October 14, 2008

Tip’d Launches Today with a Pearsonified Design 39

Tip’d financial news

Even though we’re closing in on the most pivotal presidential election in recent memory, the major news stories aren’t happening in Washington—they’re happening on Wall Street. With the Dow starting to look more like a roller coaster than a stairway to heaven, people’s fortunes are hanging in the balance of our economic system, which has been nothing if not grossly mismanaged by our government.

To be sure, the root cause of a majority of the US’s economic problems is a general lack of understanding of fundamental economic principles, both in Washington and in the average American household. Obviously, this is a huge problem, and the only real long-term solution requires an increase in the baseline level of economic understanding.

Educating the masses is no small task, but as the Internet continues to grow, so too does the efficiency of information exchange. The main benefit of this increased efficiency is that people have more collective knowledge at their fingertips, and therefore, they also have the ability to learn more things faster than ever before.

No matter what political party you choose to endorse, know this—the real hope for our future lies in education, not in tax breaks, health care reform, or any other “policy” you care to name.

So, why do I bring this up? Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been lending a hand to the design of Tip’d, a new social community that is smartly positioned as a hub for emerging economic and financial news. The site bridges a fundamental communications gap in a very important niche, and on that basis alone, I would say it has a great chance of becoming a major player in the economic info ecosystem on the Web.

On top of that, when you consider the team behind the site, it’s pretty obvious that Tip’d is a lead-pipe lock for becoming the most efficient, comprehensive source for financial news and information.

More Tip’d news from major sites around the Web:

Interesting Fact About the Tip’d Blog Design

While you’re checking out Tip’d, be sure to visit the blog. Believe it or not, the blog is running the Thesis WordPress Theme, and I was able to recreate the Tip’d design on the Thesis framework in a mere 1.5 hours.

Think about that for a second.

An entire custom design set atop a world-class, futureproof HTML framework… in an hour and a half.

Believe it. The Web design game is changing in a big way, and I’m doing everything I can to lead the charge.

39 Comments ↓

#Shane Swing  at 2:52 pm on Oct 14, 2008

Sweeeettttt!

#Nathan Rice  at 3:51 pm on Oct 14, 2008

Nice work, Chris. It is amazing what a person can do with the right tools.

#Sonny Gill  at 3:52 pm on Oct 14, 2008

Big props to you and your Thesis theme and turning around a custom design for Tip’d in 1.5 hours.

Speaks wonders to the dedication you put into your themes.

#Esther  at 4:51 pm on Oct 14, 2008

Is it only me who sees a blank screen at tipd.com?

#Chris  at 8:20 pm on Oct 14, 2008

Chris - I know your not for hire, so how do I get you to do a blog for us? :)

#Mike  at 9:48 pm on Oct 14, 2008

Ummm, …. “You Da Man !” seems a little short of the necessary props ;-)

#Wes  at 12:10 am on Oct 15, 2008

Way to go, Chris, you do good work and write a good blog. I’ll keep reading!

#Patrick K. O'Brien  at 11:11 am on Oct 15, 2008

That is a very cool example. That should convince a few people that Thesis has a lot more flexibility than we’ve really seen yet. Great job.

#Jack  at 2:02 pm on Oct 15, 2008

Great site design and a great idea to go along with it! I sincerely hope it does take off, I know I’ll try to name drop it when I can.

#Dina at Wordfeeder.com  at 12:45 am on Oct 16, 2008

Good for you… timely indeed. A strategic business move if there ever was one.

#Lightning Fast  at 7:37 am on Oct 16, 2008

@ Chris, the Web site is loading fine on my end.

#Tim  at 11:21 am on Oct 16, 2008

Yeah - wonderful. Looks Great… Where’s Cosmo?

#comunactivo  at 12:23 pm on Oct 16, 2008

just amazing, tips is maybe your best design, great!

#Armen  at 7:21 am on Oct 18, 2008

Ha!

I know who you were thinking of when you were making your font selection ;)

As for the 1.5 hours to complete the design… snap! Well, it took a weekend, but still.

#johnMark  at 7:04 pm on Oct 18, 2008

Cool! So, how tough would it be to re-create this?

Mark

#Announcing 5 Exceptional Tip’d Launch Partners  at 8:35 pm on Oct 20, 2008

[...] believers out of everyone. Check out the coverage we’ve gotten since launch day: Valleywag, Pearsonified, Neatorama, Cash Money Life, Tris Hussey, Networking Effectively, Journalism.co.uk, Five Cent [...]

#Karthick  at 4:44 am on Oct 21, 2008

Chris, you rock, you pornstar you.

#Wassim  at 1:02 pm on Oct 22, 2008

ETA on Cosmo?

#Miguel Wickert  at 3:34 pm on Oct 22, 2008

Wow Chris, keep at it bro! You da man! :)

#Bill  at 6:40 pm on Oct 27, 2008

Chris–Thesis is beautiful. In fact I purchased it last week, but there seems to be no way to download it. The download page links instead to the purchase page. There was also no confirmation email–which probably explains why my login info is “invalid,” and thus I couldn’t post to the forum, and thus I’m crying for help HERE (could find no other means to contact you, except maybe a comment on the Copyblogger theme blog, where I have posted before. Please forgive me for using this venue…but HELP!

#Chris Pearson  at 7:56 pm on Oct 27, 2008

Bill — You purchased Thesis with an e-Check, which typically takes 3–5 business days to clear. Once your payment clears, your DIYthemes account will become active, and you’ll be able to download the theme. No worries!

#Bill  at 8:12 pm on Oct 27, 2008

Okay, thanks.

#Lacey Ellen  at 12:11 pm on Oct 29, 2008

So I’m new to the blog… but just a few thoughts:
- Well written. I mean, seriously.
- I’m an education junkie, I’d stay in school for the rest of my life if I didn’t need an income (and probably will stay in school on some level, but beyond the MBA the educational impact of econ in the household. Flesh it out, people need to know, and you seem to have their ear.
- I’m a business student, and if you link back to anything I’ve written, you’ll find that I’m write, as my sister mockingly says, about the “God-squad”, not design. So I’m no expert, but the page looks great. I’ll be checking out Tip’d as well.

Great to meet ya….

#Chris Pearson on economic site Tipd.com  at 2:47 pm on Oct 30, 2008

[...] (Thesis theme), but Tip’d looks like a good source for economic/financial news. Here’s Pearson’s post. This entry was posted in Designers we like, WordPress Themes, design resources. Bookmark the [...]

#Brad G  at 3:19 pm on Oct 30, 2008

You are correct when it comes to education. It is the only way to solve issues.

#kenseo  at 3:56 am on Oct 31, 2008

wow, you did it yourslef? it’s amazing

#Wassim  at 4:10 pm on Nov 2, 2008

Is it just me or has Chris been posting a lot less recently? This is like waiting for Godot.

#Arite  at 4:24 pm on Nov 2, 2008

Chris,
Can you post a tutorial on how you did this site? I have Thesis but looked at tipd and don’t see how you can customize it that much that quickly. To be honest, it looks like other tools would be better for a Tipd site. I’d love to know how you did so that I could learn Thesis more.
Also, one place I read how you modified your copyblooger theme for Tipd. And the other said that it was modified Thesis 1.3. Can you clarify? I don’t want to waste time trying to turn Thesis into something it can’t be (like Tipd) for us “average” designers.

Thanks!

#Leon Paternoster  at 8:31 am on Nov 3, 2008

90 minutes is quick, obviously, but does it take that long to create a WordPress blog theme once the CSS is in place? Especially when it has a pretty simple, standard structure, and only uses date archives…

I find that getting the layout and typography is the time-consuming part - writing the functions is pretty quick, especially once you’ve done it a few times (you can often copy & paste).

I’m not knocking what you’ve done: your work’s great and has influenced some of the stuff I’ve done (especially how you structure archives), but one of the best things about WordPress is that it’s really suited for speedy development.

#Leon Paternoster — Writing WordPress themes is easy  at 10:00 am on Nov 3, 2008

[...] into step 2, the WordPress magic. That’s not true—it doesn’t surprise me to hear that a top notch designer can knock up a basic, standard–issue theme in 90 minutes. Because just as writing good content is criminally undervalued (good content can redeem nearly all [...]

#Chris Pearson  at 3:09 pm on Nov 3, 2008

Arite — To clarify, the only part of the Tip’d site that uses Thesis is the blog. In addition, I recently converted the Copyblogger design on to the Thesis framework, so now both the Tip’d blog and Copyblogger are essentially nothing more than customized Thesis installations.

#Leonard Klaatu  at 5:43 pm on Nov 4, 2008

I think it looks terrific, Chris.

Question: Can you share the technology you used for their member’s login area? I’m searching for the best method of incorporating that into a Wordpress site I’m noodling.

Thanks!

#Takumi86  at 11:08 am on Nov 8, 2008

Thanks for letting us know about this interesting news but sadly that theme doesn’t support with blogger

#Buyer  at 9:05 am on Nov 9, 2008

is there any way other than paypal to buy this theme. because paypal is not available in my country?

#Buyer  at 4:43 am on Nov 11, 2008

Hey Chris? You listening?

#Chris Pearson  at 12:19 pm on Nov 11, 2008

Buyer — The only way I could work this out with you is if you send me a check, and once that check clears, I can activate your account with DIYthemes. International checks usually take at least two weeks to clear, so there will be a bit of a delay time for you if you choose to go this route. Just let me know what you’d like to do.

#Chris Pearson  at 3:14 pm on Nov 11, 2008

Leonard — Most of the Tip’d site runs on Pligg, a CMS platform that features a “bubble-up” algorithm like that found on Digg.

#Shane Sheibani  at 4:58 am on Nov 12, 2008

Good blog, but I have to wonder if the nation’s financial problems might have something to do with the FED printing worthless currency and calling it money? when people print more money than is really there, and put it into the system, isn’t that usually called counterfeiting?

#Christian Toto  at 12:26 am on Jan 4, 2009

Chris,

Is Thesis compatible with Wordpress 2.7? I have Thesis (very happy with it) and I use wordpress 2.5 … do you recommend me jumping to 2.7 and will Thesis be OK with the jump?

Hoot and/or Holler ↓