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 wanted something very simple and minimalistic, where I could post my off-topic thoughts that do not fit into the context of my other web properties.

I started with Wordpress, an excellent free web publishing application – or blog. Installed this on a web host, and got down to finding myself a good clean wordpress theme that I could modify and build upon.

I settled for Empty Canvas by Romanian designer Adrian Diaconescu, It’s just what I was after, Thanks Adrian.

Next step was to create a simple, clean logo. When in need of a quick typography fix I usually head on over to DaFont, type in my text and then preview their top 100. A good place to start for logo design ideas.

Angelic War from Dirt2 caught my eye and I decided to have a play with this – I typed my surname, and name of this blog, “MacKinven” into Fireworks, my graphics application of choice, and then added a slight red gradient over the text, giving the result seen at the top of this page.

Happy so far.

Next up was getting my HTML Page Titles optimised for SEO. I found a great post from Nathan Rice, explaining how to do this. I made a couple of small modifications and ended up with this code:

<title>
<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>
<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> &mdash; <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php wp_title(”); ?> &mdash; <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>
<?php } ?>
</title>

Adding this to your header.php gives a nice Title tag for the home page that is the blog title and blog buy-line together – For posts this gives the post title first followed by the blog title.

Done! And welcome to the blog.