We love WordPress.com and have a lot of happy Theme Foundry users over there. It’s a great managed solution for people who are new to WordPress or just getting started with a blog or website. But occasionally we are asked about transferring from a site hosted on WordPress.com to a self-hosted installation of WordPress.org. Today we’re going to look what you can expect if you decide to move your site from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress.org site (and vice versa).

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Have you launched your blog, brand, or business site with Make yet? If so, we’d love to showcase your work alongside other amazing Make & Make Plus users.

We love seeing you push the limits of what’s possible with Make & Make Plus. We know that without you—your content, your vision, your unique take on the design and layout of each individual page—the theme itself is a blank canvas.

Your success can inspire the next photographer, writer, designer, organization or entrepreneur to put together a professional, polished web presence.

Share your site with us so we can spread the word about your brand or business!

All we need from you is a tweet—tell us how you’re using Make. Be sure to include a link to your site! Each week we’ll select another user to showcase on the Make website.

Use the hashtag #iusemake or tweet to us @thethemefoundry so we can continue this conversation. We’ve made it easy for you with some pre-written examples (click the links to edit and then tweet!):

#iusemake

Hey @thethemefoundry – Check out our site! #iusemake

Drag & drop page builder + a ton of customizer options? Of course #iusemake

We created a new #WordPress website with Make by @thethemefoundry and we love it! #iusemake

We can’t wait to see your site up on our customer showcase! Keep up the great work!

It’s been a little over a year since we launched Oxford — and since then, we’ve seen so many magazines and blogs start up, really leveraging the featured content area and typography to push their content to the fore.

Here are ten amazing magazines you should be reading (that all happen to use Oxford). What really stands out about each of these sites is that it’s not the theme, rather the writing, photography, and editorial stylings of each that makes them so effective.

Which is exactly what we were aiming for.

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Today we’re happy to report that Bailey, a premium theme we’ve only had available for WordPress.org sites, is now available for users on WordPress.com. You can purchase Bailey on your WordPress.com dashboard, or directly from the theme showcase page.

Like Oxford, Bailey is special because of the premium Typekit fonts bundled right into it — a feature you won’t find on other WordPress.com themes. If typography and design are important to you, we know you’ll love this theme. WordPress.com makes it effortless to get your site up and running, but should you run into any problems using one of our themes, you’ll also have access to our same quality support in the premium themes support forums on WordPress.com.

Not sure if WordPress.com is for you? Check out this list of the features and benefits, and take a look at all our premium themes available on WordPress.com.

Version 1.5.0 of Make was released into the wild today, and we’re pretty excited about the changes included in this release!

In version 1.5.0 of Make, the Customizer gets an overhaul. We’ve added a bunch of new theme options, improved the interface for controlling some of them, and reorganized things to make everything easier to find.

New interface

Inspired by the Kirki project, we added some new Customizer controls:

A range slider for adjusting numbers. These are used for font sizes, line heights, letter spacing, and more.

Button sets, which are easier to toggle than a dropdown. These are used in many places where there are a small number of options to choose between, such as font weight, link underlining, and the site layout.

New Typography Options

Make 1.5.0 includes several additional typographic properties that can be adjusted, including font weight, font style, line height, letter spacing, and word spacing.

We’ve also introduced a few new customizable elements in this release, including sidebar widget titles, and footer widget titles and bodies.

You can now also customize whether links in the header, body, widgets, etc., will be underlined.

We’ve also enhanced the font family dropdowns in 1.5.0, making it much easier to find the font you’re looking for among the 500+ Google font options.

New Color Scheme Options

Make 1.5.0 includes several new color options that will override parts of the global color scheme when set. These include header and footer colors, menu colors, and widget colors. We’ve also added separate color options for various links when they are in their hover/focus states. And for background color options, Make now includes accompanying options to control the opacity, so you can have semi-transparent (or entirely transparent) backgrounds.

For background images, we’ve enhanced the standard background position option so you can set both horizontal and vertical positioning right from the Customizer.

Updates & New Integrations

In addition to a couple of bug fixes, we’ve updated to the latest set of FontAwesome icons, added a new Russian translation, and added style support for Postmatic. Check out the complete changelog for more details.

For Make Plus, version 1.5.0 is mostly a compatibility update to keep up with these changes in the Make theme, and is a recommended update for all users. Stay tuned for some exciting new features we’ve got planned for Make Plus in upcoming releases.

When you have a moment to update your theme, let us know what you think of these new features. And if you haven’t tried Make yet, download 1.5.0 right now for free and give it a spin. We’d love to see what you’re putting together with Make and Make Plus, so please do share your creations!

Thanks so much for all your support and enthusiasm!

When you’re searching for a WordPress theme, you’re probably not doing so on your mobile device. And when you’re sketching up ideas for a new website for your business, project or startup, it’s unlikely that the vision you’re conjuring is the stacked content and mobile menu toggle that ends up displaying on your iPhone.

We’ve talked about finding and evaluating responsive themes on the blog before, but we haven’t really touched on why it’s critical, especially now, for your website to be accessible to mobile users.

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The Theme Foundry team is pretty serious about productivity and it’s exciting to be able to feature helpful tools and apps we like. This week, we’ve been talking about Desk, a writing app for Mac that makes blogging a breeze. I’ve been playing with Desk for a few weeks now, getting to know it, establishing a workflow, and testing it out with WordPress and our themes, and it’s been an overwhelmingly pleasant experience.

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If you’re selling online, chances are you’re at least familiar with the concept of the landing page. You might have even tried to put one together for a product, event, or class you’re offering. Typically landing pages are structured differently than a traditional website, though. They have a singular purpose, and often lack standard WordPress theme elements like a header, menu, sidebar and footer. This kind of page design is easy to accomplish with Make, and in today’s post, I’m going to show you how.

Landing pages are designed to tell a story. And in particular, they’re designed to tell the story of your product. Here are three basic principles you should keep in mind when creating landing pages.

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Make hit a milestone last week: over 200,000 downloads in the WordPress Themes Directory. The intention with Make was to create a truly flexible drag and drop theme while staying true to what we do best — that is, building solid and soundly coded, no-nonsense WordPress themes.

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If you’ve been hanging out in our Help Center, tweeted at us, or shot an email off in our direction over the past few weeks, we might have already bumped into each other. If not, hello! My name is Melissa and I’m so excited to be taking on the helm of Community Manager here at The Theme Foundry. It’s been such a treat to get to know the team and some of you — our friends and customers, and I’m looking forward to many more great conversations around the exciting projects we have planned for 2015!

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