The Football Journalist is a blog site aimed at people who want to become professional sports and football journalists. It features listings of sports journalism courses and jobs within the football industry.

I applied a few basic customisations to the theme, changing the background image and adding in the adsense blocks and job listings widgets. I also used a few of my favourite plugins to apply SEO to the site.

As the site is linked with FootballFanCast (one of the leading football blog and podcasting sites in the UK) I would highly recommend it for anyone who is working towards a carreer in football journalism.

Check it out: www.thefootballjournalist.com

This simple, elegant blog was designed and built by 76 Creative (coded by me:¬)  for London based artist Zakeeya. It is powered by the Gallery Mangement feature of Admin 76, 76 Creative's custom Content Management System.

The Gallery Management system was originally intended for creating a series of galleries, rather than one huge one, so although being simple in appearance on the front end, the back end of this site still posed one or two challenges for me and allowed for improvements to be made to the CMS in the process.

Another thing I enjoyed about this site is doing a layout with a fluid width in CSS, most sites I have done are fixed width so it was interesting to change things up a bit.

I'm a big fan of simplistic / minimal websites where the content is the main focus.  Check it out:

www.zakeeya.com

After releasing my WordPress theme Simplistix into the wild a few weeks ago I have been very happy, and somewhat surprised by it's popularity. It has received hundreds of downloads from my site and over 700 downloads from wordpress.org in the last 12 days. I knew that there was a niche for simple, text based blog themes as I had seen a few sites such as www.plaintxt.org that are entirely devoted to these type of themes. But, with all the sophisticated and complex wordpress themes on offer, Simplistix feels like quite a humble little theme — perhaps that's part of it's charm.

Anyway, seeing the download stats made me feel curious about who was using the theme. I had already seen it being used on a couple of blogs because, as with most wordpress projects, I had received some suggestions, ideas, support requests and constructive criticisms from members of the wordpress community. I did a bit of further research on google and instantly found loads more bloggers using my theme. The main thing that struck me was the diversity of subject matter that these blogs covered – science, computer programming, economics, movies, music, art, fashion and many more. It was also nice to see instances where people had modified the theme, adding in their own site headers, sidebar widgets, google advertising, etc.

I felt so inspired by seeing all these sites using Simplistix as their theme that I decided to write this post featuring some of my favourites. So here they are:

TOP PICKS

www.flyhypersonic.com – The seatbelt sign is illuminated
www.thewherewithal.org – Blogging about credit, debt, money, economy, theory
nicolasulloa.com/blog – Music, Animation, Graphic Arts and Illustration
www.ianthewebsite.com – If you could be any blog, what blog would you be?
2chicksblogging.com – Blogging for Change Training since 2008
feedingme.com
blog.nakedsteve.com – Oh hey is that a monome?

THE BEST OF THE REST

phoward.com/blog
ponasniekas.nespalvotas.lt
www.bigtechcenter.info
www.bletherskite.com
blog.xieer.com
www.bestmusiccenter.info
www.businesstechnologytimes.com/wordpress
likeitreallymatters.com
hasibul.info/blog

I am planning an update to the theme in the near future where I will add an options menu which will allow you to control colours, fonts etc.