First, I should note: I am not related to Jennifer Armstrong. But! I have followed her writing closely over the years — first during her years at Entertainment Weekly, and more recently as the author of books like Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted (Simon & Schuster), which offered a definitive history of the classic TV series. Her blog ...
The beginning of a new year is an opportunity to start things afresh — why should your blog not benefit as well? Here are six things you can do to start your blogging in 2015 energized, recharged, and focused. Explore your new dashboard We introduced several major upgrades to the WordPress.com dashboard right before the end of last year, including updated Stats and ...
Launching a magazine? At WordPress.com, you can choose from an ever-growing collection of themes. Here are four free and four premium themes to promote a wide variety of content. Canard Launched earlier this year, Canard showcases writing and photography in a nicely balanced layout. You can display up to five posts in a grid on your homepage, and if you publish images and use post formats, ...
Actor Heather Matarazzo has only published a few posts on her new blog, but each one has stirred up an incredible response from inside and outside the WordPress.com community. Her first essay in February, “What the F— Is F—able,” took direct aim at what it’s like to be a woman in Hollywood — an industry she’s worked in since childhood, ...
From parents and poets to journalists and politicians, WordPress.com’s publishing tools allow people to make their voices heard. Today, we’re excited to introduce our new editor: a faster, cleaner, and more streamlined way to create posts and pages, and share, promote, and manage content across all your WordPress sites. Highlights: instant saving, quick sharing It’s fast, responsive, and allows ...
Looking for more traffic? Social media is your best friend. Every Facebook like and retweet helps you grow your audience and attract more customers. To ace your online strategy, optimize your website for social media. From widgets to share buttons, here are five ways to integrate social media into your WordPress.com site. Social Media Icons Your website is an important sales tool, but it ...
The 2015 edition of the Automattic Worldwide WP 5k (#WWWP5k) is around the corner! Automatticians already hit the trail at our company meetup last week. It was early — the sun was barely peeking behind the mountains in Park City, Utah — but the air was crisp and the morning was perfect for running a 5k. (Staying fit is an important part of ...
Building a beautiful website for your business begins with choosing a theme — a design that controls page layout, widget areas, and default style. With more than 350 free and paid themes on WordPress.com, selecting a theme for your business website can feel overwhelming, but you can make it easier by focusing on these three questions. What Am I Publishing on ...
On this Theme Thursday, we have two new free themes for you: Colinear and Franklin. Colinear Colinear — our update to the older Coraline — is a squeaky-clean theme featuring a custom menu, header, background, and layout. Colinear supports featured images and six widget areas — up to three the sidebar and three in the footer. Primarily designed for magazine-style ...
On this Theme Thursday, we’re happy to announce the latest addition to our collection of free themes. Independent Publisher Independent Publisher is a clean and elegant theme by Raam Dev, with a clean and responsive layout ideal for personal bloggers and writers alike. Featuring clean and readable posts, the theme can be enhanced with Featured Images. Your personal Gravatar can ...
Gazette is a theme that balances rich functionality with a pleasant, non-obtrusive look. Depending on your site’s needs, you can tweak it to look as stark and clean, or as warm and vibrant as you wish. Business owners, visual artists, and bloggers of all stripes can find something (or many things) to love about Gazette. The theme is particularly suited for those ...
Happy Theme Thursday, ladies and gentlemen! Let’s take a look at our two newest free themes, Saga and Satellite: Saga Saga, designed by the talented Justin Tadlock, is a theme tailor-made for writers, by a writer. The theme’s impeccable typography and attention to detail make for an enjoyable reading experience, and with support for large featured images and multiple post ...
Today I’m happy to introduce Blask, a free portfolio theme designed by Mel Choyce. Blask Blask is a modern portfolio theme that uses a clean, minimal layout to showcase your work. The bold grid design keeps the spotlight on your projects, and scales to fit any screen size. Blask also lets you share your thoughts and engage in a conversation with your visitors through ...
We don’t write blogs purely for ourselves — we write them to be read. For people who live far from family and friends, blogs serve twin readerships: they give the intrepid traveler a simultaneous way to chronicle travels for a broad audience and update those back at home. We love following the worldly adventures of these four expats and nomads, and we’re sure their friends appreciate the ...
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 ...
Automatticians, the people who build WordPress.com, participate in events and projects around the world every day. Periodically, they report back on the exciting things they do when not in front of a computer. Two weeks ago, Happiness Engineers Karen Arnold, Marjorie R. Asturias, and Jamil Abreu, as well as Code Wrangler Damian Suarez, attended the sixth annual Hispanicize conference in ...
We’re excited to introduce Museum, a new free theme! Created by WordPress.com’s own Kelly Dwan and Mel Choyce, Museum is crafted to showcase your best photographs, drawings, or illustrations. Featuring elegant, museum-inspired typography and ample room for your images, Museum pays special attention to category and media attachment pages to help your collections shine. Image posts are organized into collections by adding them to ...
It’s the time of the week again, Happy Theme Thursday! We’re pleased to present a new free theme, Cyanotype: Cyanotype Cyanotype, designed by yours truly, is a monochromatic blog theme with a bold, yet simple look that sets your blog apart from the rest. Pick your favorite background color or image to lend your personal flair. Cyanotype also supports the ...
It is with great excitement that I announce the opening of ticket sales for the Press Publish conference series we teased here earlier this month! After scouring the web for bloggers with inspiring stories, successful blogs, and unique voices, we’ve confirmed the speaker lineups, and are thrilled to be including popular WordPress.com bloggers like Katherine Fritz, Jerry Mahoney, Emily Austin, and Russ Crandall. Here’s our ...
Today, we welcome Plane and Capoverso to our WordPress.com theme showcase. Plane Say hello to Plane, the newest addition to our theme collection. Based on the Flato theme by ThemeMeme, Plane combines clean and modern design and a classic two-column layout. With support for both a custom header and a logo, it’s easy to make your site stand out from ...
