'Net Features : themes

12 Effective Corporate Blog Designs

Michael Garrity — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:35:00 GMT

In the age of likes, retweets and shares, content marketing has suddenly become the best way to spread the word about your brand to bring in new customers and rack up conversions.

However, since social media has its limitations, in terms of both branding and the type of content that companies can offer, many businesses have taken to blogging to provide insightful and valuable information to their customers, while also producing likeable and sharable content that can benefit their SEO efforts.

Look, plenty has already been written about how blogs can improve a brand’s content marketing campaigns or increase leads, but we’re here to be a little more superficial than that. While content is undoubtedly and absolutely the most important aspect of a valuable, successful blog, it’s not the only thing that matters. After all, we’ve all heard about the effect that a good (or bad) first impression can have on new consumers. That’s why all of that great content on your blog should look nice, as well.

If you’re in need of some inspiration, we’ve compiled this list of 12 of the most effective corporate blog designs on the Web. Each of them takes a different approach; some are design-heavy and visually striking (e.g. Whole Foods, Southwest), while others take a simpler, less bold approach that is more in line with what the brand offers (e.g. LinkedIn, Bigelow Tea).

Which designs are your favorites? Let us know in the comments section, or share some other great corporate blogs that you know about!

Bigelow Tea Blog

The Official LinkedIn Blog

7Gen Blog by Seventh Generation

eBay inc. Ink

Disney Parks Blog

Whole Story by Whole Foods

The Cleanest Line by Patagonia

Nuts About Southwest

The Dropbox Blog

All Songs Considered by NPR

TOMS

Ice Cream Journal by Turkey Hill Dairy

Sunday Special: E-Commerce WordPress Themes

Michael Garrity — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 22:00:00 GMT

One of the largest providers of themes for WordPress sites, WooThemes, has launched WooCommerce, a new plugin that offers WordPress users a library of various integrated themes for their e-commerce websites. Of course, there are plenty of other (and sometimes free) options for e-commerce themes on WordPress that users could also consider. After all, having the right theme can make all of the difference in luring consumers to your site, fostering engagement and making conversions.

So, here is a list of 10 more WordPress themes for online merchants to consider:

ShopperPress
This is the simplest of e-commerce plugins for WordPress. It's very clean and easy to navigate and the designs can be customized; it also offers over 20 different store layouts. Other features include built-in tools for affiliate stores, advertising slots and shipping/tax/weight/promotions/coupon codes, the ability to sell ebooks and digital downloads and easy-to-use shopping baskets, checkout pages, contact pages and member accounts.

Sport & Grunge
Perfect for extreme sports athletes or alternative rockers, Sport & Grunge by ThemeForest provides users with a simple shopping cart and newsletter plugin, as well as seven custom widgets to do things like make product specials, allow newsletter subscriptions, view a cart and more. It also comes with a built-in contact form. You can write up custom post types for products and add them to the news/blog that the theme also provides. There's also a feature where it automatically greyscale hovers over home-page buttons.

Sofa SuppaStore
If you're feeling a little sporty, and by that I mean you sell sports equipment, Sofa SuppaStore is a great option for your e-commerce store. Another ThemeForest design, this plugin provides some neat and unique features such as Stock Inventory Manager and Order Tracking. It's also totally compatible with PayPal and mail orders, comes with 11 built-in widgets, a newsletter feature and the ability to define the shipping price for each product or by country, or both, and gives you the option of multiple home-page layouts.

Boutique
This is a very quaint theme from Elegant Themes that is perfect for selling unique and classy decorative items. Heavy on the pastel, this attractive theme was designed to work with major WordPress e-commerce plugins like WordPress E-Commerce, Cart66, Shopp and eShop. The real appeal of this appealing theme is its design customization abilities, offering a seemingly limitless array of color schemes, numerous font options and the ability to adjust header and body text independently of one another. You can also add user and author ratings to products.

Emporium
Mimicking the style of major clothing retailers like The Gap or Macy's, Emporium is a sleek and simple theme for your e-commerce store. Complete with a built-in shopping cart with an affiliate module, this theme makes it easy to sell regular products or digital goods. It also works well if you just want to have an online catalog. Emporium lets users manage tax percentages on products, provides multiple payment gateways (like PayPal, Google Checkout, WorldPay and more), has order management capabilities and allows for guest checkout.

Kakileema
Kakileema is a quirky, fun and simple design that is perfect for clothing and accessory retailers focusing on a younger, more artistic crowd. It comes integrated with the WordPress E-Commerce plugin. It comes with a sleek header to define your brand, provides a great visible section for new products and gives easily acessible category sections. It also shows users a "recently viewed" column on the product page that will allow them to quickly and efficiently return to old products that they have checked out.

Aquisto
Full disclosure here, this is one of my favorite themes on the list. It's got a really attractive, sleek look that could fit a wide variety of possible online stores. It's different because of its three-column layout that offers information and widgets on the left, product pictures, names and prices in the middle and featured products and other widgets on the right. You also get logo and theme-style customization options, so you can change a lot of the text and colors and really make it your own. Unfortunately, it's only integrated with the Cart66 plugin for physical products and the PulleyApp plugin for digital products.

Store
A great theme with an unoriginal name, Store has a graceful look that comes with built-in e-commerce features, so you don't need any extra plugins to use it. It offers various types of shopping cart options such as "Add to Cart," "Buy Now" or "Send Inquiry." Other features include multiple shipping options and payment gateways, coupon codes, user registration, a catalog mode and order management options, among many others. You get to choose from four distinct color schemes and the main page is almost totally customizable to best suit your business.

Velvet Sky
Velvet Sky is a really gorgeous (and free) WordPress store theme that is perfect for selling fragrances or other high-end products. It's layout is based on a scrolling, horizontal menu with a smaller, horizontal menu below it that shows featured and/or new products. You can totally customize this homepage. It also supports guest checkouts, categorized products views, detailed product pages and a sorting function.

AppCloud
Lets say you've developed a bunch of sweet apps, but you just don't have any way to get them into the hands of users. Never fear, AppCloud is here. This free theme is super clean and simple, although very professional-looking. You're able to categorize the view of products and product search using a variety of filters, such as Most Downloaded. It can also be used to sell various "gadget products," and its soft blue and white color scheme is a great way to calm customers and keep them focused on your products.

Five Awesome (Free) Drupal Themes

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:18:00 GMT

One of the most popular CMS systems in Drupal doesn't usually get the attention it deserves - at least here at Website Magazine. Choosing between open-source and commercial platforms is a difficult decision (as we address in relation to e-commerce systems in our April special issue) and requires serious consideration. That being said, Drupal is the choice of many Web professionals for good reason: it's as stable as it gets and extensible to the point of envy for other providers, thanks to some terrific modules.

In my ten-year history as a Web pro, I've only used Drupal in one other installation. A micro-project I'm working on, however, required a CMS, and instead of trying to hack up WordPress to act like a CMS, I thought I would just give Drupal another go, as the community has seen a lot of development since the last time I had the opportunity.

I tested about ten themes from the last night for the website project and finally settled on one (Acquia Marina) but others would have done an equally nice job in presenting the content. I was surprised at the number of themes that were simply reworked Wordpress themes ported to Drupal (some of which are listed below). There are several Drupal-only themes in the list as well.

	A3 Atlantis - Modern Drupal theme designed by Blamcast. Features nice typography, small files sizes and smart columns for adjusting between 1, 2 or 3 columns. Fully XHTML compliant and CSS Level 3 compliant.
	Acquia Marina - Solid theme by TopNotchThemes in partnership with Acquia. Features 15 collapsible block regions, drop-down links menu, includes icons for core and Views blocks. Cross-browser tested in IE6/7, Opera, Safari, and Firefox.
	Amity Island - A fresh Drupal theme (the first under the GPL license from ThemeShark). Features a tableless design, eight additional and fully collapsible regions and one level of suckerfish dropdowns.
	AppleWeb - This tableless, W3C compliant layout by TemplateWorld (Drupal theme by Neerja Software) has been tested for CSS 2.1 and is XHTML 1.0 Strict. Works with IE7, Firefox, Safari and even Chrome.
	Color Papper - A Drupal theme originally created by DreamTemplate for WP. The attractive design comes with a fixed-width layout with two columns, is CSS based (level 2.1) and validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

.............
Upgrade to a professional-level membership from Website Magazine