Fabrizio Giordano

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Continua a leggere 3 bellissimi set di icone gratis utilizzabili per scopi commerciali, su Geekissimo

3 bellissimi set di icone gratis utilizzabili per scopi commerciali, pubblicato su Geekissimo il 17/10/2010

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WordPress may have begun life as a blogging tool, but the open source publishing platform has evolved into something resembling a full-fledged CMS in recent years, especially with the release of WordPress 3.0 in June. In fact, it can easily be used to manage a Website for products and businesses, without or without a blog.

While we certainly recommend that any small business maintain a blog, it doesn’t have to be the main focus of your company’s WordPress-based Website, thanks to the multitude of themes that are designed with products and businesses in mind.

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There are a staggering number of WordPress themes available for download, and sifting through them all could take up an entire afternoon. We’ve taken the pain out of the process for you by finding six of the best business-oriented WordPress themes.

Please note that while most WordPress themes are free to use, the ones listed here are premium themes that will cost you a few dollars apiece. While free is always nice (and there are plenty of free WordPress themes worth using), premium themes tend to be higher in quality and include more advanced features than free themes. For business owners, site design and functionality can be critical to success and thus is one area worth investing in.

My Product

My Product is a very clean, well-designed theme intended for the promotion of a company’s products and services. It comes with five different color schemes and the original Photoshop PSD file in case you want to modify the original graphics. It supports all major browsers (even Netscape!) and can be easily and extensively customized from within the WordPress admin. The homepage design features an elegant tabbed interface alongside an auto-rotating graphic above the fold, enabling you to include a lot of information without cluttering up the page.

» Read more details.
» View a live demo.
Price: Requires a $39/year subscription at ElegantThemes.com

TheCorporation

Much like the My Product theme, TheCorporation is a slick, nicely-designed theme with a focus on promoting products and services. Instead of being blog-centric, it focuses heavily on the use of static pages in WordPress (rather than posts). The jQuery-driven homepage widget enables you to include all of the pertinent information on one page without cluttering it up. Companies can include snippets of their “About Us”, “Mission Statement” and “Testimonials” pages here, which users can flip through and then click the “read more” button to delve deeper.

This theme too comes with several different color schemes to choose from and the original PSD files.

» Read more details.
» View a live demo.
Price: Requires a $39/year subscription at ElegantThemes.com

Minimal

This theme is quite similar in concept and layout to the previous two, but it’s by far the cleanest design. As its name would suggest, Minimal is very simple. It too has an auto-rotating slider box for featured information on the homepage, and a nice, jQuery-powered drop-down navigation. Again, it’s a page-heavy architecture (rather than focusing on blog posts), with a corporate blog almost tacked on as an afterthought. Like the others, its cross-browser friendly and was built using valid XHTML and CSS. It comes with the source PSD files and two color schemes.

» Read more details.
» View a live demo.
Price: Requires a $39/year subscription at ElegantThemes.com

BusinessCard

Moving away from the more conventional product-based business site layout, BusinessCard offers a user interface that is the epitome of simplicity and cleanliness. It’s a two-column layout that features a semi-animated navigation on the left and a small content block on the right. The entire site UI is contained within a rectangular space about 785 pixels wide and 420 pixels high, and the entire experience of clicking through it is animated using JavaScript (once again, the jQuery framework). It feels like a Flash-based site, but it’s not.

Unlike the other themes included here, BusinessCard does not include a blog at all. It’s intended for static pages and a portfolio of work, making it ideal for sole proprietorships or small design shops.

» Read more details.
» View a live demo.
Price: Requires a $39/year subscription at ElegantThemes.com

Coffee Break

CoffeeBreak is another attractive, simple theme with the standard slider-based homepage and page-centric architecture, although a blog is included. It comes with 17 stylesheet options and takes advantage of the new custom post types found in WordPress 3.0. It comes from Woo Themes, which offers tiered pricing: $70 for the Standard package, which includes the theme, lifetime support and updates, or $150 for the Developer package, which includes extra bonus themes and the original PSD file.

» Read more details.
» View a live demo.
Price: $70 (Standard) or $150 (Developer). Monthly subscriptions are also available.

SeaLight

Sealight is a shiny, gradient-heavy theme that lets companies showcase products and key information in the homepage slider box while also prominently maintaining a company blog. It gives emphasis to recent tweets and RSS and Twitter subscription options for users. It comes with five color schemes and a host of fancy controls for the back-end admin of WordPress.

» Read more details.
» View a live demo.
Price: $70 (Standard) or $150 (Developer). Monthly subscriptions are also available.

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When we talk of location-based services these days, there’s a heavy focus on so-called check-in apps like Foursquare and Gowalla – apps that allow users to register their physical presence at a venue in return for deals, discounts and virtual rewards like badges and points.

But location-based services actually encompass a much larger market than check-ins, as a new venture from location provider Location Labs and fraud detection service Finsphere is now showing. They can be used to fight identity theft, too.

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Location-Based Services + Credit Card Transaction Tracking = PinPoint

Today, the two companies officially announced the launch of Finsphere’s PinPoint identity validation product, which helps to fight identity theft and validate a user’s identity with the use of Location Labs’ Universal Location Service.

The concept behind the service is simple: PinPoint tracks the location of a credit card transaction and matches it to the location of the end user’s cell phone. If the two are far apart, it raises an alert.

The end user will then be sent a text message or email to verify whether or not the transaction was legitimate. Think of it as sort of a “first responder” to the possibility of a stolen wallet, stolen credit card or any other financially-bound identity theft.

Forget Apps, Just Sign Up Online

Because Location Labs already has relationships with all major U.S. carriers and can locate over 250 million mobile phones, it’s now possible for the service to locate just about any mobile phone in the country, whether smartphone or feature phone – and without the need of an app download.

Instead, interested users can sign up online for the service (pricing available here) and choose from one of three plans: a free service associating one cell phone with one credit card, an “Advanced” plans for unlimited cards and three phones or the “Complete” plan which is the Advanced plan plus daily credit file monitoring (coming soon).

Developers Need to Think Bigger Than Apps

This launch proves the untapped potential for location services to expand far beyond mapping, navigation and check-ins.

Location Labs is one of the busiest companies in this arena today, enabling everything from the geofenced text messaging service ShopAlerts to the Foursquare-augmenting Mayor Maker, which introduced the checkout to complement the check-in. With Location Labs’ new cross-carrier Universal Location Service, developers can build location-based services that work on every mobile phone in the U.S., not just on those phones where someone has downloaded a new app.

So to developers with big ideas, we challenge you now: think even bigger. If you want to build an app, sure, go for it. But maybe you should build an app as a value-add to a service, not as the entire service itself. The potential is out there, you just have to access it.

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