WordPress theme and plugins that power my blog – Part 1

By | November 18, 2012

What plugins and theme you use?” is the frequent question I get from the visitors and fellow bloggers, so here is a detailed post about all things that power my blog.

Theme:
My blog was started in 2007 and since then I used a free WordPress theme called “iTheme” from N.Design Studio, which is a clean and Mac-flavored theme. At that time, themes were few in number and it was hard to get a clean, minimalistic, and content-focused theme.

Now, the scenario has changed. There are thousands of themes to choose. Themes have variety of options inbuilt to customize the theme as per your liking. Professional bloggers have been looking for minimilastic, responsive, distraction-free, fast loading themes to improve their SEO rankings as well as to display the content in an easily readable manner.

I wanted a minimalistic responsive theme. The beauty of responsive theme is that it dynamically adjusts the site depending on the browser and device. I don’t need a plugin or service to show my blog correctly in a mobile browser. Just minimize the browser and see how my blog adjusts itself into that window. While browsing the net for it, I landed onto Themify’s site. They have wonderful themes. I liked the theme “Elemin” especially, which is what I am currently using for my blog.

It is a paid theme, costs $39. Also, you can get another theme for free. You can google for discount coupons for Themify. Few are offering 30% off coupons, so your final cost comes to around $27 for two beautiful themes. Also, you can purchase all the themes at just $69 (though support is limited to one year).

Things I like about Themify:

  • No doubt they have wonderful themes. Check here: http://themify.me/themes
  • They have the best support. All questions are answered within 24 hours. They never got tired answering number of questions I posted when customizing my blog’s theme and my customers.
  • Themes come with a control panel where you can customize the appearance.
  • Themes have settings export/import option, so you can easily export your complex theme settings and keep a copy of it.
  • They do offer automatic updates right within the dashboard, so you don’t need to leave the site to upgrade the theme or frame work, which many paid themes lack.
  • They have an extensive documentation covering each and every thing. Take a glimpse at: http://themify.me/docs
  • Every theme comes with ready-made widgets for categories, pages, featured posts, banners/links, etc which you can utilize to display widgets that match the theme.
  • They are fast loading. Get it analyzed here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

If you are excited like me, then you can jump onto their theme list here: http://themify.me/themes

They do offer 3 free themes, check here: http://themify.me/themes#free-theme. I like “Koi” from them.

I will review the plugins in the next part. Stay tuned!

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