WordPress Theme Changes

May 2, 2007 · Filed Under Site News

Since I’m the only visitor here you won’t have noticed the Wordpress theme changes that I’ve made recently. Thankfully for you, random future visitor, I’ve captured the progress via screen shot so you can pretend you were actually here. I’m by no means a professional web page designer, but I am proud of my amateur status. I do visit a lot of blog design/tips & tricks type websites and one of my pet peeves is when a someone actually does redesign their site but they just assume everyone remembers what the page used to look like. That’s like getting a face lift and not taking a before picture.

I based this design on the K2 theme version 0.9.5 RC1. Here’s a screen shot of what the site looked like with that theme. Click for a bigger version. One exception to my pet peeve rule from above is that I had already installed the Image Headlines WordPress plugin before I took the screen shot. Damn.

I’ll spare you all the gnawing and thrashing that I did when trying to modify the theme and show you the first version I was happy with for all of about 14 seconds. Actually that’s not totally true, I have kept a lot of the layout from this version but the header and logo have all changed since then. This is the way the site looked, minus the filler text, when I took the site live.

I thought the logo was too tall and I wanted a smaller header so in the next revision I changed the logo, positioning, and size of the header.

Still unhappy with the logo, I came up with the current one that you see.

In this final shot you see what the site actually looks like right now. Again, I just put this up because it’s inevitable that I will change the look of the site and by posting this I (and you, hopefully) will always be able to see it.

At this point in the design stage I again do most of the work on the header since it really is the first thing you see when you come to the site. I removed the sill shape on the right side, used a black to silver gradient as the header background to lighten the page up, and added another glossy button. I also came to the realization that I didn’t really like the redish/marroon color and went blue with it. I’m much happier with this scheme.

I’ve tamped down my desire to make a really dark site which is usually my first inclination on any site I design, but I’ve still been able to keep it somewhat in the shadier color region. Hope you enjoyed the picture show.

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