Thesis Site Review: Simple Mom Simple Consistent Branding

Many old timer (12 month +) Thesis Theme users have probably seen Simple Mom’s site. But did you know that Simple Mom is now five-fold and growing as part of the Simple Living Media group? The new sites have the same look and feel and proves one simple rule – if you find a winning formula, repeat and grow.

If you are a new user you need to read through the Introduce yourself… thread on the Thesis Forum and if you haven’t done so already, leave a post introducing your site.

Introducing Simple Mom, Simple Home School, Simple Bites, Simple Kids and Simple Organic

All of these sites share the look and feel with similarly designed headers, logos, category widgets and tab styles.

Cleverly, if you visit any one of the sites, the feature box will prompt you to checked out the others – which at first I thought were additional categories. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw how Simple Mom has expanded its suite of Thesis sites.

I also noticed that the footer has links to articles on the other blogs in the simply living network.

The advantages of having similar styles and consistent branding across all sites is primarily due to the simple Thesis Theme file structure.

Even the favicons (visible to Firefox users) are consistent – well done!

With only two files to change to give you your unique look. -You just copy and paste the code from your existing files to your new ones on your additional Thesis site.

• To make things work the same on your new site you copy from your custom_functions.php file and paste into the new one.
• To make things look the same on your new site you copy the code from your custom.css (custom style sheet) to your new site’s custom.css file.
• Then, to change the look on the new site just change your colours and that should about do it.

Here’s what the headers look like on each site…

Here’s what the category widgets look like on each site…

A business model as clever as the design

I encourage you to explore all of the blogs and read more about Simple Living Media.

As usual there is a newsletter cleverly titled Simple Living Weekly and a book due out soon.

Here are some snippets from the SLM site…

Simple Living Media, LLC was launched in the summer of 2009 as the umbrella for a variety of media ventures launched by Tsh Oxenreider.  SimpleMom.net, the largest of the ventures, is a blog started in 2008. In 2009, the blog added five columnists, each rotating a week of publication.

In 2010, we are going to expand all the blogs to come together as more of a network.  The model we’re using is the same used by Apartment Therapy — completely separate blogs, but unified together as one look and mission — to encourage simple living.

The sum of this family of blogs will be greater than its parts, so together, we can speak in one powerful voice, passionately endorsing simple living.

As the founder, Tsh is the senior editor of SLM, being the main voice and making the final decisions on all things related to SLM.  She serves as the blogs’ administrator and chief graphic designer, and works first-hand with all the editors.

1 Editor for each blog

Each blog has its own editor, and they control the daily workings of their blog, including the content, the comments section, the community built on the blog, and the networking to spread the news about it.

They make decisions about guest posts, should they accept any, and they will work with Tsh to decide on the blog’s regular contributors.

They will also work together with the business manager regarding vendors who approach the blog about giveaways.

5 Columnists for each blog

Simple Mom currently has five columnists, each writing once a week in their area of expertise [rotating which week they write for].  They are similar to contributors, except that they write solely about their one topic and only on Simple Mom.

Many Contributors

Regular contributors and guest contributors are responsible for the bulk of content/articles.

Check out oDesk to help you with outsourcing your content. You can get 300 articles for about $600 with guarantees to get what you paid for and the writers are also guaranteed to be paid.