There are many different styles when it comes to WordPress themes. Which theme you choose will depend not only on your personal preferences, but also on how you can best display and showcase your content to your site’s visitors. Finding a nice middle ground is the Cover WP theme.

The core concept mirrors many of the magazine-style themes that you can find for WordPress. You can highlight a “headline” article toward the top of the homepage, and then have sections underneath for your featured and popular articles. The interesting thing is that the regular reverse chronological feed is then displayed underneath that as the “latest” posts.

This WordPress theme comes with support for several of your favorite plugins and it comes pre-loaded with custom menus, custom header, drop-down menus, automatic thumbnail resizing, and a widget-ready sidebar and footer. You’ll also find there is author highlighting, which is great for multi-author blogs, as well as social bookmarking integration.

Check out the live preview on WordPress.org, which is also where you can get more information and find the download link.

We’ve got quite a varied list of blog posts from around the Internet for you this week. Enjoy.

Tyler Cruz gets us back in the holiday spirit, if only for a moment, but showing off the Roomba he got for Christmas. This is a great little product that will automatically keep Tyler’s condo nice and clean (for the most part). Whether it’ll hold up to the task in his new house remains to be seen.

Benny calls himself a language hacker. At the age of 21, he spoke only English. Now at the age of 28, he is fluent in eight languages and proficient in several more. Want to know how he does it? You’ll want to start with his simple guide to speaking foreign languages. It’ll take time, but it’s worth it!

Ray Ebersole takes us for a stroll down memory lane, looking back at his most read blog posts of 2010. At the top of the list is an article he wrote asking if teachers were underpaid for the work that they do.

2modern blog shines the spotlight on Cathy Liu. The featured artist focuses primarily on abstract painting and some of the work highlighted in the blog post is really quite tremendous. Her art is described as “bold, organic, bright, modern, [and] energetic.”

Celine Roque recognizes the importance of goals, but they don’t always turn out the way you expect them to turn out. So, you might want to think about the three goal-setting tips that usually don’t work. Maybe more importantly, you’ll want to read about the three tips that do work.

The “group buying” business model really took off in 2010 with sites like Groupon and LivingSocial hitting the scene. Local businesses saw a fantastic opportunity to reach a new audience and attract new customers that may not have otherwise paid them a visit. However, the associated costs can be quite high.

Let’s say that you run a modest restaurant in the heart of the city and you’re offering a Groupon for half-priced menu items. When you remember that Groupon can take up to 50% of the net price of the deal, you’ll find that you are only getting 25% (or less) of the value you are providing. That $50 Groupon for $25 is really only putting $12.50 in your pocket. Is that $37.50 really worth having a new customer through the door?

One strategy to recoup these enormous costs is the art of the upsell or suggestive sell. This is particularly effective in the restaurant environment, because the person coming in with a $50 Groupon is likely to spend more than $50. If the final bill ends up being $100, you’ve netted $67.50 (before other expenses are considered) and you have had the opportunity to gain a new loyal customer.

You have to be careful with this strategy, though. Some time back, a boot store was offering a $100 value for $50, but no boot on their website was less than $300. For potential customers who did that pre-research, this can severely mar the image of the business and can have the exact opposite effect of what you had originally hoped. Group buying sites are here to stay, but you have to mindful of how you choose to use them.

Do you find that you oftentimes use the same snippet of text or code in many of your blog posts? Instead of copying and pasting those passages every time you need them, you may want to take a look at the Global Content Blocks WordPress plugin.

Using this plugin, you can create your own shoftcodes to easily insert reusable code snippets, text, or HTML into your blog posts and website pages. This is fantastic for blogs that utilize Google AdSense, for example, making it easy to customize your posts with the right ad code in the right location. Since Adsense-Deluxe is no longer supported, Global Content Blocks can be a reasonable alternative.

The great thing is that this plugin won’t restrict you to just one ad network. You can use it to generate short codes for just about any snippet of code. For example, you can create short codes for opt-in forms, iframes, or even common stretches of text that you use in multiple posts. The snippets are “masked as images to allow easy manipulation and non-HTML tags contamination.”

You can check out the screenshots at WordPress.org. That is also where you will find the free download link for the Global Content Blocks WordPress plugin.

The holiday shopping season has come and gone, leaving retailers all around the world likely facing substantially lower sales in the early part of January compared to what they were able to experience during most of December. What can you do to bring the customers back through your doors?

A very viable business strategy is to offer discounts and offers during these slower periods, attracting people back through the door that may not otherwise pay you a visit. This is helpful not only in the wake of the holiday shopping season, but also throughout the year to fill in the periods that are traditionally slower.

Take a restaurant as an example. Most of its business will come in during the prime dinner hours, between 6pm and 9pm. By offering a discounted menu (“early bird”) before 6pm, you can get a few people to fill in that gap that may otherwise leave you with an empty restaurant. Similarly, entertainment venues that have most of their business during the weekend can offer mid-week exclusive discounts.

Instead of allowing the slower periods to go vacant, you are usually better off making some money (at a discount) than making virtually none at all.

You have a lot of options when it comes to computer monitors. Many manufacturers offer products in this field and the choices can be quite daunting. To the untrained eye, so many of these LCD monitors can look the same, but each model is just as different as different makes and models of cars.

One of the newer monitors on the market is the NEC MultiSync EX231W. One of the differences here is that this model is being targeted much more at the business segment than it is at regular consumers. You can notice this from the much more robust metal base and stand, for example.

The NEC MultiSync EX231W is a 23-inch widescreen LCD monitor with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. This takes on the the popular 16:9 wide aspect ratio and the screen offers LED backlighting, several eco features (like a human sensor and ambient light sensor), and relatively low power consumption. The 1000:1 contrast ratio isn’t industry-leading, but it’s perfectly suitable for the office environment.

More information about this LCD monitor can be found in this thorough review on Futurelooks. The MSRP on the NEC MultiSync EX231W is $319.