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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