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We have a special treat this Two Theme Thursday: new premium themes from two of our most popular sellers, Organic Themes and The Theme Foundry.

Do you have stories to share from a trip to timeless Angkor Wat, or a camera full of images from the surreal landscapes of Iceland? Organic Themes are back with their fourth theme here on WordPress.com, the travel-inspired Adventure theme.

Whether it’s a trip around the world, or a personal journey that needs to be told, Adventure has been designed to share your travels with excitement and grandeur. A tight top menu and customizable logo allow the sweeping, full-width images to command any viewer’s attention. Bold, clean typography and a fully responsive design ensure the tales of your voyage are crisp and clear on all devices, from the smallest phone to a full desktop.

Organic Themes knows that to share your adventures, you need a choice of layouts and page formats. Adventure is bursting with no less than six custom page templates, including a specialized home page template, three-column and full-width layouts, slideshows, and more. Every experience will have the right showcase for it to excite your readers, while easy-to-use social icons allow everyone to stay up-to-date with all of your travel adventures.

Strap on your pack, and let the Adventure theme be your journal to the world.

We released The Theme Foundry’s Collections theme just a few weeks ago, but they’re already back with their first foray into business themes: Basis.

This is not your usual WordPress business theme; being The Theme Foundry, they’ve taken the business theme into the next generation with a built-in HTML builder app. This unique app allows the user to quickly and easily add product features, highlight services, and create slideshows for demonstrating the best your business has to offer. Keeping your business website fresh, dynamic and exciting is simple for even the least technically-inclined on your team, with a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to further tweak the layout and order of each of these sections, without any coding necessary. Just watch:

Of course, it wouldn’t be a theme from The Theme Foundry without sharp, clean typography, responsive layouts for mobile and tablets, and a strong sense of aesthetic and design. Basis also includes a Minimal Mode which, by removing the site header and navigation, further simplifies your landing pages for maximum impact.

Your business deserves more than just a website; let Basis be the foundation of your business web presence, a valuable tool for keeping your customer base engaged and coming back.

Adventure and Basis are premium upgrades for your blog. Get more information on their Theme Showcases (Adventure, Basis), or preview them on your site from Appearance → Themes.

Often when I mention poetry during a workshop, at least one teacher laments, "I would love to do more poetry with students, but there's so much else to teach in my curriculum!" What I try to encourage (and I'm often helped big time by the workshop participants) is for this teacher to consider using poetry within her curriculum, as an integral part of her language, reading, and writing lessons, rather than as an add-on. In other words, I ask her to find a purpose for poetry.

• The Year Comes Round: Haiku Through the Seasons by Sid Farrar and illustrated by Ilse Plume presents students with vignettes of each season in the signature haiku 5-7-5 syllable, three line form, focusing upon nature with a surprising perspective. Each month is represented by its own poem, and students can write their own after determining what makes a poem a haiku. Students can also unearth the literary devices employed by Farrar such as personification, metaphor, alliteration, and simile. A sample from the book:

• Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys by Bob Raczka and illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds stays true
  
  to the form and function of haiku, with each poem offering a funny twist in the final line. Apart from pure enjoyment, this book shows students (especially some of your hard to motivate boys) that poetry can be simple and straight forward and even fun. in "why I wrote Guyku," Raczka says, "When I was a boy, I didn't even know what a haiku was. But I did spend a lot of time outside with my friends. Nature was our playground, and we made the most of it - catching bugs, climbing trees, skipping stones, throwing snowballs. Now...I realize that haiku is a wonderful form of poetry for guys like us. Why? Because a haiku is an observation of nature, and nature is a place where guys love to be." A sample from the book:

• The Children's Poetry Archive groups poems by themes, and my class always enjoys reflecting upon poems about death since, after all, every novel we read seems to be about death! Many poems on this site are read aloud by their authors, and my students especially love hearing The Carrion Crow read aloud.
• A common theme in upper elementary and middle school novels is Change. Encourage an in-depth study of Change using Paul Janeczko's examination of Nothing Gold Can Stay in his new Heinemann title Reading Poetry in the Middle Grades. This highly recommended book features 20 thought-provoking poems from contemporary writers, with extensive lesson plans which help students to better understand each poem, and to apply it to other texts and their own experiences.
• Students can compose and publish their own poems using the Theme Poems interactive from ReadWriteThink.

• If you're seeking to help students learn parts of speech, check out the Language Adventures series
  from Gibbs Smith. These highly engaging and hilarious books focus on discrete parts of speech through the incorporation of rhyme and humor, and later editions contain learning activities, definitions, and reproducibles related to the book's topics. Answer keys and additional activities can be accessed at author Rick Walton's website. There Rick offers some wonderful language learning activities (your lesson plan for next week might just be waiting for you there), as well as an amazing assortment of ideas for using his picture books (over fifty in print!).
  
• At The Poem Farm, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater shares wonderful original poems and teaching ideas. One of my favorites is Getting Dressed, a wonderful poem featuring personification. In addition to the many poems she shares on the site, you can have her work for your very own in her newly published collection of poems titled The Forest Has a Song. In addition to the resources at Amy Ludwig VanDerwater's site, you can also download a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Poetry Activity Kit, featuring ideas for "Getting Dressed" as well as several other poems from HMH titles.
• Alphabest: The Zany, Zanier, Zaniest Book about Comparatives and Superlatives probably isn't a poetry book, since each page contains just three words (such as Fuzzy, Fuzzier, Fuzziest) but it reads like poetry, and helps kids understand how adjectives can be changed to compare two or more things. Author Helaine Becker sets the scene in a busy amusement park, and illustrator Dave Whamond delivers the goods with his spirited and wacky illustrations. Students can likewise choose a single adjective, and create images to illustrate its comparative and superlative forms. 

  From Alphabest: The Zany, Zanier, Zaniest Book

• Looking for poems with onomatopoeia? Check out Noisy Poems for a Busy Day by Robert Heidbreder and Lori Joy Smith. Short and fun, and easily replicated by students. Collect all your students' poems and create your own Busy Day anthology!
• Finally, check out this Figurative Language lesson on personification and alliteration from TeachersFirst.

• In Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns: A Muslim Book of Colors, Hena Khan introduces young readers to the world of Islam by describing its colors and traditions in simple rhymes.
  
  Each poem serves as a definition, and the terms introduced are explained in greater detail in the book's end. Mehrdokht Amini's gorgeous bright and intricate illustrations make this book itself a treasure, perfect for reading with groups or sharing on a parent's lap. A sample from the book:
  
  Gold is the dome of the mosque, 
  big and grand.
  Beside it two towering
  minarets stand. 

• Animology: Animal Analogies, written by Marianne Berkes and illustrated by Cathy Morrison, introduces students to word relationships (also known as analogies) through the simplest of rhymes. Bold, full spread pictures show realistic depictions of the animals in their natural settings. Like all Sylvan Dell books, this one includes the "For Creative Minds" follow-up activities in the back of book, which can also be accessed at the publisher's site, along with an e-book preview, a video trailer, a 48 page teaching guide, and other resources.
  
• Hey Diddle Diddle: A Food Chain Tale is another Sylvan Dell title featuring a wealth of support materials for classroom instruction (see the menu bar to the right on this page). In catchy rhyme, author Pam Kapchinske describes the the animals and complex relationships which make up a food web, the circle of life, and more specifically the ecosystem on a pond and forest habitat. Sherry Rogers' images capture each animal playing its part in this ongoing natural cycle.

• Water Sings Blue, written by Kate Coombs and illustrated by Meilo So, provides the denizens of the deep with their own voices, priming student curiosity about life in the ocean. One of my favorites is the poem "Old Driftwood," wherein this artifact is described as a "gnarled sailor"..."telling of mermaids/ and whales thi-i-i-s big/ to all the attentive/ astonished twigs." Another sample from the book:
  
  
  

  Sea Urchin
  The sea urchin fell in  love with a fork.
  With a tremble of purple spines,
  she told her mother, "He's tall, not a ball,
  but just look at his wonderful tines!

• Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night is a perfect poetry/informational text companion to Poppy or any other novel that takes place in the forest.
  
  Each of Joyce Sidman's wonderful poems about the nocturnal world of the woods is accompanied by a fact-filled sidebar, exploring the creatures described in the poems and in Rick Allen's beautiful relief print illustrations. The title poem in part reads:  "Perched missile, almost invisible, you preen silent feathers, swivel your sleek satellite dish of a head." This small excerpt gives you an idea of the book's sophisticated verse! The author cleverly formatted the poem "Dark Emperor" in the shape of an owl, and if your students are interested in creating concrete poetry like this, you might find that shape templates are a good way to get started. And if you're not familiar with Avi's novel Poppy, be sure to check it out! Boys find it easy to root for this strong female character because "she is, after all, a mouse."

If you're seeking ways to get students writing, poetry is an effective vehicle to transport them to success. Take the opportunity to preview Poetry Mentor Texts online at the Stenhouse site; you'll be amazed at the simple steps to sophisticated writing using the lesson ideas presented there. In addition to Poetry Mentor Texts inspiring students to write their own verse, this book will also provide you with ideas for using poetry as a creative response format for other disciplines as well:

• Students can extend or rewrite or revisit favorite or famous poems. In Casey Back at Bat, sports writer Dan Gutman revisits the classic American poem (the picture book version illustrated by Max Payne is one of my favorites). Choose similar narrative poems, and challenge students to extend them, revise them, or "answer them" with poems of their own.
• In an earlier post, I discussed writing "Valentines for Vermin" using Vulture Verses: Love Poems for the Unloved as a mentor text. The book closes with a request: "So many cards to write! So many animal friends! I may need some help. Do you know someone who is misunderstood? Will you help me write friendship notes, too?" Such a fantastic suggestion! Working in pairs or teams, students can research basic facts about other unloved animals that "scuttle, slither, buzz, and sting." A really fun and stress free way to get students writing creatively, with results which they'll be eager to share with others.
• If you're seeking inspirations for students to write poetry in a number of forms,
  
  you'll be amazed and delighted to read Fly with Poetry: An ABC of Poetry or Leap Into Poetry: More ABCs of Poetry. First, it's amazing that author/illustrator Avis Harley has found enough poem forms to write and illustrate not just one but two ABC collections, and second, she's done it by focusing solely on the topic of insects! So she not only presents and explains the poetry forms in detail, but these mentor texts teach students wonderful facts about dozens of creatures that crawl, climb, and fly as well. Extensions using other animal species are possible, although I can see these form poems being applied to almost any subject area.
• Students love the idea of fractured fairy tales, so a book like Monster Goose by Judy Sierra is certain to be hit. The author's creepy and comedic new versions of classic childhood rhymes will inspire your students to want to create the same.
  
  After sharing a few poems such as Humpty Dumpty (below), provide students with a collection of unrevised rhymes, and see where their imaginations can take them. See, too, if their accompanying illustrations can be as entertaining as those of Jack E. Davis, illustrator extraordinaire of Bedhead fame. Davis not only captures a key moment of each poem, but also cleverly establishes and then breaks the borders of each illustration, creating an off-the-page effect.


Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty swam in the sea
Humpty's sunscreen was SPF-3.
Because he was so lightly oiled,
Dear Humpty ended up hard-boiled. 

• Make Magic! Do Good! by Dallas Clayton is a quirky and crazy collection of verses that collectively encourage readers to see the best in themselves, in others, and in every situation.

  From Make Magic! Do Good!

  So much of modern day communication relies upon snark and sarcasm, it's refreshing to find poems that are open and honest and encouraging, while at the same time remaining zany and random, which kids also appreciate. I also think that the way the book cover turns into a poster is a pretty cool twist!
• Perspective, or point of view, plays a huge role in history and its interpretation. Although not entirely accurate in historic detail, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere remains a classic of American Literature. Check out this previous post where I discuss several picture versions of the text, and the unique perspective supplied by each. 
• In Daniel Kirk's Dogs Rule! and his later Cat Power!, the author/illustrator profiles some of the furriest and funniest heroes of each species. See my Words and Images in Perfect Harmony post for more details, as well as teaching suggestions.
• The National Geographic's Book of Animal Poetry is wonderful in that it often features multiple poems for a single animal.
  
  The zebra and the pig, for instance, are both celebrated by four different poets. Examining the poems, students can discuss what facts and features each poet chose to discuss. In what ways are their poems alike? Different? Older students can even attempt to identify the poem form used by each writer. After reading some of the examples in this book from both classic and contemporary writers, students can then try their own hand at describing animals both foreign and familiar. Such poems are an excellent addition to those animal reports and presentations which many teachers already include in their curriculum.

• A Strange Place to Call Home, written by Marilyn Singer and illustrated by Caldecott Medalist Ed Young, is an intriguing exploration into diverse and unique habitats of the world.
  
  In the preface, the author explains: "Extreme environments such as deserts, glaciers, salt lakes, and pools of oil may not seem appealing, yet in these places, there is often less competition and more safety from predators. So over time, a variety of animals have adapted to these challenging conditions. This collection of poems celebrates some of these great adapters and the risky places where they live." End notes give further explanation of each animal and its adaptations to its specialized niche, along with notes about the poetry forms employed for each piece. Below is a sample poem, written in sonnet form:

• World Rat Day by...wait for it...J. Patrick Lewis is a fun collection of unusual but authentic holidays, celebrated here in verse. Where else could you learn about Cow Appreciation Day, Limerick Day, or Chocolate-Covered Anything Day? Students will enjoy researching these and other wacky holidays, and even inventing their own to commemorate people, places, and events that are important to them. (See a video trailer here at the Candlewick Press site).

• A Dog is a Dog by Stephen Shaskan is an incredibly simple, yet funny and clever book about a dog who may not be a dog at all, but perhaps instead a cat...or is it a squid?...or a moose?
  
  This crazy dog sheds one disguise after another, and who knows what he'll be next? It's short, fun, and you'd better be prepared to read it more than once, although its simplicity, meter, and rhyme make it easily accessible to independent beginning readers. Also be sure to check out the cool stuff on the author's site.
• Do you have older students who are obsessed with zombies? The Zombie Haiku site offers a unique twist on this traditional poetry form, with submissions from famous contemporary authors, as well as poetry "fakes" by greats of the past.

• When Thunder Comes: Poems for Civil Rights Leaders by Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis features a satisfying mix of heroes and heroines from the world-wide struggle for human rights.
  
  Familiar names such as Jackie Robinson,  Harvey Milk, and Mohandas Gandhi share the pages with new discoveries such as Sylvia Mendez (Mexican-American-Purto Rican civil rights leader), Muhammad Yunus (Bangladeshi banker), and Dennis Banks (Cofounder of the American Indian Movement and Anishinabe political activist). Several artists collaborate to illustrate the poems, which can also lead to a discussion of what each artist chose to represent the whole of a person's life in a single image. For more teaching ideas integrating these poems with informational writing, see the related post at Two Writing Teachers blog.
• Another collection of biographical poems, also be J. Patrick Lewis, is Freedom Like Sunlight: Praisesongs for Black Americans. These poems are notable in that they capture the content of each person's character, rather then the rote facts of his or her life. John Thompson's realistically rendered illustrations help to make this title a standout.
• Use the The Explorers' Graveyard lesson plan for sharing facts and findings when reading biographies. Again, the aim here is to get to what's worth knowing about this famous person.If you're looking for a funnier take of epitaphs, I recommend Once Upon a Tomb: Gravely Humorous Verses by J. Patrick Lewis (yes, him again!), and illustrated by Simon Bartram. The hilarious and revealing tombstone tidings capture in the most clever way the humor of many professions. Take this one, for instance, written for a Book Editor:
  
  
  Miss Spellings

  Exclamation points

  Were myriad!!!

  She live on the margin.

  And died. 

  Period.

• My top pick is Instant Poetry Forms, which allows students to enter prompted words and verses in order to form (you guessed it!) instant poetry. Some of the forms are purely creative and student-centered, while others allow students to enter researched information (such as data on an early explorer) to create nonfiction verse. An excellent way to encourage your poetry-phobic students (usually the boys!). Each prompt generator includes an example of a finished poem in that style, so students can get a good idea of how the finished poem might sound.
• Rhyme Brain isn't just another rhyming site; instead, it has three functions: rhyme creator, alliteration creator, and portmanteau creator. The results for the latter two tools are pretty impressive, and lend themselves to some real playfulness with language.
• Poetry Splatter is a decent site for reluctant or struggling writers. Students are offered limited words to complete template poems. The results are fairly closed ended, but this might be a good place to start for those students who struggle to generate poems wholly on their own.
• At the PBS NewsHour Extra Poetry site, students can write poems based on current events using the poetry forms and examples found there.
• At WriteRhymes, it's as easy as "As you write, hold the alt key and click on a word to find a rhyme for it..." That's it. You can Copy, Save, or Print from the site.

• Stenhouse Publishing has compiled a wonderful collection of poetry lesson plans and teaching ideas from about a dozen of their best-selling professional resources.
  
  Check out the Poetry Sampler, available as a pdf download directly from the publisher.
• ReadWriteThink is a go-to resource if you're seeking poetry lesson plans complete with interactive or printable components. From the search page, you can narrow down the 285 results by grade level, resource type, or popularity.
• If needed, here's an extensive glossary of poetry terms. I wish each term was accompanied by an example, but a good place to start regardless. If you can't find a term there, then you can likely find it in this Glossary of Poetic Terms.
• Bruce Lansky books and teaching ideas at Poetry Teachers. Sixteen poetry categories, fun ways to get students writing, and poetry theater (poems to download in read-aloud theater versions).
• The Children's Poetry Archive is a wonderful collection of poems selected just for children, and read by their creators.
• For older students (middle school and up), The Virtualit Interactive Poetry Tutorial features three study poems, as well as extensive online aids including Elements of Poetry (understanding language), Cultural Contexts (social, political, and economic currents) and Critical Approaches (literary criticism).
• Tweenverse is a fun collection of poems by Richard Thomas. No activities included here, but you'll several of these to be perfect as mentor texts for helping students write verse to reflect on their own experiences. See Summer Camp Souvenirs or Brother Trouble for a quick idea of what you'll find there.
• The Poets.org Educator Site provides teaching tips, popular poems to share, curriculum units and lesson plans, and suggestions for Poetry Month.
• Poetry for Tough Guys features poems written by Steven Micciche, mostly aimed at guys. Don't worry; it's still kid appropriate! Perhaps a good stop for reluctant boys to gain entry into verse.

Last year we launched wordpress.com/restaurants, giving restaurants the ability to quickly and easily build a site with menus, maps and directions, an OpenTable reservations widget, and more, along with an elegant new free theme. Since then, we’ve seen restaurants from venerable favorites to underground supper clubs using WordPress.com to entice customers with websites as beautiful as their signature dishes. Here are a few whose sites (and menus!) we love:

POSH

POSH is an “improvisational restaurant” in Scottsdale, Arizona where Chef Josh Herbert creates custom menus for each evening’s crowd based on seasonal ingredients and personal preferences. Using the Confit theme developed especially for restaurants, he’s able to give potential patrons a feel for the restaurant with a custom background photo showcasing the restaurant’s interior while maintaining a clean overall feel.

We particularly like the way he’s loaded up the left sidebar with all the key things a customer wants to see — links to information about the chef and his food, the restaurant’s hours and location, the OpenTable reservations widget — while using the rest of the page as a blog to highlight well-loved recipes.

(And Confit doesn’t have to be just for restaurants — it also works for secret supper clubs, rental properties, and more. Visit the Confit page for instructions on configuring all the restaurant-specific features.)

The Elephant Walk

The Elephant Walk, a popular French-Cambodian restaurant in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a “benefit restaurant” — 3% of its profits go to non-profit organizations dedicated to fighting poverty. Using a customized version of the premium Duet theme, they’re spreading the word about their food and mission.

They’ve souped up their site with a custom header (which they carry over into an image widget, to keep the look consistent), and custom navigation that quickly shepherds readers to menus, FAQs, and information on the non-profits they support. As with POSH, they’ve also kept the most popular information in the sidebar, so readers can get directions or make a reservation no matter which page they’re on when the mood strikes.

Canapé

Friends Matthew and Sean run Canapé, a pop-up restaurant, every Sunday night, taking over an existing restaurant space to present a new 11-course menu. Their site, using a customized version of the free Forever theme, uses stunning close-up photographs of their inventive, refined food to great effect.

Their custom background and header hint at their elegant but playful style, but it’s the slider of featured images that really steals the show — it showcases ten of their perfectly composed dishes, leaving each on the screen just long to activate your Pavlovian response before shifting to the next. Above, a custom menu takes visitors to more information (including a whole page dedicated to food photography, if the slider images weren’t enough for you) while below, blog posts keep followers up to date on upcoming menus and other news.

Some of these sites use premium themes or other upgrades, like a custom domain name or custom design – but not all. The Confit theme is free, as are its options to use a custom background and OpenTable widget. Many other free themes can be customized with a header, slider, and menus, and image widgets are always available for adding more visual interest.

Are you a restaurant owner who needs an upgrade, or just a happy customer whose favorite taco joint has a website from 1997 and wants to help? Welcome to WordPress.com!

A simple way to add visual variety to your site’s front page is to publish your content using Post Formats. Over 50 of our themes support Post Formats, which means they can display various types of content — including images, videos, quotes, links, audio, and short snippets called “asides” — with different formatting, adding subtle but nice touches to your site.

The types of Post Formats you can choose from depends on your theme. To see what Post Formats your current theme supports, go to Posts » Add New in the dashboard and look for a Format module on the right, with various options like the one below:

Using Post Formats is optional — if your theme supports them, you don’t have to use them, since the default (standard) format works well with any content you publish. Using Post Formats is also free: you don’t need to purchase the custom CSS upgrade to enable different Post Formats.

Our Top Themes Now Support Post Formats

Recently, we made our top 25 themes — from popular free themes like Pilcrow, Manifest, and Bueno to premium themes such as Elemin — look even better with Post Formats. Here’s a sampling of how Post Formats look different, using the Elemin theme as an example:

Image Format:

Video Format:

Quote Format:

Link Format:

Audio Format:

Aside Format:

Graphic icons spice up this particular theme, while other themes have different design or textual elements appropriate for their layouts. Browse the themes that support Post Formats in our Theme Showcase.

Start Posting Now

You can publish instantly using popular Post Formats right in your dashboard. Just click on “New Post” on the top right, then select one of these popular formats to publish instantly to one of your sites:

Alternatively, you can go to Posts » Add New in your dashboard to create a new post. Just select the appropriate Post Format in the Format module, and you can use the “Preview” button to view the post before publishing it.

For us, WordPress.com is our labor of love — we’re continually releasing new themes, upgrades, and features to help you create the best website and/or blog you can. In addition to great tools, we publish articles, prompts, and writing and photo challenges to inspire you to start posting and keep posting. While we’re never, ever done making WordPress.com better, we wanted to look back at some of the goodies we brought you in 2012.

We’ve got the look: 65+ new themes in 2012

We released themes at a rate of more than one a week in 2012. These beautiful themes look great no matter which device your visitors use to see your content. What’s more, if you’re a musician, restaurateur, bride-or-groom-to-be, or a civil servant looking for a simple way to share information with your audience, we’ve got you covered.

Tae Phoenix is a Seattle-based singer-songwriter who recently released her first album, Rise. Her site takes full advantage of everything WordPress.com and the Soundcheck theme have to offer, with embedded audio and video, a tour calendar, her Twitter feed, links to her new album, and press mentions.

Custom Design puts you in charge

Have design chops or an eye for contrast, color, and composition? With the Custom Design upgrade, you can tinker with your site’s CSS, compose a unique color palette for your site, and choose from among some awesome Typekit fonts to create the specific look you desire for your online home on the web.

New and improved for 2012

No matter whether you’re just starting to blog or are a seasoned web designer, here’s a sampling of how we made WordPress.com better for you in 2012:

• We doubled the space we offer in the space upgrade.
• We introduced SASS and LESS for those who’ve got the Custom CSS upgrade.
• We added unique visitors and countries to all WordPress.com stats pages.
• We created importers to help you bring your Tumblr blog or your Splinder site to WordPress.com.
• We released tiled galleries that allow you to get creative with photos on your blog.

We made a lot of progress in 2012 and we’re already working on bringing you more awesome in 2013. Happy New Year from WordPress.com!

If you had any doubt that WordPress.com makes a great online home for your band, the range of artists who are now using it to promote their work and grow their fan base should put that to rest.  New musicians are signing on every day, making WordPress.com the go-to for artists who want sleek, functional, engaging sites without investing a ton of money or time.

Here are just a few of the acts who are taking advantage of features like the gig calendar and embedded tracks from SoundCloud and Bandcamp.  They’re all using the Soundcheck theme, developed specifically for musicians, but they’ve used custom touches to build sites with unique looks and personality.

Tae Phoenix is a Seattle-based singer-songwriter who recently released her first album, Rise. Her site takes full advantage of everything WordPress.com and the Soundcheck theme have to offer, with embedded audio and video, a tour calendar, her Twitter feed, links to her new album, and press mentions. She’s lightened up the basic Soundcheck color scheme with a bold header image that echoes her album cover, and her first single is front and center on the home page, ready to be heard.  Her site is polished, professional, and ready for the big time — just like her.

Finnish DJ Radical Effect is a 180 from our Seattle singer-songwriter, and it shows. He uses his WordPress.com site to support the October release of his debut single and his quest to “conquer the Finnish nightlife.” A rotating selection of header images gives the site its industrial feel, while a more washed-out palette creates a chill, laid-back vibe. In addition to the music-specific features, Radical Effect also houses a blog on the site, to post news and give fans insight into his creative process.

Canadian pop-punk outfit Letterbomb proves that you’ve never too young to rock — already performing together for three years, they range in age from 14 to 18. They’ve given their site a youthful edge with a moody color scheme, the repeated use of their bulls-eye logo, and plenty of photos. Their newest track is embedded on every page, begging to be heard, and plenty of links let fans buy music and merch. And as they grow, their WordPress.com site can grow with them, giving them more space for music and video and helping them keep track of tour dates.

Fifteen-year-old twins and Oklahoma natives Grace and Sophia chose WordPress.com to build the site that supports their growing careers as folk singer-songwriters. A colorful yet muted palette, capped off with custom header images and a craft-inspired background, give the site its personality. They’ve added social media sharing buttons to the main navigation bar, encouraging their fans to connect with them across a variety of platforms.

These four artists have opted for the new premium Soundcheck theme, but there are 200+ themes available on WordPress.com, many of which — like Oxygen (a freebie!), Shelf, and Debut — were either designed for or lend themselves well to music sites. With affordable upgrades like custom design, your band’s own URL, and plenty of storage space for your music and videos (coupled with WordPress.com standards, like rock-solid security, unlimited bandwith, and the world’s best Support team), making WordPress.com your band’s online home is a no-brainer.

Is there an act you love on WordPress.com? Share a link in the comments!

Have some featured content that desperately needs saving? Have no fear, our new theme Hero is here!

Hero’s featured content-rich Front Page template

Designed by antthemes, Hero is a dark and minimal theme that features the content you care about most with a Front Page template that’s packed with the promotional power of our Featured Post Slider, a custom tagline, and three featured post callouts. Hero also comes packed with sidebar and footer widget areas galore, and a full width page template for those times that you just want to eliminate some of the distractions.

Read more about its features on the Theme Showcase or dive right into previewing it on your blog from Appearance → Themes.

Happy Thursday everybody! Today I would like to introduce you to the two latest additions to our family of themes. Let’s start first with the most adorable …

Babylog is the perfect theme for chronicling your little one’s first year (and beyond!) The playful, sweet design will take you from first smiles to first steps, and you can even customize the baby graphic to look like your own bundle of joy! Read more in the theme showcase.

Delicacy is a stylish theme perfect for food bloggers. Your image and writing will look great with Delicacy’s subtle textures and clean lines. You can also use the featured content section to help draw attention to your most delicious posts. Read more in the theme showcase.

Babylog was designed by Caroline Moore and Delicacy was designed by Aleksandra Łączek.

Happy Thursday! I’m pleased to announce the two newest additions to our ever-growing Theme Showcase.

First off, it’s grungy meets vintage with Gigawatt — a clean and bold premium theme from Obox Themes.

Designed especially for filmmakers, editors, creatives, and professionals working in motion picture-related industries, Gigawatt displays your big screen talents in the best way possible on the small screen. Among its features include dark and light color schemes, a showcase page template that contains a large featured slider to place your latest video posts front and center, and up to four widget areas — one in the right sidebar and three in the footer.

Learn more about how you can get your own show going on your blog by visiting Gigawatt on the Theme Showcase.

Next up is Pinboard, a crafty, textured premium theme designed by Themify that allows you to create your own virtual scrapbook.

Share your favorite design finds, create an inspiration board for your next DIY project, or start a blog and show us your crafty side. However you use it, Pinboard is sure to inspire you.

Read more about Pinboard’s features on the Theme Showcase.

Happy Themeday, all! Today we have two brand-spankin’-new themes for your visual enjoyment.

First up is Gridspace, a classic, elegant premium theme by Graph Paper Press.

Gridspace lets you show your work in style. Designed as a portfolio for photographers, its slick features include light and dark color schemes, multiple thumbnail sizes, a responsive design, and a convenient space for your logo. Your readers can easily switch between two blog layouts on the fly – grid view and list view – while large featured images and an elegant overall design make your work the focus.

Live on the grid, and check out Gridspace on the Theme Showcase!

Next up is Ascetica, a beautiful theme from AlienWP, designed by Galin Simeonov.

Get rid of the clutter and concentrate on your content. Ascetica prefers subtle details over flashy gimmicks and provides the perfect balance of minimalism, white-space, responsiveness, and customization to allow you to focus on and support what matters most – your content – while doing it in a way that is uniquely your own.

Love that minimalist look? Then make sure to visit Ascetica on the Theme Showcase.

It’s Thursday, and you know what that means — new themes!

First, we are happy to introduce Able, a multipurpose traditional blog theme that is a refresh of our two older classics, Andreas 04 and Andreas 09.

Designed by our very own Philip Arthur Moore, Able retains the spirit of its predecessors — up to a three-column layout and a gray scale color scheme — while offering an updated look that is clean, responsive, and highly readable. We’re sure you’ll be Able to come up with many creative uses for this theme. Read all of the details on the Theme Showcase, or take the demo for a spin.

Our next new addition is Sight, another great theme from WPShower that blends simplicity with sophistication.

Elegant and versatile, Sight is a great choice for many different types of sites, including blogs and online magazines. It features a right sidebar for widgets, two custom menu locations, a slider for sticky posts, and a responsive layout that adapts to smaller screen sizes. Learn more about Sight on the Theme Showcase. You can also take a look at the demo, if you wish.

Enjoy!

Say hello to the future of reading on the web. We’re happy to introduce a new feature for WordPress.com home pages: infinite scrolling.

Speed and performance are key on the modern web: new content loads in quickly without a full page reload. Instead of the old way of navigating down a page by scrolling and then clicking a link to get to the next page, waiting for a page refresh — the document model of the web — infinite scrolling pulls the next set of posts automatically into view when the reader approaches the bottom of the page, more like an application.

See this in action on Matt on Not-WordPress—Matt’s moblog. When you get to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a loading icon display briefly as the next posts load below.

Back? Now that you are drooling along with the rest of us at the wondrous food photos he posts there daily, you’ve experienced the power of reading without clicking “next”—it means reading through many posts without friction. Imagine your visitors doing the same with your content. Pretty cool, eh?

We’ve taken care of the details like integrating with your theme design as seamlessly as possible and supporting sites with footer widgets. We’ve also refined the basic footer appearance; as you scroll down a subtle footer pops up containing your blog title, which readers can click to scroll back up.

Many of you have already seen this in action on your site. To those of you who’ve sent in feedback, thank you—we’ve incorporated your suggestions to improve the experience. The metrics from infinite scrolling are conclusive: people are reading more posts and spending more time on your sites. As you might guess, people are more likely to just scroll down than they were to click the old style links—the new way is faster and better.

If you prefer the old-school way, and disable the feature in Settings → Reading, you’ll instead see a “Load more posts” button at the bottom of the page, which loads the next available content quickly after the button is clicked—avoiding a full, slow page reload.

We’ve also automatically enabled the click-to-load button for blogs where there might be important information in footer widgets, so your visitors always have access to the entirety of your content. The number of posts loaded with the button can be changed in your “Blog pages show at most” reading setting. Learn more about the settings.

Infinite scrolling is already enabled for over 30 themes to date, and in the coming weeks we’ll be rolling it out to the rest of our themes.

Now to investigate how to make ourselves a neverending breakfast—that would be amazing, too.