WordPress Theme Preferences
July 13, 2007
If you are looking for a Free WordPress Theme, I would like to suggest that you visit the the Official WordPress theme directory. The options for filtering are superb, and it will save you a good deal of time. Also, each theme has a test site, so you can see the theme in action, rather than look at a resized screen grab. There are a number of other sites that have themes, but the filtering just isn’t there, and most of them upload to the official directory anyway.
In trying to work through my To-Do list, I spent the better part of yesterday looking at themes, but like the U2 song, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. I don’t want anything too artistic, or anything too plain, my tastes run somewhere in the middle.
What I would like is:
- 3 Columns - One on the left, one on the right. Those are for widgets, and other knick knacks, so they should be relatively small.
- Short Image in the header, with text on top - I would like to have the blog title and description on the header image. I don’t want the header image to eat up half of the screen. The image on this current theme just eats up way too much real estate.
- Fluid size - I don’t want to penalize people because of their screen size. That means either forcing people with smaller monitors to scroll left and right, or forcing people with larger displays to scroll up and down.
- No built in ads - I know people are trying to make a buck, but I really want to be able to choose how I thank and acknowledge them.
- A color scheme that is easy on the eyes - I am particularly sensitive to this. Bright colors hurt my eyes, especially at the end of the day, but black web pages makes me think the web master thinks they are ultra cool, or part of some underground.
- Other formatting - I just didn’t find the formatting that I liked all together in one place either. I know that is probably easy to modify, but the major things above were missing too.
So, with that out of the way, I think I am going to have to do it myself. I’ll be sticking with this theme for a little while, and start working on another when I get back from vacation. Yea, I didn’t mention vacation yet, but that will all come in time.
Thanks to all the very talented people out there who have made themes available. Really, there are some terrific ones.
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Posted in WordPress, Themes, BlogNewsandUpdates
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July 14th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Rather than coming up with your own template it may be easier to find something that is close to what you want and modify it. It’s usually not too terribly difficult.
Some thoughts on your template requirements…
3 columns is nice. Plenty of room for extra stuff. Widgetized templates are even better.
I agree about the header image. So many WordPress templates use a header image that takes up 25% of the screen. With a little hacking, though, this should be easy to fix.
I used to agree with you about the fluid size, but I changed my mind a while back. The reason is because a fixed-width template retains the formatting of your post no matter how wide the viewer’s screen is. Imagine you make a small blurb of a post with an image on the left. It’s not a long post, just a couple of sentences. In a fixed-width template, the lines of text flow nicely around the image and make for a post that looks nice.
Now stretch it out all the way across your screen and suddenly you end up with a single very long line of text next to the image on the left. It looks ugly.
And besides, with a fixed-width template, short posts look longer than they really are.
The ads aren’t really a big problem. Just hack the code and rip them out of there.
I won’t address the last two. They’re more a matter of personal taste.
With all that said, I imagine writing your own template is a pretty big job. I’ve never tried to do it, mostly because my 1337 h4×0r 5k1LLz aren’t up to it. The best I can do is edit a few tidbits of an existing template.
July 14th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Thanks for the thoughts Art, all good points. I know I could start hacking up a template, and to be honest, I just may.
I was reading the WordPress documentation, and PHP is pretty neat. I have always wanted to pick up CSS anyway. I guess we will see, and I think that anything I pick up with CSS and PHP will carry over into my other projects.
Your blog is looking pretty sharp by the way.
July 14th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
[…] Also, it looks like little Elves were working on Incoherent Mumbling last night. Good work Art. I don’t know how he had the time, considering the massive comment he left. […]