You may have noticed a slight difference in the look of The Blueprint.  It was originally built from the framework of the Flexx theme from iThemes, but it’s now sporting a brand new core.

I recently finished creating my very first Wordpress theme called ‘frugal’.  In its stock form it’s a super clean, minimalist Wordpress theme that has everything you need to properly showcase your blogs content and not a code snippet more.  Since creating this theme I’ve gone ahead and rebuilt Motivate Thyself with it and now The Blueprint.  (Dan Miranda of Command Your Time is running it in stock form)

The New Features

I tried to stick with the same general look.  I didn’t necessarily want to redesign The Blueprint, just infuse frugal’s core code to see what happened.  Here’s what has changed:

• Guest Post Submit button: I’ll explain more about this later in this post, but there is now a clickable button in the header for guest post submissions.
• Category Bar: Now, instead of the categories mixing in with the rest of the sidebar content, they sit right under the main navigation bar for easy access (this was a Flexx feature as well, we just never utilized it).
• A Kind of Share-This space above the comments: By way of widget, I’ve added an easy way for readers to share, subscribe and follow, right above the comments.
• MY FAVORITE!  Threaded comments: Now we can reply directly in the comments instead of having to @ everybody.  I’ve been using this on Motivate Thyself ever since I change over to frugal and I’ll never go back!

There are a few more minor differences.  You’ll notice the main navbar is a bit different as well as other minor design changes.

What is the frugal Theme?

As I’ve already mentioned, this is my very first Wordpress theme creation and I’m quite proud of it.  I’ve had great feedback thus far and look forward to seeing it on more an more blogs.  It’s totally FREE and is the **shamelessly inserting anchor text** best free wordpress theme available!

frugal came about while I was looking for a theme to meet my Wordpress theme customization requirements.  I needed something that could be the perfect clean slate theme to build off of.  The problem was that there were either simple themes that were poorly built and had none of the features I deemed essential (threaded comments capable, attractive, custom avatar size and placement without having to add a plugin, clean code that validates, etc…) or full featured themes that required a complete stripping before they could be properly customized.  So I built frugal to fill this need.

frugal is an excellent Wordpress theme in its stock form for anyone looking for a super light, fast, clean theme to do nothing more than make their content shine.  But if you want to customize it, I’ve included a 29-page ebook that goes over both the basics of Wordpress theme design as well as how to specifically customize your frugal theme.  And like I said, it’s all FREE!  So be sure to check it out, download it, promote it if you like it and give me feedback so I can keep improving it!

Share Your Voice!

Now for the focus shift for The Blueprint.  Sean and I have talked a lot about what direction we want to take The Blueprint and with the recent introduction of the best copywriting blog in existence I felt is was time to make a decision and move forward with the adjustments.  So here goes…

Most of us are bloggers, right?  And we all, at some point or another, have great ideas to share about this very subject.  But few of us have an established venue to share our great blogging insights.  Sean and I would like The Blueprint to be that place.

So what we’re doing is offering an open door to submit post ideas.  We want you to be able to take that blogging idea or tip or whatever you think needs to be aired out, and share it with our readers.

Open Debates

One of the things that we have enjoyed at BB is the willingness for this community to hash it out in the comments.  Tired of the ‘bland posts/pats on the back’ kind of content, we’re looking for ideas that will shake things up.  We want bloggers who are willing to put themselves out there a bit.  Not all posts should be agreeable and frankly it’s the agreeable ones that are often the most boring.  Let’s learn from heated discussions and brutal debates (tactful, respectful, brutal debates ), and make The Blueprint an exciting venue to chat up blogging, while sharpening our online presence.

To submit a guest post request or just learn a bit more, go to our guest posting page.

Question (I’m totally stealing this from Collective Inkwell’s last post): What kinds of posts do you find most interesting to read AND which ones seem to invite the best conversations in the comments?

Eric

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