So as you may or may not have noticed, our sister company EPKhosting.com has just had a  face lift not only on the front-end but the back-end as well. On the front-end of things, we have opted into using the Modularity Theme by Graph Paper Press.

It is a commercial theme complete with theme styling. how to video tutorials, and forum support. For as little as $50 USD you can download their entire family of themes and keep them for life.

The bulk of this themes premium features is the customized blog page. You can easily add a welcome note, video, photo slideshow, post thumbnail slider, and much more. Check the themes page for screenshots of the theme options.

Here is how EPKhosting.com put it to use on its blog page; http://epkhosting.com/blog

On the back-end of things, EPKhosting.com is now powered by WordPress MU; a multi-user wordpress platform viewed as a blog ring. It is the platform used by the free blog service at www.wordpress.com

Now members of EPKhosting.com don’t need to worry about doing arduous maintenance on their WordPress websites like upgrading plugins or staying on top of the latest security standards.

Instead, members of EPKhosting.com piggy back on the EPKhosting.com benefiting from all the commercial themes and plugins that are bundled with web hosting.

More importantly, some of the plugins and themes that are part of EPKhosting.com’s WordPress MU service require a commercial license which could cost the customer hundreds and hours upon hours to install. EPKhosting.com steps in to buy that license for you and install it too, i.e. commercial themes and plugins.

If you’re a musician in need of an official website that you want to manage and brand yourself, I suggest you take a look at what’s available at http://epkhosting.com

You’ll be amazed at how powerful, graceful and easy it is to use. There are plenty of artists using WordPress today, including Jay-Z, Beastie Boys, Matthew Good, and many more. Go to EPKhosting.com to learn more and watch some terrific live concert videos.

There are often cases where a standard wordpress template will not fulfill all of the required functions of a business. For example, a real estate agent representing properties has the unique need of real estate property listings that can be sorted by location, price and type. To create this content structure, we would use posts instead of pages so that we can use categories and tags.

Categories are used to group the listings by “location”, “price” and “type”. Within these parent categories we have child categories (sub categories) for more precision. For example;

• Location
  • Kingsway
  • Sunnylea
  • High Park
• Price
  • 100k – 200k
  • 200k – 400k
  • 400k – 800k
• Type
  • Condo
  • House
  • Commercial

Once we have our content structure in place, we need to get a search funtion that is category based that allows multiple selections, enter the WordPress theme by Theme Shift; deCondo. It is designed specifically for a real estate agency complete with agent profiles, property search and photo thumbnails.

The one thing it does not have is a mortgage calculator and land transfer tax calculator. These are handy real estate tools that would serve as great real estate resources for the public viewing your website. Fortunately, we managed to write our own real estate calculators right into the deCondo Real Estate WordPress Theme for Julian Pilarski, an acclaimed Toronto Realtor.

Visit http://www.julianpilarski.com for more details and to preview how you can rebrand the deCondo WP Theme.

It’s finally here! The plugin I’ve always been looking for; a mailing list I control from wordpress but can embed on MySpace. I have personally used on my very own artist website; After Runnymede. I have also extended the subscription process to the After Runnymede MySpace, enabling MySpace users to sign up for my mailing list without leaving MySpace.

The registration is automated, I don’t need to add the email addresses manually to my mailing list, it’s done on the fly by sending it directly to my wordpress website. From there I can send messages to my mailing list, even schedule announcements and link them back to my blog.

It’s completely free with their branding and only $5 USD to get an unbranded copy. If you want to manage multiple lists for various cities and collect more user data such as age, sex, location, etc. a full license is only $27 USD. I highly recommend that all wordpress bloggers or businesses use The WordPress Auto Responder as their mailing list solution.