Sexy Bookmarks is a WordPress plugin developed by Josh Jones and Norman Yung that is goaled at providing an attention grabbing menu so that visitors to your WordPress based blog or website can easily bookmark or share your content with their favorite social media bookmarking sites.  As you can see from the blog, I am kicking the tires of the Sexy Bookmarks 2.5.3.3.

I learned about this plugin from my WordPress dashboard and kind of cringed my face when I saw the name.  The name is not the best of branding and the .COM extension of their domain name actually resolves to a pornography bookmark site of some sort (didn’t stick around to really figure it out).  In any event, out of curiosity I clicked through to the plugin’s page on WordPress.Org and based on a review of the page decided to give the plugin a test drive.

Sexy Bookmarks for WordPress

The Sexy Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress is built off of the core of WP Social Bookmark Menu and extended using CSS and some fancy coding to make a unique and compelling bookmark menu.  The plugin itself has received a 4.5 star rating on WordPress.Org; yet, does have some documented issues that are generally caused by themes that don’t support some standard WordPress semantics.  I installed the plugin on this blog which is a WordPress 2.8.4 at the time of writing this post and using a customized version of Press75′s Urban Elements theme.  My installation when down without a glitch.  Before you install the plugin, make sure you know how to access your hosting via FTP so that if you do have an issue you can simply delete the plugin files.  The Plugin’s authors do seem to be very committed to the plugin via their interaction on their own website with user requests, feature adds, and bug fixes.

The plugin’s settings panel has 33 different social bookmarking sites that can be selected and placed into a menu order on various parts of your website.  The settings allow granular control of the DIV which houses the bookmarks and the types of pages you want the bookmarks on (index, page, post, and combinations of the three).  If you are looking to add to a template directly, the plugin also supports an inline PHP call.  There are several other tweaks including a background image that make the plugin fun.

Graphically, the plugin is great and provides yet another Web 2.0 element to a good theme.  For now, I’m going to leave the plugin on my site as it compliments our great Press 75 theme.  I’m curious to see how our readers interact and use it; I hope it’s fancy appeal doesn’t confuse anyone.  Josh and Norman, thanks for your contribution to WordPress!

No matter how many small business eMarketing presentations I make, I always get a little scared when an attendee prefaces their question with, “I am looking to create a website for our church and. . . . “.  So one might ask, are you afraid of church Derick?  Not one bit. . .what I am affraid of are the demands that an organization such as a church can have on a website and how to recommend putting all of that together for a non-profit organization.

For years, WordPress has been my my default recommendation for blogs.  It is slowly becoming my default recommendation for small business websites and non-profits.  That is why when I came across the StudioPress Church Child Theme, I smiled with relief as there was finally a theme that combined all of the flexibility of WordPress with the social media needs of a modern day congregation’s site and allowed the site owner to keep things under budget.

The Church Theme from StudioPress

The Church Theme from StudioPress comes with a rather contemporary and youthful color scheme.  For the right church, this could be ready to install; yet, I view the theme more as a great starting point for customization.  StudioPress theme customization requires some knowledge of CSS and access to tools like PhotoShop or PhotoShop Elements.  If you are a church or a non-profit looking to create a new website that has content management features and social media functionality, this theme can be given to a member of your congregation with the right skills or a local web developer to customize and make into a theme that matches your church.  If given to a third party developer, one should expect to pay between $500 and $1500 for customizations.  If looking for skills within the congregation, anyone with some comfort in WordPress and CSS should be able to get the job done.

Though the Church Theme from StudioPress is not for all out of the box, it is a great starting point for getting a dynamic website for supporting the needs of a church congregation.

WordPress is by far one of the most sensational software breakthroughs to hit the Internet in the last decade.  It has enabled writers, publishers, small business owners, and even propeller heads to create high traffic dynamic websites over virtually night.  The vast WordPress library of plugins has helped to site owners to extend their websites and blogs beyond imagination when compared to the Web 1.0 world.  Still, WordPress has traditionally had some limitations.

The most notable limitation with WordPress is that most themes have a “WordPressy Look” to them.  Second is that the integration of rich media such as video has always required some tinkering around with plugins or embedding of YouTube code.  The end result was just flat out bland.  The same can be said of photo library plugins.  That was until Press75 Themes hit the WordPress scene with video themes for WordPress and photography themes for WordPress.

Photocrati

Photocrati photography themes offer great looking WordPress 3.0 compatible photography themes that feature a thorough Theme Options section that allow photographers and photo bloggers to spend less time monkeying with WordPress and more time taking great shots.  Photocrati premium themes provide support and regular updates to their themes.

Press 75

Press75 offers 9 commercial WordPress themes and 3 free themes that combine high end graphics and layouts with two essential plugins and offer the end user theme customization and control through an appearance configuration panel.  Due to their creative and functionality, these make for excellent video themes for WordPress and photography themes for WordPress.  The premium themes are as follows:

The Photographic Theme is a contemporary photography theme for WordPress that uses the Simple Post Thumbnails plugin to simplify adding photos to an online photography site, gallery, or picture blog.  The user simply needs to select a photograph from their hard drive and the theme does all of the rest.

Press75 Photographic Theme

The VideoFlick Theme is a video theme for WordPress with seamless video integration from sources such as YouTube.  The theme uses the Simple Video Embed and Simple Post Thumbnails plugins to make posting video with an attractive thumbnail photo a breeze.  The theme also provides a user interface for customizations including managing 125X125 advertisements in the sidebar.  This theme is great for bloggers who frequently include video and photos into their posts.

Press75 Video Flick Theme

The OnDemand Video Theme for WordPress was inspired by the online video site Hulu and is a full featured video site solution supporting video from any site that provides embed code.  The site’s plugin also supports playing of uploaded video files.  Like all Press75 Themes, the admin has a UI for theme configuration.  If you paid a developer to build you a custom site like OnDemand, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars!

Press75 OnDemand Theme

At Orangecast, our web designer actually used Press75 themes to create Orangecaster.Com, our marketing blog, and our online news release site StreamRelease.Com To see all of the Press75 WordPress Themes including video and photography themes, visit Press75.com..