Here I am calling myself a Web designer but using someone else’s theme.
Why? Because of insecurity? Well,maybe.I’m pretty new to WordPress and this is only my 3rd WordPress project.Once I got the idea that I simply had to move on from my other blogging tool I wanted to do it right away.Once again I told myself I didn’t have the time to learn the insides of WordPress, that getting the project done was more important. The funny thing is I ended up learning WP finally with this latest project. Oh, not that I am now an expert, ha ha. But I did pick a theme with out the dynamic sidebar and that wasn’t widget ready. That step was amazingly easy,by the way. But I didn’t know that until I tried it for myself.That’s a lesson right there.
I was already used to the concept of templatizing a site since I’d done it many times when using the CMS, doop. In fact, my site was basically just put together using this flat file CMS and that flat file blog; SimplePHPBlog.
Not that I overlooked the fact that a visitor coming to my site might not like the change in design flow when going from my regular site to my blog. I was never very happy with this change but I found SPB a bit daunting to say the least. And so I just lived with it.
I ended up making my own template right before I made the switch to WordPress,and might’ve gone as far as customizing the blog to look exactly like the rest of my site. But it occurred to me: why not do all that work with one of the best blog tools available? I do sometimes tend to make things harder for myself then they have to be!
I am not in any way knocking doop or SPB. They served me very well for a whole year had great support forums and at least doop kept upgrading and upgrading. I felt obligated to stick with doop since they helped me have a dynamic site back when I didn’t know how to make one for myself. They are great alternatives for anyone who can’t use a mysql connection for whatever reason.But sometimes you find you have gone as far as you can and have to move on.
So back to the theme:Activate-10
by Brian Gardner.It is a 3 column theme I converted to 2 columns. I put in a script to rotate the header/banner images.I didn’t want to use all the background images,so I didn’t.I spiffed up the font css away from px to percentages of ems.
But the layout is still not mine. It is not different enough for me to call mine.This is that fine line I mentioned. I might be tempted to claim this as my work since I did a lot of work on it myself.But it wouldn’t be right.
One should always give credit where credit is due -after all I wouldn’t much like it if in the future I saw someone using one of my themes and not giving me credit for it.