Working on the New “Skillful Means” Template

Yesterday, I wrote a about creating a local development environment for WordPress on my local Vista laptop.  I had a feeling that this would be a much easier way to work on things like developing a new theme for my blog.   I am so glad that I did.  

Having a local development environment allowed me to quickly make and debug changes to new theme.  I completely gutted the old theme, keeping only some of the more structural elements that I really liked.  I also ended up using some additional tools as well, one that came in handy was the wordpress plug-in Theme Tester. 

The Theme Tester Plug-in

The Theme Tester plug-in for WordPress allowed me to upload my drafts and give them a look with out changing the viewable theme for the readers of the blog.  In a kind of stealth mode, I was able to check initial drafts of the theme on the gobs of live data in production.  It worked like a charm. 

More Theme Changes to Come

The last theme I used for Skillful Means was a conglomeration of a theme I could no longer find (that I used on my original blog site), and one that seemed real close.  I had really liked the original one (which I have since found again), but the new one had some features I liked too.  I was very very new to CSS, and the new smooched was a first attempt at creating something that was useable.

This time I took a whole new approach.  I liked some of the features of the smooched theme, but this time I wanted something a little more personal.  I started with a new “logo” the flower you see in the top right and used it to create a color palette for the theme.  Then I added little features here and there that I just wanted to experiment with. 

(The two themes that I originally was working with and smooched together and then gutted were the Chaoticsoul theme and the zindii-ii theme.)

Over the next few weeks I will be taking input to try and balance out the colors and features.  I thinking I still need to balance out some screen elements, especially some issues on font color.  This is the first time I have made such a complex presentation using CSS.  It really helped to start getting a handle not only on CSS, and a little PHP, but also some additional tools.  I did find some tools that made learning CSS and WordPress themes easier, and made changing the themes much easier.  I’ll try and write more on these tools as I get more changes into the template.

Not Bad for Two Days Of Work

There is sill some work to be done but I feel pretty good about the changes I made.  In two days I went from this:

To this:

I know it doesn’t look like that big of a change over all, but underneath it was quite an accomplishment.  With CSS the devil is in the details, there is a lot that goes into a WordPress theme. 

What Now?

Well, I have been working diligently on speeding up the server, and making some site more efficient.  I’m hoping that this will keep the server from lagging, which I know it has started to do. 

As for the template, I’m not so sure about the images that I made for the sides, or a couple of the colors.  There is also the problem of the “Category Box” that is sticking out the side at the moment.   I’m going to let this sit for a couple days and see what jumps out at me for changes.  You will probably be seeing some tweaks here and there for the next couple weeks.   As for templates, I like the dark, but I’m considering making, and this time from scratch, a light template.  I’ll keep you informed of when I get started with that.

Tell me what you think…

Over all I’m trying for a comfortable type template, one that is good for reading.  I picked a dark site long ago and have gone with the flow of that first decision.  I haven’t really played with colors in a while, and there are a couple things that aren’t jiving completely for me.  I’ll slowly get those changes in.  Let me know what you think…