My Shiny New Theme Design is Live!
I’m trying new things, I’ve been working on my blog design on a local-hosted WordPress for quite some time. It’s been an interesting experiment and getting all things just right hasn’t been an easy task. I wouldn’t recommend wasting time on theme design unless that is exactly what you want to do and/or learn – what was the case for me. But anyway, not it’s done and the new design is live for everyone to see..
Designing a WordPress Theme
Starting to build your own theme or design by yourself can eat days, weeks even. And professional designer gets the theme done a lot faster and ready-made theme gets the job done in anything between 15 minutes and couple of hours. However, I wanted my own design and I’m quite happy with it. It has some elements that not too many bloggers use and on the other hand, lot of familiar elements from many other blog designs and themes, including my old design.
By designing my own theme I know EXACTLY what’s in it, and what’s not in it (so I can add elements if needed). And by creating the theme myself I got it done exactly like I wanted – yes it took some time, but still, I didn’t have to negotiate and swing drafts and versions back and forth with anyone else. One of the design choices I made was limiting colors, going with gray color scale..
Limiting Colors – Focusing Attention
I chose a gray theme on purpose. It enables effective use of colors to highlight things I want to highlight. So instead of the blog jumping on new readers face in all colors of the rainbow, I wanted to present a minimalistic, easy to read, design – with emphasis on typography, gray color scale (apart from highlighting) and some graphical elements.
My older theme was Sandbox variant with my own CSS, but now I built the whole theme from ground up, firstly for interest, secondly because I wanted to learn and thirdly to get it “just right” for me without the generic parts that many themes have (because a public theme has to work on any WordPress blog). The whole theme is pure CSS at the moment, as the whole theme is grid-based and the actual design and layout comes from CSS which I can easily change.
This design is a work in progress, even thou it’s operational, so I’m looking to tweak the theme as needed to make it just right for me..
Feedback Time!
Tell me what you think, I’d really love to hear what you think about the new design?
And be honest here, I can take it :)
What you like, what you don’t like about the design?
As I wrote back in early August, 
What is a website? webpage? How would you create one? If you think FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or some other WYSIWYG HTML editors, I’m betting you are not alone.
