I have to confess I have never seen the draw to Starbucks. I had a coffee there once and while significantly more expensive was not in any way memorable. However many people are drawn to the brand and the logo is famous.

Starbucks wants to expand it’s range of products some of which will be coffee free so now that logo no longer includes the word Starbucks or the word coffee. Is this too brazen? After all what does a mermaid/siren on her own have to do with coffee let alone any other product – except perhaps fish? Is Starbucks a little too full of themselves in believing that their stylized maiden of the sea sans brand name will be enough to enslave even more devotees? I guess time will tell.

Starbucks Logo Change

Images can drastically alter the atmosphere and impact of your site. The hard part is finding images that don’t violate copyright. Fortunately there are some reasonably priced image resources for those of us working on limited budgets.

Stock.xchng offers photos and illustrations for free. Most can be used on personal or commercial sites. Most images are large enough to also be used on print media.

Stockxpert offers quality photos and illustrations starting from only $1US. Images are also available through subscription.

morgueFile offers photos and artwork free for commercial and personal use. It doesn’t have a mouseover feature to view images in a larger size, however it does contain a large number of quality images.

iStockphoto does offer images from $1US and have a dollar bin strictly for lower cost images.

Vectorstock offers vector images from $1US and also has a free section.

If you need current photos of news or entertainment events Picapp offers free photos and has a WordPress plugin which allows you to search their photos from your post admin page.

Of course remember to read all copyright and license agreements.

Image Resources

One of the drawbacks of using magazine themes is the way the content limiting features strip out code. This results in things like the excerpt of your story showing up as [caption id="attachment_1308" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption= Not exactly the well crafted look we’re going for.

Mediatricks has solved this issue with the Viva_Content_Trimmer plugin No more image code.

Another issue is that line breaks are non existent, Mediatricks to the rescue again with the Viva Line Breaks plugin.

Help for Magazine Themes

This is a theme dedicated to the writing. Low on graphics it’s a good theme for writers, pundits anyone who wants the miain focus to be the writing.

Pundit features built in asides, random posts, 5 sidebars, rss link at the end of every post to encourage subscribers and 3 templates–no sidebar, links, sitemap.

Requires some customization, explanation on download page and Read Me.

ZIP 1.22
pundit

Many thanks to Annie at Blog de Pensées Libres : pas de conformisme ici for translating Pundit in French.

French Version
pundit12-fr

Pundit Theme