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Best Free Mobile Compatible WordPress Themes

Graphire — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 05:33:14 +0000

Mobile devices’ hardware and software development has been astounding lately. Heated and tough competition between Apple iPhone and iPad, Google’s Android and Microsoft Windows Phone shows how large the market presently stands. The amount of people browsing the internet using mobile devices are increasing daily, and there appears to be no sign of slowing down. This indicates that websites and blogs these days should be optimized not just for desktop users but for mobile device internet users as well.

WordPress aptly addresses this need and offers a variety of themes that can help you create mobile friendly websites easily. In this article, we present to you 8 excellent, high-quality free WordPress themes compatible with mobile devices. We know that there will be more free mobile compatible WordPress themes that will come around as mobile technology prospers and demand for these mobile friendly themes grows. If you know any recently released free mobile themes that should make it on the list, please feel free to holler us in your comments.

1. iPhonsta

iPhonsta has a fluid layout that fits most mobile screens not just for iPhones but works on most smartphones and it adjusts the font size automatically. It is also compatible with WordPress 3.0+.

2. Möbius

Möbius is free WordPress theme optimized for a variety of mobile devices and desktop browsers as well. Aside from extensive compatibility with mobile and desktop browsers, features also include three skins, widget functionality, social network sharing, jQuery scripting and many more.

3. jQuery Mobile Theme

jQuery Mobile Theme is optimized for various mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android, Blackberries, etc. Use it on your own blog, along with a plugin like IWPhone, which can automatically detect a mobile device and switch from your regular theme to a mobile theme.

4. News Press Mobile Theme

News Press theme is a simple yet elegant solution for creating an mobile-friendly news, blog, and other text-centric WordPress sites. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog customization features.

5. WPtouch

WPtouch is another simple straightforward mobile WordPress theme that automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices. It also offers visitors the option to switch between WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.

6. WordPress Mobile Theme

Another minimalistic mobile WordPress theme that will look great on any mobile device. This lightweight mobile WordPress theme has key features like the ability to choose color theme, custom width and auto-generation of thumbs for your posts.

7. WordPress Mobile Pack

WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit that includes a standard mobile theme, mobile switcher, desktop and mobile admin panel, plus a whole lot more.

8. Carrington Mobile

Carrington Mobile is an elegant mobile theme that is compatible with most advanced mobile touch browsers like iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Palm Pre and is also backward compatible with older mobile devices.

10 Free PrestaShop Themes for your E-commerce Sites

Graphire — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:36:05 +0000

PrestaShop is an entirely free e-Commerce solution that allows you to create professional online shopping websites. It is now the most popular open-source e-Commerce application with over 35,000 online stores using it as their shopping cart system. With over 50,000 active member community support, you can’t go wrong choosing this open-source solution for your e-Commerce sites.

PrestaShop became instantly popular because of its scalability, modular design, lightweight footprint, numerous add-ons and extensions, and easy installation.

Themes for PrestaShop are plentiful with both free and paid themes available. You can even create your own customized PrestaShop themes if you know PHP. But if you want to start using PrestaShop right away, you can try these 10 free PrestaShop themes for your e-Commerce site.

For a complete list of PrestaShop features, you may want to take a look by checking out this link.

1. Free PrestaShop and WordPress E-Commerce Theme: Velvet Sky

2. Matrice Theme for PrestaShop 1.3 and 1.4

3. PrestaShop 1.4 Alternative

4. PrestaShop 1.3.1 Theme ColorBold

5. Free PrestaShop (1.2 – 1.4.3) Theme Black

6. Free PrestaShop (1.2 – 1.4.3) Theme Red

7. Free PrestaShop Theme from 2link – Black and White

8. Free PrestaShop 1.4 Theme – Clothes Theme

9. PrestaShop 1.4 Theme – Rose Girl

10. PrestaShop 1.4 Theme – Violeta

HTML5 and CSS3 Primer, Plus a Dozen Useful Tools and Resources to Get You Started

Graphire — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 06:04:50 +0000

HTML has been web pages standard language for ages. But new updates and technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3 will make it remain as industry standard for a longer period of time. These latest updates on markup programming changes how we interact with web sites.

Before we proceed in giving you some handy HTML5 and CSS3 tools and resources, let me discuss shortly in simple terms what they can do and why you should care.

The Basics

Web designers and developers have been using HTML to build web sites even in the early days, but just HTML is not enough. Building web sites with only HTML can be tedious and limiting. This is where CSS or Cascading Style Sheets helps make it a lot easier. CSS tells web browsers how to properly display an HTML page. Simply put, HTML is the skeletal structure, while CSS specifies the proper elements to fill up the skeletal HTML structure to be served as web pages. CSS lets you control fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc, of an HTML page thus making it less complex, easier and time consuming to change the styles of a web page. With CSS, you can make small changes to one CSS style sheet document and apply these changes across all HTML pages or your entire site.

HTML5

HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t fully completed and implemented yet. HTML5 is the latest version of HTML or Hypertext Markup Language. Currently, it is only fully supported by a few popular web browsers but is expected to be fully completed and implemented in the coming years. HTML5′s idea is to build small parts that works together instead of one large chunk of codes. And each browser may support different features or small parts making it easier for developers to figure out features they need for certain browsers. HTML5 is also built from HTML4 so that means you don’t have to throw away existing codes but you can rather build upon it and improve it with HTML5.

HTML5 highlighted features include:

HTML5′s audio visual support will allow you to add and watch audio and video without using a external plugins like Flash or Silverlight.
Simplified doctype declaration from previous HTML to just .
Simplified content editing using contenteditable attribute where you can easily edit or change your text by adding contenteditable=”true”.
Canvas element in HTML5 allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images.
HTML 5 provided a smarter solution to offline application caching. With this feature, you can now specify the files that the browser should cache and be able to access them even if you’re offline.

CSS3

Although CSS3, like HTML5, is not yet fully supported by all browsers. It has increasingly becoming popular because it makes building web sites a lot easier. A lot of new CSS3 properties and features allows web builders to enhance layout and appearance of websites.

Some of these cool new CSS3 tricks include:

Box-shadows allows the main content to slide beneath another area.
Text-shadows provides a drop shadow underneath an HTML text element.
Easy addition and management of font by simply uploading them in a server and linking those to the CSS file.
Possibility of overlaying multiple backgrounds.
Border images is an upgraded option from using old HTML/CSS plain broder allowing you to use images as borders.
Simplified implementation of opacity levels.
RGBA coloring instead of using hex coloring method allowing you to choose the amount of red, green and blue with opacity options to an element in your design.
Transform property allows you to choose how large you want an area to grow when hovered.
Rounded corners to get rid of sharp corners without using the old image trick.

With all these outstanding new features HTML5 and CSS3 brings, we have rounded up some cool handy tools and resources to help you get running with HTML5 and CSS3 in your web designs.

1. HTML 5 Visual Cheat Sheet

HTML 5 Visual Cheat Sheet is a downloadable useful cheat sheet for web designers and developers presented in an essentially simple visual grid with a list of all HTML tags and of their related attributes supported by HTML versions 4.01 and/or 5.

2. HTML5 and CSS3 Browser Support Checklist

This checklist displays all browser support for HTML5 and CSS3 including CSS3 Properties, CSS3 Selectors, Web Applications, GFX & Embedded Content and Web Forms 2.0.

3. HTML5 Demos and Examples

HTML 5 compilation of demos and examples with browser support icons and technology tag to filter the demos.

4. The HTML5 Browser Test

Launch this online tool on your web browser and it will show the extent of support by assigning marks out of 160 on different parameters like: doctype, canvas, video, audio, geolocation, storage, offline web apps.

5. HTML5 & CSS3 Readiness

A cool yet simple data dashboard, completely created with CSS3, which tracks how much browser support exists for each new HTML5 and CSS3 feature. It is presented in a rotary, sun ray-like design based on an existing infographic about America’s Wealthiest Religions.

6. Initializr

Initializr is an online HTML5 templates generator to help you get started with your HTML5 project. It is built on HTML5 Boilerplate, a powerful HTML5 template that will generate you a clean and customizable HTML5 template.

7. CSS Tricks

CSS Tricks is a web design community site that offers tons of CSS3 and HTML5 tools and resources like video tutorials, downloadable tools, code snippets and many more.

8. CSS3 Please!

CSS3 Please! allows web designers to enter one value, and have this instantly synced and normalised for each vendor-specific prefix, with the corresponding code generated automatically. It also allows you to copy the whole or part of it and paste it into your own stylesheet.

9. CSS3 Generator

CSS3 Generator is an online CSS3 tool that allows you to create and customize multiple CSS3 effects where it automatically generates the code which you can copy and paste on your own stylesheet.

10. CSS3 Gradient Generator

This online CSS3 tool will help you generate a various gradients in CSS. You can select and customize various gradient options and it will generate real time gradient preview image with corresponding CSS3 code that you can copy and paste on your stylesheet.

11. CSS3 Cheat Sheet

This CSS3 cheat sheet from SmashingMagazine presents the main features of CSS 3 in a handy, printable reference card downloadable in pdf format.

12. 52 Framework

52 Framework is a next generation cross-browser, HTML5 and CSS3 specific framework which aims to provide an easy way to build websites using HTML5 & CSS3.

15 Free High-quality WordPress Themes: Midyear 2011 Edition

Graphire — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 06:40:02 +0000

It’s time to make rounds and share with you some of the best free WordPress themes for mid-year 2011. We know that there are a lot of free WordPress themes out there but not all free themes are good. And most of them were already outdated for the latest WordPress 3+ upgrade versions. So we selected 15 free and fresh WordPress themes made this year. Premium looking themes that we think will enhance the presentation of your blogs utilizing the latest WordPress 3+ upgrade features. Browse down and click either the title or the preview image to go to the web link of each free WordPress themes to view more info, demo and download. Enjoy!

1. Free WordPress 3.1 Theme: Splendio (With PSD Sources)

This free beautiful theme was designed by Vlad and Elena Scanteie of DesignDisease exclusively for Smashing Magazine. The theme is free to use in both private and commercial projects. The theme is based upon the Twenty Ten WordPress theme and requires WordPress 3.0 to run.

2. Free Magazine Style WP Theme – Agency

Agency is a magazine style theme complete with subtle page elements that is sure to add elegance to your pages. This theme is compatible with the latest WordPress release 3.0 and up, taking advantage of some its newer features. Features include custom slideshow, 2 widgetized sidebars, custom gallery styles with lightbox and built-in contact form.

3. Free Magazine/Personal Style WordPress Theme – Lucky Guess

Lucky Guess is a semi-magazine / semi-personal blog styled WordPress theme packed with some nifty features that you will find useful, especially for new blogs. This theme supports WordPress 3.0 featues. It comes with custom jQuery Tabbed Container in the sidebar and custom styled photo galleries with a built in lightbox functionality. CSS3 and Google fonts were also implemented in this theme making it load faster as was tested to work on work in IE 7, 8, Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

4. Nyke Premium Theme

Nyke is a stylish WordPress 3 ready premium theme from fabseries. This is an ideal theme for personal blog, magazine site, etc. Designed with a blue, red and white color combination. The theme has nivo slider enabled on it, which gives you an option to enable or disable it.

5. Mentor Free WordPress Theme

Mentor is a 2 column free premium wordpress theme. This theme has green, brown, cream and white color scheme. This theme is very ideal for magazine and personal blogs. This WordPress 3 theme has custom menu features, thumbs for featured posts, tabbed content area, customizable banner ads, plus many more.

6. Iris WordPress Theme

Another cool Fabseries WordPress theme from Web2Feel. The design of this theme is very stylish modern with a minimalistic touch. This stylish theme is a 3 column WordPress theme that also features editable header text, widgetized sidebar, customizable menu, plus many more including latest WordPress 3 features.

7. WordPress Theme: Gadoliniument

Gadoliniument WP theme is a great theme for any blogger niche. It has cool features like welcome widget section, horizontal jQuery Accordion image slider, custom front page widgets and custom typography. It also has a clean and well-structured code for easy customization for your special needs and a .pot file for easy translation to your preferred language. Moreover, this WordPress 3+ ready theme is tried and tested to work in a multisite environment (WordPress MU).

8. Praseodymiumic WordPress theme

Praseodymiumic WordPress theme is a minimalist portfolio theme despite its hard to pronounce name. This theme comes with muted color palette, custom typography, custom front page widgets and testimonial widget. A testimonial section is also in place so that you can feature your previous client’s feedback for future references. This is also a WordPress 3+ and WordPress MU compatible theme. Praseodymiumic 1.1 upgrade is also available from Padd Solutions.

9. WordPress Theme: Ceriumoid

Ceriumoid is a three (3) column layout to accommodate more widgets and content. The built-in Facebook Like Box feature will help you gain more Facebook fans with an easy click like button.Ceriumoid also has built-in Facebook Like Box feature will help you gain more Facebook fans with an easy click like button. This theme is WordPress 3.1 and WordPress MU compatible.

10. MusicSense WordPress theme

MusicSense is a free WordPress theme with featured content option and supports the post thumbnails. Suitable for any niche. Theme features include post thumbnails, featured post, square and header banners, widgets ready, SEO optimized, plus many more. Logo and PSD files included.

11. Tendency Free WordPress theme

Tendency is a free WordPress theme with featured posts option that is suitable for any niche. This WordPress 3.0 ready theme offers features like custom menus, custom background, banners, widgets, SEO opmitized, gravatars, etc. Logo and PSD files included.

12. Mahasoli Tribune

This 2-column free WordPress theme features content slider, banner ads, widgets, post thumbnails, gravatars, etc. This WordPress 3.0 ready theme is also compatible with many popular browsers.

13. Leptocaros Magazine

This free theme is ideal not only for magazine type of blogs but for a lot of different WordPress blogs as well. It shows a clean and soft colored design with content slider built in. It also offers banner ad slots, different theme options, widgets, post thumbnails, WordPress 3 menu support and cross browser compatibility. Logo and PSD files are included in the download.

14. Habanera Magazine

This free magazine type theme has very stylish and cool content slider. It resonates bold and striking design with black and red colors. Content are well organized and it features a lot of theme features like banner ad slots, social bookmarking widgets, post thumbnails, page navigations plus many more. It is also WordPress 3 ready and compatible with many popular browsers. Logo and PSD files are also included in the package.

15. Kalixo Magazine

Kalixo is another free magazine wordpress theme from simplewpthemes.com. It comes in with natural woodeden background with content slider and gallery built in, adjustable theme options. This theme has fixed witdth, right sidebars, automatic image resizing, options for RSS/subscriptions, spots for banners, page navigation built in, WordPress 3.0 and google analytics ready.

Free Twitter Background Photoshop PSD Templates: Typographic Grunge

Graphire — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 06:21:57 +0000

I have a couple of nice typographic grunge backgrounds which I have used for a lot of designs particularly book cover backgrounds. And I thought about creating some Twitter background templates in Photoshop using these backgrounds. So after quiet some time since I last shared our free Twitter background PSD templates, here are five more background PSD templates typographic grunge style.

These backgrounds are compatible with all screen resolution sizes because all five backgrounds are fade to color Twitter backgrounds. Since we have no idea what resolution users will browse our Twitter page with, it’s a good idea to make our backgrounds fade nicely into a solid background color on the bottom and on the right side. And since Twitter background images are fix and will always align from top left, our fade to color background will suit any screen resolution and will just display the rest on the right and bottom part with the color our background smoothly fades.

These five Twitter background typographic grunge style PSD templates are in typical resolution size of 1280 x 1024 pixels. I have included another Twitter PSD template for download below. This template is a generic Twitter template in plain background with guides and layers for several screen resolution sizes (1440 x 900, 1280 x 1024, 1680 x 1050, 1900 x 1200, and 2560 x 1600) you could choose from should you decide to design your own Twitter background from scratch.

Typographic Grunge Twitter Background No. 1

Set background color to #422B17

Typographic Grunge Twitter Background No. 2

Set background color to #846F32

Typographic Grunge Twitter Background No. 3

Set background color to #102943

Typographic Grunge Twitter Background No. 4

Set background color to #4B2E20

Typographic Grunge Twitter Background No. 5

Set background color to #21190D

Download links:
1. Free Twitter Background Photoshop PSD Templates: Typographic Grunge – 26mb
2. Free Twitter Backgrou Photoshop PSD Template: Generic Template – 79kb

Top 10 Best Resources for Free Twitter Backgrounds

Graphire — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 06:37:50 +0000

In today’s fast paced technology savvy era, we need to do almost anything in an instant. Most of the time, we are too busy to tinker with graphic design softwares, designing and customizing our webpage or Twitter page. These free Twitter background resources will come in very handy if you don’t want to mess around experimenting too much with you twitter background.

These sites offer premium looking Twitter backgrounds for free which you can conveniently install automatically or manually by downloading the background and uploading it later to your Twitter account. They also offer color guides that matches your chosen background should you decide to install it manually.

Here are our top ten picks for best free Twitter backgrounds. Check them out and instantly jazz up your Twitter page. Enjoy.

1. Twitter Backgrounds.Org

Free Twitter backgrounds, layouts and themes. They have a very easy to use interface that lets you browse through their free twitter backgrounds & themes, find one you like, then use their auto-install tool to change your twitter profile in seconds; or manually install your new profile by downloading the backgrounds yourself.

2. Twitter-Images.com

They have a wide range of categories containing high-quality free Twitter backgrounds but you have to sign-up before you can download free backgrounds. Twitter-Images.com also offers personalized Twitter backgrounds for just $9.99. Personalized Twitter backgrounds allows you to choose a theme and you provide them your own photo wherein their designers will retouch your photo and merge it with your selected background. Well, if you know Photoshop then you can save yourself $9.99 customizing your own Twitter background.

3. Free Twitter Designer

Free Twitter Designer is a Flash based interactive website where you can easily personalize your Twitter background straight from their site. You can also sign in with your Twitter account so you can update your Twitter page automatically and also gives you an option to download it and upload it to your Twitter account anytime you want. The Flash based Twitter Designer has many cool features and tools that you can use to create your personalize Twitter background. You can add objects like shapes, text and images, and then manipulate and edit those objects or apply various filters to them. You can also tweak colors, resolutions, overlays, etc.

4. Twitr Backgrounds

Twitr Backgrounds offers a large collection of premium looking Twitter backgrounds. Their designs are top notch. Aside from their free Twitter backgrounds, they also offer personalized backgrounds for $9.99 and custom twitter backgrounds designed by their own dedicated expert designers for just $89.

5. Twitrounds

Twitrounds also offers free and custom ($99) Twitter backgrounds. They have a wide variety of background themes to choose from and gets their gallery updated daily.

6. Twitpaper

Twitpaper is a no-fuss free Twitter background resource. They offer great looking Twitter backgrounds that you can easily download without the hassle of registrations, account login or answering survey forms.

7. Twitterbacksnow.com – Free Twitter Backgrounds

This site offers free Twitter backgrounds as flat twitter background images which you can download and later on upload and install to your Twitter account. Plain and simple. You just have to tweak your Twitter profile page manually for the colors to match your background.

8. Twitlay

Twitlay offers not only free Twitter backgrounds but a lot of Twitter related stuff like campaign badges, avatars, and many more. They also have premium or customized Twitter backgrounds for just $50.

9. Twitterevolutions

Twitterevolutions is a great resource site not just for free Twitter backgrounds but also free Twitter buttons/badges. They have lots of good looking Twitter backgrounds that you can automatically install to your Twitter account or download and install manually.

10. TwitEria

TwitEria is a gold mine for lots of high-quality Twitter backgrounds without so much advertising and registration fuss, just plain straightforward free Twitter backgrounds. They have plenty of categories to choose from. They also offer automatic and manual installation of their free Twitter backgrounds.

The Best of 2010 Free High-quality WordPress Themes

Graphire — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 06:53:38 +0000

The year is almost over. It’s time to gather once again some of the best free stuff we’ve had for this year. And once a year we do a quick roundup of the best free WordPress themes that we came across this year including a few noteable ones that came late last year.

WordPress has indeed come of age with its thirteenth major release of its version 3.0 (3.0.1 latest) bundled with big features like new APIs, new default theme, MU and WordPress merger, lighter interface, bug fixes and a whole lot more. New and fresh WordPress themes were also released to take advantage of these new features. Although there are hundreds or even thousands of premium WordPress themes around that you can purchase online, there are evidently more free high-quality and professionally written WordPress themes available today gaining popularity among the design and development community.

So today, we present to you some of the best free high-quality WordPress themes released in 2010 (some late 2009) for each major theme categories as follows:

Artsy Fancy Blogger WordPress Themes – Some of the most creatively done blogger WordPress themes catering to almost all type of blogger niche.
Minimalist WordPress Themes – Themes that are clean and lean, focusing more on functionality.
Portfolio and Gallery Type WordPress Themes – Themes for artists, photographers, or anyone who wants to showcase their sample of works online.
Magazine and News Style WordPress Themes – WordPress themes which can be used for sites with magazine or news based content.
E-Commerce WordPress Themes – Themes that uses WordPress as a platform for setting up an online store covering a variety of niche markets.
Pre-launch and Domain Parking WordPress Themes – Themes that offer pre-launch landing pages to temporarily show early visitors of under-construction sites.