Howard Lindzon co-founded StockTwits® in 2008 and has led the company through several chapters since. StockTwits is the financial social network where traders post market commentary alongside a real-time ticker stream. By late 2010, his personal blog at howardlindzon.com had become a high-signal voice in the retail trading and early-stage investing community, the kind of property whose posts circulated quickly through the readers it served. This was a custom WordPress® theme build for that personal blog, completed in late 2010 / early 2011.
One engagement inside a network buildout
The Lindzon blog was not a standalone project for me. It was one site inside a cluster I was building for the broader StockTwits ecosystem during the same 2010–2011 stretch, alongside the wider StockTwits Blog Network — a curated directory of the principal StockTwits voices on which howardlindzon.com was listed as a contributor property. Same workflow, same publishing rhythm, same audience habits to design for. One cluster, not three commissions.
When you build several sites for the same media ecosystem in the same year, you stop thinking about each one as a bespoke design problem and start thinking about what the network as a whole has to feel like. Coherent enough that a reader hopping from one author to another does not feel jolted. Distinct enough that each author still sounds and looks like themselves on their own domain. That is a different muscle than building one site in isolation, and it is the muscle that made this engagement interesting beyond a single theme.
What a custom theme meant in 2010
Custom WordPress theme work in late 2010 / early 2011 was a different practice than it is now. Gutenberg was years away. Page builders as we now know them did not exist. “Custom theme” meant hand-rolled PHP templates, hand-rolled CSS, a handful of trusted plugins, and a developer who actually understood how the_loop worked. The theme was the product. It had to hold up under the kind of post cadence a daily financial blogger keeps — frequent updates, chart screenshots, ticker links embedded inline, an active comment community, the occasional traffic spike when a post got picked up by a larger outlet.
The theme’s job was to stay out of the writing’s way. Readers were there for Howard’s voice and for the calls he was making in real time. The build leaned into fast, legible, reliable through traffic spikes, and predictable enough that the writer never had to think about it on a Tuesday morning when the market was moving.
- Platform: WordPress, custom theme
- Period: Late 2010 / early 2011
- Client: Howard Lindzon (co-founder, StockTwits)
- Context: Part of the broader StockTwits Blog Network buildout
Where the network pattern shows up next
Any organisation running a network of author or contributor properties has a version of this problem. Newsroom property-networks where each masthead needs its own identity and the publisher needs shared rails underneath. Podcast networks where every show is its own brand. Creator collectives where each voice keeps their own domain but the group benefits from coherent infrastructure. Multi-brand publisher groups where the platform team is one floor down and the editorial team is upstairs. The work is figuring out which layer of the stack the individual author owns and which layer the network owns, and then giving each author the room to actually sound like themselves on top.
The other properties in that 2010–2011 StockTwits buildout each carry their own entry in this portfolio: the corporate blog at StockTwits Blog, the educational property StockTwits U, the forex vertical at StockTwits FX, and the curated editorial product StockTwits 50. Lindzon’s personal blog was the contributor end of that network; the sibling entries are the platform end.
The original build was catalogued on my then-portfolio site, rodonic.com, under the slug howard-lindzon-blog-design, and was carried forward as a portfolio reference in a 2018 client list. This entry rebuilds the record from those sources.
