited invoices and all the other handy stuff that comes with FreshBooks.

Beanstalk – $15/month

Beanstalk is a super-cool code-collaboration service, which lets our team work on awesome new themes and features without risking over-writing each others’ changes. Beanstalk also allows us to “deploy” our code easily — essentially meaning we can easily push stuff to WPZOOM.com really easily. Tools like Beanstalk are essential for us as we’re a remote-working team and all the team need the freedom to work from wherever they happen to be. Not that anyone’s ever committed some code whilst on the beach… yet ;)

Basecamp - $24/month

Basecamp is a fantastic project management tool which we use for… managing projects, actually. Basecamp is great for spec-ing out projects and then discussing them as a team, and we’ve been able to make quite a few positive changes as a result of discussing projects here.

Social/marketing

CampaignMonitor – $250+ per campaign

Email marketing has always played a big part in our promotional strategy, and CampaignMonitor is our tool of choice for sending out email campaigns. We’ve got a huge email list and we only tend to send out emails once a month, so paying per campaign is the most cost-effective for us.

CampaignMonitor offers all the tools you’d expect in good email newsletter software; tracking of open rates, clicks etc. Its main advantage over its competitors has been price, although other services such as MailChimp are offering slightly better value for a list of our size and send frequency, so we may look at switching in the future.

BufferApp – $10/month

We’ve only started using Buffer relatively recently, but it’s a fantastic addition to our tools. Buffer is a social-network scheduling tool which we use to schedule our tweets and spread them out throughout the week. It also has all sorts of handy analytics which let us track which tweeting times are most effective.

Buffer has a free plan available, but the paid “Awesome” plan offers a little extra flexibility; it lives up to its name.

Site tools

Google Custom Site Search – $100/year

Google’s Enterprise Custom Site Search is, well, the best there is. We need search for our site, we want the most relevant results to be displayed, so using Google’s Custom Site Search makes sense.

Woopra – $29.95/month

Woopra and GoSquared are the two real-time analytics tools we use, and they provide us with all sorts of handy eCommerce stats, working out which pages on the site result in the most people buying our awesome themes — and which pages people are visiting and then leaving as fast as they can. We know we need to work on those pages.

Swiftype – $19/month

Swiftype is the awesome app which we use for our all-new support center. It will fetch results for searches and display them in real-time, so we can use it to get people the answers to their questions as they’re searching. Pretty cool, huh?

Grand total of…

That all adds up to $550.65/month, or $6,607/year in web services which we pay for. That’s quite a lot  and really goes to show how it all adds up.

So what are your monthly costs? Talk it out in the comments!

You may have consequently wondered what that actually means.

Seasons is powered by the ZOOM Framework!

In this post I’m going to answer all of those questions for you and explain everything you need to know about the ZOOM Framework, and how it should inform your decision to purchase one of our WordPress themes.

What does it do?

The ZOOM Framework is essentially the “base” all of our themes are built on. As the foundation for all of our WordPress themes, this means it’s built into the theme and you don’t have to worry about it being there, you don’t have to worry about purchasing or installing it separately and you don’t have to worry about whether updates to the framework will break your theme.

The ZOOM Framework is built in to all our WordPress themes.

For you, this means you get to take advantage of all of the amazing features offered by the Framework regardless of which framework you’re using. If you’re a developer, this also means you easily work with any of our themes as they all use the same code-base.

What are the features?

So, we know that the Framework gives you access to a standardised set of features across all of WPZOOM’s themes, but what are these awesome features?

I’m glad you asked! The most noticeable one is the theme options panel.

The ZOOM Framework’s options panel in action.

The options panel, accessible from the WordPress Dashboard, is where you can configure and customize your theme without having to touch any code. You’ll be able to do things like upload your logo, change color schemes and set theme-specific options.

You’re also able to backup your theme settings via the import/export option, setup SEO options and make use of our “one-click widget install”, which will replicate the structure of the demo theme on WPZOOM.com on your site. This last feature in particular is really handy for getting your site up and running quickly after you’ve installed your new theme.

Some of the layouts, buttons and boxes which can be created using the ZOOM Framework’s shortcodes.

And did I mention the one-click automatic updates? You can update the ZOOM Framework right from the theme options panel, meaning you get to take advantage of new features and upgrades right away.

We’ve also bundled a bunch of shortcodes, buttons, slideshows and customization options into the Framework. For all the details, check out this framework tour.

So why do I want it?

The best thing about the ZOOM Framework is that you don’t need to worry about it. It gets out of your way and lets you get on with what you want to be doing — making an awesome website. All the features listed here are geared up for enabling you to make your site better, and that’s why we think you’ll want it.

It also means once you’re familiar with one of our themes, you can very quickly get to grips with all of our themes. And when we’ve got over 50 themes to choose from, that’s no bad thing :)

Any further questions about the ZOOM Framework or any of our themes, then please either head over to the support forum if you’re an existing customer or get in touch if you’re not yet a customer.

Happy theming!

In order to provide people with relevant information in an easily-usable way and maybe cut down on support requests, we have decided to improve our Support Center. The new design for the support section we’ve been working on goes a long way to achieving this, but it also required a lot of new content to populate it.

Fulfilling the gaps

It’s no secret that our previous support section included only theme documentation and support forum. So the first thing we did was to identify what else is missing and what additions would be most useful for our users. Are the majority of users beginners who need to know basics such as installation, theme options panel setup? Or – are people looking for more advanced info, such as customization?

So we decided to try and make everyone happy, and started to categorize support information in: Knowledge Base, Tutorials and Theme Documentation. In this way people will get access to information needed to them as quickly as possible.

Cross-theme vs. Theme-specific instructions

Since all of our themes are running on the same framework it’s much more efficient to have cross-theme tutorials, and keep theme-specific instructions in the theme documentation. So we’ve cut down all the instructions that are common to every of our theme, included them in a Knowledge Base, and maintain the theme documentation with theme-specific only information.

Easy auto-complete search with Swiftype integration

To make things even easier for our users, we integrated a great service called Swiftype, which allows us to enable auto-completion for the search form, so that users could get access quickly to common questions or issues.

But this is not the only reason we chose this service. It also offers us detailed analytics and insights on what people search, which definitely helps us in maintaining an informative knowledge base to cover everything they are looking for.

Click on the image for more details

Visit our new Support Center

Prologue

Demo Theme Info

Hot on the tail of Academica Pro, Prologue is our second theme release in March 2013.

Responsive Design+

Prologue comes with something we’re calling “responsive design+”. As well as automagically adapting to fit any screen resolution, including tablets and smartphones such as iPhones and iPads, Prologue is also touch enabled, meaning on devices with touchscreens, you’re able to swipe through the theme’s main slider and footer carousel.

Responsive design+ is about ensuring your site’s visitors have a great experience visiting your website regardless of which platform they’re on. Prologue does that by offering more than just a design which shrinks when you visit it on a smartphone or tablet.

Video-enabled slider, video showcasing carousel

The main content slider in Prologue supports embedding video right into the slider, meaning you can show off video content right from your site’s homepage. The slider, of course, also supports images and lets you easily feature posts. Neat, right?

If you’ve got more video-content to show off, you can also use the carousel slider in the footer to display your latest video content — and then visitors can click through to watch. If you’d prefer to feature content in the carousel which doesn’t have videos, then Prologue handles that beautifully too. We’ve got your content covered.

Feature specific categories

A magazine theme needs to give you the option to feature specific content and categories. Prologue has got you covered here, too: with our featured category widgets, you can feature categories in three columns in the footer, or in one column in the sidebar.

Don’t want to feature any categories? Then Prologue works just fine without the featured category widgets. The flexibility is there if you want to make use of it, though.

For more detailed features, see the theme’s page or check out the live demo of this theme.

In this post I’d like to show you what SEO is and how you should be using it on your WPZOOM powered site for it to be most effective.

In order to establish exactly what we’re dealing with, I’m going to quote a post from my own blog, “WordPress SEO Tips“. In that post I asked Jeff Starr, WordPress rockstar, to give a definitiion of SEO. He said it was:

“The optimization of web pages for success with search engines.”

And I think that’s as good a definition as you’re going to get. It’s simple, but so many times I’ve seen it misunderstood and misinterpreted – and if you don’t exactly understand what you’re dealing with, you’re not going to be able to effectively optimize your site.

SEO is about actively working on your site, with the aim being that the end result is your page being displayed prominently on search engines.

Is my WPZOOM theme “SEO ready”?

Quite simply: yes.

One of the big parts of SEO is letting search engines know exactly what’s on the page and all of WPZOOM’s themes have logically placed code which search engines can easily understand.

We’ve put the right header tags in the right places for you, so search engines know which are the important bits on the page and you’ll often find little features like breadcrumbs which give search engines a better idea of how your content is laid out. Don’t worry about the the theme itself; we’ve got you sorted there.

Should I install this plugin?

If the plugin in question is Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin or All In One SEO Pack, the answer is yes. If the plugin is any other plugin, the answer is possibly, probably no.

We would recommend you install one of those two plugins and use their functionality instead of the backend SEO functionality built into your WPZOOM theme. Just make sure you uncheck the “Enable SEO Settings” checkbox you’ll find in your WPZOOM options panel, under SEO.

Why do we recommend a third party plugin for these SEO features? WordPress SEO especially is dedicated to SEO, and it does its job very well, better than we’re able to provide within the theme, as obviously we have to work on the whole theme and we can’t dedicate our whole time to one feature! Furthermore, if for whatever reason you decide to switch themes in the future, you can take your data with you if you use a plugin, otherwise it’s stuck to the theme and we want to make sure our customers always have that flexibility.

If you’re wondering about installing any other SEO plugins, it’s probably not worth doing. The code in any WPZOOM theme is solid stuff and does most of the “heavy lifting” for you; if you’re thinking about using a plugin that will make your content “easier for search engines to read”, don’t worry about it as we’ve got that covered for you. I should add that even if we didn’t, Google’s intelligent enough to be able to get to your content.

Does the speed of my website matter?

In short: yes.

In long, still yes, but it’s important to understand how Google decides whether your site is “fast” or not. The bit to get your head around here is that in order for Google to think your site is fast, it may not actually be fast.

Google understands that factors like the speed of your internet connection, the power of your host and where you are in the world all affect the “real” speed of your site, and so measures the speed of your site in an environment where these factors are not such major players.

Google uses a thing called PageSpeed in order to measure your site’s speed, which ranks your site on a scale of 1 to 100. This measures the potential of your site to load quickly, not whether it actually does. Here a score of 75+ is okay, and 85+ is great. Google will tell you what you can to do increase your PageSpeed and give you instructions how to do so; the majority of the things Google suggests are outside of the control of your WPZOOM theme.

That doesn’t mean to say you should ignore your real page speed, however, and you might like to use a tool such as Pingdom to measure this, it’s just helpful to know what is worth spending time on and what isn’t when it comes to the SEO benefit. We’ve sometimes seen users concentrate too much on optimizing their site for their slow internet connection on their under-powered host, which is helpful, but it’s not critical. Once you know how SEO works, you can set your priorities effectively.

So what should I be doing?

This is the easy bit: write quality content that people are very happy linking to. As you start off, don’t worry over SEO too much; your search engine success will come as your site grows and you become an authority on your topic, and Google recognises your site as such.

Whatever you’ve read and whatever you’ve heard, content is still king and your main priority should be writing quality content, not optimising for search engines.

Hopefully that’s made SEO a little less of a mystical thing you’ve heard about and more of a tangible thing you can understand and get on with.

Image credit

Academica Pro

Demo Theme Info

Responsive Design

The layout of this theme automatically adapts to fit on any screen resolution, be it desktop or mobile devices (iPhone, iPad).

Custom Page Templates

Academica Pro has numerous custom templates for single posts and static pages:

• Only Left Sidebar (two columns) for posts and pages (example);
• Only Right Sidebar (two columns) for posts and pages (example);
• Full Width (no sidebars) for posts and pages (example);
• Blog Archive (example);
• Events Archive (example);
• Testimonials Archive (example);
• Parent page with sub-pages (example);

12 Custom Widgets

Academica Pro has 12 built-in, custom WPZOOM widgets.
Each custom widget has one of the 4 color styles, as seen in the example below:

For more detailed features, see the theme’s page or check out the live demo of this theme.

Here at WPZOOM we’re often asked to recommend WordPress plugins to add various features to people’s sites, so here we’ve rounded up some of the top essential plugins for running a powerful WordPress site in 2013.

WordPress SEO

Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin is hands-down one of the best plugins for WordPress SEO around and is used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers.

The plugin’s main strength comes from the comprehensive options: WordPress SEO does everything you’d expect a good SEO plugin to do, and it does it very well. That’s why we recommend using it to help power your site up the rankings.

Digg Digg

Despite using the name of a social sharing site which is a shell of its former self, make no mistake: the Digg Digg plugin is not one you want to miss out on.

Using a style first pioneered by the tech blog Mashable, Digg Digg adds a set of social sharing buttons which ‘float’ alongside your content and then scroll with the page.This creates a great opportunity for promoting your content on social media and it’s devastatingly effective at doing so. Don’t miss out on free promotion!

W3 Total Cache/WP Super Cache

The two giants in WordPress caching, running one (although not both) of these plugins is essential for virtually all sites running WordPress.

A caching plugin creates a copy of your site and then displays that to visitors, rather than generating a unique copy for each visitor. This allows your site’s server to use fewer resources, resulting in the site loading faster.

It doesn’t matter which one of these two plugins you’re using, as long as you’re using one of them. It’s likely the performance of each one will differ slightly on your host, so make sure you test out both and see which works best for you.

WPTouch

Many of WPZOOM’s themes come with built in ‘responsive’ mobile support, with the theme automagically shrinking to fit your screen size on mobile or tablet. With widespread use of smartphones, especially as a way of consuming information, these mobile-friendly themes are great to have.

Not all our themes are responsive, however, and on the ones that are, sometimes something a little more lightweight is required. Here steps in the WPTouch plugin which, when activated, applies a specially-built theme to your site when viewed on mobile. The mobile theme itself is nothing exceptional, but it’s functional and it works, so for a mobile plugin, look no further.

Easy Digital Downloads

In the current difficult economic climate, many site owners are looking to diversify their income by selling items and downloads through their websites. If that’s you, then this is the plugin which is going to empower your selling.

Easy Digital Downloads, as the name suggests, provides an easy way for you to sell downloads via your WordPress-powered site. The plugin itself is free, but extra premium ‘addons’ are available which add extra functionality. If you want a simple way to monetize your site, this is the way to do it.

Jetpack

Made by Automattic, in part the same people behind the WordPress project, Jetpack brings some of the super-handy functionality enjoyed by WordPress.com users — such as caching of images on a super-fast CDN, website stats and spelling and grammar checking — to WordPress.org users (like you!).

Jetpack adds a bunch of functionality, and is a really handy plugin to have around, so make sure you check out the full list of features and get it added to your site!

Hello Bar

If you want people to do something when they visit your website, be that purchase your book, contact you or read a special report you’ve written, the Hello Bar is a great way of increasing your conversion rate — or in plain English: getting people to do what you want them to do.

The plugin adds a “Hello Bar” across the top of your site, which gives you a short space for your message and then has a call to action. You’ll need to sign up for a free account on HelloBar.com, but with that done, there’s nothing more to do, except sit back and watch your conversion rate fly through the roof!

WPIde

Though this is not a revolutionary plugin, it does something that misses in WordPress: the ability to edit files included in theme subfolders. WordPress Theme Editor is great, but it doesn’t allow you to edit all the files from a theme, and since many of our themes include multiple files organized in sub-folders, it becomes impossible to find those files when you want to edit them. Here WPIde plugin comes in help and let you modify anything you want, without having to leave the WordPress Dashboard.

WPThumb

WPThumb is also a useful plugin which does something that we think should be included in WordPress. It allows you to choose the cropping position of the images that you upload as Featured Image. This way you can make sure that you don’t end up with badly cropped thumbnails. To enable this feature in your theme, just follow instructions from this topic.

Rock up, plug in, roll!

The WordPress community is fantastic in continuing to provide fantastic plugins which add great functionality to your site quickly and easily at no or very little cost to you.

All of these plugins install in a couple of steps, but if you run into any trouble, just remember to look for documentation and search for similar problems before asking for help on WordPress.org, only if necessary. Have fun!

Seasons

Demo Theme Info

Responsive Design

The layout of this theme automatically adapts to fit on any screen resolution, be it desktop or mobile devices (iPhone, iPad).

Unique Menu Template

In the Seasons theme you can easily showcase all the food items on the menu page. Food items can be added through the Custom Post Type functionality.

Food Menu Items

The theme includes two menu templates: one that will display food categories sorted alphabetically, and a widgetized template, in which you can order food categories as you want:

Arrange Food Categories in Menu Page

Blog Easy

The built-in Blog Template and numerous custom widgets allows you to use the theme beyond its limits. You can very easily run separately a blog to keep in touch with your visitors about news, events and why not even about new food additions to the menu.

Blog Template

P.S. This is also the first theme that uses the newly re-designed theme page on our website. Do you like it?

For more detailed features, see the theme’s page or check out the live demo of this theme.

Petit

Demo Theme Info

Responsive Design

The layout of this theme automatically adapts to fit on any screen resolution, be it desktop or mobile devices (iPhone, iPad).

Custom Shortcodes

Besides numerous built-in shortcodes in our framework, we’ve also added two custom shortcodes for recipes: Ingredients and Directions, so you can quickly create such sections, like in this recipe, for example.

Custom Posts vs. Regular Posts

One thing that you’ll be happy about this theme is that it doesn’t use Custom Post Types, like many other themes do, to separate regular posts from recipes. That’s why we have decided to keep on using regular posts for recipes, but there is still an option that allows you to let the theme know which of your posts are recipes, and which are traditional blog posts.
Why we took this decision?
Because we wanted to make the theme accessible to anyone who used a different theme previously, without any custom features, which most of the time will keep you from switching to another theme without losing your content.

So if you already have a food blog, then Petit is the right theme to switch to.

Instagram Widget

Beside standard widgets that can be found in all of our themes, we’ve introduced in this theme a Instagram widget that allows you to display recent images from any users.

For more detailed features, check the theme’s page or check out the live demo of this theme.