WordPress 3.0 is on a stable release and the developers have ironed out any bugs by releasing 2 core updates to bring the current release to version 3.0.2.

In light of these new updates I’ve made some small updates to both my theme designs to take advantage of the new features of WordPress 3.0. These include support for the new custom menu system, which means it’s much easier to create and edit your own menu’s directly from the admin dashboard.

For those who don’t know – Workbase and ProLab are custom themes I’ve designed to appeal to designers, visual artists, photographers, bloggers or anyone looking to present their services in a well designed, easily editable way.

Both themes can be customised to suit any branding and colour scheme. Why not head over to the demo pages to see them in action:

WorkBase Theme Demo

ProLab Theme Demo

The ease of use was important for non-techy types. Creating and editing galleries is as easy as creating a gallery, uploading your photo’s and copy pasting in a shortcode. You can tag your photo’s add captions, resize images and embed slideshows in the sidebars if you wish.

After researching other photography themes, I came to the conclusion that the photo’s should be the star, not the site graphics. I’ve kept things minimal and clean so the photography really stands out. I will be using this theme to re-design an existing clients site and hopefully other photographers will be interested in using it to show off their work and generate new business.

View the Demo

Roger’s recent books are a series of historical crime novels set in St Petersburg and featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment. He wanted to evoke something of the dark, harsh times in which the novels are set. He also wanted to be able to write his blog and have it as part of the site. It was really nice to have an open brief from a fellow creative, so I set about designing a custom WordPress site that would showcase his writing and allow him to blog.

Rogernmorris is the outcome of my labour. The custom WorkBase child theme I had designed a few months ago served as the backbone. I was able to create a site that fitted in with the themes in Roger’s books, while being easily updated and maintained by Roger himself. I walked him through the admin side, and in no time he was up and running.

I’d like to thank Roger for being such an easy going client and wish him the best of luck in his writing. You can find out more about his books on the website and buy them from Amazon.

Thanks also Rog for biggin me up to your publisher Faber. One of their new writers, Alex Preston, contacted me shortly after Roger’s site went live to ask me if I could do a similar job for him. His new book, “This Bleeding City” will be published by Faber early next year. I also designed his website and blog which you can visit here.

During my research I found some truly awesome writers sites, although these tended to be ‘big money’ authors who have already sold millions of books. I did struggled to find decent, well designed sites for lessor known writers though. It is a shame that people so talented with words and language seem to have to settle for sub standard visual design for their online presence, which has become such an important part of bringing their work to a larger audience.

I myself had no idea what a ‘child theme’ was until I found an interesting article over at op111. I wanted to create a WordPress theme that appealed to creatives, individuals and small businesses (or even large ones), that was simple and easy on the eye. Instead of reinventing the wheel I figured I’d find an existing theme I liked and customise it.

Graph Paper Press had the exact theme I was after. It’s called Workaholic. So I signed up and downloaded the theme and got down to creating my own version. The result is a child theme – so called because it’s based on a parent theme (Workaholic in this case), which I’ve called WorkBase.

As you can see it’s really clean and well laid out and even has Twitter integration. I changed the colour scheme, graphics and some core functionality of the original theme to make it, well, much better in my opinion. By far the best change I made was integrating SmoothGallery into the theme. This replaces the rather clunky image gallery that was included. SmoothGallery is a Flash-like image slideshow viewer. Using a plugin to integrate it into the theme meant I now had a fully user editable slideshow. I also improved some of the graphic elements and gave the whole theme a classy sheen.

To find out more about WorkBase, how to get the files, installation instructions and how I can design and install a custom version of the theme for your website, simply click the button below:

UPDATE: I’m in the process of updating WorkBase. As such it won’t be available to download until I know it’s solid. Click the button above to check out the demo.