DailyThunder.com – A New Showcase Site from iThemes Creative Services

We’re pumped to announce the launch of the new DailyThunder.com, the latest work of our iThemes Creative Services team.

Built on iThemes Builder, the new Daily Thunder site features custom design and functionality that enhances a site that has hosted nearly 15 million page views and 500,000 comments since its launch in late January of 2009.

Here are a few things you’ll want to check out:

Content-focused design

With thousands of posts, readers and commenters, the primary focus of the new site is content — and continuing to build the active community that follows it. With large, easy-to-ready type and a real-time commenting system (powered by LiveFyre), we feel the new site accomplishes exactly what Royce Young, owner and operator of the Daily Thunder, hoped to accomplish with the redesign.

The idea was to give DT some more bells and whistles and a more modern feel, while still maintaining the simple, easy to navigate design of the previous site. I’m not a fan of crowded, busy sites that have a bunch of places for you to click and a mess of pictures and links all over it. Daily Thunder has a simple focus and there’s really no need to get overly carried away.

- Royce Young, Welcome to Daily Thunder 2.0

Home page custom-created content slider

This content-slider was designed and developed exclusively for the Daily Thunder site to showcase recent posts and videos. If you’d like something similar to this, check out our own Featured Posts from the DisplayBuddy series of plugins.

Custom Post Type for headlines in sidebar

This content was moved from a post category to a custom-built Custom Post Type with its own archive. The transition from category to the Custom Post Type was made simple by Convert Post Types, a free plugin available on the WordPress repo.

Check out the new Daily Thunder

Many props to our own Matt Danner, Brad Ulrich for the design and Ty Carlson for the development of the new Daily Thunder. Check out the entire iThemes Creative Services portfolio and let them know how they can help with your next website project.