How to use this Page

Whether you’re a personal blogger, a designer, or an artist, Isola gives you a bright, clean space to showcase your work. Its minimalist design stays crisp across devices and screens of all sizes, with generous white space to keep the focus on your content.

Isola, a free theme, comes with numerous customization options, from featured images and custom header images to sleek post formats. Let’s take a look at three sites that are already using it to great effect.

Design_That’s_It

Leon Scott, who writes thoughtful posts on design and technology on his aptly-named blog, makes the most of Isola‘s out-of-the-box look. He kept the layout simple and clean; all the widgets are tucked into a panel off screen.

Many of Leon’s posts — like the one shown above — include featured images, which establish their tone and also add a welcome burst of color.

Beyond the Black Mountain

The environmentally-conscious blogger who writes at Beyond the Black Mountain focuses on the intersection between fashion and eco-friendly living. Her site’s vibe echoes her approach elsewhere, with a stylish, spare look. A moody custom header image coupled with a retro serif font (Ambroise, which is available with the Custom Design upgrade) personalize Isola even further.

a dimpleate blog

The blogger behind a dimpleate, based in Northern Virginia, has created a photo-heavy lifestyle blog that still maintains an airy, clean feel. She uses Isola‘s image and gallery post formats to highlight the beautiful images, linking them to her Flickr galleries for visitors who wish to explore more of her work.

Have you also customized Isola? Is there another theme you’d like to see featured here? Let us know in the comments.

Kelly, which was designed by Automattic’s own Kelly Hoffman, is an inviting, fun theme for bloggers of all stripes. Its clean, one-column layout makes it perfect for text-heavy posts, but can be just as ideal for a tumblelog-like stream of images.

With bold featured images, the ability to customize the header and the background, and three widget areas in the site’s footer, you can make it your own with just a few quick tweaks. Here are some examples of the theme’s versatility.

Curated Style

Curated Style, a Toronto-centered fashion blog, makes great use of Kelly‘s out-of-the-box look. The theme’s cursive font in the header injects a stylish playfulness, while the generous white space in the posts makes the images of Toronto’s fashion scene stand out.

The blogger behind Curated Style effortlessly added a few personal touches, like a patterned custom header image, a splash of bright pink in the custom background, and an easy-to-navigate custom menu.

The Lens Less Traveled

Created by a photoblogger based in the Southeast (of the US), The Lens Less Traveled shows how radically different Kelly can look with just a few small changes.

The site uses a more neutral palette than the theme’s trademark bright greens and pinks, as well as a serif custom font instead of the default cursive. The focus is squarely on the gorgeous photography, like the picture above, taken in a state park in Georgia. The splashy featured image in each post creates a particularly striking effect, drawing viewers in and enticing them to explore more.

Lorenzo Setale

Taking Kelly in a very different direction than its default design, Italian software developer and entrepreneur Lorenzo Setale recognized the theme’s inherent strengths, and used them to create a tailor-made look for his site.

The dark background and sans serif font join forces to become a modern, clean canvas for Lorenzo’s thoughts, while the theme’s original focus on readability and balance stay as effective as ever.

Have you customized Kelly as well? Is there another theme you’d like to see featured in this series? We’d love to hear your input!

In our Early Theme Adopters series, we focus on bloggers creating great-looking sites with the most recent additions to our Theme Showcase. Today, let’s visit some of the sites that are already using Illustratr, a stunning, modern theme perfect for portfolio sites and blogs alike.

Looking for a theme that supports custom menus? Take our brief tour of custom menu themes and check out a few samples.

In our Early Theme Adopters series, we focus on bloggers creating great-looking sites with the most recent additions to our Theme Showcase. Today, let’s visit some of the sites that are already using Hemingway Rewritten, a free theme that makes both words and images shine.

We release beautiful new themes every week. In our Early Theme Adopters series, we focus on bloggers who are using the most recent additions to our Theme Showcase. Today, let’s visit some of the blogs that are already using Sorbet, a vibrant, inviting theme.

From your sidebar to your comments section, these tips will help you clean up your blog in just a few minutes.

Most bloggers display their latest posts first — reverse chronological order is the classic blog format, after all. Many WordPress.com users, however, choose to build a static front page — a homepage — that creates a website feel and brings your long-term content to the front.

A well-designed homepage has always been a staple of major websites, like The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation — a WordPress.com VIP partner. You don’t have to be a large company or non-profit organization to see the advantages of a homepage, though. Artists and other creative professionals enjoy the benefits of portfolio sites and personal pages to showcase their talents. Increasingly, so do personal bloggers across a wide variety of niches. To give you a taste of what a homepage can do for your blog, here are some sites that use this option in a smart, creative way.

Groovy Bow Sequence

Claire, the Seoul-based kindergarten teacher behind Groovy Bow Sequence, put together a sleek-looking homepage for her travel-focused personal blog. 

She uses Moka to great effect. The theme offers the option of adding a splashy post slider to the homepage, enticing visitors to click on Claire’s striking landscape images and read her posts, while still maintaining the easy navigation and streamlined look of a fixed front page. While sites with a homepage often still feature a blog section, Claire has opted to forego one altogether, presenting some recent posts on the homepage itself, and letting the rest be easily accessible through the sidebar menu.

Alexandra Corinth

Writer-blogger Alexandra Corinth deploys a homepage — and especially her site’s primary menu — to direct readers to her various writing projects, from her young-adult books, to her multi-genre portfolio, to her personal blog.

She chose the clean, easy-to-navigate Suits, and kept most of the theme’s out-of-the-box look. The focus here is on her content, and her homepage is a distraction-free zone — visitors will only find an author’s portrait, along with a short bio tucked into a Text Widget in the sidebar. They can then quickly decide which section of the site to explore first.

redstuffdan

Dan, the blogger behind redstuffdan, is a retired expat living in the southwest of France. His blog is mostly about his art — a mixture of photography, digital art, and painting — and he’s opted for a homepage to showcase his creations. Right beneath a short introductory text to his site, visitors quickly plunge into a colorful tiled gallery full of Dan’s art. The gallery’s composition can be modified whenever new material is uploaded — just because the page is “static” doesn’t mean it can’t be updated and refreshed.

For the rest of the content on redstuffdan, the sidebar gives visitors easy access to the site’s top posts and pages, most recent posts, as well as to older content through monthly archives.

Up From The Deep

Up From The Deep is the labor of love of Mark Ellinger, a musician-turned-photographer who chronicles the gentrifying streets of San Francisco’s grittiest neighborhoods. Creating a homepage allowed him to highlight the different types of writing on his site: a blog to which he uploads new photos regularly, as well as long-term project pages, like the ones on the Tenderloin and Mid-Market neighborhoods.

The homepage layout features a selection of images that whet the visitor’s appetite, and its primary menu leads not only to the site’s main content, but also to an extensive bibliography page and a Prints page, where interested readers can order copies of images from Mark’s website.

Creating a homepage

If you’d like to try out a front page that isn’t populated by your latest posts, setting one up is a breeze. Go to the Settings → Reading tab in your dashboard, and select “a static page.” Then, choose your desired page from the “Front page” drop menu, and you’re set. If you wish to add an optional blog section to your site as well — where your posts will be displayed in reverse chronological order — specify a separate “Posts page” in the second drop menu. Note that you can also set up a homepage from the Customizer, where you’ll need to go to the “Front” panel.

Looking for more ideas for your homepage? Here are a few more examples to inspire you:

• Haley the Wonder Dog, a resource site for owners of dogs diagnosed with cancer.
• The Lovecraft eZine, a popular horror fiction ezine that puts Oxygen‘s Showcase Page template to excellent use.
• H. G. Robert, a minimalist site showcasing the work of a soon-to-be-published author.

Your blog’s design should reflect your personality, and we want to make that as easy as possible. That’s why, today, we’re releasing three big upgrades to the Theme Customizer on WordPress.com that make customizing your blog faster and easier.

1. A more-focused Customizer.

We’ve made the Customizer more compact; open it via Appearance → Themes → Customize, and you’ll notice that you have more room to view your customized design in the live preview. The panels open when you need them, and they slide out of the way when you’re done.

2. Your Custom Design tools, inside the Customizer.

Change your fonts

What does this mean? Instant live previews of your CSS, font, and color changes. See your creativity immediately instead of repeating the old cycle of “edit-save-preview, edit-save-preview.”

Add some pizzazz

3. Custom Design Snapshots.

Design Snapshots make it possible to save all of the Custom Design changes you’ve made in the Customizer, together, so that you can reapply them in the future as a group without having to recreate them. Save a snapshot of any customization combination you like; there’s no limit on the number of snapshots you can save.

All of these features are included in the Custom Design upgrade for just $30 per year, and you can try them out before purchasing. If you don’t have the upgrade yet, just look for the “Custom Design” option under Appearance → Themes → Customize.

Looking for inspiration? Check out what other WordPress.com members have made in the Custom Design showcase.

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!

Photos can add life to your blog and be the catalyst for getting a message across to your readers. Today, we launched new options for our WordPress.com galleries that allow you to create elegant magazine-style mosaic layouts for your photos–without having to use an external graphic editor.

When adding a gallery to your post, you now have the option to select a layout style for your images. We’ve added support for Rectangular, Square, and Circular galleries (take a look at the screenshots below for examples). By default, galleries will continue to display using the standard thumbnail grid layout. To switch to one of the new layouts, head over to Settings –> Media in your blog’s dashboard, scroll down to “Image Gallery Carousel,” and select the box next to “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic.”

Choosing this option makes the new look the default for all your blog’s galleries, old and new, without having to manually change each one of them. And they also should work great with all our themes!

If you’d like, you can also manage your galleries individually. Leave the box unchecked to keep the default thumbnail grid layout across your site. When you want to include one of the new galleries in a post, simply switch over to the ‘Text” tab in the post editor and add the code for the gallery style you want to use to the gallery shortcode text. Shortcodes for the new gallery layouts are:

[gallery type="rectangular"]

[gallery type="square"]

[gallery type="circle"]

The new galleries also allow you to set captions without taking space away from the images. Captions are hidden and slide into sight when you hover the image. You can check it out now: below you’ll find a demo of all of the new gallery layouts using images from our recent company meetup in San Diego!

Rectangular (default if you enable tiled galleries)

Square

Circular

Oh, and one more thing! We added support for mobile devices to our full-screen gallery carousel. Now you can view galleries on your smartphone and swipe to navigate.

We hope you find these galleries to be a neat new way to wow your readers and present your creations!

Adding Custom Colors to your blog just got simpler than ever! Now you can change your entire color scheme with the single click of a button. Color has impact: it sets context and should complement your message.

You’ll find the most popular palettes and patterns from COLOURlovers are sure to delight whether you want to paint the town red or always bet on black.

Adjust your color palette by using drag-and-drop to swap colors, view suggestions and variations, or pick colors manually.

To appeal to your inner fashionista, dress up your blog in a gorgeous background pattern—they’re preloaded based on your chosen color palette.

Themes that have Custom Colors support have been set up so each color value can easily find its place. Not only that, color contrast is carefully calculated to make applying colors as easy as pie.

To get started, go to Appearance → Themes, click the Live Preview links or the Customize button for your current theme, and select the Colors & Backgrounds panel. Custom Colors is part of the Custom Design upgrade. When you save changes, your colors will be stored and then you can apply them live on your blog once you have purchased the upgrade. See the Custom Colors help page for more details.

Whether you want something bold, understated, or with just enough oomph, you can make your message stand out from the crowd by selecting colors that fit your style.

Choose your colors with purpose. Worlds of difference await!

13 Comments on Go Ahead—Add a Splash of Color, last added: 7/11/2012

Can’t convince your little one that reading is worth their time?  I’d be willing to bet that they still think comics are cool and don’t even realize that when reading them, they are in fact READING.  I won’t “nerd out” on you and tell you that comics deserve every bit as much literary criticism as novels (you must admire my self control) and simply state that the pictures provide a very effective “carrot” for your reluctant reader.

Bitstrips is a site that allows users to make their own comic strips with customizable characters.  Customization… what a good idea, right?  Now, they’ve rolled out a kiddie version for schools called, well, Bitstrips for Schools. 

Bitstrips for Schools from Bitstrips on Vimeo.

By making their own comics, kids are empowered, and yes, tricked, into creating literature.

I must brag that I have been a Bitstripper since just after the site’s launch and have even had a comic featured on the “front page”.  You’ll see my lovely wife in a cameo in the second panel.

We are quite proud of the fact that we offer personalized images inside of our custom kids books.  It is extremely important to us that the children receiving our books see THEMSELVES inside, not just their name.

But how did our artists create characters that could be customized to become every child in America (and some very far away countries, too)?  A fantastic book called “Making Comics” by Scott McCloud illuminates how, as a default, a reader envisions a character as him or herself.  I’ll try to explain with my own horrible drawings.

Imagine a stick figure.  We recognize it as an icon signifying a human.  Any human. It could be you!

 <— You.

You identify with the stickman.  Feel his pain.  But when we give him a monocle, top hat, and cane, it is no longer you (unless you are Mr. Peanut).

 <— Some jerk.

So it is through each new detail that you begin to differentiate a character on a page as “not you”.

“Okay,” you say, “so you were too lazy to create all the different face shapes, noses, and brows to more accurately match each character to an individual child, so you went generic.”

Not quite.  Have you ever seen this piece of art?

If not, I’ll relate how nearly everyone learns about it.  The French script underneath the pipe says, “This is not a pipe.” 

“Silly French Artist,” you say with a bit of disdain for all people who were berets, “of course it is.  Look at it, it looks just like a pipe.”  

“But can you smoke it?” asks some snooty art person who’s already in on the joke, to which you sheepishly hang your head, roll your eyes and admit, “Fine.  It’s not a pipe.  It’s a PAINTING of a pipe.”  And then you wait anxiously for the moment you can look smart by explaining it to someone else.

Back to our “laziness”. We realize that anything we put on a page can only be a visual REPRESENTATION of any particular child.  Photorealistic detail only underlines this fact, which is why it’s a lot easier to believe that this…

 <— Jeff

is ME, and this…

<— Some jerk.

is just plain creepy.

I suggest everyone who has ANY interest at all in comics (funny papers count) to go out and buy or check out from the library “Making Comics” by Scott McCloud.  It’ll change the way you see not just comics, but art itself!   Check out his amazing lecture on Ted.com.

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