This week I put up a website whose only job is helping people find the themes I’d already built. It’s a strange chore for someone who spends a good share of his week on sites about getting found, and it wasn’t even the biggest thing to go live.
Almost everything that left the workshop this week was a last step: a theme cleared review, a theme line finally got a front door, two of my own sites got redesigned and actually reached visitors, and the newsletter went out on schedule. None of it was the hard part. The hard part happened weeks ago, on other days, mostly out of sight. This week was just the part where something finished on my machine finally becomes something someone else can see.
Masthead joins Quillwork as a free block theme on WordPress.org
Masthead cleared WordPress.org theme review on Wednesday and went live the same day. It’s a newspaper-style block theme for publishers, with Playfair Display headlines, multi-column layouts that behave like a front page, a dark reading mode for anyone who reads the news in bed, and accessibility built to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA guidance.
It joins Quillwork, which has been on WordPress.org since July 1, all Cormorant Garamond with teal and ochre. Both are free WordPress block themes built for full site editing, and they sit on the same shared core. That core works like a jig in the woodshop: build it once, carefully, and every cut after it lines up. A new theme in the line starts with the layout logic already solved and gets to spend its time on the parts a reader notices, the type and the colour and the way a front page breathes.
The honest part is the arithmetic. Quillwork went up on July 1 and Masthead joined it on September 23, so that’s nearly three months between the first Colophon theme on WordPress.org and the second. The showcase site (more on that below) puts the whole line at eleven themes so far, everything from a marina booking site to one built for furniture rescue and resale, which puts the WordPress.org count at two of eleven. I’m choosing to hear that as momentum.
A showcase site for the Colophon theme line
Which brings me back to the website that exists so people can find my themes. Until this week, anyone curious about the Colophon line could find two of them on WordPress.org and had to already know the names to find the rest. I made the line, so I made that problem too.
So themes.thisismyurl.com is live now, with the whole line in one place. You can look at Masthead’s front-page columns and Quillwork’s Cormorant Garamond on the same site and work out which one suits your publication, without a pile of browser tabs. It’s easily the least technical thing I shipped all week, and I suspect it’ll be the most useful to anyone who isn’t me.
Two site redesigns in one week: a river map and a campground
The other big track was a pair of my own sites, both redesigned from the ground up, for audiences with close to nothing in common.
The Niagara one, niagaraseo.com, is about local search, and its new design (I’d been calling it Cartographer) opens on a schematic map of the Niagara River that doubles as the navigation, with each of the eight town pages reached from the map. I confirmed it live in a fresh browser on Tuesday, because a browser that has already seen the old site is the least reliable witness in the building.
Over at campgroundwebdesigner.com, a site about web design for campgrounds and RV parks, the redesign went somewhere else entirely: a white header, a blue-square logo, a split hero with photo cards, and a pricing card built around three sizes. After the deploy came the cache purge, the dull but necessary step where a new design actually reaches the people visiting, and after that I checked 18 pages at two screen widths. Thirty-six looks at one website on a Monday, and by the end I could have drawn that header from memory.
Where the week landed, and newsletter number nine
Edition nine of AI Learning, Keeping It Human, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter, went out on Thursday. Eight editions came before it. It lives on my personal profile rather than a company page, which feels right for a newsletter with the word human in the title, and it’s the one place this week where the thing I shipped was mostly me thinking out loud.
Lay the week out end to end and very little of it was invention. Most of it was finishing, the waiting-on-a-review and clearing-the-cache kind of work that never makes the highlight reel. A couple of weeks ago I was taking stock of the thirty-odd side domains I’d half forgotten I owned (that’s in the previous installment), and this week a few of the things I build finally left the house.
If you run a publication and want a theme like Masthead set up for your newsroom, or a site that’s been sitting half-finished waiting for someone to push it the rest of the way, it’s the work I do for clients too, and the publishers page has the details.
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