The Blaze - Glenn Beck's New Conservative Website
Glenn Beck has launched a new website based on WordPress, The Blaze. Beck markets The Blaze on his personal site with the catchy tagline, “nothing burns hotter than the truth.” I’m not going to expound on my own feelings about Glenn Beck, but his influence in America is obvious. Mediaite describes The Blaze as a potential conservative rival to the Huffington Post.
The Blaze will undoubtedly attract enormous attention from conservatives and liberals alike, and it is really a pretty nice showcase of WordPress. It’s a pretty basic magazine layout, but very sleek and clean. The design is actually a welcome change to the often over-crowded, ad filled layouts we see in many magazine style themes. The feature article takes up most of the screen on first load, with just a picture and post title at the top. The main content area is a two column layout of recent stories, and the sidebar is a pretty typical layout. The blog is separate from the main stories, and there is a section in the sidebar called, “The Wire” that is just a title listing of additional stories that don’t appear worthy of the main content area.
The site loaded pretty fast for me, in less than a second on every page I tried, which I think is pretty impressive for the home page especially. I can’t nail down many plugins used, but the site is using the new official Tweet button.
As far as I can tell, The Blaze is not in the WordPress.org Showcase directory.
I too like The Blaze website. It seems a little plain compared to Huffpo but he is actually trying to show news, not ads and a lot of other garbage. I would be interested to see how this was built because I like the number of categories and the super long home page. I am sure we will know soon enough. Thanks for the post!