After years of using other people’s themes — some very good and some that left a bad taste in my mouth — I decided it’s high time to get off my arse and build my own.
Especially after seeing Schiller’s most recent redesign, and realising that mine was way too graphical for the amount of content, and it needed to be a lot lighter. Besides, I was feeling substantially ungeeky because I didn’t actually make the template myself.
Ah, but here’s the rub: I can’t design. I can’t even draw a stick person.
Yes, true, I suck at being creative. I’ve never been good at it, and most of what I design I’m never really happy with. It could be that my expectations are set too high, or that I don’t feel I can swing something particularly great on my own. I try, but I’m never really satisfied.
I’ve been working on this for weeks now (lack of time to do this in a single sitting), and I’m … well, not really happy with the results, but they’re at least good enough for me to put it out. I gotta start somewhere, right?
Okay, so here’s what this sucker has…
- WordPress widget-enabled (a big need, since my sidebars are widget-driven)
- Three column layout
- Liquid layout so it’ll conform to the size of your browser
- Fonts scale nicely to at least 200% (I’m working on making it 100% accessible)
- Unformatted HTML doesn’t look too bad (read: bad browsers and mobile devices)
But I’m a long way from done. Right now, the HTML is not coming out the way I’d designed it — WordPress is throwing in a lot of stuff I don’t like and in the order I don’t prefer. Something I gotta fix. I’m not happy with some of the layout (my local dev was on a much simpler version of my site — WordPress has issues importing more than 15 MB of data), so I have to spend more time tweaking. I also want to make the colours change on demand — orange is just a place to start. I also would like to have blue, red, and green, at the very least. Maybe toss in some other formats as possible.
Still, it’s a start. Hopefully, it’ll get me somewhere. But first, I got some bugs to fix. Namely the ones I just found in IE that weren’t there in development. Grr.
