My good friend Violeta has overhauled her website Tips and Tricks. She’s used the Thematic theme by Ian Stewart from ThemeShaper, a Wordpress theme I am very impressed with. At present Violeta has been working on the layout and placing modules to display “Recent Tips”, etc.

Already the site has a clean and minimalist feel that reminds me of the design used over at the NY Times. Thematic theme has really nice typography out of the box and makes for a very ‘readable’ blog.

As I understand it, Violeta’s intention is to customise the header in due course, and add a little colour and style. Thematic also makes this very easy if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty and diving into a little HTML and CSS.

Thematic is also a very well search engine optimised theme, with H1 tags for your blog description on the home page, but H1 applied to post titles on post pages – sexy! There are some other quite advanced SEO things happening under the hood, and it will be interesting to get a report from Violeta on the search engine performance of Tips and Tricks a month or so from now.

In summary I really like what Violeta has done and I think the Thematic Wordpress theme framework is a great starting point for developing a new look for your Wordpress powered site!

I’ve setup a new site recently with my friend Violeta from All Tips and Tricks, it’s called Easy Recipes.

The site is built on Wordpress and provides a nice selection of tasty, yet easy to prepare recipes.

The problem is that the site has been up now for about 3 weeks and is still not appearing in Google’s index. It’s very strange because usually I find Google picks up new sites in a matter of days.

I’ve added a Sitemap and submitted this via Google’s webmaster tools but still no luck.

The domain does have history in the Wayback machine – and the history displayed is good – however I am now wondering if the site has been used by a more recent owner for some negative purpose and possibly is now being penalised by Google. The Wayback machine does not show the most recent year of history so this period is unknown.

I’m hoping with a link from my own personal blog that Google may come to its senses – if not I will have to file for a reconsideration request.

If anyone else has tips on rapid indexing, or overcoming penalties in Google – I would love to hear about them in the comments below.