The more than 59,000 free plugins in the WordPress official
directory deal with nearly every feature or function to be put to use in any
type of website. Premium WordPress plugins from third-party marketplaces are
also available. The largest, CodeCanyon, has over 5200 WordPress plugins.
The question is, do you have the time to sift through
59,425 free plugins? Would you do so even if you did had the time?
We tested scores of WordPress plugins, narrowed the options,
and listed what we consider to be the 8 top WordPress plugins for a range of key
functions and purposes.
We looked at plugins for –
building stunning website landing pages with
ease.
visual storytelling featuring unique and
engaging user experiences.
managing and displaying financial, statistical,
scientific, commercial, and other types of data.
automating the booking of appointments and
events.
Since the majority of the following plugins offer a free
version, you’ll be able to build your website for a minimal cost.
The following review provides important knowledge about these
8 great WordPress plugins for 2024:
Some people may tell you that anything worth inventing has
already been invented. That is not true, it probably never will be, and it
certainly will not be the case for the website design world, which just keeps growing
and improving.
Website requirements keep becoming more and more demanding.
Website design has to correspondingly follow suit. Today’s websites have to be fast,
responsive, user-friendly, and engaging in every detail.
Multipurpose WordPress themes are great at helping website
builders get a website up and running quickly and efficiently. That said, what
is involved in finding one that will best meet your needs, especially in terms
of user friendliness and engagement as well as conversion proficiency?
The best way is to select a theme that has the features you need and is ranked highly by its users and those who should know.
Here
are 10 such multipurpose WordPress themes, one or more of which
will likely have your name on it.
When website designers get together to discuss popular multipurpose WordPress themes, it usually isn’t long before the talk turns to BeTheme, a supremely popular 250K-user multipurpose theme that keeps getting bigger and better. BeTheme’s 40+ core features give web designers easy access to a host of powerful and up-to-date site-building tools, design aids, and options.
Be’s library of 650+ customizable, responsive, and UI/UX friendly
pre-built websites make website building fast, fun, and easy.
The new Be Builder is the fastest, lightest and most intuitive
website builder for WordPress. Click on https://demo.muffingroup.com
to inspect Be Builder’s stunning capabilities.
Be’s WooCommerce Builder is an excellent tool for creating layouts
featuring popular customer-centric elements like product previews, sticky
menus, and more.
Add the Header and Mega Menu Builders and Be’s wealth of design
options and you have all the flexibility you’ll ever need.
BeTheme
has the responsiveness, flexibility, and performance you need to create award
winning websites that will leave your competitors in the dust.
Click on the banner to learn more about BeTheme’s powerful core features.
The beginning of a new year is
typically a time when we plan to find ways to make life a little better. The
same applies to web designers who look for new and better ways to make their
designs more engaging and productive.
In this post we will look into 5 web design trends that focus on issues like UX, accessibility, and responsiveness and use 10 pre-built websites from BeTheme to demonstrate how best to execute those trends .
If you intend to improve something,
it’s always good to have an understanding of those things that can influence or
impact it, whether they be positive or negative.
In our case, its web design skill
and experience, along with web design itself we want to improve on. Web design
trends, in this case 5 of them, make up the influencing factor. What follows is
how these trends can be implemented.
One description of a WordPress plugin could be “a software addon that packs a punch”. That doesn’t necessarily apply to every WordPress plugin. Even though that is more often than not the purpose behind them. At their best, plugins can be capable of taking a business to the next level, and that could be your business as well.
One or more of the 9 essential WordPress plugins featured
in this article could do that for you. Or, at a minimum give your websites some
extra pizzazz, make them more engaging, or make them more useful.
Having said that, you have to have created a quality
website to begin with, so that’s where we will start.
Brizy is a no-code website builder that you can use to add
functionality to or customize existing areas in your WordPress site or start
from scratch and build your own. Brizy is free to download, and you
don’t have to be a techie or worry about having code or design skills to use
it.
Brizy’s theme builder
makes it as easy as can be to customize any and every part of your site.
You can create your own
dynamic templates for special pages, headers, and footers, and display
conditions make it easy to set up repeating header and footer blocks.
150+ high-converting
pre-made templates are included along with a useful selection of dynamic
elements (posts elements, breadcrumbs, shortcodes, sidebar, etc.).
The 100% White Label
option allows you to brand the builder as your own. A perfect option if you are
doing client work.
WooCommerce integration
is included if you are building an online store. You can customize all areas of
your shop site.
A Pro version of Brizy is available that adds extended
functionality to the Free version.
Click on the banner to find out more about this WordPress theme builder.
The right WordPress theme used in conjunction with the WordPress Platform allows a web designer to create almost any website design. There are situations however where almost isn’t quite good enough. The design may not have quite as much pizzazz as the designer hoped for, or may simply lack some functionality that, if added, would put it over the top.
That’s what WordPress plugins do. A plugin is a piece of added software that when put to use can extend the capabilities of a software system, in this case, a website.
There are more than 42,000 cool WordPress plugins in the
marketplace. So, you should be able to design a website that could do anything
and everything you could possibly think of.
It doesn’t work that way of course. Most WordPress themes feature more useful WordPress plugins. When they don’t provide everything you may need, it usually takes but one or two additional plugins to set things right.
Examples of how a WordPress plugin might add to your design
will become quite obvious as you go down this list of these 9 top WordPress
plugins for 2022 projects.
The Amelia WordPress booking plugin will automate and streamline your business’s interactions with its existing or potential clients. It does this by helping them select a given service online, at a given time, and with a certain employee.
Amelia replaces
manual or partially automated systems that tend to be slower, error prone, and
labor intensive.
Amelia can manage bookings at multiple locations for an unlimited
number of customers.
Amelia can track the work schedules of an unlimited number of
employees, again at multiple locations.
Your clients can easily book, change, or cancel appointments
online 24/7. They can also receive automatic reminders and make payments
online.
Your booking forms can be customized to match your brand.
Events can also be booked using Amelia, attendees can be tracked.
This popular plugin can save you and your workers significant
amounts of time and money and at the same time make appointment bookings much
easier for your customers.
Click on the banner to find out even more about what Amelia could do for your business.
The online world has gone from being a novelty in the
latter part of the 20th century to a major influencer in our lives
in the 21st.
And it keeps on growing at a seemingly exponential rate.
Once upon a time a decently performing website could count
on attracting a goodly number of visitors or customers.
That is no longer the case. Nearly 1,000 new websites come
into existence every hour of every day. The competition keeps getting fiercer
no matter what the purpose of your website or its niche may be.
To stay ahead of the competition, a website has to be
supremely engaging, flawlessly responsive, and highly performant. To create
such a site in a reasonable time requires choosing one of the best WordPress
themes that satisfactorily addresses each of those characteristics.
To find such a theme without having to submit to a
mind-numbing search requires a great deal of expertise. Building this list of
10 top WordPress themes required just that.
This
supremely-popular theme (240,000+ customers) with 40+ core features that give
its users quick and easy access to a range of powerful site-building tools and
design aids and options is the biggest WordPress theme of them all in terms of
sheer size.
BeTheme has the responsiveness, flexibility, and performance needed to create websites that feature those same characteristics.
Be’s library of 650+ customizable, responsive and UI friendly pre-built websites make creating any type of website a quick and easy task
The fast and user-friendly Live Builder features a remarkable collection of powerful page-building capabilities
Be’s WooCommerce Builder is a treasure house of shop and single product page layouts and customer-centric options
The Muffin Builder, Header Builder, Shortcode Generator, and a ton of design options give users all the flexibility they may need
BeTheme is also Elementor ready, it is regularly updated, and owners receive free lifetime updates. Click on the banner to find out more about this amazing theme.
Web design trends don’t just appear out of the blue. They arise in response to people’s thinking in terms of their needs and comfort zones.
We tend to welcome change, as long as its for the better and doesn’t create chaos during a transition from one condition to the next.
The digital world has provided numerous good examples
of this balancing act, with the web design trends of 2022 being the latest.
In this post we will take a close-up look at 5 of these trends. We’ll include BeTheme pre-built sites you can use for inspiration or implement them directly to create or redesign sites for your clients.
5 Web Design Trends to Use in 2022
Designing or redesigning your clients’ websites with these new web design trends in mind will go a long way in helping them better engage their customers and capture their attention in their search for cutting-edge brands.
Every year at this time you’ll find us hard at work to place an enticing selection of great Black Friday deals and discounts in front of our web design and agency friends to help them prepare for the big event.
2021 is no different. The task
has been somewhat easier thanks to a greater number of tempting bargains. At
the same time, the difficulties encountered in paring the number down to a
manageable few are always present.
We think you will be pleased with
the final result; ten great deals on top-quality web design and time and money saving
products.
Brizy brings
power to the novice! This fast and easy to use drag and drop builder is great
for beginners and experienced web designers alike, and for agencies as well.
An easy to
understand and navigate UI together with an excellent selection of multi-page
templates and landing pages makes building a website a quick, easy, and
satisfying task.
Designers can
select or switch between the Brizy for WordPress and the Brizy Cloud website
builders. The latter includes hosting.
White label
options are available for agencies
Pre-made
designs help you get off to a fast start, but you also have the option of
starting with a blank page and using your imagination as your guide.
Huge Black
Friday discounts are offered across the board, including partner rewards and
promotions, discounts for white label Agency plans, and the opportunity for
participants to win a MacBook Pro.
Since the Brizy
team has been at it for 11 years, Brizy gets better with each update. Click on
the banner to learn more.
If you’re a professional wanting to showcase your products, what better way is there to do so than with a personal portfolio? Maybe one that’s presented in a way that invites close study?
A portfolio used to be a folder of papers you would carry around with you when visiting one potential customer after another. Today, you can get not only the same results, but far better ones. You can do it by using a website builder to create a portfolio website.
A portfolio website is perfect for displaying your work to existing clients and attracting potential ones.
There are plenty of platforms to choose from to build a stunning portfolio website. You’ll find six of the very best ones right here. They’re all easy to work with, flexible, and you can try and test most of them at no cost.
Portfoliobox is a highly-suitable online website building tool for photographers, artists, designers, and other creative types. It’s not theme-based, it’s super easy to use, and it’s extremely flexible; plus, you don’t need to know anything about code to use it.
As its name implies, it gives you all the tools needed to create a stunning, professional-looking portfolio, the type that not only keeps visitors engaged but encourages them to spread the word.
While you naturally will spend as much time as you feel you can afford to create a next-to-perfect portfolio, you could easily create a very attractive one within a few hours.
Portfoliobox offers two plans, including a free one that includes hosting of 10 pages, 30 images, and 10 products – plenty for you to see if it’s the right choice for you.
The pro plan includes web hosting for 1,000 images and an unlimited number of pages, blog posts, and products. Portfoliobox has more than 1 million users. Version 4 is in the works and scheduled for release within a few months.
You can use Wix to promote your business, set up and online shop, or test out new ideas. Or, to create a portfolio website to showcase your art. That’s this website builder’s strong suit. With this innovative drag and drop tool you can start from scratch, work from any of the 500 designer-made templates, customize to your heart’s content, and create the most stunning portfolio you could imagine, and any other type of website for that matter.
Your portfolio doesn’t have to consist of static displays either since you can make it come to life using clever scroll effects, animations, and even video backgrounds.
If creating an award-winning portfolio is your objective, and you want to have total design freedom to be able to obtain that objective, the Wix website builder and Wix editor is for you.
You’ve decided over your morning cup of coffee that today’s the day to start building an online portfolio to showcase your wares, you make Weebly your portfolio website builder of choice, and before day’s end your website is up and running.
It’s that easy with Weebly. You have access to a host of customizable webpage designs, useful tools, custom fonts, video backgrounds, site search, and last but not least, a powerful website builder that’s free.
Weebly even hosts your portfolio website free of charge and you can either purchase a domain or easily transfer one you already have. If you have a product line to display in your portfolio the folks at Weebly will gladly take professional-class photos for you if you ship them the products. Otherwise, there are plenty of tools to help you display products, photos, and works of art in all their glory.
This is it! Your one-stop shop for developer tools and resources. Designed to save you time and money, streamline project workflows, boost productivity, or all the above,
Choosing the right tool for the job is never easy for several reasons. There’s a huge number to choose among, you have to know what to look for, and your needs can sometimes be project-dependent.
Better tools for developers continue to appear over the horizon as app developers seek to bridge the development-operations gap that exists for many software solutions. Fortunately, there are already more than a few tools and services on the market. These tools can help to bridge that gap that also tend to be project independent.
While Elementor has established an impressive reputation as a web design tool, not everyone may be aware that this open source tool was created with designers in mind. Because it’s an open-source software solution it’s natural to assume that Elementor has many powerful features, it’s flexible, and it’s easily extendable; which is indeed the case.
Elementor’s software development features include the ability to compile, minify, and externally load CSS files as well as the capability to easily assimilate custom CSS into any page, section, or widget. You can also trigger tasks via the Command Line (CLI), track data across multiple pages, and call up earlier versions and switch between versions.
As a user, you can access Beta versions, help the Elementor team uncover bugs and fix issues. You can also join thousands of others who have contributed to this project to immeasurably extend its functionality and extensibility. The documentation provides all you need to know to get the most from its frontend features, editor, and useful widgets.
With AND.CO, you can automatically generate invoices from a single platform, based on data contained in your contracts, proposals, and time tracking results. AND.CO relieves you of manual or semi-automated duties such as manually inputting billable hours or having to constantly check when it’s time to invoice again. The platform lets you set up recurring invoices, receive alerts when clients view your invoices, and accept online payments
Since AND.CO’s mobile app can easily be synced across all your devices, you can view your invoices or create them on the go and keep abreast of your billings and cash flow. When payments are received, AND.CO automatically deposits them into your bank account.
Once you have this handy application in-house, you’ll have that much more time to spend on your core activities and responsibilities. Read the rest of this entry »
