Jamie Lynn Spears Fan Site

Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.

Well we think we’ve cracked it, and we’re calling it WordAds.

Blogs are unique and they shouldn’t be treated like every other page on the internet. There are more than 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs coming online every day, and every time I explore them randomly I’m always surprised and delighted by how people are using the platform to express themselves.

As a WordPress user you’re breathing rarefied air on the internet: the Creators, the Independents. Creative minds aren’t satisfied being digital sharecroppers on someone else’s domain, and you want to carve out your own piece of the internet and have a space that you’re proud of because it’s so… you.

If you’re going to have advertising on your site, it darn well better be good, and beginning with our partnership with Federated Media we’re ready to start rolling out WordAds here on WordPress.com.

If the above is something you’d be interested in, fill out this form to let us know a bit about yourself.

It’s that time of the year again, and we decided to take care of all our users whether they feel like lining up in the cold to take advantage of today’s bargains or not.

This year’s offer is about two upgrades that first saw the light of day during the past twelve months: Custom Design and Premium Themes.

For the next 24 hours if you pick up any of our Premium Themes we’ll throw in a totally free one year subscription to the Custom Design Upgrade, which would usually cost you $30. Depending on the theme you choose, that’s between 30% and 60% of the Premium Theme’s value.

Don’t miss this great occasion to stand out from the crowd, by adding a great Premium Theme to your site, and customizing its fonts and CSS to make it truly yours.

If you already have a Custom Design subscription, no problem, we’ll add an extra year to it for free.

If you’re not sure on what Premium Themes and the Custom Design upgrade actually do:

Premium Themes: feature detailed designs, exciting options for customization, and exclusive support directly from the theme authors themselves.

Custom Design: easily customize the fonts in your theme, and dive into CSS to make all the presentational changes you desire.

It’s only one day, it happens today, but the gift is yours for one year.

Don’t wait anymore to browse our Premium Themes collection.

I’m happy to introduce two new cool and colorful themes: Shaan and Adventure Journal.

Shaan is a smooth-talking theme, quietly delivering a cool, casual backdrop for your content. It’s perfect for writers who like a calm, quiet tone to their blog. If you use images to illustrate your writing, you’ll like how Shaan displays featured images in two sizes: small in archives and search results, and large for sticky posts on your home page as well as on single posts and pages.

Example of Shaan in action.

Designed by Specky Geek, Shaan is available today in your WordPress.com dashboard and directly from the Theme Showcase.

Have a well-traveled blog? Adventure Journal is a natural fit for highlighting your adventures. A theme for your next trip. Or your next blog.

Example of the Adventure Journal front page.

Featuring a warm wood background, a header image for your favorite photo, widget areas styled on curling paper, and a crinkled sticky post area for those important notes—this theme is full of rustic charm. Customize it with layout options, sidebar and footer widgets, and more. See all the options and details on the Theme Showcase.

Designed by Contexture International, Adventure Journal is available in your dashboard and directly from the Theme Showcase.

Also… Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you gobble these themes up.

We want to help your websites come alive with beautiful design. The WordPress.com theme team has been adding new themes at a dazzling rate, but did you know you can customize the style of any of our themes using the Custom Design upgrade?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets which are styles that define how to display HTML elements. You can do anything from changing font colors to styling an entire site from scratch using CSS.

Not only does the Custom Design upgrade let you choose from 50+ custom fonts in the Fonts tab, it includes a CSS editor where you can save style rules after purchasing the upgrade or preview changes before buying.

Whether you are a design expert of amazing talent proportions or you are just learning the ways you can bend websites to your will, we think you’ll love making your WordPress.com sites even more beautiful with custom CSS. Beginners can start with the CSS Basics help page. Everyone is always welcome to share some CSS love in the WordPress.com CSS Customization forum where happiness engineers and amazingly tireless volunteers help with CSS questions.

To inspire you, here are a few strikingly different Twenty Eleven theme variations currently living at WordPress.com made by our very own Automatticans:

If you are a WordPress.org user, never fear! You can use the WordPress.com CSS plugin to get a CSS editor that won’t modify theme files, keeping them wrinkle-free and easy-to-update.

Go to Appearance ? Custom Design ? CSS in your dashboard and try out some CSS edits!

Today, we’d like to give a warm welcome to Google Knol users who are migrating to WordPress.com. Begun in 2007, the Google Knol project has provided people in many fields with a place to share their knowledge and expertise with the world using a platform designed for scholarly authoring and publishing.

Starting today, those same authors can move their articles and collaborative journals to WordPress—and they have the power to choose whether to move to a self-hosted WordPress installation powered by the freely-available, open-source Annotum themes, or to have their Annotum-powered site hosted for free here on WordPress.com. Knol will slowly shut down over the next year, and we’ve worked closely with Google, Solvitor LLC, and Crowd Favorite to make this transition as simple as possible.

We here at WordPress.com are thrilled to provide an easy, fast way for Knol authors to move to their new homes without the need for configuring their own installation. And WordPress.com users who would like to start new sites powered by the Annotum platform can activate one of the two new Annotum-enabled themes on new blogs and get started right away. It’s yet another way the WordPress platform and WordPress.com are enabling the democratization of publishing and sharing of information with the world.

For more detailed information on the Annotum Project, please visit the official site. If you’re moving to WordPress.com and have questions about the process, please see our step-by-step guide and our list of frequently asked questions.