Are you one of the many online publishers using WordPress? As your blog or site grows you’ll need to decipher which hosting solution benefits you the most. We won’t keep you in suspense: Cloud Hosting IS the answer. This post is here to explain why.

Hello WordPress

WordPress is the ultimate in user friendly blogging and CMS platforms. The fact is, WP is an open source godsend that has made it possible for millions of people–most with little to no web design and development experience–the opportunity to customize a website to fit their needs and vision.

Themes, plugins and widgets are changing the way web newbies and techie experts alike design online content. And as WP enters into its tenth year, we should see even more developments that make publishing web content easy and accessible to the masses.

WordPress, Meet the Cloud

The term cloud is thrown around all over the place these days. It certainly wins the award for most popular marketing buzzword in 2013, anyway (funny enough, its such a buzzword it’s made the term buzzword a buzzword in the blogosphere, believe it or not). But I digress.

Anyway, just remember that the “cloud” is just that: a trendy term.

What cloud computing really means is that accessing data can now be done very easily over the Internet, rather than on your computer’s hard drive. So rather than downloading software and tech resources locally, it is available in an overarching network that spans the Internet. This makes life easier for both IT wizards and common folk.

So what does this mean for WordPress users? The four S’s: Speed, Scale, Support, and Security.

WordPress + Cloud = <3

Some bloggers and marketers try to call out hosting companies for making the concept of the cloud seem too “magical”, alluding that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. They’re wrong. WordPress hosting in the cloud is a match made in heaven.

• Security: As mentioned above, WordPress is extremely popular. Thus, hackers find it pretty alluring. The great thing is, our WP cloud hosting is offered with: redundant firewalls, DDoS protection, custom firewall rules, malware scanning, and more.
• Support: Giving quick, well rounded tech support is simple in the cloud. Diagnosing errors is pretty easy as well with such access. What’s more, if one server on the network crashes, it’s backed up by multiple other sources–meaning no downtime for your precious site.
• Scale: Making things cost effective and efficient, the cloud hosting solution for your WP site allows for scalability. This means you can scale any and all of your resources as you go, with complete control of RAM, disk space, CPU cores, and bandwidth.
• Speed: Things are just quicker in the cloud. Users lack patience, and with the CDN of a WP site hosted in the cloud, things come at your users quickly, giving them no time to navigate away from your page or move on to some other shiny object.

Check out more WordPress articles!

• Top 10 Amazing WordPress Plugins You Shouldn’t Miss
• Top 15 Premium WordPress Themes for a Wedding
• 25 Excellent Personal WordPress Themes
• ThemeFuse Review: Launching a New WordPress Site Is No Longer a Hassle!
• Top Solutions for Easy Online Payments on WordPress

Did you enjoy this article? We would love to hear your thoughts, so don’t be shy and comment below! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

We’ve come to a point in time, where creatives can help other creatives pursue their passions. If you feel that a specific project is reasonable and beneficial, you have the ability to vote with your money. Because of your help, an idea turns into reality. Plus, depending on how much you pledge, you’ll receive an early copy or special edition of the work. That’s a very powerful concept.

Now that you’ve got the basic idea, let’s discuss why you should create your own crowd funding website. If you’re the entrepreneur type, I’m sure you probably have thousands of ideas floating in your head right now. The following themes will allow large groups, online communities, and other organizations fund project they’re most passionate about. You don’t necessarily have to compete with Kickstarter or Indiegogo. I mean you can try, however if I was in your shoes I would tackle a specific niche.

Let’s use the design community as an example. What if you were to start a crowd funding website for designers? Think about all of the possibilities. Other fellow designers could help fund each others projects like icon sets, logo designs, posters, calendars, vector graphics, themes, printed materials, and much more. You could potentially start your own business helping others seek their passions.

Thanks to the efforts of great designers & developers, launching your own crowd funding websites on WordPress has become a reality. Today we’ve collected the absolute best crowd funding WordPress themes for you to consider. You can publish your own campaigns or build a community where people can submit campaigns to your site. Enjoy!

Campaignify – $55

Creating a crowd funding site has never been easier with Campaignify – the best theme for single campaign fundraising currently available. Imagine taking the very best of a Kickstarter campaign and leaving the frustrating parts behind.

• You won’t be told what you can or can’t raise funds for – because it’s your own site.
• You won’t have any part of your funds raised for your cause or project taken from you.
• You won’t have any other campaigns draw your viewers attention away from your project.

Like everyone else, your prospects carry their phones with them everywhere they go. Now they can participate in your fundraising campaign without waiting until they’re at a computer. Campaignify is mobile-friendly with a responsive theme and allows users to create pledges easily from their phone.

Demo & Download

CrowdPress – $55

CrowdPress is a crowd funding WordPress theme created bu Justin Scheetz. This responsive theme lets you create your own crowd-funding site in minutes. It provides multiple features like layouts, fonts, styling, colors, custom widgets, page customizer, and much more. This theme does require two plugins to run properly. Both of them are free: Easy Digital Downloads & Crowdfunding by Astoundify.

Demo & Download

Fundingpress – $55

Fundingpress is a WordPress theme that allows you to create your own crowd funding site. Users will be able to create projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others. A lot of thought and care went into the creation of this theme. Fundingpress is very easy to use, and packed with numerous details so that you can easily monitor the progress of your projects.

Demo & Download

Fundify – $60

Fundify is a WordPress theme that lets you create your own crowd funding website. Raising money has never been easier. Tell people what you are doing and inspire them to contribute to your campaign. Offer creative rewards and perks for your backers. Submitted campaigns will be “pending” until approved by the site administrator.

Fundify isn’t just an amazing WordPress theme for crowd funding, it is a complete WordPress theme for business and blogging too! Fundify is coded with a responsive design which means it will look great no matter how you view the site. This makes your campaigns and your blog easily accessible to mobile devices, tablets, and desktops alike.

Demo & Download

Check out more awesome WordPress themes!

• Top 15 Premium WordPress Themes for a Wedding
• 25 Excellent Personal WordPress Themes
• 15 Premium Hosting WordPress Themes
• 45 Outstanding Themes for Photographers
• 40 Retina Ready Premium WordPress Themes

Did you enjoy this article? We would love to hear your thoughts, so don’t be shy and comment below! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Thanks to Wordpress, it’s easier that every to get a website up and running. Your guests will also find it much easier to R.S.V.P. and stay informed about your wedding. You can put all the important information on the website like where the ceremony and the party will be held, gift registry information, photos from the wedding, bridesmaids, groomsmen, your story, wedding blog, accommodations, and much more.

Be sure to think beyond your wedding when choosing a domain name. Don’t include words like “wedding” or other related terms. This will come in handy when you want to change the website and use it as a family blog or etc. Today we compiled a high quality list of wedding based WordPress themes. We hope you’ll like at least one of them for your perfect wedding. Enjoy!

Analytical full Width WordPress Theme – $49

Analytical WordPress theme is a full width theme built keeping Photographers and other users who wants to show more graphics on their website. The theme features a full width Background slider which is highly customizable and is totally responsive.

Demo & Download

Just Married – $17-$49

Crafted with pixel perfect details, this wedding WordPress theme will let you document and share your wedding experience with your friends and family in an original out of the box way. The built in RSVP module lets you take control of all your RSVP requirements and ensure a fast and easy communication with guests directly from the WordPress admin. It doesn’t matter if they use desktops, tablets or smartphones, your visitors will enjoy the same remarkable experience. All the elements scale and resize depending on the device the website is viewed on.

Demo & Download

Marriage – $40

“Marriage” is a wedding related theme that looks great on all devices including mobile. The design is a minimal one with nice simple colors and custom web fonts to match the wedding event. You’ll be provided with a custom admin panel from where you can easily edit the main settings, change colors, modify the layout, just read the HELP file to better understand how to do it.

Demo & Download

Unique Wedding – $40

Unique Wedding is a clean, fully responsive, light, fast, professional, flexible, modern & easy WordPress Template. Intuitive and ready with the most modern Technologies. Built with HTML5 & CSS3, based on Twitter Bootstrap & SEO Ready, we included all features you need to create your Wedding web site.

Demo & Download

GeekLove – $40

GeekLove is a beautiful, clean, minimal and responsive WordPress theme for wedding. It’s even more beautiful on retina displays. With an elegant design and rich features GeekLove allows you to create a website for your wedding in minutes!

Demo & Download

Game Over – $35

Game Over is an elegant and romantic wedding event theme with a powerful drag-and-drop layout builder intended for couples that are looking for engagement or wedding planning theme or an online invitation card.

Demo & Download

The Big Day! – $40

Welcome to The Big Day! : A feature-rich, easy-to-use responsive WordPress theme built on the popular Super Skeleton theme system (with a community of over 10,000 users). It’s designed for users, not geeks – all by a couple brothers in Southern California who just loves making rockin’ WP themes for other folks. WP 3.5 Ready!

“The Big Day” is for events – Specifically for weddings & celebrations, but certainly not limited to them. If you have a corporate, charity, church, or school oriented event, this theme is perfect for quickly and easily popping up a site within minutes!

Demo & Download

Wedding Day – $35

Wedding Day is a HTML5/CSS3 optimized, Bootstrap powered responsive theme perfect for wedding invitation, personal and business websites. The theme also comes with RSVP support so you can use any plug-in with this theme.

Demo & Download

Soul – $40

The Soul theme features an elegant,clean and minimal look to give your wedding site an outstanding look. Setup your wedding site now using our Soul Responsive WordPress Wedding theme.

Demo & Download

The Wedding – $40

Planning on getting married? Don’t forget to setup your wedding site using The Wedding WordPress theme. The Wedding features an elegant and classy look to give your wedding site an outstanding look. Setup your wedding site now using The Wedding theme.

Demo & Download

Moreno – $35

Moreno is a Wedding Event WordPress Theme. It’s super simple. It has a responsive design meaning your content will be displayed beautifully on all mobile devices.

Demo & Download

Weda Elegance – $40

Wedda Elegance is an incredibly powerful and responsive product. The main aspects of the theme are controlled with custom post types and theme options panel. Theme created on powerful object oriented framework. Imagine tons of features, shortcodes, styles and widgets! Wedda Elegance Premium WordPress Theme has many great built-in features and theme options with automated shortcodes. Designed for wedding blogs, reviewers, agencies, magazines, and specially for you!

Demo & Download

MJ – $30

MJ is a HTML /CSS/Wordpress optimized Theme perfect for wedding invitation, personal and business websites. Theme also supports tablet versions ( both 800×600 and 600×800 )

Demo & Download

Adam & Eve – $49

Let your friends and family experience these adventures with you to the fullest and get their comments to support and share their stories with you. Adam & Eve is designed to have responsive layout. That means your website will look great no matter the device or screen size on which it is being viewed. Adam & Eve comes with four sidebar positions: the left and right sidebar for each of you, the middle sidebar and the bottom sidebar.

Demo & Download

Wedding – $35

Wedding is a Powerful Single Page Responsive WordPress Theme. With this theme, you can easily create a wedding related website, but you can also use it for other purposes too, everything is flexible and easy to customize.

Demo & Download

Check out more awesome themes:

• 55 Brilliant Blog and Magazine WordPress Themes
• 30 Charity, Non-Profit and Donation WordPress Themes
• Free WordPress Themes Released in Summer 2012
• 15 Extraordinary WordPress Themes by Theme Trust
• 25+ Premium Food Based WordPress Themes

We hope you enjoyed this collection! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

There are thousands of WordPress plugins available on the internet, but today I am going to talk about the top 10 WordPress plugins that every blogger must install on their website. So without wasting your valuable time let’s see what those plugins are.

1. WordPress SEO – With this SEO plugin you can make your website search engine friendly and also optimize your posts individually so that they can rank higher on search engines. WordPress SEO also builds a sitemap for your site which you can submit on Google’s webmaster tools to help them index your site more quickly. Overall this is the best free SEO plugin that you can install on your blog.

2. BackWPup – You must install this plugin on your website if you really care about your sites security. With this plugin you can backup your full WordPress database and you can store the backup files on services like Amazon S3, Google Storage, Dropbox, SugarSync. No matter what happens to your website, you can always get everything back as long as you have the backup files.

3. WP-Optimize – You can easily save tons of database space with this plugin. When you create a post, by default WordPress automatically creates post revisions. With Wp-Optimize plugin you can easily delete your post revisions, auto drafts, spam comments, unapproved comments, and optimize your database tables with just a few clicks.

4. WordPress.com Stats – If you don’t use Google analytics on your website then you should install this plugin instead. WP Stats shows you your top posts, pages, referrers, search engine terms, outgoing clicks, and of course live traffic stats. This plugin will appear on your wp-dashboard page so that whenever you will login to your account you can instantly see your traffic stats.

5. Better WP Security – Every website is incomplete without a security plugin. I’m sure you’re constantly reading news about companies getting hacked every other month of so. The most recent one, as of April 2013, was LivingSocial. 50 million users were affected! Security isn’t a joke, your website needs to have proper security plugins like Better WP Security.

6. Broken Link Checker – Google hates broken links. If your website even has one, you need to remove it as soon as possible. Broken links can and will hurt your search engine rankings. Why should you waste your time manually finding and removing your website’s broken links? Simply install the Broken Link Checker plugin and remove any broken link with a click of your mouse.

7. Simple Feed Copyright – Many people will steal your website content through your RSS feed. You obviously should stop this from happening. Simple Feed Copyright plugin will add a copyright notice at the end of a post in full text RSS feeds so that Google can easily find the real content.

8. WP Super Cache – This awesome plugin is recommended by almost every hosting company. This plugin will speed up your website’s page loading time and reduce the bandwidth usage of your hosting account.

9. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – If your website bounce rate is very high then you can fix this problem by displaying related posts at the end of your article. This plugin shows very accurate related posts which will increases pageviews and reduce your bounce rate.

10. WP Smush.it – Yahoo’s Exceptional Performance series recommends optimizing images in several lossless ways: stripping meta data from JPEGs, optimizing JPEG compression, converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs and stripping the un-used colors from indexed images. Smush.it performs these optimizations for faster loading. With a click of your mouse you can reduce all the images at once or individually in the image library. This is a must have plugin for websites that use tons of images.

Check out our previous articles!

• ThemeFuse Review: Launching a New WordPress Site Is No Longer a Hassle!
• 25 Excellent Personal WordPress Themes
• Top Solutions for Easy Online Payments on WordPress
• WordPress Updates That Nurtured a Blogging and CMS Revolution
• The Year of Mobile: WordPress Plugins for Instant Responsive Design

Did you enjoy this article? We would love to hear your thoughts, so don’t be shy and comment below! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

What is it exactly?

Just to give you a quick summary of the whole service, here’s a short elevator pitch: It allows you to pick a theme from ThemeFuse’s gallery and have it installed by their team, on an optimized hosting platform, and under a new domain (of your choosing). From a client’s point of view, this is great because the only thing you have to do is choose a theme and your work is done. Then after a while, you end up with a fully functional WordPress site. Cool, isn’t it?

Who is this for?

The official press release says that it’s for beginners in the WordPress world who don’t want to deal with all the hassle that’s usually involved when building a site. That is true. However, I’d say that it’s also for anyone who simply can’t be bothered to set everything up on their own and would rather have it done by someone else. Hence it’s also a good deal for pro developers and designers.

Does it work?

Here’s the thing, creating a product for beginners is actually really really really hard due to something called the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is, for example, what prevents you from explaining a basic concept of an area that you are an expert in to a complete beginner. In other words, it’s when the scope of your knowledge makes it impossible for you to switch to a beginner state of mind and be able to deliver value in an easy to grasp way.

This is ultimately the reason why no one understands university professors when they try to explain things… And sometimes, it’s also a problem with many “beginner” products in various niches. So today, I want to check if this new service has similar issues or not. This is how I’m going to do this – my original testing method:

• The service gets a credit of 10 points to start with.
• I’m going to go through the entire setup process and try acting like I’m completely new.
• If something isn’t clear, that’s -1 point.
• At the end of the test, we’ll have the final score.

The test begins

To take advantage of this new offer, all you have to do is go to ThemeFuse.com and click the promotional banner/bar that’s right at the top of the homepage. When you do so, you’ll be redirected to the official signup page.

Quite a long page, but it explains the main idea behind the service pretty clearly, so it’s surely worth a read. There’s a signup button at the bottom.

After clicking it, you’ll end up straight in the theme gallery, where you can choose whatever theme you like (every theme is included in this new service). After browsing around for a while I’ve decided to go with Conexus. 

The sales page for every theme itself is very clear with a visible buy button. But the next step – after clicking this buy button – can cause some problems. It’s an order customization page, and unfortunately, I’m going to have to call “-1″ on that (yeah, let’s keep this review honest). Here’s the problem, this is what this order customization page looks like:

Since I’m interested in the “theme-domain-hosting” package, I clicked the big blue box at the bottom of the screen, which led straight back to the page where I started this whole journey. Not a serious issue, but still a little misleading. Anyway, the thing you should click here is either the BUY STANDARD version button or the BUY DEVELOPER version button (in most cases it’s the former). Okay, let’s do that and see what happens.

Everything is back on track in this step. There’s a very clear confirmation page where you can click the orange button and get started with the new service. The next screen:

This is where you have the possibility to get a new domain along with your package (the domain is optional; you can skip it if you already have one). By the way, if you decide to get a domain, it’s free for the first year. You get to choose from domains under.com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info. After clicking the Review Order button you’ll see the final confirmation page.

This is where you can check if everything is alright, pick a payment method, input a discount code if you have one, and finally proceed to checkout. One more step you have to take care of before the checkout itself is the signup page for a client account at ThemeFuse.

What follows next is a standard PayPal payment procedure (if you’ve selected PayPal as your payment method). I don’t think any screenshots are necessary here… It’s a pretty standard PayPal transaction. Lastly, after successfully completing the transaction you can go back to ThemeFuse (through the link provided inside PayPal). Well, apparently, that’s it for the whole purchase process. All that follows now is an email from ThemeFuse informing you that the site is up and running.

Now here’s the best part. Literally 15 minutes after completing my purchase, my new domain was live, and I could access the site’s Dashboard via the client panel at ThemeFuse.com. Again, that’s 15 minutes. (Note. This is a fully functional WordPress site. So you get unlimited access to the Dashboard, where you can publish posts, pages, create new user accounts, install plugins and so on.)

The good

To be honest, I love everything about this service. It’s clear, the signup form is impressively simple, and the whole idea itself is superb. The main element where this service stands out is its ease of use. You really don’t need any experience in order to handle the signup process. Everyone can do it.

The bad

If you’ve read this closely then you’ve noticed there’s only one “-1″ moment. And to be honest, it wasn’t even that serious. Just a single, little misleading message for people landing on the order page. The signup process itself is so simple that it’s really hard for me to find anything else wrong with it. And believe me, I tried. I even waited for the session to invalidate and did other similarly strange things, but nothing bad happened. More than that, I made my test on Saturday, and even despite this the site was live within 15 minutes.

Plans and pricing

ThemeFuse sells their themes for a variety of price points. The standard range is $49 to $99 for a standard license (there’s also one free theme). The hosting package is $69 a year. In the end, to get started, you need $128 in total, and that’s exactly what I paid during the test.

The bottom line

Let’s compare this service to the traditional way of launching a WordPress site. Usually, you have to do the following things:

1. Get a domain.
2. Choose and buy a hosting account.
3. Connect the two together (not always that simple).
4. Install WordPress (either by hand or through an auto-installer).
5. Get a theme and upload it to your hosting account.
6. Install the theme itself.

With this new service, on the other hand, there’s just one step:

1. Pick a theme at ThemeFuse and tell them to handle the setup process for you.

I mean, you can’t beat that. I believe that this service truly is the perfect solution for every beginner to get a site as quickly and effortlessly as possible. What do you think? If you decide to take advantage of this service, don’t forget to shot me a message and let me know how it went. Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Thinn - $35

Thinn is a fully responsive personal WordPress theme. It features:

• A unique design, designed in balance.
• SEO Optimized.
• Super Easy Installation & Setup.
• Unlimited Colors.
• Google-Fonts Ready.
• Organized .php, .css and .js files.
• Customisable accent colour.
• Constant updates.
• External & Custom Plugin’s & Widgets Support.

Demo & Download

Basic – $35

Basic is an ultra-clean blog theme. Basic gives you the ability to let people actually read your content, instead of focusing on all the other stuff that’s going on their screen. With Basic, you won’t be distracted.

Demo & Download

Blogrid – $40

Blogrid is grid-based multi-purpose WordPress theme. Show off content with all post format that are there. Create online portfolio or gallery with few clicks. Count views and likes. Use unique and useful templates. All options are builded in customizer, play with them and see results before publishing them to audience.

Demo & Download

Phrase – $35

Phrase is a Responsive WordPress Blog Theme, best suited for Magazines and Personal Blogs. It comes with 5 custom widgets, 10 post formats and tons of theme options. Phrase was developed on Bootstrap — beautiful boilerplate for responsive development so it look beautiful at any size, be it a 17” laptop screen or an iPad, iPhone.

Demo & Download

Thumb WordPress Theme – $45

Thumb is a advanced blog Theme. Easy to setup, enhanced with Massive Panel, Visual Composer and custom shortcode wizard. This combination makes creating content extremely easy.

Demo & Download

Duplex – $35

Duplex is a clean personal blog theme, perfect for sharing your world. Duplex is all about posting what matters to you. Whether it’s graphics, videos, music, or photography, you can always find a space for it with Duplex.

Demo & Download

Read WP – $35

Read is a responsive HTML5 WordPress theme focused on readability with a minimalist design.

Demo & Download

_rite – $35

_rite, minimal responsive blogging at its finest, you write and allow your visitors to read without distractions.

Demo & Download

Blogdrops – $40

Blogdrops is infinite, fresh and minimal WordPress theme with mansory and fully responsive layout. Theme is suited for personal or magazine websites. Theme includes lots of advanced features and functions and is based on solid backend framework.

Demo & Download

Diario – $40

If you are searching something different and out of the line, please check out Diario – Bold & Minimal Responsive WordPress Theme. Diario is a fully configurable and easy to use WordPress theme with a lot of great features. It has been specifically designed to be easily customized and it’s created for creatives who want to make personal blog in minutes.

Demo & Download

Foodie – $45

Foodie is a blogging theme with a focus on food. Whether you are a seasoned chef, or just getting comfortable in the kitchen, Foodie allows you to showcase and talk about your latest creations, or the art of food in general.

Demo & Download

Apart – $35

Apart is a super simple, photoblog-style WordPress theme for sharing your images, videos, articles, quotes and more. Use it as a personal blog or a minimal portfolio to show off your latest works! It has a responsive design meaning your content will be displayed beautifully on all mobile devices.

Demo & Download

It’s estimated that almost 70% of the developers use WordPress for building a blog or website. Tell designers that you want a website built cheap, yet with zero compromises on quality, they will suggest WordPress. Since, the time it made its appearance way back in 2003, it has keep adding to its repertoire, and its various releases have just made this platform bigger and better.

Let’s take a journey through the various WordPress releases and see how these updates revolutionized the way we blog and what we expect from a CMS platform.

Version 0.7 Released on May 7, 2003

Today, only the 0.71 Gold version is officially available for download from the WordPress Release Archives Page, nevertheless there is no doubt that its launch almost 10 years ago started a revolution. Developers could use features like Highly Intelligent Line Breaks, New Administration Interface, Manual Excerpts and New Default Templates, default plugins for better navigations etc. to create websites and blogs that were as good, if not better, than those built with proprietary software.

It can safely be said that the release of WordPress gave everybody who wanted an affordable online presence, the power to dream big, and dream cutting edge.

1.2 Mingus released on May 22, 2004

A year later, the Mingus update arrived, which added features like sub categories, for adding categories in a single sub category (great for ecommerce sites); another important addition was encrypted passwords and cookies, which offered better security; advanced comment moderation, was another feature that made blog commenting simpler and spam free; also bloggers could now view their post with the post preview feature; feature liker and Live Journal Importer ensured that blog followers are updated with the latest news from the blog or site. These and other features, further cemented WordPress’s position as a top notch blogging platform.

1.5 Strayhorn and 2.0 Duke Released in 2005

Two updates by the WordPress community in 2005 really set the ball rolling for some great open source website development. The Strayhorn update was more about blog management, managing latest updates, and customization of default templates. The Duke update gave a boost to the WordPress admin panel and made it faster; it offered a feature called Redesigned Backend which offered on- demand customization of the background; other features included spam and backup plugins, resizable editing, streamlined importing and lots more.

2.1 Ella, 2.2 Getz, and 2.3 Dexter Released in 2007

The expectations with WordPress kept growing, and to keep up with the demand, three versions were released in 2007.

Ella offered features like autosave, that saved your post automatically, a new search engine privacy option, that helped you indicate search engines shouldn’t index your blog, more AJAX integration, faster admin and more visual consistency and much more.

Getz was an update that offered security fixes and tried to plug all the big and small holes in the WordPress blog. An important change that it brought to WordPress is that widgets that were available as plugins were now made available in the core and default themes.

The Dexter update focused on next generation features like native tagging support that allowed users to tag their posts, update notification giving info about any plugin or WordPress update, canonical URLs, advance WYSIWYG and more.

2.5 Brecker, 2.6 Tynerand 2.7 Coltrane Released in 2008

Continuing the tradition of releasing a new update every four months, the WordPress community released three more in 2008. The focus here was upgrading the functionality of the platform and offering users a superlative experience. More designing templates made their appearance on the scene; you could now add videos and pictures to the website; and plugins could now get automatically updated through the administration interface.

2.8 Baker Released in 2009

In a break from tradition, only one update released in 2009, which was the 2.8 Baker. The most notable addition offered was that you could now go through the various themes, from the WordPress dashboard. The Theme Browser feature helped you specify columns, width, and color of the theme; redesigned widget interface, bug fixes, better speed, were just some of the many other features of this update.

2.9 Carmen, 3.0 Thelonious Released in 2010

The Carmen update came with features like Global undo/”trash”, allowing you to restore a deleted post or comment from trash; Built-in image editor allowed users to crop, edit, rotate, flip and scale images; better SEO with rel=canonical; easier video embeds wherein, you just need to paste URL for it to convert into an embeded code, and much more.

In the 3.0 Thelonious, features included a new default theme called Twenty Ten; developers had new APIs for easy implementation of headers, menus, post types etc.; new lighter interface; bulk updates, and many more.

3.1 Reinhardt, 3.2 Gershwin and 3.3 Sony Released in 2011

We are now back two three updates in a calendar year, beginning with Reinhardt, with this release the idea was to make WordPress a better CMS platform. Features like redesigned linking workflow, helping easier linking of existing posts and pages; admin bar to access popular dashboard pages quickly; post formats support for simplifying creation of portable tumblelogs; enhanced CMS capabilities for archiving pages for custom content types and many more made this a great CMS platform.

The sole focus of Gershwin was to boost the speed of WordPress and make it lighter. It offered a tight new dashboard design, an HTML 5 new Twenty Eleven theme, a redesigned post editor, distraction free writing or Zen mode, and other great features.

Honoring the Jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, the 3.3 Sonny update offered features like pointer tips to new users of WordPress, better co-editing support, amongst many other improvements. Here the focus was also on ensuring that even tablet users have a satisfying user experience while using WordPress.

And finally, 3.4 Green, 3.5 Elvin released in 2012

The Green update included significant upgrades to image captions, Twitter embeds and theme customization.

3.5 Elvin focuses on offering next generation features like support for Retina Display, a new Twenty Twelve theme, improved image workflow and many more.

End Words

Through its decade of existence, WordPress has continuously made the effort to reinvent itself to suit the needs and demands of users and developers. This has made it into the platform it is today, and I am sure 2013 will see another update/s that will further enhance the features and functionalities of WordPress.

Check out our previous articles:

• WordPress Secrets that Enterprise CMS Vendors Don’t Want you to Know
• Do You Have Enough Bandwidth on Your WordPress Host?
• Free WordPress Themes Released in Summer 2012
• How To Add Google Analytics to WordPress Multisite
• Increase Social Media Traffic – 7 Free WordPress Plugins

We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

With the rise in digital communications and the widespread use of tablets and smartphones, mobile internet is gaining momentum as the preferred way to access the web. Since 2010, mobile usage has increased 500 percent year-to-year with average smartphone usage tripling in that same time. And just over 10 percent of all web page visits are made from a mobile internet connection via smartphone or tablet. Mobile is growing exponentially – it’s even forecasted to surpass desktop internet usage as early as 2015.

With such an emphasis on mobile browsing, there’s no doubt that “responsive design” is at the forefront of every web professional’s mind.

Responsive web design—or “RWD”—ensures your site is visually appealing no matter what kind of environment it confronts. Through CSS media queries, site layouts are rendered depending on what kind of browser is detected whether on desktop, smartphone or tablet. Responsive design is important because it provides the end user with the best possible website experience without the need to squint, pinch, zoom, or exit the site due to a poor experience when accessed via mobile. In other words, responsive design is intelligent because it allows websites to adapt to different environments on-the-fly while providing the best possible visual experience for the end user.

Give your website visitors an easy, productive mobile experience and gain the rewards with increased pageviews, leads, and conversions.

Here’s how.

Plugins for Responsive Design

Instantly transform your WordPress based site into responsive design without the typical development costs associated with creating a separate mobile site. These plugins solve common problems associated with mobile browsing such as navigation, photo gallery or video.

1. WordPress Responsive Mobile Pack

The WordPress Responsive Mobile Pack is a toolkit packed with responsive essentials including a “mobile switcher” that automatically suggests desktop or mobile presentation, custom color variations, image rescaling, mobile ad resizing, and a wide selection of mobile themes.

Download Here

2. WP Fluid Images

For basic informational websites, you may only need the WP Fluid Images plugin – an essential tool that removes height and width attributes from graphics placed on pages or posts. It replaces CSS image attributes with fluid percentages instead, allowing for a visually suitable experience whether your site is accessed via mobile or desktop.

Download Here

3. FitVids jQuery Plugin

Like images, videos can also cause problems due to typical CSS styles that don’t jive with mobile. Videos often result in stifled bandwidth, pinching, zooming or exiting the website entirely. FitVids jQuery plugin solves the issue by resizing videos into fluid form, eliminating the cumbersome experience ordinarily associated with video on mobile.

Download Here

4. WP Mobile Detect

The WP Mobile Detect plugin solves common problems associated with large files such as photo galleries, chat functions, streaming, graphics and audio that can choke when accessed on smartphones or tablets. Now you can prevent large files from loading on mobile with the use of an easy shortcode.

Download Here

5. Responsive Select Menu

Navigation and menus can be visually challenging on a mobile device, but the Responsive Select Menu plugin resolves the issue by turning them into a select box instead. The plugin converts WordPress 3.0 menus into responsive select boxes, taking up less real estate on pages without space to spare. It’s easier for the user and works automatically – no extra PHP code is necessary.

Download Here

Check out our previous articles:

• WordPress Secrets that Enterprise CMS Vendors Don’t Want you to Know
• Do You Have Enough Bandwidth on Your WordPress Host?
• Free WordPress Themes Released in Summer 2012
• How To Add Google Analytics to WordPress Multisite
• Increase Social Media Traffic – 7 Free WordPress Plugins

We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!