Categories
CMS Gadgets Multi Media Photo Portfolio Themes

Charlotte WordPress Theme

The Charlotte WP Theme has been released by Ignacio a Spanish designer & developer. His themes are showcased at wp.paragraphe.org and we recommend having a good look through his work.

Charlotte is free and has been designed for use as portfolio theme. The home page keeps its emphasis strongly on your work. Using a showcase style Charlotte keeps its looks as far away from the typical ‘WordPress blog’ as possible, displaying everything in a clean, easy to navigate style.

You posts / work are displayed in nice round cornered boxes on the home page in two columns, anyone familiar with wp portfolio themes or sites such as Notcot.org will know how successful this style of layout can be. Each posts main feature is the photo or image of your work, followed by the posts title, author, tags and the first paragraph of text (the excerpt) from the posts main page. We really like the way the tags have been implemented here. Portfolio themes are not always easy to navigate but by using this method of tagging the user can always find other similar posts easily and quickly. Ignacio has also used a similar navigation method for the categories which display in much smaller text at the top of each posts box, giving the visitor a more general search option for other similar items.

Charlotte-WordPress-Theme1
Charlotte WordPress Theme: Clean, functional and beautiful

Features:

  • Free theme under the GPL license.
  • Valid Code as HTML 4.01 Strict.
  • Using the Blueprint CSS Framework.
  • 5 Photoshopped Colorful Headers to choose from.
  • Rounded Corners all around.
  • Widgetized Sidebar, Footer & Header.

As you can see from the demo (link at the top of the page) each posts individual page is styled just as beautifully and Ignacio has built in a separate wigitized sidebar system which with a bit of thought could be used for anything from exif data if you are a photographer to sales links for your work / adverts if you run a gadget blog or similar.

Charlotte comes with five photoshopped headers to choose from but obviously you can restyle this theme very easily to suit your brand or personal style.

Overall we are very impressed with Ignacio’s work and we think that Charlotte WordPress Theme is a shining example of what he is capable of. Definitely one to bookmark and keep an eye on in the future!

Categories
CMS Gadgets Multi Media Photo Technology Themes

BlogKurus WP Theme (Thin Blog)

blog-kurus-thumb1We are so excited about this!! Ladies and gentlemen we proudly present to you BlogKurus! Translated as Thin Blog this is the most innovative and fantastic use of design we have ever seen from a WordPress theme designer. That designer is of course Mohammad Mustamar Natsir.

BlogKurus is not just thin its THiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiN. With very simple functionality and beautiful styling we can see a potential competition ahead between WordPress developers to see who can make the best use of this theme.  But the bigger fight might be to see who can create the best background image to fit either side of the blog,  (have a look at the promo shot below!) please please post links to your developments of BlogKurus in the comments below we are chomping at the bit to see them.

WOW BlogKurus
WOW BlogKurus

We still haven’t mentioned the very best thing about BlogKurus yet, it’s free!! That’s right, one of the best wp theme designs on the net is completely free to download and use straight away (download link at bottom of page).

We cannot believe just how much of what you would expect to find in a blog is right there in this streamlined theme, inline comments, menus, footer content, gravatars and search bars. Can you imagine this developed into a twitter like application or a ultra hi-tech portfolio (changing background images anyone?)

BlogKurus
BlogKurus

Obviously we recommend this theme! There’s a full demo below and a link to Mustamar’s website which is a must see. We love this one so much we are even offering installations of BlogKurus for £150 which is our lowest price so far, so if you are a non-tech WordPress newbie you can have this theme too!

Lastly a big thank you to Mustamar we hope you keep designing and we are looking forward to the next one!

Download BlogKurus Here

Categories
Gadgets Magazine Office Technology Themes

Revolution Office

Revolution Office comes from the creme de la creme of site designers Jason Schuller (of Revolution Two). Although this design is called ‘Office’ its use is pretty universal and is suitable for almost anyone. With Web 2.0 looks and beautifully crafted composition we cannot stress enough just how nice this site is, please go to the homepage and check out the demo to see for yourself.

Available as a WordPress theme only however Revolution WordPress themes are becoming very well known for supreme quality and an amazing level of after care support. Buts that enough about Revolution (as you can probably tell their a bit of a favorite of ours) lets check out Office theme and see if its any good!

Office is a pretty minimal site which means your visitors arn’t going to have any trouble finding their way around and getting to the information they need quickly. The homepage has an impressive image slider (please try this out in the demo it has such a cool smooth sliding action!!) with a link from the images to the appropriate page or featured article. The slider could be used in so many ways, it could be turned into a very dynamic looking menu or a showcase for photography or any products you are selling or reviewing, your imagination is pretty much the limit with this one. If you do go for this theme please post links and show off your sites below, we would love to see how you have developed this!

Features

  • Beautiful image scroller
  • Breadcrumb enabled
  • Gravatar enabled
  • Widget ready
  • RSS 2.0 enabled
  • Unlimited fast support
  • Suitable for almost any use

office-home
Click for homepage, categories and post page

When you do a search or click on catagories / featured content you are presented with a very nicely layed out page with thumbnails of each item with a text excerpt, rather than just a huge page to scroll down containing all the related articles, or worse a horrible built in google type search results page.

The articles or pages themselves are simple and effective, with a two column look, lots of room for your content and a content details section at the side. This allows visitors to see which sections of your site the article comes from for easy backtracking, and an RSS 2.0 feed. Here’s our only gripe with the design of office, below the content details is a recent content section showing the titles of all the latest storys or pages. This would be so much more effective as a related content section, this way if a visitor has not found exactly what they wanted then its easy for them to quickly get back on track.

So as you have probably guessed we love this design and cannot recommend it enough.

Now here’s the important choice you have to make if you want this site! Themes from Revolution Two are availible as free downloads directly from their site however, the free versions arn’t exactly easy to find and come with no support what so ever!! Not even an instructions.txt in the zip file! Worst of all its not always the most upto date version of the site. Speaking from experience this can be a very frustrating and time wasting way of trying to get their sites up and running quicly even for an expert. Googling dosen’t help either as their support forums are closely guarded and locked to anyone who hasn’t brought their support package. Although slightly pricey their support is unlimited across all their themes and very very quick so even a newbie can get the site up and running in a matter of hours. They even offer customization techniques and tutorials and all questions answered by experts. Their standard membership package only lasts a year however if you want lifetime option then there is a Revolution Pro Plus Membership available for not much more than the standard price! Quite frankly its the option we have gone for and haven’t (yet) regretted it! However if you carn’t afford it, or have a lot (months!) of time on your hands then plug for the free option.

Don’t forget to post and show off your versions of this site below!

Categories
Gadgets Technology Themes

Mod Blogger Tech

modblogger-techDeveloped by Blog Oh Blog
this is a premium technology based wordpress theme. If you love gadget and technology websites as much as we do and have ever wanted to run your own then this could be the site for you! Not sure? Take a look at some of our favourite sites on the net for some inspiration Notcot, OhGizmo!, Boing Boing Gadgets, Gizmondo and Ektopia. The basics are also all there to run a games blog or review site.

There are a few tweeks that we feel could improve this site, for instance the sleek looking product showcase section at the top would be much better as a menu and could be easily customized to work as one. Also the jQuery based Accordian feature on the homepage could do with some re-vamping

There’s also an area for 125 x 125 ads so you can monetize you blog, and with a technology blog or site there’s plenty of opportunity to advertise.

Features

  • Inbuilt Gravatar support
  • Stylish formatted tags making it nice and easy to navigate
  • Custom products scroller (easily turned into a stylish menu)
  • Very easy to monetize with banner and ad support
  • Breadcrumbs enabled
  • Custom Author information for every post
  • Complete with all the widgets needed to run the site
  • Complete post-sales support from Blog Oh Blog

Complete demo of the site is availible from the homepage (link below) and it is worth checking out before you make a decision. Blog Oh Blog offer complete support after purchase and are well known for quality in both code and style.