I’ve been delighted to experiment with new themes to bring a splashier look to my more commercial site, Health Spectator. Although time-consuming, it is fun to search out full themes that may come close to the design concepts you originally had in mind for a site or a set of posts.
During the design phases of Techismo, for example, I spent a lot of time developing styles in CSS, coding HTML, and perfecting Javascript routines to help me with collapsible menuing systems and navigational themes. When it came time to begin production, I was still tweaking these themes across browsers. Those issues, combined with a little real-life complexity, led me to hold off plans for a launch of what I would call Techismo the magazine, but I did nevertheless pound out an occasional episode of what I think of as Techismo the blog.
Meanwhile, choosing the same blog design for this site quickly proved a form of compromise, given that the originally intended subject was one that lent itself more to a page-oriented developmental approach, since so much of what I planned to discuss was issues in design and implementation of actual, functioning web pages. As detailed in an earlier post, I chose Wordpress as my blog vehicle, and as recent readers of these pages will be well aware, I chose to use the default theme, Kubrick, at least while I learned the ropes.
Of course, the blogs soon took on lives of their own, at least in terms of interests, since I soon found myself reporting on the legal, political and economic issues confronting us as users of technology, whether that technology be the latest in web technologies or streaming music. That was within the pages of Techismo, of course, where I found the vicissitudes of Internet radio a compelling issue in itself, not to mention its ramifications for pieces I had planned and even written on subjects such as streaming radio and hardware devices.
Through all this, my abandoning painstaking page design to become a novice at what I regarded as sort of a page-generator package (Wordpress) was both a source of frustration and of relief. Frustration because I felt removed from the design process that I considered an organic part of writing for the web; relief because it essentially freed me from those frustrations, particularly as they concerned cross-browser compatibility (though not completely) and enabled me at least to focus on writing.
I was delighted therefore, when I began to look around a bit at alternatives that might free me from the self-imposed Wordpress constraints that I had taken on much as a Buddhist monk might declare a vow of chastity. I found a few ready-made themes that held promise, some because they gave me three columns readily, others because they achieved a level of elegance in design itself that was both exhilirating and refreshing.
While I hope to talk about all of these in future installments, for the moment I am delighted to report my experience in the remaking of Health Spectator as a more mature product, at least in its presentation and packaging. So far, for that purpose, I have chosen the theme Feather 1.0 by Andy Mathijs, a Belgian developer with Mindloop, while considering others such as Bob’s Big Blue and Chris Pearson’s Cutline 3-Column Split 1.1; even a few themes from plaintext, such as Scott Allan Warwick’s Barthelme, which you (most likely) see here. I say, most likely because I have been flipping back and forth between Barthelme and Bob’s Big Blue for this site. Barthelme is I think, by far the cooler, while Big Blue gives a genuine 3-column layout and feels customizably homey.
So, for the moment, Health Spectator is stunned out in Feather 1.0 with a few of my own modifications, while this blog and Techismo are heading towards Barthelme. Actually, for Techismo I have been downright experimenting with Sandbox, a cruder-looking quantity right out of the box, but readily customizable just with CSS. I already find myself enchanted.
So however briefly, I’m at least getting to experience the joy again of getting my fingers into the code and making it do what I want, standing on the backs, as I do it, of other good designers.