One of the things I appreciate about the forums is that they are free and open with no restrictions or fees to pay to get the help you need as you learn to make Thematic do what you want.

10 design tips for your custom wordpress theme built with thematic at Cozmos Labs — in fact there’s a whole category of posts on Thematic at the Cozmos Labs site and I’ve found myself there often poking through those posts. There’s also a few free Thematic child themes available there.

Add “Featured Posts” to your Thematic child theme — popular in magazine style layouts, here’s a good tutorial on adding featured posts to your Thematic based theme.

Build WordPress Sites Fast With the Thematic Theme Framework — this post has a wealth of Thematic resources, like help with theme hooks, tutorials and links to lots of child themes.

Thematic Page Structure — This is a visual representation of most of the div elements, theme actions, hooks, and widget areas in Thematic. As you dig into the nuts and bolts of Thematic this will help save you time as you track down what goes where.

How To Modify WordPress Themes The Smart Way — this is a series of posts on themeshaper.com that covers, WordPress Child Theme Basics, Modular CSS in WordPress Child Themes, Using Filter Hooks in WordPress Child Themes and Using Action Hooks in WordPress Child Themes.

Useful Thematic Filters — this a a very helpful post with some handy Thematic filters such as: how to Replace the Blog Title with Your Logo; Add a Search Form to the Header; Add “Home” to Menu Options; Remove Blog Description; Remove the Post Footer; Add Google Analytics Tracking Code; Change the Footer Message; Add a Favicon; Removing Plug-In Code; and Removing and Renaming Widget Areas.

My sincere thanks to Ian Stewart and everyone who contributes to the Thematic framework making it such a powerful WordPress theming tool.

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Thankfully there are thousands of free WordPress themes available that can serve as a canvas or starting point for your site.

This site illustrates my point. With a few subtle tweaks to a very simple theme developed by Upstart Blogger I’ve developed a look that’s given the site a unique design, which is less like a blog and more like the resource I want it to be.

If you are looking for WordPress themes to use as a canvas for your site you’ll find of few of my recommendations by clicking here.