You have a passion for creating awesome digital products like eBooks, software, courses, or even artwork? The good news is that now you can sell them and start earning passive income. And how? Well, by selling them online.

And what if you don’t have your own product to sell but you still want to tap into that market? No worries! A digital products marketplace is your answer. It’s like a virtual mall where you connect creators with consumers. You provide the platform, they provide the products, and everyone wins!

In this tutorial, we will show you how to create a digital products marketplace in nine easy steps. So, keep reading!

Why You Should Create a Digital Products Marketplace

The digital products industry is booming. The latest data shared by ResearchAndMarkets.com shows that the global market is estimated to grow from $23,328.73 billion in 2021 to $33,313.50 billion in 2026 at a rate of 7.4%. The market is then expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.3% from 2026 and reach $45,149.00 billion in 2031.

If you want to get a slice of this huge pie, you need to jump in directly, with an online presence. The industry is not showing any signs of slowing down, so you really shouldn’t wait.

Why? Well, digital products are just plain convenient. They’re:

So, if you have a skill for design, love writing, or are a coding wizard, you can create a valuable digital product and share it with the world. And if you don’t have products of your own, you can easily connect with creators and sell through your platform.

Most Profitable Digital Products to Sell in 2024

These are some of the most profitable digital products to sell in 2024:

You can learn more about these digital products from our article 9 Types of Digital Products to Sell on Your WordPress Website.

How to Create a Digital Products Marketplace Using WordPress – 9 Simple Steps

As we said earlier, we will show you how to create a digital marketplace using WordPress in nine simple steps. You will learn how to:

Now let’s get into the details!

Step 01: Register a Domain Name

The first thing you need to do is register your domain name. Follow these steps to register your domain name:

Your domain name is the foundation of your digital presence, so take your time to choose the name that reflects your brand and resonates with your audience.

Step 02: Buy a Hosting Plan

Buying a hosting plan is almost the same as buying a domain name. Follow these steps to buy your domain name:

After registering, you’ll receive login credentials to access your hosting account’s control panel. Then change the password for you.

Step 03: Install WordPress on Your Control Panel

If you don’t want to install WordPress manually, simply ask your hosting provider to install WordPress on your behalf and provide the credentials. They will happily do that for you.

However, if you want to install WordPress on your own, follow this procedure:

Log in to your control panel and look for an option or section related to website management or software installations.

Once you’ve located the installer, select WordPress from the list of available applications. Follow the prompts to begin the installation process. You need to provide some basic information, such as your desired website name, username, and password for the WordPress admin area.

After providing the necessary information, initiate the installation process. The installer will automatically set up WordPress on your hosting account, including creating the necessary databases and configuring the required files.

Once the installation is complete, you’ll receive confirmation along with login details for your WordPress dashboard. This dashboard is where you’ll manage your website’s content, design, and functionality.

Step 04: Install a Multivendor Marketplace Plugin

WordPress has a dedicated eCommerce solution called WooCommerce. However, using WooCommerce, you can only create single online stores. To create a multivendor marketplace, you’ll require a multivendor plugin along with WooCommerce.

There are several multivendor plugins available. Among them, Dokan, WCFM, and MultivendorX are popular.

In this blog, we are going to use the Dokan plugin to create a digital products marketplace since Dokan is the most popular multivendor solution with more than 50,000 active installations. Also, Dokan comes with dedicated support for creating digital product marketplaces.

Let’s check how you can install the Dokan plugin!

Navigate to your WordPress dashboard -> Plugins -> Add New Plugin, then type Dokan into the search box and install the plugin from the search result.

After activating the plugin, click on the Activate button to activate the plugin.

Step 05: Install a Suitable Theme

Now you should install a suitable theme for your digital product marketplace. When you are choosing a theme, make sure it’s WooCommerce compatible. And all the WooCommerce-compatible themes are by default Dokan plugin compatible.

One such theme is Gioia – Modern Fashion Shop theme. It is a feature-rich, superbly designed theme, completely WooCommerce and Dokan compatible. You can use this theme to give your multivendor marketplace a professional look.

Let’s see how you can install and activate this theme on your website.

Since Gioia is a premium theme, you have to purchase it first. After purchasing the theme, go to the WordPress dashboard -> Appearance -> Themes -> Add New Theme -> Upload Theme, then upload the theme as a .zip file.

Finally, install and activate the theme to use it on your website.

Step 06: Configure the Basic Settings of Your Marketplace

To configure the basic settings of your marketplace, go to Settings under the Dokan option. There, you’ll find all the basic settings to configure:

To set the commission type and rate, click the Selling Options button. There you’ll find the options to set up commission type and rate.

You can choose either Flat or Percentage as a commission type, then set the rate.

Finally, click on the Save Changes button to save all the changes.

Now you need to set the minimum withdrawal amount. Click on the Withdraw Options button and configure the withdrawal settings.

Don’t forget to click the “Save Changes” button to save these changes.

Dokan supports all WooCommerce-compatible payment gateways. With Dokan Lite you can use non-adaptive payment gateways like PayPal, bank account transfer, cash on delivery, etc.

Go to your WordPress dashboard -> WooCommerce -> Settings, then click on the Payment tab to get the available payment methods.

Note: If the PayPal option isn’t there by default, you should install the “WooCommerce PayPal Payments” plugin and you will find the PayPal option here.

Step 07: Prepare Your Admin Store

It’s an optional step for you. If you don’t want to be a seller on your own marketplace, you can skip this step. However, you’ll still get commissions from your registered vendors if you don’t have an admin store.

But if you want to earn more, you can create your store and start selling as a vendor from your own marketplace. Let’s check how you can do that!

First, you need to enable yourself as a seller. To do that go to Dokan –> Vendors and enable selling by turning on the Status button.

As an admin, you’ll get two ways to upload products. You can upload products from frontend or backend.

Let’s check how to upload products from the backend:

Go to your WordPress Backend -> Products -> Add New. There you’ll find options to add the product’s name, description, image, category, tags, price, and so on.

Note: Since it’s a digital product, don’t forget to click on the Downloadable box.

When you’re done, click the “Publish” button to publish the newly added product.

That’s how you can add products from the backend.

Now let us show you how to add products from the frontend. Your registered vendors will also add products following this same process.

Go to your WordPress Dashboard -> Visit Vendor Dashboard -> Products. Then click on the Add new product.

Now add the product title, image, price, etc to complete the process.

Don’t forget to tick the Downloadable box.

Once you’re done with the configuration, hit the Publish button to publish the product.

Here is the preview of the product that we have just added:

Step 08: Allow Vendors to Register on Your Marketplace

After adding all the functionalities and configuring your marketplace, you can invite vendors to sign up for your marketplace. To make sure vendors can sign up for your marketplace, enable the “Anyone can register” option from WP Admin –> General –> Settings.

It will open the default registration form for vendors to sign up.

That’s all! This is how you can allow your vendors to register on your digital products marketplace.

Step 09: Promote, Promote, and Promote

You’ve built a beautiful marketplace, and stocked it with amazing digital products – now it’s time to promote it.

Here are some ways to promote your marketplace:

Bear in mind that promotion is an ongoing process. Track your results, experiment with different strategies, and adapt as needed. The key is to consistently put your marketplace out there and build relationships with your target audience.

By implementing these promotional tactics, you’ll attract vendors, and customers, and watch your digital marketplace flourish!

Digital Products vs Physical Products to Sell

Starting a digital products business over physical products has many advantages. Let’s go through some of them.

Easy to Create and Distribute

Digital Products: Creating digital products like eBooks, software, or online courses is a breeze. Once you’ve made them, you can distribute them instantly over the internet to anyone, anywhere. No shipping is required!

Physical Products: Making physical products often involves more steps. You’ve got to source materials, manufacture them, package them up, and then ship them out. It can be time-consuming and costly.

Low Management Costs

Digital Products: Since everything’s online, you don’t need to worry about renting a physical space or stocking inventory. Your main costs are usually related to creating the product itself and marketing it.

Physical Products: Running a business selling physical goods can be expensive. You’ve got rent, utilities, staff wages, and inventory costs. It can eat into your profits pretty quickly.

Scalability

Digital Products: Once you’ve created a digital product, you can sell an unlimited number of copies without any extra effort. Whether you’re selling to one person or a million, it doesn’t matter – it’s all digital!

Physical Products: Selling physical products has limits. You can only produce so many items at once, and you might need to invest in more resources if demand suddenly spikes.

Environmental Impact

Digital Products: They’re eco-friendly! No need for paper, plastic, or transportation – it’s all online.

Physical Products: Producing physical goods can have a big environmental footprint, from manufacturing processes to shipping emissions.

Creating a Digital Marketplace- Key Takeaways

The digital product market is booming, and creating a marketplace with WordPress offers a fantastic opportunity to tap into this potential.

Here are the key takeaways to keep in mind:

Now you know how to create a digital products marketplace using WordPress. So, create your own multivendor marketplace now! If you have any questions related to this tutorial, feel free to ask us using the comment box. Take care!

For a wide range of creatives and industry professionals, having a WordPress portfolio website is the easiest and surest way to get their work out there, be noticed, get more clients and grow their name. It’s easiest because WordPress makes it so. It’s surest because, without an online portfolio, you’re as good as invisible.

In this article, we will cover some basics of what an online portfolio should have, why WordPress is such a great choice and how to get started.

Note: Because we have a comprehensive guide on how to create a WordPress website that covers virtually everything you need to know in this process, we will not delve in technical details and just highlight the most important questions, so make sure to keep our guide at hand when you start making your own WordPress portfolio website.

What Is an Online Portfolio?

Donde – Artist Portfolio Theme

The word “portfolio” is a Latin term denominating a portable stack of papers. Until everything went digital, a portfolio was an actual, physical collection of an individual’s most representative work (projects, sketches, designs, blueprints, etc). A lot of people still have physical portfolios but in the last couple of decades, we are seeing a prevalence of online ones.

An online portfolio is a digital collection of work samples, projects, and achievements that individuals or businesses use to showcase their skills, expertise, and experience. It is a representation of one’s capabilities and accomplishments, usually tailored to a specific industry or profession. The most common use of portfolios is when seeking employment or new clients, and it often accompanies a professional CV or biography.

An online portfolio can come in various formats: a website, a blog, a social media profile or a profile on dedicated platforms (for designers it can be Behance, Dribbble, Portfoliobox, etc). These formats allow creators to customize their presentations according to their preferences and target audience. They serve as a dynamic tool for self-promotion, enabling individuals to attract potential clients, employers, or collaborators by providing a compelling overview of their talents and achievements, complete with personal info and a professional biography, as well as contact info.

What Makes a Good Portfolio?

Alicia – Elementor Portfolio Theme

A good online portfolio represents a clear and cohesive narrative of your work, highlighting your skills and accomplishments effectively. It should feature high-quality visuals that accurately represent your projects, along with concise descriptions that provide context and insight into your process. The visuals can be displayed in a simple and minimalist way, one below the other, but for maximum effectiveness, it’s best if they’re arranged in gallery layouts, in slideshows that can even be fullscreen, with a parallax effect, etc. It’s also a good idea to create a separate page for each of your most accomplished works, where visitors can explore it further and with more details.

Navigation of your online portfolio should be intuitive, allowing visitors to easily explore different sections and projects. Additionally, a good portfolio is responsive and optimized for various devices, ensuring accessibility for a wide range of audiences. This is essential since most people access the web through their hand-held devices these days.

Finally, incorporating elements such as testimonials or case studies can add credibility and further engage visitors with your work.

Who Should Have a WordPress Portfolio?

Munich – Creative Portfolio Theme

An online portfolio can be useful for a wide range of individuals and professionals across diverse fields. Most commonly, it’s associated with creatives such as graphic designers, photographers, artists, and writers or anyone else who can benefit from a portfolio to showcase their work and attract clients or potential employers.

Portfolios are not limited to creative industries. Professionals in industries like web development, marketing, and consulting can leverage portfolios to demonstrate their skills and previous projects to prospective clients or employers.

Additionally, students and recent graduates seeking internships or entry-level positions can use portfolios to showcase their academic projects, internships, and extracurricular activities to stand out in a competitive job market.

Essentially, anyone looking to present their skills, expertise, and achievements in a visually compelling and organized manner can benefit from having an online portfolio.

Why WordPress?

Areia – Portfolio and Agency Theme

There’s a variety of platforms you can use to build and host your online portfolio, but there are plenty of reasons why WordPress in particular makes a great choice.

First of all, it’s cheap. The software itself is free, the free themes are quite good, and there’s a whole range of free plugins that can provide additional portfolio functionalities. You do have to pay for hosting and domain, but these costs are rather affordable, too.

Second, WordPress is an open-source platform with a very lively ecosystem of theme and plugin developers and a rich support community. It is scalable, giving you plenty of room to grow, expand and get more traffic.

WordPress is, to a great extent, responsive by default, meaning your portfolio will look good on mobile devices, too. You will probably have to tweak a few things here and there, but it’s not much work. Plus, the built-in SEO features will help you get your portfolio out there in the search engine result pages.

Next, WordPress has a rather easy learning curve. It is equally suitable for beginners and those who already know their way around HTML and CSS. Again, thanks to the great and active community and plenty of documentation, you can solve most problems on your own.

Finally, the look of your WordPress portfolio is mostly dictated by the theme you’re be using, and there are tons of amazing portfolio themes that provide innovative and elegant design combined with the essential portfolio functionalities and features.

Elements That Every WordPress Portfolio Should Have

Lyndon – Portfolio Theme

Every WordPress portfolio website should incorporate several essential features and elements to effectively showcase work and engage visitors:

Clear Navigation: Easy navigation can be achieved with a user-friendly menu structure that allows visitors to explore different sections of your portfolio effortlessly. Menus and other navigational elements should be located in places that are intuitive and where most people will look. Check out our guide on how you can improve your website’s navigation and consider using innovative navigation solutions like fullscreen navigation.

High-Quality Visuals: A portfolio should feature only high-resolution images or videos that showcase your work effectively. In addition to accurately representing your work, high-quality visuals also instill a sense of confidence and professionalism.

Portfolio Grid or Gallery: Display your projects in a visually appealing grid or gallery layout, allowing visitors to browse through your work easily. Implement features like filters or categories to organize projects by type, industry, or skill.

Portfolio Slider: To make the portfolio even more engaging, interactive and visually compelling, consider displaying the work as part of a slider or a carousel. With the right tools, such as Qi Addons for Elementor, you can easily create highly innovative displays like device frame sliders, circled sliders, parallax image showcases, cards galleries and much more. These will add a spark to your presentation and help you come off as imaginative and up-to-date with the latest design trends.

Project Pages: Create dedicated pages for each project, providing detailed descriptions, objectives, methodologies, and outcomes. Include before-and-after images, client testimonials, or case studies to provide additional context and credibility.

About Me Page: Introduce yourself or your team on an “About Me” or “About Us” page. Share your background, expertise, and passion for your work to build trust and rapport with visitors.

Contact Information: Make it easy for visitors to get in touch by including clear contact information or a contact form. Consider adding social media links or a dedicated “Hire Me” button to encourage potential clients or employers to reach out.

Testimonials or Reviews: Incorporate client testimonials, client reviews, or endorsements to build credibility and trust with potential clients or employers. Display these testimonials prominently on your homepage or project pages.

Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons: Include clear and compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout your portfolio website to prompt visitors to take desired actions, such as contacting you, viewing more projects, or subscribing to your newsletter.

SEO Optimization: Optimize your portfolio website for search engines by using relevant keywords, meta titles and meta descriptions, and alt text for images. This helps improve visibility and attract organic traffic to your site. SEO is a complex field so make sure you check out our article on SEO basics.

Now let’s see how you can get all this up and running. First things first, you’ll need…

Hosting and Domain Name

Lorne – Creative Portfolio Theme

We said earlier that WordPress is free but for a WordPress portfolio you still have to pay for a few things, primarily for hosting and domain name.

The domain name is essentially your portfolio’s address. You need to think this one out carefully because it should be representative of you as a professional or a creative. It should be straightforward, clear, and uncomplicated. For a portfolio, the best practice is to use your own name or your professional alias (if you’re using one) for the domain name. If your preferred domain name is taken, you can still create one that’s close to your personal or professional brand. And if you get stuck, there are some cool domain name generators that can help.

Some people buy a domain name they like before figuring out the rest. However, the more common option is a two-in-one solution that includes both hosting services and a domain name. A lot of hosting providers include the domain name in their packages, along with other features, so this can be an important factor to consider when choosing the hosting provider.

Hosting services come in different plans or tiers. The plan you’ll choose should depend on the size of your website and the amount of traffic you expect. If you’re just starting out, you probably don’t expect a lot of traffic right away, but you never know how big you can grow so it’s important to pick a plan that allows for scaling up (and down) and handling traffic peaks. And since portfolio sites are usually media-rich, you may want to pick a plan with considerable hosting bandwidth.

Some providers have plans designed specifically for WordPress users. There are several good reasons for using managed WordPress hosting but you should know that shared hosting, which is more affordable, can also be a good option. Finally, there are hosting options that are completely free, but before you sign up for that check out our pros and cons of free WordPress hosting.

How to Choose A Theme for Your WordPress Portfolio?

Qi Theme for Elementor

We now come to what’s probably the most important choice you’ll make when setting up your online portfolio. WordPress themes are responsible both for the look and for the functionality of your website. They determine the design, the layouts, and a lot of other visual elements, but also functionalities like navigation, certain premade pages, page sections, elements like testimonials, galleries, video sections, parallax sections, titles, icons, and much more.

When it comes to themes, you have two options: free themes and premium ones. Every year WordPress releases a new default theme and it’s the one you get when you install the software. These themes are actually quite good, and after the switch to full site editing there are nicely designed block patterns and templates you can use.

Then there are free themes designed by independent theme developers, like our own Qi Theme for Elementor, or Qi Templates for Gutenberg. Although free, these themes are superbly designed and come with demos made specifically for portfolios.

And if you’re looking for something a bit more advanced, there’s quite a large market of premium portfolio WordPress themes for you to choose from. These come in all sorts of styles, vibes and aesthetics, some are more feature-rich than others, and most of them include innovative and elegant ways to display your content and really impress with your portfolio.

Premium themes represent a one-time cost and usually come with a lifetime of updates, but make sure to pick one that has good support and documentation, responsive features and compatibility with the major page builders.

How About the Plugins?

Qi Addons for Elementor

We said earlier that the best portfolio themes already come equipped with features and functionalities that can elevate your portfolio and make it stand out. However, you will probably find that using certain plugins can further improve both the looks and the performance of your WordPress portfolio website. Plugins are like addons that you install on your website to add certain functionality. Most WordPress websites have quite a few plugins since basic WordPress and themes cannot possibly include everything a website could need, plus some specific practical requirements might always emerge.

For instance, you will probably need security plugins to make your website safer and more reliable. Then, you should also consider an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast, plugins for adding contact forms, and so on.

A lot of plugins are actually completely free and won’t cost you a penny. However, there are premium plugins too that are worthy of consideration, especially for a portfolio website. One of such plugins is Qi Addons for Elementor, a collection of extremely useful widgets or addons for the popular page builder. What’s great about this plugin is that with a single installation (and a single payment) you get hundreds of features that can significantly elevate your WordPress portfolio, such as innovative sliders and carousels, fullscreen elements, typography effects, interactive carousels, flip boxes… All that plus various business, SEO and infographic elements.

In short, you will probably need some plugins, but you don’t have to add them all right away. As you build and promote your WordPress portfolio, the need for certain plugins will emerge spontaneously. Just make sure you’re using plugins that are regularly updated and maintained, and regularly uninstall the ones you’re no longer using.

Getting Your Portfolio Out There

Portfolio websites are specific as they’re mostly used as a sort of digital CV and, as such, don’t rely that much on organic traffic. However, there’s no reason not to work on your marketing and SEO to actually get some organic traffic and therefore reach more potential clients or employers.

First of all, you need to understand the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. Next, you will want to look into content marketing and see if perhaps you can enrich your portfolio with articles, blog posts, case studies, know-hows etc, anything that can provide value to the visitors and drive more traffic your way.

You should also regularly monitor the performance of your WordPress portfolio using Google Analytics and focus on the most important metrics, for starters.

As for SEO, we said earlier it’s a big and complicated field but one you can definitely master on your own, if you’re persistent. We suggest you check out our selection of the best SEO blogs and resources that regularly release useful and relevant content, as well as the list of 150 SEO terms every WordPress user must know.

Installing an SEO plugin, which we mentioned earlier, is a great way to make sure you’re on the right track in this department. Most of these plugins make sure you have your meta titles, meta descriptions and image alt text in place, which is essential for portfolio websites. Keywords are also important but since you probably won’t have much textual content, it’s perhaps a lesser concern. Proper URL structure, however, is important for each and every page of your portfolio so make sure you follow the best URL practices and guidelines.

Finally, don’t forget to promote your WordPress portfolio on social media, especially creatively oriented ones like Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok. Wherever you have a profile, link it to your website, and vice versa, using social icons.

We hope this article provided solid and actionable first steps into creating a truly memorable WordPress portfolio. Once you get it up and running, we hope you’ll let us know in the comments!

There is no overestimating the importance of a search function for your website. Even if your website is remarkably easy to navigate, your visitors might still have a little trouble finding what they want. It’s up to you to give them a hand. And you can do it if you add a search bar to your WordPress menu.

WordPress itself has a default search functionality. However, you may be dissatisfied with it, or you might want to include functionalities it doesn’t come with.

A functional search bar is a feature that’s often integrated in themes. This includes our own premium WordPress themes. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be using the Bridge theme to demonstrate how to add a search bar to your site. However, please note that the options for adding a search bar may vary, depending on the theme you’re using. And in case you’re not using one of our themes at all, we’ll also cover how to add a search bar to your site using a plugin. Here’s what we’ll cover:

Why Add a Search Bar to the Menu?

Good search functionality is one of the pillars of good user experience. Only a few things are more annoying for visitors than failing to find what they’re looking for, quickly and easily.

There’s a lot that can be done to improve the search. For instance, you can add live Ajax search for a faster, interactive search experience. You should certainly consider adding the autocomplete search feature, too. If you’re running an eCommerce website, you can set up the search filters for your products. Finally, you can even completely remove the search feature from your WordPress website.

But in terms of improving the usability and navigational experience of your website, you can also consider the best locations for placing your search bar.

By default, since the search bar is a widget, WordPress only allows you to add it to your widget-ready areas. These are dependent on the theme you’re using and you’re limited by those options, unless you know how to make custom widget areas.

An excellent location for the search bar is the navigation menu. Search is, after all, an important part of the website navigation, and placing it in the menu is a natural choice and a logical place where your visitors will look. The navigation menu is located at the top of the page, and the users will be able to find the search easily and instantly, which will, in turn, increase engagement and reduce the bounce rate.

If you feel like your website can benefit from placing the search bar to your WordPress menu, read along to discover two ways to do it.

How to Add a Search Bar in the Bridge WordPress Theme

Adding a search bar to your website using Bridge is very easy.

First navigate to Qode Options > Header.

Once you have found the Header screen, click the Qode Search button in the bottom bar, and you will be taken to the search switch. You will need to enable it.

Having enabled the search bar, all you need to do is Save your changes. Now, when you visit your site from the frontend, you will see the search icon in the header. Clicking on it will open the search bar at the top.

We also have a video tutorial with detailed instructions on how to easily add a search bar to the menu of our Bridge theme, as well as how to configure it to match your website design and functionality preferences. Check it out below.

As you can see, in just a few short steps, you will have helped your visitors sort through your content and find what they were looking for.

How to Add a Search Bar to WordPress Using a Plugin

In case your theme doesn’t come with an inbuilt search functionality, adding a search bar to your WordPress menu works a little differently. For this demonstration, we will use the Better Search plugin – a free and simple solution which greatly improves upon WordPress‘s default search functionality.

First, you need to install and activate the plugin. If you are not sure how to do this, you can check out our article on installing WordPress plugins. Once you have Better Search installed and activated, you will need to configure it. This plugin is well-annotated, with explanations in italics, and you will never be in doubt as to which command does what.

For this demonstration, we won’t touch anything with regards to the General settings. We just need to make sure that the Enable seamless integration checkbox is checked. This means that the plugin will use your theme’s settings and style in order to blend in.

In the Search tab, we will take a look at three functionalities. The Number of Search Results should be set to how many results you want to appear per page, and the Post types checkboxes should be checked for each post type you want to appear in the searches.

Next, if you scroll all the way down, you will find the Filter these words field. There are some words which are not included in the searches by default. These are profanities in English, and you may want to review this list, depending on your content. Note that this field may be used for all terms, not simply profanities, making this field an important tool in refining your search.

We won’t be changing anything in the Heatmap tab for our demonstration, since we are using the plugin in seamless integration mode. If you wish to use it, however, check Include heatmap on the search results. The options in this tab will help you customize the appearance of the “heat map” of popular searches, to further help your visitors find what they want. The Styles tab is there for custom CSS you might want to use.

Once you have your plugin configured and all settings saved, you need to find a place to add the search bar. This is done using a widget included with the plugin. Use your right-hand side menu to reach the Appearance/Widgets screen. We are using the Bridge theme, so the name for the widget area we’re adding our search to is Header Bottom Right. Note that themes may have different names for different widget areas.

In your list of available widgets on the left-hand side, find the Search Form [Better Search]. In its drop-down menu, find and select Header Bottom Right, then click the Add Widget button.

Your search form widget will now appear in the Header Bottom Right area on the right-hand side. You may choose to change the title of the field. We have gone with “Looking for something special?“. Once you Save your title, your search field should appear in your menu.

When you visit the frontend of your site, you will see what your search plugin looks like.

And that’s all there is to adding a search bar via a plugin in WordPress.

In Conclusion

While WordPress offers its own search functionality, it has been described by various users as rudimentary. We recommend you either use your theme’s in-built capacities, or a search plugin which best suits your website. Either way, adding a search bar to your WordPress menu is really simple, as we have shown. With a functional search bar, you’ll be a step closer to fulfilling your visitors‘ content needs – and you can be certain they will appreciate that.

If you’re in the real estate business and looking to create a website with all the required functionalities, you may have heard of IDX, software used to add MLS (Multiple Listing Service) listings to real estate websites. In this article, we’ll show you how to create an IDX website to attract visitors and potential customers, using minimum resources and without advanced technical expertise. You’ll learn about:

What Is an IDX Website for Realtors?

If you’re a realtor, individual or working for a real estate agency, you have a couple of options regarding your online presence. You can have a simple website using one of the available platforms, like WordPress.com, Wix, etc. You can have a more complex and robust website made on WordPress.org, with your own hosting, custom domain name, etc. You can even have a custom-made website created by a professional web developer. Finally, you can have an IDX website for realtors built on WordPress, which is the best possible solution.

An IDX website is a real estate website that displays active listings directly from a Multiple Listing Service (MLS). A MLS is a database, maintained by real estate professionals, that holds information about properties currently on the market. Think of it as a giant, exclusive catalog of homes for sale. This info includes details like price, bedrooms, location, and photos. Only licensed real estate agents can access the complete MLS, but some basic info is displayed on public websites like Zillow or Trulia.

So, IDX acts as a connection between the MLS and public websites like the one you want to create. It allows websites to securely pull and display accurate, up-to-date listings directly from the MLS, without needing to manually submit each property. This guarantees that the users see the latest information and agents can showcase their listings to a wider audience, all on a single platform.

The advantages of these sorts of real estate websites are obvious. They are better for customers since they provide a more convenient search experience. They’re better for realtors, too, since they can be a tremendously useful tool for attracting new leads.

WordPress as a Platform for an IDX Website

Here at Qode Interactive, we firmly believe that WordPress can be used to create any sort of website. Creating a website with WordPress is something that even non-experts can do, with proper guidance. There are tons of specialized real estate themes out there, and a lot of amazing real estate websites have been made with Qode themes, too. So, WordPress makes a great choice for realtors when it comes to boosting their online presence. But can it be used to make an IDX website for realtors? The short answer is: yes.

WordPress packs amazing functionality out of the box, but a lot of times it is the WordPress ecosystem of plugins and themes that really takes the experience to the next level, adding required design solutions and extending functionalities.

We’ll talk more about how this can be applied to IDX websites specifically, but now let’s see what you’ll need to get such a website up and running. The essentials include:

Hosting and Domain Name

In order for your site to be accessible on the web, it needs to be hosted by a specialized service that offers all the required facilities, services, space and bandwidth for it – a web hosting service. We’ve written extensively about hosting so we invite you to check out our article on the difference between shared and managed WordPress hosting that should help you figure things out. If you’re on a tight budget, you should know that there are free options, but before you commit, please check out the pros and cons of free hosting. In any case, make sure to check out our guide on how to choose a hosting provider first.

As for the domain name, you can get one even before you figure out hosting. However, if you don’t already have a domain name paid and parked, bear in mind that a lot of hosting providers include domain names in their services so that may be a more convenient solution.

Once you have a hosting plan and domain name in place, it’s time to install WordPress (check out our guide on how to install WordPress manually) and set up your IDX website for realtors. Depending on the type of hosting you’ve chosen, you may already have WordPress installed, but either way after this step you can go ahead and install a theme of your choice.

Picking the Right WordPress Theme for your IDX Website

Fokkner – Real Estate and Property Theme

The choice of WordPress theme for an IDX website for realtors is one of the most important choices, as the themes not only set a certain visual mood and engage the visitors in a certain way, but they also come equipped with specific elements, sections and functionalities designed to boost engagement and conversions.

For realtors, this includes above all a professional search functionality that allows visitors to quickly find the property they’re looking for, as well as all the necessary info about a property. Then there are individual property listings equipped with multiple photos, galleries, videos and sliders. Maps, contact forms and client testimonials are also a must.

The best real estate WordPress themes usually come equipped with all this, and more. You should always opt for a theme that, in addition to modern and professional design, ease of use and speed, also offers a comprehensive real estate module – a set of functionalities, sections and elements designed specifically for realtors. To get inspired and see some great themes in action, check out our list of the best real estate websites made with Qode themes.

Make sure the theme you pick has good reviews, comes with professional customer support, that it’s regularly updated and that has a good performance and speed score.

Sometimes, a WordPress theme for real estate will also include IDX/MLS integration, which is a plus, but in majority of cases this functionality is added via plugins.

Best WordPress IDX Plugins

Before we check out a couple of excellent IDX plugins for a real estate website, let’s quickly go through what IDX and MLS are and how they work.

We said previously that IDX is software that allows site visitors to go through real estate listings in a specific area. These listings are pulled from MLS (Multiple Search Listing) platforms, which are real estate portals updated by local realtors. These are comprehensive, detailed and large aggregations of listings and it’s the realtors’ responsibility to keep them up to date – after all, it’s in their best interest. MLS platforms are for realtors only, and if they want to add these listings to their own websites, they need to use IDX as a sort of bridge.

The easiest way to create an IDX-based real estate website is to first create the site using WordPress, as we described above, and then use one of the several available IDX plugins to add the functionality. Here are a couple of our favorites:

Realtyna Organic IDX

Realtyna Organic IDX + WPL Real Estate is a freemium plugin designed to manage property listings by adding MLS/IDX/RESO/VOW/XML/DDF functionalities to any WordPress website. With the free version, you can easily pull listing features, addresses, appliances, neighborhood info, videos and images and display them on your website. The plugin supports all MLS providers in North America.

With the paid version, which costs $199 (one-time payment, lifetime updates and one-year support), you can host all the IDX/MLS data on your own server, which is ideal for realtors who want more control over their data.

DS IDX

The WordPress IDX Real Estate Listings & MLS Search takes pride in being the only IDX plugin that offers live support, a custom marketing solution and IDX listing feeds from more than 730 MLS platforms in Canada and the United States. The plugin adds user-friendly search widgets with a map and a slideshow of featured properties. Listings are comprehensive and informative, and can include school information and similar properties in the desired area.

This plugin also features useful lead-capture tools, like forms for scheduling property showings, tools for adding favorite listings, saving property search criteria for the next visit, and more.

Note that this is not a free plugin. It does come with a free 7-day trial. The basic package costs $59.95/month, and includes live listing shortcodes, an interactive IDX widget and indexable city and neighborhood pages. The Pro version costs $89.95/month and includes full IDX search interface, flexible site registration options, saved searches and favorites, lead capture tools, additional widgets and CRM with lead behavior insights. The Pro Plus plan costs $299.95/month and includes everything from the Pro version plus dedicated help from digital marketing and SEO experts.

Showcase IDX

Showcase IDX Real Estate Search is a freemium solution for real estate agents and companies, providing them with portal-quality listings search functionality, fully integrated into WordPress and managed from the WordPress admin. It basically works as a CRM solution, on top of providing the IDX search functionality. The listings are responsive out of the box and fully customizable to match the style of your theme. You can create neighborhood and community pages and import MSL in batches, with custom styling for each batch. Showcase IDX is the only IDX that allows for multiple polygon search, with customizable map elements.

Showcase IDX comes with a free 10–day trial, and the paid plans start at $74.95.

MLS Import

With MLS Import, you can easily connect to the MLS platforms you choose and import listings in batches, using your own criteria, and sync their information. The plugin is created specifically for WordPress and can be used with most real estate themes. It is built on the latest RESO API technology, which is important since RETS is a deprecated data standard that no longer works. Selected properties are imported directly to your domain and images and videos are served through a CDN, which improves performance and guarantees a fast user experience. MLS Import works with 800+ platforms across North America and the listings changes are synced hourly, guaranteeing your content will always be up to date.

MLS Import has a 30-day free trial, after which, if you decide to use the plugin, you will pay $49/month.

Wrapping It Up

After you’ve installed and activated the plugin of your choice and imported the listings from MLS platforms, you’ll be ready to go. At this point, it’s time to grow your audience and turn them into customers. Check out our tips for WordPress lead generation and consider using some of the lead generation plugins for the platform. One thing you’ll want to do is promote your website on social media and use email marketing. For realtors, it’s also important to implement proper local SEO techniques. Don’t forget to monitor your metrics, as they can tell you with certainty which aspects of your website are performing well and which ones need improvement. Many of the IDX plugins come with built-in insights, especially those with the user registration option. Finally, make sure to check out Qode Magazine regularly since mastering WordPress is a sure way to get your business out there, attract more customers and close more deals.

This handy 101 of working with WordPress covers all the essential steps in building a website using the world’s most popular CMS – from installation to monetization, and teaches you how to create a WordPress website all by yourself. For easier navigation, use the Table of Contents below.

Part 4 – Adding eCommerce Features

Part 7 – Frequently Asked Questions

Part 8 – Additional Resources

Part 1 – Getting a Website Up

If you’ve decided to use WordPress to power your website – you’ve made a great call. WordPress is affordable, reliable and scalable, and there’s a lot of other “-able” adjectives that can be added to it. It can power any sort of website, and it’s beginner-friendly, so if making websites is not something you do for a living, it makes the perfect choice. It’s an equally great tool for professionals who build websites for clients – the flexibility and scalability is what makes WordPress so special.

Before You Begin

First things first – when we say “WordPress,” what do we actually mean? There are two versions of the platform, and a lot of people confuse the two. WordPress.org is the “proper” WordPress, the platform that allows you to create any sort of website – from the smallest blog to the biggest eCommerce shop or an enterprise website.

Check the article linked below regarding WordPress.com. For the purposes of this guide, from this point on by “WordPress” we will mean the .org version.

Hosting

Since we’ve opted for WordPress.org, our next step is to take care of the hosting, i.e. pick a hosting provider or service. Unless you have your own hosting resources (a server), you will need to sign up for a plan with a service that will host your website for you.

In addition to traditional hosting providers (BlueHost, Hostinger, GoDaddy, HostGator and so on), more and more users opt for cloud hosting, which is especially suitable for smaller websites that don’t expect tremendous traffic.

Domain Name

Now, if your hosting plan doesn’t include domain name, you will need to take care of that, too. There are services that only work with domain names – these are called domain registrars. Oftentimes, a user will purchase and register a domain name (especially if it’s a good name) and “park” it until he’s ready to use it. The domain name can then be transferred to your hosting plan.

A domain name is a unique and human-readable address that identifies a website on the internet. It serves as a key component of a website’s online presence, facilitating navigation and establishing a distinct online identity for businesses, organizations, and individuals.

Right now, you’re reading this on a website with a domain name “qodeinteractive.com.” The /magazine part of the URL indicates the subdirectory of that domain.

Installing WordPress

WordPress is known for great ease of use. Basically anyone can download and install it, and there are plenty of tutorials from the developers that can guide you through it.

We’ve covered the process in this handy video so make sure to check it out before you start, and perhaps leave it open in one tab so you can consult it along the way.

Before you begin, you will need a couple of things:

First, you’ll need to create a database on the server, using cPanel from your hosting provider. Next, you’ll need to download the latest version of WordPress from the official website. When you unzip the folder you’ve downloaded, you will need to connect the files inside it to your database on the server, using cPanel or FTP. This is an intuitive step-by-step process, especially if you’re using an FTP client like FileZilla, but you will need the credentials from your hosting provider (username, password, host) so make sure you have them on hand. After the files have uploaded, go to your website’s URL, where you will find the WordPress installation screen.

This is a very straightforward process as WordPress guides you through the installation step by step.

If everything went well, it’s time to take care of your website’s looks and functionality.

Choosing a WordPress Theme

A WordPress theme is a collection of files that work together to determine the overall design and functionality of a WordPress website. It provides a template for how the website should look and function, including the layout, color scheme, typography, and other visual elements.

Themes allow WordPress users to change the appearance of their websites without altering the underlying content. They provide a quick and efficient way to customize the design and style of a website, making it easy to create a professional and visually appealing site without extensive coding knowledge.

WordPress themes consist of various template files written in PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Don’t worry! That’s just what’s “under the hood” of your theme. You don’t need to be skilled in any of these in order to work with your theme. Most WordPress themes are based on the principle of “WYSIWYG” – What You See Is What You Get. However, it’s good to know that these files define the structure and presentation of different parts of the website, such as the header, footer, sidebar, and individual page layouts. Themes also include options for customization, allowing users to modify settings such as logo placement, color schemes, widget areas, and more.

In a nutshell, a WordPress theme helps you get a professional-looking website up and running without having to hire a web designer.

When choosing a theme, you first need to ask yourself a couple of questions:

It’s often said that WordPress allows people to create websites for free. The platform software is free, and there are free themes, both from WordPress itself, and from theme developers, that can be used to create highly functional websites. Many of those free themes, like Qi Theme, are simply remarkable. However, you need to be very lucky to find a free WordPress theme that both looks and works great. Oftentimes, free themes are rather basic in its features, come with limited design and customization options, and generally lack that special something that will make your website stand out. Also, free themes often come with very limited support options.

Premium themes, on the other hand, being more expensive, obviously have more effort, care and extras invested and instilled into them. For instance, many premium themes come with built-in premium plugins, like Slider Revolution and others. Sometimes they even come with premium images included, which means you can keep them and use them on your pages without paying extra.

So it all boils down to your personal choice and your budget. If you come across a premium theme that fits your needs like a glove and offers a range of useful functionalities, you should consider investing in it. On the other hand, it may just happen that you’ll find a free theme that suits your needs just fine.

WordPress currently comes with the Gutenberg site editor out of the box. It is a block editor that allows you to quickly and easily create website pages by combining integral elements called blocks. Being extremely user-friendly, versatile and customizable, Gutenberg is one of the most popular solutions for WordPress site creation. In addition to the basic blocks you get by default, you can also purchase block collections, like Qi Blocks for Gutenberg, that give you advanced functionalities, from showcase and creative ones (interactive elements, advanced typography, complex sliders and galleries) to business (various infographics, tables, client carousels, etc) and eCommerce ones (advanced cart functionalities, product galleries, etc).

Another popular page builder is Elementor. Similarly to blocks, it uses elements that can be mixed and matched to create any sort of page you like. Again, addons are available for this editor, like Qi Addons, that further extend its functionality.

There are other popular page builders out there, like Divi, SeedProd, BeaverBuilder, Oxygen, etc.

WPBakery (formerly known as Visual Composer) used to be the single most widely used builder, but it has recently seen a huge decline in popularity.

You may wonder why it matters which page builder you will be using. Well, this decision also influences the choice of your WordPress theme. Some themes are built on/for Elementor, some on/for Divi, etc.

In short, when you decide which builder to use, you will search for appropriate themes.

Note that the best premium themes come in several versions. For instance, Qode Interactive themes are available both for Gutenberg and for Elementor, and there are WPBakery themes too.

This depends on what you want to do with your website. If you’re going to start a food blog, you should probably get a food blog theme. The same with travel blogging, or fashion, and it’s particularly true for listings, directories and real estate websites. This is because these themes come with a specific set of functionalities that you’re probably going to need. For instance, the best food blogging themes will have recipe modules allowing you to create lovely and convenient recipe cards, with nutritional info, prep time, etc. Travel and tourism themes usually come with premade destination pages, beautiful galleries for travel photography, and booking modules. Restaurant websites should always be equipped with booking forms, menu pages, maps, etc, which are features that all good restaurant themes have.

On the other hand, multipurpose themes can also be quite feature-rich, as they usually contain a number of niche-specific demos. These themes are great if your future website doesn’t fall strictly into any specific niche and you want to have the ability to experiment and combine different elements.

Installing Your Theme

If you opted for a free theme, or if you still haven’t made up your mind and want to shop around directly from your WordPress admin, you can use the theme search by navigating to Appearance>Themes.

Click on Add New and browse by categories. If you know the name of the theme, you can type it in the search bar.

When you find the theme you want, simply click on Install under its thumbnail. After the theme is installed, you will be prompted to Activate it.

For premium (paid) themes, the process is somewhat different. After completing the purchase, you will get your theme files in a zipped folder, and you will probably get the activation key. You need to upload the zipped theme to your website. To do that, go to Appearance>Themes and click on Add New. A new page will load, with the Upload Theme button at the top. Click on it and upload the zipped theme. After the theme has uploaded, click on Activate to complete the process.

A theme can also be installed using FTP. To learn more about this method, check out our guide on how to install a WordPress theme, linked below.

Installing the Plugins

Plugins play a very important role in the WordPress ecosystem. They are pieces of software that are added (“plugged in”) to your WordPress installation. Their purpose is to extend or expand the functionality of your website, making it richer, more functional and useful both for you and for your visitors.

As you grow your website, you will probably add more and more plugins as needed. For instance, if at some point you decide you want a Nutrition Facts card for your recipes, you will find a plugin that will help you do that easily and quickly. Or you’ll want to add a chatbot, a booking form, a cool scrolling effect, a caching or security plugin, and so on.

A lot of plugins you can add for free. There are currently over 60k free plugins at the official WordPress plugin repository. There are also premium plugins of all sorts, and there are plugins that represent entire collections, like Qi Addons for Elementor or Qi Blocks for Gutenberg.

As we said, you will probably add a lot of plugins as you go. However, some plugins you’ll want to install right after you install WordPress and your theme, because they are essential plugins that every website should probably have.

These include:

Plugins are extremely easy to install from your Dashboard, by navigating to Plugins>Add New and then browsing or searching for the plugin you need. When you find it, simply click on Install and then on Activate. If the plugin you need is not in the plugin directory, you can download it from its developer and upload the zipfile you get after purchase.

Note that having too many plugins can cause conflicts or slow down your website. Only install plugins that you really need and perform occasional cleanups to remove the ones you no longer use, or the ones that are not adequately supported or updated by their developer.

Part 2 – Customizing Your WordPress Website

The great thing about the WordPress themes is that you can set them up just the way you like. You don’t have to leave the adjustments as they are. Of course, you will change the placeholder content with your own. Even if you import all the demo content, you will want to make the website your own.

Customization is performed on two levels – global options affect the entire website, while page options only affect that particular page.

After you’ve installed a theme, you will probably first want to take care of the site identity – change the logo, the website name and tagline, the favicon, and so on.

Adding Your Own Logo, Site Title and Headline

To take care of these, head over to Appearance>Customize. This will get you to the Theme Customizer, where the first option will be Site Identity. Here you can update your logo, set your site name and tagline (or choose not to display them at all) and add the site icon, a.k.a the favicon. Some themes go the extra mile and offer additional settings for the logo, which are usually found in global options.

Creating, Customizing, Adding and Removing Menus

Menus play an important role in any website. They are the most important navigational element, and, as such, they are also crucial for UX.

When you install a theme, it will probably have several pre-created menus that you can simply adjust to your needs.

To check the available menus, in your Dashboard menu, go to Appearance>Menus. Here you can select the menu you want to edit or create a new one. When you select a menu, in the left section of the screen you will see the available pages you can add as your menu items. In addition to pages, you can also set posts, categories, tags or custom menu items. To the right, under Menu Structure, you can easily rearrange the menu items and change their order.

Note that you can do all this in the Theme Customizer, too, under the Menus option.

If you want to use different menus for desktop and mobile navigation, you can set that up, too.

Note that there are many different types of menus. Some themes have hidden menus, mega menus, some have vertical or sidebar menus, sticky or floating menus, and so on. Feel free to play around with different types that your theme allows until you find the one that fits your website style and purpose the best.

Setting the Homepage

Another thing you will want to take care of before you launch your website is what sort of homepage you want to have. The homepage is the page where your visitors land when navigating to your domain, whether through a link or by typing in the URL. It’s the entry point of your website and its main navigational hub.

There are two types of homepages in WordPress: static and dynamic. A static page is always the same, while the dynamic one displays your latest posts. Because WordPress was originally conceived as a blogging platform, this is still the default type of homepage, so you will probably want to change that to static by navigating to Settings>Reading in your Dashboard menu and making the change there. If you opt for a static homepage, here you will also have to pick the page you want to set as your homepage.

Changing the Colors and the Fonts

When you pick a theme, you probably pick it based not just on the functionalities, but on the visual aspects, too – the color scheme, the typography, the style (minimalist, cluttered, brutalist, retro, romantic, etc). However, along the way you may want to tweak a thing or two regarding the appearance.

The location of the options depends on the theme you’re using. Older WordPress themes still have this feature in the Theme Customizer. With full site editing themes, like the latest WordPress default theme, you get to pick among a series of preset styles and color variations, and you can also customize them additionally in the Editor menu and then the Styles option for each page, template or template part.

The same goes for typography. Depending on the theme you’re using, you can change the fonts globally (for the entire site) or for specific pages. The default full site editing theme has template parts that you can customize, including header and footer.

Note that many theme authors offer their own styling options and these may be located in other sections of the backend.

In general, WordPress themes are always extremely customizable, and you can basically change anything you like, especially if you know your way around CSS. Custom CSS can be inserted to provide additional styling options that are perhaps not available by default.

Adding or Removing the Widgets

In WordPress, widgets are little blocks or elements or pieces of layout, essentially tools that add extra functionality. Some come with WordPress by default, some come with the theme, and others can be added through plugins, like the Qi Addons for Elementor.

Widgets can’t be just added anywhere – they can only be added to designated widget areas. These, again, depend on the theme you’re using. The most common widget area is the sidebar, and also the footer. Commonly added widgets are social links, blog categories, product categories, shopping cart, Instagram feed, etc.

If your theme doesn’t come with a widget or a widget area you’d like to use, you can easily add them. Go to Appearance>Widgets and you’ll see the list of available widget areas. In the default WordPress theme, you can add widgets as blocks. In other themes, you will probably see a display of available widgets on one side, and widget areas on the other. Simply drag and drop them where you want.

If there are widgets you’d like to remove from a widget area, you can just as easily do so. Depending on the theme, click on the X above the widget, or on three dots and then select Remove.

It’s also possible to have certain widgets on certain pages, and not have them on others.

Part 3 – Creating Pages and Posts

Now that your website is up and you’ve made the essential customizations, it’s time to fill it with content.

Every website contains a number of pages. Sure, there are one-page websites, in which all content is located on a single page. In most cases, these are actually landing pages created for specific purposes and designed to convert. A website such as a portfolio, online shop, online community, business website etc, will in most cases have many different pages.

Some pages come with a WordPress installation by default. Some pages come with the theme you’re using. You can remove all the pages you don’t plan on using, and also add new ones very easily. Bear in mind, though, that there are certain pages every website should have, such as the Error 404 page, Contact page, and so on.

Adding or Removing a WordPress Page

In your WordPress admin, find Pages in the Dashboard menu. Here you’ll have the option of viewing all the existing pages, or adding a new one. The process will slightly depend on the page builder you’re using (Elementor, Gutenberg, etc). For instance, in Gutenberg, you will add page elements by adding blocks to it and then rearranging them and customizing them. In Elementor, you will add elements. Either way, you will have the option of setting the page visibility (public, private password-protected), editing the publishing date, the author, etc. You will also be able to preview the page at any time before publishing it.

If you add new pages, don’t forget to put them in your navigation menu so the visitors can find it.

Removing a page is just as simple: click on Pages in your dashboard menu, and then check the box next to the page you want to delete. In the Bulk Actions menu, click on Move to trash and that’s it. You can also delete the page while editing it, by clicking the Move to trash button in the right-hand side menu. FInally, a page can be deleted using the quick actions which appear under each page’s title when you hover over it.

Essential Pages

As we said above, the decision on the pages is all up to you but best practices dictate that every WordPress website, regardless of the kind, should have certain essential pages. Ideally, these should be linked to in your main navigation menu. These pages include:

Customizing the Header and Footer

The settings for these parts of the page are defined by the theme you’re using. Customization of these parts will depend on the theme, as well as on the page builder. For example, if you want to change the content and the appearance of your header and footer in Gutenberg site editor using the Twenty Twenty-Three theme, you will need to head over to Appearance>Editor, where you will select the part you want to edit from Template Parts.

In many themes, including our own Qi Theme, you can set different styling and customization on the level of individual pages – you can set the header, footer and sidebar you want and style it the way you like. You can even turn off the header and/or footer for certain pages.

Themes usually come with preset header and footer styles to pick from, but if none of them work for you, you can tweak them to your liking.

Some of the best practices tell us that the header shouldn’t be too big and imposing and it should contain the logo, page title or subtitle, and the main menu.

As for the footer, that’s where we usually find contact information, copyright info, social links and, oftentimes, another menu.

Adding Multimedia (Images, Galleries, Videos)

Whatever page builder or editor you’re using, you’ll find that adding multimedia content to your pages and posts is extremely simple. All you have to do is add an appropriate block (in Gutenberg) or element (in Elementor). For single images, you will need the Image block/element, and for a gallery you will search for the Gallery block/element.

Video, VideoPress and YouTube are blocks that come by default and that you can use to add videos to your posts or pages just as easily as you do with images.

If you have enriched your editing capabilities with a block/widget collection plugin, you will also have advanced elements to combine – carousels, animated galleries, sliders, various gallery layouts, video players, etc. Of course, you can also use single plugins for this, but it’s more convenient to use a good collection, like Qi Addons or Qi Blocks.

The multimedia content that you want to display is added through the Media Library.

Making Sure Your Website is Responsive/Mobile Friendly

As more and more people use primarily their hand-held devices (mobile phones, tablets…) to access the internet, it has become vital to have a website that’s optimized to look good on various screen sizes.

Mobile-friendly design means that a website is adapted to smaller screens, but not completely. This sort of design is today almost obsolete. Mobile-optimized or mobile-first means that design allows the users on mobile to access information, content and design with no effort and in a complete manner. Responsive design makes sure this happens by default – it is design that adapts automatically to various screen sizes and viewports.

Most WordPress themes these days are responsive. They scale to the screen they’re viewed on automatically, both design and content. In most cases, users don’t have to worry about this part at all. Still, additional responsiveness settings can be found in page editors/builders, and they can be adjusted, if needed, for individual sections, elements, pages, etc.

Part 4 – Adding eCommerce Features

You don’t need to run a well-established business or to be a big company in order to sell things online through your website. That’s one of the beauties of WordPress: it allows users to create all sorts of websites with ease, including websites meant for profit.

Whether your main focus is to run an online store, or you simply want to add a basic shop page to sell a few of your products or services, you’ll be glad to hear they’re both quite easy to accomplish, thanks to a little thing called WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is the best and the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It is a free plugin that comes with a wonderful set of functionalities out of the box, from product-related options, to cart and checkout functionalities, shipping, inventory, taxes and everything in between.

Once your shop is up and running, you can make use of the range of free and premium addons and plugins to add advanced functionality to your eCommerce website.

Now, we won’t get into step-by-step instructions for setting up an online shop, as it requires a separate tutorial and we’ve already written about it extensively – check out the links in the “Further reading” section.

We will tell you though that, if your primary intention is to run an online shop, your best bet is to use one of the premium eCommerce themes. These themes come with premade shop pages, attractive product lists, sliders, carousels and galleries, cart and checkout pages, so you don’t have to create any specific pages yourself.

After picking one such theme, you will need to install WooCommerce and set it up. There’s a setup wizard to guide you through the process and it’s really very simple and quick.

So, theme plus WooCommerce plus plugins or addons of your choice, and you’ve got yourself an online shop. The physical part of the business – the products, the logistics, etc – is up to you to take care of.

Part 5 – Taking Care of Security and Performance

In order for your beautifully set-up website to grow and prosper, you have to assure that all the essential security and performance features are in place. Online threats, attacks, downtime… there’s a lot that can compromise your website and cost your valuable traffic.

How to Keep Your WordPress Website Safe and Secure?

The protection you introduce to your website should have two goals – one is to keep it safe for your visitors, and the other is to keep the website itself safe from outside threats.

WordPress generally has a stable and safe structure, but there are still things you can and should do to build up on that. Your hosting provider will play an important part, too – a lot of protection comes from the server side, so you have to make sure your plan comes with some form of DDoS protection, firewall, regular backups, potentially IP ban feature, encryption, etc.

Next, your login procedure should be secure, possibly with two-factor authentication that protects both you and your visitors. Adding CAPTCHA and introducing login attempt limits is also useful.

Good security practices also include keeping your website backed up at all times, and regularly updating to the latest version of WordPress. The same goes for the theme you’re using, and all the plugins you have installed.

Occasional plugin cleanup is also recommended – over time, we tend to install quite a lot of them, so it’s a good idea to delete the ones no longer in use.

For securing the connection between the site and the browser, it is essential to have a valid SSL certificate, as well as SFTP.

Finally, if you have multiple people logging into the website (authors, editors, etc), you may want to manage and control user roles. Not everyone needs access to just anything in your backend.

Of course, on top of all that, and perhaps even before all that, you need security plugins. These plugins monitor your core files integrity, watch for suspicious activity, provide additional firewalls, scan your website and filter for spam. And the great thing is that a lot of these plugins are free! To learn more, check out the “Further reading” section.

How to Optimize Your Website Performance?

A great part of your website performance will depend on your hosting plan. The bandwidth is one of the major factors, as it allows your website to work well during traffic peaks. Together with the type of hard drive and the RAM you get with the package, it defines the speed (page load speed, that is) of your website and obviously has a great impact on the UX of your site.

Another thing that affects performance on the hosting side of the issue is uptime. As we mentioned earlier, always choose a provider that guarantees 99.9% uptime.

On your part, there are certainly things you can do to make sure your website performs well. Again, regular backups are crucial as they protect you from loss in case something goes wrong.

Database management is also important. An occasional cleanup can help you delete unused or superfluous files that could be clogging your database. Of course, whatever you do with your database, don’t forget to back it up first.

Uninstalling the plugins you no longer use will also help lighten up your website and keep it fast.

Lazy-loading images, image optimization, code optimization, caching and using a CDN are also important practices for optimizing website performance.

Part 6 – Growing Your Audience – Marketing and SEO

So, you’re finally here – you’ve installed WordPress, the theme and the plugins. You’ve added all the pages you need and started posting content. Everything works and looks great, and now it’s time to get your website out there, get more visitors, more clicks, more traffic. In short – it’s time to promote it and grow your audience and your reach. Whatever the purpose of your website, if it’s online and it’s public, your goal is most likely to get as many visitors as possible.

For this, you need to create two crucial strategies: a marketing strategy and an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. Both these subjects merit a full guide on their own, but let’s just quickly touch on some of the most vital aspects.

Creating an SEO Strategy

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it represents a set of practices aimed at helping your website rank better in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages), gain more visibility and more traffic.

SEO can roughly be divided into two segments:

On-Page SEO:

This set of practices includes your content keywords, meta titles and descriptions, headers and title tags, URLs, internal and external links, Schema Markup, images, and everything else that is actually done on a website’s page.

Off-Page SEO:

This part of your SEO strategy involves content marketing, link building, social media, reviews, etc.

There are also technical aspects of SEO, and these include optimizing the page speed, using structural data, XML sitemaps, canonicalization, Hreflang, and more.

A good SEO strategy needs to include all these vital aspects. If you focus just on a few and neglect the rest, your efforts will be in vain. It is advisable to hire or periodically outsource an SEO expert to take care of all these things for you. However, since brand new websites rarely have the budget for it, you can also do all of this by yourself, by following guidelines and tutorials, many of which you will find in the “Further reading” section.

Remember that SEO is an ongoing effort and something that needs to be revisited and revised on a regular basis. The internet is a very fast-changing environment, and there’s also the fact that Google itself frequently changes its SERP rules and algorithms.

Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing represents a particularly important part of both your SEO strategy and your overall marketing strategy. It is a set of procedures, techniques and approaches that involves producing and distributing highly relevant website content to your targeted audience. Its main goal is to help you grow your audience, increase your reach and build authority.

In WordPress, content marketing mainly involves writing blog posts, as well as whitepapers, case studies, video tutorials, podcasts and so on. The strategy should involve setting an area of interest relevant to your industry and niche, and creating content that addresses issues pertaining to that area. In short, if you’re a B2B company or an app developer, your content marketing strategy will not include travel, food or health topics. Conversely, if you’re selling beauty products, your content will not include topics like politics or tech.

Keyword research and related strategies play a particularly important part in content marketing. Keywords allow you to target the audience most likely to convert – those that are interested in what you have to say, and their search intent (what they search for to get to your content).

Your content needs to meet several criteria: it needs to be relevant, informative and helpful. In addition to search intent and keyword research, it should also be based on competitor analysis. Needless to say, the writing has to be impeccable in terms of grammar and spelling, it needs to be engaging and captivating, and – 100% unique. Anything less than that won’t get you far in SERPs and might even get you penalized by Google.

Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy

In this day and age, no brand, business or website can survive without a strong social media presence. It seems that, depending on the demographics, almost everyone is on one social media platform or the other. The younger demographic is on TikTok and Instagram, the middle aged and senior audience is on Facebook, professionals are on LinkedIn, and so on. Depending on your industry and niche, you definitely want to pick one or more of the most popular platforms to promote your website.

This is particularly important for eCommerce and service-based businesses. If your conversions take place on your checkout pages, your website contact forms and download pages, you need to get the crowd from social media to your website.

Conversely, in order to grow and expand your overall digital presence, the visitors of your website need to be directed to your social media profiles, as well. Coupled with physical locations (if you have any), this is the basis for a powerful omnichannel marketing strategy.

Fortunately, WordPress offers plenty of tools by default (plus a great many in the form of plugins and extensions) to help you connect your website and your socials, and to develop a social strategy that grows your audience and reach. Social media buttons, dynamic Instagram, Facebook and Twitter feeds, Facebook likes on blog posts – these are just some of the solutions you can leverage.

Leveraging Paid Ads and Affiliate Marketing

Once your website has grown and developed, you’ll probably start thinking about monetizing it, especially if your traffic keeps showing an upward trend. In addition to selling products and services using WooCommerce or another solution, you can also make (some, or a lot of) money through paid ads and affiliate marketing.

Displaying Ads in WordPress

One of the easiest ways to make money through your WordPress website is through paid ads. This essentially means displaying other people’s ads on your pages. Google Ads are your best bet and to monetize from the ad views it’s best to use Google AdSense, the search engine’s huge advertising platform. You display ads on your pages and earn a percentage from each ad view.

Not all websites are approved for AdSense, so before you apply, make sure your website has solid traffic, good structure and follows the best SEO practices.

There’s a number of AdSense plugins for WordPress that you can use to add and manage ads on your website.

Of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to AdSense. There are several other major ad platforms you can work with, and there are Amazon ads, too.

Using WordPress for Affiliate Marketing

Another way you can earn money passively through WordPress is through affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a setup between a merchant and an affiliate. The affiliate usually displays a link or an ad on their website and every time a desired action is performed (click, signup, sale…) the affiliate receives a commission. Directing your visitors to your partner’s website or landing page is called a referral.

Not all websites make good candidates for an affiliate program. Some types of websites make a better choice – specifically, blog and content websites, review websites, online communities, coupon websites and so on. In addition, you need to have a solid audience and traffic, and it’s best if you’re working within a specific niche.

Tracking Performance Through Analytics

When growing, developing and tweaking your website, you can’t just do it in the dark, without any insights into how it’s actually doing. To steer it in the right direction, you have to gain insight into a number of metrics that tell you about the people who come to your website: who they are, where they come from, what they look for, how they behave on your website, how long they stay, at which point they decide to leave, and so on.

For this, you need to perform website analytics. The most widely used, most trusted and most reliable tool for that is Google Analytics. It’s a free tool and you don’t need to be an expert to use it, but it does come with a somewhat steep learning curve, so before you dive into it, make sure to check out our tutorial linked below.

Analytics is something that needs to be performed regularly. Trends change, and so do algorithms, and the only way to stay afloat is to make analytics a regular task. Whenever you notice a change, especially if it’s a drop in traffic, analytics will help you identify the problem so you can work on fixing it.

Part 7 – Frequently Asked Questions

Absolutely, yes. WordPress was first developed with the idea of providing everyone with a user-friendly blogging platform. The fact that it later developed into a CMS that allows you to create any sort of website you like, from small to enterprise, doesn’t change the fact it’s very beginner-friendly.

Even if you don’t know much about it, you can easily solve almost any WordPress problem using a myriad of tutorials you can find online, like the ones in your own Magazine. Plus, it’s worth mentioning that WordPress has an incredibly active community of users, developers and designers. It’s an open-source platform and solidarity, knowledge sharing and helping are part of its ethos.

Yes, to an extent. WordPress itself is free, you can use the default theme or one of the free themes you can find online, as well as free plugins. However, good hosting is rarely free, and you will have to pay for the domain, too. The website itself can be created with little to no investment, but you will have some expenses if you choose premium solutions, plus for the annual hosting plan.

We’re probably partial but we have to say – WordPress. Wix is definitely a more all-inclusive option, and it does come with great design solutions. However, WordPress provides much more flexibility. It’s an open-source platform and the ecosystem of themes and plugins is incredibly rich. WordPress also provides you with more control, it’s easier to scale up and overall gives you more ownership of your website.

No. It certainly helps if you know how to code, so that you can have more liberty in customizing your website just the way you want, without having to rely on plugins and other solutions. However, you can build and maintain your WordPress website perfectly well with absolutely zero coding knowledge.

It depends on the definition of “web developer.” WordPress is written in PHP and uses the MySQL database. Working with it also includes JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Therefore, a person who knows how to alter the WordPress source code and to create new functionalities using these tools is basically a WordPress developer, and therefore a type of web developer. A WordPress developer writes code for the platform, and can become a developer in the broader sense of the term by expanding the skillset to other scripts and languages, too.

Again, it’s a plus, not a requirement. CSS helps you customize the appearance of your website according to your needs in situations when the available options are not enough. WordPress has a designated location for entering custom CSS so if you know how, you can use it to very easily adjust whatever you like.

Yes, and not just if you’re a developer or a designer. The knowledge of WordPress is considered a plus in many industries, from marketing to publishing. A lot of businesses use WordPress as a CMS for their online presence so if you’re applying for a job related to the website, the knowledge of WordPress, at least the basic one, will be a major plus, perhaps even a necessity.

WordPress developers promise that the platform, at least its core, will remain free forever for all its users. Now, as we said, WordPress is not 100% free (we’re talking about the .org version here) so if you’re paying zero dollars now for your website it doesn’t mean you won’t be having to spend some money on it in the future – for a premium theme, if you decide to change it, for upgrades to premium plugins, add-ons, etc. But the core will stay free and you will never be charged for a WordPress installation.

WordPress itself doesn’t come with limitations of this kind. Like we reiterated throughout this guide, WordPress can be used for basically any sort of website. The real question is, should it be used just for any kind of website? Here, the answer is probably: no.

You probably don’t want to use WordPress for eCommerce on a really big scale. You can sell products, and many of them, too. But WordPress can’t help you make the next Amazon or eBay.

The same goes for social media websites. There are plugins you can use to add social functionalities to a site, but it won’t even come close to Facebook and the likes.

Finally, if during your WordPress experience you often find yourself in need to work with PHP and change things there, or to have someone do it for you, then WordPress probably isn’t fit for your needs.

Yes. Because so many businesses, especially startups, choose WordPress as the platform for their website, there is a high demand for professionals who are able to use it in one capacity or another – as an author, editor, designer or developer.

First of all, define the option you want to go for, according to your skills and interests. You can become a designer, a plugin or theme developer, an admin, you can do content marketing or blogging. Next, make sure your skills are relevant and up to date. For this, you can use one of the many available online courses and tutorials, and you can – and should – frequently turn to the WordPress community itself, both on the official website and on other relevant forums, such as Stack Exchange. Finally, you need to take a deep dive into the job market, using “WordPress” as a keyword followed by the career option you’re pursuing. You’ll find that there are many companies looking for WordPress professionals these days.

There are many ways to monetize your WordPress knowledge. You can set up websites for clients, for instance. A lot of people simply purchase a theme, and then, after taking care of hosting and everything else, they customize the theme (either using page builders or, more frequently, custom code) to make the website unique and true to the client’s brand. You can also create template designs or animations for WordPress websites and themes. You can work as a WordPress website admin, or a WordPress content marketer, and you can, of course, use WordPress to power your own business through an extensive online presence.

Part 8 – Additional Resources

We’ve created a series of video tutorials on how to make the most common types of websites using WordPress, along with other useful tips and how-tos. The tutorials are beginner-friendly, rich in information but very easy to follow, so make sure to check them out:

If there’s one thing you can be sure of when starting a gaming website, it’s that you’ll never, ever run out of content. The gaming industry is huge and it’s growing even bigger. The niches are plenty and more are popping up by the second. The ways to approach the industry and create content from your own unique angle are many and open to exploration.

Gaming is also a part of the culture that seems to bring out much passion in the people who enjoy it. For all these reasons and many others, you might find yourself with something to say about the industry, the culture, or the tech that underpins it. However, instead of looking for websites that will allow you to submit content for publishing – or because you’re done doing that – you think about starting your very own gaming website.

If this sounds at all familiar, you’re in the right place. We’ll help you with the basics of how to start a gaming website with WordPress, covering topics that include:

Why Choose WordPress?

The first thing to settle when figuring out how to start a gaming website is what platform or framework you want to use. For many, WordPress is the very first thing that comes to mind. The next question you might want to ask yourself is why choose WordPress for your gaming website, and not even the free kind, but the self-hosted kind that costs money? What it boils down to is the level of control and customization that comes with using WordPress. You won’t be able to find it anywhere else – not even on WordPress.com.

For starters, WordPress is notoriously easy to install. Many hosting providers offer things like one-click installation for WordPress. Some even offer managed hosting that takes a lot of the behind-the-scenes work from your hands. You should consider these options when choosing a hosting provider.

Then again, you don’t have to go with a regular hosting provider at all. You can install WordPress on most cloud service providers, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. You should always do a cost/benefit analysis when choosing the host, as some might give you more than your gaming website actually needs and at a higher price. But that’s one level of control you have with WordPress that some other website builders don’t offer.

With your own hosting and your own website, you’ll also get to choose what monetization model you employ. You can use AdSense or its alternatives, offer affiliate links, have a store section, put your content behind a paywall – you name it, you’ll be able to make it happen with WordPress. How? With plugins, of course.

Plugins – and themes, too – are what make WordPress genuinely great. Thanks to them, you can easily change how your website looks and behaves, add or remove functionalities to it, and spend ridiculous amounts of time making sure that every detail is just the way you want it to be. WordPress is a powerful facilitator of your creativity, and that’s something you’ll learn to love about it.

What Kind of Gaming Website Do You Want?

The very first question you should answer when considering how to start a gaming website is exactly what kind of a gaming website you want to create. Because gaming is an incredibly diverse term that encompasses technology, culture, social phenomena, economy, probably even politics – there are just so many different ways to approach gaming.

As you might have imagined, creating a website that’s home for the speedrunning community is quite different than creating a website for, let’s say, an indie developer. A regular gaming website that features reviews and news, might look completely differently. Then again, if the website is the presentation of yourself and your gaming persona, or even your gaming team or guild, you might want to build something unlike anything we’ve mentioned so far.

Then, you should consider whether you want your website to be game-specific or genre-specific. It might also be completely devoted to the nerd culture and all the beautiful and quirky ways fandoms manifest themselves. You can create a website that tracks gaming events and tournaments or even a website that hosts them.

The possibilities are endless, but you’ll need to narrow them down as much as possible because that’s the kind of option that will affect other choices as you move on. So for starters, know what kind of gaming website you want to build.

Choosing the Hosting

We’ve already covered the wide variety of hosting options that you might look into when starting your gaming website. If you decide to go with a hosting provider – something that’s a popular choice, even with the availability of cloud hosting platforms, you should take your time and research them properly.

The things you might want to look into include:

Some other things you might consider when choosing a host is whether they allow you to register a domain name with them, or you have to go to an independent registrar. Even more importantly, you should make sure that they have a package that would facilitate you building a gaming server on it if that’s what you’re creating the website for. The demands will depend on the game you plan to run, so do your research beforehand and check for leeway to expand later on.

Picking the Name

Choosing the name for your website is an important step for a couple of reasons. The name is a part of your website’s brand, and as such is a recognizable symbol for everything that you do with the website. But semiotics aside, it’s also a word you might want to use in your domain name. It would be best to have one before registering your website’s domain name.

How to pick a good name? It’s not that easy to tell, especially given all the fantasy elements that are readily found in games, which expand the possible vocabulary tremendously. Things would be complicated enough without them, too, as gaming is a truly global culture that draws upon influences – and words – from national cultures as diverse as Eastern Asian, English-speaking, or even Slavic.

Still, some best practices to follow include:

Finally, you should always come up with a couple of strong choices for the name for your website. In case the domain name is taken, you’ll want to have a fallback.

Installing and Customizing the Website

One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s ubiquitous, which means most hosts have an easy way for you to install it. WordPress is a CMS with a lot of features, so even if the installation is easy, you’ll want to spend some time learning your way around it.

For starters, you should learn what themes are and how to install them. Your gaming website should have all kinds of elements and layouts depending on its niche, and while it’s possible to build them all from scratch, choosing the appropriate gaming WordPress theme can save you a tremendous amount of time and effort.

Artorias Theme

So let’s say you’re building a website to support a game you’re publishing. You’ll probably want to have a landing page that packs a big hero image, possibly even animated, and then shows off a game trailer, maybe some copy about the setting, some cards showing different races or classes people could play in the game, a quote from someone who played an early version, maybe an email capture form, and even a countdown clock – why not. You can either build a page with all of that from scratch, or find a theme with that kind of layout, ready for you to upload your content to it.

The same really goes for any other kind of gaming website. For an eSports website, you’ll need a theme that supports easy YouTube and Twitch integration, has layouts for match lists, and layouts for team presentations. Leaderboards, tournament lists and timetables, and player lists would also be nice features to have.

Overworld Theme

For a news type of website that also does reviews, elements that enable you rate games or products would also be must-haves. You can even stray away from gaming themes and look for a technology theme that might work better for your type of website, as would a blog or magazine theme. What’s important is that you match the look and features of the theme with the feature you need for your website.

Then again, you can use plugins to make it even better.

Leveraging WordPress Plugins

That’s the other thing about WordPress you’ll need to figure out – what plugins are and how to use them. While you might not need plugins to, let’s say, live stream to your website, you will need them for security, updating, optimization, and a whole host of other things. You can take a hint from business websites and look at the plugins they commonly use, and that should give you a good idea of where to get started with adding your plugins.

For instance, if you already have a website set up with a theme you like and don’t want to change, but that doesn’t come with Twitch integration out of the box, don’t worry. You can quite easily add Twitch integration to your existing website and stream the games directly from your pages using a plugin.

We recommend using StreamWeasels, a free WordPress plugin designed for embedding Twitch streams. It works with Gutenberg – after installing it, you will find a brand new block in your block editor, which you can use to stream games. If you’re not using Gutenberg, the plugin also provides a shortcode with the same function.

The plugin offers a variety of sleek premade designs for the stream, and you can customize it in a variety of ways: start muted, autoplay, embed chat, different color schemes, embed heights and widths. The best thing is that the Twitch API is not required, which really makes things simple.

Another gaming-specific functionality you might need a plugin for are game reviews. If you plan on having them (whether you want to write them yourself or have your visitors write them and benefit from user-generated content), you will probably need a plugin (although some themes have reviews by default).

Game Review Block is another block-based plugin that you can use for this purpose. It adds a review functionality with 1-10 rating system that you can place anywhere you want and your visitors can use it to rate your game, or any other game in case you’re publishing game reviews. What’s important is that this plugin adds Schema.org structured data to your reviews, meaning they qualify for Google rich results. Rich results, just like featured snippets, help you rank higher, boost traffic and significantly improve your CRT rate.

Finally, extending the functionality of your gaming website using plugins doesn’t necessarily mean installing a bunch of them – there are plugins that represent collections of widgets or blocks that can be used for anything from typography and infographics to SEO and business features. One such plugin is Qi Addons for Elementor, with 100+ remarkable widgets, and if you prefer block editing, there’s Qi Blocks for Gutenberg, so make sure to check them out.

What’s Next?

After you’ve taken care of the domain and hosting, installed WordPress, the theme, and have a couple of valuable plugins to keep your website safe and working well – you’ve started your very own gaming website and you could even teach others how to start a gaming website! Congrats!

Now comes the hard part, however. You need to start populating your website with content – whatever type of content you choose to create. You’ll need to hustle to promote the website on social media, monitor its performance, look for ways to reach new audiences, work on it with the utmost diligence while waiting, patiently, for the numbers to start showing that it’s taken off. It’s maddening, but that’s why we love it. We hope you will, too.

We are excited to announce the release of premium versions of our two products – Qi Addons for Elementor and Qi Theme, featuring expanded options and functionalities, 40+ new widgets and 50+ premium demos.

While our free line offers all WordPress users a chance to create beautiful and functional websites for free, the line of premium products is designed with a bigger, professional output in mind, helping build superior websites quickly and effortlessly while simultaneously guaranteeing top quality in line with the latest web design practices.

You can now choose between working on unlimited websites or just one. Our annual plans are tailored to provide maximum flexibility while working with a comprehensive set of 150 demos and 100+ widgets, starting at $49.

Choose Between Qi Addons and Qi Theme & Addons

To accommodate all our clients’ needs, we are offering the products in two premium packages, each packed with all-new, exclusive features.

Qi Addons Premium is an exclusive version of our free Qi Addons for Elementor plugin, now with 40+ new widgets designed to enhance business, eCommerce, creative, SEO and other aspects of a website from any possible niche.

Qi Theme & Addons is a comprehensive solution that, in addition to 50+ exclusive, superbly designed demos, also includes all of the premium widgets from the Qi Addons package. It is a package that covers all aspects of website-making, speeds up the process and guarantees a unique, professional and superior result.

Both products are available in two modes – single-site and multisite license. With the multisite license, you get to create unlimited websites using our products for the duration of the license.

Both products include even more convenience, functionality and ease of use, and come with some exclusive features in terms of available widgets and options. With it, our goal is to expand on the industry standard of features and options and offer our clients a premium solution for their most important projects.

Qi Addons – What’s New

The Qi Addons for Elementor plugin comes with an exclusive set of widgets that we have created with maximum attention to detail. With them, our intention is to fill the industry gap, by providing options that were previously unavailable on the market. The plugin is designed to work with all themes built using Elementor.

The 40+ all-new, exclusive widgets are designed to enhance the site-building experience, enrich the pages and provide superior functionalities for a wide range of niches, from creative through eCommerce to business.

Creative Addons

We have expanded our range of addons designed to make showcasing projects not just easier and faster, but aesthetically more accomplished.

For instance, in order to allow for dynamic, engaging presentation of works, we have created a range of sliders, from hover-aware to animated and circled, with several kinds of divided sliders. Intro glitch effects, swipe- and scroll-based galleries, brand-new reels and carousels are devised to provide maximum flexibility in terms of innovative options.

Business Addons

Functionality and efficiency are imperative when it comes to business websites, so we made sure our premium version includes top solutions for various business aspects, such as comparative tables, star rating element, Google Maps and pricing tables.

eCommerce Addons

While our free Qi Addons already contain a comprehensive set of eCommerce solutions, we made sure to expand the functionalities by adding product comparison and order tracking form widgets, two solutions that help improve eCommerce UX and streamline the shopping experience.

Showcase Addons

When devising our addons, we took particular care to provide our clients with a comprehensive set of solutions for highlighting certain website sections in an innovative and efficient manner. Our range of showcase elements has now been expanded with image hotspots, ideal for online shops, a striking image marquee, content menu and an attractive vertical timeline.

Typography Addons

Typography is a major constituent of any website’s identity and that’s why here at Qode we pay particular attention to that aspect of design. The premium Qi Addons now include even more options for styling the text, including text gradient and a very attractive and versatile premium button with options for animation and SVG-based illustrations.

Form Style Addons

Reaching out to visitors in a striking, elegant and efficient manner is paramount to any business, which is why we enhanced the options for styling the website forms by adding beautiful Mailchimp, Typeforms and Gravity forms elements, thus covering all major contact form providers.

SEO Addons

Our range of premium addons wouldn’t be complete without advanced SEO functionalities that come out of the box and help users rank and perform better with search engines. New addons now include Yelp and Google business reviews, wonderfully designed social share buttons and social links.

Qi Theme – What’s New

As for the Qi Theme, we have designed a range of exclusive demos that feature not only unique options and capabilities, but also the most innovative design solutions. As always, our focus is on interactivity and motion, superb visual content and pristine aesthetics meant to create a lasting effect of professionalism and expertise.

In the premium version, the Qi Theme also features some additional functionalities and advanced options. For instance, our users can now enjoy even more styling options for the Blog Single, as well as for various footer and header types, assuring the perfect fit with the brand aesthetics.

Navigation options have also been enhanced in terms of styling, and there is, of course, a set of whole new options reserved for our premium users. They can now add a content bottom section to their pages, add parallax background on content rows, and choose between a range of all-new header types, including boxed, divided and vertical expanding headers, or improve the website performance thanks to the Ajax pagination for lists. And that is, of course, just a small fraction of premium options we’ve prepared.

Package Features

In addition to advanced elements, demos and options, both our premium packages include a set of exclusive features meant to fill all gaps in the current market offer.

Qi Addons comes with:

Qi Theme & Qi Addons come with:

In addition to premium support, we have a set of YouTube tutorials and Qode Magazine articles to help you get acquainted with Qi Addons for Elementor and the Qi Theme, with new topics being covered on a regular basis. Check them out to see just how simple it is to adapt any of the plugin’s custom widgets to your specific needs.

For the latest news and updates from the Qode Interactive workshop, make sure to sign up for our newsletter.

Photography is perhaps the medium most deserving of a great presentation. Whether it’s commercial or artistic, photography demands a quality setting, be it on the page of a newspaper or a magazine, a gallery wall or a website. It needs to have breathing room, a “canvas” on which it can be viewed without interference, and a space in which its message can be communicated clearly. The web has proven to be the perfect environment for displaying photography, thanks to the great level of versatility and flexibility it offers, both in the technical and in the design sense, not to mention its accessibility. That’s precisely why these days most photographers, regardless of their niche, opt for showcasing their work through an online portfolio.

Here at Qode we make it our mission to create themes that can not only accommodate any creative project and artwork, but also shine a spotlight on it. We pay particular attention to photography themes, aware of all the specific requirements an online photography portfolio might have. This goes well beyond equipping a theme with photography-related elements like galleries, sliders, lightboxes, proofing galleries and such. More than anything, we strive to provide a layout with a particular character and voice, and each of our photography WordPress themes bears unique, carefully constructed aesthetics. This is why so many photographers choose Qode themes for their portfolios. In fact, the number of amazing photography websites created with our themes is so vast that we had quite a hard time narrowing our choice down to these masterful portfolios:

Julien Theunissen

Julien Theunissen website made with the Objektiv theme

Julien Theunissen is a younger generation Dutch photographer with a penchant for black and white urban scenes. His photography, characterized by strong contrasts and somewhat gritty imagery, follows him and his friends around their favorite spots in their hometown, so his portfolio can be read as a sort of a chronicle of their youth. For his website, Julien opted for Objektiv, a theme that allows for a clean and elegant display of photographs. Choosing white for the background and picking a smaller slider size, he added a minimalist touch to the layout. The left menu features links to the albums and the contact page, while the center of the page is reserved for a gallery of selected photographs. The pure white background, fine interface details and the light, subtle logo match perfectly with the black and white photography, creating a fluid and coherent composition.

Jenny Haimerl

Jenny Haimerl website made with the Manon theme

Jenny Haimerl believes that successful work comes from the synergy of one’s passions, in her case – graphic design and photography. Equally engaged in both fields, Jenny combines clean, minimalistic design with powerful imagery and pays particular attention to details. In fact, according to her own statement, it’s the details that often serve as a starting point not just for a photo, but sometimes for an entire project.

Opting for the Manon theme, Jenny made sure she would have a wonderfully designed showcase of her work, which includes corporate graphic design and fashion, beauty and interior photography. A warm beige background pairs wonderfully with large, outlined TT Drugs typography for titles and links, and Touche Light for text. The interface color scheme boils down to black on beige, topped with a black dot for the cursor – a signature motif of our Manon theme – giving the website a playful and smart touch. The website homepage is created as an introduction to the artist and her work, and the photography and other works are tucked away in separate pages, in beautiful two-column layouts. It’s an elegant, smart portfolio that is a testament to the artist’s refined taste and skills.

N. Winski

M. Winski website made with the Manon theme

The website of the Canadian photographer Nathan Winski is a perfect example of how a well-designed theme, in this case our Manon portfolio and agency theme, can not only complement the displayed works but also woo the visitor with creative and smart design solutions. The website opens with large outlined typography in the hero section, which then fills with color and moves up to make room for the content. The design is a combination of bold and subtle choices – it is generally minimalist, with selected details with a stronger character. Thin lines are combined with bold typography, the menu opener is discrete but the menu itself is rather intense, and so on. The cursor is a black dot that fits great with the light gray background. The photographs are arranged in a well-structured gallery with a dark overlay displaying information about the image. The unique theme cursor turns into a tiny white flame when the photos are hovered upon. It’s the details like this, courtesy of the Manon theme, that give the entire website a smart, modern character, while keeping the displayed photographs well in the focus.

Rosa Fernández Leal

Rosa Fernández Leal website made with the Objektiv theme

Rosa Fernández Leal is the perfect example of how true passion always finds its way. With a degree in advertising and public relations and another degree in piano, Rosa is definitely a person with diverse interests, but she has always found photography to be the perfect medium for expressing her inner life. Wedding photography came as the obvious choice for this artist with poetic inclinations, as it shows the depth of emotion in one of the most important and intense moments of life.

Rosa’s website is not one of those sugary, hyper-feminine wedding portfolios with pretty flowers and airy layouts, but it is still decisively romantic nonetheless. Created with our Objektiv theme, it has a strong, well-defined and artistic character that leaves a lasting impression. A fullscreen numbered slider features touching black and white photos with a strong contrast and well defined lines. The interface elements in Objektiv – navigational items, icons, etc. – are subtle and unobtrusive, and the dominant palette is monochromatic, including most of the photographs, although Rosa’s portfolio does feature some color photographs – they’re just not that prominently displayed.

Max Koliberdin

Max Koliberdin website made with the Objektiv theme

Max Koliberdin is an award-winning Russian photographer and one of the pioneers of the Fine Art style in wedding photography. His work is characterized by highly atmospheric imagery with soft focus, sometimes with grainy textures and diffuse light. Being a renowned wedding photographer, Koliberdin made sure his website, created using our Objektiv theme, represents an extensive showcase of his business, featuring a selection of his best works and a separate portfolio page where visitors can explore photos from select weddings. Koliberdin also hosts workshops and writes a blog, and these and other website sections can easily be accessed from an elegant header menu, just one of the theme’s beautiful design solutions. The white background not only makes an appropriate choice for a wedding website but also contributes to the light and airy feel of the website, complemented by a beautiful logo in watercolor typography.

Arushi Parakh

Arushi Parakh website made with the Bridge theme

Arushi Parakh is a freelance fashion stylist from Delhi, whose previous work includes editorials and commercial projects for Marie Claire, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. Her portfolio website, created using our bestselling Bridge theme, includes collections of editorials, product showcases, lookbooks and celebrity photos, all neatly sectioned in separate pages, with clean, symmetric galleries. Arushi’s website doesn’t feature any text at all and is kept very simple. There is plenty of imagery to explore so the stylist decided to keep the visitor focused on those. The website is simple and streamlined, which makes it rather powerful when it comes to promoting the work and attracting new clients.

Yaşar Turanlı

Yaşar Turanlı made with the Nightshade theme

The portfolio website of the Turkish photographer Yaşar Turanlı, created using our Nightshade theme, is a colorful display of fashion and beauty photography, arranged in a gallery with a slight shrink effect that appears when the photos are hovered upon. This sort of animation on hover lends a touch of dynamicity and life to the photos but doesn’t hamper the order or interfere with the viewing experience. In fact, Turanlı apparently wanted to keep things simple – he opted for the same gallery type for his Fashion and Beauty sections, keeping the entire website in line. There isn’t much information about the photographer himself, aside from a clean, minimalist contact page. For Turanlı, showcasing the work is all that matters for a website of this type – everything else is just an unwanted distraction from the carefully balanced photo display.

Hiroyuki Kobayashi

Hiroyuki Kobayashi website made with the Me Voy theme

Hiroyuki Kobayashi is a Japanese photographer, art director and graphic designer. His portfolio website bears a distinct Japanese minimalist character, with small, toned-down typography in Kanji and in English, lots of breathing room and sharp, thin lines for interface details, courtesy of our Me Voy theme. His photography explores Japanese urban scenes, as well as landscapes, with a sensibility that ranges from melancholic to dramatic, depending on the subject. Still, a typically Japanese sense of calm permeates these pages, supported by the airy, almost austere minimalism of the design, the light gray background and, above all, the hero image on the homepage – a lovely, atmospheric beach scene, fit for an artist whose name in Japanese means “extensive, spacious.”

Lila Neutre

Lila Neutre website made with the Bridge theme

Lila Neutre is a young French photographer whose work explores various sociological issues and themes, most notably the notion of identity and self-presentation. Lila’s portfolio website created with the Bridge theme features selected photography works and a showcase of her exhibitions, as well as her resume. She describes her work as Poetics of Resistance, following five subcultural groups that use clothes to express support of political or social movements. Each photograph on the homepage leads to a separate page about that particular group, consisting of text and images. The artist places equal focus on the visual and the textual aspects of her poetics, and these two elements are finely balanced on all the pages. The palette is balanced, consisting of an off-white background and black typography, with very little interface details, or none at all. The overall character of the layout she chose from Bridge is a bit restrained but not conservative, and definitely a good fit for the artist’s poetic intentions with this website.

Ludwig Favre

Ludwig Favre website made with the Bridge theme

Ludwig Favre is a French photographer specializing in American urban landscapes. His works have been featured in numerous magazine editorials, ad campaigns and galleries around the world. Ludwig’s website is a full-fledged one, with portfolios, photo galleries, a blog, a page dedicated to his video work, and even a shop where visitors can purchase high quality prints and lightroom presets, all courtesy of our multipurpose Bridge theme. The homepage opens with a pastel blue Californian sky and palm trees, a vast, atmospheric and somewhat vintage piece that is emblematic of the photographer’s sensibility and his artistic concerns. From here, we are invited to discover more of his work or purchase an art piece from his shop. It’s a professional, practical Bridge-powered website for an artist who doesn’t shy away from the commercial aspects of his work and does a great job at presenting it in the best possible light.

Hilo Cusco

Hilo Cusco website made with the Azalea theme

Although not a photography portfolio per se, Hilo Cusco, the website of the Ireland-born and raised clothes designer Eibhlin Cassidy is decisively photography-driven. Eibhlin has developed a great passion for Peruvian hand-crafted fabrics and garments in 2003 and has been creating unique, hand-made pieces made of 100% locally sourced fabrics and alpaca wool ever since. Today she owns a shop in San Blas, Cusco. Her collections explore various issues and topics, from postapocalyptic to gender-bending, sometimes reaching deep into the past for inspiration.

The homepage of the Hilo Cusco website, created with our Azalea theme, features a gallery of collections, each collection in black and white photography for the cover – the rest of the photographs from the collection are a mix of color and black and white. As the homepage is scrolled, the images softly come up to their place with a subtle animation effect and feature a purple, transparent overlay effect on hover. The imagery takes up most of the page, as the side menu is smartly tucked away to the left. These carefully crafted features of the Azalea theme helped Cassidy shine a most flattering light on her work and engage the visitor in her story.

Jonathan Nafarrete

Jonathan Nafarrete website made with the Ukiyo theme

Jonathan Nafarrete is more than “just” a photographer: this super-talented, curious young creator from Los Angeles is also a sought-after mixed-reality director and live drive animator. As a digital content strategist, he has worked with brands such as Nike, Toyota, Sheraton and Refinery29, and his photography work has been featured in national ad campaigns for Ford.

For such an eclectic and innovative creator, our Ukiyo theme came as the perfect choice. The website is divided into three horizontal full-width sections, each dedicated to one line of the artist’s work. These sections lead to gallery pages with neat layouts placed in a grid with plenty of breathing room. The photography section is further divided into Street and Documentary series with separate galleries, and Everyday photos that are displayed right there on the Photography page. It’s a well-structured and simple website with photography that speaks volumes, particularly those from the Street and Documentary series.

Studio Tęcza

Studio Tęcza website made with the Brick theme

Studio Tęcza is a complex of professional photography studios in Poland. Working with some of the nation’s largest companies, as well as with many major international brands, Studio Tęcza has made quite a name for itself. In addition to offering facilities and professional equipment (digital cameras, professional-grade lights, etc.), the studio also offers production services and hosts events and seminars.

For their website, the studio went with our digital agency theme, Brick. With just a little bit of customization, the theme provided a modern, smart and design-savvy overview of the studio services and facilities. The studio logo, which we can see in the upper left corner of the page, is essentially deconstructed into smaller “logos” that turn to text when hovered upon and lead to appropriate inner pages. Everything on the website, aside from the photographs, is white on black, and its somewhat austere atmosphere is further enforced by the lack of any unnecessary interface embellishments. The final result is a website that spells professionalism, technical adeptness and skill.

Luca Fontana

Luca Fontana website made with the Stockholm theme

Luca Fontana is a young Italian photographer with a lot of experience, especially in advertising, sport and lifestyle photography and photo retouching. His portfolio website, created with our multipurpose creative theme, Stockholm, is an impressive collection of portraits (including some well-known sports names, such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Gianluigi Donnarumma, the Italian National Basketball team and many others) and action shots done for advertising and lookbook purposes.

For his portfolio homepage, Fontana picked a layout from the Stockholm theme that features a masonry gallery occupying most of the page, allowing the visitor to dive right into the works. The gallery features a soft overlay effect that matches very well with the particular lighting in most of the photos – a soft, golden-hour type of light that bears a hint of nostalgia but still gives the photos sharpness and edge.

Luca Spennato

Luca Spennato website made with the Lumiere theme

The wet plate collodion process has been having a big comeback over the past few years. Photographers have turned to exploring this early photography technique that, albeit quite technically demanding , can yield astonishing results that can’t really be achieved with any other technique. More than just retro, wet plate photography seems to reach into its subject and bring out a previously hidden voice of the spirit. Luca Spennato is an Italian photographer with an expansive collection of wet plate portraits and still life photographs (particularly striking are his wet plate renditions of old churches and 100-year-old olive trees). It is somewhat strange to see such an old technique displayed on a contemporary medium such as the web, but in Spennato’s portfolio, made using our Lumiere theme, the two are paired perfectly. A light, porcelain-like background houses the row after row of collodion photographs which a visitor might think were made 150 years ago if it weren’t for an occasional contemporary detail in them – a modern t-shirt, a camper van, an electric guitar. Spennato chose a fittingly simple layout from Lumiere to use for his homepage – besides the light grey background, the only other colors are black and red for the interface details and typography, but even those are as subtle as can possibly be, so that they don’t disturb the solemn quality of the displayed works.

Ellen Sjö

Ellen Sjö website made with the Objektiv theme

Another photographer who went with Objektiv for her portfolio, Ellen Sjö is a versatile young Swede working parallely in digital marketing, content creation and brand strategy and – photography. With photography being her biggest love and digital marketing being her bread and butter, Ellen Sjö decided to put the two together under one roof – her portfolio website. Most of her photography work consists of wedding photos, but she also does portraits, as well as business and product photography. Her photos are bright, optimistic, full of life, and she made sure she has a website to match. The menu on the left features interactive links with gorgeous fullscreen images changing on hover with a discrete zoom-out effect. The interface details are quite minimalist, making sure the focus remains on the imagery. Navigation from page to page features a lovely fading effect that gives the entire website a soft, subtle feel.

Oliver Look

Oliver Look website made with the Shade theme

Oliver Look is a German photographer specializing in portraits, as well as theatre photography, most notably dance. For his portfolio website, Look opted for our Shade theme to create a tightly packed but tidy gallery layout with a little bit of breathing space between the photos, preventing them from melting into each other. The gallery is a mix of color and black & white photographs, and there’s quite a lot of them, too, Look being a prolific portraitist. The gallery occupies the central part of the page, and the white space around it serves as a sort of catalyst for the visually saturated content. Look wanted to keep the website extremely simple, and the theme, of course, has just the layout for that. The galleries occupy most of the homepage, keeping it uncluttered – the logo and the navigational elements are discrete but easily discernible, uniting good design and good UX.

Roberto Ruffo

Roberto Ruffo website made with the Bridge theme

The website of the Italian photographer and art director Roberto Ruffo, created using the Bridge theme, opens with a dark, moody fullscreen photo of seafoam at night, with the author’s logo splashed in the center of the screen and links to his portfolio, contact page and Instagram. This page serves as a sort of a calling card, from which we can proceed to examine Ruffo’s portfolio, a dense gallery of large images which cannot be enlarged or examined on a single page. There is basically no information on Ruffo’s website, and the photographs are presented almost as a teaser. There seems to be an intent to create some sort of mystery with this website, which invites us to contact the author directly and explore more of his world.

Universo Ulupika

Universo Ulupika website made with the Bridge theme

Universo Ulupika is the portfolio website of the Bolivian visual artist and photographer Carla Spinoza. Her art explores the topics of otherness, body, identity and violence, and bears a strong social subtext. Her photography is visually suggestive and can be experienced outside of any contextual elaboration; however the artist in most cases opts for providing some text on individual gallery pages, shedding additional light to the displayed work.

The artist’s website is a rather straightforward showcase of Spinoza’s selected works. The homepage features a gallery with a hover effect on images that reveals additional information about the project – the title and the category of the piece, with a cursor that turns into a plus sign. Her work is divided into three sections – artwork, photography and art books, individual project pages open with a black square preloader and include the images and some text accompanying the work. Navigation is possible between individual project pages without having to go back to the homepage, which is a convenient way to explore this artist’s creative vision. This is a fine example of the versatility of our Bridge theme, which Spinoza chose for her website, and of the theme’s ability to shift and change according to the users’ sensibility, allowing them to express their individual aesthetics.

Closing Words

Some of the websites on this list were made using the same theme – but you didn’t notice that, did you? That’s precisely the secret behind Qode themes. We give you the tools and the looks, but once you fill a theme with your own work, your own imagery, your own story, it takes on a life of its own. It’s like a dress that looks completely different – but still stunning – depending on who’s wearing it. There’s nothing that makes us happier than to see our themes shine like in the examples we listed above. Each of the photographers on our list recognized the potential that comes with our photography themes and chose an atmosphere that fits their personal creative sensibility – they chose a perfect home for their work.

Much like everything else, the way we acquire and share knowledge has evolved along with the times. Physically being in a classroom and borrowing books from the library is no longer the only way of educating ourselves. Instead, over the last few decades, online courses have gained in popularity, with many people choosing eLearning over the traditional forms of education. That’s why having a compelling, professional website is paramount for all serious educational institutions.

Even if a school or a university doesn’t offer the possibility of online education, they still need to ensure users can easily find any information they might need in just a few mouse clicks. A good education website must introduce its visitors to the history of the institution, its program, its teachers, and any extracurricular activities they might provide. Anything that might be of use to a future student should be included on the site.

Aside from being informative, well-organized, and easy to explore, an education website also needs to look good. An institution that cares about the way it presents itself online and wants to provide its users with a visually attractive experience is likely to spark their interest and attract more students.

To create such an engaging website, numerous schools, kindergartens, academies, and other types of educational institutions around the world chose Qode’s education themes. We have compiled a list of some of the most striking examples from the web to show you that, with the right WordPress theme, you, too, can make powerful LMS platforms and build beautiful, enjoyable, and memorable presentations of your education business the easy way. The sites that demonstrate the power and the endless possibilities of Qode’s education themes include:

Institut Supérieur d’Informatique

Institut Supérieur d’Informatique website made with the Academist theme

Institut Supérieur d’Informatique (ISI) is the higher institute of informatics based in Montreal. They made their website using Academist, a modern education and learning management system theme. The homepage starts off with an engaging image slider, giving viewers a taste of what the institute has to offer. As soon as they continue to scroll down, users will notice that the image slider features the parallax effect, which makes the browsing experience smoother and more enjoyable. They will also come across a clean overview of the institute’s programs, with more information included on inner pages. Using Academist’s assortment of practical course elements, the institute made in-depth presentations of their classes in a visually appealing way. The embedded YouTube videos feature appearances from current students, further immersing users into the ISI’s story and encouraging them to take the next step and contact the institute. And thanks to the theme’s Instagram Feed widget, viewers can enjoy a collection of the latest posts and experience life at ISI through a camera lens.

Seneca Language Training

Seneca Language Training website made with the Depot theme

Seneca is a language training center located in France. For their website, they chose Depot, a contemporary eCommerce theme. Even though Depot was originally created for an entirely different niche, its highly customizable features allowed the Seneca team to craft a refined presentation of their language center. The pages are adorned with a number of large images that almost look like illustrations, giving the site a particularly artistic vibe. Everything is in neutral tones, with lots of white, grey, and black elements. To tell the story of other people’s experiences in an engaging manner, the designers added Seneca’s practical Testimonials Carousel to the homepage. A medium-dark shade of blue is used for the footer, separating useful links from the rest of the content. The pages are quite simple, containing just the right amount of information and imagery without overwhelming the viewers.

Central Mediterranean Business School

Central Mediterranean Business School website made with the Academist theme

Central Mediterranean Business School (CMBS) offers courses on finance, human resources, law, leadership, coaching, and more. They used the powerful features of the Academist theme to create an engaging online presentation of their school. The sticky menu is displayed at the top of the page at all times, helping you find your way around the site with greater ease. The most interesting section of the menu is “Courses” – when you hover over it, a mega menu appears. CMBS offers a plethora of courses, so they decided to introduce them to audiences in an attention-grabbing way by combining texts with images. The website includes beautifully designed, detailed presentations of each course and it also enables users to apply for each class online. The theme’s practical LMS features allowed CMBS to set up online courses and let students attend them from the comfort of their own home. Viewers can also read students’ testimonials and enjoy interesting video content. Moreover, Academist’s Team shortcodes allowed CMBS to introduce their professors to the public and share what they do. There is also a regularly updated blog, with categories facilitating your search for a particular subject.

ESCODI – Escola Universitària de Comerç

ESCODI – Escola Superior de Comerç i Distribució website made with the Academist theme

ESCODI – Escola Superior de Comerç i Distribució crafted their simple and modern website with the help of the Academist theme. Like several other education sites from the list, ESCODI, too, started their presentation off with an image slider, capturing the visitors’ attention from the onset. To ensure the audience stays interested in the content and keeps browsing the school’s offer, ESCODI also added YouTube video embeds to the homepage, sharing a bit of the atmosphere from the school with their viewers. Academist’s animation effects helped make the content subtly appear in the viewport, enhancing the appeal of the displayed imagery. Inner course pages include detailed descriptions of each course as well as a particularly helpful FAQ section placed in accordions at the bottom of the page. Video embeds are also located in the “Tips” section, with several school professors sharing advice on how retail businesses can overcome the challenges posed by the pandemic. This sort of content is precious to all future students, and Academist made it possible for ESCODI to display this information in a visually engaging way. Moreover, the theme’s compatibility with the Events Calendar plugin has enabled the school to display a calendar to their site and share the news about upcoming events with visitors. Speaking of the news, thanks to the theme’s malleable blog templates, ESCODI have created a section where they share articles on subjects that are of interest to their students.

Levende Muziek

Levende Muziek website made with the Peggi theme

Levende Muziek is an interesting educational children’s theater. The first thing you notice on their bubbly website are animated, illustrated elements placed in an image slider. Using Peggi’s Counter shortcode, they’ve beautifully showcased the number of plays they’ve performed so far and the number of children they’ve entertained. Inner pages are informative and appealing to the eye, containing image sliders and embedded video material. Moreover, the site offers the handy possibility of booking a spot for one of the upcoming shows. Probably the most engaging page on the site is the gallery. Thanks to the flexible Image Gallery shortcode, the designers were able to add bouncy animated illustrations to the page, enlivening the displayed photo and video materials.

DNA Formazione

DNA Formazione website made with the Academist theme

DNA Formazione made the most of the Academist theme to present the educational services they offer. The website starts off strong, with several images and image sliders placed in a masonry layout, instantly capturing the user’s attention and leaving a great first impression on them. Elsewhere on the site, DNA Formazione have showcased what each of their programs consists of, and they also included the possibility of sending course enrollment requests online. Thanks to Academist’s compatibility with the Events Calendar plugin, they were able to display a calendar of the upcoming courses, helping users find what they’re interested in with greater ease. The site also contains a blog that users can browse via keyword. If they find a post they like, they can share it on some of the most popular social networks.

De Driestroom

De Driestroom website made with the Lilo theme

De Driestroom is a primary school located in the Netherlands. They opted for the Lilo theme whose playful aesthetic perfectly matches the school’s character. De Driestroom created an enrapturing opening section of their homepage with Lilo’s striking image slider. They also incorporated the Process shortcode into the homepage, presenting their ideology in a fun, beautifully illustrated way. As you continue to explore their engaging website, you will come across picturesque showcases of all the types of education the school provides and the activities they offer to their students. The footer opens with a smooth parallax effect, subtly revealing the basic details about the school, their contact information, and the Facebook feed embed. Lilo’s Team shortcode allowed De Driestroom to present their staff, introducing them to visitors in a visually attractive way. Integrated Google Maps help you find the school with ease, while the inviting contact form encourages you to get in touch with the school.

Ad Formandum

Ad Formandum website made with the Academist theme

Ad Formandum offers courses to the young but also to everyone seeking lifelong education. To craft their professional online presentation, they chose the Academist theme. Using the Boxed Showcase layout and the theme’s attractive image sliders, Ad Formandum started off their homepage strong. The vibrant imagery irresistibly lures viewers into the world of this school, inciting them to continue exploring the website. Academist’s practical functionalities let the Ad Formandum team share extensive information about their school and courses, integrate a search option onto their site, share articles on topics that may be of users’ interest, etc. Visitors can also subscribe to the school’s newsletter as well as submit a request to become an Ad Formandum student. The content is well-organized and the entire website looks modern and refined, with subtle animation effects enhancing the beauty of the displayed content.

Food Genius Academy

Food Genius Academy website made with the Academist theme

Built with the Academist theme, the Food Genius Academy website is another fantastic example that demonstrates the allure of fullscreen image sliders. Large photographs along with compelling copy welcome viewers into the academy’s exciting world. The homepage contains a practical overview of the available courses as well as the subtly animated photo and textual content that incites users to explore everything that the academy has to offer. The list of teachers i.e., chefs and critics is displayed in a sleek way using the Academist’s Instructor Slider shortcode. Elsewhere on the site, you can see more of the theme’s stellar features in action. Also worth mentioning is the news section where one can use helpful tags to find articles on a topic of their interest.

Elyon College

Elyon College website made with the eSmarts theme

The moment the Elyon College website loads, visitors are encouraged to fill out an application form and enroll. The whole website is designed in a simple yet effective way that encourages students to choose Elyon over their competitors. The pages contain just the information every student needs when deciding on a college, all presented in a clear way thanks to eSmarts’ practical and flexible shortcodes. For instance, in the sections that contain lots of textual content, such as the College Policies page, the designers of the website used the theme’s Accordion shortcode. That enabled them to elegantly separate information while displaying all of it in one place for visitors to explore. The theme’s collection of customizable course shortcodes allowed them to share details about each course and also about the classes each course consists of. The eSmarts theme is also compatible with the practical Events Calendar plugin, which enabled Elyon College to share the courses schedule with students.

Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli

Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli website made with the Academist theme

Like several other schools and centers on our list, Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli also recognized the qualities of the Academist theme and used it to craft their engaging website. The fullscreen slider placed at the top of the homepage undoubtedly catches everyone’s eye as soon as the website loads, transporting them to the classes and halls of this school. The immersive opening section is followed by yet another slider, but instead of pictures, this one includes news previews, luring visitors into discovering the latest updates regarding the Mosaic School of Friuli. Video embeds enliven the website, vividly depicting the school’s history and bringing it closer to contemporary students. The gallery page also includes a YouTube video embed and an extensive collection of images captured in the school and on exhibitions, demonstrating the students’ artistry. Visitors can access the school’s social media channels directly from the site by clicking on any of the displayed social icons. Moreover, users can subscribe to the school’s newsletter and receive the latest news from the school delivered straight to their inbox.

DoitAustralia

DoitAustralia website made with the eSmarts theme