With 2008 coming to a close in a couple of months, one thing is clear; the rapid rise of Wordpress shows absolutely no sign of slowing down.  The project is going from strength to strength and the volume and quality of free and premium themes released in 2008 is staggering.

Photo by aheram.

"Dude are you freakin' deaf? I said Wordpress ... not shoulder press!"

This makes 2008 another epic year for Wordpress users who have more free themes, plug-ins, hacks and fellow users to draw upon than ever before.  Why are these 413 themes the best? Simple … because they were hand picked by some of the top web design and development blogs on the planet then tagged, bookmarked and shared by tens of thousands of people across the major social networks. Continue reading…

Selling God, spiritual beliefs, blessings and superstitions is the original big business and like all organizations, religions use visual devices for branding themselves.  The marketing techniques may have evolved along with technology, yet one thing amongst most religions has stayed incredibly consistent: their branding.

Photo by pearbiter.

"Umm God ... so aah ... which logo do you want to go with?"

To me, that’s very interesting. I mean think about it; unlike prolific brand marks of our times like the Nike swoosh or the Apple apple, some of these religious symbols have been in circulation for centuries if not thousands of years.  Lets take a look at some of these brand marks … those belonging to religions big and small, old and new.

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The Wordpress Magazine - www.thewpmag.com

My friend (and fellow Wordpress nut) Steve recently launched his new site which reports on all things Wordpress.  Highly active in #wordpress irc channel, and it’s because of people like Steve that the Wordpress project is so vibrant.  He and many others like him can be found assisting people with their questions about Wordpress.  Stuck on some PHP?  Wondering what that plugin is you saw on a site? You’ll find your answers floating around in the #wordpress channel.

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For the second offering of free Wordpress themes here at EliteFreelancing.com, I’ve decided to feature one theme maker in particular — Jai from BlogOBlog — and hone in on what I feel is his best work.  Let’s start with Angel.

Angel

For those you you fond of neutrals, Angel is offers you a low contrast look that can be used for many different purposes.

Angel - Free Wordpress Theme

Demo Angel | Download Angel

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There’s nothing like having the right tools and resources for the job. For us web workers, this includes having a great stash of icons we can draw on when the need arises.

Bright! A free icon set with vectors included. Yum.

Today, it’s 338 free icons contained in three different sets. One set in particular stands out for it’s workmanship, the sheer number of icons and the fact that the designers provide the vectors as well.  Oh man, we love when the vectors are provided. Continue reading…

Creativity. At our best it surges through us like a high voltage current leaving beauty in its wake.  At other times it’s fleeting, elusive and we struggle to manifest anything of value.

Photo by Krikit.

Special places, both real and digital, will get you charged up again.

Whether it’s website design, Wordpress powered sites, logos or icons you should have some default go-to resources you can put into play when your own creativity runs dry. Here are some great resources to kick start your creativity…

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Automatic plugin upgrade for Wordpress is a gem of a feature, when it works.  If you’ve tried updating your Wordpress plugins using “upgrade automatically” in the plugins list and are getting error messages like:

“Installation Failed” or “Cannot download update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/”

You might try going to your host and making sure CGI support is enabled.  I’m not sure if this is a must for the automatic upgrade plugin feature in Wordpress to actually work, however, enabling CGI worked for me when recently encountering these errors.

Naturally double check your FTP username and password are correct and relax the CHMOD permissions on /wp-content/upgrade folder.

Cripes.  Have you tried to register a domain name lately?  If you have, you’ll now that typing in anything remotely recognizable in one or two word combination is more than likely going to return results something like: “This domain is already registered.”

Photo by darkpatator.

You can still find a decent domain name ... without going crazy.

Then get red in the face as you repeat this search process a hundred times attempting to find a name that isn’t complete gibberish and/or 5 words long. Next time you’re in the market for a domain name, check out this crop of domain name generators and search tools that that will make your life way easier.

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Heh.  I just got done posting a quick shout to Jean-Baptiste for his excellent Sliding Doors + Wordpress technique when I realized it had happened again: The Visual and HTML tabs on the Wordpress text editor were broken again.  I don’t know of any permanent fixes, but if this happens to you here’s how you can fix the issue temporarily:

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I just got done experimenting with some options for the main menu here at Elite Freelancing. Given I don’t code PHP — I’m more of a cut ‘n’ paste kinda guy when it comes to PHP –  I had to do some digging around to find what I needed. Specifically, I needed a way to add tags into wp_list_categories so that Wordpress.

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The rise of so much high caliber goodness available for free never ceases to impress me.  Some of these are themes I felt were verging on premium or just themes that were simply special because they met a certain criteria. Whether you need a theme for yourself or a client, these free Wordpress themes are worth a second look.

Portfolio Wordpress Theme by Sorel Mihai

Portfolio Wordpress Theme by Sorel Mihai

Download it | View Demo

Designed by Sorel Mihai, this theme is everything you need to start showing off your work.  It’s got a slick color palette and clean lines that will have you looking like a modern service provider in no time. Great work Sorel.

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So today I’m chippin’ away at a redesign for my rusted art website.  Like most sites I develop, I rolled it out on Wordpress. I seemed to have run a into a bug though, and I’m not sure if this a localized me thing, or a legit gremlin.

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Looming stock market crashes. Government bailouts. Rate cuts. Recessions. Depressions.  These are all words gladly being thrown around by the mainstream media of late. And we all know the mainstream press loves nothing more than selling us doom by the truck load.

Photo by lefthand.

Recession got you bummed? Fear not, there is much you can do.

I’m no economist, but it seems only natural that markets should correct themselves (level off and perhaps retract) after consecutive years of positive domestic and global growth. In any case, the situation is what it is. So what’s a freelancer to do amidst leaner and tougher economic times? The answer is: Be even more valuable to your clients.

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One of the best and arguably easiest ways to generate good faith with your clients is via the customer service you provide.  I’m an advocate of providing killer customer service wherever possible for many reasons.  A large part of that killer service is how fast you get back to your clients.

Photo by marinacvinhal.

"I got the answers I needed and my boss loves me."

Yep, speed is important!  The old cliche is that “time is money” and when your clients consistently get super fast responses to their queries, your stock with them invariably goes up. It’s also important to understand that as a freelancer one of your greatest strengths is your mobility. Studios and development teams aren’t generally able to respond as quickly as you are.  So get guerrilla and leverage that competitive advantage to the max!

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Users of Wordpress 2.6 will know that you can insert captions underneath photos and images within your posts. If any of you have tried to add hyperlinks within a caption, you’ll also know that Wordpress will strip that link faster than a suspected terrorist at LAX when you hit save.

Photo by superbomba.

"Baby, I know how to add hyperlinks to Wordpress captions."

Now, I’m not techy enough to know exactly why Wordpress strips links from captions but it does. I do know that with some fiddling about, I finally found a fairly straight forward workaround that doesn’t involve custom fields or plugins.

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