1. Mochi

When it comes to portfolios, creating a personal brand is important. The Mochi portfolio WordPress theme provides an amazing masonry portfolio layout for displaying your projects, art, or photography, plus color and font customization tools to get your brand right. You can customize most aspects of the design right from the theme options panel in WordPress, and never worry about changing any code.

Try Mochi

2. Portfolio

This portfolio theme offers stunning design with multiple layout options to fit your list of projects. It also comes with well-crafted project templates for your portfolio that make it easy and straightforward to organize the most important information.

Try Portfolio

3. Optimus

The Optimus portfolio theme includes pre-made designs for all types of websites, including 3 portfolio demos in light and dark style. The graphics and typography in the pre-made designs are each amazing in their own right, and give you plenty of flexibility to capture your personal brand and show off your work. This theme comes packed with options and hundreds of page templates to work from. For someone who’s a novice WordPress user, there may be too many features. However, you can simplify a lot of the options by choosing a demo design.

Try Optimus

4. Portfolio

This portfolio theme from Organic Themes is one of the cleanest, hippest portfolio themes around. This one is perfect for showcasing photos or artwork that demand large scale images and little to no junk around them. The logo placement and dropdown menu style make the design standout—perfect for a visual arts or creative professional.

Try Portfolio

5. Jayo

You will have trouble finding a cleaner, quicker theme than the Jayo portfolio. This theme has an excellent sense of space and typography, and also does a great job of layering color tones (especially if you start with the demo design). With the Essential Grid plugin, customizing your projects is easy, and the portfolio tag sorting animations make a lasting impression.

Try Jayo

6. Zenith

The Zenith portfolio theme has a plethora of options and demo designs ready to import with one click. Easily build pages with the Visual Composer plugin and create the best portfolio for your work with tons of customization options. This theme is robust, and may have too many options for a beginner, but if you need a lot of flexibility, it’s a great choice.

Try Zenith

7. Edge

The Edge portfolio provides attractive full-width presentation for creative agencies or professionals to present solutions and projects. The demo design is packed with amazing layout, typography, and eye-catching animations that give your work a professional presentation. You can edit/add to pages easily using the Visual Composer page builder and present all your social media touch points nicely above your navigation menu.

Try Edge

1. The Core

The Core is a longstanding favorite WordPress theme for businesses because it comes pre-packaged with over 20 demo designs created for niche websites and businesses. These demos take best practices from well-designed industry websites and wrap them up in a beautiful package. The best part? You can import a design with one click and customize the branding.

Using a demo from The Core could save you hours and dollars in design and development by giving you a better starting point.

The Core also makes it easy to customize features and design through WordPress. Learn more about The Core in this video:

Try the Core

2. Creativo

Creativo is a true multipurpose WordPress theme, and it’s built so you can do just about anything with it. For businesses, this theme gives you excellent control over the look and feel of every page or blog post with the Visual Composer page builder—drag and drop elements to create a page. Also, Creativo is ready for an online store, and includes premium slider plugins to create a great product or post feed at the top of your home page.

Also, Creativo comes with a complete set of tutorial videos that will walk you through using WordPress and Creativo’s feature set. See the videos here.

Try Creativo

3. Highend

A longstanding favorite theme on MOJO Marketplace, Highend provides an excellent framework for customizing your WordPress site, and includes the Visual Composer page builder and slider plugins for free.

Like The Core, Highend features many demo designs to start you off with an online store, app, creative business, church, lifecoaching platform, and much more. All designs can be imported with one click, and with the range of customization, you can make Highend accomplish all of your goals.

Try Highend

4. StartUp

The StartUp WordPress theme is one of the best themes available for creating landing pages and engaging content for your business. Instead of building pages through an interface like Visual Composer, StartUp features it’s own plugin that let’s you create amazing pages using widgets. This video demonstrates how it works:

Try StartUp

5. New!Shop

If you want to start selling products online tomorrow with an excellent user interface and experience, try out New!Shop. This theme offers a full-width or boxed layout design and packs in all the e-commerce features you need for an online store to be effective.

The admin panel makes it very easy to customize the features of your shop, without ever touching the code.

Try New!Shop

6. Apoa

Apoa is a beautiful business WordPress theme that is simple to use and effectively designed. This theme was built with the agency or creative in mind, and it lends itself to a beautiful presentation of your work and philosophy. This theme comes with the basic features you need to build a great landing page with animations and style, without a lot of features to sift through or bloating to deal with later on.

Try Apoa

7. Multicorp

The Multicorp theme features a clean, minimal design for businesses that makes it easy to find information and learn about your company or products. It’s easy to choose one of the pre-defined skins, pick a layout, and get started with other customizations for your brand, right from the WordPress admin panel.

Try Multicorp

8. Creatica

Creatica is a very cool WordPress theme for business, and features one-click importable demos for everything from creative agencies to restaurants. Their designs alone are worth buying the theme. But the features and customizations available make this theme a real standout for businesses looking to improve their user experience with limited resources.

Try Creatica

9. BizBuzz

With BizBuzz, you can build a complete, fully featured business website with one of their 6 one-click importable demos very quickly. You can easily create amazing, dynamic pages using the included Visual Composer page builder, and brand customizations like colors and fonts are a click away in the WordPress customizer.

Try BizBuzz

1. Blogger

The Blogger WordPress theme has long been a favorite for people with a story to tell. It’s simple, but highly functional design enable you to get started quickly and publish stories frequently. This theme is designed with bloggers in mind, first and foremost, so it doesn’t take a WordPress whiz to make it look and work great.

Try the Blogger Demo

2. Freyja

The Freyja WordPress Blog theme offers an elegant personal blogging design with simple customizations that go a long way. You can choose between 2 personal blog demos and an e-commerce store demo and import the designs with one click. However, if you want to go completely custom, Freyja is easy to use and provides all the options a blogger would want.

Try the Freyja Demo

3. Wunderful

Wunderful is one of the cleanest minimalist blog themes you can find for WordPress. With simple layouts and features, it’s very easy to make this blog theme your own. Choose between grid and list layouts for your blog posts, and add widgets and contact forms to tie it all together.

Try the Wunderful Demo

4. Tuulikki

For 2017 blogging themes, you can’t miss Tuulikki, a theme that looks as elegant as it sounds. This theme features a crisp minimal blog design. The look and feel lends itself to fashion, food, family, or home bloggers, and has the flexibility to fit any type of blog.

Our favorite feature of this theme is the posts slider.

Unlike many of the clunky or aggressive sliders out there, this one shows off posts with clean scrolling right at the top of your posts page. This makes for a nice user experience, as your latest content is prominent right next to your main navigation bar. You can choose from the three different slider layouts built in.

Tuulikki also does a great job displaying categories in the right sidebar.

Tuulikki isn’t a one-trick pony, though. With plenty of variety in blog layouts, a promo box, and WooCommerce integration for online stores, this theme packs in tons of style and function.

Try the Tuulikki Demo

5. Carbis

Another contender for bloggers is Carbis, which features a very professional design geared toward travel blogging and rich photography.

We love the featured post slider, and the title box that only appears on the middle post, as well as the awesome category tiles.

In addition, the blog post feed comes in a unique format which slightly overlaps the post body with the featured image, blurring the boundary between photo and text.

Carbis helps you create a great reading experience with room for photos to breathe. It’s a great option for travelers, photographers, or anyone who wants to create compelling content paired with beautiful photos or instructions, such as recipes.

Customize the fonts, colors, and layouts easily with the theme options, and this blog will tell your story with swagger. Or, with a rich photo display and social media links up close and personal, Carbis makes a great hub for the social media whiz.

Try the Carbis Demo

6. ZenBlog

ZenBlog has been a longtime favorite at MOJO Marketplace for it’s straightforward blog format and highly usable features. ZenBlog has plenty of room for photos that tell a story as well as an optimal layout for reading and perusing your thoughts.

The typography design stands out among other blog themes.

The different font weights, for example, guide your eye and create a very finished professional look.

The layout and placement of widgets for ZenBlog are highly customizable, and you can try all the options in the theme demo. Also, the theme developer has created tutorial videos that make it easy to set up your WordPress site just like the demo and customize.

Try the ZenBlog Demo

7. Blogera

Need some inspiration for a uniquely designed blog? Blogera features 25 demo designs, each with a different perspective on what a blog should be. The cool part is you can take any of these designs, import the settings and content with one click, and customize the content.

This theme lets you create any type of blog very quickly because of the demo designs. Seriously, it has everything from a basic travel blog to a unique full-width style, as shown here:

We can’t underscore enough the value of variety here. Want to get started blogging fast? The developer has created a video that shows you how to build your blog in 5 minutes, and our customers have raved about their support:

Try the Blogera Demo

8. Heron

Sometimes, a blog WordPress theme just needs to be simple and focus on the content experience. Heron is one of these themes. You can get started quickly with a pixel perfect design that is tried and true, and puts your content up front.

Our favorite feature is the extended excerpts for posts, which allow you to read a couple of paragraphs before having to click “read more.”

You have many options to make each post unique, such as galleries and sliders, but the layout can remain uncluttered and centered on your stories.

Try the Heron Demo

9. Bloghi

Bloghi is an outstanding design for nature, fashion, and lifestyle bloggers who want to bring style to their writing and photography.

Some of Bloghi’s coolest features are the widgets, such as: about me, advertisement, flickr, video, carousel, and social media sharing buttons. You can add dimension to your blog feed by placing these nice easter eggs in the sidebar.

Above all, Bloghi does a great job of presenting your blog posts in an attractive feed, with all the features you need tocreate interesting categories and expand your audience.

Also, having great support for your theme is not to be overlooked. See what people are saying about Bloghi and their support:

Try the Bloghi Demo

10. Juliet

The Juliet blogging WordPress theme brings sophistication to your writing. Of all the blog themes we’ve combed through this year, this one has one of the coolest category designs, which also give you space to describe the different types of content you create.

Juliet’s elegant layout enables you to pack in a lot of information, photos, and features without getting crowded. For example, this blog feed and sidebar layout features a ton of info, yet it feels adequately spaced.

This theme has many features and styles, but also offers something different—a look book template. With the look book template, you can create as many look books as you like and change the layout as well. The look book is a great way to group evergreen content that fits together, or to provide product guides and comparisons.

Try the Juliet Demo

What Google Thinks About Automated Content

Let’s say you stumble across a nifty WordPress plugin that promises to generate meta tags automatically. It sounds like a super easy way to check off the meta tag box, especially when you’re staring down a giant chore list of digital marketing tasks for your business.

Resist the temptation to sign up. Bread comes sliced. Your website doesn’t arrive pre-packaged with content. You’re supposed to create the unique, valuable content that will benefit your audience—and not clog up Google. But don’t believe us. Let’s go to Google’s Quality Guidelines for the answer on auto-generated content:

“Automatically generated—or “auto-generated”—content is content that’s been generated programmatically. Often this will consist of paragraphs of random text that make no sense to the reader but which may contain search keywords.”

How to Start Writing Great Metadata

Let’s just say you already scooped out a giant helping of auto-generated content for your site. The great news is that you’ll probably see an improvement in rankings if you fix it. Just remove the plugin causing all those Google no-no’s, then add new meta tags writing (by a human) in its place.

The key to knowing how to write meta tags is understanding them in context. Your meta tag content is a lot like the title and dust jacket blurb on a book. That intro description and title are what people see about your site in the search engine results page.

Make Your Digital Marketing More Effective With CTAs

So, let’s get them to click. Write a call-to-action (CTA) in your Description tag that urges viewers to click through—and delivers on your page promise. The Title tag should describe the purpose of the page, for example “FAQs.” Include keywords in the meta tag content when they’re pertinent to delivering a great audience experience. Don’t stuff keywords. If you get stuck or need inspiration, look up some competitors. Test out what makes you want to click on results in the search engines.

Now, Let’s Get Those Meta Tags Up and Running

The best way to implement meta tags on your WordPress site is to get a quality plugin that will help you with formatting and word count (good automation). Google has specific guidelines for the length of two of the most important meta tags, Title and Description. Going past recommended keyword lengths is not the place to get creative. Google makes the rules when it comes to SEO. It’s up to you to know the rules and play by them if you want to compete at a high level.

Use your newfound savvy to be more competitive in Google. Remove any automated content and get fresh meta tags—just be sure the new content is written by humans.

Why Websites Still Matter

1. Establish your authority and professionalism.
2. Impress (and rank on) search engines.
3. Give your users and customers a place to return to and a way to engage, from sharing your content to commenting and creating user generated content.
4. Don’t get Panda’d — Protect your content from algorithm changes beyond your control.
5. Detailed analytics — Along with the ability to control your content and your audience, managing your own content hub allows you to collect data and perform detailed analytics.

WP Live Plugin Features

The WP Live plugin is simple and elegant. Once it’s installed on your website, the ultimate WordPress tool is just a click away. We hope this plugin improves your overall experience with WordPress, and makes it easier to solve problems as they come up.

Quickly Access WP Live Experts

Depending on your subscription level, you’ll be able to initiate Phone Calls, Live Chats, and VIP Support Tickets directly from WordPress. With the WP Live Plugin, you can do all your work in one place.

Know When You Can Get Assistance

WP Live business hours are Monday-Friday 9-5 MST, and your dashboard will let you know when our office closes so you don’t even have to think about it.

The Journey Snapshot

With WP Live, our experts walk every user through a 4-part process called The Journey to help ensure you reach your website goals. Now, you can easily monitor your progress – and next to do’s – without leaving WordPress.

Member Perks Reminders

We want to ensure you get the most out of WP Live, and you get a number of perks with your subscription. You’ll be reminded of which perks you have available in this feed every time you reach out to a WP Live expert from your WordPress dashboard.

Installing the WP Live Plugin

The WP Live plugin works the same as any WordPress plugin—it adds functionality to your website without changing the design or current features you have in place.

Current WP Live subscribers will receive an email with additional instructions to install the plugin. You can also learn more about installing WordPress plugins, in general.

Alternatively, you can contact a WP Live agent through your account dashboard, and they’ll walk you through installing the plugin and navigating the interface for the first time. This is a great opportunity to learn some WordPress basics (such as installing a plugin) and get an overview of how WP Live works.  Give us a call, start a chat, or submit a ticket today!

If you have any questions about WP Live or the new plugin, please don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below, or call us at (855) 464-5345.

Creatica Multipurpose WordPress Theme Features

Creatica’s unique features set it apart from typical WordPress themes. In addition to the expansive feature set, the included demo designs make it easy to get started with a very specific niche website design.

If you are looking to build a specific type of website, this will save you hours of design and development time. Here are the available demos:

1. Creative Agency
2. Classic Restaurant
3. Full Screen Photography
4. Classic Shop
5. App Showcase
6. Creative Freelancer
7. Blog Magazine
8. Law Firm
9. Grid Photo
10. Church
11. Gaming
12. Minimal Blog
13. Minimal Shop
14. Animal Shelter

14 plug and play designs to get you started! Even if your website falls into a niche not listed here, the theme is flexible enough to adjust or add to the demo design and make it right.

Other notable features include:

• Visual Composer Page Builder
• Custom Visual Composer Blocks
• Multiple Header Options
• WooCommerce Online Store Ready
• Portfolio Showcases
• Extended Admin Panel
• One Click Demo Install
• Optimized for SEO
• Translation Ready
• RTL Supported
• Layerslider Included
• Preloading Animated Icon
• Amazing Support
• Fully Responsive
• 800+ Google Fonts Available
• Detailed Instructions, Video Tutorials, and Support Included

Recent Updates to Creatica, Support, and Documentation

The team at Skywarrior Themes is fantastic about keeping their themes up-to-date and secure, as well as providing excellent support.

Recently, Skywarrior added four new demos, upgraded the theme core to PHP7, and a boxed layout option. As the web changes, it’s great to have dedicated support and updates that keep your site in line with current practices and technology.

For more information and support, check out Skywarrior themes support center, Creatica instructions, and watch the video tutorial below to learn more!

5 Ways to Tap Into the WordPress Community

Let’s explore some of the key ways to not only tap into, but also contribute to, this large group of innovative entrepreneurial-types.

Your goal: get tips, discover hacks, learn trends–ultimately, you want to have a best-in-class website and knowing how to tap into the WordPress community is tops as far as making the most of your WordPress experience.

1. Explore the Vast WordPress Community and Information Resources

You certainly can’t contribute, or even borrow much, if you don’t know what kind of info exists. But there’s no need to feel overwhelmed. Simply start with what you know.

Here’s what we recommend:

• Visit your WordPress theme developer’s blog or forum.

You chose your theme for a reason, hopefully at least in part because you liked it. And if that’s the case, it’s worth taking a gander at WordPress-related information your developer is sharing.

Look for any tips on coding, widgets, or answers to questions you might have. Chances are, other users have had similar challenges that have likely been addressed on your developer’s website.

• Read WordPress for Beginner Articles

The WPBeginner blog is a powerful resource for WordPress tutorials and walkthroughs informed by WordPress community members. Get down with the WordPress lingo by visiting the WPBeginner dictionary which clues its visitors into WordPress-related acronyms and terms — know what a slug is?

Also, check out other WordPress articles and website advice on the MOJO Blog. We’re dedicated to helping you get the most out of your website, from now till the day you’re a billionaire.

• Get Real, Live WordPress Support

Don’t want to spend time doing your own research, or just want to have an in depth WordPress conversation? The team at Mojo Marketplace offers WP Live where you get to have a WordPress expert at your side. These tech nerds will help you build, grow, and maintain your site at any stage of its development.

2. Subscribe to WordPress blogs, RSS feeds & YouTube accounts.

Once you have a sense of the kind of WordPress community material that exists, you can start reading the stuff that applies most to you. For example, if you’re a developer you’ll want more developer-focused content that will keep you up to date on best practices.

But if you’re just starting out, you’ll want useful insights and guides to building, growing, and maintaining your website.

Here are a few ways to curate a feed of content that will keep you on the up and up.

• Find your medium.

Find out what your favorite WordPress community resources are.

There are plenty of daily emails, forums, social media accounts, videos, and podcasts that can give you valuable information. Knowing what you prefer can focus your search and save you time.

And it’s totally okay if it’s a few of these methods combined or if your preference switches. Just get a basic idea of what may work so you can stay up to date on what matters most to you.

• Subscribe, no really, do it!

If you want to stay on the cutting edge, or receive inspiration frequently, it’s a good idea to subscribe to great blogs, podcasts, and email lists.

Don’t be shy! Most WordPress blogs out there are designed to help you, so take advantage of it!

• Bookmark

Also consider bookmarking your favorite WordPress resource websites in your browser. Keep your go-to support sites available for quick reference so you know where to go if you’re in a jam or just want to brush up on some WordPress thought-leadership.

Or if you’re browsing, and you find something interesting, bookmark it. It’s always so frustrating when you can’t find that super helpful forum post three weeks later.

3. Contribute to the WordPress Community. (Yes, you!)

Of course, you’re not required to contribute anything to the WordPress community. But if you find it useful, it’s only fair to pay it forward, and it can help you create connections that can be beneficial. If you’re growing a business, it may be useful to think of sharing on WordPress forums as a free marketing plug.

Look at the astronomical number of posts in this WordPress.org support forum. Online communities as engaged as this are not easy to come by.

No matter your reason for participating, there’s no need to make it complicated.

Keep it simple: ask questions, seek advice, and provide answers when you can.

Vote up or “like” forum Q&As that are helpful to you. This verifies strong answers/developers/themes that help give credibility to quality WordPress support sites, blogs, and forums. And leave a comment or even just a “thanks!” when you have a chance.

Because we’re in this together.

4. Share Your Own WordPress knowledge.

Sharing is caring, and it’s a vital part of any successful community. Here are a few ways you can share your WordPress knowledge with and for the WordPress community:

• Consider starting your own WP blog.

Share your personal WordPress insights by creating your own blog. Show others how you have found WordPress success. Pass on what you’ve learned and teach others to make the most out of their WordPress community experience.

In fact, if you’re blogging about WordPress, and some of your readers come to MOJO for themes, support, or services, you can earn a commission, too!

• Tell your story.

Present examples, images, or case studies demonstrating the ways in which the community continues to help you improve your site.

Using content to tell your story can help convert sales, but that’s not the only reason to explore this option.

By adding significant value to others’ workflow, productivity, or business, you’re helping out while getting more eyeballs on your site, product, and service.

• Be a WordPress social media hero.

Use social media networks to share more about your story and to learn from others.

A quick Twitter search for popular #WordPress hashtags like #ChatWP will reveal a host of posts about what’s happening in the world of WordPress today.

There are also a variety of more professional WordPress LinkedIn groups to join and learn from. With upwards of 75,000 members, the big one of course is WordPress. But there are also specific groups for WordPress designers and developers.

In addition, MOJO offers a Facebook group where you’re free to ask any questions and get advice on things like choosing the right WordPress theme.

5. Attend events, network, share your brand.

If you can believe it, the WordPress community even adheres to live, in-person events.

More than people behind a screen, this community knows how to network, build, and innovate.

• Attend a WordPress Meetup group.

Most major cities have WordPress-dedicated Meetup groups. The topics will vary, but if you want a quick way to hang out with a group of like-minded, entrepreneurial types, this is a good bet.

• Go to a WordCamp conference.

WordCamp is kind of a big deal. It’s a conference “dedicated to all things WordPress.”

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg launched the first WordCamp in San Francisco in 2006. It has since taken on a life of its own with local community-based organizers taking charge.

Check the upcoming global schedule.

Wrapping Up

As you can tell, the WordPress community is well-established and continues to grow. If you’re using WordPress in any capacity, the benefits of involving yourself with this community can only work to give you tools and ideas to improve your website. We suggest working alongside the WordPress community to get the tips you need (and maybe even share a few back) to learn and grow your own brand.

2. From the left sidebar in your dashboard, choose Settings and Reading from the pop-out menu.

3. In the Reading Settings, choose between a homepage that displays your latest posts or a static page (meaning a page that doesn’t display a feed of blog posts) by clicking one of these buttons.

4. Now, you’ll need to pick a page to be your front page (a.k.a. your homepage, or the page that you first land on when you enter your url). Choose an existing page from the dropdown next to Front page: to set your new homepage.

You will have to create your new homepage before you can set it here. To do this, check out our post on creating pages in WordPress.

5. Next, you can designate a separate page for your blog posts, by choosing a page from the Posts page: dropdown menu. Or, if you don’t plan to blog, you can remove the blog feed entirely by choosing the — Select — option from the same dropdown menu.

Again, you will need to create a page to designate as the posts page, just like you did for the homepage.

For your posts, you could simply create a blank page titled Blog and link to that in your navigation menu.

Changing your front page to a static page is that simple.

Hiding Specific Blog Posts

But what if you keep your blog, and you want to hide a specific post? You can do that too, without hiding all your posts as we showed above.

In your post editor, you’ll find a Visibility setting in the Publish box to the right of the editor. Click edit next to Visibility, and you can choose to set your post to Public, Password protected, or Private.

By choosing Private, your post will be hidden from the public. Only you and other admin users on your blog will be able to view it.

Another option is Password protected, which will prompt the reader to enter a password you set before they can read your content.

However, you may be looking to monetize your content. In other words, if you want to require a paid membership to view your articles, you can do that with a WordPress plugin like MemberPress.

Refer back to this post when you need to reconfigure your homepage, posts page, or hide a post from public view. See our other articles below for more WordPress help.