Bye-bye Kubrick, hello Synaptic!
WordPress 1.5 has a very powerful system to manage themes, but to the uninitiated with the inner workings of WordPress it seemed too difficult to take a bite at. Well, help came along in the form of UrbanGiraffe’s WordPress Theme Guide series of four tutorials. Following it step by step and adding in a few things on my own, in only a few hours I have created a new theme for my blog.
Why, you ask? Well, the default theme, Kubrick, is very nice, but it wore off quickly when thousands of WordPress blogs didn’t change it to something else. It also doesn’t fit too well with my tendency to write (very) long posts, because you have to scroll so much. Experts say that a narrow column is easier to read than very wide lines, and I agree, but there needs to be a balance between length and width. They also claim that fixed width helps maintain a consistent appearance of a site on all resolutions and browsers; on this, I beg to differ. Fixed width sucks, it wastes space on larger displays which become more and more affordable these days. Displays also use the landscape format, which is improper for displaying text and pages without scrolling so much; until most people will have displays that rotate 90 degrees to display pages in portrait layout, I believe that using the entire window width brings more benefits than headaches.
Apart from the above mentioned reasons, I also made a checklist of principles for the appearance of my blog. For example, I was looking for a layout that sustains and structures the content, a combination of colors, fonts and spacing that makes text easier to read, a visual appearance free of useless “bells and whistles” that distract and annoy visitors, an intuitive, consistent navigation. In other words, it needed to be clean, minimalistic, light, nonintrusive, useful.
The theme is only needed when the content is displayed in the browser as a web site; most people prefer reading through RSS aggregators, which allow them to decide on their own colors, fonts and so on, and they couldn’t care less if my theme displayed green text on a bright orange background. Yuck.
And I do hope that I have successfully inserted all these features in my theme, called Synaptic. What are your thoughts about it?
May 26th, 2005 at 10:55 pm
Thanks for the comment, and glad you liked the guide. I definitley agree with you on fixed width layouts - I’ve got a wide screen myself, and it’s frustrating to be forced into small fixed widths. Saying that, I haven’t yet had time to change the theme on my own website - oops!
Nice work on the theme anyway, very clean and clear.
May 26th, 2005 at 11:02 pm
Thank you for the feedback, John, and for the excellent guides — I’d still be squinting at Kubrick if it wasn’t for them! The one I’ve created still has some rough edges, but in time they will be polished. I’m planning on replacing the gray shades with pale blue, for starters. And I haven’t tinkered with the page feature of WordPress yet…