Jan 26, 2007 | blog
I’ve been using some very nice (I think) themes from very creative developers in the WordPress community. They all have had some design component that I really like, maybe the full use of space on one, the clean uncluttered look of another, the graphics on a third, the font/type/CSS creativity of a fourth, and so on.
However, I’ve not found that one theme that I can be happy with and just leave alone. Sure, I could hire a professional designer to create a real professional theme just for my site, but I can’t justify paying a couple thousand for a good design. Not that they are not worth the money, I just am too cheap to do it.
The nice thing about all these different themes that I’ve tried or tested, is that I’ve learned a lot about CSS and a little about PHP. Each one has taught me a little more about how to manipulate each section, where to place an add, how to wrap objects in the proper tags, and much more.
So with that said, I’m going to start work on my first custom WordPress theme, complete with custom graphics designed by yours-truly. Though, the graphic part is probably the only area that anyone should be worried about – I’m not a graphical designer, nor played one on TV – :). It might look really bad – guess we’ll find out.
So, in short, there may be a few posts focusing on the trials and tribulations of theme development as I blow off steam. Or there may be cryptically giddy posts about something working. Either way, I would really enjoy feedback about what your likes/dislikes about the sites you visit, or the themes/layouts that you use yourself and, of course, your opinion of how the new theme is turning out.
I’ll be developing the theme on a separate development blog that I’ll post about later, so it won’t effect the day-to-day usage of my main site. Maybe from there I can work on a few others for another site or two I work with.
Thanks for stopping by today!
Jan 10, 2007 | blog
Hi all!
If you’re reading this on the web, you’ve noticed a new look & feel for my blog here. What I was going after was a cleaner “white space” look with a changing header graphic.
The new theme is “Water3” by The Undersigned which is a variation of his standard, dual column “Water” theme. I’ve created some custom header graphic images from my own photo stocks (can you tell which ones are from my phone?) to cycle through, and will probably add/change them during the course of the year.
Hope this theme is easy to read, I really enjoy the cleaner appearance than the last theme. The last theme was nice because of really good use of the screen space, the center column had a lot of space for text and graphics.
So, be patient with me as I’ve got a little bit of tweaking to do on the CSS for bullets, and some script code to add for social networking links. I’m also interested in opinions on the new look – let me know what you think!
Nov 11, 2006 | blog
Ok, its late – 2:30am Saturday morning. But I’ve done it! RickMahn.com has a new layout. I’ve leveraged a 3-column theme here on the blog, and have gotten to use several new features that I had been planning on for some time. And it only took 4 hours to do!
The nice part about this layout is that the main body of every post has much more room for text and pictures. It also has a bit cleaner CSS structure for text, bullets and the like. Another neat feature was the support for sidebar widgets in WordPress – it made it much, much easier to set up all the specialized items that I had on the original configuration.
Well, off to get some rest – I’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow. Hopefully, we’ll get a chance to go to the Power Sports show in downtown Minneapolis – one can hope anyway.
Dec 13, 2005 | blog
I’ve finally got around to customizing my blog here at Blogger! Neat stuff, and good flexibility compared to MSN Spaces. That is not to knock Spaces at all, it is maturing quite quickly – the differences are substantial, and I hope to make use of both services as I go forward.
