New Themes: Resonar and Scrawl

Happy Theme Thursday, all! Today I’m pleased to present two new free themes designed especially for longform writing.

Resonar

Designed by yours truly, Resonar is an elegant blog theme with full-screen Featured Images. It’s perfect for blogs about fashion, food, or design, and the layout works especially well for longform features with large images. The combination of gorgeous images and beautiful typography creates posts that make an immediate visual impact.

Read more about Resonar on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site from Appearance → Themes.

Scrawl

Scrawl, designed by Caroline Moore, is a clean, responsive theme with bold featured images, fancy image captions and pull quotes, and plenty of space for your content to shine. Post details fade in when you hover over them, so readers can focus entirely on your beautiful content when not navigating your site. A slide-out sidebar provides ready access to secondary content, including Social Links, Custom Menus, and Widgets.

Read more about Scrawl on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site from Appearance → Themes!

Websites for the Win: Four Home Pages

We love blogs, but we love websites, too. Small businesses, personal portfolios, non-profit organizations, government websites — bring ‘em on! These four sites are each beautiful, effective, and built on WordPress.com.

Sandyfoot Farm

Purple carrots, green grass, red tomatoes — rather than clashing, the images on Sandyfoot Farm’s site suggest abundance and health. Popular free theme Sela is the perfect backdrop for these Virginia farmers’ vibrant vegetables.

Sela‘s built-in “front page” template gives them space for a welcome note and and three areas highlighting key elements of their business like farmers’ market appearances, farm shares, and their farm blog. The theme’s default sans-serif font plays well with the Sandyfoot logo and keeps things feeling streamlined, even amidst a riot of color.

Only in the Peg

Ever thought about visiting Winnipeg, Canada? You will after seeing Only in the Peg, the adorable online showcase the city’s tourism board built using the premium Adventure theme. While the site retains a blog-style layout, its use of featured posts, widgets, and a menu create a home page feel.

Replacing the theme’s stock adventure travel images with retro-mod patterns and a trio of cartoon clothespegs — Mister, Missus, and Lil’ Peg — gives the site a fun, family-friendly vibe. We especially love the punch of orange in the site’s logo, and shadow of Winnipeg’s skyline spanning the header. Next stop, Manitoba!

Trina Lambert

Even we are hard pressed to tell what theme graphic designer Trina Lambert uses for her personal site — pared down and bold, it puts all the focus on her, where it belongs. (Hint: it’s Clean Home, a free blog theme.)

Clean Home already features bold text against a crisp white backdrop; Trina takes that a step further, removing the theme’s standard red title text and creating a stripped-down home page with a few well-placed graphics. It’s an eye-catching presentation that gives visitors an immediate sense of her style.

Leading Change

New Zealand’s Leading Change is a network of social entrepreneurs committed to fostering social and environmental change. On their website, they lead the charge using the free theme Edin.

Edin is tailor-made for business and organizational sites. Leading Change makes the theme their own with an engaging image layered with their mission statement. Swapping out Edin‘s chunkier fonts for lighter, leaner Futura keeps things modern, in line with the organization’s forward-looking stance.

From themes like Goran, Creative Portfolio, or Swell designed with websites in mind to malleable blog-style themes like Twenty Twelve and Oxygen, WordPress.com lets you go beyond the blog. Free themes and tools allow anyone to build a professional site quickly and easily, and add-ons like premium themes or the WordPress.com Business plan, mean the sky’s the limit.

Four Themes for Photographers and Photobloggers

Maybe you’re working on a 365 project, with a photo for each day of the year. With a couple months under your belt, you might be looking for a new theme to showcase your work. Let’s check out four themes where the typography and color palettes step aside so that your photos get your visitors’ full attention.

Cubic

Made with photographers and photobloggers in mind, Cubic is eye-catching and bold out of the box. Its pleasing homepage grid showcases your posts’ featured images.

Consider this subtle, almost ethereal application of Cubic at WE THE BIRDS, a site “dedicated to the travelers, the nomads, the free spirits, the culturally aware, the expat kids.” The Birds’ muted photography looks fantastic with the theme’s dark filter option for featured images. Using the site logo feature, they’ve uploaded a beautiful feather illustration that lends a unique, personal touch to their site.

Minnow

Minnow‘s gray color palette accentuates photography. The social links menu knows its place: front and center on the homepage, it will encourage visitors to share your work on their favorite social networks.

We loved Minnow in action at AMSTERDAMMING, a fun, vibrant, photo-filled blog chronicling life in Amsterdam through Andra’s eyes. Her photo collages are particularly stunning. A short trip through her blog, and you might be ready to pack your bags for a visit or even a move to the Netherlands.

Radcliffe

Radcliffe’s full-width images are ideal for showcasing your latest photographs.

Check out Radcliffe in full force at JONASRASK|PHOTOGRAPHY, where, as a visitor, you get a wonderful sample of Jonas‘ incredible work simply scrolling through stacked images on his homepage. Jonas intersperses stark black and white featured images with brilliant color, to great dramatic effect.

Editor

Editor‘s large and sophisticated typography and gray color palette offer the perfect canvas for any photographer or photoblogger.

Rob Moses‘ sharp red and blue site logo is the first thing that grabs your attention, until you catch sight of his work; you can easily lose yourself scrolling through his stunning photos of life in Calgary, Alberta. Winter is particularly beautiful, as seen through Rob‘s lens.

Which themes do you love for photography and photoblogging? It’s always wonderful to see how WordPressers put themes to work.

March Blogging U. Courses: Blogging and Photo 101

Registration for March’s Blogging U. courses is now closed, and both courses have started. Check back later in the month to learn more and register for April’s offerings!

Blogging 101: Zero to Hero — March 2 – 20

Blogging 101 is three weeks of bite-size assignments that take you from “Blog?” to “Blog!” Every weekday, you’ll get a new assignment to help you publish a post, customize your blog, or engage with the community. Whether you’re just getting started or want to revive a dormant blog, we’ll help you build blogging habits and connections that will keep you going over the long haul.

You’ll walk away with a stronger focus for your blog, several published posts and a handful of drafts, a theme that reflects your personality, a small (but growing!) audience, a grasp of blogging etiquette — and a bunch of new friends.

Photography 101: A Photo a Day — March 2 – 27

Photography 101 is a photo-a-day challenge. You’ll publish new posts, make new friends, and hone your photographer’s eye.

Photography 101 is a four-week, intro-level course open to all, from new bloggers to hobbyist photographers to pro-shooters. Use the camera you like: a phone, a point-and-shoot, or a dSLR. Each weekday, we’ll give you a new photography theme and tip — we might share advice on composition, tips on working with different light sources, or image editing ideas — and the community critique will inspire and motivate you.

How do Blogging U. courses work?

Blogging U. courses exist for one reason: to help you meet your own blogging goals.

• Courses are free, flexible, and open to all.
• You’ll get a new task to complete each day, along with some advice and resources. Do them on your own time, and interpret them however makes sense for your specific blog and personal goals — we’re not grading you, we’re not checking that you complete every task, and there’s no “wrong” way to use the resources we give you.
• You’ll receive each assignment via email. Each assignment will contain all the inspiration and instructions you need to complete it. Weekends are free.
• Each course will have a private community site, the Commons, for chatting, connecting, and seeking feedback and support. Daily Post staff and Happiness Engineers will be on hand to answer your questions and offer guidance.

How do I register?

While you’re free to register for both, we encourage you to try one course at a time, to be sure you get the most out of the experience. All courses will be repeated throughout 2015.

To register, fill out this short form. Registration for each course remains open until the day before the course begins. You won’t receive an automated confirmation email, but you’ll receive a welcome email with more detailed instructions before your course(s) begin.

Registration for these courses is now closed. We’ll announce April’s Blogging U. offerings later in the month!

New Theme: Lyretail

Happy Theme Thursday, all! Let’s dive right into a new free theme:

Lyretail

Designed by Mel Choyce, Lyretail is a stunning visual treat for your personal site. The theme puts your social presence front and center, displaying social links prominently below the site’s title and logo, so readers can easily find you on your favorite social networks.

Secondary information, like a Custom Menu or Widgets, are tucked behind a convenient slide-down menu, while bold featured images grace the header, putting your photographs front and center.

Read more about Lyretail on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site from Appearance → Themes!

WordPress for iOS: New Visual Editor and More!

WordPress for iOS version 4.8 comes with exciting editor and navigation enhancements.

Visual Editor

We’re thrilled to announce that the 4.8 release includes a beautiful new visual editor. With the new editor, you can add rich text like bold, italics, links, and lists naturally as you type. You can also insert images with a tap, seeing real-time uploading progress and images right in the post.

Image Settings

The visual editor also comes with more robust image settings. Editing image title, caption, alt text, alignment, link, and size is just a tap away while you’re writing.

Thank You!

The WordPress mobile apps are open source and work for both WordPress.com and WordPress self-hosted blogs. Wonderful people from the entire WordPress community contribute to making each release a success. Thanks to all of the iOS app contributors, and thanks to our wonderful users who share thoughtful feedback daily.

Five Themes for Poets (and Other Text-Loving Bloggers)

Over at The Daily Post, our first poetry-focused Blogging U. course, Writing 201: Poetry, has just entered its second week. It’s been a blast, with hundreds of poets sharing their work, experimenting with new forms, and commenting on their peers’ poems.

After working hard on polishing their elegies, haiku, and ballads, most writers want to make sure their readers can enjoy their work to the fullest. This is where choosing the right theme can play an important role (this is true for non-poets too, of course): you want your posts to be readable, clean, and inviting. Here are some options to consider (as well as a few community favorites).

Illustratr

This might sound like an unorthodox choice, given Illustratr‘s natural appeal to visual artists of all types. But its typography, post title styling, and overall crispness makes Illustratr as poem-friendly as it gets. Add a featured image, and you can balance the spare look with a bold dash of color.

Illustratr‘s relative, Writr, is also a favorite theme among the poetry crowd. “The font size is quite big and this works well with poetry,” says the blogger behind This Hideous Heart.

Sela

For those who want to create a warm, inviting space without sacrificing readability, Sela — a very recent addition to the Theme Showcase — is a theme worth exploring. Even if you use a number of widgets in your sidebar, the focus is squarely on your words.

Poetry curation site Ars Poetica makes great use of Sela‘s airy look. Blogger Denise chose it because it’s “easy to navigate and pleasing to the eye.”

Tonal

A bold, emphatic post title area coupled with a generous, full-width featured image prepare your reader for what’s to come. Tonal‘s clear font and white background take care of the rest.

Many writers go for some of our other popular minimalist themes — from old favorites like Manifest and Truly Minimal to recent additions like Penscratch.

Cubic

Created with photobloggers in mind, Cubic is a theme that makes it clear you can paint pictures with your words, too. The gorgeous typography might convince your readers that they’re reading a volume produced by a vintage letterpress, not a webpage.

Another versatile theme that’s become a go-to for many poets is this year’s highly customizable default theme, Twenty Fifteen. It comes recommended by blogger-poets Zen and Pi, Mutafariq Khayalat, and Kavita Panyam.

Minnow

Taking minimalism to a pleasing new height, Minnow‘s stark look directs your visitors’ eyes where you want them: your words. However, with a centrally-located social links menu, the theme also keeps you connected to the world outside your poetry.

To see Minnow in action, head to poetry-heavy blog Devious Bloggery, where poems of various styles and lengths are equally easy to read and savor.

Looking for more ideas for reader- and writer-friendly themes? Here are few more ideas.

Poets, wordsmiths, and minimalists of all stripes: what theme do you use for a clutter-free reading experience? Share your favorites in the comments.