I just wanted to say thanks to all of you who helped me raise $2600 for the Chicago Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk. I’m on my way out the door to leave for that, and won’t be back until Sunday night. Wish me luck, and the strength to endure 60 miles of walking.

For those who are new to my blog, you can read all about my involvement for the cause to help fight breast cancer.

One last thing. Project X is ahead of schedule, and more than likely will be released next week! So long…

Over the past few months, I have seen a significant trend in request for custom WordPress themes – more and more people are emailing me and asking me to design them a theme that looks like a newspaper or online magazine.

As WordPress becomes more popular, people are becoming aware of the fact that the capabilities exceed that of a typical blogging platform, and can be used as a reliable content management system. I have now created the Revolution WordPress theme to accomplish that!

I would say that the thing I hear most is “I don’t want my blog to look like a blog.” In my opinion, people are bored with the look and functionality of a typical blog, and want to take theirs to “next level”.

Aside from individuals having these requests, there is also a growing number of small business/publications that are wanting to test how far we can make WordPress go – this is the primary reason I taught myself how to code PHP and CSS.

With the help of the WordPress Codex and support forums, taking WordPress to the next level with customizations is quite possible. Granted, it takes a fair degree of code knowledge, how to play with “the loop” and make special function calls.

If you are looking to use WordPress for an online magazine or online newspaper, feel free to contact me – I’d love to work with you on creating a custom theme.

When you answer that question, one thing to remember is how much work you would normally spend customizing a basic theme that can be found over at Theme Viewer or on other websites. If you think it might be a few hours, then give yourself some credit and value how much time you would save by not having to modify it so much.

Here’s what I can tell you far about the Project X theme. The theme’s main site will have a tutorial blog, which will be updated regularly to show you how to modify and enhance the theme even further. One thing to know is that it will be extremely easy to modify, and will be pretty much ready to use “out of the box”.

The theme will have a single page file, a static page file, a featured page file, a news page file, an archive page file and possibly a few more. This means that with the help of a tutorial, you can take your blog to a higher level and have multiple page layouts within your blog.

So back to the original question - how much would you pay for a premium theme?

On September 1st, a revolutionary theme will be born. This theme will be the answer to anyone and everyone who wants their blog to look like a website. (While remaining a blog.)

It will have it’s own site dedicated to it, and will have the ability to be customized in ways you can’t comprehend. There will be multiple stylesheets available, with multiple background images and simply so much more.

I’ll forewarn you, it will be a premium theme - the time it will take to develop this definitely warrants that.

Depending on my schedule, the theme might release early, yet in the same breath, it might be delayed. I have a huge vision for this, and want to make sure it’s ready, XHTML compliant, and the best it can be before it’s released.

On a side note, the name of the theme will change - Project X is part of the mystery. Stay tuned…

Whitespace is a minimalistic 3-column Widget-ready theme created for WordPress.

3-Column Version
Live Demo | Download Now ↓