Creative Hive: A Meeting Of Minds In Manchester

When I went to the www.thebusinessgroup.org meetup on Wednesday I was expecting to meet some interesting people, and perhaps get a bit of business. An assortment of local business people were there, but Alex Fenton of Creative Hive was the most interesting.

Creative Hive is a free to use and advert free way for anyone to blog or set up a showcase of their work. It aids collaboration and opportunities, enables a personal web space to be created and produces a searchable central pool of creative ideas and projects. The idea is that it acts as a bit of a showcase for people to display their work and although it stands alone as a blogging and portfolio platform it can also integrate with your own website: it reads and displays blog posts from here on my profile.

Themes

I was looking for a way to make a splash and get a bit of appropriate attention (read, "attract business by demonstrating my DHTML skills") and although Alex is sorted for staff and can't take on interns at the moment, Creative Hive is fairly new and there are opportunities for designers to impress if they go about it the right way.

Creative Hive offers some basic themes but I decided to spice mine up by taking one and changing the background images. Then I got creative and changed the text and link colours too. I got into the source code and have been pulling out the parts I wanted to change there, bending it to my will until I had pretty much made a clone of my own website over there.

I've made three more themes for others to use: Night, Park, and Orange. Each has their own Google Fonts font for headlines: Alex told me that by adding the @import code to the top of the template I could get it to work. He's right; it does, and it looks gorgeous!

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Night Template[/one_third][one_third]
Park Template[/one_third][one_third_last]
Orange Template[/one_third_last]

Get your Creative Hive Theme

I've attached them to this post. All you have to do is click on the link, download or copy the text file and insert it in place of your own Creative Hive space theme. I know they work because I test them on my own account before offering them to others. I'm not asking for payment for them but I would appreciate you leaving the attribution at the bottom. Your readers won't see it, but the search engine spiders will. Please note, they will only work on Creative Hive unless you tweak them. If you use them for anything else, please credit me.