I’m really pleased to announce that I’m releasing my first FREE WordPress Theme – ThreeColumnsBlue.

It’s based on the custom WordPress Theme I designed for the Dad: About the Boy blog and will give any blog a clean, stylish and very readable look.

The 3 column design in cool blue comes configured ready to use Rob Marshes’ excellent Recent Posts and Recent Comments plugins (both of which need the Post Plugin Library as well) to really help show off your content. And if you haven’t installed Rob’s plugins the Theme degrades gracefully so you’d never know anything was missing.

Live Demo

Why not take a look at the live demo of Theme:

Demo 

Download

If you liked what you saw in the demo click the link below to download the Theme:

Download The ThreeColumnsBlue Theme!

If you do use the theme, please drop a link in the comments below, I’d love to see it in action!

Link baiting is a great way to improve your search engine rankings.

That’s because two of the most important factors that Google uses when creating it’s Search Engine Results Pages are the number of and quality of inbound links to a site.

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Here’s the second part of my 5-part guide to help you through the process of integrating a WordPress blog into your existing Web site:

1. Checking Your Web Hosts Has the WordPress Pre-Requisites Installed
2. Installing WordPress On Your Web Server
3. Creating Your WordPress Theme
4. Uploading Your Theme
5. Adding Links to Your Web site

This time I’ll talk you through installing WordPress on your Web host.

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A question that’s be on my mind recently is why is the content of some excellently designed offline magazines (you know the one’s you actually have to hold in your hands) so very boring in their online versions?

It’s never designed, it’s typography is non-existent, it just sits in a narrow column, squeezed by screen clutter, broken up by the occasional image (that never fits the column). Online content is no longer king. It’s be dethroned by usability and findability, by adverts and chicklets.

So I’ve been looking at ways to present online content in a creative and interesting format.

Ways to break out of such a restrictive grid layout and into something that allows designers and publishers more freedom.

And most importantly, ways that put the content back at the heart of a WordPress site.

With this in mind, over the next few weeks I’ll be completing the development of a new “magazine” style WordPress Theme.

The Theme will have some support for multi-column layout (OK, Mozilla, IE6 and IE7 only) and have built in CSS hooks to enable users to quickly and easily change the way content is laid out on screen.

SiFR will be built in to produce more attractive screen typography whilst maintaining flexibility and accessibilty.

The Theme will also support custom style sheet uploads to individual Posts and Pages giving publishers even more control over how Posts and Pages are displayed on screen.

And the Theme will, in addition to a standard blog chronological publishing model, support an “Edition” model of publishing – enabling you to organize Posts into a single edition of your magazine, published when you choose to publish it.

Most importantly, this Theme will be released under the Creative Commons licence for free.

It’s something I’m passionate about and this Theme is something that I’m getting quite excited about so please check back in a few weeks when the Theme will be ready to downlaod.