This article is a guest post written by Adam J. Blust.

When you’re building a website, it’s easy to get distracted by the technology. Which WordPress theme or framework will you choose? Will the site have video? How will it connect to social media? What about responsive or mobile design?

All of this is fascinating, even fun. But what sometimes gets lost is the most basic question of all: Why does this site exist?

I’ve spent years making sites for clients, mostly small businesses and non-profit organizations. And it still amazes me how many clients haven’t thought through the basics: Who is my audience? What do they need and expect from my business? And how can my site give my audience what they need? Until you answer those questions, a website project is just playing with pixels.

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I am excited to announce that we are currently working on the development of a new WordPress theme and it will be a Child Theme for Backbone Theme Framework. So far we had 5 Child Themes: magazine, news, multimedia, portfolio and business/corporate theme. This next creation will be an e-commerce child theme and obviously there will be more coming.

Meanwhile here a sneak preview of the upcoming child theme for Backbone. The design is about 80% ready and we will move to the WordPress development stage tomorrow. Stay tuned!

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We want all of you to be able to take Backbone Framework even further and tweak the colors and CSS to suit your needs. So to fasten the process and make your work even more easier we also provide a few selection of Backbone Framework Child Themes in various category. And today we’ve released another one.

Introducing Sharpness, a Backbone Framework Child Theme.

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Over the next 30 days we have a special running offering up to 38% off discount on ALL ColorLabs Theme Bundles. With ColorLabs Theme Bundles you can get multiple WordPress themes for a very low price. Visit our Pricing Page to find out what other pricing plan available for ColorLabs’ customers.

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Thanks to the availability of high quality WordPress e-commerce themes, WordPress has made a mark in the e-commerce industry as a serious online shop platform. More and more e-commerce websites are now powered by WordPress e-commerce. To turn WordPress into an online store you need to install a shopping cart plugin for WordPress. There are several different e-commerce plugins available now for use with WordPress and one of the more recent arrivals on the scene is WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is an open source e-commerce platform with enterprise-level quality & features from WooThemes. Even though it’s still new, WooCommerce plugin has received thousands of complement around the net on how well it is (inside and out) and there is a growing market of themes and plugins made specifically for it.

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Everyone nowadays wants to speed up their site to every millisecond, as it provides best user experience by reducing your site’s load time making it more search engine friendly and helps in search rankings. There are many ways to make your WordPress blog or site load fast, like using W3 Total Cache plugin to improve efficiency of caching of the files, using CDN to serve images from multiple locations and also some server tweaks. Some are free to use and some may cost you in bulk.

One of the free option (currently free in beta stage) available from Google itself is the PageSpeed service. You may have used the Google PageSpeed online or the browser extension or Mod PageSpeed for analyzing and improving your site performance.

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We are going to release another Child Theme for Backbone Framework. The new Child Theme will be released by the end of this week and it will be a photoblog/portfolio WordPress theme. We haven’t really decided on the name yet, so if you have any idea feel free to write it down on the comment. :)

The main purpose of the upcoming Child Theme is to showcase photography, so we keep the graphics and distracting imagery to a minimum and only use neutral colors to maintain the focus on the pictures. The theme has white background color that works with all your photos, letting the photography steal the show.

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Until today, there are many cases where people don’t take good composition into account when using images on their website. This happened because they are ignorance in how to use and include thumbnails with good size and composition.

Much remains to underestimate the role of image thumbnail in a website. Apparently, the image quality is very important for a website, especially for websites that display photos like a gallery or photography website. One of the reasons why user is interested to visit a website is the quality of the image thumbnail. Copy-writing is an intrinsic part of web design, but it can easily be brushed aside for a beautifully shot photograph or well drawn image as our brain can interpret picture much quicker than text. 

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We found another batch of user-customized version of our themes out there in the world wide web. We’ve added them to our Showcase Page where we feature the best ones. If you have created a site using one of our themes, please provide us link to that site and if they are as awesome as the others in the Showcase gallery we will include them in.

This post, will cover the 10 websites that we added to ColorLabs Showcase Page last month. Click on any of the screen shots to visit these awesome ColorLabs WordPress Themes customization!

Economic News Monitor (ENW)

Based on: TypeMagz

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I could never stress out enough the importance of regularly backing up a WordPress website, especially true if it makes money. Hopefully, if you are a business owner who is also a WordPress user, you feel the same way as I do. You don’t want to drive a car without a spare tire, do you?

To help you do the job, I’ve covered some backup services that will backup the entire WordPress website ( the database and the site itself) and store them securely so that you can re-install them and roll backed to your post in no time if the site is compromised. They  also provide you with other services like upgrading your versions, controlling your data, migrating to a new server and more.

To find out which one works out the best for you, you have to give them a test. If you are a small business owner who doesn’t have a tehcnical support, you can create a duplicate of your website to test on.

VaultPress

VaultPress is a WordPress backup service by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com). Starting at $15/mo, VaultPress will provide realtime, continuous (up-to-the-minute) backup and synchronization of every post, comment, image, video, audio podcast, plugin, theme, revision and dash­board setting across at least two separate cloud services (including Amazon S3).

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We have a new Child Theme for Backbone Theme Framework! It’s a magazine-style WordPress theme and it’s called Papuros.

Papuros puts a lot of content on the page. The homepage layout shows excerpts of headlines of articles from a variety of different categories or topics on the front page, allowing visitors to have easy access to more content compared to a typical blog-style layout.

Let’s take a closer look on what Papuros has to offer.

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Just over 6 months ago, we took a new identity as ColorLabs & Company and we introduced Lemuel, our cool mascot, for the first time. We also hinted of upcoming style changes on the storefront. Finally, after some successful and unsuccessful ventures in the past 6 months, the redesign is finished.

The site you see before you today is a result of the past three months of work and loads of bugs and error resolving. The following is just a quick overview of everything that has changed.

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