WebHelperMagazine.com

Welcome to WebHelperMagazine.com. Please consider signing up for our RSS feed. Check out our job board, and be sure to leave comments -- we post your name and a link to your site as a way to thank you for joining the WHMag conversation.

by Scott Frangos

If you’re a WordPress BlogMaster, you probably love all of the themes there are out there for free. Of course there are paid themes too, and some good reasons to use those with advanced capabilities, but free is always a very nice price. And now here comes HP (yup, that HP) with a nice offering of over 20 free templates. Hmmmm… HP? Well, it seems that that HP, through its LogoWorks division, want to offer the templates to build awareness of and gain customers for their “Logoworks” line of services which includes custom blog designs ranging from $449 to $1999. Smart.

Above, Logoworks (a division of HP), has a free theme viewer on it’s front page, above the paid service listings.

The themes are all fairly standard, as layout goes, with two columns — one for posts, and a sidebar for widgets. They all rely on a strong graphic to convey an image and set a style. For example, there are several that offer a modern grunge like graphic at top of page which gets echoed in the background and the rest of the design. One offered with a large fire graphic at top uses orange from the flames as the heading color to tie the theme’s design together.

I downloaded one to have a look at the set of files you receive, and found that the Logoworks designers have included a number of graphic files to build the theme. The Typewriter theme, shown below, relies on a large graphic of an old manual typewriter (anyone remember those?), to set the visual metaphor for writing a blog. In addition to the lead graphic at top and behind the text columns, there are some background graphics for post titles, bullets, and rounded corners at the top of the sidebar.

Above, the images in use are outlined in red (using the Web Developer extension for FireFox).

The designers elected not to use “Courier” font, for some reason, which I think would tie-in better with the idea of typing (old typewriters used a font like that — ok, I admit it… I have been around long enough to know that). I also think the text is a bit hard to read — contrast improves legibility, and the dark brown background does not contract enough from the creamy type color.

So… why does HP do WP? If you dig around on their site you find this blurb: “Hewlett-Packard plans to leverage Logoworks’ technologies and professional design services in its large portfolio of small business products and services.” Free templates, not quite finished lead to orders for revisions, and maybe custom design. And of course, you can print out the drafts on your HP printer using HP ink. Not a bad strategy. What do you think? Leave a comment here and we’ll thank you with your site link in our sidebar.