In the mid-noughties anyone who was anyone had a blog. Many of those blogs were and to a degree still are used as Internet calling cards; a place to exhibit personal work and to write about subjects close to heart. Then Twitter hit the scene in late 2006 and the social media boom put an end to the “blogging revolution”.
Two things have happened to the blogosphere since the rise of social media. One, it has drastically shrunk in size. This is not necessarily a bad thing since at its peak the blogosphere comprised so many sites that were arguably 80% word pollution. Two, many of those who used their blogs for self-promotional purposes have migrated to more targeted social media platforms – or – have shifted from using WordPress as a blogging platform to WordPress as an online portfolio. Click here to continue reading
This post is a response to a simple question I asked myself when compiling the recent 2011 WordPress theme list: where do self-hosted WordPress newcomers go to get high quality, trustworthy themes?
First of all, let’s give credit where credit’s due. Automattic and the wider WordPress community put in a huge amount of time to maintain the excellent WordPress Codex and the WordPress support Forums, Themes and Plugins lists. Combined, this is a formidable resource for anyone serious about WordPress.
But when it comes to WordPress themes; faced with an increasingly dominant premium theme market, the official free WordPress theme list seems at best, amateurish and old hat by comparison. And so the question must be asked: what can be done to change this? What can be done to give WP.org newcomers more choice?
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Not another mind-numbing theme list I hear you say. Yes, but this one is different, this one is organic! Every week until the end of 2011, this list will be updated with new themes as and when they are released. To that end, I very much welcome suggestions from readers for new, high quality 2011 WordPress themes. Either leave a comment or send me a quick message via the contact form with a link to your theme.
In addition to providing an excellent, centralised resource for anyone looking for fresh and free WordPress themes, the point of this exercise is to demonstrate that along side the continuing expansion of the WordPress premium theme market, free alternatives are still being developed – they just get far less exposure than their paid counterparts. This post is a humble attempt at unifying some of the best free themes released in 2011 so far. The post will have a continual presence on this blog via the banner you see in the sidebar. Either bookmark the post or click on the banner to see updates. Each new theme added to the list will carry a small red star icon flagging its arrival.
A couple of notes on the presentation and selection of themes before we begin. First, the categories. The order of the themes presented here is inspired by theme categories in use over at ThemeForest. More categories will be added when needed, and current categories may be rearranged as time goes by. Second, the selection criteria. Each theme included here has been selected for its high level of usability and aesthetic beauty and all present themes are, to the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I’m wrong), 2011 releases. And that’s about it. So without further ado, it’s time to enjoy these iconic free 2011 WordPress themes! Click here to continue reading
Stop reading this post for a minute, turn away from your screen and look at some of the fonts around you. We tend to take this storm of signs for granted, its sheer density saturates the senses, but look closely at the bars and bends, the ascenders, descenders and extenders, the serifs, italics and obliques, and the subtle art of typography begins to emerge.
Typefaces inform our relationship with signs. They are the pitch bend in the musical chord: get them right and they have the potential to unlock emotion, get them wrong and they’re dull, discordant and their message is obscured. Fonts have of course long been a staple of graphic design and the advent of the Web – the world’s most extensive typographic archive – has seen this subtle art soar in popularity.
In this post I want to highlight a selection of the Web’s best open source font collections. Each site was chosen for its potential to inspire, inform and be a practical resource for anyone in search of high quality free fonts and for anyone wanting to find out more about the importance of Open Source font licensing. Click here to continue reading
In my last post, I wrote about some of the factors that have helped transform WordPress from a fledgling blog application into a sophisticated content management system; factors that include code, community and financial sustainabilty. One of the companies that continues to play a significant role in this development is WooThemes, and their WordPress theme BookClub is a prime case in point. In this review, I’ll explain why.
One of the fields that WordPress has touched on in the past, but has never fully embraced is data classification. By that, I mean archives, repositories, special collections and other systems of data typology. It’s a burgeoning space with academic, cultural and political institutions the world over busy building digital archives. Some recent examples include the Proceedings of the Old Bailey; the Times Newspaper Archive; Oxford University’s John Johnson Ephemera Collection; and the Google Art Project.
The name ‘BookClub‘ may sound prosaic by comparison, but don’t be fooled, the framework that lies beneath has the ability to turn WordPress into a powerful digital archive. Let’s take a closer look at how it achieves this and more. Click here to continue reading
The brief history of open source content management systems (CMS) is the history of a range of applications offering similar core functionality – desktop publishing features – but all pushing different specialisms: blogs, portals, forums, e-commerce, e-learning and so on. There is one application, however, that has gone a long way in a short amount of time to covering all these areas, and if you’ve read anything on this blog you’ll know it’s a platform I carry unequivocally close to heart: WordPress.
Gone are the days when you had to run 3 or 4 different MySQL databases, create themes for 3 or 4 different platforms, and link all this up to achieve a comprehensive CMS for your company’s website; WordPress is the king of all trades and I think the reason for this can be summed up by three crucial factors. Click here to continue reading
A while back I reviewed an innovative horizontal sliding WordPress theme called Shelf. Today I’m covering a new theme by the Theme Foundry and it goes by the name of “Linen“. It’s billed as a clean and flexible magazine theme and I’ll be putting it to the test to see if it lives up to its claims.
On first glance Linen is an elegant, spacious and professional looking magazine/blog theme with a well integrated home page slider; a clear and simple layout and a useful extended footer. But it’s not something we haven’t seen before. Linen sets up shop in a fierce market of minimalist WordPress theme designs. So the question is: what – if anything – sets it apart from the competition? To answer this, we have to look beyond the surface at a little thing called detail. Click here to continue reading
Back in 1990 a select group of computer scientists in the post-industrial world witnessed the birth of a powerful communications tool, something that had been in the offing under various technical guises since the Second World War. But it took a radical leap of faith to conceive of this tool as serving a progressive human function rather than a covert institutional one. Unsurprisingly, Tim Berners-Lee has it best:
“The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up.” (Source)
The keywords in Berners-Lee’s genesis story are ‘share’ and ‘grassroots’, and further on in the article he speaks of principles of egalitarianism and freedom. The main thrust of his article is to warn netizens of the growing affront to these liberal foundations by means of network control and domination by the few over the many. What is written out of his brief history of the Web however, is the oft-stated but underrated fact that it was the commercialization of access to the Web that enabled it to ‘spread quickly’ – AOL et al. Click here to continue reading
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A NOTE ON BALANCE
I’ve been fairly vocal about my predilection for free WordPress themes in recent weeks. I’ve applauded the up and coming WPShower.com for producing clean and usable templates, and for reviving the ‘share alike’ spirit that WordPress was founded on. But that’s not to suggest that paid theme developers can’t stir up some excitement now and then, or raise the WordPress design bar, far from it. In fact WordPress owes much of its success to premium theme developers, to those dedicated design professionals who have a vested interest in expanding the performance and the appeal of the platform. But whether free or premium, when it comes to designs that change the way we think about WordPress, we are dealing with a select few, a few rare pearls in a sea of similarity.
In order to redress the free vs premium balance on this blog, I’ve decided to review a recently released premium theme that strikes me as a bit of a game changer. The theme is called Shelf, and it was created by the renowned UK designer John Hicks in collaboration with The Theme Foundry. Rather than write a technical account of its feature set, I’ll begin with a quick tour of the theme and then address its form factor, its viability as a Tumblr alternative and some suggested areas for improvement. Click here to continue reading
In a recent blog post, I sang the praises of one of the WordPress community’s rising stars; a site devoted to producing high quality, free WordPress themes called WPShower.com. WPSHOWER released their latest theme today. It’s called ‘Sight‘ and it’s clean, sophisticated and free!
Since so little has been written about this curious project, I wanted to find out more. I emailed site founder and lead designer, ‘Leg’, and put to him a set of 10 quick-fire questions. Here’s what he had to say:
1. Who is behind the mysterious WPSHOWER?
Designer & Creator – Oleg (leg) and coder – Yuri (neolot). Yuri joined WPSHOWER just after the release of the Portfolium theme.
2. Where are you from?
I live near the Baltic Sea, and Yuri lives near the Black Sea. Click here to continue reading
