Fessing Up and Building My Own WordPress Themes
For client work I always work on a custom website design and layout and then transform that into WordPress template for the client’s website. For my personal sites I will admit that I generally rely on the work of others to get something up quickly and have even resorted to purchasing some memberships to theme sites and outright purchased themes. It is the same adage of a chef that does not cook at home, you do it all day as work so the last thing you want to do is do it at home.
Recently I decided to take the easy way out on a couple of personal sites by purchasing a few themes for them. The main reason that I purchased these themes is that out of the box they seemed to do exactly what I wanted and even seemed to be a step up from what I usually produce myself. Unfortunately with both of these themes I spent more time fixing theme to run properly then I would have if I would have built them from scratch myself. In both cases I could tell that the people building them while excellent Web Designers were not that well versed with WordPress.
I supposed this is just a testament to the fact that the easy way out is not always the best way to go.
Back to Photoshop & Dreamweaver I go to make my own themes!
/Rant over.
The Frustration in Choosing WordPress Themes
I think frustration is maybe a little strong word to use given my situation. My “frustration” stems from me trolling several sites that offer free or even very inexpensive WordPress themes. I do not really think it is fair on my part to be “frustrated” because hey, these people are giving these themes away for free (or for very cheap).
The part that does frustrate me though is that I cannot find a theme from my dan.idano.net website in the layout that I want. I would think that what I want is simple but it is just not proving to be that way. The layout that I want is simple –
- Has Pages and Categories along the top in the header
- Has the first post section on the blog be a “Featured Posts” section where I can control which posts show up there
- Has recent posts under the featured posts section
- Has a two column sidebar for ads, links, and my network feed
- Has a footer that can have different sections for Blog info, Archives, etc
- Have just the recent posts on the 2nd page + when paging through content
- I have the above sketch that I whipped up really quick and it looks like I am just going to have to build it myself. Oh well, maybe I can distribute it for free in order to get some free back links from it.
Dreamweaver CS3 Crashes After Daylight Savings Time Change
There is a project that I had not worked on in a few weeks that was coded in .asp via Dreamweaver that ever time I tried open an .asp page it would crash. HTML pages were fine.
At first I thought it had to do with the fact that I had previous had Dreamweaver 8 installed and had uninstalled it. Reinstalling 8 did not fix the problem. I then turned to the extensions that I had installed. Disabling and then uninstalling them did not do it.
Finally I resorted to uninstalling CS3. While that was happening I once again started searching the web and came across this article from Adobe -Dreamweaver CS3 crashes after Daylight Savings Time ends.
In the article they talk about how the WinFileCache-AD76BB20.dat can get corrupted because of the time change. You simply need to delete the file and then all is well.
Unfortunately I was already past the point on no return in my uninstall so I as not able to very that this was my problem. My clean install seemed to have solved the issue.
As a side note – Dreamweaver CS3 takes an awfully long time to uninstall AND install.
Technorati: Adobe, Dreamweaver, Studio CS3, Web Design, Crashing
UrbanFonts – Get Your Font On
As a designer I am always looking for good resources that will make my life easier. It is even better when these resources are free.
Urbanfonts is a site that offers fonts for free. While this is nothing new UrbanFonts has a couple of things that I feel set it apart from the rest. Most free fonts sites have plenty of fonts but finding a particular style is often difficult because they just list the fonts that they have. UrbanFonts recognized that and did something a little different.
The first thing is that they have an alphabetized list – not of fonts – but categories of fonts like 3D, Dirty, Funky, Rounded, and Sophisticated. This really helps to narrow down you search if you have an idea of the type of font that you are looking for.
WordPress SunFlower Theme – 500 Downloads in 2 Weeks
Simply Amazing.
The Custom WordPress Theme named Sunflower that I made for my wife’s blog has been downloaded over 500 times since it was released 2 weeks ago.
This theme as you know is a rendition of my Beach House WordPress Theme that has been downloaded over 2000 times in the last 2 months (see my post Over 2000 Downloads of the Beach House WordPress Theme).
Just a reminder I have made the Photoshop file available for download for this theme so that you can customize it yourself.
Thanks to all those who have downloaded and are using this theme!
Technorati: Blog, Blogging, The Sunflower Theme, WordPress, WordPress Theme, Beach House Theme
Optimize Your CSS for Better SEO Results
Wow.
You know the SEO arena is getting competitive when people start optimizing their CSS for SEO purposes.
I was just really starting to understand the benefits of CSS over a table design.
Anyway this is a really good article that compares some different CSS optimizers and publishes the results.
The article is – CSS Optimization: Make Your Sites Load Faster for Free
A Good PHP Tutorial Site
I am starting a new project at work that is requiring me to do some dynamic sites in PHP.
I have not really worked with PHP in the past but have become more and more familiar with it by using WordPress. I have mostly worked with ASP in the past but I cannot use that for this project since I will be utilizing the Web Server on a Stick software (for more info on WOS see my post – WordPress on a Stick for Meeting Notes).
40 Different CSS Page Layout Site
Here is another resource that will help will CSS layout for a standard site or even a WordPress Blog template.
It is Layout Gala and they have 40 different CSS layouts that are free to download.
Their site can be found at http://blog.html.it/layoutgala/
Mindcomet Web Design Interactive Agency
I have across one of the nicest and best laid out Web Design Company web sites that I have seen in a long time – Mindcomet.
They label themselves as an Interactive Agency which I think is very appropriate based on the presentation of their web site.
You can tell that they are very professional by the content, layout, and use of different technologies on their site. Their use of flash video on the front page is one of the best implementations that I have seen. It loads quick and is non-intrusive. A lot of design companies are in your face with this type of technology trying to show off – Mindcomet uses it in context.
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