13 Best Premium WordPress Themes for 2012
13 of the Best WordPress Themes in 2012
We have all seen the thousands of WordPress themes available (free or premium), designed in various colors, and functionality. This give you the ability to find a theme that is tailored to your needs whether you are starting a website for a magazine, portfolio, news or personal blogs styles. But with all of the choices, how do you know which ones are the best?
Selecting the best WordPress themes that tailor to your brand can be tough sometimes, but if you know to the right place you sure can find the best WordPress themes for you company.
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems for bloggers, professional websites, businesses and even top companies are now using WordPress to power their online websites. The majority of the websites you view every day are created with WordPress, and as of December 2011 there are 69 million sites running on WordPress. This statistics shows how powerful WordPress is as a blogging platform and CMS.
OKAY, SO WHY WORDPRESS?
There are many reasons why WordPress is being used as a blogging platform today, but here the most important.
- WordPress is Free – with basic knowledge you can setup your own WordPress website on your own server.
- Thousands of WordPress Themes to choose from, you can use free WordPress Themes or Premium WordPress Themes.
- Plugins, Plugins, Plugins – With WordPress’ growing popularity, plugins are becoming available to achieve nearly any online objective.
- Active WordPress developers and community – there is no shortage of WordPress help when you need it.
I am constantly searching at WordPress themes making sure that My Media Magnet is providing our clients with the same cutting edge technology seen in Premium WordPress themes. Here are some favorites a few weeks into 2012.
Best Photography Themes for WordPress
DK for Photography Creative Portfolio
DK is the Premium Photography, Portfolio, Personal website Template built with latest WordPress features. Custom Post Type, Unlimited Colors and Image Uploader etc.
King Size Theme WordPress
Including a variety of options, King Size can be suitable to fit any particular use. Offering you five very different gallery styles (including 4 additional layout styles for ColorBox, FancyBox and prettyPhoto), with ability to blog about your photos (attach featured images) and etc.
Best Small Business & Agency Themes
Yin & Yang
Yin & Yang is a light, minimalistic, simple to use portfolio theme. Quick to setup and easy to customize, thanks to the powerful admin panel, and the detailed documentation, Yin & Yang is the perfect theme for showcasing your most important work directly in front of your potential clients.
U-Design
U-Design is a very powerful theme which suits both, users with no programming background as well as advanced developers. It will help you build your site in no time to your liking with minimal effort. It empowers you to set any color to elements such as backgrounds, links, text, menu links, etc. You can completely change the look and feel of your site in seconds. You can also choose from over 200 fonts, including Google Font Directory and Cufón fonts.
Striking
Striking is an extremely powerful and flexible wordpress theme – actually a “Super Premium” theme as it has extraordinary features and coding that are not found in the normal premium WP theme. It is the theme you buy when you want to create a website in every way you imagined possible. In fact 5000+ Themeforest purchasers tell me it is the most feature laden and customizable theme they have ever used. The top seller on Themeforest in 2010/2011 period, I invite you to view the demo, and features below, to see for yourself why it is the best solution to your web design needs.
Scope
This theme offers some amazing features such as:
- Customisable Accent Colour via Colour Picker (Yellow in Demo)
- Filterable Portfolio (Supports Video, Audio & Unlimited Images)
- Custom Background Functionality (Tiled, Static & Fullscreen Support)
- Full Localisation Support (contains .po/.mo files)
- 5 Custom Widgets (Twitter, Flickr, Video, Portfolio, Blog)
RT-Theme 15
RT-Theme 15 is a premium wordpress theme with powerfull CMS tools. You can use it for business, corporate, product catalogue, services or portfolio web sites. The product and portfolio tools also give you wide opportunities to use in various services as tour iteneraries, rent a car, real estate or hotel room presentations.
THEME REVIEW | WORDPRESS THEME
Reaction for WordPress | A Super Skeleton Joint, Fully Responsive
Reaction is more than a WordPress theme, it’s a comprehensive HTML5 framework and it includes a full templating system as well; A collection of several incredibly powerful scripts and CSS structures that’s been tied together into a kit that’s perfect as a jumping off point of your next project.
Propulsion Theme Demo
This is a responsive theme, able to adapt its layout to the screen size of your visitors. (try resizing the screen and see for yourself) The Slideshows for this theme are also touch enabled and hardware accelerated, which means they are working super sleek on mobile device like ipad or iphone
Cleanest Themes for WordPress
Aware | An Ultra Interactive Portfolio Theme
Aware is an interactive, responsive portfolio theme perfect for freelancers, web designers, photographers and videographers alike. Its user interactive interface delightfully enhances your most loved portfolio pieces. Now, you can take your portfolio with you, in your pocket.
UX – User First
UX is a HTML5 & CSS3 “Super Premium” Commercial theme full of WordPress 3.3+ gems and features. The flexibility of the framework allows it to be tailored to a Blog, Portfolio, Creative, Business or almost any other kind of website one can imagine. You will not find a more comprehensive admin interface – easy enough for a beginner to grasp immediately.
Good News
This theme contains some great features such as:
- Valid HTML5
- Unlimited Colors
- Custom CSS
- RTL Full Support
- 3 types of posts (articles/video/slideshow)
- WPML support
- 2 layout options (Full width/ Fixed Width)
- Unlimited Sidebars
Karma – Premium WordPress Theme
Karma is a Premium WordPress Theme built on a highly intelligent framework. It’s the only theme on Themeforest to feature the amazing new CU3ER v1 3D slider. Whether your a wordpress pro or just a beginner, you’ll have absolutely no problems at all working with this theme.
The 10 Best Free and Premium Plugins for WordPress in 2012
Best Plugins for WordPress in 2012
WordPress is an amazing content management system which is only getting more powerful as more people are using it as their content management system.
As mentioned in the annual WordPress “State of the Word“, WordPress data says that 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, and 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress. This means that developers are being pushed to make amazing plugins to please the millions of WordPress users around the world. While plugins are great for helping you achieve nearly anything on your website, some plugins are simply MUST HAVES on nearly any WordPress blog. Here are some of my favorite.
SEO WordPress Plugins for 2012
WordPress SEO by Yoast
An absolute must have for any WordPress blog. Ever since blogging in WordPress, I’ve used to use the All in One SEO Pack. This has been considered to be the best plugin for SEO purposes that can be installed. However, recently I’ve switched to the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin, which is more advanced.
Here are the main advantages of this plugin (from the Yoast site):
- Post titles and meta descriptions
- Robots Meta configuration
- Canonical
- Breadcrumbs
- Permalink clean up
- XML Sitemaps
- RSS enhancements
- Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
- Clean up head section
FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK
Scribe SEO
Scribe SEO is a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress. It has been developed by Brain Clarke (www.copyblogger.com). Most WordPress SEO plugins are highly technical and tedious to operate. Scribe on the other hand has been specifically developed keeping non-programmers in mind.
Scribe SEO follows a simple three point formula to improve optimization and make your site more attractive to search engines. It automatically suggests relevant keywords, modifies your content to make it more SEO-friendly and lastly, it helps you generate a lot of back-links which draw traffic to your site.
PREMIUM PLUGIN – VISIT LINK | Scribe Makes SEO Simple
Google Analytics Dashboard
The Google Analytics Dashboard plugin for WordPress gives you access to your Google Analytics data directly inside your WordPress blog. You can also allow other users to see the entire dashboard while they are logged in or include just parts of the data in posts, as a widget or as part of your theme. Goal tracking is also available.
FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics may be able to do more for your WordPress blog than you think. Did you know that Google Analytics and track which categories are the most popular for you? It will also track any out-going events making it easy to analyze your affiliate marketing data. This WordPress plugin will make it easy for you to customize your Google Analytics stats based on your own personal WordPress blog. This really is an exciting plugin…also made by Yoast.
FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK
301 Redirection
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.
FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK
Conversion and Lead Generation Plugins for 2012
Formidable and Formidable Pro
Formidable Pro is installed as a plugin to the WordPress content management system. Once activated, it adds several options to the WordPress dashboard. Forms are added easily with a few clicks by the designer. Theses can be used instantly as standalone pages or bound into existing pages with surprisingly little effort – and no programming. These facts make it perhaps the best WordPress plugin available today.
FORMIDABLE PRO allow you to save your entries into the WordPress database, but now it gives you an incredible platform in your WordPress admin to view the results from the entries. Even better, it allows you to save the content to a CSV file directly from your WordPress admin. Digging deeper, we found that not only would it save it to the database, and featured an easy way to save entries, but it also provided beautiful reports and charts based on the information entered.
View our recent post on the Formidable Plugin here.
PREMIUM PLUGIN – VISIT LINK
Max Landing by Max Foundry
Quickly create great-looking landing pages proven to increase website traffic, conversion rates, and sales. The 12 landing page templates in this plugin will save you hours, days, even weeks of time. No HTML required, just select options and fill in the blanks.
Max Foundry’s WordPress landing page templates were designed to get the most bang for your buck in terms of conversion rates. Each landing page template is highly customizable – fonts, sizes, colors, styles – it’s all there, and easy to use. There are 9 different backgrounds for the call-to-action button, the 6 most web-friendly fonts, over 30 font sizes, and an unlimited number of colors to choose from, just to name a few customizable options.
PREMIUM PLUGIN – VISIT LINK
Lightbox Evolution
Lightbox Evolution is a tool for displaying images, html content, maps, and videos in a “lightbox” style that floats overtop of web page. This is our favorite lightbox plugin that we have found for WordPress. It comes with 6 different themes, as well as settings that allow you to automatically add the lightbox effect to all images and videos. If you choose you can also set Lightbox Evolution to group all images from the same page or post into the same lightbox.
PREMIUM PLUGIN – VISIT LINK | FREE DEMO
White Label CMS
This is a great plugin that allows you to really customize your WordPress admin panel. There are clients who might be a bit confused by having the WordPress branding and news everywhere , and this excellent plugin lets you transform WordPress into a client-branded CMS. It’s very simple to use and set up and will make your clients very happy.
FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK
TinyMCE Advanced
Looking for ways to beautify your WordPress pages and posts but not knowledgeable with HTML or JavaScript codes? Then definitely there’s a plugin that can help you. TinyMCE Advanced is a perfect plugin that could let you edit designs through a WYSIWYG editor to complement your blog’s whole layout.