I’m still tweaking my own refinements, but I have to say I’m basically thrilled with the new Wordpress theme I’ve installed over at Health Spectator.
Please take a look and tell me what you think.
This is from a theme called Feather 1.0 by Andy Mathijs. Perhaps the best thing about the theme (and I personally find it stunning) is its developer. If my own experience is any indication, Andy supports the product fully and promptly.
My own problem with the theme was that as downloaded, it did not work right in Firefox or Opera, though it was splendid in Internet Explorer—essentially a one-browser solution, which I can’t use, since I don’t want to leave out the FF and Opera users even on a non-developer site.
The fix was easy enough. The sidebar—which floats left—did not have a width specified. (I had thought that was a problem for IE, not the other two, but I’d been away from writing style sheets for a while. Eventually I remembered that whenever you float something, you have to specify a width. IE is the one that doesn’t conform to the specs, so it was the one that didn’t choke. Firefox and Opera worked properly, refusing to float the sidebar that didn’t have a width. The width, in this case, specifies the space for the text.)
Presumably Andy did his development and testing with IE (usually the problem browser, after all) and missed that little detail in at least one released version of the theme. His mistake, not mine. But I thought his handling of it was impressive.
Not only did his reply to my email contain the details of the fix, but it concluded with the sentence–and I quote—”Just let me know if you do/don’t know how to edit the css file, if you don’t know how to then I’ll help you out with it.”
Wow.
I responded with some stupid questions (things I could have figured out for myself if I’d taken ten minutes to half an hour to browse the code) and he was never condescending or impatient. What’s more, he was amazingly prompt! Granted, we had the time zones working for us. I would email my question late in the PM my time (EDT) as he was presumably about to start his day in Belgium, and when I got up the next morning, there would be his response: clear, concise, and to the point.
It just doesn’t get any better. I give Andy Mathijs an AAA+++ as an overall rating. We all have our own design viewpoints, and whether or not the version I’ve almost settled on is an improvement or a desecration of his original design, I’ll leave up to my readers. (Please do let me know what you think.) It does still look slightly difference (colors only) in IE and Firefox, a situation I haven’t gotten to examine yet.
Since my intention really is to move toward a three-column design (always my preference) I might not even keep this theme for Health Spectator. I might decide to modify it to my three-column needs or just start afresh with something else. (I’m trying to find time to work with Sandbox, as I mentioned in an earlier post. It’s too ugly for me to use with just the defaults, but once you merge in your own favorite style sheet, I imagine it really sings.)
But I wanted readers to know that they can do a lot worse than to download Feather 1.0 or probably any other design by Andy Mathijs at Mindloop.