Supporting the blogging community – 2

If paying for something that you can get for free seems far too altruistic, then perhaps you can consider using the services of a theme designer to make a school website or blog look presentable. Even in this day and age, many websites look crap. This is as true of school sites as it is of those set up by ICT folk.

I’m in the middle of sorting out my company site for a relaunch and as a starting-point, I’m using a great theme designed and made freely available by Brian Gardner. However, he will create you a simple custom theme for about $200. This seems like incredible value. I’m going to get in touch with him.

Static school websites cost anything between £500 and £1000s and often look static and cheap. Brian and others like him will save you money and produce a school or personal site that looks good. You’ll be supporting the community in return. You might even turn some of these part-time designers into pompous yuppies! That everyone’s goal in life isn’t it;-)

Supporting the blogging community.

Suffering from a sort of design hyperactivity, I’ve changed the look of this blog yet again. The designer of this WordPress theme, Fredrik Fahlstad, offers this and other cool designs to the community to use for free. It must have cost him a fair bit of time though to design this template and I think it only fair that I should throw a financial ‘thank-you’ his way. I found a donate button on his blog and sent him 20 quid via paypal. I had never done that before for a free theme design. This particular theme has been downloaded 1308 times so far. If everyone contributed something to their favourite designer (or plugin creator) then that person would probably be even more inclined to continue producing (and supporting) themes and plugins. It seems to go against the grain in education though, paying for something that you can get for free. Shame really…