In new construction, home builders continue to struggle to meet buyer demand, as housing starts nationwide dropped 7% last month, according to the Commerce Department.

The increase in sales prices comes with a slight decline in existing home sales nationwide, as homebuyers struggle with declining affordability amid a lack of inventory, forcing some buyers to simply wait it out in hopes of more inventory and less competition.

Home prices are still on the increase and that is not likely to change during the summer months. The Median Sales Price increased 16.1 percent to $342,500 for the month.

April was another strong month for home sales. The busy spring market continues to see many multiple offer situations driving sales prices above asking price.

WordPress’ growing market share is fueling a continual influx of new users but also a higher level of scrutiny around advertising. Companies with large advertising budgets target this segment of consumers, because many who are new to WordPress need help hosting and creating their websites.

Last week Bluehost pulled an advertisement that misused WordPress’s trademark. The company’s PR department has not responded to our request for comment, but onlookers have noted that this isn’t the first time Bluehost has floated questionable ads. Multiple Facebook campaigns, dating back several years, include trademark abuses, as well as active campaigns on YouTube in various markets.

In another advertising-related matter, Elementor, a popular page builder used by more than five million websites, has caught some attention recently for its Google ads that target “full-site editing.” Birgit Pauli-Haack, the publisher of the Gutenberg Times, pointed out the ads last week in the Post Status Slack community.

WordPress theme development company Themix released its third free theme to the official directory this week. Churel is described as a theme for organizations and businesses that also works for traditional blogging.

The development team has a keen eye for modern color schemes and font families. The theme has a refreshing design that is rare for the free theme directory, at least at first glance. It is the sort of project with just the right amount of eye candy to pull users in.

If that was everything necessary for great design, the theme would land in my top 10 picks from WordPress.org without a second thought. However, after digging deeper, it was clear the design had some issues. They are fixable. It would not take much nudging of a few CSS rules to make this a much better theme, so let’s just dive right into the problems before getting into the good stuff.

The theme’s most clear-cut flaw is with its typography. Sizing and words-per-line work well enough. The default Open Sans font is rarely a poor choice for readability. However, the line height is far too large for a good flow, and the white space between paragraphs makes it tough to tell where one ends and the other begins. It is almost as if the team got halfway through with fine-tuning the typography and decided to simply stop. It is a glaring issue that makes the theme practically unusable for long-form content, but it could be addressed with two minor style changes.

Mortgage interest rates ticked a bit higher in February, but remain below their February 2020 levels.