Check out our review of Elegant themes for more details on the service.

They are a fantastic themes club service, and if you are a web developer, or anyone who has ever needed a classy theme for WordPress, Elegant themes is a great value, quality service. For $39 you get access to a huge range of professional themes, the count currently sits at 76.

If you want to be in the draw jump over to the Pingable facebook page and click the like button.

These are a few excellent resources help you learn WordPress.  These are targeted to both experts and newbies.

1. The official documentation.  This is regularly updated by a slew of editors and developers.  Most often, if you Google a WordPress term, the documentation is one of the first results.  There’s a reason for that!

2. WordPress Lessons.  Another official resource, WordPress lessons are targeted towards newbies and intermediate users with specific tasks in mind.

3. WPQuestions.  A Fiverr style website where you can ask a question, name a small price, and people will answer it.  The site takes a cut and the answerer gets paid.  Some people are making a modest living on this site.

4. WP Apprentice.  They are a paid site with a lot of free videos as well.  They will teach you mainly simple tasks aimed at beginners.

5. wp.Tutsplus.com. Part of the TutsPlus and Envato network, this marketplace has lots of tutorials about WordPress.  Some are free, many are paid or part of a membership plan.  But you can guarantee you’ll get quality instruction on WordPress.

Urban (free!)

 Photocrati WordPress Theme for Photographers

By far, the most expansive and variable WordPress Themes for Photographers.  It comes with 15 style variations and 4 layouts which come together to offer 60 different variations.  This one theme could be considered 60 themes-in-one.  But that would be cheating, so here are 49 more!

Photography by ThemeForge

Announcement by WooThemes

Simply Delicious (free!)

Statua by WooThemes

Imbalance (free!)

Imbalance 2 (also free!)

Object by WooThemes

Aperture

Postcard

Portfolium (free!)

Suburbia (Free!)

TheStyle by Elegant Themes

Envisioned by ElegantThemes

Autofocus (Free!)

Notebook by ElegantThemes

Photography by Organic Themes

Photographer Theme (free!)

Invictus

Flashlike Photographer

Photo Nexus

Radiance by YooTheme

Inspire by Yootheme

The Big Easy by YooTheme

Crystal by StudioPress

Blocco by Press75

 Hoon by Press75

Folio

Photocraft by Templatic

Photonote

Vimes

Photoria

Elegance

Graphix

Polaris

Proudfolio

Artistica

Photoland

Gallery

Photoblog

 Retouch Pro

Retouch

Emporia

Immense

Sidewinder

Uno

Mansion

Widescreen

Fullscreen

Using it’s solid and clear interface you can create a custom theme in no time with more than 1000 predesigned elements at different layout options at your disposal. WordPress Theme Generator is a versatile and efficient tool to produce custom themes, for it has more than 1000 design elements that you can use, as well as supporting your uploaded designs. On top of that you can download every theme you created with a ”full of features” framework, as well as saving them within the interface for later edition; this presents the advantage of up-to-date framework in all of them. For an even faster solution it presents a public themes gallery where hundreds of pre-designed themes can be found along with their layered psd files.

WordPress Theme Generator main features

• 1000+ Pre-designed elements
• New design elements added daily
• Change any design aspect with an easy to use interface
• 50+ preloaded fonts to play with
• Unlimited sidebars or widget areas
• Save themes for later edition or download
• Download in both WP & HTML/CSS
• Always updated with the latest WP version
• A powerful framework behind
• Check all features

Framework Options

Within the theme you download using WPThemesGenerator there’s a powerful framework:

• Bootstrap Ready (don’t know what bootstrap is?, please take a look)
• Unlimited sidebars:  Using the layout tool you can create unlimited sidebars or widget areas. (both horizontal or vertical) And assign them in a page by page basis.
• 4 Sliders: Select 4 different slider types.
• Custom logo and images: Upload your own personalized logo and slider images.
• Featured slider: Select featured posts and they will appear in your slider. That easy.
• Live edition window: You can decide whether to show a little sidebar in your site homepage (admin only), which allows you to edit aspects of your theme directly from it, like color, textures, etc.
• Galleries page: You can create full featured galleries that comes with categories and lightbox ready ready to use.
• Portfolio & services pages: Easily create a portfolio or a services page (with categories)
• Products Page: Selling your products never was easier, just add your products images, prices and they will be displayed in a products page (with categories)
• Testimonials Page: Create testimonials from your users.
• Contact form: A ready to use (spam free) contact form.
• Social icons: Add social icons in seconds
• Create GUI elements: Buttons, frames, lightboxes, quotes, sliders, tabbed content, menus, tooltips, highlights, notice boxes, warnings, and more..
• and much more…

Don’t take my word for it and please take a look to the WordPress Theme Generator. Team behind this tool is the same crew of wordpress theme shock and iconshock.

PremiumThemeFinder was invented, as most things, out of necessity.  The creator found himself looking for a premium theme, needing to bounce between memorable theme developers.  It wasted time and energy and caused him to forget the lesser known theme developers.

WordPress users looking for their next premium theme just select tags that describe the theme they’re looking for, and filter through tons of themes really fast.

PTF has a simple purpose: to be a single source premium theme browser that is free, easy-to-use and time saving.  There are no ads and no search engine bait.  Simply click the screenshot to go straight to the theme.  It’s that simple.

The following are some great WordPress magazine themes.  They are well designed, bring lots of organizational function to the WordPress site, and are fun to navigate.  We hope you enjoy them.  You may also enjoy this post about WordPress magazine themes.

The Morning After (Free!)

Premium News (Free!)

Karmag

The Daily Press

Dryer

Radial

Felici (Free!)

Sight (Free!)

If you enjoyed this post or found it useful in choosing a WordPress Magazine Theme, the kindest compliment you could make would be to share it with your friends.

One often neglected customization is the WordPress sign in.  Although most people don’t bother changing it, there are some neat tricks and plugins available to improve both the design and function of the WordPress sign in page.  Here are some of our favorites.

Change the WordPress sign in URL

This is a smart move for security reasons alone.  Changing the universal “domain.com/wp-admin” is the first step to securing your WordPress site.  A free plugin called Hide Login allows you to customize the login and logout urls without modifying the WordPress core.  This is important as many files reference the /wp-admin directory.  You can also set a more cryptic login url and set the plugin to “hide mode” which disallows direct access to wp-login.php.

Customize the WordPress sign in page

This can be done manually through the theme files of course, but why customize code when you may need to go back and re-do your work some day?  Using plugins for this task makes more sense.  The Custom Login plugin, also free, lets you style the WordPress sign in page without knowing any HTML or CSS.  Of course, advanced users can input style code directly.

Just use a custom image

Don’t like the idea of a plugin? This brief tutorial explains how you can insert a custom image by uploading it to the theme’s images file and inserting this code into the functions.php file:

function my_custom_login_logo() {
    echo '<style type="text/css">
        h1 a { background-image:url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/custom-login-logo.gif) !important; }
    </style>';
}

add_action('login_head', 'my_custom_login_logo');

Get some inspiration

Check out these examples of amazing WordPress sign in designs.  Some people get really creative.  Use them as inspiration when you go to design your own page.

Cadillac of WordPress sign in pages

If you’re not worried about spending $15, consider this feature-rich plugin.  It will secure your WordPress sign in page to the extreme by banning malicious IP’s, utilizing captcha, preventing bots from registering, redirects users by role and stops brute-force login attempts.  There is no design function built into the plugin, but it certainly customizes it for maximum security!

The theme is incredibly customizable and serves one very important function.  Users visiting the site can enter their email address to receive future updates.  That’s something many themes can do.  But here is where Launch Effect stands apart.  Users who sign up are provided with a custom generated URL they can use to share with friends.

You can then track referrals so top performers can be rewarded, or just thanked with a kind email.  The following are screenshots of the signup and sharing screens.

As you can see, users can share the launch in lots of different popular ways.

The free version of this theme has all the features described above including a powerful design dashboard and lots of customization options.  It also comes with a small footer linking back to the developer.

The design dashboard allows for complete color and style customization from top to bottom.  All colors, fonts and text is customizable through this dashboard.

The premium version adds functionality to include a progress bar, countdown timer, brandable footer, and full theme functionality to use as a regular WordPress site.  In development for future releases is the ability to add extra form fields and sell single products with Paypal support.

Launch Effect can also integrate seamlessly with Mailchimp (my personal favorite), Google Analytics, AWeber and PressTrends.

The stats are also impressive, allowing the site admin to track signups and conversions each person has generated.  This is great for content entries and true viral launches.

Launch Effect is in use by lots of exciting new concepts right now.  One nice feature of Launch Effect is that no theme ends up looking the same so you don’t have to worry about lots of other sites using the same design.  Check out some of these cool designs:

Go ahead, check out Launch Effect for yourself.  If you’re experienced with this theme, we would love to hear your feedback in the comments below.

Below are some screenshots of premise 2.0, or you can check it out here.