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06
Dec
2017

On-Page SEO: The Ultimate Guide to Google Love

A lot of attention in SEO, or search engine optimization, is focused on off-page optimization, i.e. improving a website’s authority by getting high quality links pointing to it from other authoritative resources. To be fair, this is for good reason: external backlinks are how search engines get third-party verification of the quality and relevance of a website, which is still one of the most important ranking signals for search results pages.

This, however, often implies that good on-page SEO is self-evident and ubiquitous, which is (not surprisingly) far from true – just try analyzing any web page using one of the SEO tools such as this one. Funnily enough, even their own homepage does not get a solid 100/100 score, while some small-medium websites can get as low as 50/100. The thing is – if you want your website to rank high in search engines, two components are crucial: the authority and the quality; and while Google uses third-party links to verify the first one, it can easily gauge the quality of your web page all by itself.

What is On-Page SEO?

Simply put, on-page SEO is any practice that uses the elements of a webpage to increase the chances of better search engine rankings. On-site SEO, in this context, is slightly different, as it leverages all the pages on a given website through tactics such as internal linking. Both of these differ from off-page SEO which attempts to use exogenous signals such as hyperlinks and social shares in order to improve rankings.

What exactly can we do with a webpage in order to improve its SEO quality? In order to answer that, we will need to examine what a webpage is, why it exists, and what Google and other search engines expect from it.

What Makes a (Good) Web Page?

Any web page, in essence, is just a document composed in a language called HTML (for HyperText Markup Language). Your browser gets this document from a specialized computer (server) which stores the website’s files for any online user to access, parses the document and displays the page on your screen. This page can contain a lot of various elements, but on a more fundamental level we can distinguish between:

  • Text, which is also often called content in the SEO context. This is the “meat” of the page and often accounts for the largest share of the page’s value to the visitors.
  • Media – mainly images, but can also be video, audio, and other more exotic stuff like 3D embeds and interactive elements such as browser games, charts, etc.
  • Layout and design – all the various elements that define the structure, format, and visual representation of the page; those are usually set with CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets.
  • Navigation – the menu and everything else that helps you get around; this also includes the site logo, which often serves as the home button, as well as lists of categories, breadcrumbs, and the search bar.
  • Meta elements such as the data that describes the content of the webpage; those are usually needed for other programs and systems (including search engines and social networks) to interact properly with the page.

For successful on-page SEO, each of these elements needs to follow the guidelines and best practices set forth by Google and other search engines. The goal of such rules is to ensure that the pages served by Google in its search results are us useful and convenient as possible – in other words, making your visitors happy will also make search engines happy. In the next parts of this guide we will look at each class of web page components mentioned above and see how they can be improved to best server the visitors (and give you some well-deserved Google love).

Textual Content

In the very early days of the Web, SEO was much more simplistic; the frequency with which certain keywords appeared on a page was more of a direct ranking factor. For example, if your target keyword was “dog trainer”, and you mentioned “dog trainer” 30 times in a 300-word article, that would be a keyword density of 10%. And it was very likely to perform better than another page with only a 5% density for the same keyphrase.

As search evolved, Search Engines began to move away from this simplistic scoring method and towards rewarding content created for people instead of search engines. With time, high keyword density came to be seen as an unnatural manipulation by webmasters, and is now classified as “keyword stuffing” – a dodgy SEO practice that can actually hurt your rankings rather than improve them.

Today, keyword density is still sometimes referenced as a metric for analyzing page content, although it has evolved to mean something different, namely how well a page’s content matches the search intent. Instead of looking at density percentages, it is more useful to follow these basic guidelines:

  • The title of the page should go into an H1 tag – a HTML element which denotes the most important heading on the page. Include the primary keyword into the H1 tag, but do so in a human-friendly way, avoiding artificial “stuffing” – Google can understand synonyms and close variants of phrases these days. Instead of “Dog Trainer New York”, it makes much more sense to go for “The Best Dog Trainer in New York City – Bark up the Right Tree”
  • Whenever possible, try to structure your content using subtitles – this will not only help your users to better navigate the page, but also send the right signals to the search bots. Subtitles should be included as H2, H3, etc tags following a consistent hierarchy; using keyword-rich phrases will also help here, yet it’s, again, not an exercise in maxing out on percentage stats but rather a helpful way to consider which other related search queries might be targeted with the same piece of content. Using the example from above, the “dog trainer New York” primary topic might include subtopics about with keywords like “dog behavior” and “dog trainer New Jersey”.
  • There’s generally no need to specifically try to include the keywords you’re optimizing for into the main body of text (i.e. the content of the page) – if your text is to the point, the keywords will pop up naturally anyway. To repeat – Google has gotten very good at “sensing” unnaturally stuffed keywords, so such practices will only bring additional risks with no potential upside.

In is worth reiterating that the above tips are more of a checklist than a task – if you have a competent and knowledgeable person writing about a topic, chances are your content will be nicely optimized for search engines without even thinking about it too much; due to the sophistication of Google’s algorithm nowadays, there’s no need to include very precise phrases in a specific order for the search bots to understand what the text is about.

Google has long since moved past the days of keyword density and simple keyword lookups. In fact, you often don’t even need a keyword to be included on a page in order to rank for it. How does the algorithm accomplish this? Through semantic analysis – i.e. figuring out the topic of a page from its content.

Think of it like this: Google isn’t trying to understand what “words” a webpage is about anymore, it’s trying to understand what “concepts” or “topics” a webpage is about (yes, it’s gotten that smart). Words, of course, are helpful for Google to determine this, but due to the powerful nature of its semantic analysis algorithms, they don’t have to be exact matches of your keyword.

This means that a semantic hierarchy not only reads well for the user, but is also easy for the algorithm to digest. It allows the page to be seen as truly relevant for an entire semantic graph of a topic, and not just one specific keyword. The end result will be a broadly relevant page that ranks for a wide variety of topical keywords, some of which might not have even been identified in your keyword research.

Images and Other Media

The web is an increasingly visual place. Sites like Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat have found massive success with a purely image/media based value proposition, for a simple reason – visual media is much easier to digest and has a much higher information bandwidth; they say “a picture is worth a thousand words” for a reason.

Images have consistently been the largest contributor to web page size all across the Web, and given the constant growth in average web page size this implies that images have also been proliferating, encouraged by the rising Internet connection throughputs.

This means that images and other media content like videos are increasingly important for user experience on your website. And yes, they can also help with SEO – here’s how:

The most common media online is images, so we’ll focus on those at the moment; in order to help search engines understand your page, as well as to pop up in image search more often, it is useful to keep the following in mind:

  • Despite incredible advances on image recognition, Google still heavily relies on basic text markup to determine what a new image is. This means that the so-called alt text is still an important part of any image you include on your page.
  • The name of the image file also serves as a relevance factor, so it’s best to avoid filenames like images001.png – instead go for dog-trainer.png if you’re using a photo of a person training a canine).
  • Text around the image also helps establish relevance. Insert the image within relevant content, and include captions where appropriate.

With that being said, it’s important to point out that including more images does not help your pages’s rankings in any way. As with everything, sensible use and moderation are key.

Layout and Design

While specific design decisions do not seem to have any direct influence on search engine results (i.e. do not act as Google’s ranking factors), design can have a significant effect on how your visitors interact with your page – and user engagement metrics are very likely to be a part of the core ranking algorithm.

Thus, a clever motivational scheme emerges: Google doesn’t care about your page’s design, but it cares whether your users like it – which in turn means you should care as well. Since design is a very relative term, there are no specific rule-of-thumb bullet points to follow, except for the generic principles of clarity, legibility, and sensibility. In addition to that, however, there are some specific edge cases that deserve separate attention, and they are both connected with visibility of content.

Often used for hackers to inject links and other content into a website without the site owner’s knowledge, the use of hidden content has been prosecuted by Google, as it’s obviously quite deceptive towards users. As long as you aren’t actively trying to game the algorithm, chances are you won’t ever run into these issues, but best practice dictates that you don’t include any text, links, images or other elements that can’t be readily accessed by users in some way, such as by clicking a tab. Speaking of tabs..

Some variants of hidden content, such as sliders, tabs, accordions and other moving/interactive elements either temporarily hide their content, or require a user action (such as clicking a button) in order to view the content. There has been some speculation as to exactly how Google treats this type of content: it’s not against Google’s guidelines per se, but it also may be treated as less worthy of use in ranking factors since a user can’t readily see it.

This is even further complicated by the introduction of the Mobile-first index, which seeks to use a site’s mobile version as its primary source for search engine rankings. Since hiding at least some elements is one of the most practical ways to make pages consumable on smaller devices, the question of how Google would treat such content rose up again. With mobile first in place, content hidden for UX will have full weight, at least according to Google. However, some studies have shown that it’s still harder to rank for terms showing in hidden content, so even if mobile rules are rolling out, they will require time to come to full effect.

Conclusion? Don’t hide crucial content on full-width versions of your web page and use elements such as tabs and sliders in moderation. To prepare for mobile-first, do your best to present a mobile page that is as usable as possible, while still making all the content (and links!) clearly visible.

Navigation

The most important concept when it comes to navigation is “clarity”: your visitors should understand the structure of your website, where they currently are within that structure, and how to get to any other part of the website from here. Just as with design, well-executed navigation will not directly affect your rankings, but it will help people stay longer on your website, which is yet another tangible metric that can influence Google’s perception.

There are several tactics you can use to ensure that your website’s navigation is working for the users, not against them:

  • Always have a primary menu linking to all major pages/sections of your website, as well as the homepage (alternatively, you can use the logo as the home link, since it’s a stable usability pattern that is recognized by most internet users).
  • Avoid using links to external websites in any of your navigation elements, as it is widely considered as a spam factor.
  • Even if you have a single-page website with all information located solely on the home page, it is often useful to introduce internal links to the most important sections.
  • Consider using breadcrumbs on internal pages of your website, they are very effective at improving navigability and might even help Google index your pages better.

Meta Elements

Meta data can generally be defined as “information about information” – in our case, it’s the bits of data that help describe a webpage. There are numerous types of HTML meta elements with relation to SEO, including <title>, <meta>, and <link> tags; in this guide we will take a look at the most important ones.

Let’s start with meta title – this is the phrase that is used by the search engines as the blue title of the search result, as well as by browsers as the text displayed in the open tabs. While the impact of title tags has shifted over the years, they are still a crucially important aspect of any on-page SEO initiative. Not only do title tags help search engines to understand the topical relevance of a webpage, they are also the first thing a user sees of your site in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

As with on-page headings, good title tags no longer have any direct positive effect on a page’s ranking strength, but getting them wrong might still hurt: firstly, having auto-generated or artificially keyword-rich meta titles are a spam signal for Google. Secondly, this is typically the only part of a search engine result that is being actively read, so users will tend to click less on the titles they don’t like.

The most common way of treating title tags is just using a page’s main heading text; while this is good enough in most cases, you can do better if you really want to make the most out of your on-page SEO. Firstly, try making them as “click-inducing” as possible (without going into clickbait territory, of course); secondly, use at most 60 symbols (including spaces), since Google will cut off everything after that on its results pages. Be sure to include the most important keywords, but in the form of a natural sentence – don’t try overstuffing in the form of a comma-separated list of bare keywords, Google is way smarter than that.

Custom-writing meta titles, at least for all major pages of your website, will ensure maximum relevancy and help click-throughs from the search results pages, which is a direct multiplier of your incoming organic traffic.

Like meta titles, meta descriptions are used in the search results, appearing as the two lines of black text under the page’s title and address. While much fewer users actually read those, writing a good meta description does not take much time (use a maximum of 160 symbols) and will surely not hurt your click-through rates. Another good news is, because meta descriptions are not a direct ranking factor, you may feel free to test to your heart’s content without worrying about disrupting your organic rankings.

You can track the click-through rates of your pages by using the Google Search Console – the Search Traffic → Search Analytics section provides detailed data for each search query that sends organic traffic to your website. Be sure to tick the “CTR” checkbox in the top part of the view to trigger the respective readouts.

Over to You

Looking at your site from the perspective of search engines will inevitably lead you to a conclusion about a motivational alignment: the more you make your pages useful, relevant, and easy to use, the better off are the visitors, and the happier Google is with your efforts. Coupled with solid authority-building strategies, on-page SEO can help you to compete in the upper echelons of your niche.

We’d love to hear about your personal experience with on-page optimization: what works for you and what doesn’t, and what else you think should be added to this guide. Also, in case you’ve got questions regarding on-page search engine optimization, hit us in the comment section below – let’s discuss!

03
Oct
2017

The Ultimate Review 2024: Is It Worth Your Money? + 35% Discount Inside

Good news everyone! Our Blinkist review is now also available as a video – right here inside this article or on YouTube.

Note that the rest of the review contains much more information than the clip – including our exclusive 35% coupon

UPDATE: Blinkist now has a new feature called Connect – adding a friend to your Premium account for free! More details in this part of the review.

Video thumbnail

Alright, time to go into more detail! First of all, let’s answer the most crucial question about Blinkist:

Why Should I Even Consider It?

Simply speaking, there’s just too many books and too little time! Countless other things are competing for your attention every day, every hour and every minute.

As if that wasn’t enough, the number of newly published books has been growing so rapidly in the last decades that some have called it a “book explosion”:

Source: ourworldindata.org/books

With thousands of fresh titles being written every year – and 24 hours in a day, how do you keep up with a constantly growing reading list?!

This is where Blinkist comes in – by offering easy-to-digest versions of popular books, it helps you to better navigate the ever-expanding ocean of human knowledge and wisdom.

In this in-depth analysis, we will look at Blinkist from all possible angles, based on our 36-month testing period – with the goal of answering the following questions:

  • 💰Is It Worth Paying for a Blinkist subscription?
  • 🏆Are there any alternatives that are better?
  • 📚Is Blinkist a substitute for reading full books?
  • ⚡How to use Blinkist in the most effective manner?

By the end of this Blinkist review, you will have everything you need to make a decision on whether it’s worth your time and money, and how to use it to efficiently to read dozens of books each month. Let’s get to it:

So What Is Blinkist, Exactly?

To put it simply, Blinkist is a non-fiction book summary service. There are thousands of book abstracts, or blinks, in the Blinkist library, and new titles are being added all the time.

How does Blinkist work?

Each blink is structured as a self-contained mini narrative that can be read (or listened to) in about 15 minutes.

There are 7-12 sections in every blink, including a résumé of the book’s key thoughts [yes, a summary of a summary 💎] and actionable advice.

Blinks come in text and audio format, which we’ll cover in more detail in the next section; to sum up, here are the 3 key things you should know:

What is Blinkist?

Blinkist really makes sure the summaries are available in just about any situation by providing several ways to access content: via a browser-based online service, a mobile app, and even a direct Kindle link.

We will review each of these below –

Blinkist App: The Mobile Experience

The interface you’ll probably be using the most is the Blinkist app, because it covers some of the most popular use cases.

These are, of course, reading or listening to blinks on the go – while commuting, walking, or just waiting for a friend to show up in a café ☕

The app is subdivided into four areas available from the bottom tabs: Discover, Library, Activity, and Profile.

Notice the nice little details, like filters to show/hide blinks according to their state (not started, in progress, finished), or subtly colored progress bars:

The reading interface is minimalist and distraction-free: the only buttons visible are back, audio, and text size, and even they can be hidden by simply tapping the main text.

Swiping right or left flips the page, and the progress bar at the bottom of the screen unobtrusively indicates your current position in the blink.

And now the killer feature:

Having used Blinkist for more than 3 years, we can definitely conclude that one of the most useful things in the Blinkist app is the audio versions of the blinks, which allow keeping your eyes and your hands free for other activities.

You can click on the earphones icon next to a blink to download the audio version to your device’s internal storage for offline listening – quite useful for flights or times off the grid.

After a thorough testing of the audio blinks feature, the following can be said about its implementation:

  • there are both 💁‍♀️ female and male narrators, which implies varying but for the most part non-irritating voices,
  • thanks to the above mentioned variation, you will 📣 not get bored of listening to the same person over and over again,
  • and in terms of 🎧 sound quality, there are very few hiccups, and incidences of poor sound quality have been declining over time.

Speaking of the latter, the most common issue is the freezing of sound during a transition between blink sections – this can sometimes happen on a weak connection or after unexpectedly losing connectivity.

To solve this, simply closing and opening the Blinkist app works just fine.

Let’s indeed close the app for a minute and turn our attention to the browser version of the Blinkist service:

Blinkist Web Service

Once you create an account with Blinkist, you gain access to an online profile which also contains your personal library, allowing you to read or listen to blinks from your laptop or desktop computer. It has two separate tabs for ongoing and finished reading, where each item is simply a link to the blink with a handy progress indicator at the bottom:

Just like the app, the in-browser reading interface has been designed in minimalist style, with every detail aimed at contributing to a distraction-free reading experience.

The entire menu has been removed in favour of three buttons: the home link (leads back to your library), the contents button which open a slide-in overlay with the structure of the current blink, as well as the font size control. Not much, but in reality, that’s all you need to focus entirely on the abstract at hand.

The web service is of course synchronized automatically with the Blinkist mobile app, which allows you to seamlessly continue reading across all your devices.

Overall, the browser version of Blinkist is as distraction-free and easy to use as the mobile app, yet based on over 24 months of testing it has been used much less often than the app. This is probably due to the fact that you can’t do much else on a hands-free smartphone (apart from listening to music), but there are many more things on the web that compete for your attention.

Now that we’ve looked at the Blinkist offering, let’s discuss the pricing and see if it’s worth moving to a paid subscription:

How Much Does Blinkist Cost?

A Blinkist subscription costs $79.99 per year (let’s call it $90 for easier comprehension, shall we?), which can be reduced to $62 per year for the first year using our exclusive 35% discount.

A new feature rolled out in late-2022 called Blinkist Connect now allows adding one friend to your Premium subscription for free – in other words, the cost is reduced by 50% per person. Ideal for sharing with friends, colleagues, or significant others!

We will discuss whether we think the service is worth the price a bit later, but now let’s look at two ways you can try it out for free:

  • The most straightforward way is to use the 7-day free trial, which is available for the annual billing cycle. Here’s how it works:

    Blinkist trial

    When you sign up, you get instant access to the entire Blinkist library of 3000+ non-fiction book summaries. After 5 days, you get a reminder to unsubscribe if you don’t want your card billed, and after 7 days your trial expires and your card gets charged for the subscription.

  • The second option is to sign up for the Free Daily account, which lets you read one random blink per day:

    You don’t get to choose which book’s summary you’re reading, but there’s no time limit and you can switch to the paid version at any time.

If you do find Blinkist useful and decide to subscribe, here’s a detailed overview of the cancellation process:

Is It Easy to Cancel?

In order to be called truly user-friendly, a service also needs to offer an easy and clear procedure for cancelling an existing paid account. While preparing for this review, we’ve tried stopping a Blinkist Premium subscription in various ways, and the most important takeaway is that your cancellation options depend on the platform you’ve used to subscribe in the first place:

if you’ve purchased your Premium via their website, you can click on “You — Settings” in the top right corner of the Blinkist web interface, and then click on “Cancel subscription” in your “Account” tab. Quite straightforward!

If you’ve subscribed via an Android smartphone, the Premium plan, just like pretty much any other thing you buy on an Android, will be stored in the Play app – so you’ll need to unsubscribe there: just click on the three-line menu button in the top left corner of your Play app, and then go to “Account – Subscriptions” in the drop-down menu.

If you’re using an iPhone instead, you’ll need to go to the “Settings” app, click on “iTunes and App Store”, select your Apple ID, and click on “View Apple ID”. In both cases, you will be presented with a list of your active subscriptions; just locate Blinkist Premium among them and click on “Cancel”.

In case of any difficulties with the paid plan it is highly recommended to approach Blinkist’s support team – they’re quick to reply and always friendly.

Now that that’s settled, let’s head over to the next stage of our review, where we bring together all the pros and cons of Blinkist in order to make a more informed final decision –

Pros and Cons

In this section we will summarize the advantages of using Blinkist as well as point out certain areas for improvement:

  • Access to condensed summaries of the best non-fiction books gives the opportunity to absorb maximum knowledge and wisdom, flexibly and quickly.
  • Blinks are subdivided into logical sections and feature short summaries (“a blink of a blink”) for maximum comprehension.
  • Web interface as well as mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices. Possibility to sync the personal blink library into a Kindle.
  • Less expensive than any existing competing service of book abstracts, given the library size and available features.
  • Useful for pre-selecting the books for reading in full as well as acquainting yourself with new ideas, concepts, and facts. Can be synced with an Evernote account.
  • Possibility to send feedback on existing blinks regarding both style/grammar as well as content.
  • The audio version of the content allows for distraction-free absorption of the abstracts while reducing eye strain.
  • The highlighting feature enables storing specific snippets and retrieving the most important parts of the blinks later on.
  • Possibility to store text and audio versions of blinks in local memory and reading/listening to them later on, regardless of Internet availability.
  • Clean and modern design of both the web and mobile versions of the app; the interface is easy to learn and intuitive to use.
  • While using the mobile app, the library might sometimes need to be refreshed manually (by holding and pulling down on the screen) to stay current with the blinks added from the web interface.
  • Audio can freeze on rare occasions when transitioning from one part of a blink to the next, observed during poor connectivity of the host device.
  • It is not yet possible to recommend the blinks you read to other people who use Blinkist directly from within the app (need to share a link instead).

Blinkist for Teams

The company has recently unveiled a new offering, which is in practice an additional pricing plan: Blinkist for Teams. It works exactly as you’d expect – a bulk subscription option for 10+ people, each getting all the features of Blinkist Premium at a discount.

The latter depends on the number of user accounts you purchase and ranges from 32% ($549 for 10 people, or $54.9 per person per year) to 50% ($1999 for 50 people, or $39.99 per person per year). In order to obtain custom pricing for larger teams you will need to contact Blinkist directly.

A slider like this lets you choose the pricing for the team version of Blinkist.

Apart from the hefty discount, the main benefits of giving your entire team access to a library of condensed non-fiction bestsellers are better mutual understanding due to multi-disciplinary new knowledge and insights, as well as tighter bonding because of all the additional shared subjects to discuss and books to experience.

Notable Competitors: Better Than Blinkist?

As with any other web service, it would be odd if Blinkist was alone in its niche – indeed, you can read book summaries in other places as well, including specialized apps. Among the closest competitors, it is worth mentioning getAbstract and Instaread, with the former being the most comprehensive alternative as far as the feature set goes.

While Blinkist is not the only non-fiction book abstract service in existence, there are certain important features that help it differentiate from competing offers. Let’s dive into more detail and see how each of them stacks up against Blinkist:

Blinkist vs getAbstract

As Blinkist focuses primarily on personal and small-medium company use, getAbstract is geared towards corporate clients, offering a library of condensed non-fiction books (some of them highly technical), articles, video talks and economic reports.

The collection is much wider than that of Blinkist, offering 22,000+ titles for the Pro plan – which comes at a cost: with the yearly subscription your wallet will become $299 thinner per year.

There are also two separate offers for students, though, one of them offering 5,000 titles for free if you verify your identity; the Student Pro plan gives access to all 22,000+ summaries for a discounted $99 per year.

getAbstract boasts additional features such as multi-dimensional summary ratings and the possibility to structure your personal library with the help of tags, which will be quite relevant for power users.

The pricing speaks clearly in favour of Blinkist, yet those with the craving for the widest possible choice of titles and media channels will definitely find the getAbstract Pro plan an interesting investment into personal and professional growth.

Blinkist vs Instaread

As is frequently the case in a specific online services niche, there’s that one competitor with a mobile-first, Apple-centric offer. For book abstracts, it’s Instaread – an iPhone and iPad app with a 700-strong library of the most popular non-fiction book abstracts. Each is available in text and as an audio file, with the possibility to buy the full audiobook right within the app if you liked the shortened version.

One of the key distinctions with Blinkist is that Instaread also offers fiction book summaries, such as Orwell’s “1984” and Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” – which makes it a interesting alternative to consider for those who are looking to supplement their non-fiction cram-reading with some well-known works of literature.

The app offers a 7-day trial, after which you will need to choose one of the paid options – either a monthly billing plan for $8.99 per month, or the plan with a yearly billing cycle for $79.99 per year.

This is just 10% more expensive than the comparable Blinkist Premium plan, yet one should bear in mind that Blinkist is available on more platforms, including an Android app; moreover, Instaread’s library is considerably smaller, which means that it’s actually really possible to run out of titles in the entire category(ies) of your interest.

Blinkist vs Joosr

UPDATE Apr 2020: Joosr has recently declared that they will be closing down their business, so this section is for informational purposes only 🤷

Another notable competitor is UKs Joosr, a mobile-first microlearning service similarly offering summaries of non-fiction books. The library contains 250+ titles, which is about an order of magnitude less than Blinkist, available for reading from an Android/iOS app or browser account.

Joosr offers a free 15-day trial which allows reading 5 book abstracts of your choice. After the expiration of the demo period you will need to purchase one of the paid plans to continue using the service. Joosr Premium ($71.88 per year) allows full access to the library yet does not have audio abstracts.

The Prime subscription ($83.88 per year) adds the possibility to listen to audio versions of the summaries (5% more expensive than Blinkist Premium), while the Select plan, while more expensive on a per-year basis, allows monthly billing cycles ($7.99 per month).

Taking into account the smaller choice of books, the higher pricing, and the fact that Joosr’s reader as well as user interface overall feel significantly more dated, there seems to be little sense in choosing this particular service over Blinkist.

Blinkist vs 12min

One of the more recent competitors is 12min. This abstract service so closely resembles Blinkist that some would superficially call it an imitation, but on closer inspection it does have some important distinctions which make it a worthwhile alternative to consider.

Hailing from Brazil, 12min has been focusing on multilingual audience right from the start – despite being a relatively young service, they already offer summaries in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, with plans for many more languages in the near future. The library includes about 200 titles right now, which is not something to boast just jet (compare this with Blinkist’s 3000+ library), but the company is adding new summaries at a fast enough pace to call it a promising one.

There is a free 3-day trial period, after which you have two options: either to stay on the free plan indefinitely, which entitles you for one summary per week – or upgrade to the Premium plan for $69.30 per year. Considering the library size, this is quite a lot at this stage, but with a 30-day money-back guarantee you don’t risk much if you try out Premium.

Overall, 12min currently feels like a rather raw attempt at producing a book summary service, but it’s an interesting competitor to watch for the foreseeable future, especially for those of us who know or are learning other languages.

Blinkist vs Accel5

Accel5 is the new brand identity of Bizsum, a summary service focused specifically on business books, as its former name suggests. Apart from text and audio versions of popular book abstracts, Accel5 also provides access to a library of educational videos by prominent figures in the fields of management, finance, marketing, etc. – which is an interesting addition for those who are looking for a 360 degree learning experience.

There are both enterprise and personal plans, the latter costing $14.95 per month or $149 ($12.41/mo) with annual billing. While this is considerably higher than the price of Blinkist Premium, the additional video materials mentioned above, as well as a wider selection of languages (including Spanish, French, and even Chinese) might be appealing to business-focused readers, especially those who can obtain funding for their Accel5 subscription from their employer.

Blinkist vs SumizeIt

Speaking of more recent competition, here’s SumizeIt – a fresh book summary market entrant with a strategy that seems to focus on aggressive pricing: their Premium plan with unlimited access to the library costs just $4.99/month or $39.99/year, which is almost 2x cheaper than Blinkist.

The catch? SumizeIt has a much smaller library than Blinkist, just 150+ books in total (that’s smaller than a single category at Blinkist).

Those who just want to read a couple of specific summaries might find their monthly plan worth considering; a yearly subscription doesn’t really make much sense though, unless you’re willing to read every single item from their collection.

SumizeIt is available as an mobile app or a web interface; there’s also a free version which lets you access 3 book summaries at no cost. Each summary comes with a voice version, but the audo files are not subdivided into sections like on Blinkist, which makes it considerably less usable.

Blinkist vs Soundview

Soundview is another noteworthy competitor of Blinkist, having been offering executive education since 1978 and recently revamping their online presence with a newly designed website (Summary.com).

The service is available as a website, and a mobile app, allowing you to take Soundview with you anywhere you go.

The key difference compared to Blinkist is that the basic offer of Soundview consists of a monthly batch instead of full library access: the Standard plan subscribers ($99 per year) receive summaries of 3 most notable new books published during the month, in both textual and audio form.

Unlimited access to the full archive of summaries will set you back $199 (Professional plan), and the Premier plan ($299 per year) will also grant access to the video library, containing business tips and book summaries.

Another interesting addition to the list of Soundview features are live webinars with book authors and business influencers, conducted on a regular basis for all paying subscribers.

Overall, this is a more pricey alternative to Blinkist that is worth considering for those who are interested mainly in business literature and are focused on staying current on the fresh publications – unlimited library access at Soundview is just too expensive compared even with Blinkist’s $79.99 per year Premium offer.

In order to visualize the differences in the key parameters of Blinkist and its competitors, such as price points and the size of the library of summaries, we’ve compiled this table:

Cheapest plan Collection size
$79.99 5000+
$299.00 22000+
$89.99 700+
$69.30 200+
SumizeIt logo $39.99 150+
$99.99 2000+

The above data suggests that Blinkist not only offers more attractive pricing compared to its major competitors, but also looks good when we take into account the library size: its value for money becomes even higher when we include the interface and features into the picture.

Common Misconceptions About Blinkist

Now that we’ve examined the competitive landscape, it’s time to bust some myths! Below we’ve collected the most common misconceptions about Blinkist:

  • Myth #1: It’s hard to cancel a Blinkist subscription. We’ve seen some complaints from users about Blinkist automatically billing their cards at the start of new billing cycles (you can check out the comments section below for examples). While this is a completely logical behavior from a subscription service (by definition, in fact), we did investigate the cancellation process after that, and added a separate section to this guide. Check it out for more details!
  • Myth #2: Blinkist is spelled with a second “L”. This one is quite understandable, because the word “BlinkList” does arguably make more sense. It gets even more confusing after you find out that there in fact was a completely unrelated website with that exact name. That website hasn’t been updated since 2017 and so can now be considered defunct; this means neither “BlinkList” nor “BlinkEst” nor “Blikist” are the correct way to spell the name of the book summary service we are discussing in this review :)
  • Myth #3: Blinkist is a substitute to reading full books. A lot of criticism about Blinkist revolves around directly comparing blinks to books. It might be argued though that substituting normal reading was never the goal of Blinkist; in fact, it works even better when you combine it with full book reading. By the way, this is exactly what we’re going to discuss in the next section:

Using Blinkist Effectively

The most important thing to understand with respect to Blinkist is that it is by no means incompatible with reading full books: while it does help eliminate some reading of that type, as we’ll see below, the real power of Blinkist can be unlocked when actually combining it with reading full titles. Let’s look at some ways it can be done:

📚 Pre-selecting books: there are countless books out there, and only so much time in each day; this means you will have to be rather picky with what you read if you want to maximize your reading value.

Here’s where Blinkist comes in handy – by going through the blinks you can filter out some of the books that aren’t going to be worth your while for various reasons (e.g. too few new ideas, weak arguments, irrelevant or simply uninteresting to you).

This can help save massive amounts of money (and time) by helping you pay only for those books which are truly worth it. See the next section of this review for some figures to support this idea.

🔍 Pre-scanning books: before immersing yourself into a new book, it may often be worth scanning its content to have an overall idea of what the author is trying to say.

This strategy has been described in great detail in the 1940 classic by Mortimer J. Adler called “How to Read a Book”. The author argues that is makes sense to approach a new book in steps, going deeper with each iteration; the “pre-reading” phase, or inspectional reading, as Adler calls it, helps absorbing the basics of the book in the most time-efficient manner and deciding whether or not the book is worth a closer inspection.

By the way, this book is also available on Blinkist :)

💡 Recapping books: another situation where Blinkist can be helpful is reminding yourself the essence of a book you’ve already read a while ago. There are some titles which are so good it’s worth going back to them from time to time and re-incorporating their ideas into your worldview.

Otherwise, a certain book can prove more valuable to you as time goes by and outside conditions change – and re-reading a blink of it can help you quickly refresh your memory.

Let’s look at one particular example of how the Blinkist app can be combined with reading full books:

  1. First, compile a long list of title that might be interesting for you to read – for example from one of those “what famous people read” articles and/or from personal recommendations you’ve received lately (it helps to have a dedicated note for that in your favourite note-taking app like Evernote, Google Keep or Dropbox Paper).
  2. When your list becomes at least several dozen items long, add the respective blinks to your personal library on Blinkist and go through them in a methodical manner (e.g. 2-3 per week). In case a particular book is not available on Blinkist (this happens about even 10th book for me), you can search for a summary in one of the competing services we’ve listed above.
  3. Make notes in your list after reading each blink, detailing whether it got you interested in the book. When this is done, you’ll have a filterable list of “worth reading” titles which you can now go through in full, by e.g. buying them on Amazon or at your local physical bookstore.
  4. It is also worthwhile going through the book’s summary right before starting the full version as well as some time after finishing the book – this will help improve assimilation by reminding you of the author’s overarching ideas, free of minor details and side-stories.

For those of you who enjoy infographics, here’s a visual representation of the summary-aided reading process we discussed above.

Click on the image to view the full version in an overlay:

Infographic preview

The above routine can be repeated regularly as you go through your existing short-list and as new titles come out. The best part about it is that it strikes a balance between getting as much as possible from worthy books while still acquainting yourself reasonably well with all other titles – all while optimizing your time use and cash expenditures.

Is It Worth Paying for Blinkist?

This is one of the most frequent questions faced by the new users of the service; each has to answer it for themselves according to own preferences, yet here’s a way to put the cost of the Blinkist Premium subscription into perspective.

At $79.99 per year, the annual payment translates into $6.67 per month – which is roughly equivalent to 2-3 cups (depending on where you live) of takeaway coffee from your favourite coffeeshop chain; not a high price to pay for access to the repository of condensed knowledge of the human race.

Another way to consider Blinkist pricing is by looking from the perspective of its function of pre-selecting full books. The average price for the most popular Blinkist titles is approximately $11 on Amazon (Kindle e-book versions).

If we take into account the fact that book quality varies and not every single one feels like it was worth your time afterwards, you can expect to spend $20-$30 per worthy book on average. Blinkist can help reduce this cost several times over, at a fixed price of less than $8 per month, by helping pre-select which books to read in full.

To sum up, the annual billing cycle of the service masks the fact that Blinkist costs no more than three takeaway coffees per month, all the while also saving money by helping to pick full-size books more effectively.

Bonus: Exclusive Blinkist Discount, 35% Off Premium

We are proud to offer an awesome deal in cooperation with Blinkist: an exclusive link that allows saving $18 on the first year of a Blinkist Premium plan. It’s much easier to use than a coupon code and works regardless of whether you already have a free account or still need to create one.

In order to use the promo price, please take the following steps –

  1. Click the button below to visit the official Satori + Blinkist offer page (it will open in a new window automatically):

    Get 35% off first year at Blinkist ›

  2. The discount will automatically be subtracted from your purchase price. Enjoy the best repository of condensed human knowledge!

P.S. in case the link above does not work (although it should), there’s another way: you can try visiting this link – the Blinkist website will say that “the promo has expired” yet will give you a nice discount nevertheless :)

Our Verdict – and Over to You!

Overall, Blinkist is a well-thought-through service that inspires to read more and makes it easy to do so as well. Apart from value for money, its most prominent features include a large library, a clutter-free reading interface on multiple devices, and audio abstracts that help absorb new knowledge on the go.

Still having questions about Blinkist or not sure whether it’s worth it? Already using the service and want to share your experiences? Be sure to visit the comments section below, let’s discuss!

Affiliate Disclosure: we believe it is worth letting you know that some of the links in this article are affiliate links, which means we get a small from purchases made via those links. The good news is that it does not affect the amount you pay – so if you found our content helpful (or just used our promo code at the end of this post), we encourage to use our links for ordering the Blinkist Premium plan if you decide to do so :) Cheers!

26
Jun
2017

How to Choose a WordPress Theme for Your Website

If you’re running a WordPress blog or a company website, its design is largely determined by the theme you are using. In this article, we will discuss what a theme actually is, why you need it, and how to make the right choice that will make you a happy website owner.

What is a Theme?

Let’s start with the basics: a website template is a set of visual styles and page layouts that users can upload/install to their websites and customize up to their needs. A stand-alone template includes HTML and CSS3 files, and often some JavaScript; even though adding content is up to the template user, some bundles also include pre-made images, audio and video.

Website templates are usually created for a specific website engine, or CMS (content management system): a Joomla template won’t work for WordPress, and a template that is meant for Wix will is usually not portable to Drupal or Ghost. Summarizing the above, a WordPress theme is a web template made specifically for WordPress-powered websites.

If you’ve already tried looking for a WP theme, you’ve surely noticed that scarcity is definitely not a problem: rather, one can quickly get overwhelmed by the sheer variety of hundreds and thousands of template options all over the web. To help you choose, we’ve compiled a list of the most important factors to consider; before we get to that, however, let’s quickly answer the question:

Why Do You Need a Theme?

To understand the implications of using a website template, let’s look at the alternatives. First of all, you may hire a freelancer (or an agency) and order a custom website design – this is a suitable option if have several thousand dollars to spare, as high-quality, personalized web design is not a cheap product these days. Moreover, you will need to choose a knowledgeable developer to implement the design, or you’ll end up with a product of poor quality that might be ridden with bugs and security glitches.

If you don’t feel like paying that much for your website, you may think of creating your website yourself. This is a viable option if you already know the basics of web design and development, yet if you’re new to both of these fields AND you need a website now, this option may be ruled out with easy heart.

The third way to launch your website is by using a content management system (CMS) and a template. As you might have probably guessed, this option combines the speed of the first approach with the low cost of the second option:

  • Using a website template is a good solution for small businesses, even if you’re on a budget. The template’s average price is $40 – $80, which is way less than for a custom design from an agency.
  • Website templates help you save massive amounts of time as you don’t have to start from scratch with your designs. Templates not only come with pre-made layouts and styles, but also frequently with sample data that contains diverse content, pre-made for you by template developers. Using sample data, you can simply change the text and images to the ones you need.
  • With many templates, you save on acquiring paid plugins as authors tend to equip their themes with premium plugins, such as sliders or content builders, at no additional cost.
  • High-quality website templates are usually well-documented and many of them come with customer support so help you solve any configuration issues.
  • You can easily check which theme an established website is using with the help of our WordPress detector.

Things to Take into Account When Choosing a WP Theme

To fully reap the advantages listed above, it is worth while keeping certain things in mind while choosing the right WordPress template for your future website:

  1. Who is behind the theme? To end up with a high-quality template that is built with valid, well-structured code, you are better off searching for it on the websites of the leading template providers, such as ThemeForest, TemplateMonster, or Elegant Themes. By doing so, you can be sure that you’ll get a product free of security vulnerabilities, glitches and bugs. Moreover, due to the severe competition, well-established template providers are motivated to deliver designs that follow the latest trends and bring you the most powerful features.
  2. Does the theme look modern? If you want your website to be taken seriously, you’ll need a theme that looks current and professionally designed. Some of the most prominent features of modern web design include clean, clear lines, plenty of white space, bold, easily readable typography, absence of obtrusive, noisy or too detail-rich elements. It is also a given nowadays that a website looks good on all types of screens, from large HD monitors to the smallest smartphones – so be sure to check out how the theme looks and behaves on various devices.
  3. Does the visual style match your needs? Your website’s design and content should go hand in hand – depending on what you’re offering and who your target audience is, you might want to adjust your requirements. For examples, if the site is meant to showcase your creative works, a more minimalist and bold theme with an emphasis on imagery could be suitable, while a more text-focused theme is a good fit with an information-heavy website, such as a blog or a news portal.
  4. Do you need a niche template? Keep your specific needs in mind when looking for a specialized theme – be it fashion, photography, car repair, sports, education, consulting or food industry, you’ll be able to find a number of options that offer niche-specific features and design elements.

    Niche templates include features that provide for specific needs of your visitors and clients. For example, you’ll find an extended real estate search plugin in a real estate template, an appointment booking plugin in a healthcare or beauty salon template, a timetable plugin in education or sports template, etc.

  5. Does it load fast? Load speed is one of the most important visitor retention factors for any web page – so make sure the theme you’ve chosen does not take too long to fully render a page. Among the factors that most commonly influence website speed are the scripts, stylesheets, and other files loaded by the theme and bundled plugins. You can check a theme’s demo page in Pingdom’s Speed Test or using the GTMetrix engine to make sure everything is running smoothly.

    It’s an additional bonus if your chosen template comes with an animated pre-loader which clearly indicates to your guests that the page is in the process of being loaded. Be mindful, however, that it’s not a substitute for lean, optimized code, as Google and other search engines will still prefer pages which load faster.

  6. Does it include a content builder? Most theme users prefer creating pages using content builders nowadays; a content builder is a visual system that offers pre-designed elements as drag-and-drop blocks for your content. Such a tool helps you add varied content (such as tabs, dividers, counters, progress bars, timelines, blurbs, diagrams, tables, etc.), as well as create and reuse entire custom layouts.

    It’s not a big deal if your chosen theme doesn’t include a page builder out of the box, though – you can always purchase and install one by your own, e.g. the Visual Composer, one of the most popular plugins from the CodeCanyon marketplace.

  7. Is it search engine optimized? Look for a template that is built in accordance with recommendations of major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. You use free tools such as the SEO Site Checkup to perform an SEO audit of the chosen theme’s demo website or other existing pages that use the theme.

    Despite the fact that there are numerous specialized (free) SEO plugins for WordPress out there, it’s always a plus if a theme allows at least defining meta titles and descriptions for individual pages, as this alone might even be enough to avoid using yet another third-party plugin that would potentially slow down your website.

  8. Is it compatible with major plugins? It’s also worth checking whether a template is compatible with popular WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, BuddyPress, bbPress, etc. Most good themes will offer pre-built features and styling for the most widely used plugins, while the best theme authors will also offer their help in ensuring that a given less popular plugin also plays nicely with the theme.

Premium or Free?

The web is a pretty competitive and largely frictionless market – which means that in most cases, you truly get what you pay for; even if what you paid was zero dollars. Having said that, it would be unjust to claim that only premium WP themes are worth your while: there are numerous free templates that offer most (if not all) of the important features of paid ones (you can check out our free Bento theme for example).

With the free themes getting more and more advanced, it can be argued that the real value of premium templates stems from three thigs these days: pre-built layouts, more detailed documentation, and faster, dedicated support. The former saves you massive amounts of time by allowing to start from entire websites pre-designed on top of a specific theme and just fill them with your content; the latter will come handy if you’re on a tight schedule.

Overall, it all boils down to your personal requirements: in case you’re okay with getting into the nuts and bolts of it, and do not have significant time constraints, a free theme might be a good fit; if, though, you value top quality visuals, abundance of options and quick support, going for a paid theme might be a sensible idea.

Over to You!

Have questions about any of the above tips? Still can’t choose between two or more WP themes after reading this? Drop us a line in the comments section below, we’ll be happy to help!

29
May
2017

Avada vs Enfold: Choosing the Right WordPress Theme for Your Project

With all the available options, choosing the right WordPress template can be a daunting task. For example, most top themes available on ThemeForest are so powerful and well-built that they almost look identical from the first glance. And if you’re considering Avada and Enfold as your final candidates, the choice only gets harder as both themes are TF top-sellers with massive feature sets and fantastic design. So how do we choose just one? Let’s break down the primary aspects of theme quality and find out which template is right for whom:

Close-up Comparison

There are several things to consider when buying a WordPress theme, and design plus features are by far not the only components of the mix: one should also be mindful of such aspects as search engine optimization, theme speed, item rating and reviews, and support quality. For your convenience, we’ve summarized the important factors in a table; below we will discuss them in more detail.

Avada Enfold
Year created 2012 2013
Content Builder Fusion (custom) Avia (custom)
Builder elements 55 47
One-click demos 27 27
ThemeForest sales 300,000+ 100,000+
Average rating 4.77 4.84
Price $60 $60

Both Avada and Enfold have a long history on ThemeForest, having been around for more than 5 years. Avada was the theme that probably had the most influence on the ongoing all-round, multipurpose WP theme revolution, and Enfold followed suit shortly after. The idea was to create a truly versatile and flexible theme which would allow users to build their own layouts; this implied integrating a content builder of some sort, and most themes went for the Visual Content Builder by WPBakery at first. The idea was a huge success, and nowadays you won’t find a self-respecting premium WP theme that does not use a content composer.

Avada, and later Enfold, when their own way, creating custom content builders which are fully integrated into the theme core – this meant smoother updates and zero compatibility troubles. These custom composers contain dozens of pre-made functional elements such as widgets, sliders, buttons, etc, enabling each user to build beautiful custom pages from scratch, with being confined to pre-set layouts. At the moment Avada offers 55 composer blocks, and Enfold is slightly behind with 47, yet both are continuously adding new ones to their arsenals, and the tally might change in the future.

Time flows fast in the world of web design, so over the years both themes had to keep modernizing to keep pace with the latest visual trends. Most experts would agree that Enfold has managed this path slightly better than its competitor, being more minimalist from the start. While the initial theme demos have stayed mostly intact since their creation, theme authors responded to the new design challenges, most notably the flat design movement, by creating numerous new demos based on specific user needs; whether it’s a coincidence or not, both Avada and Enfold currently offer 27 demos, and each can be easily installed with a single click as a ready-made website to tinker with and work from.

When it comes to popularity, Avada is clearly the winner, with over 300 thousand purchases on ThemeForest, Enfold having three times less. However, this can be a double-edged sword, since a huge user base can generate a wide variety of websites, so new users building a website on even a theme as versatile as Avada can have difficulties staying unique. This is mitigated by the wide variety of settings, options, layouts, and content blocks each theme offers, but should not be forgotten when choosing the right one for your website.

Support is top-notch for both themes, with entire teams of dedicated experts always ready to answer user questions. Both Enfold and Avada have extensive manuals and video tutorials, with slightly differing approaches to pre-purchase information. Avada chose to make its knowledgebase public, letting anyone to browser through its features before buying, while Enfold’s manual is contained within the downloadable theme package. However, Avada does not let non-buyers ask questions on its support forums (in fact, their forums can only be viewed by those who have the purchase code), while Enfold has a separate section on its open forums for pre-purchase questions.

Enfold has a slightly higher average rating among the two themes, standing at 4.84 as opposed to Avada’s 4.77. This might seem like an insignificant difference, but given tens of thousands reviews, even decimals can translate into large numbers of extra negative or positive opinions.

It’s easy to see that none of the themes has a clear upper hand and can be called the ultimate winner. However, there are cases in which one might be preferable over the other, and we’ll go over them in the next sections of our article.

Who Should Use Avada?

Avada is perfect for those who have little or no experience with WordPress, or need to set up a website as quickly as possible. Their extensive online tutorials and walkthroughs include countless useful articles, from general WP-related questions to specific Avada-related aspects: you might not even need to use the support ticket system at all! It is also worth keeping in mind that, as the top-selling ThemeForest item, Avada has the highest motivation to stay on top of its game by constantly improving, which is clearly evident from the frequency with which the authors publish new updates.

Who Should Use Enfold?

Enfold is a great theme for picky users who aim for absolute quality and support excellence. With this theme, websites stand slightly more chances of looking unique. Despite its 100,000+ sales, Enfold can still be called an underdog when compared to the behemoth Avada, and this gives Enfold’s authors additional motivation to keep striving for the top position.

Have you got hands-on experience with any of the themes? Still looking for the right one? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

26
May
2017

7 Amazing Examples of Salient WordPress Theme Based Websites in 2024

Salient is one of the top-10 ThemeForest best-selling themes of all time, created by an elite author ThemeNectar. First available in April 2013, the theme was a breakthrough in terms of design, giving rise to a plethora of later imitators. Salient has since accumulated 60,000+ happy users and evolved into a full-fledged website building environment, preserving and updating its distinct visual style.

We remember our team’s initial reaction on seeing Salient for the first time: “whoa! Now these guys sure know how to design!”. Cracking it open, we saw clean, rather efficient code, adding to our respect towards the theme’s creators. Salient is distinctly minimalist, but not excessively so; this allows using it to create crisp and clean websites which still retain their individual touch.

Take Salient for a spin ›

The Salient theme is choke-full of features and settings, the most prominent additions of the last years being the internal templating system, which complements the existing drag-and-drop content builder (already a standard in premium WP themes) by allowing to use entire pre-designed page blocks or even entire layouts easily and quickly.

The ThemeNectar team is doing a great job in terms of providing timely and friendly support for the item. During our review we’ve created several “test tickets”, ranging from newbie questions to customization to developer-level inquiries; each was answered within 2 working days (most of them much faster), and none of the underlying issues was left unsolved.

Let’s See What This Baby Can Do

We won’t overwhelm you with dozens of Salient-based websites – instead, let’s look at 7 noteworthy real-life examples of the theme in action, hand-picked by our design and development team:

1. Senz

The creators of the original storm umbrella with the easily recognizable tilt, Senz use Salient for their official website. It makes extensive use of the theme’s WooCommerce compatibility to render and manage a complex online shop.

The front page slider is worth a separate mention: it features both beautiful static-image backgrounds as well as animated backgrounds and built-in animations for text elements to make it more dynamic. The front page itself is organized into several blocks using the theme’s visual content builder, ranging from product grids to full-width call-to-action sections, making it anything but boring.

2. Design Garden

This gorgeously-designed website is a learning platform created by Sabina Radeva, an Oxford, UK, based designer and illustrator. Sabina uses the Easy Digital Downloads plugin ecosystem to offer online courses to her Design Garden visitors, which blends in well with Salient.

The entire website is sprinkled with Sabina’s lovely illustrations; the theme does not stand in the way, letting the author express her talents while providing that minimalist touch to everything from navigation to the blog feed.

3. Manifesto

Let’s head to Canada and check out Manifesto Festival’s homepage for a change. This annual hip-hop culture event has been brightening Toronto’s youth scene for over a decade, and its unique essence has been successfully captured by the website’s style. Using basic colors (red, black, white), contrasting elements, bold typography and large elements, the page conveys the feeling of authenticity and freedom of expression.

The front page makes use of full-width image grids as well as clever call to action button placement to simultaneously maximize its “wow!” effect and visitor conversions. The previous years’ Manifesto editions are also worth checking out from the top menu, all those pages are also built with Salient’s visual composer.

4. Lion’s Share Digital

The Austin, TX based web design and development agency’s ambitions are reflected in their telling name. The Lion’s Share website is there to express their drive for growth and service excellency. Salient readily offers the necessary elements: large, basic fonts; colourful, full-width sections, plenty of room for imagery.

This is a great example of Salient’s full-screen header in action: on entering the website, we are immersed into an epic video presenting the brand. The rest of the page is comprised of visual composer elements tailored to give it a dynamic and colourful vibe.

5. StorNext

If you’re starting to get an impression that Salient is only good for design-focused web pages, think again. Here’s StorNext, a specialized provider of highly distributed file storage system solutions. A good example of a no-nonsense website by IT specialists, for IT specialists:

Content is king here, and Salient successfully helps the right things stand out. The website integrates a plethora of plugins, including a client-facing live chat, which works flawlessly with the theme. Another interesting thing to mention here: the StorNext website has been specifically tailored to closely resemble its parent company’s page, quantum.com – showing how easily Salient morphs and flexes to fit any design requirements.

6. Mota

Another high-tech company on our list, Mota is a hardware maker: they produce a range of cool gadgets, focusing on drones and wearables. In this case, Salient needed to support a website with a large and complicated structure, which it handles pretty well with the built-in MegaMenus.

The theme’s visual style fits perfectly with the company’s image: a future-facing manufacturer of highly advanced electronic devices. The individual product pages deserve a special mention: there’s an example of Salient’s custom visual content builder in its full glory; parallaxed images, subtle animations, specs and FAQ sections – all come together to create professional-looking and functional product presentations.

7. Gravual

Last but not least, one of our personal favourites, Gravual, is a tiny design boutique based in Antwerp, Belgium. The entire thing breathes minimalism and style, and scales extra-neatly on smartphone screens thanks to Salient’s smart grids.

This one’s a good example of Salient’s single-page capabilities: the entire website is essentially presented on the front page, with separate sections branching off where and when needed. The site’s also available in Dutch, showcasing the theme’s multilingual functions.

Your Examples?

Building a website on Salient or know any other noteworthy examples? Drop a line in the comment section below, we’ll consider including it in the list!

26
May
2017

TemplateToaster Review – Better Than a Theme?

Any website owner faces the need to create a visual front-end for their page at some point – without its own distinct style and well-thought-through layout, a website would be virtually unusable and look unprofessional. There is a wide range of options when it comes to this process, here are some of the most popular ones:

  • Buying a ready-made theme (if you’re using a content management system like WordPress, Joomla or Magento)
  • Writing a theme yourself (requires being able to code in php, css, html and other languages)
  • Create a theme using a visual theme builder

While the first option provides ample customization opportunities if you choose the right theme that is flexible enough, you are still at the theme author’s mercy with respect to providing all necessary elements and layouts to suit your specific needs; moreover, you will need to learn how to use the theme in any case, and it will only be available for a specific content engine, so migrating later would not be possible.

Developing your own theme gives you all the control you can think of, yet requires considerably more time and effort, as well as specialized knowledge in web programming (not even mentioning the fact that in terms of code you will most probably be re-creating what others have already done thousands of times before you).

This is where the third option comes in, in the form of TemplateToaster: using this tool you can create your very own website template in a powerful yet easy to use drag-and-drop style editor, generate a template package and install it on your website. The end product is automatically mobile-friendly (responsive) and compatible with all existing web browsers. TemplateToaster is a downloadable Windows application which allows you to work offline on your local machine.

The TemplateToaster Advantage

The suite offers a plethora of editor tools for building various types of pages and any imaginable layout and visual style. Apart from text and images, there’s an extensive widget library to choose from: sliders, social media, videos, etc. In your designs, you can start from a blank canvas or modify any of the pre-built layouts included in the sample library. All standard website features such as navigation menus are also available inside the builder.

One of the most interesting and unusual capabilities of TemplateToaster is its wide CMS compatibility: using TT, you can save your designs to be installable on any of the following content management systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger, Magento, and PrestaShop. You can also save your files as plain HTML/CSS, removing the CMS dependency altogether.

Trial and Pricing

TemplateToaster is available to download for free on their official website; the installer is quite large (144 Mb), yet with a decent cable/optical connection it shouldn’t take too long to finish. The trial version allows creating any number of themes and has no time limitations (which is refreshing, given today’s standards of two-four week test periods on most applications).

In order to be able to generate the installable template packages, you will need to upgrade to a paid version, which comes in two flavours: the Standard edition ($49) and the Professional edition, worth ($149). While the prices are above the average level you’d pay for a popular online site builder like Weebly, it is worth noting that the above figures are one-time payments, i.e. you won’t have to incur monthly payments unlike with the former. In this respect, even the Professional edition of TemplateToaster will pay for itself in about a year, still leaving you with the software you originally purchased, yours to use for unlimited time.

The most notable differences between the two editions, i.e. the extra features you get in the Professional edition, are as follows:

  • Possibility to start from scratch instead of editing an existing template
  • Custom positioning for modules and widgets
  • Custom page templates
  • Possibility to use custom images in templates
  • Your own logo with a hyperlink

Since most of the above are quite useful capabilities or are usually considered to be standard parts of any self-respecting website, it’s difficult to imagine many use cases for the Standard TemplateToaster edition – unless you want to test your website first and then upgrade to Professional and finish the work.

Is It Worth Using?

TemplateToaster is a neat hybrid of a CMS template and a website builder – it allows creating unlimited themes to work with most popular content management systems, at the same time offering the power and flexibility of a drag-and-drop interface which completely removes the necessity of editing any code. Cross-platform compatibility gives it an advantage over traditional CMS themes, while fixed pricing makes it a more sensible choice than a site builder with recurring billing.

The reviewed software is suitable for individual website owners of any experience level and especially for freelance web designers who make CMS templates for their clients regularly – for the former, the suite will allow building the website you need, quickly, for the latter – greatly simplify and streamline your client work.

Using TemplateToaster and would like to provide a review? Still have unanswered questions about the product? Let us know in the comments below:

23
Mar
2016

Bento Theme Manual

About the Theme

Bento is a free multi-purpose WordPress theme packed with features and possibilities. With a variety of templates and settings, it can be used to create anything from personal blogs or landing pages to complex showcases and online shops. Bento is a result of years of theme-building expertise accumulated here at Satori Studio, making it a stable and reliable, yet at the same time remarkably flexible theme. With over 80 theme options as well as dozens of settings for individual pages and posts, Bento offers unprecedented customization possibilities for both beginners and experienced WordPress users.

Bento is responsive, retina-ready, and translation-compatible. The theme is also bundled with the Content Builder plugin by SiteOrigin, which offers an easy drag-and-drop interface for creating both simple and complex pages, with a choice from dozens of building blocks such as text, images, sliders, carousels, buttons, widgets, and many more.

Thank you for choosing Bento! We hope you will enjoy using it as much as we have enjoyed building it.

Version: 2.2 (changelog)
Theme demo: satoristudio.net/bento
Free download: wordpress.org/themes/bento

Support and Feature Requests

You can ask us a question or report a bug on the official support forum. We generally aim to respond to all requests and messages within 5 business days, yet would appreciate your patience taking into account the fact that the theme is a free and open-source item.

Moreover, if you have suggestions or ideas on how Bento or our support could become better, please do not hesitate to get in touch – we appreciate your feedback!

Installation

Please follow these steps to install Bento:

  1. In the admin area of your WordPress website, visit the Appearance -> Themes admin menu section.
  2. Click on the “Add New” button on top of the page.
  3. Input “bento” into the search form on the right hand side of the page.
  4. When results appear, locate the “Bento” theme and place the cursor over it.
  5. Several controls will appear; click on the blue “Install” button in the bottom right corner.
  6. Wait for the theme to upload and install; after the process completes, click “Activate” on the next screen.
  7. After a successful installation of the theme you will be prompted to install the bundled Content Builder plugins – please see the respective section of the current manual for more information.

Alternatively, you can install Bento manually:

  1. Download the theme archive from the official theme page.
  2. In the admin area of your WordPress website, visit the Appearance -> Themes admin menu section.
  3. Click on the “Add New” button on top of the page.
  4. On the next screen, click on the “Upload Theme” button on top of the page.
  5. Click on the “Choose File” button that appears.
  6. In the pop-up window, navigate to the archive you’ve downloaded on step 1. and press “Open”.
  7. Click on the “Install Now” button to the right, which has now become active.
  8. Wait for the theme to upload and install; after the process completes, click “Activate” on the next screen.
  9. After a successful installation of the theme you will be prompted to install the bundled Content Builder plugins – please see the respective section of the current manual for more information.

That’s it, you’re all set!

Updating Bento

You can update the theme from the Apperance -> Themes section of your website’s admin panel: when an update is available, you will see a “New version available” ribbon on top of the Bento theme box; click on the “Update now” link in the ribbon – everything else will be handled automatically.

Alternatively, you can update the theme manually:

You can always download the latest version of Bento from the official repository. After obtaining the “bento.zip” archive, unzip it and upload the resulting “bento” folder into the following folder inside your WordPress installation: /wp-content/themes/ using an FTP client or your hosting provider’s file manager. Agree to replace all existing files if prompted. Updating the theme will not erase any theme settings, pages, posts or other content.

Theme Options

Bento comes with a powerful set of options that allow full customization of the theme according to your wants and needs. All theme options can be set through the native WP Customizer interface in your admin area, by visiting the Appearance -> Customize section. After any modifications to the theme options please do not forget to click on the blue “Save & Publish” button in the top right corner of the customizer area.

The theme adds or affects 16 sections of the Customizer panel:

  1. Help & Expansion Pack – here you can find useful links as well as information on the Expansion Pack
  2. Site Identity – this section allows you to set the custom logo, favicon, and other site-wide branding.
  3. Site Elements – in this section you can set up various elements of the website such as displaying next posts in blog without reloading the page, fixing the header on top of the window when scrolling through the website, etc.
  4. Site Layout – here you can set the width of the content area, choose between a wide and a boxed layout for the website, as well as set up the backgrounds for the website and the content area.
  5. Site Colors – allows you to define the background color for the website (please note that for this to have effect, the “boxed” mode should be set in the “Site layout” section).
  6. Site Background Image – allows you to define the background image for the website (for this to have effect, the “boxed” mode should also be set in the “Site layout” section).
  7. Fonts and Typography – in this section you can input the fonts to be used for the headings, the menu, and the rest of the texts of your website. Just go to the Google Fonts repository, pick any fonts you like, and write their names into the respective fields. Note that all fonts used in this section can also be identical if you wish.
  8. Header Colors – this section allows you to choose the colors of each separate element in the header section of the website, including foremost the main menu.
  9. Content Colors – here you can change the colors of each element in the body of the website, i.e. the content and the sidebar areas.
  10. Footer Colors – the third styling section lets you choose the color of every element in the footer, the lowermost part of the website.
  11. Homepage Settings – apart from the standard options of choosing which page to display as the front of the website, Bento allows you to choose the header image and call-to-action elements for that page.
  12. Additional CSS – here you can add your own CSS code to the website, without the need to edit the style.css file. This code will stop having effect if you switch to another theme, but will be restored if you then switch back to Bento.
  13. SEO Settings – here you can define the meta information for search engines. Please note that this feature is only available with the Bento Expansion Pack.
  14. Analytics Code – allows you to add Google Analytics code to track your website’s traffic and other visitor data. Please note that this feature is only available with the Bento Expansion Pack.
  15. Call to Action Popup – the settings in this section enable you to activate and customize the call-to-action popup for converting your visitors. Please note that this feature is only available with the Bento Expansion Pack.
  16. Preloader – here you can activate and customize the loading animation for your website’s pages in order to improve user experience and only display fully rendered pages to your visitors. Please note that this feature is only available with the Bento Expansion Pack.

There are two menu locations in Bento: in the primary header area where the logo is situated (primary menu), as well as in the footer, below the footer widget area and next to the copyright statement. The primary menu can have sub-menus up to two levels deep (i.e. a sub-menu item can have its own sub-menu); the footer menu does not display submenus and is intended for a flat navigation section, such as terms and conditions, contact information, etc.

The menus are sourced from the native WordPress menu constructor, found in the Appearance -> Menus admin section. You can create and assign your own menus to each of the menu locations: first, create a new menu by clicking on the respective link just below the “Edit Menus” tab, entering a unique name in the “Menu Name” box, and clicking on the blue “Create Menu” button on the right; once you’ve created a menu, the checkboxes in the “Theme Locations” option under the “Menu Settings” section will provide an opportunity to assign the menu to one of the locations mentioned above (you can also change it later by visiting the “Manage Locations” tab on the same admin page).

To add new items to a menu, tick the respective page, post, or term in the panels on the left hand side of the menus admin page; you can rearrange added items by means of drag-and-drop, and create sub-menus by dragging an item under its intended parent item and then slightly more to the right, until it sticks.

Grids And Other Page Layouts

Bento comes with a flexible page layout system, consisting of three parts, each of which can be configured while in the editor mode for a particular page, post or product:

  1. Page templates, of which there are two: the default template (i.e. classical page) and the grid template, which, in turn comes in three varieties (see details below). Any page can be assigned any of the two templates by using the “Template” drop-down in the “Page Attributes” settings block on the right hand side of the page edit screen.
  2. Grid modes, of which there are three: masonry – a tightly packed layout using various tile sizes which fills all available gaps (demo); columns grid – a layout which uses “cards” with images and text and aligns them by columns (demo); and rows grid – a layout which organizes the blocks by rows, independently of their heights (demo). Grid modes can be switched using the “Grid mode” drop-down in the “Grid settings” box which appears at the bottom of the page when the “Grid” template has been chosen in the “Template” drop-down in the “Page Attributes” settings block on the right hand side of the page edit screen
  3. Sidebar configurations, which exist in three varieties: right-sidebar (default), left-sidebar, and full-width. Each of these can be mixed with any of the page templates or grid modes described above. To switch between sidebar configurations in Bento, use the “Sidebar layout” drop-down in the “General settings” box underneath the text area editor, in the edit mode of the particular page. Since Bento version 2.0 it is now also possible to set site-wide sidebar defaults, the respective option is located in the “Site Layout” tab of the Customizer panel

The pages with “grid” templates (see point 1 above) act as containers for displaying collections (grids) of individual items, which can be posts, products (in the presence of WooCommerce) and projects (in case you have the Bento Expansion Pack installed and activated). You can set which content types to display on a grid page by using the “Content Types” checklist found in the “Grid Settings” box which appears underneath the content area when switching to the “Grid” template in the page editor mode.

Since Bento version 2.0 grids are filterable by taxonomies (tags or categories) and can be ordered by date, title, or comment count, the respective settings can be found in the “Grid settings” box mentioned above.

It should also be noted that individual posts (Posts admin menu section), products (Products admin menu section) as well as projects (Portfolio admin menu section) have a separate settings box called “Masonry Tile Settings” which allows customizing the look of the particular item on a grid page with the “masonry” grid mode (see points 1 and 2 above for details).

The images for the tiles and grid items in other grid modes are sourced from the thumbnails (featured images) of the respective posts/projects/products. The overlay text of masonry items is generated from the titles, while the body text of the columns and rows grid mode tiles comes from the main content of the respective post or the post’s excerpt, if it is not empty.

Apart from that, you can add even more diversity to your pages by using the bundled Content Builder, which enables constructing column grids with 2-6 columns of various relative widths, as well as mini-grids and other layouts elements right inside the content area of any page or post.

One-Page Mode

Bento is capable of creating one-page websites, which implies having all information on the same page, with the navigation menu scrolling to the respective section of that page without the need to reload the page every time the visitor clicks a link. This layout has become quite popular in the recent years, especially for smaller websites with a simple structure which does not require multi-layered navigation. One-page mode can increase the impact of your website by keeping the visitors engaged.

It should be noted that using one-page mode in Bento implies the presence of the bundled Content Builder plugin (see installation details in the respective section of this manual). The following steps outline the process of creating a single-page website using Bento:

  1. Create a page (Pages -> Add New) using the Builder – while in the page edit mode, click on the “Page Builder” tab in the top right corner of the content area. This will be your canvas for the one-page layout.
  2. Use rows (the “Add Row” button in the top left corner of the content area) to organize the contens of the page into sections, corresponding to how you want your one-page layout to be structured.
  3. For each such row, hover over the small wrench/spanner icon in the top right corner, and click on “Edit row” in the hover-menu. In the pop-up window that opens, click on the “Attributes” section under the “Row Styles” on the right. Input an identifier for the row into the “Row Class” field; the identifier should consist of lowercase latters, underscored, and dashes – e.g. “contact-us”. Click on the blue “Done” button to save the changes.
  4. Save/update the page by clicking on the blue “Publish” (“Update”) button in the top right corner of the page editor view.
  5. Visit the Appearance -> Menus admin section and create a menu, if you haven’t yet done so (please see this chapter for more details on menus). In the accordeon on the left click on “Custom Links”, and into the URL field input the URL of your website’s home page, plus the “Row Class” identifier you’ve specified earlier, preceded by a hash, i.e. “http://yourwebsite.com/#contact-us”. The “Link Text” field should contain the name of the menu item as seen by the user. After filling out the fields click on the “Add to Menu” button below and then on the blue “Save Menu” button on the right in order to save the changes.
  6. Voila! The menu items you add in this fashion will link to specific sections of your page, and the window will scroll smoothly to the required location thanks to the theme’s built-in scripts.

Header Layouts

The theme offers four distinct header configurations to personalize the look and feel of your website, which can be set by using the “Menu Layout” drop-down in the “Site Layout” section of the Customizer panel:

  1. Top, right-aligned: this is the classic configuration with the header on top, the logo on the left and the menu on the right.
  2. Top, centered: the header is on top of the page, with both the logo and the menu centered (see demo).
  3. Top, hamburger button + overlay: the header is on top of the page, with the logo on the left and the menu represented by a hamburger icon on the right; clicking on the hamburger opens a full-page overlay with the menu (see demo). This option is most suitable for websites with flat navigation structure, since the overlay menu does not support submenus.
  4. Left side: the header is on the left side of the page, pushing the content area to the right. The logo and the menu are left-aligned inside the header (see demo).

Widget Areas

There are three widget areas in Bento: the Sidebar, which is situated on the right or left side of the content (see the Page Layouts section for more details on content alignment); the Footer, which is situated below the content and above the copyright area; and the WooCommerce sidebar, which is identical to the first widget area in its position but is displayed only on WooCommerce-related pages, such as the shop, individual product pages, checkout, etc.

By default all widget areas are empty, you can add widgets to them by visiting the Appearance -> Widgets admin menu section – simply drag the needed widget from the left side of the view and drop it onto one of the widget areas on the right. It must be noted that when a widget area is empty, it will not display on the front-end – in other words, if there are no widgets in the Sidebar widget area, all pages and posts with sidebar layouts will still appear as full-width (same logic is applied to other widget areas); this is done automatically to avoid unnecessary swathes of empty space on the website.

Color Customization

You can change the color of any group of elements in Bento using the visual colorpickers in the Customizer panel; the respective tabs are “Header Colors”, “Content Colors”, and “Footer Colors”. To change a color setting, click on the rectangle to the right of the “Select Colour”, which will open a hover control; there are three ways of interacting with the control: by clicking into any part of the square gradient area, by using the colored squares on the bottom (which will change the hue of the gradient area), and by using the draggable caret on the right, which will change the level of saturation. Apart from using the hover control, you can simply input the color in the hex notation into the field which appears next to the colorpicker once you click on it. To clear the value of the colorpicker, use the “Clear” button on the right of the active hover control. Do not forget to click on the blue “Save & Publish” button on top of each section to preserve your colors!

Visual Content Builder

Bento comes bundled with a powerful free content builder by SiteOrigin which allows easily creating awesome professional layouts from a set of “building blocks”, including text, images, buttons, grids, widgets, and many more. Its use is not required for Bento to work, yet your webmaster experience will be much more pleasant with the content builder installed. Upon activating the Bento theme you will see a prompt on top of each admin page recommending to install the Content Builder, which is as easy as clicking the link in the prompt. It is also recommended to install the second offered bundled plugin, the Extra Elements package, which will enhance your Content Builder with cool additional blocks such as galleries, sliders, post grids, etc. Alternatively, you can also install both plugins manually from the Plugins -> Add New admin section. After having installed both plugins you will need to activate them by clicking on the “Activate” link underneath the title of the respective plugin. You can also install the bundled plugins by visiting the Appearance -> Install Required Plugins admin menu section.

After activating both plugins it is advisable to visit the Plugins -> SiteOrigin Widgets and click the “Activate” button on every available widget since some of them might be disabled by default. Moreover, it is recommended to visit the Settings -> Page Builder admin section and tick the checkboxes of the content types you wish to use the Builder with, in the “Post Types” option inside the “General” tab.

Please note that due to the way the theme generates grid pages, the Post Loop element of the Content Builder will not create a grid if you choose the “content-grid.php” in the “Template” drop-down. If you need a post grid, you’re better off using either the theme’s built in template or the “Simple Masonry” widget supplied by the SiteOrigin Builder.

For a detailed guide on using the Content Builder, including high-quality tutorial videos, as well as widget-related support, please refer to the official manual.

Post Formats

There are six post formats in Bento, which can be switched between using the “Format” settings box on the right side of the post editor mode view:

  1. Standard – the default format, used for displaying the text, images, and other content in a normal way.
  2. Aside – intended for shorter remarks, thoughts, announcements, etc. This format does not display a title.
  3. Gallery – used for gallery-type posts, such as photo collages.
  4. Quote – pre-formatted for displaying quotes; the content of the post becomes the text of the quote, and the title of the post is used as the author of the quote. It is recommended to use plain-text mode for quote-format posts instead of the Content Builder mode.
  5. Link – useful for recommending specific links; the title of the post is used as the text (anchor) of the link, while the URL of the first link within the content of the post will be used as the link destination.
  6. Image – intended for displaying single images.

Advanced Page Headers

Pages, posts and other content types in Bento can display full-width headers with text and button overlays like seen on the theme demo homepage or this page. To enable this feature, tick the “Activate Extended Header” checkbox in the “Page Header Settings” section underneath the content area in page editor mode. Doing so will expand a set of additional options which such as defining the height of the header by setting the padding above and below the title, customizing the coloured semi-transparent overlay to increase readability of the title, as well as adding primary and secondary action buttons to the header. The header image itself is sourced from the post/page featured image, which can be added via the native Featured Image box on the right side of the page edit mode view.

In addition to the page/post title, it is also possible to add subtitles in Bento, which are sourced from the excerpt of the respective page. In case you do not see the “Excerpt” field while in the edit mode, please click on the “Screen Options” tab in the top right corner of the screen in edit mode and tick the respective checkbox.

The front page’s header image and call to action buttons can be added via the “Homepage settings” section of the Customizer. Since Bento version 2.0, it is also possible to assign a separate header image to the blog posts page – the controls can be found in the same section of the Customizer.

Please note that due to particularities of the WordPress templating system extended headers do not currently affect the WooCommerce shop page, as well as other archive pages, such as category, tab, or custom taxonomy archives.

Vector Icons

Bento comes with 500+ vector icons from FontAwesome, which you can use on any page or post by inserting a simple piece of markup: an <i></i> tag with a class which specifies which icon to use. For detailed usage instructions please refer to the official FontAwesome guide.

Translating Bento

The theme uses proper WordPress functions to wrap all localizable strings, which means it can be both manually translated and used with third-party translation plugins such as the free Polylang or the paid WPML. The files needed for a manual translation are located in the “languages” folder inside Bento’s main directory; for detailed instructions on translating themes manually please see this guide. In case a plugin requires inputting the theme’s text domain, please use “bento”.

WooCommerce + Bento

The theme is fully compatible with the world’s most popular free e-commerce WordPress plugin, WooCommerce. The plugin is free software and is not included within the theme, i.e. it must be installed separately to activate Bento’s WooCommerce features. No additional steps are required from the theme’s side after the installation of WooCommerce – however, you can adjust certain additional parameters in the “Website Elements” tab of the Customizer panel For a demonstration of how Bento works with WooCommerce, please see the “E-commerce” section of the official theme demo.

The grid page template in Bento works just as well with WooCommerce products – you can tick the “product” option in the “Content Types” setting found in the “Grid Settings” box which appears underneath the content area when switching to the “Grid” template in the page editor mode in order to create project grids or even mixed post+project grids. The “Masonry Tile Settings” box also works for individual products (enter the editor mode for the product and scroll to the bottom of the view) for customizing how a particular item will look as a tile in a masonry grid.

Please note that the extended header feature does not currently affect the default WooCommerce shop page due to the limitations of the WP templating system. In case you need a shop with a header image, you can create a new static page, set it to Grid template, and choose “products” as the source of grid items in the “Grid Settings” box underneath the main content edit area. DO NOT set this new page as the WooCommerce shop page, since doing so will prevent the header image from being displayed.

Importing Demo Content

There is a sample data file available for Bento which includes all data from the official theme demo, it can be downloaded here (please right-click on the link and choose “Save As” in the popup dialogue). In WordPress, you can import data by going to Tools -> Import, clicking on the WordPress installer and installing it in the pop-up window, then clicking “Activate Plugin & Run Importer”, and choosing the xml content file to upload. After you press “Upload file and import”, do not forget to check the “Download and import file attachments” box (you can also set the author for the imported posts in the same screen, but that is not mandatory), then press “Submit”. In case you do not have the WooCommerce plugin installed, the “product” and “product tag” items will return errors when imported – you can ignore the error messages in this case. In case you install WooCommerce after importing demo content, the demo products will not be visible and will need to be imported anew – you can use this separate source file to do it. Moreover, in case you install the Bento Expansion Pack after importing demo content, the demo projects for the portfolio will not be visible and will need to be imported anew – you can use this separate source file to do it.

Please note that the sample data does not contain any settings in the “Settings” admin section or any Customizer panel settings; you will also need to assign the menus to their respective locations – make sure that the theme location checkbox is checked in the “Menu Settings” section right under the menu constructor in the Appearance -> Menus admin section.

Child Themes

It is highly recommended to use a child theme for any modifications to Bento code – this way your changes won’t get overridden when a theme update occurs. A minimal sample setup for a child theme can be downloaded here; more information on using child themes can be found in this part of the official WordPress knowledgebase.

Frequently Asked Questions

The website went blank after updating the theme to a newer version; what gives?
Please completely remove the existing version of the Expansion Pack plugin and install it anew using this source; after that, refresh you web page – in case the issue is not fixed at that point, please let me know and I will investigate further.

I have uploaded the theme manually but upon pressing “activate” the system returns a white screen and the website stops working. What the hell is wrong?!
Don’t panic :) It is most probably due to your hosting server running out of php memory, breaking the website when you tried to install an additional item. What needs to be done is to add the following line to wp-config.php file in the root folder of the WordPress website: 

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '2048M');

If this does not work, try doubling the figure in the brackets; if still broken, please contact us.

I have uploaded the theme manually and it shows the message “Are you sure you want to do this? Please try again.” What went wrong?
Please upload the unzipped theme folder (it should have the name “bento”) into the “wp-content/themes/” directory of your WordPress installation using an FTP client – some hosting providers have small file upload limits for user convenience which limits the usage of WordPress’ internal theme uploader. After that, visit the Appearance -> Themes admin page, locate the newly uploaded theme from the list, and click “Activate”.

All portfolio projects I create with the Expansion Pack display a 404 error (“page not found”).
Please try visiting the “Settings -> Permalinks” admin section and clicking on the blue “Save Changes” button without adjusting anything. After that, refresh the portfolio page in your browser and try to access the project pages.

License

Like WordPress itself, Bento is licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License) and is free for personal and commercial application – use it to make something cool, have fun, and share what you’ve learned with others.

Changelog

2.2 / 29 August 2019
Improved main menu behaviour on sertain mixed one-page setups.
Fixed header background color on scroll for centered header configurations.
Fixed menu text color setting as applied to second-level submenu items.
Fixed the bug that prevented the SiteOrigin widget block from displaying properly.

2.1.3 / 10 July 2019
Fixed page excerpts for pages with Grid template.

2.1.2 / 8 July 2019
Improved compatibility for admin scripts.

2.1.1 / 20 June 2019
Improved thumbnail support for custom post types registered by third-party plugins.
Fixed scroll position for same-page menu links with active full-height page header.
Fixed the Grid settings animation for classic editor mode.

2.1 / 26 March 2019
Fixed compatibility issues with the Gutenberg editor.
Added extra styling for the admin metaboxes.

2.0.6 / 6 February 2019
Improved side menu scrolling for very long menu cases.

2.0.5 / 26 November 2018
Updated theme screenshot to comply with the latest requirements.

2.0.4 / 22 October 2018
Fixed mobile logo sizing for side-menu layout.

2.0.3 / 27 September 18
Standardized button appearance across all browsers.
Fixed copyright displaying in the theme footer.
Updated theme translations.

2.0.2 / 20 July 2018
Added more blog page controls to the “Homepage Settings” tab of the Customizer.
Fixed the behaviour of the extended header elements on blog posts pages.

2.0.1 / 11 July 2018
Fixed the CMB2 admin notice bug.
Added extra functions for the Expansion Pack.
Fixed the text float issue on aligned images inside content.
Fixed submenu chevron positioning for larger menu font sizes.

2.0 / 29 June 2018
Replaced all Isotope layouts in the theme with modern CSS grids, removed Isotope dependency.
Added a category filter for grid pages.
Added item ordering options for grid pages.
Added site-wide options for page/post sidebars layouts.
Blog posts page can now have an image header.
Completely rewrote the Customizer scripts using Customizer JS API.
Replaced Font Awesome internal dependency with a CDN.
Improved primary menu CSS for higher robustness and customizability.
Fixed side-menu layout styling issues.
Replaced submenu menu chevrons with analogous Dashicons.

1.8.1 / 27 February 2018
Updated the bundled CMB2 library.
Updated the bundled FontAwesome set to v5.
Improved the behaviour of the “Hide thumbnail” post option.

Version 1.8 / 29 December 2017
Improved WooCommerce single product page styling.
Removed animations from footer widget nav menus.
Included backward-compatibility for the custom logo function.
Fixed scroll position for the same-page links from the CTA buttons in the presence of fixed header.

Version 1.7.9 / 8 December 2017
Added a Spanish translation.
Fixed sidebar behavior on blog index-template pages.

Version 1.7.8 / 9 November 2017
Submenus in side-menu layout now stay open on pages corresponding to active submenu items.
Masonry grid now behaves better on page resize with side-menu layout.
Added the “target” attribute to allowed html for the footer copyright.

Version 1.7.7 / 25 October 2017
Fixed the full-width grid behaviour in the presence of side-menu.
Fixed the bug which prevented the new breakpoint for fixed header on scroll.
Fixed thumbnail display with active extended header on static pages.

Version 1.7.6 / 2 October 2017
Fixed scroll positions for same-page links in the absence of fixed header.
Posts with excerpts now display the excerpt on the native blog page.
Added more robustness to the one-page links js function.
Fixed margins for the first stretched Content Builder element.

Version 1.7.5 / 8 August 2017
Fixed thumbnail visibility for posts with active Extended Header
“Hide featured image” option now also hides thumbs on native blog page.

Version 1.7.4 / 17 July 2017
Improved the presentation of item content in column and row grids.
Fixed html tag rendering in grid items of quote format.
Fixed duplicate featured images on grid pages with active extended headers.
Removed unneeded arrows from grid page excerpts.

Version 1.7.3 / 11 July 2017
Fixed thumbnail behaviour on pages with active extended header.

Version 1.7.2 / 10 July 2017
Fixed content width for the SiteOrigin Features widget.
Fixed side menu width for boxed site layout.
Fixed grid image for posts and projects with active extended headers.

Version 1.7.1 / 19 June 2017
Fixed call to action button alignment settings with extended header being switched on.
Fixed the default logo line height for long site titles.
Fixed mobile menu scroll behaviour for one-page setups.
Adjusted the fixed header position with active admin bar.

Version 1.7 / 11 May 2017
Moved the mobile styles breakpoint to a smaller width (1024px).
Added a control to change the logo padding.
Fixed mobile menu z-index order for cases with transparent header.

Version 1.6.7 / 25 April 2017
Updated the included CMB2 library.
Fixed header overlay and tile overlay opacity setting saving.
Removed hyphenation from the stylesheet.

Version 1.6.6 / 12 April 2017
Fixed submenu behaviour with active sticky header given that a page is loaded in the middle.
Added a more universal fix for the same-page menu item highlight on scroll.
Added product gallery features support for WooCommerce 3.0+.

Version 1.6.5 / 7 April 2017
Added full pingback support in the theme using native WP functions.
Improved the function that determines the number of WooCommerce shop columns.
Fixed the appearance of the WooCommerce Star Rating filter widget.
Fixed same-page menu item highlight on scroll.
Fixed the sticky header positioning when loading the page in the middle.

Version 1.6.4 / 3 March 2017
Fixed the featured images control visibility issue for the project content type.
In case of empty logo the theme now displays site title in its place.
Replaced the theme screenshot with a more accurate one.
Replaced the front-end welcome header with an admin page.
Removed Expansion-Pack-specific metaboxes from the front-end.
Moved the option to edit the credit link in the footer into the Expansion Pack.
Corrected the name and description of the colors section of the Customizer.
Fixed the output of the “link” and “quote” format posts and linked to single post view.

Version 1.6.3 / 13 February 2017
Added the header image upload field for the Expansion Pack.
The bottom footer does not display at all now if the footer menu and the copyright statement are blank.
Fixed the featured image behaviour in the presence of extended header on Grid pages.

Version 1.6.2 / 5 February 2017
Fixed the “Hite title” option on WooCommerce product pages.
Removed the unnecessary “Hide thumbnail” setting from pages.
Removed Facebook and Twitter links and fixed the rating link in the Customizer
Added notes on site title and tagline into the readme file.
Moved the “Tile image” field into the Expansion Pack.
Corrected handles for third-party scripts and styles.
Updated the included CMB2 library.

Version 1.6.1 / 1 February 2017
Corrected the text domain in the translation function which sets sidebar names.
Added unminified versions for all minified js files included in the theme.
Replaced custom comment function arguments with hooks.
Added the pagination link mechanism to page template.
Removed the “create-function” call from the WooCommerce “loop_shop_per_page” hook.
Removed theme prefixes from third-party script-enqueue handles.
Escaped all input for the wp_localize_script(), image URLs in the logo function, and category lists in post meta.
Replaced the json_encode() with the native wp_json_encode() function.
Moved the register_nav_menus() function inside the after_setup_theme() call.
Removed the excessive function_exists() check for the register_nav_menus() call.
Wrapped admin strings for plugin activation module into proper localization functions.
Added a reset to the custom grid query.
Switched to home_url() in the custom WooCommerce search function.
Removed the unnecessary “page-” prefix from the grid template.
Removed excessive escaping for the get_search_query() function.
The search form now fills with existing search query using the get_search_query() function.
Removed the excessive post date from the bento_entry_meta() template function.
Wrapped the year in the theme footer into a localization tag.
Fixed the unordered multiple placeholders issues included libraries
Removed the error control operators from the included CMB2 library.

Version 1.6 / 25 January 2017
Moved all theme-related support and upsell links into a single native Customizer section.
Removed all premium sections and fields from the Customizer for non-upgraded users.
Got rid of the ‘add_option’ call on theme activation.
Displaying the novice header only to users with admin capabilities.
Got rid of any separately stored additional options.
Added the user-defined website title with home link to the copyright notice in the footer.
Moved some of the page/post meta settings to Customizer or the Expansion Pack.
Replaced the global $post calls with get_queried_object_id().
Replaced the deprecated woocommerce_get_page_id().
Moved the custom site background option to the native Customizer functions.
Replaced the logo-related calls with native WP functions.
Replaced site_url() with home_url().
Added has_nav_menu checks for all theme-defined menu locations.
Replaced the custom excerpt-generating function with the native WP function and filters.
Defined the content width variable using a global.
Moved the custom CSS theme option to the WordPress native setting.
Escaped all user-inputted data on output for improved security.
Switched to the native WP imagesLoaded script.
Enqueuing admin scripts only on necessary screens.
Removed the redundant register_script() function calls.
Made menu and sidebar names translation-ready.
Removed the upload_mimes filter from the theme.
Corrected license version inconsistensies across theme files.
Added a readme file with theme information and credits.
Improved WooCommerce cart styling on smaller screens.
Fixed search form icon when used as a SiteOrigin widget.
Fixed Content Builder elements overlaying the mobile menu.
The fixed header now fits inside the boxed website layout.

Version 1.5.5 / 25 October 2016
Fixed bug in masonry grid image urls.
Fixed “post types” multicheck for “grid” pages.

Version 1.5.4 / 22 October 2016
Updated the CMB2 included library.
Sanitized all output instances.

Version 1.5.3 / 21 October 2016
Adjusted the way the CMB2 library is included into the theme.

Version 1.5.2 / 18 October 2016
Prefixed all hooks in the included php libraries.
Reverted to non-prefixed names for JS library enqueues.
Included favicon using native WordPress functionality.

Version 1.5.1 / 9 October 2016
Improved the way Google Fonts are added to the theme.
Added theme prefixes to all external libraries and custom classes.

Version 1.5 / 7 October 2016
The “hide title” setting now also works if the extended header has been activated.
Added an option to hide the featured image on posts and projects.
Mobile menu now closes also on touching outside the menu.
Fixed scroll position on page load with hashed URLs and fixed header.
Fixed oversize logo fit on side-header configuration in IE11.
Fixed the duplicate subheading issue for extended header.
Added sanitization to all output fields.
Corrected HTML validation errors.

Version 1.4.1 / 16 September 2016
Fixed content width bug in the Customizer.
Fixed individual page/post setting effect scope.
Added defaults to all get_theme_mod calls.

Version 1.4 / 12 September 2016
Migrated theme options into the native Customizer.
Moved non-theme functionality into the Expansion Pack.
Optimized and streamlined the functions.php theme file.
Fixed pagination links for Grid page template on static front page.
Updated JS breakpoints from pixels to em units to sync with CSS breakpoints.

Version 1.3 / 23 August 2016
Added highlight for the current position in the footer menu.
Fixed mobile menu animation on iOS.
Fixed sidebar logic in the absence of sidebar widgets.
Fixed Google maps header behaviour for maps without custom styles.
Fixed post meta for posts in Uncategorized category.
Fixed header menu submenu styling on transparent headers with large logos.
Fixed theme welcome screen on side-header configuration.
Added full translation into Ukrainian (special thanks to Vadim Chernobublik).
Improved footer widget area compatibility with Polylang plugin.
Fixed Theme Options tab navigation beaviour in Firefox in cyrillic languages.
Fixed Google Fonts appearance in Safari for latin-ext and cyrillic characters.
Fixed sidebar on WooCommerce shop category pages.

Version 1.2 / 23 June 2016
Added a possibility to upload a separate logo for mobile devices.
Site header custom color now also applies to fixed header.
Fixed Theme Options framework bug in php 7.
Fixed the bug with the “Hide title” setting for Grid pages.
Header background color setting now also affects side header layout.
Added full translation into French (special thanks to ThemeCloud.io)

Version 1.1 / 16 May 2016
Added a possibility to upload a separate tile image apart from thumbnails.
The heading font setting in Theme Options now affects extended header headings.
Added full translation into Russian.
Fixed compatibility of link colors with user-defined styles in Content Builder.
Fixed sidebar layouts for pages that were created using other themes.

Version 1.0.2 / 20 February 2016
Fixed the submenu animations and styling for “side” menu layout.
Added extra padding to the mobile menu in the absence of logo.
Hiding mobile menu elements if no menu has been created.

Version 1.0.1 / 4 February 2016
Updated theme screenshot.

Version 1.0 / 3 February 2016
Initial release.

Bento Expansion Pack

About the Expansion Pack

Bento Expansion Pack is a plugin that has been developed by the authors of Bento in order to add more capabilities to the theme. It’s easy to install and offers a host of cool additional features such as portfolio functionality, pre-built layouts, video and maps headers, preloaders, and many more. The Expansion Pack also allows to fully customize the copyright statement in the footer, removing all our branding. The Pack can be downloaded here for $25 (one-time payment), which includes support and lifetime updates; this is about 2-3 times less than what you’d need to pay for a premium theme elsewhere.

Version: 2.0 (changelog)
Expansion Pack demo: satoristudio.net/bento, “Expansion Pack” menu section.

License

The Bento Expansion Pack is licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License); one purchase of the Expansion Pack offers one activation key, which is in turn valid for two activations – i.e. it can be used to activate the Expansion Pack on two separate instances of WordPress, be it on individual domains, subdomains, or localhost setups. The second activation has been primarily included for the sake of giving an opportunity to configure the Expansion Pack on a test environment (e.g. Localhost or separate dev URL) before using it on a live website.

Installation

Please follow these steps to install and activate the Expansion Pack:

Step one: install the Expansion Pack.

  1. Purchase the Pack at the bottom of the official page and download the archive using the link in the purchase confirmation email which is sent automatically to the email address you’ve indicated during the checkout.
  2. After downloading, please visit the Plugins -> Add New section in your website’s WordPress admin panel and click on the “Upload plugin” button on top of the page, next to the heading.
  3. After that, click on “Choose File” and navigate to the archive you’ve downloaded from the link in your confirmation email, then press “Open”.
  4. When the pop-up window closes, click on the “Install now” button that appears in the center of the screen and wait for the magical fairies to do their thing.
  5. After the installation has completed, click on the “Activate plugin” link.

Step two: activate the Expansion Pack

  1. After installing the Pack, visit the Plugins -> Bento Expansion Pack Activation section in your website’s WordPress admin panel.
  2. Input your licence key – the long string of letters and numbers seen above in this email – into the field, and click on the “Activate license” button.
  3. A green success message should appear. Great success! The new features and options will be available from the Appearance -> Customize admin section.

Updating Bento Expansion Pack

Since version 2.0, Expansion Pack has received an auto-update routine which periodically checks for available updates and displays a notification if a newer version of the plugin is available. If you see such message next to the Expansion Pack in the Plugins – Installed Plugins section of the admin panel, simply click on the “update now” link to bring your version up to date.

Alternatively, you can also manually download the latest version of the Expansion Pack at any time using the download link from the automatic email you received after your purchase. After obtaining the “bento-expansion-pack.zip” archive, unzip it and upload the resulting “bento-expansion-pack” folder into the following directory inside your WordPress installation: /wp-content/plugins/ using an FTP client or your hosting provider’s file manager. Agree to replace all existing files if prompted.

Included Features

The current version of the Bento Expansion Pack augments the theme with the following features, and more are being added all the time:

  • Fully customizable or removable footer copyright message.
  • Portfolio with various layouts and a new specialized content type called “project” (demo).
  • Beautiful prebuilt layouts for the Content Builder allowing you to create professional-looking pages in seconds (demo).
  • Fully customizable pop-ups for engaging and converting more visitors (demo).
  • A new element above the header in the form of a customizable full-width bar that can display any HTML, e.g. contact details or promo offers (demo).
  • “Under construction” mode which automatically redirects all non-logged-in visitors to the from page of the website, displaying a custom “coming soon” template (demo).
  • Customizable preloading animations for better user experience (demo).
  • Video headers which help your pages to stand out and leave an impression (demo).
  • Google Maps headers with customization and styling possibilities (demo).
  • “Twitter Feed” custom widget for displaying your latest tweets in your website’s sidebar or footer.
  • “Advanced Recent Posts” custom widget with additional options compared to the standard one.
  • Possibility to upload own fonts for displaying the website’s body, headings, and menu text.
  • Possibility to add a Google Analytics tracking snippet without touching the theme’s code.
  • SEO settings such as meta data for search engines.

The Expansion Pack adds 6 new sections to the Customizer panel:

  • SEO Settings – allows you to set the meta information for search engines.
  • Analytics Code – here you can insert the Google Analytics code to track your website’s traffic and other visitor data.
  • Call to Action Popup – enables you to activate and customize the call-to-action popup for converting your visitors.
  • Preloader – in this section you can activate and customize the loading animation for your website’s pages in order to improve user experience and only display fully rendered pages to your visitors.
  • Coming Soon Page (since 2.0) – allows activating and configuring the “under construction” mode.
  • Top Bar (since 2.0) – provides control over a new full-width section above the header.

After installing and activating the Bento Expansion Pack you will be able to customize or fully remove the copyright message in the theme footer – just input your own text or HTML into the “Copyright message in the footer” field in the “Site Identity” tab of the Customizer panel.

Portfolio and Projects

The Expansion Pack adds a new custom content type to the Bento theme: the so-called “projects”, which are pre-styled for showcasing work by creative agencies, service providers, freelancers, photographers, etc. The projects function similarly to the classical WordPress posts and be can created by visiting the Portfolio -> Add New admin menu section. There is a separate specialized taxonomy for projects which is called “types” (Portfolio -> Types admin menu section) which works just like categories do for classical WP posts, and which can be used to differentiate between the projects and construct filters used on portfolio pages; you can specify one or more types for any particular project by using the “Types” settings box in the right part of the editor mode view.

In order to display your projects, you can use the existing layouts and features found in Bento, namely the “Grid” page template. After successfully activating the Expansion Pack, the “project” content type becomes available in the “Content Types” checklist found in the “Grid Settings” box which appears underneath the content area when switching to the “Grid” template in the page editor mode. You can use this setting to create grids of projects or even combined grids displaying both projects and posts or projects and products, or all three content types. In case only “project” is chosen as the content type to display on a particular grid page, that page will automatically display a portfolio filter based on which “types” you assign to each of the projects (see portfolio filter demo here).

In case the project pages you create display a 404 error (“page not found”), please try visiting the “Settings -> Permalinks” admin section and clicking on the blue “Save Changes” button without adjusting anything. After that, refresh the portfolio page in your browser and try to access the project pages.

Prebuilt Layouts

The Expansion Pack includes a continuously expanding set of pre-formatted page layouts for the Content Builder, designed to fit specific needs, such as product homepages or corporate landing pages (see live demos here). These pre-packaged layouts have been built with the aim of saving your time by offering a fast and easy way of setting up professional-looking pages.

Currently the Expansion Pack offers the following pre-built-layouts:

  • Product Homepage With Slider
  • Corporate Homepage
  • Creavite/Agency Homepage
  • Coming Soon Page

In order to make use of the pre-built layouts, you will need to have the Content Builder and the Extra Elements plugins installed (see this section of the current manual for more details). The layouts are accessible for all users of the Bento Expansion Pack by switching to the “page builder” mode (click on the respective tab in the top right corner of the content area while editing a page) and clicking on the “Prebuilt Layout” button in the content area – in case the page is new you haven’t added any content yet – or clicking the “Prebuilt” button in the top left corner above the content area. The available layouts are found under the “Theme Defined”. Each layout contains placeholder text and icons, so after applying a layout you will only need to replace those with your own text and icons by editing each respective section; you can, of course, modify any of the layouts in any way you require, using them as a basis for creating more custom pages.

Popups For Converting Visitors

Visitor engagement is one of the most important success metrics for almost any website, which is why the Expansion Pack features a tool to help you transform more visits into actions using specialized pop-ups (see a demo here). It is a popular method of motivating website visitors to perform a specific task, such as signing up for a newsletter or clicking a button, or even purchasing a product / service. In order to set up a converting pop-up with the help of Bento Expansion Pack, please follow these steps:

  1. Create a page that will serve as the content of the pop-up (Pages -> Add New admin menu section); it can include any text, images, Content Builder elements or layouts, as well as third-party shortcodes such as contact forms, social widgets, etc.
  2. Visit the “Call to Action Popup” tab of the Customizer panel and choose the page you’ve created in step 1 from the “Source of content for the popup” drop-down.
  3. In the same tab, choose where to display the pop-up using the “Display call to action popup” setting and set the trigger using the “Popup trigger” setting.

The “Call to Action Popup” tab of the Theme Options panel mentioned in the steps above also contains auxiliary settings to fine-tune your pop-up, such as the width of the pop-up window, its border thickness and color, as well as overlay color and opacity.

Please note that pop-ups use cookies to only display once per session to each user; in other words, once the pop-up is shown to a particular visitor, it will not appear again to that particular visitor until they close their browser window. This is done in order to minimize the chances of the pop-ups becoming annoying to your website’s visitors.

Preloader

Bento Expansion Pack allows displaying a loading animation to the visitors while a page is loading in the background in order to only display the fully loaded page to the viewers and at the same time to let them know that the process of loading the page is underway (see the preloader in action here). The preloader can be activated and configured in the “Preloader” tab of the Customizer panel.

Top Bar

Since version 2.0, you can activate and configure a new site element with Bento Expansion Pack – a full-width bar above the header. It can contain any text or even HTML and can be customized in terms of color palette and content alignment. All settings for the top bar can be found in the respective tab of the Customizer panel.

Coming Soon Mode

Since version 2.0, the Expansion Pack offers the possibility to switch to an “under construction” mode for your website, which means all non-logged-in visitors will be automatically redirected to the front page, which, in turn, will utilize a custom template with no navigation and other details. You can pick any existing page as the basis for the content of the “coming soon” page, all related settings can be found in the “Coming Soon Page” tab of the Customizer panel. When the “coming soon” mode is active, only the site admins are able to see the full website, which allows for hassle-free launch preparations.

Video Headers

One of the new types of headers available in the Bento Expansion Pack is full-width video – an additional setting in the extended header which allows uploading a video file to display as a background of the page title (see demo here). The .mp4 file format is recommended for the video files, yet you can also use .ogg and .webm files. The smaller the size of the file you’re using, the better for user experience and SEO, it’s recommended that the size of the video file does not exceed 2-3 Mb; using a Content Delivery Network is highly encouraged to increase loading speed and reduce server load.

Please note that it is still recommended to upload a static header image using the “Header Image” field in the same settings section in order to have a fallback for the cases when the video fails to load or play. Moreover, the image will display as the header on smaller devices since the video will automatically be hidden in order to save on data service bandwidth. When defining a video background, you can use all other extended header settings and features in a normal fashion; if you wish to revert to displaying a static image header, click on “Remove” under the video you’ve uploaded and save changes to the page.

Google Maps Headers

In addition to video headers, the Expansion Pack allows creating headers with functional maps using the Google Maps API v3 (see live demo here). In order to set up such a header you need to check the “Activate Google Maps header” checkbox in the “Map Header” settings section underneath the content area in the page editor mode. After that you will be able to set the parameters for the map, such as its centering point, zoom level, and height, as well as define a custom style for the map using your own code or the ready-made snippets from Snazzy Maps; to achieve the latter, navigate to the page of the style you like and click on the “Copy” button or simply select and copy the code under the “Javascript Style Array” heading.

It should be noted that the Google Maps header has precedence over the image/video header – in other words, in case you activate the map your header will display a map regardless of which settings you have in the “Page Header Settings” box.

Extra Widgets

Bento Expansion Pack adds the following widgets to the standard WordPress selection in the Appearance -> Widgets admin section:

  • Twitter Feed – a configurable stream of tweets from a specific Twitter account. Since Twitter requires creating an application in order to display its data on third-party websites, please follow the instructions in the widget settings area to set up the required data.
  • Advanced Recent Posts – a take on the standard WordPress “Recent Posts” widget offering more display elements such as thumbnails and more links as well as more customization options.

All widgets above are pre-styled to work seamlessly with Bento’s Customizer panel color settings.

SEO settings

After activating the Expansion Pack you will notice a new section in the page/post edit mode view, beneath the main content area: the “SEO Settings” box allows defining the meta title and description for each individual page without having to introduce additional strain on your WordPress website by installing a separate SEO plugin.

In addition to that, the new “SEO Settings” tab added by the Expansion Pack to the Customizer panel allows you to set the front page meta title and description (used by search engines such as Google and Bing), as well as customize the suffix added to all page meta titles.

Since version 2.0 of the Expansion Pack, there is also a possibility to turn off all SEO settings, preventing the plugin from generating any custom meta tags. This can be useful if you are willing to activate a third-party SEO plugin on your WordPress install. The checkbox for deactivating the SEO settings can be found in the respective tab of the Customizer panel.

Changelog

Version 2.0 / 11 July 2018
Added a top bar for contact details or other additional information.
Added a full-height header image option.
Added a pre-built layout for a coming soon page.
Content Builder tags are now stripped from meta descriptions.
Added a “coming soon” page option.
Added an option to disable all SEO settings.
Fixed the portfolio filter.
Set up automatic Expansion Pack updates from our server.
Fixed image import in pre-built layouts for the Content Builder.

Version 1.1.1 / 11 May 2017
Header video now switches to image at a smaller width.

Version 1.1 / 24 April 2017
Fixed a compatibility issue between EP maps and the Content Builder maps widget.
Made the Expansion Pack translatable.
Fixed the issue which prevented the EP widgets from being available in the backend.
Fixed file upload issue introduced by changes in WP core from 4.7.1.

Version 1.0
Initial release