Tag: themes

Jai Verma has written out a very easy to follow tutorial on adding an extra sidebar to any WP theme.
Some people have a gift when it comes to explaining how to do something. Loads of people have written WP tutorials but seem to bury you in terminology so that very few could follow without being smart enough to have written the tutorial themselves. And in which case they wouldn’t need any help,would they?
Check it out.Easy to do and a heck of a lot less painful than cooking a 12 pound turkey in a Showtime Rotisserie oven. But that is another story.
Blog Oh Blog

Today I got a call from my nicest client whose site I have been tweaking since the spring. She wanted to tell me a few problems she was still having with the site(mostly typography issues,spacing,etc).

I felt a little guilty because I began to get these problems in line last week then dropped the ball and started working on 2 other projects. I’d also begun the migration of her site from a very simple CMS to WP. She writes a monthly column and was excited about the promise of more interaction via a blog.

The thought of absolutely iron cladding her current site’s design only to have to dive in and make her a theme for her new site kind of galled me.But she had done a recent mailing and wanted the site to look good when folks came calling… So no way to avoid the extra work. If her project was the only one on my list I think I could have done all of the improvements that same week. But I am just one little slave.

So I did the improvements and began to work on making a theme for her blog. I worked for 3 hours had dinner and worked for 3 more hours.

One tiny little thing didn’t work and I deleted the whole thing! Over 6 hours of work down the drain. I am seriously disturbed. I knew that deleting the files was rash even as I decided to do it. And I still did it. (Of course I have a similar template lying around but) I was getting close with the one I was working on, then I just wiped out.

Six hours of work.Sheesh.

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.

I’ve been trying out WordPress to set up a friend’s online art gallery.

But I just kept getting stuck on the same thing over and over.Because I am no WP genius my options are to look for a theme that resembles what I want.I do not like to use themes.But with WP it’s different because a theme isn’t just a design,it’s widget-ready and set up with all the correct WP “hooks”.I don’t quite yet know what all of these are so to fast-track my last job(my client had a short build time)I just heavily converted a premade theme. Now that I have the luxury of time I have considered making my own theme for my friend’s artwork…but I dunno.Seems like a lot of fiddling about when I could just load up a PHP script or 2.

Is it worth it in order to have the WP community and all the cool plugins and etc to turn to? If this were a site for a friend who meant to actually use her site then it would be worth it.But all she wants is her art online.That’s it.Just a place to send folks to see her work.She isn’t going to blog.She probably won’t want comments.I don’t want her art pages to have comments.
I will just have to think about it.