Tag Archives: Picks

10 Best Event & Conference Themes for WordPress (+ Our Picks)

[ad_1] Would you like to attract potential customers and business partners to your next seminar so that you can do business together? Or perhaps you are setting up a meetup for the local hobby group and want to get as many like-minded people together as possible? Whatever your situation is, you need an interesting website that catches everyone’s attention. At the same time, your site should give all the information your potential partner needs. In this post, we look at the best event themes for WordPress that will impact your visitors. So whether you are a musician, a business owner, or a speaker, you’ll find the right theme that makes your website stand out. But Before We Look at the Themes, Let’s Talk About Your Website First To have a functional website, you need a web host to store all your content. There are quite a few hosts out there, and sometimes it’s challenging to pick the right one for your needs. The one we recommend here at WP Kube is Bluehost, one of the most popular hosting companies for WordPress. It offers an outstanding balance between features and affordability. And once you have your site up and running with Bluehost, it’s time to complement the setup with some of the best WordPress plugins. When you have taken all the steps above, you are now ready to pick the theme for your event website. 1. Oscillator Oscillator is a WordPress theme for DJs, clubs, event organizers, and the whole entertainment industry. The theme contains plenty of valuable features that help you showcase your talent or promote your event. For instance, you can choose between six page types, including artist, discography, or gallery. You can also let the visitor stream or download media on the website with an integrated audio player. Key Features: The theme supports translations so that you can serve international audiences. Oscillator integrates with WooCommerce, and you can create your event-based online store. It is optimized for speed. Six custom widgets improve how your content looks. The list includes “tracklisting” to show discography tracks, or “events” to show upcoming or recurring events. The homepage supports a slider for displaying slideshow content. 💰 Price: starting from $49 (use our CSSIgniter coupon to get 30% off) DOWNLOAD / MORE INFO VIEW DEMO 2. Divi Divi, by Elegant Themes, is a mixture of a WordPress theme and a page builder.  With Divi, you can create stunning websites with drag-and-drop functionality. You can also customize every part of your website.  This powerful functionality lets you create a website visually, with no coding. You can also make whatever type of website you want (you are not just limited to event sites). Divi includes 100+ Layout Packs that help you build a website for every occasion. In the event category alone, you can find 11 packs, including Design Conference, Meetup, or Event Venue. Key Features: The theme contains 40+ elements you can use on your website, including sliders, galleries, or testimonials. With Divi, you can customize every part of the site. You can even customize your theme with the Theme Builder tool. There are many built-in productivity features that make your website building faster. These features include saving and reusing your designs, editing multiple elements at once, or speeding up the common actions with keyboard shortcuts. Test anything with built-in split-testing tools to see which layout or element performs better. Access to 100 extensions that expand the functionality of your Divi website. 👉 If you are interested in more of what Elegant Themes can offer, see our Elegant Themes review.💰 Price: starting $89/year (use our Elegant Themes Coupon to get 20% off) DOWNLOAD / MORE INFO VIEW DEMO 3. Astra Pro Astra is currently one of the most popular WordPress themes. It is lightweight and optimized for fast page downloads. It is also full of features that help you build any type of website you wish. One exciting feature is its pre-built website library. With these websites, you can build your site fast. The library includes a template for over 150 different sites. In the event space, you can find templates for Weddings, DJs, or conference events. Or you can create the template of your own by customizing the pre-built template to your needs. With Astra, every aspect of your website is easily customizable, including fonts, colors, headers, or blog posts.  All the features are available without a page builder since this theme integrates nicely with the Gutenberg editor. Key Features: Build and customize your headers and footers. The theme integrates with WooCommerce so that you can create an online shop on your website. Astra is translation-ready, so you can also serve international audiences. Customize your website with no coding skills. Hook your website with an LMS (Learning Management System), like LifterLMS. 💰 Price: starting $47/year DOWNLOAD / MORE INFO VIEW DEMO 4. ShowPro ShowPro is a theme that includes eight starter designs, helping you to create your conference website quickly. The theme is customizable with the standard WordPress customizer, and you can easily access various aspects of the page elements, including colors and fonts. ShowPro also contains multiple page and blog layouts you can choose from. You can also choose from half a dozen header layouts to your liking. What makes ShowPro more complete is the Conference Plugin, which is designed solely for managing conference websites.  But here is the catch: If you decide to purchase the plugin only, you don’t get access to ShowPro themes. Therefore, I suggest you invest in the “theme + plugin” package to get the best of both worlds. Key Features: A lightweight theme designed for speed. Choose a layout from various starter sites, then customize it to finish your design. Display all the event sessions in one beautiful schedule (the Conference Plugin). Add and manage the speaker information (the Conference Plugin). Ticket Sales integration with Eventbrite (the Conference Plugin). 💰 Price: $79/year (the Conference plugin only), $129/year (ShowPro themes + the Conference Plugin). DOWNLOAD / MORE

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Castos Picks Up $756K in Funding from Automattic and Joost de Valk to Expand Services in the Private Podcasting Market – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Castos, a WordPress-powered podcast hosting provider, announced a $756K pre-seed fundraising round today from Automattic, Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, and other individuals. The company raised money from all the investors in this round via a SAFE note, which founder and CEO Craig Hewitt said is a fairly standard investment vehicle for companies at Castos’ stage of growth. “On both the individual and corporate investor side I think the investors see the vision that we have for what the Private Podcasting market can mean for Castos and want to help us achieve that potential,” Hewitt said. Private Podcasting is a growing trend where creators and organizations broadcast to supporters in a more intimate format that isn’t open to the public. Hewitt likens them to membership sites, except in audio format. It is often used by people who are running membership sites, courses, or online communities as a way to stay connected with members. “The other application is companies wanting a way to connect with their employees in audio format,” Hewitt said. “Podcasting is perfect for that because it’s mobile-first, on-demand, and can be consumed asynchronously.  We call it the Step Away Experience. Companies that are adopting Private Podcasting internally are giving their team members a way to consume their internal content without being tied to their computer on a Zoom call or glued to Slack.” Castos is developing a mobile app specifically targeted at the private podcasting market. Hewitt’s team is aiming to have the app become a place where people can listen to all of the private podcasts for which they have a subscription. Listeners would simply use the app instead of going through the process of manually subscribing to all their private podcasts via RSS feed. New episodes will appear automatically in the app for subscribers. “For our corporate clients, the ability to white label our app with their own branding/style is a big win,” Hewitt said. “It’s also a much more secure way to distribute private podcast content.  There’s no RSS feed to share around, no files to download (our app is streaming only to offer more security to those files).”  The pandemic ramped up unprecedented interest in podcasting when lockdowns were in place across the globe. Even with vaccines more readily available now, Hewitt said Castos is still witnessing strong growth in the podcasting industry. “There are all the new podcasters in the market now since so many launched podcasts during the pandemic, but now that people are traveling again and commuting to work we’re seeing listenership going up quite a bit,” he said. “This is a trend we expect to continue into the future.” In the past 10 months, Castos has grown to serve nearly 3,500 customers and the team has grown from seven employees to 13. The company’s Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin is used on more than 30,000 WordPress sites. Castos is actively hiring for several roles right now, thanks to the new round of fundraising. “All of the funds will go towards growing our team,” Hewitt said. “This will be pretty evenly split between product (designers and developers) and Sales and Marketing roles – more people, more energy, more great minds working on ways that we can better serve our customers.”  Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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