Fajar Widiantoro - detikinet

 

Jakarta - WordPress adalah salah satu portal blog paling populer di seluruh dunia. Tahukah apa saja keunggulannya?

Berdasarkan keterangan tertulis WordPress yang dikutip detikINET, Sabtu (30/1/2010), berikut adalah 8 keungulan WordPress yang paling dijagokan:

1. Berbasis Open Source
WordPress ini berbasis Open Source, sehingga bisa didapatkan secara gratis dan dapat dikembangkan siapa saja.

2. Kustomisasi
WordPress memiliki keunggulan dalam hal Content Management System (CMS). Hal ini memudahkan pengguna untuk menambahkan dan mengubah isi dari situs maupun blog, sesuai kebutuhan.

3. Plugin
Dukungan plugin ini sangat bervariasi, dari mulai pemblokir Spam seperti Akismet, pengatur komentar seperti Intense Debate, pembuat pooling seperti Pool Daddy, sampai dengan keamanan, pembuat forum, dan plugin untuk e-commerce.

4. Themes
WordPress memiliki theme yang sangat banyak, sehingga menyediakan tampilan sesuai dengan yang pengguna butuhkan.

5. Search Engine
WordPress memiliki struktur dan sistem yang mudah dikenali oeh mesin pencari seperti Google dan Yahoo.

6. Dukungan, Perawatan dan BackUp
WordPress didukung oleh perusahaan besar dengan mengedepankan kemudahan penguna untuk melakukan perawatan dan backup.

7. Riset dan Pengembangan Berkelanjutan
WordPress melakukan pengembangan terus menerus untuk mencapai kesempurnaan yang dilakukan para developernya.

8. Dukungan Komunitas
Dengan adanya WordCamp yang merupakan kopi darat berkumpulnya penggiat WordPress dari berbagai belahan dunia, WordPress pun semakin kuat pengembangannya.

( fw / ash )

How I Built a Church Website for Free: Picking a Wordpress ThemeSo far in this series we’ve learned the advantages of a self-hosted church website, hosting it through BlueHost.com, and how to install Wordpress to manage your website content. But now your website looks really ugly and boring, and we can’t have that. Thankfully, giving your Wordpress website a whole new look is as simple as downloading a few files and then uploading them to your website (click here for step-by-step instructions to install a theme). These collections of files that style your website and give it a particular look are called “Themes.” There are tons of both free and paid themes available for Wordpress, from the simple blog theme to a complex news and video website. If you Google “best Wordpress themes” you will get a ton of websites who have compiled a list of themes that they think stand out. If you want a really great-looking website a paid theme is probably the way to go ultimately. Be warned though, that some of these themes require a significant amount of customization that may not be really easy to do at first. Most of these paid themes include step-by-step instructions for how to customize things like rotating picture banners, but you might have to dig a little bit to find it. Also, for the best appearance, you will need to crop pictures to certain sizes at times, which can be done pretty easily online at sites like Picnik.com. With that, here are some of the best places to find themes for your church website.

My Favorite Wordpress Themes for Churches

Some of the best free church Wordpress themes:

• [UPDATE] Ministry Theme – As you might guess, this theme is built specifically for ministry websites. I’ve never come across this theme, but it looks really great. As of right now, the theme isn’t able to be downloaded as the creators of the theme tweak it to be more compatible with Wordpress 2.7. It also looks like they may re-release it as a paid theme, but up until now it was free. Thanks to Bill Robbins of Organized Themes for pointing this one out.
• Ashford – This theme claims to be among the most user-friendly for the novice. Among the unique traits of this theme is the ability to edit certain aspects of the website from the front end rather than having to login to the back end of the website at do all the editing. I have never used this theme, but if you have never used Wordpress before (or will be allowing other people to edit the site who have little experience), this might be the perfect theme.
• LivingOS UPSILON – A very clean theme with a rotating picture header. Changing the pictures takes a little bit of code work, but it’s pretty easy to figure out. I used this theme to create PassingOnFaith.com for a conference I helped organize. This theme was designed specifically for churches. Check out the other themes at LivingOS.
• Notepad – I’ve never worked with this theme, so it might be difficult to customize. Since it’s free, the only thing you lose is time if you end up not liking the theme. If you will only have a few pages, this is a very clean look that makes it clear where information is located on your site. It also has 13 different color schemes.
• WP Full Site – Targeted at small businesses, but could easily be adapted for church use.
• Organized Themes.com (some paid themes, too) – Run by a guy who worked as an associate pastor and realized churches need a simple way to present their web content and began designing Wordpress themes. I’ve never used them, so I can’t speak for their user-friendliness but a few of them look really nice.
• Refueled.net – Never used their themes but I have seen some churches that have. Look like they would be very easy to use and for certain demographics they would provide a simple solution.
• Ocean Mist – Another really simple site, but I’ve never used it so can’t speak for it.
• Vigilance – This is the new theme that I just switched to here at MattCleaver.com. It has some really sweet features that could make it a great site for churches to use. Go to the linked page to see the extra goodies that I am not using right now on my site. I can also vouch that it is very user friendly, a great place to start for newbies who want some flexibility and customization options. This is one of the best free themes I’ve run into in a long time.
• Titan – Just released on March 11 by the same guy who made the above Vigilance theme, Titan is another amazing looking theme. This theme offers drop-down menus that are helpful for sites with a lot of pages.
• Sero – I almost used this theme for something a few months ago, but can’t remember what it was or why I decided against it. Anyways, it’s a good looking theme that might be right up your alley.
• WooThemes (mostly paid themes, but some freebies) – WooThemes has some really sweet themes, most of them paid. There are a few free themes though, like the Original Premium News theme that Tim Schmoyer uses.

Paid Themes:

• Church Wordpress Theme ($59.95) – This is a pretty advanced theme that was free for a very short period of time. During that time I downloaded it and played around with it. I have to say, it isn’t for the novice but can make for a really good looking site if you know what you are doing.
• iThemes ($79.95) – iThemes has a lot of different themes, all paid, many of which would work fabulous for churches. In fact, I decided to purchase their Architect theme for our church’s website. I considered going the 100% free route when developing our church’s website, but decided a one-time fee of $80 was well worth it for a clean theme that did exactly what I wanted it to do.
• WPRemix ($75) – I used this theme for a project I was doing quite a while ago and it was pretty difficult to use. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has been updated significantly since then and is now more user-friendly.
• ChurchRoot (as low as $12.50) – This website just launched a few days ago on March 9 and is, as the name suggests, targeted specifically at churches. They have some great specials since they are just now launching their site.
• Thesis ($87) – Everywhere I turn these days, people are using this theme. Supposedly it is really flexible and customizable, yet has a really clean look to it. I’ve never used it, but it looks like a great theme.

Please leave some links and comments in the comments section below if you know of other great themes for churches. And yes, you can promote your own themes, paid or free! If I like them, I’ll add them to the body of the post.

Source from :

http://mattcleaver.com/2009/03/16/how-i-built-a-church-website-for-free-picking-a-wordpress-theme/

Using WordPress to open the window into your church’s life is a recurring theme of my blog and one of the ways I’ve been able to share some of my skills with others.

A number of my own WordPress themes were designed for churches in mind, and I was surprised to discover someone had reckoned my Delta theme “the only decent-looking church theme”. I’m sure there are plenty of other great themes out there. So here is my version of the ten best that I have noticed being used.

And, oh dear, I could only find 6, that I could say were in some way “best”.

They are in no particular order and I hope you won’t mind me at including at least one mine!

1. Delta

I’m not sure it is the “the only decent-looking church theme”, but it is the one I put together for out church web site. You can see it in action here.
Theme Homepage

2. Ad Clerum

Ad Clerum is a distinctive theme and has been put to good use by Antelope Valley Church.

Theme Homepage

3. Mandigo

Mandigo is a fairly standard and popular WordPress theme. It has some big name users like Sony and Björk. Lindale First Baptist has put it to use for their web site, though the customised version is not quite to my taste.
Theme Homepage

4. Andreas09

Another popular WordPress theme. This one is here, because it is running on WordPress.com, which is where smaller churches with less technical skill can be on-line in five minutes for free. Immanuel Baptist seem to do OK with this. But…

Symmetrical 3-column designs are fundamentally flawed as a concept. One of the reason why Drupal hasn’t hit WordPress levels yet is the dominance of the 3 column centred theme – which just doesn’t work.
Theme Homepage

5. Ocean Mist

A much better theme, but also available on WordPress.com is Ocean Mist. Serpentine Rd Family Church are using this one.

Theme Homepage

6. Upsilon

OK, so I’ve included two of my themes, but while Delta gets the accolades, Upsilon has been the most popular of my themes; and not just for church applications. The main reason is that it includes SmoothGallery for a cool rotating header. See it action on Perimeter Pointe church’s site.
Theme Homepage

Help me out here!

There must be more than this. What do you think? Which ones have I missed? What is the best WordPress church theme? They must be free to be in with a shout and they must be being used by a church!

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Similar posts:

• Yet Another Five WordPress driven churches
• WordPress-Driven Church Smoothy
• Five more WordPress-driven churches
• Five more WordPress Churches
• Church Planting with WordPress

Today, Amir Helzer from WPML (WordPress Multilingual) shares his experience building a custom WordPress theme.

When you’re designing your blog all sorts of options are open to you - starting with a free theme (that you can later edit), through a premium customizable theme (like Thesis or Revolution2) and ending with a custom theme, created just for your site.

In January, Web Designer Matt Brett talked here about how to redesign a blog (and part 2). These posts covered the design goals, functionality and implementation. I’d like to talk about the process of working with the designer - the person who’s going to create your theme.

If you’re thinking about getting a custom theme, following these steps can make the process shorter, more productive and more enjoyable for both you and the designer.

1) State what you need and define the scope of the work

We’ll start with a list of everything that we need from this design:

A WordPress theme - sounds obvious, but you don’t want the designer to supply you just the PSD files, or a HTML file that you can turn into a theme yourself, right? Specify which version of WordPress you’re going to use it with.

Logo - a professionally designed logo can be expensive by itself, so make sure it’s included. When you ask for a logo, remember that you’ll also want to use it in printed material (like business cards or in magazines). This means asking for a high resolution version of your logo with transparent background.

Copyright - make sure it’s crystal clear that you have full copyright and exclusivity. This implies that the designer cannot use anything that violates the rights of others.

The discussion about copyright should clearly mention back-links. Web designers often give away free themes in exchange for credit links. If you want to link back to your designer’s site, that’s great, but you should decide that. You can instruct the designer to get your approval for any outgoing link placed in the theme.

Testing - ask the designers to supply a preview of your theme on their server. Normally, you can’t test their work on your live site. You might need to supply contents for this, or just do with the standard Lorem Ipsum.

2) WordPress theme basics - which elements to ask for

WordPress is evolving and theme design is more than just putting HTML in pages. You need to specify what kind of functionality you expect to get from your website.

List everything that you know you need. Here is what I told my designer when we started:

My design should include:

• Front page
• ‘Regular’ internal pages - for general purpose texts.
• ‘Features’ internal pages - these pages should have a unique template that lets me highlight special features.
• Posts (with threaded comments)
• Category pages
• Search

The design should have site-wide navigation including top tabs with drop-down menus, breadcrumbs trail navigation and context-dependent sidebar navigation. There should also be room reserved for the language switcher (inside the header).

The sidebar should be widget ready. Comments in posts and pages must support threading. Every page in the website must be HTML clean (pass HTML validation).

This list doesn’t tell the designer how I want the site to look, it just lists which things I need. Since she was doing a redesign for an existing site, I didn’t need to explain much about the contents for each page. If you’re getting a theme for a new site, there’s more explaining to do.

3) Prototypes come before the design

Even though you’ve chosen great designers, they’re not mind-readers. Ask the designer to provide prototypes before building any HTML or coding the theme. This way, you can approve the design concept before too much work has been put into it.

A prototype is normally delivered as an image (JPEG or PNG). During your work on the prototype, you need to take care of all the design issues. This includes the color scheme, look and feel, layout and content arrangement.

When you’ve accepted the prototype, know that this is how your site will appear. There’s not much room for design changes later on in the process. The designer’s job changes from design to implementation.

4) Payment and delivery terms

Last, but not least, before the project kicks off, you should agree on both payment and delivery terms.

Design work is not like building a railroad. You can’t pay per mile. However, there are some checkpoint on the way:

• Prototype / wireframe design
• Working draft
• Completed and polished design

Both you and the designer would feel better if payment is split per delivery. You can make an initial payment, release payment when each milestone is met and the final payment is left for when the work completes and is fully reviewed.

Ready to begin your custom theme design? Here’s a quick checklist of what we talked about:

1. Project overview
2. Detailed scope of work
3. Payment and delivery terms

In the next part of this post (tomorrow), we’ll talk about how to help the design go smoothly and make sure you’re getting everything you asked for.

This post was written by Amir Helzer, founder of WPML, a mega-plugin that aims to turn WordPress into a fully featured multilingual content management system.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Designing a Custom WordPress Theme - Working with a Designer

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 Finally!! A Complete Step By Step System For Creating Your Own Video Sales Letter From Scratch Using WordPress … It’s As Easy As Riding A Bike With Training Wheels …

“Now Anyone Can Have Their Own Professionally Designed, Red Hot Video Sales Letter Page in Under 15 Minutes …”

… personally engaging your site visitors in ways that will let them watch, read, listen & interact with your message while at the same time persuading and convincing them to take action, opt-in and even buy your product right now!

Dear Web Entrepreneur,

Are you sick of hearing that video is the next new big marketing tool that you simply have to utilize? Tired of seeing video on almost every website but yours? Have you thought about doing a weekly video newsletter or adding video to your existing sales letter web page? Have you seen websites like Armand Morin’s Big Seminar website and wondered what kind of sales or conversions he is making from a seemingly simple web page?

Are you confused about how to create a video and put up a web page featuring that video so that you can finally start making money on the Internet? Have you ever received David Frey’s Video Newsletter in your email inbox and wondered, “How the heck does he do that?” or “Why do his website salesletters look so darn professional and what can I do to make mine look like that?

Have you been to YouTube and seen videos with hundreds of thousands of views and thought to yourself, “I bet that guy is making a fortune off such an amazing promotional video like that one!”

Maybe you even keep telling yourself that you are going to make your own video and get in the game.

If this sounds like you, then this could be the most important website you ever read.

Here is your wake-up call…

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Video Is One Of Your Greatest Marketing Tools - Period! I Challenge You to Look at ANY Wildly Successful Internet Marketing Business that Isn’t Utilizing Web Video In One Way or Another.”

You Can Use Any of the Available Templates Shown Below (Which Can ALL Be Fully Customized!!

Click any of the thumbnail images below to see the included Video Sales Letter Templates (links will open in a new window):

Which of these video sales letter templates could you use to grow your business?

Give me 15 Minutes and I Will Give You a Customized Sales Letter Page Guaranteed to Increase Sales!

We have all seen those mini-sites designed to be instant sales letters to sell a product, usually an ebook or audio program, and let’s face it - they all look alike!

I know instantly when I land on one of those pages that it is merely a cookie cutter sales letter page and it is going to be predictable. Using video allows you to change that cookie cutter feel into something that will let you truly show your customers your personality. Studies have shown that adding video to your site increases response rates. Whether you are trying to convince someone to buy your product or just opt-in to your mailing list, video helps!

Video lets you become a real person to your website visitors. It helps the visitor feel like they can identify with you and hopefully trust you. Creating a successful video will allow people to feel more comfortable joining your mailing list or taking you up on your offer, whatever it is.

Think of it this way…

Have you ever gone into a store just to have the salesperson or cashier ignore you or carry on a conversation with someone else while you are left to figure everything out for yourself? Imagine that you have a bunch of questions about a product in the store and not one person comes up to see if you need help. It’s frustrating right?

Now imagine that you walk into that same store and the salesperson or owner greets you with a smiling friendly face asking if they can help answer any of your questions. Two totally different experiences, right? In the second scenario, you feel welcome and comfortable. What does that tell you? Your customers are just like you - they crave human contact. They want to know that they can trust you and relate to you … they want to know that you give a darn and that when they need you, you will be there.

If You Aren’t Convinced Yet that
Using Video Can Help You Skyrocket Your Sales
Read This!

Now I am sure you already know that YouTube.com sold for 1.65 BILLION dollars. If that doesn’t tell you how important video is to your marketing efforts, then stop reading now - this is not for you - you will NEVER get it.

There are crazy wacky videos put out by internet marketers that get more than 1 million views on YouTube alone. If that isn’t marketing power - I don’t know what is. That is over 1 million prospects viewing your message … FOR FREE! Are you getting this yet? Whether you plan on using video in your sales letter or marketing campaign - video sells!

One marketer owner of a membership site has acquired over one thousand members for his membership site at a fee of $29 a month - you do the math … He is bringing in more than 29 THOUSAND DOLLARS a month, mostly because of a creative YouTube video that has been viewed more than 1.1 million times.

If You Can Write a Blog Post in WordPress Then You Can Have a Video Sales Letter Page That Gets Results!

Click Here to Order Now!!

Now before you start panicking because you have no idea how to create a video - let alone get it onto your computer or website, just relax because you are going to get everything you need to put up a video sales letter on the Internet and you will amaze yourself how easy it is. And guess what? … it all starts with a WordPress account - which is FREE!

If you can write an email, you can write a blog post in WordPress. It’s as easy as writing an e-mail to one of your friends.

Let’s take a look at what you will need to know in order to create a video sales letter page using WordPress. The trend of the Internet is that it’s all about content. Your visitors want answers to their questions - solutions to their problems - and that is what video can accomplish and what WordPress makes easy.

WordPress is basically a content management platform that helps you write and manage your articles, posts and various other content. It allows you to add and manage photos, images, audios, videos and other media that helps you communicate with your site visitors.

• Are you sick of relying on someone else to make updates or changes to your website?
• Are you frustrated trying to figure out how to create your own videos so that you can compete in the marketplace?
• Are you worried that unless you learn how to add video to your business, you will be surpassed by your competition?
• Are you fed-up with paying a ton of money on products on the Internet that are too difficult to use and you end up doing nothing with them?
• Do you need a Smokin’ Hot Website but don’t want to pay the thousands of dollars many web designers charge?
• Do you need other interesting ways to “make-over” your business so that you can give new life to sales and boost your newsletter opt-ins?
• Do you need to have a persuasive website that will convince visitors to register for your seminars or teleseminars?
• Does any of this sound familiar?

If you want to improve traffic, receive more opt-ins or sell more products and services then you need to know the Internet Genius, Ben Cope. He is the Go-To Guy for WordPress themes that are not only professionally designed, but easy to use.

Ben has countless clients that have implemented his WordPress themes with fantastic results. He can set-up, install and customize your Video Sales Letter template if you want, or you can do it yourself with the easy to follow, step-by-step instructions he provides to make setting up your site a snap. If you have ever been frustrated by programs that sit on your shelf unopened and unused then you will love your Video Sales Letter. Why? Because the “Full Service” version includes free installation and setup, PLUS one full hour of customization by Ben himself, The Internet Genius. He will customize your salesletter site to fit your specific needs and special situation.

If you are like many small business owners and online marketers, you may have been led to believe that creating a video for the web is expensive and difficult.