UPDATE: I now recommend these three WordPress theme-makers for podcasting: StudioPress (my first choice), Appendipity, Elegant Themes, and Thesis.
If you've listened to The Audacity to Podcast™, you know that I've talked about making a WordPress theme specifically for podcasters. Combined with my background in web design with my own podcasting, I can see many things that podcasters would want a theme to do and have been—rather slowly—attempting to incorporate these ideas into the theme running Noodle.mx Network.
However, have I set my sights too high to be reasonable? Being recently married, working full-time, and podcasting, I'm finding very little time to develop the podcaster's theme with what little programming knowledge I have. My primary skills are design, not programming.
Enter Thesis, whose banners even say, “How smart is your WordPress Theme? How good is your support?” I would certainly have little to no time to support my paying customers for the podcaster's theme, and it's very possible that much of what I want to do already exists in Thesis.
So I can either continue to design my own theme, and probably not achieve my goals, or switch to designing Thesis-based and Standard Theme-based sites for podcasters.
What are your thoughts? Please comment or email me at feedback@TheAudacitytoPodcast.com.
Whoa. That's big. I thought Thesis was compatible with child themes. I've done plenty of work with child themes in the past, and had assumed that I would be able to with Thesis, as well. This would seem to be where Standard Theme would have greater capabilities. Thank you for pointing that out.
Daniel, have you considered StudioPress themes? They run on what's called the Genesis framework (fancy term for the Parent theme). I'm using it on my site http://propodder.com and got the idea from ProBlogger and CopyBlogger (both use it as well). Extremely flexible.
As for creating one on your own, an honorable task. But instead of just doing everything yourself, have you considered outsourcing a lot of the work? You can literally put together a simple Keynote, PowerPoint, Illustrator or PhotoShop layout of what you have in mind then find someone on eLance or such site to produce the final work.
Actually, Genesis is my top consideration at this point. Mashable even called it the successor to Thesis. But I'd like to see what kind of admin options it has, and the level of theme hooks for developing a child theme.
You can click to their site on my affiliate link at http://proppodder.com
Take a look at the SUPPORT tab… that's where their forums are. And under the Dev.SP tab you'll find the Theme Development forums.
Thesis is compatible with child themes. There arent many out there but they are there. I use one at http://drivingcommonsense.com has one that is designed by Kolakube. But trying to design a theme for podcasters sounds more like trying to reinvent the wheel. Maybe a design layout that would appeal to podcasters would be cool but take into consideration that a podcast is basically a blog that is spoken. So why try to redesign something that already works. I can vouch for Thesis. It is very easy to work with and even my own little crappy skills can manipulate it through the Thesis Hook plugin.
Here is the link to Kolakube if you wanted to download one of there free Thesis skins to try out. http://kolakube.com/
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