Internet users who have viewed the functionality and amazing uniqueness of hundreds of WordPress themes in action wonder how the websites look as though they were painstakingly hard-coded, instead of the generic template look. The truth is that websites powered by WordPress are designed by elegant themes like any other hard-coded website.

The best WordPress themes 2012 are products of a laborious process of concept design, architecture, and program coding by experienced and competent web developers. WordPress is, however, aware that not many people who are interested in creating their own websites have the skill or the finances to engage the services of professional web designers. Thus, WordPress gathered the best developers to come up with a collection of useful themes which may be used by people who have a message to convey to the world.

One of the secrets to the distinct look in every website put up using the best WordPress themes 2012 is the shortcode application program interface (API). In theory, shortcodes are fundamentally text macro codes or tagged codes which are inserted into a web post or a webpage to create a specific functionality. Shortcodes in WordPress are part of the advanced features of all available themes. When shortcodes are displayed in the website, they are replaced by other types of content, such as buttons, column layouts, content boxes, drop caps, image sliders, social media links, tabbed content, etc.

Three of the most pronounced advantages of shortcodes in WordPress are speed, ease-of-use, and consistency. Following are a number of tips in using shortcodes to enhance both functionality and aesthetics of your WordPress-themed website designed by elegant themes.

Use button shortcodes to create buttons of various sizes, colors and styles for highlighting textual content. There is basically just one tag for all buttons, which are then adjusted in terms of color and type parameters.

Another method of emphasizing important content to your target audience is by the use of content boxes, which are available in five WordPress shortcode variants: the bio box generally used for About Me content, the download box, the info box, the normal box, and the warning box.

If the default layout settings do not suit your unique style requirements, or if you ever find difficulty in organizing content with the WordPress editor, try to use shortcodes for column layout. This shortcode allows variety to your desired layout.

The dropcaps shortcode provides the classic typographical look to textual content and to some extent offers itself as another way of highlighting hierarchy in your website content.

The [ tab ] shortcode in WordPress may be used as an image slider, which generates a slideshow of automatically images resized according to the slider size you specify. With this functionality, you have control over transition effect adjustment, rotation of the image slideshow, and speed and enabling of rotation. The [ tab ] shortcode can also be used to create horizontal or vertical tabs in your posts. Increase traffic to your website using the social media shortcodes for Facebook, Twitter, etc.