Early Theme Adopters: Espied

WordPress.com News

From a full-blown professional portfolio to a streamlined homepage, Espied, which was launched a few short weeks ago, gives you a wide variety of options to display your best work.

You can tailor the theme to suit your most exacting needs. On top of standard customization touches like a custom header image, Espied comes with four featured color palettes, different layouts to choose for your featured images, and a custom social links menu. The Portfolio feature gives you even more choices to control the way your visitors experience your site.

Let’s take a look at some of the creative uses of Espied.

CDM Productions

cdm productions early theme adopters
The graphic designer behind CDM Productions has created a lively, colorful portfolio homepage using Espied. Hooked by the visuals, interested readers — and potential clients — can easily find additional information in the fly-out side panel menu, from the designer’s blog to a contact form to a “Hire…

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Rev Up Your Writing with Our Blogging U. Challenge

WordPress.com News

Lots of us start blogs with the intention of writing regularly, but quickly find ourselves struggling to sit down at the keyboard. Cultivating a consistent writing habit isn’t as easy as starting a blog — but we can help!

Writing 101: Building a Blogging Habit is a write-every-day challenge designed to help you create a writing habit, publish posts that mesh with your blog’s focus, and push you a bit as a writer. It’s also a great way to make new friends and find new favorite reads. All bloggers are welcome, whether you use WordPress.com, are self-hosted, or use another platform entirely.

Here’s how it works:

  • We’ll post a new writing assignment just for Writing 101 each weekday in June on The Daily Post. Assignments will publish at 10:00 AM EST (14:00 PM GMT). You can follow The Daily Post to get assignment notifications.
  • There are no weekend assignments — you’re…

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Promote Your Books and Blog: A Look at Author Websites

WordPress.com News

The comments poured in on our last twoposts highlighting new books by WordPress.com authors. We’re happy to host such a prolific literary bunch! For those of you interested in using a website to promote your books, take a look at three authors on WordPress.com who do this well — each with very different designs and approaches:

H. G. Robert

We found H. G. Robert’s website from a comment he’d left on a previous post. I clicked on his link and was delighted to find a simple, clean, and effective homepage for his self-help book:

The black-and-white design is crisp and stylish, and with just a few elements to focus on, you can’t miss anything. A highlighted “Read more” button takes you to another clean, concise page with a book synopsis, excerpt, and reviews.

His menu at the top right includes just two links, to his bio and blog.

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Early Theme Adopters: Illustratr

WordPress.com News

If you’re looking for a theme to showcase your creative work — be it your words, images, or multimedia projects — Illustratr, launched last month, might be just what you’re looking for. It has a distinct, effortlessly cool look, but is also easy to customize to create a tailor-made design.

The theme (designed by Automattic’s own Thomas Guillot) lets you take full advantage of the Portfolio feature, so you can create beautiful showcases for your best content. Even if you opt for a classic blog layout, splashy featured images and other custom touches (like social icons in your custom menu) will draw your readers in.

Looking for some inspiration? Here are just a few of the thousands of striking sites already using Illustratr.

Derek Roczen

early theme adopters derek roczen

With a name like Illustratr, it comes as no surprise that visual artists of all stripes flock to this theme. Illustrator and…

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Tax Rebates With Tankless Water Heaters

Tankless water heaters are quite different from the regular run of the mill water heaters you find in most homes or http://www.noritzwholesale.com/. As the name suggests, these water heaters don’t have a storage tank where water is stored after being heated. This is the reason why these water heaters are also referred to as on demand water heaters since they only heat water as and when you need it.

These heaters come in gas as well as electricity varieties. The electric variety uses an element to heat cold water as it passes through a pipe while the gas heater does the same thing but with the help of a burner and not an element. There are advantages to both these types of heaters but at the end of the day, tankless water heaters come out on top for one major reason, they are environmentally friendly.
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The cost of energy is at an all time high and this has forced many people to start concentrating on green energy. There are many different types of alternatives available to people in order to make purchasing tankless water heaters and other energy efficient devices easy on your pocket. Some of the most common incentives available include tax rebates, tax credit or sometimes even both. All you need to do is speak with your city’s tax company and you will know exactly what kind of rebates they have to offer. Ensure you get a tankless water heater which qualifies for such incentives though as not all of them do. The rules may vary from state to state but in most cases, you can rest assured that if you are doing your bit for the environment, the government will do its bit for you.

As far as searching for the best tax credits are concerned, you need to understand that this isn’t exactly the same thing. Instant rebates can be claimed immediately on purchase of your water heater but tax credit is something which you will have to claim while filing your tax returns. This can help reduce the amount of tax you need to pay in a year depending on how your returns are structured. This is much better as compared to a rebate since credit is taken from the tax which you owe the government and will not lower your taxable income. So you see, tankless water heaters don’t only help save the environment, they help save you money as well. So what are you waiting for? Get one for your home today.