I use a lot of WordPress themes. Here are some I might like to give a go in 2010.

Many of the themes I found from WPHacks.com.

Evolution Theme

Source | Download | Demos: Blue, Green, Red

Daily Press Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Digital Statement Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Maggo Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Padangan Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Blue Block Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Dark Zen Theme

Source | Download | Demo

WP Premiere Theme

Source | Download | Demo

Hamasaki Theme

Source | Download | Demo

These are fonts that graphic designers would appreciate, below are ones that they wouldn't.

Design and development types take fonts very seriously. They even make documentaries about them.

By almost no one’s standards am I either. Still, I love a good fight over typeface. Why I’d really never fit the mold as a serious graphic designer, though, is because I’m not one to giggle at the standard set of Microsoft fonts. Indeed, there are a handful I actually quite like.

At the risk of facing the wrath of design quarters, below I share some of my favorite fonts that you probably have on every standard PC word processor, design application and font kit around.

Arial: OK. This is a quick way to turn off any professional designer. See, turns out Arial is considered a Microsoft knock off of the often worshiped Helvetica font. But guess what, I’ve always been a Microsoft user, so Arial is what I know. And knock off or not, I’ll say that I think I like Arial better anyway, and apparently you can tell the difference.

Boulder: I love me some sans serifs and rounded corners.

Cuckoo: Damn it, I like it. It’s that ‘y’ and that ‘k’ I think, which involve straight lines with the rounded corners of Boulder above.

Diediedie: Yes, something about a faux handwriting font wins over the uninitiated of us, and so I love diediedie. (This may be the root cause of the popularity of the much maligned Comic Sans).

Franklin Gothic: It’s more than a century old, perhaps named after Ben Franklin, a former standard newspaper font and still used in a variety of media, of course I dig this.

Heather: It’s a rare serif that works for me, something about the width, my friends.

Vagabond: See those notes from Boulder above, and add those bends and that ‘g’.

(I also love me some Herald, which I used for NEast, but that’s for another post.)

OK, either bash me for digging these basics from the Microsoft package or offer some others.

While I wouldn’t want anyone to go and brand on the same theme, I do like the idea of showing folks how top flight products can take hold on little more than a template. Below, I share a handful of WordPress themes I’ve seen used and used well.

Take it as motivation to find your own. Let me know some others you dig, by sharing in the comments. I won’t use yours, if you don’t use mine!

Typebased Theme used by Technically Philly

Source/Demo | Download

From here.

Freemium [Demo] used by NEast Philly

StudioPress Theme by My PICC Line

Source | Download | Demo

Premium News Theme by The Temple News

Source | Download | Demo

One Room [Demo] by, well, by me here

For more than eight months, NEast Philly, the online hub for Northeast Philadelphia news I introduced back in May, grew to a small, but targeted, 6,000 monthly page views, housed on a free template from WordPress.com.

Finally we have broken free. Yesterday we launched the brand new redesign of our neighborhood news site for the future.

No longer just a forwarding domain, NEastPhilly.com now aims to be the Web portal for content creation, aggregation and dissemination of news, views, information and events happening in Northeast Philadelphia, a middle-class, still print-reliant community. We hope to recapture our traffic numbers from the old site quickly and move far beyond them.

If you’re interested in the geography or another online news startup find a voice, audience and value, grab the RSS feed here.

What’s more, it’ll also be another experiment in establishing a small, self-supporting local news product. Unlike the Technically Philly product I co-founded that is a swing at a high-end, double niche, NEast is a decidedly more modest proposal.

Aggregate all the news on the Web, build on it with perspective and original reporting to create a one-of-a-kind audience based around a geographic locale, just like the small-town newspapers are that are faring a bit better than their big metro counterparts. The work is spearheaded by Shannon McDonald, while I (try to) handle its Web faculties and write occasionally, like other weekly contributors. We are a fine beginning to a product built for the coming years, I think.

This new incarnation of NEast carries the same content and the neighborhood-centric organization of the old, with the greater versatility of a self-hosted product, in addition to, yes, the very purposefuly chosen advertising space of this altered-Wordpress theme.

This industry needs experimentation, no? So, we launched TPhilly.com, and NEast and, as I introduced last month, health-care-related personal story site MyPICCLine.com.

We hope to keep overhead low, rely on user generated content, automation and occasional contributors to abut our professional reporting, and slowly build out from advertising beginnings to other revenue models.

But first, we need to build traffic and further brand recognition in the Northeast, bootstrapping all the way. It’s a long build, but I look forward to being a part of it. This is fine part-time work for now.

I am quite young, as are almost all of the others with whom I conspire in projects like this. But we’re in a period of great change in the news and information business. So, while I pay the bills by freelancing, I see no better obsession than trying to create additional work opportunities with small, niche media organizations for the future. Get the business plans out.

We can at least admit that the new version of NEast is a big step from the old one depicted below, right?

Any advice? Any likes or dislikes?

Finding an audience, a focus and a voice involves place, time and circumstances.

So, I knew what I’d talk about when I arrived at Hackensack University Medical Center the first week of July to see Matthew C. Sheehan, my best friend from growing up in northwest New Jersey who had long been looking for something meaningful to write about and had just been diagnosed with a rare blood disease.

Let’s get you to write about enduring the often-maligned U.S. healthcare industry at a time of great national interest. Of course, Matt, who graduated in May 2008 from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst with dual biology and journalism degrees, already had it in mind.

With graciously offered hosting space from my Philadelphia partner in media obsession Sean Blanda, a WordPress template and a few hours of my tinkering and Matt’s first couple weeks writing, I present MyPICCLine.com, his personal journey through the healthcare industry.

He’s tried before. My blogroll is stuffed with aborted attempts by Matt to be passionate about something. The kid can write, but writing about media or his native and beloved New Jersey or coupling such Garden State thinking with his freelance writing, never seemed to excite him enough to keep him motivated.

Thus far, he curates healthcare news, updates followers on his personal whereabouts (in of hospital, out of hospital, at the clinic, holed up in his parents’ Sussex County abode or his Weehawken walkup) and, most passionately, will share the mental state of a 23 year old who just this month was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a blood disease that less than a 1,000 Americans are afflicted with annually.

His traffic, which in just the first week without promotion and fanfare has fanned around 200-250 hits a day, blew higher, and he saw an outpouring of comments and e-mails after he wrote just such a post last week.

Just last night, right before bed my mother filed my toe nails. Nurses my age walk by, I just smile and nod as mother rounds off the edges.
“Much better,” she adds, gently wipings my feet down with alcohol,  we have to be cautious, I can’t afford any infections.

“Thanks mom,” I return in a tone she hardly deserves.

I’m a 23-year-old, who was working full-time less than three weeks ago, living in my own apartment, filing my own nails. [Read the rest here]

He’s also tweeting and joined Facebook — big steps if you know Matt — just to promote the site and help find people discover the story he’s trying to sell.

In fact, even earlier than I wanted, our hometown newspaper the N.J. Herald reached out and ran a big, front-page story on Matt and his condition. It was before Matt found his voice on My PICC Line and too early on in the process for the promotion, frankly, but there’s no turning down some good press. I hope very much to help him get larger publications to cover the site, too, and otherwise build his traffic.

Matt is passionate about writing consistently and meaningfully, developing a larger audience with whom he can share the story he and so many others have to tell and, more specifically, of trying to increase bone marrow and even blood donations — two things that will, yes, ultimately save his life.

There is a great emotional value to writing. This we’ve known for generations. The worst result of doing this, I told Matt, would be that no one reads it and in the coming years he’ll be able to look back and see his state of mind (and of blogging) at the beginning.

The best result, and something I think is entirely possible, is that he’ll develop a real readership, increase bone marrow donors (even by a very small number) find his own writing voice and niche and, really, keep him active and with purpose.

It’s too compelling a story to not follow and enjoy — whether you know him, or perhaps even more so — if you don’t.

I hope you will. You can subscribe via RSS here. If you have any questions, comments or criticisms post them below or contact me… or contact Matt here.

Finding an audience, a focus and a voice involves place, time and circumstances.

So, I knew what I’d talk about when I arrived at Hackensack University Medical Center the first week of July to see Matthew C. Sheehan, my best friend from growing up in northwest New Jersey who had long been looking for something meaningful to write about and had just been diagnosed with a rare blood disease.

Let’s get you to write about enduring the often-maligned U.S. healthcare industry at a time of great national interest. Of course, Matt, who graduated in May 2008 from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst with dual biology and journalism degrees, already had it in mind.

With graciously offered hosting space from my Philadelphia partner in media obsession Sean Blanda, a WordPress template and a few hours of my tinkering and Matt’s first couple weeks writing, I present MyPICCLine.com, his personal journey through the healthcare industry.

He’s tried before. My blogroll is stuffed with aborted attempts by Matt to be passionate about something. The kid can write, but writing about media or his native and beloved New Jersey or coupling such Garden State thinking with his freelance writing, never seemed to excite him enough to keep him motivated.

Thus far, he curates healthcare news, updates followers on his personal whereabouts (in of hospital, out of hospital, at the clinic, holed up in his parents’ Sussex County abode or his Weehawken walkup) and, most passionately, will share the mental state of a 23 year old who just this month was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a blood disease that less than a 1,000 Americans are afflicted with annually.

His traffic, which in just the first week without promotion and fanfare has fanned around 200-250 hits a day, blew higher, and he saw an outpouring of comments and e-mails after he wrote just such a post last week.

Just last night, right before bed my mother filed my toe nails. Nurses my age walk by, I just smile and nod as mother rounds off the edges.
“Much better,” she adds, gently wipings my feet down with alcohol,  we have to be cautious, I can’t afford any infections.

“Thanks mom,” I return in a tone she hardly deserves.

I’m a 23-year-old, who was working full-time less than three weeks ago, living in my own apartment, filing my own nails. [Read the rest here]

He’s also tweeting and joined Facebook — big steps if you know Matt — just to promote the site and help find people discover the story he’s trying to sell.

In fact, even earlier than I wanted, our hometown newspaper the N.J. Herald reached out and ran a big, front-page story on Matt and his condition. It was before Matt found his voice on My PICC Line and too early on in the process for the promotion, frankly, but there’s no turning down some good press. I hope very much to help him get larger publications to cover the site, too, and otherwise build his traffic.

Matt is passionate about writing consistently and meaningfully, developing a larger audience with whom he can share the story he and so many others have to tell and, more specifically, of trying to increase bone marrow and even blood donations — two things that will, yes, ultimately save his life.

There is a great emotional value to writing. This we’ve known for generations. The worst result of doing this, I told Matt, would be that no one reads it and in the coming years he’ll be able to look back and see his state of mind (and of blogging) at the beginning.

The best result, and something I think is entirely possible, is that he’ll develop a real readership, increase bone marrow donors (even by a very small number) find his own writing voice and niche and, really, keep him active and with purpose.

It’s too compelling a story to not follow and enjoy — whether you know him, or perhaps even more so — if you don’t.

I hope you will. You can subscribe via RSS here. If you have any questions, comments or criticisms post them below or contact me… or contact Matt here.

The older, WordPress.com version of this site.

Well this is overdue.

Exactly 575 days after my first post on this incarnation of ChristopherWink.com, I’ve done a massive redesign. If you’re in a feed reader, come on over and browse.

There is so much left for me to do, though. A lot of usability, design and organization elements remain janky. We’ll get to that. For now, I wanted to get over the big introduction hurdle of the redesign.

Of course, when I say redesign, I mean I switched from a free WordPress.com theme to using a free, self-hosted WordPress theme, but, hey, I’m tweaking this baby up.

It’s a slightly bold step forward.

Thanks to Sean Blanda, my friend, colleague and fellow co-founder of Technically Philly, who offered a good deal on hosting. There’s a lot of work left to be done for the transition, but for now it sure looks a bit more professional, no? I’ll be going through an overhaul of my portfolio, some of my site’s organization and certainly delving into greater, more detailed metrics. I also look forward to all the normal fun you can have on a normal, self-hosted site. All that said, I don’t intend on straying from my usual focus here, writing on being a young freelance journalist and (very) small time Web entrepreneur.

More to follow on the transition. But, for now, let me know what you think about the theme, called OneRoom. But yeah, please, don’t go and take it.

A host of people smarter than I am call Philadelphia magazine home.

Better writers, reporters, editors, designers, photographers and more. I suspect they know worlds more about the business model, their print product and Web presence, but I can’t help but think Phillymag.com has a lot of work to be done.

Their lessons are worth learning for all publications on the Web, particularly magazines. Philadelphia is too large a market, and Philadelphia magazine is too historic a product for both not to be served by innovation in every field and industry.

Below see four broad areas Philadelphia magazine can improve its less-than-remarkable online product.

Earlier this year, the 140,000-circulation glossy mag moved its Web site design to this from this, and while perhaps the shift cleaned up the job for staff and updated its interface, in terms of functionality, design and branding, I can’t say I believe it was an improvement.

Here is what I say is wrong.

Organization — It’s perhaps the most important element of any Web site. You want me to be able to find all your content. I can’t on Phillymag.com.

• Recent stories before this past November have no publication date associated with it. …Seriously. Here go to this story, which I called one of the best 2008 stories published in Philadelphia. Tell me when it was published if not for the comments. I dare you. (I do admit some older archived stories do have dates, for reasons beyond me. But why not include dates in the URL pattern?)
• Not a very good search field. Frankly, it’s ugly and there is no advanced search options. I can’t choose between listings, stories, features, bylines, etc. No choice of date, no excerpt included in the search field. So even when I search “Hall & Oates,” I get a host of listings for individuals that – and let’s be real – most readers don’t care about.
• You benefit from having a high-class audience. You get high-class advertisements. Could you get me a Google map, perhaps, with all your advertisers, perhaps, letting me click thru, navigate your ads? This is something new, but I can’t help but think that folks look at magazine ads in a way they don’t news print ads. Why aren’t you making better money off this?

Brands – In the online world this is likely the biggest change in importance from print. When you just had yourself a print magazine that people in this region read, well, OK, we know what you’re about. But now you have the opportunity – an opportunity I don’t think many in this region are capitalizing on yet – for your stories to be read around the country.

• Masthead — What masthead? It’s naked text, and the mag’s online icon is a green “P.” Really? What marketing consultant would ever recommend that? So why does Phillymag settle for it?
• What happened to the evergreen content? In switching over to their new site, lots was lost and it’s sadly inevitable. But the rules of online monetization is profiting on archives, passive income on what is already done. So why haven’t really brilliant pieces like this been spruced up and primed for eternal clicks and online ad-revenue, no matter how small it is?
• The Daily Examiner, the magazine’s blog and daily news presence is mostly dead, I guess. It had been the best blog in town for my money when A.J. Daulerio was running the ship, but now can you even find it from the home page? And if you do, you’ll see it isn’t its own brand, but rather housed on the site and lagging. I seem to get the feeling that too much has been pushed onto Tim Haas, Phillymag’s online editor. Blog? Daily online presence? Let the online guy do it. It’s a struggle too many publications have.
• All reporter names should link to their other bylines, and, Hell, a biography too. This should be standard stuff. Why aren’t you branding your content producers? Note for all publication, and really, all Web sites, do not link a name to an e-mail address that will thrust open Microsoft Outlook or another e-mail client. List the contact information for me, link to other work or a biography, so I can check the author’s conflicts, understand his authority and authenticity.
• Where’s the staff list? The contact page doesn’t give me a sense of the staff or brand them in anyway. This is a century-old publication, why don’t I know that after visiting its site? No history of Phillymag on this site? That is a primary suggestion I gave the Inquirer. Any newspaper or, really, any organization should offer a fairly detailed account of its history. That’s transparency, but that’s also branding. Remember, in an online world, your readers don’t have to already know who you are and what you’re about.

Design — Boys, this is square one for a print magazine, so why is it any different for its online product? There are a host of common magazine-design rules broken or otherwise ignored on Phillymag.com.

• What is the dominant image on the main page? There are too many boxes and that rotater – which is otherwise cool – should be twice as large.
• Embrace white space, they’ll teach you that day one in design class. On Philymag.com, the use of white space around its masthead makes it seem generic, un-branded.
• Are those perforated edges on the navigation bar? …Why?
• Where are the photos? Phillymag doesn’t show off its magazine-quality photos with wide banner shots at all. I want color content, big, wide photos.
• I want the advertisements to be larger and, I’d say, prettier. Magazines are known for their big, glossy advertisements, where are the online? How can you sell more expensive online advertisements if you aren’t offering anything more than a newspaperdotcom is? This is something about which all magazines need to think. Big, pretty ads, not popups, but biggers ads, maybe click-thru ads with big, bold images. Magazines, you were never supposed to give advertisers the same as newspapers, so why are you now online?
• Make it easier for me to read. Magazines are based on long-form texts, so give me a wider column. This is an example, I think, of refusing to innovate, but rather falling into what everyone else is doing. Get some designers and give me a wider column. And, while your at it, why not give me the option to have the entire story on one page, rather than forcing me to give you extra clicks. Wider columns can also warrant me wider photos.
• Where’s the multimedia? I understand not investing much money in this game because you aren’t bringing in money on it, but I’d think you’d want, oh, maybe one big multimedia project a month. Once a month launch a piece of evergreen, with hot design, video and big glossy photos. Make it something that will last forever, so you keep getting clicks for years to come.
• You know, sometimes you don’t immediately include all of the text online, like this story. I think I am alright with that right now. Of course, I don’t know if that actually makes anyone buy a subscription, but I understand it isn’t making you any money at this instant. So I’ll let others criticize that.

Dissemination – How are people getting Phillymag? Print readers are print readers and that’s just dandy – still value there. But online offers you the chance to broaden that reader base. How are you guys doing that?

• The above story that I called one of the best in 2008 focused on the owners of the Philadelphia Phillies, now World Series Champions. Who was trying to re-market that story for interest around the region once they were World Champions? Does Phillymag have a staffer who can do that to bring in hordes new readers on archives, to increase traffic and, one would hope, the value of their online advertising. Content doesn’t have to die online. Get off your old media idea that last month’s news is dead forever. You can still bring in readers. Think of folks who clip newspapers and even magazines. They want to return to those stories. Why doesn’t that carry over online?
• The Daily Examiner blog, mentioned above, seems now to be just filling a requirement. Hey, they tell us we have to have a blog, so there it is. But why not unchain it from its Web site and let it be active, out-linking more frequently and trying to drive traffic.
• Are we really not linking out or even linking within? I have to think some stories relate to older stories, so why not let me navigate your site. When the reader is done with your story, where is he going next? Ideally, you want options, either automatically generated related posts or enough interesting links in-text.
• I should add that the tagline of the Daily Examiner is, I joke you not, “Just another Metrocorp Blogs weblog.” I guess it was never changed. Fortunately it doesn’t come up on search fields, but when you sign up for an RSS feed, it sure does.
• Speaking of RSS feeds, there isn’t exactly a lot of goodness. The only one, as far as I can tell, is for the Examiner, which admittedly isn’t fresh daily and is limited more. Can I get just feature stories, or only blog posts or just interviews, etc.
  

Credits: I love Phillymag’s cover gallery and like how they offer readers ways to promote their work, like through Digg and Redd It in text. Also, I’ve always thought branding “PhillyMag.com” is great for online. If Phillymag remains profitable, which is almost surely will, that’s freakin’ awesome. This is a product I actually enjoy – note, disclaimer, whatever: I do have a subscription and genuinely look forward to it – but I have to believe they ought to make inroads into the future. Maybe I’m just crazy.

They aren’t hurting for content. While Phillymag gets ragged on for coming off uber-suburbs focused, I understand this is part of their business reality. I just wish they seemed more bullish on Philly and the phrases “New York” didn’t appear so frequently and with such idolatry. But the point is made that a product of their caliber shouldn’t have even an average Web presence. We should all expect innovation out of Philadelphia magazine. I don’t know if any of the mainstream media in Philadelphia have done that in years, maybe decades.

Why not start online?

Philymag.com simply doesn’t scream big glossy magazine. I think its redesign pales in comparison to what the Philly.com did last May and, while it has its own problem, the smaller and struggling 215 magazine is, I believe, a better online product than the bigger fish in town, Phillymag – although, I think 215 magazine is embarrassingly obsessed with New York in a way that even Phillymag isn’t.

So, what do you think? If you’re in Philly or not, as a reader of big publications, what do you think?

Let me know if I’ve been unfair or if you have any more thoughts or suggestions. I’d love to update this post further.

Mark this off the list of simple things I wanted to get done for this site.

I made the above banner, though I don’t have plans for using it as a header. Rather, it’ll serve its purpose as a focus when I need one, in places like on my blogging experience page. Something that no site in the world needs but will get action if it exists.

That banner goes along with claiming my Web sites on Technorati and grabbing an OpenID – and then realizing I didn’t need to do so.

Additionally, I implemented WordPress.com’s new-ish option to develop a “blavatar” – blog + avatar – for this site. A favicon goes a little way to creating a brand. See mine at right.

I did the same for other Web presences of mine.

In this case, meet my blue outline. Surely it’s a nod to the other Chris Wink – the founder of the Blue Man Group and my competition for Web searches. Now my Blue Man is the icon for this site, for the time being.

Want to see the banners over which I chose the above one? They’ll serve no other purpose, so here goes:

No. 1: the Blue Man seemed lame and the text was deemed too cartoonish, and, yes, too pink.

No. 2: Not big enough a change from No. 1.

No. 3: Here’s where I decided the Blue Man really needed a blank face if it existed at all, but the banner was boring otherwise.

No. 4: I liked incorporating my navigation bar as a means of branding my services. This was my choice before friends coaxed me into bringing the Blue Man back into the game.

No. 5: Clean, my second favorite of these losers, but too plain.

OK, now tell me where did I go wrong? Any advice? Do you have banners, blavatars or favicons? What were your experiences?

ChristopherWink.com was always meant to be my professional Web site, where I blogged about the interests and experiences that involve being a young journalist today. I decided I needed a place to display my more personal experiences, particularly pursuing My Life To Do List. I am announcing the soft launch of that site today.

When I was 13, I sat down in my bedroom of my parents’ home in rural northwest New Jersey and I composed a list of 26 things I had to do before I died.

From time to time, I have updated it, so that the list, now in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, is a more than 300-item syllabus for my life. It still governs the choices I make and experiences I want to have. It’s where my money goes and dreams lead.

So, if you’re hear for the chronicles of a young journalist, tips and advice, then stay here. But, I’d love it if you followed both. There I will share all those items I cross off the list, and the many experiences that never made it on the list, but perhaps should have. It is, to steal a line from a friend, a “memoir in motion.”

Still, that site isn’t as developed as I’d like it to be, and it won’t get any better now that I am traveling in Europe, podcasting with We Don’t Speak the Language, even if I will be crossing off plenty of items during the backpacking jaunt.

Nevertheless, stick with both, My Life To-Do List will be a far less regularly updated experience.