Seitz. Writes.

Well, so much for that last post.  Turns out that building themes doesn’t take long at all if you’re the only person in your apartment most of the day. Despite a few minor aggravations getting this to look right in IE, the whole process was a little bit simpler than I’d anticipated. Maybe I’m just some kind of idiot savant when it comes to coding.

In the unlikely event that someone cares, here’s my rationale for some parts of the design:

• No Sidebar: Technically, there is a sidebar. It’s just at the bottom of the page. I’ve always hated the look of most blogs, because you get so much stuff piled up on the edges that it tends to take away from the real focus: the content. Since I don’t have any ads and this is nothing more than a personal website, I didn’t really see a point to using a traditional sidebar.
• Color: I already made my case about black type on white backgrounds. I went with a small color palette because, again, I’m trying to keep the design elements of this site as low key as possible.
• Fonts: Sans-serif fonts (Arial/Helvetica) for the headlines and serif fonts (Georgia/Times New Roman) for the type.  Unfortunately, I don’t actually have Helvetica installed on my computer, so I can only hope that it comes out right for those that do.  The Georgia font has a really nice texture for the type though. It’s a lot of weird serifs and strange letter/number spacings.
• Overall Design: I nicknamed this my “adidas” template.  It wasn’t intentional, but the whole thing came out with a kind of funky euro-minimalist look when I finished it.

This is version 1.0 though. I’m probably going to change little things here and there as I move forward with this site. I definitely want to work on creating an actual logo for the header, but until I figure out what I want it to look like I’m okay with this. I also might try to figure out how to turn this into a distributable template at some point, but for right now there are a couple parts that are essentially lashed together with duct tape and paper clips.

(For example, I had to go back and make some changes just to get this post to display right. Damn unordered lists.)

Big thanks to www.wpdesigner.com for their tutorial series. If you’re interesed in making wordpress themes but you don’t have any idea where to start, I highly recommend it.

Special thanks also goes to Paul Rausch for helping me out with this site whenever my techno-retardation flares up. Like when I don’t know how to use ftp.

Tags: coding, design, Meta
Filed under: Meta